Читать книгу Eating in the Underworld - Rachel Zucker - Страница 7

[ONE]

here there is no place

that 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 won’t 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 out—first 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 account

for this impeccable stillness.

He says when I turn my head away it’s 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 don’t matter.

It’s so hot the thin-skinned lemons are weeping.

Isn’t 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.