Pamela Uschuk Poems

I

Persephone, too, shudders at disrobing
when aspen leaves freeze, just before opening
the slimey door to the underworld.
Clammy as a wet towel, the air exhales
fatal black mold and sulfur
across the ceiling of the spa shower
despite aromatic eucalyptus and cedar
smoldering in sconces near the message.

Your skin registers first the ecstatic scrim
that laces her fear, jittery as a salamander,
as she begins to read earth's scald
with her fingertips, descending
through granite the color of a scalp wound
striped with aging hair, descending
through milky quartz,
through the stone heart of a mountain
rising a mile, then more above her.

The antechamber is dim, so steamy
that eyes film and fingertips lose their grip.
This is the realm of water gods
cascading across smooth mineral buttocks,
hollowing the mountain into their own drum
keeping time to a constant drip. She readies.

This is nothing compared to the crush
of dark heat that pushes against
the door of her terror she cracks
in spite of this abduction
from her mother, who is left
to her fury, to scream then
turn earth blind as ice.

II

My love and I enter the far grotto
together, slick as vulva
or oiled nipples, heat-woozed, the only
couple inside this giant geode
radiating haze above a broiling pool
droozed black as stamens inside a poppy.
We dip in our hands, our feet,
watch them become their own ghosts.

Stalagmites rise around us sluggish
as glaciers, the steady
pop of droplets from
stalactites like wet stone beards
we stroke with numb fingers

while we breathe our own stacatto
heart beats, regretting those bursts
of desire too often lost to laundry, stacks
of unpaid bills multiplying on the counter,

lost to the stale air of offices and memos
collapsing our lungs.

III

It is then we relearn speech, purring
words that reverberate deep
as the throat thrums of Tibetan monks
or the keening of sperm whales across
distances as vast as the spaces between stars
in Alpha Centuri, yearning as old
as the moan of Pluto when he finally lifts
Persephone's smooth chin to his eternal loneliness.

Dumb with sweat, we hum across
the cave to one another, long vowels
clanging against sorrow, like vows taken
long ago in the belly of earth, while
Persephone opens
wholly to what is inscribed
on dark bedrock oozing heat.
...

The full moon eats the screams of magpies,
dawn-colored jays ratcheting away
atop soggy lawn furniture even though the moon's developed
new facial cracks and has lost more mass
on its way to total disappearance in another million years. Still
I am grateful to see its bright
white appetite as it flies invisible as the handkerchief
of my grandma's ghost while sunrise claims this world.
Yesterday I thought I was going blind, fragile
retina blown apart or aqueous humor
squeezed by a fatal tumor from my eyeball's global field.
Etched somewhere inside my sight,
a phantom yellow bulb or spectral solar
paramecium shimmied through my cornea.
Neither sleep nor eye drops erased the indelible proof
of melanoma, of fear's nickel-plated
electricity murdering what I envision.
Why do I always feel I deserve disaster?
After a battery of tests, stinging
drops, finger pokes, laser white
lights digging at the back of my eyes,
the doctor says everything is fine.
The floater still burns and leaps
just out of range. I'll carry it through
the afternoon's bureaucracy, the endless
back to school meetings, but I would rather be that magpie
yelling at the uncooperative sky or a jay
braying against the full moon
it can no longer see.
...

I

Michigan was flat as my chest,
the Lookingglass River so lucid that even at seven
I could read its slow tannic thoughts.
At seven, I knew I'd fallen into the upside-down heart
of a world always saying goodbye.

II

After last night's dust storm that slashed nuthatches
from trees and flung all the solar lamps around the gravel yard,
the sky is unapologetic, sees all
regret wriggling like meal worms under its scoured lens.
Must everything today lean over its reflection like a heron
mesmerized by the pond of its own loss?
Mountains rip wind through grief, sing
the way a saw sings as it chews through spruce.

III

At ten I watched a tornado
harrow a trench straight down the road to our farmhouse,
while my father stood in the kitchen door. He sent me
to huddle with spiders, my brother & sisters, and Mom,
the only one screaming down the stone ribs of the basement until it was clear.
I could have run, then, into the shriek of wind
and pulled out its tongue, strangled the syllables of fear
spitting shrapnel into my mother who would dervish into a mental ward
before the next week, but my father blocked the door.
More guts than brains, he said of me.

IV

Grandma said wildflowers can't be transplanted.
She wanted to die in her own house.
All I wanted was for her to laugh
beyond my own life line. It took me twenty years
to visit her grave, and when I rubbed my hand
over the mound, a sweat bee stung my palm.

V

Where do they come from—
those gales that whip branches out of our hands
like the faces of those we love
who won't stay in place? How do we
begin to untangle the snarled hair of goodbye?
...

