The Book of Women Read online

  Contents

  Red Dragonfly Press E-book Editions

  Waitress

  Woman in a Bar

  She

  Secondhand Coat

  Black She-Snake Speaks

  Menstruation/Menopause

  The Year of My Hair

  Dolly’s Breasts

  “Music My Rampart”

  Nearly Free

  Acknowledgments and Notes

  Dorianne Laux

  The Book of Women

  Red Dragonfly Press E-book Editions

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  The Book of Women

  For the women of poetry

  Waitress

  When I was young and had to rise at 5 a.m.

  I did not look at the lamplight slicing

  through the blinds and say: Once again

  I have survived the night. I did not raise

  my two hands to my face and whisper:

  This is the miracle of my flesh. I walked

  toward the cold water waiting to be released

  and turned the tap so I could listen to it

  thrash through the rusted pipes.

  I cupped my palms and thought of nothing.

  I dressed in my blue uniform and went to work.

  I served the public, looked down on its

  balding skulls, the knitted shawls draped

  over its cancerous shoulders, and took its orders,

  wrote up or easy or scrambled or poached

  in the yellow pad’s margins and stabbed it through

  the tip of the fry cook’s deadly planchette.

  Those days I barely had a pulse. The manager

  had vodka for breakfast, the busboys hid behind

  the bleach boxes from the immigration cops,

  and the head waitress took ten percent

  of our tips and stuffed them in her pocket

  with her cigarettes and lipstick. My feet

  hurt. I balanced the meatloaf-laden trays.

  Even the tips of my fingers ached.

  I thought of nothing except sleep, a TV set’s

  flickering cathode gleam washing over me,

  baptizing my greasy body in its watery light.

  And money, slipping the tassel of my coin purse

  aside, opening the silver clasp, staring deep

  into that dark sacrificial abyss.

  What can I say about that time, those years

  I leaned over the rickety balcony on my break,

  smoking my last saved butt?

  It was sheer bad luck when I picked up

  the glass coffee pot and spun around

  to pour another cup. All I could think

  as it shattered was how it was the same size

  and shape as the customer’s head. And this is why

  I don’t believe in accidents, the grainy dregs

  running like sludge down his thin tie

  and pinstripe shirt like they were channels

  riven for just this purpose.

  It wasn’t my fault. I know that. But what, really,

  was the hurry? I dabbed at his belly with a napkin.

  He didn’t have a cut on him (physics) and only

  his earlobe was burned. But my last day there

  was the first day I looked up as I walked, the trees

  shimmering green lanterns under the Prussian blue

  particulate sky, sun streaming between my fingers

  as I waved at the bus, running, breathing hard, thinking:

  This is the grand phenomenon of my body. This thirst

  is mine. This is my one and only life.

  Woman in a Bar

  I didn’t like liquor but my girlfriend loved the bars, and when she came to visit she’d ask around. “Where,” she’d ask the sky cap, the cabbie, the bus driver, “can you get a drink in this town?”

  She’d buy a pack of cigarettes from the corner grocer and linger at the counter, picking at the seal, tugging the red strip embedded in cellophane, and unfold the silver origami paper to reveal a row of blind white filters, in no rush. The Gas Lamp, The Duet, The Past Time, The Come-On-Inn.

  She’d say, “Let’s go there.”

  The bar would be dark, patrons swimming through the gloom-hovering light, neon letters spaghettied across the lacquered walls, blue smoke drifting tributaries above the heads of those who had just stepped in out of the rain or out of the too-bright sun, out of the wind or a stagnant heat. They were all there for the same reason, to stare into the foam of a cold beer, a dark rum and coke, a clear-as-glacier-water martini, sucking pimentos from the bodies of green olives one by one.

  We’d enter like strangers in a matinee western, people turning on their stools to glance at us standing in the open door, the light of the world streaming in around our shoulders, falling in motes from our hair. It was a movie set: the long mirror resting sideways in its gilded frame, the sepia strains of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, the shallow donation baskets of pretzels and nuts. I ordered one drink and sipped at it. She would order three of something strong, straight up, and a beer back, tipping her head and throwing them down while she laughed.

  Shot glass after shot glass lined up like spent shells next to her blown open purse. She would talk to anyone then, about anything: politics, religion, sex. Drink made her fearless and flirty, and because this was in the early years of her drinking, gorgeous. By midnight she was ordering bread sticks or french fries with catsup saying, “Let’s stay a little longer.”

