Dorothy Barresi - All of the Above (Barnard New Women Poets Series)

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Page xvii The milkie way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud, The land of spices, something understood. George Herbert "Prayer (I)" Rave on! Buddy Holly

Page 1 The Back-Up Singer for C., for the original Coconuts The Father of the Stethoscope: Ren Theophile Hyacinthe Lannec, mellifluous name. In 1816 he rolled a cornet de papier, then held it against the first chest of the first heart to open its argument to another man that way, through flesh and conducting bone. Later the instrument was crafted of wood, and a small hole bored for the passage of human sound. Is it wrong to want to be the only one? To wish the wedding ring of the spotlight slipped over me in a moment that finally holds? Houselights rise then lower like the rush of blood through narrowed vessels. The cymbal solo and high hat shimmer me forward, but in the blur and slip of horns I'm singing do wop and shing, shing-a-ling behind a lame pimp and his big-haired girls. I like to read the old school books. The page of Ren Lannec turned down in particular, and nearly worn through, which is also the nature of hope. A young girl's hands turned whole lifetimes down. Page 2 I'd listen to the telegraphing night bugs' double ardor, and eventually to darkness siphoned off by dawn like the sounds I'd make with my perfect pitch and years of training under that same blue no-protection sky. But there are planetary systems in the blood. A grand opera of fate brings chances we can't see but choose somehow. Later, we see how we went wrong. Now August says he never, ever wanted anyone so badly. But there's rehab first, and the business with his wife. And the last abortion having left a disability of my womb I've come to think of as a million tiny birdsfeet tracking over muddied ground. Some nights it's too much like this on the girls' bus. Regret or Spend It Now, towels around our throats. More often it's regret rolling its bullet casings at our feet Lissanne, Yvette, me its spent and blackened flashbulbs. Then I recall the lessons I never quite learned for their sweetness alone. On a single mating flight the queen bee will store enough spermatozoa to hold her the rest of her working days. Page 3 In the blue runways of iris and morning glory, from ultraviolet nectar guides, she'll fertilize as she goes. Call it love that keeps me here. Call it the final, female talent for demurring when life takes over. I call it a living, discovering at sixteen that come in my mouth doesn't taste remotely like white flowers. Ten years later I'm waiting for the bus to stop or lurch me to my next home. I'm housewife to an act that pays and pays and pays. Under lights hotter than God I activate the angels in my voice and take three steps backward, cha cha cha. But I call it a science more mine than either sex or shame to be this alone, in time, among others. Some days I get up before noon just to hear the first notes of the treble world break from my throat over the heads of everyone listening but me.

Page 13 Cinderella and Lazarus, Part II And all the question marks began singing of God's being. Tomas Transtrmer, "C Major" "If the crown fits, wear it," the Prince always crowed. Have a heart, the moon says now, the same one the dish & the cow & the spoon had dealings with. One life's enough for anyone. Did we mention that we began in ashes? Bone-grave, small town, our mourning mothers and sisters swatted back the way a white horse swats heat, sometimes hitting a fly; later our gramophone, prized possession, stiffened to a morning glory with rigor mortis. The wind roared like nothing in our ears, then nothing. Kidney pills for kidney stones. Forty years we've gone on dancing. The shoe's on the other foot, but we are always exactly the same couple in original rags older than God, than dirt, Page 14 doing the Lindy, the Bop, the oh restless for consummation tango. Not now death; but now, now. Even his hands spoke in radical tongues.

Page 15 At the Pioneer Valley Legal Clinic All eyes are lowered in the waiting room of my final visit. Xerox machines whir, operating like any human heart by lights and memory next time, next time, next... From down the hall a lecture sponsored by the Whiplash Club, "Why Pain Does Not Make Us Special." The clock ticks out Emergency in minutes. All morning I have carried what is left of my marriage in a strongbox rusted, come slightly unhinged. It isn't heavy. Inside, disappointment weighs nothing more than, say, a child's pink bunny jacket with its own two sleeves tied together. Now in the narrow plastic seat hooked to all the others as if this were an airport or parochial school, I'm shifting, anxious for what lies waiting on the other side of a dotted line. When a lawyer with hair blue as gunmetal bends close, eyes full of rented grief, I know what to do. Page 16 I say No Fault. For once I do not call it train wreck, cruel cosmic prank or house on fire. I say, ''I believe in precision beyond blame, and second chances even those unasked for can be legal, binding." I say, "Party of the first part." I say, "We are all adults here," and when I do parolees nodding off in the corner moan a little, stirring, the white perfume of documents rising fiercely from their wrists.

Page 17 Nine of Clubs, Cleveland, Ohio Thursday night: Progressive

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