Almost Like They Wanted It

Because she’d heard him laugh through new moon darkness
and she knew he’d fallen and she knew, before she turned,
he’d be crawling, like a crawdad, rock to loam—

because she tried to love the straight back and neck
he’d erected to recollect the man he’d been
before—because she found herself adding up his usefulness

like some kind of auctioneer—she showed him
the dark coils areoling both her breasts and all the ways
she bent and lifted, bent and lifted, steady, strong.

She let him believe he was past due for a harvest
and her hands were the right ones, now, to hold the scythe.

*
She made quick work of pleasure. The boysmile bunked down
in his eyes, she claimed. Her tongue found the place in his mouth
where the teeth were gone—where he’d hold his corncakes

until they grew soft enough to chew. History had bedded him
in all of this—his own history and failures not his own.
Before he’d tramped in she’d watched another man—a man she’d thought

she’d hated—watched his body opened, opened, opened until
blood had married brine. She’d watched that man be whipped into something
good for nothing more than fertilizing clay and she’d thought

buckshot would have been a brand of kindness if sprayed into him
just then. But even after his hard going, she did not miss him very much.

*
Anyone she chose could be shucked like surplus property tomorrow,
but that hadn’t been enough to warn her off of picking him that night.
Because she knew if she set her sight on nothing she’d get nothing

in return, she’d walked with him. But because the night progressed so
—because there were some clouds—no stars—no moon—he’d tripped
over the branch of a dead and down tree. In all that darkness,

there, without a moon, even then, she had not fallen. She thought
to say so, but she did not say so. She did nothing
but say she was sorry for him. She did not use her mouth

to say this. Could he not listen to her hands? They spoke softly,
articulating her condolences, to his torn and bleeding skin.

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Arthritis is one thing, the hurting another


The poet’s hands degenerate until her cup is too heavy.

You are not required to understand.
This is not the year for understanding.

This is the year of burning women in schoolyards
and raided homes, of tarped bodies on runways and in restaurants.

The architecture of the poet’s hands has turned upon itself.

This is not the year for palliatives. It is not the year for knowing what to do.

This is the year the planet grew smaller
and no country could consent to its defeat.

The poet’s cup is filled too full, a weight she cannot carry
from the table to her mouth, her lips, her tongue.
The poet’s hands are congenitally spoiled.

This is not one thing standing for another.

Listen, this year three ancient cities met their ruin, maybe more,
and many profited, but this is not news for the readers here.

Should I speak indirectly?
I am not the poet. Those are not my hands.

This is the year of deportations and mothers bereaved
of all of their sons. The year of third and fourth tours,
of cutting-edge weaponry and old-fashioned guns.

Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork
for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.

This is the year the doctors struck for want of aid
and school children were sent home in the morning
and lights and gas were unreliable
and, harvesters suspect, fruit had no recourse but rot.

Many are dying for want of a cure, and the poet is patient
and her hands cause the least of her pain.
 

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Copyright © Camille Dungy 2007

Author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), Camille Dungy has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and Cave Canem.  Dungy is Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006).