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Four Poems by Rachel Zucker VIVIPARITY the spoke holds the wheel's intellegence but controls nothing like the spine aware of danger tightens but cannot move these stupid limbs have so much power behold the downed perimeter and beyond the frail limbed fathers bringing things in ziplok baggies meanwhile I must get up and make his childhood up this steep embankment of no sleep to sort stones from snail shells though he is too young to count or fathom matters just one moment, please, I beg to conjure: the neck of the lute the rim of the glass the way the wheel eventually stops without knowing NOT KNOWING NIJINSKY OR DIAGHILEV A certain kind of man asks the same question again, again until it isn't a question but a threat, shove, spit in the eye. Phyllis says you're sitting on your power but I know what I'm sitting on: my ass. Obviously, running out of language. My desire is "A pre-electric impulse with a too-small synapse." What a tired image that is. I sit on my power. Finally, in the boxed-up city, night comes on without a sunset; books push out their backs, turn stiff arms away, press closer together. The editor says we have no patience for metaphor. In the dream the baby carrier is crammed with plastic bags. My ex-lover shoots hockey pucks at my breasts through a metal tube. I want to hold you once before the world explodes I say to the baby who is not there. Two women screaming "Filthy Jews!" die too. The memo from the editor: it is even sub-Hollywood. I sit on my power and try to describe anything. "My mother inside me": air in a well; a heavy, starless chill. Her love the texture of canned lotus root, the color a cross-section of diseased lung; slight smell of vinegar. The editor jots no patience for description. So I am back where I started; another old man and his helpful invective. He suspects me. Uses the words musicality, mimesis; what do you know, if anything? I think: I know what it is to have a child but (truth is) not now, I only know what it is like. Here: here is a picture of me in labor: ...hand around the metal bar the body crushing in and in the room white hot, exploding The reason I even mention [it] is that I don't know anything but memory which is nothing except— child, sleeping in my elbow— marks and tracings, a neural map, my thoughts are like piranha, transparent and vicious, but no one gets away with similes like that. Where is the pool of diction the myth described? The old man spits in my eye, says a child is no excuse and points, pushing me toward the shallow pond. I CANNOT WRITE ESSAYS, WILL NOT BE FAMOUS It's not what you suspect. (Taking a taxi home for no reason. Leaving the movie early. Who is it I'm talking to on the phone, in the room, in the end, where do I go?) The essay is too easy to dissemble. The sentence sickens, then dismisses: The boy with two arms is not an amputee. I leave the ring on the nightstand. There is a will under the pillow. from ANNUNCIATION post card (central park) Jesus in the water does not look clean or fish-like or marine at all but only unafraid as if he knew he had gills as if the oxygen in the sea was the same as air— I will not get clean but will drown I have one name only— a spider rests in his lazy cross of web high up above the park bench— one branch to another— why in the world did the dove’s tiny sprig comfort Noah? he had no gills— I see now I was not the subject but location— the dove spies an ark on the horizon then atop the mountain beached, harbored— and see how they occupy the pagan temples slap on another fresco— now who does it belong to?— the architect won't live to see it so designs his plot inside— now these first buds some plot within my very death I hardly mind have eyes enough to see: this ravishing there may not be another like it— | ||||||||||||
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