  I loved her. Anyone sitting at that bar could tell you why. Even in the locked bathroom where she leaned over the toilet and the night poured from her throat in a gold gush. I held her heavy hair back while she fumed and retched, stroking wet strands from her forehead. I pulled her off her knees and helped her stand, held a folded paper towel under the dripping faucet and blotted her face, the nape of her neck, helped her find her lipstick, her hairbrush, stood beside her while she cupped a palm full of water and swished it between her teeth. She was ready for anything now, refreshed, newly coherent, dazzlingly alive. Her skin, poreless, fragrant, smooth as the sink she leaned against to apply her mascara, glowing under the violet fluorescent light.

  She

  She was all shamble and spangle,

  the P-Town transvestite

  standing in the crosswalk,

  stopping traffic, looking deeply

  into the little satin casket of her purse,

  trying to wrangle something

  from it, her silver dress

  flaring up around her bald knees,

  a flower made by the gods

  of excess and bliss, revealing

  a border of wiry hair on her thigh

  where the razor stopped. Tears

  streamed down through her

  pancake make-up, and for

  a bottomless moment she looked

  straight into the eyes of the cars

  chaffing at the intersection,

  her face a statue’s face, half-gone.

  Some ordinary samaritan

  walked into the street and cradled

  her elbow, helped her to the corner.

  I saw them talk, their mouths

  moving as the honking stopped

  and the cars revved and rolled on.

  I saw her collapse in his arms.

  I saw the sunlight glitter

  along her back as sh
e breathed,

  and again when he pulled her

  to her feet, her size twelve high heels—

  such small blue boats—all she had

  to row to some other shore.

  Secondhand Coat

  We lay in his king-sized bed, me and the man I’d met hours before at the beach, the aria of my orgasm still echoing in the still summer air, disturbing the dust motes into pale paisley swirls that hung in bars of sunlight over the white sheets. Those were the days I believed I could love anyone, giving my body away like bread, my lips swollen from kissing. He told me his wife had recently died in this bed, suicide. I didn’t look at him or touch his hand. I stared up at the nubbled ceiling, its white moonscape, and continued to breathe. There were boxes half-packed, the walls whiter in squares where he’d taken pictures down, rice paper lampshades stacked in a corner near a small potted palm, a silver mister. We smoked a whole pack of cigarettes down to their white filters, crushing them into a saucer propped on a pillow between us. He said he’d woken soaked in her blood. He was from somewhere back East. His name was Sellers McKee. We were together, if you could call it together, for a few weeks. One night we stayed up late, ate pizza and watched Jay Leno. I smeared sauce on the bedspread and when I got up to clean it he said Don’t bother, I’ll use it for packing. Later, we had a fight about whether the word decorative was pronounced dec-ra-tive or decor-a-tive. Every day something would disappear, the clock from the kitchen, every white mug in the cupboard, a plaster cast of someone’s left hand. Once he came over to meet my mother because she was from Maine and he’d grown up somewhere near there. He brought her the potted palm as a gift. They talked and flirted for hours while I did something else. Toward the end he had a party, invited a bunch of his friends. He took my hand and pulled me into the bedroom. Someone in the living room turned the music down right in the middle of my notorious song. He kept saying Go on, It’s okay and I suddenly got it that he wanted them to hear it, that he’d set me up. I could never decide if that bothered me or not. The last day he told me to open the closet. I looked in at her dresses, arrayed in color-coded rows, white silk blouses and black pencil skirts, sandals, then heels, then winter boots. He said Take anything you want. I settled on a coat, tan with tortoiseshell buttons, a creamy cashmere lining you could unzip and discard in spring. I was overwhelmed by his generosity. I kept saying Thank you, thank you as he led me to the door. Then it was over, and for the next few weeks I went out with a garbage man who’d pick me up in a big white truck. His name was Sam, which I probably only remember because I sang it like a child’s song whenever he called. It’s Sam, I’d sing. Sam, Sam the garbage man, if he can’t do it no one can, and he’d say, deadpan, nothing in his voice at all, Yeah, yeah, darlin, it’s me.

  Black She-Snake Speaks

  When I see him sliding toward me,

  parting the grass, his long body flaring

  in the noon sun, a black comet

  riding the earth, sawdust

  from the chicken coop

  on his beautiful blunt nose,

  my breath catches in my throat

  and my fangs tremble.

  I don’t know his name,

  but I don’t care. He tips his head

  up above my back and runs

  his soft blonde belly scales

  along my spine. I can’t tell you

  how fine it is to feel

  all 200 vertebrae quiver at once.

  He’s my pleasure stranger. Forgive me.

  I let him braid himself around me,

  all the way up to my heart.

  And when he enters me I twist

  my tail tighter to receive him,

  our bodies a raised and knotted scar,

  our muscles flexed and bulging, shining

  like the darkest wet clay, until

  all we know is this ordinary day:

  his head grazing my sleek umber neck,

  the red pearls of his eyes seized by light.

