The End of the Alphabet Read online

there is this about me: I feel bad

  as if grief needs to be and is in the end, anyway.

  *

  The tongue is a muscle

  simply strolling along.

  She said:

  Crumbling is a neck bone as some distress

  that called itself flame

  burnt a life down, and rude was the laughter

  lodged in whose throat?

  Tongue, tasting of rue, added:

  Or on its own

  a mouthful of muddy water you can swallow.

  One comes to this place of being born—here is necessary.

  Hear its sorrow. Always again, its beauty in your eyes.

  In the tone you pity.

  Day sky responded:

  Some lift their arms, feel remorse in their knees, candle

  after candle lit and all the weeping with its straightforward

  face—

  to benefit doubt—

  Unhyphen the self from the part that cannot

  leave the cruelty of this. For it is

  better to curse, Shut up, Shut up, before understanding sets in.

  Hunger to the table

  *

  Though we occupied our regular seats, the tolling

  of the tower’s hand unlit the skylight’s blue: night sky

  before the shade. Two feet away

  the thickened bones of the street. The soaring

  traffic sung very badly to prove we owned some part in it.

  Across, he, who was tossing earlier, hurled into the talk,

  the talk, the talk, and what?

  about the starving … Give

  nothing? All of you, your kind, hold your doubts: on thinking

  back, on truth, on distribution, the famine, the drought.

  On the linoleum floor,

  prefixed, I detach myself. Stir out of solution

  to the next place, just below. Un

  generous, holding

  the tongue. To sense like scent his uneven equation, the width

  of the gustatory taste bud and some small mouth, 100,000

  nanometers empty. In the same eye the linoleum we occupy,

  square

  after square.

  And easy it is, the wording of, Can’t grasp. Not there. Inherent

  indeterminacy. And the nodding. Smuggled from: Safeway.

  Sanguine.

  Stalemate. But I have stood within. A hunger sinking

  into. Nothing stops. And the feeling: Bound

  less. Could say: A hand. Could say: Needed. Close in

  on humanistic regard. Then the waiter wanted.

  We ordered two two-lb. snappers.

  The very elite, the very fine, most costly sent

  four one-lb. snappers. Ragged bottom to our rushing hunger

  without vision of the casting down.

  *

  Even today, after,

  coldness in the flesh wakes the loneliness of him,

  calls such contorts of want to his gut—

  the thrust, a block of ice too thick to be, yet dragging up

  within man’s desire to look around, to know physically

  she will touch him, she will turn toward, wake up into

  from her own herculean expression of sadness.

  (At last, then, are all the ways the hands stay involved:

  weightless, lost word of love on the hardening nipple,

  unburdened between the thighs as touch echoes, after all,

  you. His hand urging out of her deep surrender what

  on its own could not. How he holds her holds him down.

  (All the way through it is finally, then, that fear in the breath

  of the breath swept out, lost to dawn, loosened

  by the other’s sleeping arms, bodies adrift

  until the space between them asks, How wide this?

  *

  A turned ankle is its own consequence. She hops about, then caught on the sofa waiting for the swelling to go down is reminded we move among others to fall from ourselves, windswept, having a liking for laughter but the ridiculousness of falling off one’s own heels. What was being viewed from up there? The mind varies so, then the tripping up; for the foot, not steadiness, is at the same time as the mind running about in downpour. Outside the bathroom, moments before, having just pulled her panty and his underpants out from where the lump detracted from tightly tucked bedsheets, she, in that place which proves as she holds in her hands the closest mingling of them, scent sweetly wading across the mouth of love, comes about in this remembering and is reminded, the ankle throbbing, lying there. And so, knowing again remarkably, after all, you, she, finding the glass of water between the legs of the sofa, is moved to respond like any woman collecting rainwater to stay alive.

  *

  Nearer the open hydrants of summer to arrive flung. sung. sweat

  stains tossed aside: all effort

  past forgotten:

  tension of whether forgiven

  as the unclothed if disciplined body releases as it wraps its

  legs around: closure rewarding and sustained and thigh-high.

  * * *

  Don’t ask to be told x to y in time or eternity.

  Passage bleeds between the hammering

  breath and flesh. Sweetness mumbled

  is the voice nice. Just as the lips open open the eyes.

