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| | Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942 Everything has been taken that anyone thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted, scattered with sycamore leaves curled like ammonites in inland rock. Wood shows through the paint on the frame and the door is open--an empty room, sunlight on the floor. All that is left on the porch is the hollow cylinder of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial head is bowed, its scrolled neck glistens. I was born, that day, near there, in wartime, of ignorant people. CRAB When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She'd drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she'd ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She'd stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky homes, wild- red and knobby, those cartilage wrists, the thin orange roof of the back. I'd come home, and find her at the table crisply unhousing the parts, laying the fierce shell on one side, the soft body on the other. She gave us lots, because we loved it so much, so there was always enough, a mound of crab like a cross between breast-milk and meat. The back even had the shape of a perfect ruined breast, upright flakes white as the flesh of a chrysanthemum, but the best part was the claw, she'd slide it out so slowly the tip was unbroken, scarlet bulb of the feeler—it was such a kick to easily eat that weapon, wreck its delicate hooked pulp between palate and tongue. She loved to feed us and all she gave us was fresh, she was willing to grasp shell, membrane, stem, to go close to dirt and salt to feed us, the way she had gone near our father himself to give us life. I look back and see us dripping at the table, feeding, her row of pink eaters, the platter of flawless limp claws, I look back further and see her in the kitchen, shelling flesh, her small hands curled—she is like a fish-hawk, wild, tearing the meat deftly, living out her life of fear and desire. The Sash The first ones were attached to my dress at the waist, one on either side, right at the point where hands could clasp you and pick you up, as if you were a hot squeeze bottle of tree syrup, and the sashes that emerged like axil buds from the angles of the waist were used to play horses, that racing across the cement while someone held your reins and you could feel your flesh itself in your body wildly streaming. You would come home, a torn-off sash dangling from either hand, a snake-charmer— each time, she sewed them back on with thicker thread, until the seams of sash and dress bulged like little knots of gristle at your waist as you walked, you could feel them like thumbs pressing into your body. The next sash was the one Thee, Hannah! borrowed from her be-ribboned friend and hid in a drawer and got salve on it, salve on a sash, like bacon grease on a snake, God's lard on the ribbon a Quaker girl should not want, Satan's jism on silk delicate as the skin of a young girl's genital. When Hannah gave up satin her father told her she was beautiful just as God made her. But all sashes lead to the sash, very sash of very sash, begotten, not made, that my aunt sent from Switzerland— cobalt ripple of Swiss cotton with clean boys and girls dancing on it. I don't know why my mother chose it to tie me to the chair with, her eye just fell on it, but the whole day I felt those blue children dance around my wrists. Later someone told me they had found out the universe is a kind of strip that twists around and joins itself, and I believe it, sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other. The Unborn Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads, Like gnats around a streetlight in summer, The children we could have, The glimmer of them. Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing In some antechamber - servants, half- Listening for the bell. Sometimes I see them lying like love letters In the Dead Letter Office And sometimes, like tonight, by some black Second sight I can feel just one of them Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea In the dark, stretching its arms out Desperately to me. The Victims When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and took it in silence, all those years and then kicked you out, suddenly, and her kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we grinned inside, the way people grinned when Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South Lawn for the last time. We were tickled to think of your office taken away, your secretaries taken away, your lunches with three double bourbons, your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your suits back, too, those dark carcasses hung in your closet, and the black noses of your shoes with their large pores? She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it until we pricked with her for your annihilation, Father. Now I pass the bums in doorways, the white slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their suits of compressed silt, the stained flippers of their hands, the underwater fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and took it from them in silence until they had given it all away and had nothing left but this. |