The Break Away Analysis

Your daisies have come

on the day of my divorce:

the courtroom a cement box,

a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me

and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land

for the Jew in me,

but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—

and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors

that makes the now separate parts useless,

even to cut each other up as we did yearly

under the crayoned-in sun.

The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break

into two cans ready for recycling,

flattened tin humans

and a tin law,

even for my twenty-five years of hanging on

by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.

The gray room:

Judge, lawyer, witness

and me and invisible Skeezix,

and all the other torn

enduring the bewilderments

of their division.


Your daisies have come

on the day of my divorce.

They arrive like round yellow fish,

sucking with love at the coral of our love.

Yet they wait,

in their short time,

like little utero half-borns,

half killed, thin and bone soft.

They breathe the air that stands

for twenty-five illicit days,

the sun crawling inside the sheets,

the moon spinning like a tornado

in the washbowl,

and we orchestrated them both,

calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.

There was a song, our song on your cassette,

that played over and over

and baptised the prodigals.

It spoke the unspeakable,

as the rain will on an attic roof,

letting the animal join its soul

as we kneeled before a miracle--

forgetting its knife.


The daisies confer

in the old-married kitchen

papered with blue and green chefs

who call out pies, cookies, yummy,

at the charcoal and cigarette smoke

they wear like a yellowy salve.

The daisies absorb it all--

the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love

(If one could call such handfuls of fists

and immobile arms that!)

and on this day my world rips itself up

while the country unfastens along

with its perjuring king and his court.

It unfastens into an abortion of belief,

as in me--

the legal rift--

as on might do with the daisies

but does not

for they stand for a love

undergoihng open heart surgery

that might take

if one prayed tough enough.

And yet I demand,

even in prayer,

that I am not a thief,

a mugger of need,

and that your heart survive

on its own,

belonging only to itself,

whole, entirely whole,

and workable

in its dark cavern under your ribs.


I pray it will know truth,

if truth catches in its cup

and yet I pray, as a child would,

that the surgery take.


I dream it is taking.

Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.

Next I dream the love is made of glass,

glass coming through the telephone

that is breaking slowly,

day by day, into my ear.

Next I dream that I put on the love

like a lifejacket and we float,

jacket and I,

we bounce on that priest-blue.

We are as light as a cat's ear

and it is safe,

safe far too long!

And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window

and peer down at the moon in the pond

and know that beauty has walked over my head,

into this bedroom and out,

flowing out through the window screen,

dropping deep into the water

to hide.


I will observe the daisies

fade and dry up

wuntil they become flour,

snowing themselves onto the table

beside the drone of the refrigerator,

beside the radio playing Frankie

(as often as FM will allow)

snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side

like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.


It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds

and their little half-life,

their numbered days

that raged like a secret radio,

recalling love that I picked up innocently,

yet guiltily,

as my five-year-old daughter

picked gum off the sidewalk

and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.


For me it was love found

like a diamond

where carrots grow--

the glint of diamond on a plane wing,

meaning:  DANGER!  THICK ICE!

but the good crunch of that orange,

the diamond, the carrot,

both with four million years of resurrecting dirt,

and the love,

although Adam did not know the word,

the love of Adam

obeying his sudden gift.


You, who sought me for nine years,

in stories made up in front of your naked mirror

or walking through rooms of fog women,

you trying to forget the mother

who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door

as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss

through the keyhole,

you who wrote out your own birth

and built it with your own poems,

your own lumber, your own keyhole,

into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,

you, who fell into my words, years

before you fell into me (the other,

both the Camp Director and the camper),

you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,

and calls and letters and once a luncheon,

and twice a reading by me for you.

But I wouldn't!


Yet this year,

yanking off all past years,

I took the bait

and was pulled upward, upward,

into the sky and was held by the sun--

the quick wonder of its yellow lap--

and became a woman who learned her own shin

and dug into her soul and found it full,

and you became a man who learned his won skin

and dug into his manhood, his humanhood

and found you were as real as a baker

or a seer

and we became a home,

up into the elbows of each other's soul,

without knowing--

an invisible purchase--

that inhabits our house forever.


We were

blessed by the House-Die

by the altar of the color T.V.

and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage,

a tiny marriage

called belief,

as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy,

so close to absolute,

so daft within a year or two.

The daisies have come

for the last time.

And I who have,

each year of my life,

spoken to the tooth fairy,

believing in her,

even when I was her,

am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,

although your voice cries into the telephone:

Marry me!  Marry me!

and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:

The love is in dark trouble!

The love is starting to die,

right now--

we are in the process of it.

The empty process of it.


I see two deaths,

and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart,

and though I willed one away in court today

and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other,

they both die like waves breaking over me

and I am drowning a little,

but always swimming

among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.

And though your daisies are an unwanted death,

I wade through the smell of their cancer

and recognize the prognosis,

its cartful of loss--


I say now,

you gave what you could.

It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on!

and the dead city of my marriage

seems less important

than the fact that the daisies came weekly,

over and over,

likes kisses that can't stop themselves.


There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.

Let one be forgotten--

Bury it!  Wall it up!

But let me not forget the man

of my child-like flowers

though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior,

he remains, his fingers the marvel

of fourth of July sparklers,

his furious ice cream cones of licking,

remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth

when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.


For the rest that is left:

name it gentle,

as gentle as radishes inhabiting

their short life in the earth,

name it gentle,

gentle as old friends waving so long at the window,

or in the drive,

name it gentle as maple wings singing

themselves upon the pond outside,

as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond,

that night that it was ours,

when our bodies floated and bumped

in moon water and the cicadas

called out like tongues.


Let such as this

be resurrected in all men

whenever they mold their days and nights

as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine

and planted the seed that dives into my God

and will do so forever

no matter how often I sweep the floor.

.: Poem :.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward... this baby that I bleed.


| Posted on 2007-04-16 | by a guest

.: Poem :.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward... this baby that I bleed.


| Posted on 2007-04-16 | by a guest