  Extent and root of

  *

  As each syllable leaves these lips as touch, feel how onerous

  —always

  a draft touching, its embrace the dream awake

  chilling distance

  and the body feeling it first as desire—

  the just sound of lovers in a sureness of love without

  the love, oh, yearned-for thing, never without—

  The same chill already resembling how the ocean feels

  though one flies over

  gray voice of the open mouth,

  each wave blown apart. So sullen each attempt—

  until she who doesn’t want, but having need, tries

  to land somewhere without giving in; giving no expression

  and haunted at center, haunted at heart, without

  forgiveness in this atmosphere of—

  Think of me somewhere dumb, open corridor into—

  whispering, okay, okay.

  and afraid. alone

  and not. afraid

  with no more room. falling

  into nowhere else—

  *

  (ripped out night, your core untranslatable. preverbal, paralyzed, out-of-place syllable outcried. tacked up sequences of daylight. distrusted though crossed over, miscounted wanting. fist in mind. damage in touch. age that broke and broke the fear up. other ache doubled over, occupied. echo smuggled in. rumored, dehydrated sweet. bound with twine, lost with shrug. course of dustiness revealed.

  Autopsied:

  just the girl breathless

  and in her way against him, saying, Love, I love you.

  *

  Angled between sperm and please, tugging at her hem, the day cut close though not thinking midwifery, nor breast milk, nor tooting horn, before wetting the lips to begin. She whispered, mixed up as she was in the sheets, Hard to plow the once cow fields: eruptions rather than abrasions and the body’s sudden expression, its ruthless stir toward.

  He tried to climb, one word, the next, yet could not conclude a sentence. She threw the switch then. From her own need, in her own discomfort, she too had to rise up. Sunday. Monday … Friday they rescued each other. The one or the other pried open the parentheses. Love, the direction: Lone Star. Lone Shark. They invited themselves out into the crowd. Their perused heart spilled after the eventual stir. Urged. He said, Love tastes like pepper. Moved aside dishes, flesh on wood, let the stove go. When they woke up he worked up the furnace in silence, refusing the sweater. Ridiculous! Too short the relief. This

  the deep into, the out of register,

  the striving af
ter—

  But then exhausted, but not blessedly,

  what’s real floods the room: Mickey Mouse is a man in a mouse costume. And the ring in the medicine cabinet signifies preoccupied not ruefulness. Both sides those days after curiously still, off key, sloppy, cannot be mechanical. And it is difficult, this road to consequence. Some strain in herself knotted. Forgive me, please. Already in the body was too much. How he hated, forgive me, the more of her. And sure to lose in what’s never to happen, never did he forget to crawl a finger along her cheekbone. She held her face that way, wanting. Bent as she was truly inward elucidates her head shaking, even as she touched his leg to still it, and the doctor, taking restraint as her cue, simply said: Complicating, we can get in the way of the umbilical cord and waste what is. Misery gone.

  *

  (Heaved into porcelain: crumbs to chicken, neither orange

  nor brown, each previous becoming diluted—

  or piped through is the upset,

  for what cannot be absorbed must be expected

  like sun subtracted bringing all to mud.

  Similar is the journey from not imagined to conceivable:

  touch sinks, and innocence rolls over

  residue, falling. Then to want; and in feeding the self

  also to feed another, but at any moment to have chosen the self

  only: without emphasis, staring at nothing, though deepest is

  the taste in my mouth: sour. Despite the presence of others, spit.

  * * *

  —in memory remorse wraps the self. Where regret curves

  I must be entering. So much disappears. So much

  gripping the senses; then____anywhere but where I am heading.

  *

  (She would not see it if she had been disgraced she would not

  see she would not put it in front she

  would not have it put in front she said do not bring it to me

  if she has been disgraced

  she said remind me of something else

  an actress or a place something

  juice in the islands of Langerhans the four-legged beast

  nosing a crotch she said remind me of anything

  she would not see if she had been disgraced

  she said never get into the skin of someone you won’t know

  she said homiletic over the osso buco she said

  listen to me disgraced do not put it do not bring it to me.

  *

  Observe that meanwhile,

  upstairs, the sheet untucked

  left his foot bare. Then the emergency

  is caught shaking hands hard

  in his nostrils. He awakes. The burner had not

  caught. Gas. Tripping down

  the stairs: Are you crazy? Don’t you smell it?

  Sometimes

  side by side, then pulled out, blessedly, or maybe,

  slipping, taken by the shoulders and I am

  still, and I am working hard to hold

  what it is that cannot let go.

  I like to pay bills. I sleep eight hours. When winter comes

  I drink soup. But again, pulled in on the trip

  over the mountain, early

  afternoon, the vultures wing-wrapped

  in the trees and some form of despair, a body

  lying dead, wind held, odor pulling out

  through skin and underfoot, distrust? April 22nd

  Xed out. Nine months to outstare

  as each garbage truck

  coughs in its wide turn. Without hurry, they begin

  loading, like flood victims passing sandbags;

  already weary, they work in slow motion. The loading

  takes all the time it can take.

