by Mary Karr
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,
let me learn from this animal’s deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me.
COAT HANGER BENT INTO HALO
Gathering up my mother’s clothes for the poor,
I find the coathanger that almost aborted me,
or so I dub it—the last hand clung to the high rod.
Unwound, it could have poked
through the pink, puckered hole of her cervix
to spill me before I got going good.
Instead, from the furred litter of souls squirming
to be visible, I was picked.
May I someday spy Mother’s poppy-studded hat
on the skull of a street-corner gospel singer
swarming with sores. May I twist from this black wire
a halo to crown my son’s head.
LAST LOVE
For years I chose the man to suit the instant,
from good guy to goat boy,
dreadlocked to crewcut. Not one could bridal me.
In place of lace veil,
I peered from bandage gauze. And if,
in rage, some suitor
tore that off, the red sun was a scald, and I felt
scalped and rocket-shot
onto the nearest flight. So everyone I kissed
left hurt. One man broke
the table I served him bread on. Another
claimed my heart
was arsenic at its core. When my last love came,
he slid a palm across
mine eyes, lent me his mouth
(a bitten plum)
lay his head in the middle of me, bent me
to that. Nights now,
my face rests on the meadow of his chest—
so I’m a loose-petaled poppy
blown open, a girl again, for the first time
hearing the earth’s heartbeat.
THE ICE FISHERMAN
Because Grandpa Joe pronounced way
long ago, They’s fish
big as Cadillacs down there, the ice fisherman
hacked a hole
and stood above a slush abyss
in steel-toed boots. Headphoned to the Pops—
engrossed, he couldn’t hear the spider cracks.
When the river chasmed under him,
it was a blind
plunge into white flame, headphones
drifting down to silt. He rolled like a walrus,
body chub keeping him up
as green currents pulled him seaward at a tilt.
He felt the scarf his wife had knit an iron noose.
He failed to feel his hands.
His numb lips pressed to the river’s spine, to suck
slid inches of air.
When he skimmed under the town rink,
music blurred and bored into his hurt ears.
Maybe some grappling hook wielded by solid citizens
would boost him, heave him
steaming onto the ice like a calved seal.
But the skaters’ blades just cut scrollwork above his face.
Their blades went whisk, and he went out of reach.
Then out of his red mouth hole
he hollered up.
His dumb heart slowed.
All this was very swift, and by the time
the great gray fish with mandarin whiskers
nosed his hand, he didn’t know
it wasn’t the stony ghost of Grandpa Joe,
or that his every filament
was being reeled to the burnished floor
of Heaven, where he’d be
hoisted up to show.
DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE CRUCIFIXION
To be crucified is first to lie down
on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out
on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes
fix you into place.
Once the cross props up and the pole stob
sinks vertically in an earth hole, perhaps
at an awkward list, what then can you blame for hurt
but your own self’s burden?
You’re not the figurehead on a ship. You’re not
flying anywhere, and no one’s coming to hug you.
You hang like that, a sack of flesh with the hard
trinity of nails holding you into place.
Thus hung, your rib cage struggles up
to breathe until you suffocate. If God
permits this, one wonders if some less
than loving watcher
watches us. The man on the cross
under massed thunderheads feels
his soul leak away, then surge. Some wind
sucks him into the light stream
in the rent sky, and he’s snatched back, held close.
RED-CIRCLED WANT AD FOR MY SON ON HIS COMMENCEMENT
The cabdriver wants a job where he can play
head-banging music loud, the director
to flicker forever on each skull’s screen.
The scholar wants the whole oceanic mystery
to radiate from the next flipped page.
The drummer wants to keep time,
to beat it, the President to leave scorched
imprints of his oily dollar sign in every flaming
foreign field. I only want strafe bombers
to drop zillions of my books
over stadium and glen and rice
paddy, to satisfy the citizens who scream
for whatever streams from my Razorpoint,
plus for my son never to suffer
a knife tear in the frail
fabric of self, and to reckon
this loud, head-banging
world is a bequest no labor can earn.
