Zucker - Eating in the Underworld

EATING IN THE UNDERWORLD EATING IN THE UNDERWORLD RACHEL ZUCKER WESLEYAN POETRY WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT PUBLISHED BY WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CT 06459 2003 BY RACHEL ZUCKER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 5 4 3 2 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA ZUCKER, RACHEL EATING IN THE UNDERWORLD / RACHEL ZUCKER. P. CM. (WESLEYAN POETRY) ISBN 0819566276 (CLOTH : ALK. PAPER) ISBN 0819566284 (PBK. PAPER) I. TITLE. II. SERIES. SERIES.

PS3626.U26 E25 2003 811.6DC21 2002152722 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which these poems or versions of these poems first appeared: 3rd Bed, Colorado Review, Columbia Journal, Epoch, Explosive Magazine, Fourteen Hills, New Letters, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Volt. Thank you to Larry Sandomir, John Aune, Wayne Koestenbaum, Nancy Kricorian, Lois Conner, David Trinidad, Phyllis Rosen, Jorie Graham, and Brenda Hillman for guidance and inspiration, and to these kind and careful readers: Brian Cassidy, Ben Mosher, Katy Lederer, John OConnor, Kevin Prufer, Wylie OSullivan, Tom Shakow, and Arielle Greenberg. Thanks to Joan, Josh, and most of all to Doug Powell. Excerpt from Wuthering Heights from Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath. Copyright 1962 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Pomona Brittannica (plate #92), by George Brookshaw. for my mother who wrote down my dreamsfor my father and his faithand for Josh [ONE] here there is no placethat does not see you RAINER MARIA RILKE DIARY [GATHERING FLOWERS] If the light were good I could see everything. Look through rain, live the even life. I, who have been pressed and prettied, feel more watched than wandering, wonder, does someone expect me? Today wind, like water pulling back the pebble-layer, wants to sigh, the big stones heave and settle. But before the ribs expand it pulls again. I crave but damn these maidens wont allow The light is just a likeness, (if I could only show them) oh what does the wind want? DIARY [ON THE BANKS] a light as if pure and white were one word: scrito, stepping twice am I real alone? alone, alone what waves are for I cannot afford this sky or the sky to move on watching the dead go in, the tides come out the light might not be the same again all the light turns green at once go go go go go I will go, not even knowing where it seems so simple this sea my voice carries (flag snapping, crack of static) and comes back to me: no one dies in the land of the dead DIARY [UNDERWORLD] Not even the moon saw me withdraw.

I grasped my chastity and swallowed it into the lower crescent of my belly. What is it good for? Where does it take me? Only on cool nights will I need its light to show me the way toward passion. The dead draw blood from my shadow as I walk among them. I realize now it was the foreground that opened up, not the ground. There was a seam in that sulphurous strand and though afraid of water, I stepped in. Away from where the body of my mother is everywhere.

DIARY [UNDERWORLD] My toes reflected in the bath water make a shape. When I wiggle the big one, two move. I am still alive. Hot body in hot bath, the cool stream jets invisibly underwater. Spout submerged scalding raw, wrinkled fingers. Cool moving through hot, around hot, pockets of little atmospheres.

The only thing left to feel: the mix of fevers. Remember the beginning, before science was necessary? Now we know hot does not change cold in any way. They move around each other: spreading each other outfirst pockets, then harder to recognize spreading each other apart, still cold and hot, broken into pieces: molecules. Anyone could mistake it for tepid, that which is scalding and frozen at once. DIARY [UNDERWORLD] Somewhere between a father and lover but not my father or any lover possible. He says to say the heat hit like a wave is not to accountfor this impeccable stillness.

He says when I turn my head away its like the word broken. And I am not the same when I look back to where the world and its thick air are examples: moth in a glass walkway; he calls me lambent, lucent. I have changed form, but such things dont matter. Its so hot the thin-skinned lemons are weeping. Isnt this what I wanted? Sick of deciduous life, the dappled light, pointillist neighborhoods He leads me where no one has invented comfort. He says July is a perfect month for snowfall.

LETTER [DEMETER TO PERSEPHONE] In your place there was a dry color turmeric? cinnamon, cumin, cayenne? but not like color, more like cloves, cardamom, coriander like coarse-cut salt on the tongue if I taste it will I know? what is the color of fish in the river Styx? Thumbprints and tracks inside the door, lights left on in the room, small things lying about days and days and days you have been gone LETTER [PERSEPHONE TO DEMETER] At home, the bells were a high light-yellow with no silver or gray just buttercup or sugar-and-lemon. Here bodies are lined in blue against the sea. And where red is red there is only red. I have to be blue to bathe in the sea. Red, to live in the red room with red air to rest my head, red cheek down, on the red table. Above, it was so green: brown, yellow, white, green.

My longing for red furious, sexual. There things were alive but nothing moved. Now I live near the sea in a place which has no blue and is not the sea. Gulls flock, leeward then tangent and pigeons bully them off the ground. Hardly alive, almost blinda hot geometry casts off every color of the world. Everything moves, nothing alive.

In the red room there is a sky which is painted over in red but is not red and was, once, the sky. This is how I live. A red table in a red room filled with red air. A woman, edged in blue, bathing in the blue sea. The surface like the pale, scaled skin of fish far below or above or away DIARY [UNDERWORLD] many cities no longer exist but there is cleaning to finish lemon halves wrapped in clinging plastic arms invisible around me the only sun lightning the night a chance to be ready for morning DIARY [UNDERWORLD] Even my handwriting is lonely. Severed legs and spinnerets, abandoned dolmens Tonight a wind without direction (echo without origin) confess, unsettles I spread oil over my shoulders knowing you watch me.

I dont remember killing these spiders or wanting your name. DIARY [UNDERWORLD] The hand pulls up through water, trails of resistance follow like bridal trains, exhausted smoothed-out ripples, and rests palm-up on the surface. Buoyant and lifeless, open. The body would make this shape if it knew how. If the body could bend. If the mind would let it, cupped but not hollow.

NOTE [HADES TO PERSEPHONE] We would not feel our own flying and would move faster than anyone could track our progress. If one senses motion at all it is falling, but this is a misperception: we would be falling upward. Like the sound of ocean if you live life as a fish. Loosen your photographs from the walls but leave them hanging. DIARY [THE FIRST SEED] He gives me the wedding band of the real world a story with pockets and mirrors woos me with music that could kill insects its frequency reveals men in the distance forging the bridge between nether and either when night sets, the stones return to the earth and in the morning, work again: swimming through chaos to find the world NOTE [HADES TO PERSEPHONE] You will find ardor. Congeal, extract, distill one thousand times.

Solid to vapor and vapor to solid; you move too quickly for rain. Sublimed, we are changed elixir, transmute, refined face and chest scrape below the surf: afferent polestars invert, invert. DIARY [THE SECOND SEED] The flagstone trail winds serpentine through he loves me and he loves me thrum of prayer behind talk sky a background of birds the ache and savor of flowers out of season NOTE [HADES TO PERSEPHONE] Spin to breathe. Only the still world passing as you flee reminds you to fill and empty lungs when you have forgotten how to blink. DIARY [THE THIRD SEED] Would that I were not an only child, that shed find other models to subject to her affections here silk and paper flowers a landscape, no horizon and it isnt the sky that matters but if I fly through the frame, a window, distributes time across dimensions: I would not stop it if I could NOTE [HADES TO PERSEPHONE] All over the world women are dreaming of the same child. Fingers poised around a golden tigers-eye.