  While behind the window, I open

  the milk carton from its other end. Reined in half-sewage

  sickening, stiffening the jaw. Regularized abruptly

  I take it all outside. Elbow my way

  north of the 45th parallel beyond where the plants green up;

  out of reach I close the lid

  or so I recall

  though it is otherwise

  and heavier than air in the bureau all wrapped up

  alongside rolled socks. The complete effect: criminally

  subterranean: first towel. then plastic bag. blood

  and the umbilical cord fragmented. Remaindered: Asphyxiation

  elsewhere.) It isn’t my death but I am deep in with it

  when the dog next door barks. I put the kettle

  on the stove, go to the door, and then it’s in

  rotation. Are you crazy? Don’t you smell it?

  Something

  adolescent takes me where people as close as me to me

  did not save, cannot save. A form of despair is

  running over the mountain on the outskirts of the minute

  in the shape of—

  no foreigner comes.

  *

  (then the blond arm, taken

  aback, encircles my waist, the long, ready-to-wear

  appendage, soothing over

  the appeal:

  The day I am at peace I will have achieved

  a kind of peace even I know suggests I am crazy.

  But, as it will be how I survive, I will not feel so.

  Residual in the hour

  *

  When she arrived

  she felt composed. Someone called her. The voice broke,

  trying to bridge or to remember. The voice that called

  was no other than her own.

  *

  Did they take a vein from her thigh to mend her heart?

  She pulled a pant leg up. Her face, undressed, was more interesting.

  She was grinning. How old do you think I am?

  Still she wanted to die. And there, her reflection

  facing her. It motioned as if she were alive.

  Her photo was in her purse.

  *

  For nostalgia: the Ferris wheel turns.

  No one rides it.

  It brought her to tears. She was recalling.

  She put the drink down. She went into the bathroom. The toilet

  never flushed.

  *

  Da daa daa. She repeated,

  Da daa daa. She wanted to leave.

  I got a lot of life for a dead woman.

  She laughed. She was laughing. She was lying. The rain.

  *

  Here. Take the photo. In the photo she is not gorgeous.

  She is not ugly. She is in the photo only.

  In the photo the Ferris wheel does not turn.

  In the photo she is alive.

  I was alive. Did I say this? I asked. I stood up. The rain.

  *

  Before the arrival of everyone, drinking glass after glass,

  she had to excuse herself eventually, not that

  the bougainvillea moved or that the neighbors stood still,

  but because he would see through her and say,

  You won’t be liked tomorrow. All across the mountains

  trees like matted hair took everything in. There they were

  in what developed: that place discouraged.

  He could be sweeping the grass, so ruined his smile.

  She sprinkled salt on her lime. In the window

  his gritty glance making the clouds move, loosening

  the configuration of a volcano into a sleeping woman:

  her hard lines dimmed by unclaimed rain. More expansively,

  the sky is blue. This in time reminds. Stands one up.

  *

  Laughter has the house to itself. It wraps to hide

  expectation elsewhere. Laughter has the house to itself.

  It swings from ear to ear until her eyes squint,

  wrinkle wicked, against a flood of salted years.

  The trouble: hers is, she has

  no imagination for the future.

  When she lies face down on the much-praised woo
d floor

  she considers her face a ceiling. The trouble:

  hers is, she has no image of the future.

  Though if we turn the corpse face up in the coffin

  the lid remains the floor in face of such distance. Tell her,

  she can’t rest there. Though she thinks herself a fish shored,

  laughter sputtering against the unwept,

  ever peaceful. Tell her, she cannot rest there.

  *

  Within the untrained ear

  laughter sounds like sobbing because breath catches

  in the throat, then spurts out.

  When he was in the house, he would ask

  (blue tones) he would ask, “What’s so funny?”

  He knew her secret (but could not know)

  and felt random in the face of—

  When he was in the house

  for him her face was not the ceiling; the ceiling

  was the ceiling. He chose that. In the face of—

  She didn’t appeal to him.

  *

  Later in a bar with a friend. He muses: There we were,

  two children really.

  Later in a bar with only one question. It begins: If we had had

  the child—It ends: could he have shielded her from herself?

  Later in a bar, he has had a few, he begins: mad, madder than

  He ends: Miss. Miss. Understand.

  His friend answers only because he thinks he must

  but a touch would do—It’s a shame. He says: A shame. A shame.

  No one is sad to have saved himself.

  He lives. And what is better than a cold beer?

  Even with her wet eyelash picking up dust she must realize.

  *

  In another language hunger might bring her to her feet

  but there is no hunger in English. Desire, longing—

  every emotion in a relationship with too much of itself.

  Not unlike the aphid sucking sap, soon we are unable

  to swallow: aphagia.

  and its meaning: If she stabs her throat thirty times