Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals Page 2

Boys, two-hundred-proof I read somewhere, and his throat went

  whoosh and he died too. Who was the final McCoy

  or Hatfield? He says point a gun at me, then maybe

  I’ll know where I am. What else, I will learn

  what year it was, and lift my head from reading

  a full year later, finished with Hatfields and McCoys,

  my sight on fire will have gutted their houses, the line

  of old whiskey will have ended here now.

  The Arch

  Of all living monuments has the fewest

  facts attached to it, they slide right off

  its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit

  on and no horse to be astride. Here is what

  I know for sure:

  Was a gift from one city to another. A city

  cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit

  any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives

  away a great door in the air. Well

  a city cannot except for Paris, who puts

  on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks

  through the streets of another city and will not

  even see the sights, too full she is of the sights

  already. And within her walk her women,

  and the women of Paris looking like

  they just walked through an Arch . . .

  Or am I mixing it up I think I am

  with another famous female statue? Born

  in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts

  slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned

  to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy

  we know got third-degree burns from touch-

  ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting

  for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and

  so sad she’s not a Cross. She was long ago

  given to us by Ireland. What an underhand

  gift for an elsewhere to give, a door

  that reminds you you can leave it. She raises

  her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female

  armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.

  When the World Was Ten Years Old He Fell Deep in Love with Egypt

  Just as he fell in love with the dinosaurs,

  just as he would fall in love with the moon—

  no women in the world yet, he was only ten

  years old. A ten-year-old is made of time,

  the world had forever to learn about Egypt.

  He entered encyclopedias and looted every

  fact of them and when he had finished looting

  there he broke into the Bible. He snuck

  into his mother’s room and drew thick lines

  around his eyes and those were the borders

  of Egypt. He carefully wrote in stiff small

  birds, he carefully wrote in coiled snakes,

  he carefully wrote in flatfooted humans.

  The ten-year-old world needed so much

  privacy, he learned to draw the door-bolt

  glyph and learned to make the sound

  it made. I am an old white British man,

  decided the ten-year-old world, I wear a round

  lens on my right eye, the Day, and see only a blur

  with my left eye, the Night. When the sun shone

  on him it shone on Egypt, all the dark for a while

  was the dark in the Pyramids, the left lung

  of his body was the shape of Africa

  and one single square breath in it Egypt.

  They never found all the tombs, he knew. Anyone

  might be buried in Egypt, thought the ten-year-old

  world in love with it, I will send my wind down

  into my valley, and my wind will uncover the doors

  to the tombs, and I will go down myself inside them,

  and shine light on all the faces, and light on the rooms

  full of gold, and light on even the littlest pets, on the mice

  and the beetles of the ten-year-old kings, and shine light

  on even their littlest names.

  List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers

  First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only

  with oil, no one knows how; then there was

  Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield

  put men back together; and then there was Rose

  of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s

  clothes and walked out of the house and herself.

  Disguised women were always among them.

  They badly wanted to wear blue, they badly

  wanted to wear red, they wanted to blend

  with the woods or ground. Together

  with men they were blown from their pronouns.

  Their faces too were shot off which were then

  free of their bodies. “I never had any dolls I only

  had soldiers. I played soldier from the minute

  I was born. Dropped my voice down almost

  into the earth, wore bandages where I didn’t

  need them, was finally discovered by the doctor,

  was finally discovered at the end.”

  Someone thought long and hard how to best

  make my brother blend into the sand. He came

  back and he was heaped up himself like a dune,

  he was twice the size of me, his sight glittered

  deeper in the family head, he hid among himself,

  and slid, and stormed, and looked the same

  as the next one, and was hot and gold and some-

  where else.

  My brother reached out his hand to me and said,

  “They should not be over there. Women should not

  be over there.” He said, “I watched people burn

  to death. They burned to death in front of me.”

  A week later his red-haired friend killed himself.

  And even his name was a boy’s name: Andrew.

  A friend writes to him, “My dress blues are being

  altered for a bloodstripe.” That’s a beautiful line,

  I can’t help hearing. “Kisses,” he writes to a friend.

