My Body: new and selected poems
Joan Larkin
Copyright Joan Larkin 2007
Published by Hanging Loose Press at Smashwords
Published by Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11217-2208. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Hanging Loose Press thanks the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts for a grant in support of the publication of this book.
Cover image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
Cover design by Marie Carter
for Kate Aguilar
The Offering: new poems
The Offering
When they cleaned you and gave you to me, long legs and fingers, red glow
rising from creased flesh,
eyes already awake, gaze steady, I shook for three days
in my knot of hospital sheets.
Tears came later—
cries, fears, fierce holding. The ways you’d shake me off. Your well of rage. Over and over
you bloomed in your separate knowledge.
Yesterday, you offered tender words.
I remembered gorging on teglach Fanny made, thick knots of dough shining with honey.
I’m filled and wanting more—only to taste that heavy gold on my tongue again.
Processional
In Tamilnadu
where it’s still morning, where the mixed scent of burning rubber, incense and excrement hasn’t yet
heated to a thing you sweat through your feet and tongue, where day is beginning to burn through the neem leaves,
a long string of men
snakes along a dirt route, chanting and in their center like a gold bead lofted on their shoulders
a man sits in a painted box
its canopy dyed bright yellow and he, too, is clothed yellow and his face upturned to the sun is smeared with turmeric:
a man the color of saffron grain. He’s leaning back in his high seat and you see from your safe distance his stiff posture and open mouth.
You stare as if you’ve never seen the dead: Francis in his smeared bedding,
your father a waxwork freakish in mortuary rouge,
all the young men in varnished coffins. Each death its own strangeness,
a gold face tilted to the light. Yet common to all. You’re
in this moving line. And he is,
the one you carry, the one you praise
and want to spare. The line jolts forward Jaya, jaya, Shiva Shambho toward the wood and fire, and you breathe the scent of everything alive.
Testimony
I wasn’t the only drunk reaching for Kleenex as short Arnold
on the foot-high platform choked the wild sound
rising in his throat. He was filled and pouring joy like anguish. Tears drew light to his face.
Two hundred of us in the room and none coughed or shuffled or scraped a metal chair
as he said how he saw
clear sky spreading above him and a thing like a lead band
that snapped and freed his chest. I didn’t drift for once or argue
or make lists for later.
I let the hush wrap me,
felt how John was near me, Steve across the big room.
I saw how Mary lifted her chin,
how Sybil suffered in her bloated flesh, her unreadable lipstick smile.
For a moment all was as it should be. Everyone in the room knew it.
I think so. It wasn’t some dream. Harsh blues, heads nodding amen—not even that. How
to explain it. I wish you’d been there.
Ashes
I thought they’d be fine and white as beach sand in a glossy ad
for the good life, honeymoon-cruise sand, so I was shocked by grit
that was your bones un-
consumed by 1500 degrees of heat and flecked like the sand at Brighton, where once I dragged a nice Boston girl to show her the Moscou, the greasy kasha knishes, the Polar Bear Club— old, hairy Russians plunging into icy brine—a Sunday ruined
and now forgotten, long after the day
I waited in the upstate police station
to sign for your body. If there was a crime it was your sudden dying, of which I was innocent, though the cop’s grimace
behind the high counter haunts me. I was often in the wrong then
and thought he could see
how I wouldn’t grieve, how I’d stall
for months before I picked up your ashes. We cast you into the Hudson
you loved and praised with heavy paint, and what was left of your
drunk anger and lovely flushed skin, your terse, barely audible wit and dark flame of Irish hair
was gone, everything burned, sifted, dropped into the cold, slow current.
Denis
when you were grass in the wind when you were a silent wave
when you wallowed in blood in the midst of the highway when you shed out your bowels to the ground
when you were a friend of silence when you were a cloud
when you fattened like a caterpillar
when you crossed the braided stream on stones when you offered yourself at the rest stop
when you lit up the house with white candles when you were afraid, alone in the metal bed when you came back as God’s roar in a dream when you took the mouthful of bitter fluid when you were new