Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Read online

  Pelicans and storks swoop by

  On their way to other islands further

  South, their alabaster bills encased in glow

  As if flight was all there ever was,

  Their feathery white and black backs

  Outlined in radiance, ruffled

  By oceanic breezes that wrap

  Themselves around this island beyond time,

  And perturb Isadora’s tangled scarf.

  Winter Flood

  Ah my darling beloved old man,

  With white hair and topaz eyes,

  Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder

  As the Lucite sun of winter

  Streams across our residence of corporal

  Destruction, all bodily divinity

  Diminished and dissected from that state

  Of adoration that consumed it for so long

  When it was summer and our bodies

  Were vast landscapes of jade wheat

  And emerald corn stalks swaying

  Ripe for harvest untouched by

  Disease or rot, blight or frost or

  Northerly winds that would have scraped the

  Bloom from our collateral beauty

  And the right to mourn it.

  Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder,

  That once shuddered under such provocation

  Warming like the rising tide of a river still

  Irrigating coveted and fertile flesh

  With cries of lust and groans of happiness

  As spring blew soft rain and loose petals

  Fell and willows bled semen and birches sang

  Root and limb growing together as did

  Grain and husk, chafe and rice, pea and pod

  Inseparable from our youthful arrogance

  Never dreaming one day that age and decrepitude would

  Come lie beside our rustling and breathing

  Bringing giant gales of discontent that rage

  Across the phantom moons of green pastures

  Dispersing a whiff of musk from lavender fields

  Ancient battle grounds of war and maiming

  Nothing prepared us for winter floods

  Touch my forehead, touch my shoulder

  Lying in puddles of non-consummation

  My head rests quietly on your heart,

  And still banks as we watch our river

  Swoon and swell with the monsoon and

  The flood’s arrival destroys

  Our house built on stilts.

  Leave the door open

  I

  Leave the door open

  After I’ve walked through it.

  I’ll start from there not here,

  From the end, not the beginning

  I’ll look back only once, so that

  I can remember you standing there,

  Your long polished body framed

  By luminosity like Leonardo’s

  Universal man; handsome, black haired

  Smooth muscled, arrogant in soft down,

  Brown eyed, soft lipped, narrow limbed,

  Whose hand I fell in love with

  Taking change at a toll booth on the freeway.

  II

  Leave the door open

  After I’ve walked through it

  So I’ll know that this

  Whispering flight from you

  Is not the end, but a parenthesis:

  An illusion that I can find my way back

  From intolerable absence

  Through a crack

  In the door,

  With only a crescent of light,

  Just enough to keep me alive in an exiled world,

  An unyielding universe of solitude,

  Planetary loneliness for lunch and dinner

  Famine rationed to sack of grain,

  I’ll forget you the day I die.

  White Peony Petals

  Peony petals floated upon the rumpled white square

  Of my first love’s bed, scattered and crushed

  Into the sign of a crescent, its neon fading

  In the dawn’s loveliness which awake

  Echos of the night before gushing love

  Laid side by side on a stone beach,

  Tide drenched in sand snails and medusas

  Escaped from our own ruminated depths.

  The Han Princess of Via Jacopino

  A Han princess greets me every morning with

  A creamy cup of steaming cappuccino,

  This perfect throwback to the dynasty of Empress Wu,

  Almond eyes lowered, chin drawn in, two small

  Dimples carved into the suppleness of the white oval

  Of her eternal countenance, a refugee from Sachow,

  Who doesn’t speak a word of Italian, English, or French,

  An illegal alien straight off the boat with her

  Shy smile and Hanchow accented Mandarin, her

  Silhouette etched against stylized painted clouds

  Of a 5th century scroll painting, upswept hair and

  Elaborate flowing white robes drawn in ink in the

  Exquisite style known as Wei hu, confused

  With the line of slot machines and Coca Cola signs that

  Line the walls of the Jolly Bar in Milan.

  Pale daughter of a 5th century court magician,

  This lacquered white porcelain doll bends like bamboo,

  As thin as rice paper, no breasts, no buttocks,

  No hips, only one long exquisite curve of an extended

  Brushstroke applied to silk by a master calligrapher,

  Her sublime posture the perfect rendition of her soul

  Not standing in an Italian bar but in the stone gardens

  Of the Forbidden City—luminous in Red,

  White Kimonos reincarnating—the once cherished

  Princess, Lu Chung, ruler of dreams and Palaces,

  Summer pavilions enclosed by endless parallel walks

  Along which she glides head bowed in submission,

  A vivid ink stroke of life, livid and electrifying

  As the graffiti scrawled on scarlet bricks

  Her pale lotus flower mouth pursed in a secret smile.