  His friend he writes back, “Cuddles.” Bunch of girls,

  bunch of girls. They write each other, “Miss you,

  brother.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They passed

  the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches

  together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,

  what a bunch of girls.

  I sent my brother nothing in the desert because

  I was busy writing poems. Deciding one by one

  where the breath commas went, or else it would

  not stand and walk. This was going to be a poem

  about release from the body. This was going

  to be a poem about someone else, maybe even me.

  My brother is alive because of a family capacity

  for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.

  The night the roadside bomb blew up, all three

  sisters dreamed of him. There, I just felt it,

  the family capacity. My brother is alive because

  the family head sometimes hears a little voice.

  I had been writing the poem before the boy died.

  It then did not seem right to mention that burn means

  different things in different bodies. I was going

  to end the poem with a line about the grass. But

  they were in the desert, and I was in the desert when

  I thought about them, and no new ending appeared

  to me. I was going to write, “The hill that
they died on

  was often a woman, wearing the greatest uniform of war,

  which is grass.” I know my little brother’s head. The scalp

  is almost green, where the hair is shortest. I know

  my little brother’s head, and that is where the ending

  lives, the one that sends the poem home, and makes grass

  stand up on the back of the neck, and fits so beautiful

  no one can breathe—the last words live

  in the family head, and let them live in there a while.

  The Hunt for a Newborn Gary

  Once babies were born as Garys

  and no one doubted what they were, and they were

  true men, these babies,

  with dangle, and the very name

  Gary it had the sound of exposing itself to you. Each

  Gary made a fine crowd noise, each Gary was a Crowd

  to cheer his death-defying loop-de-loops, and each Gary

  went wild when he did not die, one Gary after another

  in a loud unbroken line. But was somewhere born a baby

  named Gary, sometime in the last fifteen years? Not one,

  says the Living Record. Not at two o’clock in the morning,

  not at three o’clock in the afternoon, and Gary sounds to us

  now the way ORVILLE must have sounded in 1950: a man

  in the brand-new days of the car saying Haw and Gee

  to his Ford, he can’t help it, so recent did the horseflank

  twitch beneath the fly. What Garys are still alive are gray,

  they ask to hold our newborns and the rest of the family

  looks on afraid. If the infants are dropped and broken

  they will make a sick overripe sound: Gary. Now just

  one minute I interrupt, my father had that name,

  I don’t believe a word of this, except for the honest

  word Gary. When he had it the name was in fullest flower

  and perfectly a name of the now, and he shot wiggling

  seconds into my mom and one of them plumped and grew

  bigheaded, and he named me he couldn’t help it Orange,

  and my life was a film as long as my life of my name growing

  mold in real time. I was part of a picnic basket, and packed

  for a family trip, for a family trip to where, the past, and Gary

  was a canyon there, and the babies of the past tumbled into him

  happily, and the sunset into him was famous, and up and down

  his sides grew the freshest wildest four o’clocks.

  The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple

  How many sets of her parents are dead. How

  many times over is she an orphan. A plane,

  a crosswalk, a Boer war. A childbirth, of course,

  her childbirth. When she, Shirley Temple, came

  out of her mother, plump even at her corners

  like a bag of goldfish, and one pinhole just one

  pinhole necessary. Shirley Temple, cry for us,

  and Shirley Temple cried. The first word of no

  baby is “Hello,” how strange. The baby believes,

  “I was here before you, learning to wave just

  like the Atlantic.” Alone in the world

  just like the Atlantic, and left on a doorstep

  just like the Atlantic, wrapped in the grayest,

  roughest blanket. Shirley Temple gurgled

  and her first words were, “Your father is lost

  at sea.” “Your mother was thrown by a foam-

  colored horse.” “Your father’s round face is

  a round set of ripples.” “Every gull has a chunk

  of your mom in its beak.”

  Shirley Temple what makes you cry. What do

  you think of to make you cry. Mommies stand

  in a circle and whisper to her. “Shirley Temple

  there will be war. Shirley Temple you’ll get no

  lunch.” Dry, and dry, and a perfect desert. Then:

  “Shirley Temple your goldfish are dead,

  they are swimming toward the ocean even now,”

  and her tears they fall in black

  and white, and her tears they star in the movie.