  Menstruation/Menopause

  I have no stories to tell, no tales of extremity.

  It was all so ordinary, except for the fact

  that I thought my first kiss brought it on,

  that brown-eyed neighbor boy who agreed

  to meet me in my side yard, next to the trashcans,

  and touch the full pads of his lips to mine.

  I remember the hard lumps in my chest

  were sensitive, the butt of jokes, the triumph

  of my first bra, but no fevers, lust for food

  or wild mood swings or if I did it was lost

  in the usual angers and illnesses of adolescence.

  They came and went without fanfare, and I

  accepted the inconvenience, bore it like a gracious

  host, the flow, the chemical smell, the discomfort

  of elastic straps, the quarrels about how

  to insert the first bullet-sleek modernized tampon.

  And it was the same with menopause.

  I hardly noticed it amid the move, the new

  job, the death of friends, family, a lover

  whose cancerous back felt like those first

  bumps that became the breasts he longed for,

  preparations for the end, last words, last rights.

  No hot flashes in the night between bouts

  of inconsolable crying, no heating pad for comfort,

  just a few more gray hairs I’d pull out by the root,

  the shoes my enlarged feet no longer fit into.

  When all is said and done there was nothing

  I could point to and say: This is when…

  It just was…then it wasn’t, that time of blood.

  The Year of My Hair

  for Ruth Stone

  I’m standing in the year of my hair, my brushed-

  to-a-gloss, longest, thickest, reddest, wildest hair,

  my stark-naked Lady Godiva days, my lucky lover

  looking down at the youth in my face, my hair

  a starburst on the pillow, saying, “Don’t be sad,

  go to sleep.” And all through the night dreams

  of my mother waving, she’s clearing bones

  from the table, leaving a swipe of glistening

  grease, her curlered hair burning, little hallways

  of flame calling my name. And all through

  the sweat-laced dawn my sweet one whispering,

  his arm around my shoulder, brushing the bangs

  from my forehead with the hard heel of his hand.

  Dolly’s Breasts

  are singing

  from the rafters of her chest,

  swaying beneath sheeny satin,

  suspended in the choreography

  of her bra: twin albino dolphins

  breaching from her ball gown’s

  rhinestone cleavage. Her breasts

  are sisters praying at twilight, a pair

  of fat-cheeked Baptists dreaming

  of peaches, her nipples the color

  of autumn, two lonely amber eyes.

  When she shakes her metallic bodice,

  tinsel swimming up her pink fonts

  of nourishment, the spotlight hums

  and shimmies with them, the audience,

  open-mouthed, stunned into silence

  as she crosses her legs and bows, her hair

  hanging down, a permed curl caught

  in that soft, improbable seam.

  “Music My Rampart”

  I can point to the exact place in my chest

  where James Taylor’s voice reverberates.

  I have no defense against that tenor, those

  minor keys. It rushes through the aisles of my body

  like a priest on dope, trailing smoke, his crucifix

  caught in the folds of his robe. I can know

  anything I want to know, but my body reveals me.

  I sink down beneath the notes, each light-cracked step.

  There are nights I jerk
awake as if the phone

  had rung. But there’s no sound except

  the refrigerator humming, the joists creaking

  in the cold. I watch moonlight move

  across the wall and it’s as if I could touch

  my own sadness, the rooms flung with filaments

  that loom in the pockets of my closed eyes.

  There’s no accounting for it. I open my mouth

  and sing Sweet Baby James. I cross my hands

  over my breasts like a woman who is happy to die.

  Nearly Free

  We drove up the 101, Patricia riding shotgun, her bare, unpainted toes spread out on the dash, rivers of dried sand glittering along the hollows of her ankles in the windshield sun. We were talking about Freud, Bob Dylan, our boyfriends. Nothing. Listening to Joni Mitchell, Janis, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. We ate oranges and avocados. Our hair was long and the windows were open. The warm air rolled in like a Mariachi band. We sang to the radio, tossed the rinds out and watched them tumble in the rearview mirror, the skins hopping off asphalt. Our tongues were coated with oil and citrus. We smoked cigarettes, leaving white filters wet where we’d brought them to our lips and kissed them. Our arms were strong, our legs.

  I was white and she was Mexican. We knew how to hide nickel rolls behind our knuckles and hit. For years in the restaurant, we hefted trays stacked with plates of enchiladas and Happy Hour margaritas, lime pinwheels spinning above our heads. Patricia dug into a bag of walnuts and held two in her fist, cracked one husk against the other, offered me the meat. We were driving to the beach. We had our bathing suits on beneath our shorts and t-shirts. We had towels in the back seat and a bamboo mat, a paper bag bulging with peaches from her mother’s tree. Two used paperbacks we bought with our tips.