Mary Crow

PENIS

What words have I been given?

Why did I slip on a red gown in my dream?

Is everything about sex?

About the truck driver holding up his

enormous rubbery and pink penis

to the high cab’s window—

as we passed from grade school

horrified and fascinated

Do not despise, the poet said, the penis.

Whoever despises the clitoris,

she said, despises the penis.

Suddenly I remembered the soldier

who told me that some men

who visited prostitutes

had their penises

seized by a vagina

and they couldn’t pull free—

like the dogs we saw,

crest-fallen, heads bowed.

The vagina, he confided,

has teeth, teeth that slide out

and grab. And then what?

Because they did not love—

Because they did not feel merciful—

Because they could not climax—

Whoever despises the cunt,

she said, despises the life of the child.

Light may be bleeding through Venetian blinds

into a room filled with silence.

Oh, my god, he moans,

thinking of those small girls

who surely admired

the silvery flash of his sperm on the glass.

EGYPT: FRAGMENTS

I flew into the revolution.

The Nile always there,

entire walls to tells its story.

White ibis, deity of scribes

and wisdom, dot the trees—

Egypt’s god is also

Ra, the sun, has always been Ra.

Otherwise: stones, palms, fragments.

Burning tires and tear gas!

A city roaring with cars,

ochre dust that rains down.

The long, sun-blasted corridors

of byzantine bureaucracy.

A whiff of tear gas now and then.

O Plaza of Lamentation,

where is your liberation?

The road up and the road down

lethal with potholes. Always the Nile.

ALL NIGHT LONG THE WATER IS CRYING FOR ME

To treat the days like separate lives,

like tatters of a river,

like the deep red walls of Pompeii

on which sparrows sing.

All night long the water cries to me.

Repetitions of waves, of sighs.

Socrates said that flight

is the best way to fight love.

Holy Never, have mercy on us.

A red ladder made of clay—

those lateral clouds in the sunset

I’m watching this evening,

become a sweating red mare,

I’ll ride into the water

over this landscape stretched out

like the hard body of a man.

Given me give I you.

Sometimes I too tell the ah’s

of my heart one by one.

The repetition of all the rain that rains.

In the world there’s still that rush,

as if someone waited to tear

my desire to shreds.

As if you weren’t both love and flight.

Holy nothingness, have mercy on us,

all night long water is crying:

more is more.

I must grieve for it right now:

water, repetition, our separate lives,

sighs and waves, flight of sparrows.

To overflow, like water.

This is the story of where

water comes from, and returns.

HALF IN AND HALF OUT

For a long time

I believed in solitude,

but you cured me,

you spared me.

Out of your own need,

mine grew, an island.

It erupted from the sea—

extending an atlantis

on its palm.

I remembered then

that what I hate most

is having to wait.

Come in, come in.

My house . . . .

And the moon above it

like a wandering child.

The first owl of the evening.

The owl, you know,

who hoards our aches,

moans out of pity

for us, clicks her beak:

Is it I don’t know

or is it yes?

SAND-FILLED STORY

The sandman has sprinkled my eyes

but I can’t sleep.

All morning sand has been sifting down

over city and river,

its veil has turned the sun blue.

The year is 2011,

month February.

It’s Friday noon.

Hello, Mary, how are you?

As in, I can’t catch you.

I saw the female cardinal,

perched in her gray dress.

But, inside: arborization it’s called,

those twigs and leaves with veins,

a brain’s design

waiting for a scarlet bird.

Sand always wins in the end—

remember that.

Sand always wins in the end.

You’ll see what damage

a few months of desert sand

can do to tanks.

A halo hovers over

the western horizon,

swaying in the blackout,

grains of sand like sparks.

WHAT WAS THAT CITY

What was that city that tangled me in its sandy roots?

That led me into the desert where I gasped

at vastness and vacancy, miles and miles with

nothing growing, pyramids that ringed it

gnawing at me, dust and ashes in my hands—

how can I build anything out of these ruins?

Night after night it was always the same city,

and always the same desert, city whose sky

is starred with sand, sky like an endless beach

from which day peels itself behind domed pyramids

to the god of sand, and near where I live fed up

with boredom, with ruins inside me, unforgiving sand.

All along the rivers, palaces still stand ruined, doors

pouring out a sand-story, above a thousand buried

sphinxes—how small human life appears here,

where the sky is tired of light, and dark seems bright

with the bright dark of death, the horizon looks

like frosted glass, like a repetition of repetitions.

Travel was meant to set me free, solitude to teach me wisdom,

how to bear pain without crying out, how to read the desert.

Instead, this city has become a hissing, a massive sprawl

on the Nile’s banks where resentment floats words

like shards of glass between two shores of sand.

Beyond the sand, no end of light. The sky was years ago.