  The timeless face floats in ether, expressionless except in love,

  Hurries to a secret assignation, carried by prancing porters,

  Followed by mute eunuchs from the emperor’s harem,

  A line of ink blots stretched along her red prison,

  The slim graceful figure reclining, eyes watchful behind silk curtains

  No more than a sliver of existence, a hand that suddenly

  Extends out of the baldaquin’s veil in a nervous flutter.

  The sound of cascading coins which spill

  Out over the gray tile floor, breaks the spell, an habituee

  Who has been playing the slot machines all morning, has hit the jackpot,

  His victory cry startles the princess who wordlessly hands me my cappuccino,

  Her pale tapered fingers still curved around its rim, I open my morning paper

  And wonder how long it will take some smitten Italian boy to rescue the

  Imprisoned princess from the Jolly Bar; three months I calculate

  Less time than Pushkin’s grandfather took to measure the Great Wall of China.

  Hela

  My name was Henrietta Lacks

  But doctors knew me only

  As Hela

  The name they gave my

  Immortal cells,

  Cells that have survived

  For 50 years beyond

  My mortal remains,

  50 metric tons of

  Immortality

  Reproducing themselves into eternity

  A universe discovered:

  Polio vaccine

  The secrets of cancer,

  Vitro-fertilization,

  Weightlessness in space,

  DNA and cloning,

  I was bought and sold

  Like my ancestors b
efore me

  By the billions.

  It didn’t seem to matter

  That my cells were colored

  For the first time, no one cared

  From the Negro ward of Johns Hopkins

  They appropriated all of them

  Without my permission

  Nor consent

  These miracle cells that

  Invaded white porcelain laboratories

  And labyrinths of medical freezers

  With their Frankenstein possibilities

  To make History all over the planet,

  Far from my white Birch

  Slave cabin town of Clover, Virginia

  A place like myself that no longer exists

  Of voodoo and faith healings

  Except …

  My legacy was not Faith

  But the multi-billion dollar

  Biotech industry.

  My human biological material

  None of which my children inherited

  None of which profited me

  None of which was recognized

  As the stuff:

  It was made of

  This cornucopia of DNA

  Which is even now

  Still giving and still living

  In beauty and abundance

  Studded with my pearls of pain

  Strings of them flooding

  The surface of liver, diaphragm,

  Bladder, intestine, appendix, rectum,

  Heart, ovaries, and fallopian tubes,

  All gray and pearly with invasive cancer.

  A portrait of Dorian Gray

  The suffering of the Crucifixion

  Fever and delirious, vomiting and poison

  Excruciating agony.

  Another steel day dawning

  At the tobacco auction barn

  Only a mile away

  From my four room cabin,

  The horror of abandoning

  Two baby girls;

  My beloved if mediocre

  Husband,

  I floated from carnage to cadaver,

  Split open on the autopsy slab

  A conspiracy of cancer cells,

  A universe of cancer cells,

  A Milky Way of cancer cells,

  A galaxy of effervescent stars

  That still lives while I die.

  Enough to drive anyone insane

  Cancer cells …

  Swimming in homemade culture

  Dividing themselves spontaneously

  Every second for sixty-eight years.

  Cancer cells

  That danced to their own tune,

  With their own secrets,

  Exactly like creation.

  Carcinoma of the cervix:

  The DNA of the nucleus

  A fabulous lemon yellow,

  The action filaments

  Light cerulean blue.

  The mitochondria a shocking pink,

  Monster cells as beautiful as a

  Kandinsky abstraction.

  My eleventh chromosome

  A virulent masterpiece of evil

  Metamorphosing themselves on their own,

  Angels of Satan called fluorescence in situ,

  Hybridization where fish glow with

  Multicolored dyes like multicolored fireflies:

  A sapphire sky in eerie radium blue,

  Punishing Henrietta for being sick.

  Rewarding Axel with a

  Nobel Prize …

  But not Hela,

  How about an honorary Nobel for the legend?

  A Thank You to the goddess of eternal healing?

  Or posthumously to her daughter?

  For injecting HIV into cells to

  Learn how to infect 100%

  Postulating if DNA should be altered without

  The permission of God Almighty

  Dividing indefinitely,

  Never growing old and never dying,

  These Hela cells of devastating

  Resplendence and obstination,

  Proving there is no wisdom

  And no old age

  And just possibly no death …

  Except that of Henrietta Lacks,

  Resting now in an unknown,

  Unmarked grave.