SON’S ROOM
After my son left for college, come dusk,
I used to sit in his room painted green
like the first shoot of any plant,
caterpillar green, neon green of unripe papaya.
There was no stuffed polar bear to hold nor illustrated book
whose valley I could wander down;
no laundry heap—no shirt an acre wide
I had to steam an iron across; no gunboat soccer shoes
to scrape mud off; no posters of beachball-breasted girls
urging him to sling on his backpack
and hop a train the length of Italy
to the topless beach.
The walls were bare, the windows losing light.
If you’ve never been a kid, and choose to raise one, know
he’ll wind up raising you. From whatever small drop
of care you start out with, he’ll have to grow an ocean
and you a boat on which to sail from yourself
forever, else you’ll both drown.
From his desk, I’d stare across the courtyard
while night dragged its tide across the stones.
Once the fire escape vanished, I’d reenter the sarcophagus
my drinking boxed me in when he was a baby whose cry
ripped through the swathe of ether I hid in,
and the certain, struggling
substance of him helped to my shoulder
did birth me to this flesh,
each luminous dawn
he grinned up and eventually down
to me from his towering height—each breath
that filled him freed me
from my own ribcage.
EASTER AT AL QAEDA BODEGA
At the gold speckled counter, my pal in white apron—
index finger tapping his Arabic paper,
where the body count dwarfs the one in my Times—announces,
You’re killing my people.
But in Hell’s Kitchen, even the Antichrist
ought to have coffee—one cream
and two sugars. Blessings
upon you, he says, and means it.
>
GARMENT DISTRICT SWEATSHOP
Through the plate glass, a vast concrete field of machines
repeating like war crosses on the Expressway
graveyard you pass coming in from the airport—so many.
You must be bred small
to fit such a slot.
Through the needle’s eye a thread stabs
a slit void. You’re on one side
then the other, where work gets done, gears engage.
Your wiry frame must bend like a fishhook
and hold there. Your black hair must convey restraint
with its ponytail or chopped bowl cut
or snake snarl at the nape.
That’s at eyelevel, but below the hummingbird engines
of the work surface, the women dip into cool water.
It’s a secret level where each woman
insists on using her free hand, where folded notes swim
clever as pilot fish—and white bottles of tablets
are passed—orange aspirin,
Extra Strength and Aleve.
By each woman a bag;
in each bag a billfold closes over a window
into another country’s house—fat grandson,
rice-powdered daughter.
Some windows are vacant.
No one keeps the brothel’s ceiling fan;
or the infant’s mouth sewn shut.
On the factory floor all day, the tiny feet
are encased in embroidered shoes flimsy
as those you get buried in. They stomp down
on the machines’ accelerators,
making the guises fit, never staying in one place.
OVERDUE PARDON FOR MOTHER WITH KNIFE
Some nights I startle up from sleep to gasp down
your death again like a draft of venom,
and feel I’m five, and see your flame-eyed shape
raise the knife you failed
to bury in my chest—whose gleam can still flash
across some desert in me, searing me awake.
I no longer curse that hand, as I once did,
but glorify the force that stayed it, set the blade
aside. Last week in the city you loved most
(the Paradise my birth stole you from),
I paused at a shop window
where spring heels floated
above staggered pedestals, as if tiptoeing
some drunken stair to the invisible.
Through the mist barrier,
your stare became a flicker
in the glass; then holding my face,
as if I were a gift, your hands (which grow now
on the ends of my own arms). It was me,
astonished, inside you.
Again in the chest, the heart’s aperture (not
a dagger slot) opened. There
was the odd resolve I found in youth—
to guzzle down breath like sweet spirits,
as if a pillow just slid off my face.
DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE RESURRECTION
From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and blood ink—
till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void
even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart
began to bang on the stiff chest’s door,
and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he longs to flow into—
from the sunflower center in your chest
outward—as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.
A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON
I have this son who assembled inside me
during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,