The Summer Without Men

going to leave her even though she shone that day and later she was congratulated heartily by many for telling what was generally agreed to be something true because it is well known that the dead often go to their graves wrapped up in lies. But we are going to leave us there at a funeral as it rains hard beyond the stained glass windows, and we’ll let it unfold just as it did then, but without mention.
    Time confounds us, doesn’t it? The physicists know how to play with it, but the rest of us must make due with a speeding present that becomes an uncertain past and, however jumbled that past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again and loot from any time we choose, a savory tidbit here and a sour one there. It can never return as it was, only as a later incarnation. What once was the future is now the past, but the past comes back as a present memory, is here and now in the time of writing. Again, I am writing myself elsewhere. Nothing prevents that from happening, does it?
    Bea and I have been skating on the rink over by Lincoln school, and we are waiting for our father to pick us up, and we see him coming in the green station wagon. On the way home, he whistles “The Erie Canal,” and Bea and I smile at each other in the back seat. At home, Mama is lying on the bed reading a book in French. We jump on the bed, and she feels our feet. They are so cold. Ice, she says the word ice. Then she strips off our four socks and takes our naked skating feet and puts them under her sweater on the warm skin of her stomach. Paradise Found.
    Stefan is sitting on the sofa, gesticulating as he makes his points. As I look at him, I worry. He is too alive. His thoughts are pressing ahead too quickly, and yet I am ignorant then of what will happen. I am innocent of the future, and that state, that cloud of unknowing, is impossible for me to retrieve.
    Dr. F. tells me to push. Push now! And I push with all my might and later I discover I have broken blood vessels all over my face, but what do I know about it then, nothing, and I push, and I feel her head, and then voices cry out that her head is coming out of me, and it does, and there is the sudden slide of her body from mine, me/she, two in one, and between my open legs I see a red, slimy foreigner, with a little bit of black hair, my daughter. I remember nothing of the umbilical cord, do I? Nothing of the cutting. Boris is there, and he is weeping. I don’t shed a tear. He does. Now I remember! I said that he had never bawled in real life, but that’s wrong. I had forgotten! He is standing there right now in my mind crying after his daughter is born.
    I am walking into the AIM gallery, a women’s cooperative in Brooklyn, to attend the opening of a show called The Secret Amusements.
    I am standing beside Boris in our apartment on Tompkins Place. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, as long as ye both shall live?
    Well, do you? Speak up, you redheaded numbskull. That was then. I said yes. I said, I do. I said something in the affirmative.
    My mother has turned ninety, and we are celebrating in Bonden. Her knees are giving her problems, but she is lucid and doesn’t use a walker. Peg is there, and my mother introduces me to Irene. I have heard a lot about Irene on the telephone lately, and I pump her hand to show my enthusiasm. She is ninety-five. “Your mother and I,” she tells me, “have had some really fun times together.”
    Mama Mia is writing poems at the kitchen table. The little Daisy girl is stirring in her crib.
    Mia is in the hospital now, diagnosed with a brief psychosis, a transitory alienation of her reason, a brain glitch. She is officially une folle . She is writing in the notebook BRAIN SHARDS.
     
7.
An insistent thing—
but speechless,
not identity,
a waking dream that leaves no image,
only agonies. I need a name.
I need a word in this white world.
I need to call it something, not nothing.
Choose a picture from nowhere,
from a hole in a mind
and look, there on the ledge:
A flowering bone.
     
11.
I blibe and bleeb on rovsty hobe
With Sentecrate, Bilt, and Frobe,
My buddles down from Iberbean,
The durkerst toon in Freen.
     
21.
Once over easy, love,
Twice over tough,
Piss and