  The Rape of a Chambermaid

  You tell me to go lie down on the bed,

  But if you knew what I find in my bed,

  You would not ask me to go there

  The same bed I tear apart each morning

  From the leavings of the night before;

  Bodies naked or clothed, secretions

  Semen, screams of pleasure or pain

  Phlegm, blood, night sweat, odors of

  Love and gropings saline or salacious breath

  I fling the linen shrouds of last night’s garbage

  Up and away to morning’s bright yawn adumbrating

  Other strangers’ limpid flesh impounded on white freshness;

  A new icy ironed sheet unfolds like blown sails

  Filling my wide flung arms, coxing the rampaging veil

  Onto the box spring, taming the jagged edges into smoothness,

  A white sinless prairie awaiting the next homesteader

  A tourist from Nebraska, a Nabob from Shanghai for this is a

  International Hotel suite, five starred and accredited

  For the rich and famous and wannabes’ crushing vanity,

  Making their way in the world as I do mine except in the Bronx,

  That untamed wilderness just north of Manhattan,

  A no-man’s land from which I emerge each morning showered and scrubbed

  At 5 a.m. for the two-hour train ride to the mirrored and carpeted safety

  I lied myself into from the barbed wire refugee camp I lied my way out of,

  Lies that weigh lightly on my soul considering that lies

  Are the linguafranca of the Bronx, the busy signal of the

  Six hundred thousand cell phones that ring and ring and ring

  At all hours of the day and night in desperate chorus on its

  Streets and highways, alleys and parking lots, bars and diners,

  While 15 year olds play basketball on glass strewn macadam

  I believed myself to be alone, in an empty room with bleached linen,

  Miniature soap, clean towels, a noisy vacuum cleaner,

  So I do not perceive him or hear his naked feet

  Suddenly a long shadow darkens the bedclothes

  Ink wings of burnt flesh and macadam feathers

  Reach out from the bathroom shower to incase me

  One hand penetrates deep into my vagina,

  The fingers of the other hand thrust deep into my throat

  So no cry for help can escape me

  Unable to move or scream under the double bind,

  Thrown to the floor and held there under suffocating weight,

  The full specter of Hellish rape appears

  The stranger’s strange body is livid and naked

  Against my starched uniform, trussed up in a

  Silent movie of flashing sheets, flesh and penetrating pain,

  Vomit and spleen burst from my impaled body’

  Strangled and skewed like fowl,

  Violated from throat to anus

  A phallic tank destroying the no-man’s land between

  Human and beast, burning breath rank and rabid assail

  My senses fighting unconsciousness twisting helplessly on this split

  Horn still embedded in me, hope shredded that this is

  Only nightmare not attempted murder: a hard slap across the face

  “You tell and you’re fired Bitch.”

  A trickle of blood escapes my uncorked throat

  From which pours a stream of vomit, semen and shame

  The pike of pain withdrawn, my head upon it

  Still mute, peace is all that’s left to live for

  My mouth full of come I flee into the darkness of

  The
linen closet to die and die.

  The suite is empty now and calm, its horned occupant

  Disguised as human has checked out downstairs

  With his gleaming platinum American Express card.

  Voile curtains sweep breezes across the still unmade bed,

  I hurry to clean the next room in the 27 minutes allotted,

  Afraid I will be reprimanded like a convict

  For loitering on the job.

  Akhmatova’s Centotaph

  Whose victory was it?

  I don’t know.

  Perhaps poetry itself?

  Certainly Pushkin and Pasternak were there

  A multitude stood before her tomb

  Bareheaded in Leningrad’s March winds,

  Boys and girls recited her verse by heart

  From two or three in the afternoon

  Until the light leaped away and darkness crept in

  At ten when it was still tricky white night,

  And everything shone without the sun

  Which wrapped itself around harsh throats congested

  With unreleased tears and KGB agents who

  Mingled everywhere watching and taking notes,

  The crowd advanced slowly on foot following the sepulcher

  Through the miniscule cemetary flanked

  By pale hills pierced with black pines

  Until it reached a bouquet of Evergreens

  Men without hats, women without scarves,

  Who dares to disturb them?

  They have their rights: the right of grief

  The right of vengance, the right of memory

  The right of broken heartedness, the right of

  Mothers, sisters, brothers, students all claiming

  Relief—against death and oblivion, authority

  Censure, terror, oppression and for instruction

  Resistance, humanity, the rights of man

  The coffin is crowned with ribbons and blossoms,

  The air of triumph and victory, the music in everyone’s head is

  That of Richter playing Prokofiev’s Possession

  All the old women stood straight and tall

  Maria Yudina, Nina Tabidze, Vana Khalturina

  Olga Iriskala, Rita Wright Kovaleva, Maria Petrovykh

  Marina Chukovskaya, Lydia Chukovskaya

  Natasha Pavlenko, Frida Vigdorova

  Old women with graying hair and ravaged faces

  Though they like she had all been beauties,

  Aligned like the surrounding cypresses