Orpheus Descending

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——-

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot ——
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—-

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

painting by Schiele Egon ‘seating woman with bent knee’

on what was already a frantic afternoon, a mid-day episode on the routinary dance of life, nature renders a corybantic interlude. in an instant, the centipedal tango, the vehicular salsa, the relentless celebration of quotidian events were held a-freeze. all because it rained. it rained early september. it rained so hard that insects begin to fret but their worry is nothing of magnitude, of emotional gravity  as those of the Melancholy who sighs in quasi-literary spiel: "here comes the rain  that darkens the shade of day".

it rained. the day is a shade darker. and though i am safe from it, my attention is drawned into it as my eyes timed in a nervous tic, winking trickedly on every drop that fell on the roof like tacks of irregular sizes. eventually everyone was held off of their tedious tasks to delight in its unexpected arrival. and i, in a far-off corner, began to worry.

there are those contemptuous of the rain. those hypochondriacs. those world-weary bullfrogs and mad-working insects. the rain froze their toes and clogs their nose and heightens the hormones of even the most abstemious monk.

oh rain. that which tempts the sorrows of the loverless, rhyming in verse libre every staggered rhythm of this stratospheric excrement, wallowing in rain-given sadness. falling like a divine peck for the sad, old and dying. you exhort a subliminal cry from those lonesome folks fated to roam, those inveterate drifters, them blessed young waifs that scurries the earth like mad-driven somnambulists hoping to wake up one day, not to dream again but to live. to finally live.

mr. rainmaker, your song thickens in my mouth. it’s taste lingers like coffee or curry or something a lot like a forgotten mishap held in a scar.

oh rain. still i know you’re good for something. i can’t keep you from coming or falling. no one can. fall if you must. come even when you’re not bid to. i only hope you wouldn’t come too often that i may only wet my feet once in a while. because dear rain, it scares me too you know. that in a momentary stasis, i’d fall,

helplessly,

like you.

september 06, 07