  She cries so wet her hair uncurls, and then the rag

  is in the ringlet and the curl is in the wave, she thinks

  of dimples tearing out of her cheeks and just running,

  out of cheeks knees and elbows and running hard

  back to the little creamy waves where they belong,

  and the ocean. Her first

  glimpse of the ocean was a fake tear for dad.

  A completely filled eye for her unseen dead father,

  who when he isn’t dead he is gone across the water.

  A Recent Transformation Tries to Climb the Stairs

  One segment of a worm ago I was a swan,

  I stank of the surface of lake just the surface

  and I was a sight on the water. Why is it always

  the swans, why is it never the stilts who turn

  human, the stilts who would know how to walk

  at least? I lift my webfoot for once and for all

  and I try to climb one step, but a blubbery force-

  field surrounds me now and I learn why human

  women bounce: they’re deeply encased in pink

  rubber, so sad. The smell

  of it, erasing! Erasing a picture

  of what? Pink Pearl is written everywhere!

  A bite mark on one end, a mouth of incisors

  and molars and canines—out of nowhere I know

  the proper terms, I suddenly want to know every-

  thing else, and whenever I felt that way on the lake

  I simply ate a fish-head, but fish-heads won’t fill

  me now. Your attention is a fish-head,

  so throw it back into my new body, back

  into the body climbing the stairs. For ten years

  writers loved phantom hands and wrote with

  and about them nonstop, this particular writer

  wrote, I quote,

  “She lifted her phantom hand and she threw it

  to the swans,” but where are all the writers who

  had extra hands sewed on? Which hand should

  get the pen? The one that never wrote a word

  or the one that knows what to do? Is there one

  that knows what to do, is this it? A grown girl

  swan is called a what, the tips of my fingers

  can almost touch it! You’ll look it up when you

  get home—a recent transformation has no way

  of knowing which wordplays are mostly

  exhausted. My hair blows out behind me, where

  my hair is attached to my head

  I can feel a rushing

  hot pivot, like where the wind changes direction.

  I think that’s where I begin to be dead, the best

  part of this new body—better to be in one cell

  of a swan! When I finally feel where these new

  legs end,

  I’ll take two at a time to the top

  of the stairs and two at a time back down,

  and I’ll walk to the lake and climb in a swanboat

  and ride as a gizzard inside it.

  The Feeling of Needing a Pen

  Really, like a urine but even more gold,

  I thought of that line and I felt it, even

  between two legs I felt it, the legs I wrote

  just now, a panic, a run-walk to the private

  room with a picture of a woman

&n
bsp; on the door, or else the line was long, too long,

  I barged into the men’s, and felt stares burning

  hard like reading or noon, felt them looking

  me up and over, felt them looking me over

  and down, and all the while just holding their

  pens,

  they do it different oh no they don’t,

  they do it standing up, they do it at the window,

  they do it so secret in a three-hour bath, they do it

  aloud to someone else, their wife is catching

  every word and every word is gold. What you eat

  is in it, blackberries for breakfast are in it,

  fat atoms of Shakespeare and Hitler are in it.

  The sound of water makes me need to: Atlantic,

  Pacific, Caspian, Black. I feel it so much because

  I am pregnant, I am pregnant with a little self,

  all of its self

  is that spot on a dog that causes its leg to kick.

  It kicked and I felt and I wrote that last line. Even

  now it’s happening. I eat only asparagus like arrows,

  I am famous for my aim. I get almost none on my hands,

  almost. Under my feet the streets, under the streets

  the pipes. Inside the pipes a babble sound.

  Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It

  Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The green

  of her is a scum on the surface, she would like

  to look at herself. Should I have a memory?

  she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin

  in muddy water? I do not have that memory.

  My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing

  it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that

  memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though

  she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated

  from the sun on stone, and one hundred vertebrae in every

  wave of the lake, as one hundred vertebrae in every wave

  of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot

  on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever

  touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and

  -less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs

  that say NO SWIMMING.

  So far all she knows is her whereabouts.

  Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver