(After ‘The Two Fridas’, 1939)

Be near me & tell

where the blood is going.

Too often bull-bellied clouds slow

drag our hips, fracturing

both girl & woman.

Barbed ideals conjoin

& coil their righteous dreams through

arteries, thick as autumn vines

that keep light out.  And I must take

my own hand, must hold my own

hand, as if it were a stave of notes

scattered from a razed moon: brokenly beating

the rhythm of a thousand-throated

hummingbirds beneath a dress of tulle.

Listen to us: these women

say to ourselves:  Eliza:  Eliza.

The men have left & in a dusky corner

the women you have been

are piled like a beige heap of slips

to be ironed & mended, hung.

All mothers have left you

& in their shadows blood

drips from the chandelier

to the floor where your body

rocks in its cradle.

Eliza: you: Eliza: me.

Which if I’m answering

all of you

there’s light in my lungs

like a pale bough of cricket lanterns.

I wear golden lamps

that open after midnight.

Our hands in blue water.  Our thighs

a chord beyond the last sonata. 

Four lips of light opening towards

testament & earth.  Our imagination

& plague.

The things that hold.

Hold me now

 before I am no more

 of a fragment

than the clouds behind me.

The body expands

its luminous stain.

Melancholic now, one Eliza.

Inconsolable: you: the Others.

Be near me & tell

us where the blood is going.

Be near me & tell Beauty

I was once unbearable.

Some colorless breath blows mulatto snow past this window.

Opened or shut? Accident or not? There’s a one-drop ghost

haunting the frame of this window.

What happened, they ask me again later.  Did Clare Kendry fall?

Or did she lean back into a white shawl of cool gems?

I might have touched her. Can’t say. Can’t remember. Ask the window.

In a pale shroud of cool flakes, the gold wick

smolders.  Clare’s laughter coiling its elegy through the sky:

constellation of an asp & siren.  Fallen sting of height

from that window.

No more Nig.  No further worry about the colorful secret.

Bellew would’ve done worse.  Black curtains over windows. 

Remember voiceless Whites Only signs in the window.

I might have pushed Sorry off the ledge too.  Might have bared

my teeth as my fingertips tapped the flame near the window.

Why, I knew my place well enough.  Why didn’t she? 

The tall French casements will keep this secret.  The window

in my heart will need its glass replaced.  Shattered, splattered

with blood, pride, race.  Continue to control my manners and my Brian. 

On either side I exist.  A suspect-scale upon the sill of the window.

Too dark outside.  Too light within.  Or flip it

like a coin falling from a window.

Funnyhouse Haiku