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though,
    If anyone ever makes

    Fun of him, calls him
    Stupid or a spaz

    Or anything, I’m sure
    Even our eighty-five-year-old

    Self, we at our big
    Wisdom-apex age,

    Will vivisect that anyone
    With a grapefruit spoon.

    We’ll laugh, but then
    She’ll turn to me and say:

    But you’re from the past.
    You’re just me last year.

    You don’t know
    Any more than I do.

    In fact, she’ll say,
    Backing away,

    You know even less.
    You’re fucking with me.

    Then she won’t let me
    Touch her or say another

    Word. So what was
    The point of my coming here?

The New People

    I had no desire to get to know the screamers,
    our loud-in-ten-ways, annoying, drunk and boorish
    neighbors, but I didn’t put up

    a fence or anything. Didn’t fight it
    when they brought us plates of their fatty meals
    and overlong chitchat. We were new,

    just renting, and I didn’t want to be rude,
    either, when Joanna and Vince
    brought us their statue of the Virgin Mary

    when our newborn son was in the hospital.
    Joanna had tears in her eyes and though I am not
    Catholic, or even Christian—or not

    anymore anyway, I think, if it’s like what I suppose
    in that you have to keep up with the dues
    to stay in the club—

    I accepted the statue. I took in the alien
    mother and wrapped her in a blanket.
    I lay her on a low shelf and broke

    the news to my Jewish husband, who cringed
    and said, “She gave you
what?
”
    But I didn’t care

    what it was, from what god or goddess
    or neighbor or creature or kiln.
    I was becoming someone I didn’t know

    each day without my little boy—near insanity
    about his tiny, pure, hurt self. All those wires.
    Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God,

    Holy Statue in my baby’s silent room, I promise
    I will believe in you, and in Jesus too. Please…
    Why was I cradling a “mother” statue,

    a ceramic doll, this creepy relic,
    instead of my living, beautiful son?
    If
she
could make it all the way here,

    across so many territories of indifference,
    into my most secret empty room—
    surely my child, who belonged, would come home soon?

If You So Much As Lay a Hand

    What can I possibly understand
    holding on to the idea that he is mine?

    Denying the fact that he’s really being passed
    from hand of the living to hand of the dead
    above my head

    in a game of keep-away
    in which I am not the mother who makes
    the rules and has her say

    but the target, who makes them all laugh
    at my attempts to stay light-

    hearted, game, so the teasing
    doesn’t turn more vicious.

    If some clumsy god drops him
    or forgets to wind up his breath
    enough to last the whole night

    or if some irritated hand swats him away
    like a fly, I will replace my life

    with blood sport, wild to find that arm,
    the tendoned shoulder, the loose fist of that god,

    aim for his face, his expression. I will see it.
    See whether he equals in horror
    my child’s beauty.

    Whether there is light in his eyes,
    or envy. If there are such hands,
    such a brutal face

    to my son’s luck or unluck.
    The words flog and flay and no mercy
    come to mind, like some maniac order

    divinity believes only it can give,
    or dissolve like a membrane

    between world and love.
    A jellyfish can find, in water,
    the air it needs

    to keep the poison ready. Even if
    this god is not some creature,
    with creature-logic

    and animal heft, but only an idea
    the breath forms from death,

    from a random plot of book or land,
    not man or kind of man,

    if I so much as see the shadow
    of that hand.

Nachträglichkeit

    after Kaja Silverman’s
    Flesh of My Flesh

    On having slashed myself from throat to instep
    in one unbroken line,

    I suppose it was a reenactment, Freud’s
Nachträglichkeit:
    the second act. The past presses so hard

    on the present, the present is badly bruised,
    blood brims under the skin.

    That was the situation I was in. Wearing a jacket of