Driving across the Rez to home, the shattered
cores of ancient volcanoes accuse distant rain that
evaporates before it can save dry earth. One resembles
a woman head thrown back, wailing down the mute sky.
Where is love and why would he button up his shirt
of gray wind, turn up the sleeves of his solitude,
pull grease through his beautiful braids only to leave?
Her cries vanish like vultures
who snatch beaks full of dead rabbit
scoured by dust and the slow grind of earth
through stars who never forget their names.
In the time it takes to slam the door on heartache,
the woman is calm as a monk, face recued East,
sunblazed, chin lifted, hair cascading sonorous
as a sandstone river or an avalanche stopped
mid-crash all the way down her back. In either case,
she is alone with the weather who fashioned her
from an imagination larger than time, alone, that is, but for
the red-tail hawk circling the crown of her decisions
and four slick-billed ravens ripping
fresh-struck rabbit from berm. Last night
I dreamed of volcanoes, of saving the tribe
as I led children from the crocodile earth, cracking under our feet.
Lava the color of a fiery wound crowned high
above date palms telling the ancient truth
that rattled too high for our broken tympanum to hear.
Driving through mirages spilling their guts across asphalt,
I think of a friend whose violin bursts for love
to save her from her own fists punishing the floor
that betrays her. Fire her grief that consumes
the innocuous arms that would comfort her, consumes furious
air above her fingers that crackle out the prosody of longing
on Isaye's mad chords. The skin of her flexed wrist
fits close over mine. What tempers the scalpel that dissects
its own anguish in desire's fickle lab tray? Nothing
saves me but this highway cut through a desert where old volcanoes
remake themselves according to angles of rainlight and wind,
to sky's blue illusion so wide it might swallow our breath.
...

for Terri Acevedo


What is love but feasting atop a grave?
Mother's Day and the Catholic cemetery is packed
with barbeques, Mariachis and plastic
tablecloths laid for picnics. There, alone
with his hands pressed into a burial mound
and in the cool shade of a concrete angel's wings,
a boy sits crosslegged. He could be a yogi
concentrating on the orderly column of black ants
that carry, one blossom at a time, yellow
mesquite flowers to their eggs underground, except
that it's Mother's Day, and he is as alone
as he'll ever be, staring at the empty curl
of his fingers holding nothing but
the distant mourning of doves.
At desert noon even the dead enjoy
singing that braids heat waves
shimmering molten lead between spring blooms.
My friend has come to speak to
her mother riding the spirit horse of memory
along an underground river this past year.
She lights a candle and brushes debris
with her tender palms from the ant-tilled soil
above her mother's ghost face.
Walking between graves, her skin fills
with a guitar's laughing blue chords,
with charcoal smoke,
with the boy's mute hands,
with loneliness spun by hot wind each afternoon
under the invisible birth of stars, where
the dead begin to remember their names.
...

Just north of the border, the migra doesn't consider
this bumpersticker a joke. Only a chihuahua
without papers, maybe a pair of pawned cowboy boots
would fit in the trunk of this mini SUV driving Oracle
swarming at rush hour. Even though half of Tucson's traffic
speaks Spanish, the legislature's declared
English the only legal fuel—it's
the same Continental Divide stubborn and paralytic
as the steel-plated wall insulting our nation's learning curve
as it cleaves us. For over seventy years
my grandma's high cheekbones were illegal. Lovely
as a tiger lily she spoke
the six severed tongues dividing her heart.
In a grave that does not spell out her name
in any language, she is beyond the shovels of police
who would have to dig up her bones to deport them
back to a village outside Prague, where
beneath a Catholic church are layered
the crumbling skulls and femurs
of her ancestors slaughtered by centuries of wars.
I am safe in my adobe house
with its rainbow nations of chuckling quails,
pyrrhuloxia, phainopeplas, choirs of mockingbirds,
skitterish verdins and purple finches, coyotes,
javelinas, rattlers, scorpions, collared and leapard lizards,
and the not so silent majority of English sparrows
who accommodate too easily to walls—there
is not one passport among them. The cactus wren
weaves her tough nest among the barbed thorns
of the cholla, while round-eared gophers construct
complex subways for their babies to run
under chainlink fences separating yards.
Each day along the border of our sealed hearts
gleaming with coiled razor wire, traffic
idles waiting for armed guards
to pillage each car trunk for contraband
people and drugs. I have seen our agents rip
out the interiors of vans, spit commands
at old women with black hair and dark skin.
Sanitary, they use rubber gloves
to deconstruct the meagre grocery bags
and plastic purses of common lives. Indians
are particularly suspect, even though reservations
were drawn like tumors by both governments
to spill across borders, so that whole families
are amputated like unnecessary limbs.
This morning walking the Rillito River,
we read bilingual signs warning the thirsty
not to drink irrigation water slaking imported
ornamental bushes & flowering trees.
This year, statistics say, twice
as many border crossers will die of thirst
in Arizona. Who can stop tongues
alien or otherwise from swelling black at noon. After all,
in the barbed wire waiting room of the heart
there is no seating for sentiment
nor room for the frail arms of hope to save strangers, even
if they are nursing mothers or desperate fathers
looking for work who haven't yet learned
the English word for por que.
After all, waging a war on terror
like any war is not for the faint ambitions
of the humane, so, in the game of homeland security,
we erect a bulletproof wall across the borders of our souls
that guarantees destruction must win.
...