One Secret Thing Read Free Page A

under, the float,
    we might get tangled in the anchor chain, I
    swam, under the float, and saw
    the slant of the chain, its mottled eel. And you must
    never go up, under the raft, to its
    recessed chamber where there’s poison ether.
    I would soar supine on my back, looking up
    at the bulk, I’d rush up slowly closer
    to the antilife, holding my breath,
    finally dipping up into it,
    putting my face up into it
    a second or two, then shove down
    and water-sprint for home. But of course
    I felt I had to inhale that stuff
    and live. I left no note, the woman on my
    right chest would always long for
    the man on my left, and never touch him, I
    came up, between those boiler-plated
    bulges, and breathed. It was more an unguent
    than air, it smelled like myrrh gone bad,
    I’d go and sip it up all summer,
    and live. Sip, sip, sip,
    first the left, then the right
    nipple faintly puffed, almost
    chartreuse with silvery newness, the lover
    on the left pushed out his mouth, and on the right
    she puckered hers—if they grew enough,
    they could kiss, or some resuscitator could be
    begged to give them mouth to mouth to mouth.

Freezer
    When I think of people who kill and eat people,
    I think of how lonely my mother was.
    She would come to me for comfort, in the night,
    she’d lie down on me and pray. And I could say
    she fattened me, until it was time
    to cook me, but she did not know,
    she’d been robbed of a moral sense that way.
    How soft she was, how unearthly her beauty, how
    terrestrial the weight of her flesh
    on the constellation of my joints and pouting
    points. I like to have in the apartment,
    shut in a drawer, in another room,
    the magazine with the murder-cannibal,
    it comforts me that the story is available
    at any moment, accounted for, not
    dangerously unthought-of. I think he kept
    ankles in the freezer. My mother was such a good kisser.
    From where I sat in the tub, her body,
    between her legs, looked a little
    like a mouth, a youthfully bearded mouth
    with blood on it. From one hour to the next on earth
    no one knew what would happen.

The Bra
    It happened, with me, on the left side, first,
    I would look down, and the soft skin of the
    nipple had become like a blister, as if it had been
    lifted by slow puffs of breath
    from underneath. It took weeks, months,
    a year. And those white harnesses,
    like contagion masks for conjoined twins
    —if you saw a strap showing, on someone
    you knew well enough, you could whisper, in her ear,
    It’s Snowing Up North. There were bowers to walk through
    home from school, trellis arches
    like aboveground tunnels, froths of leaves—
    that spring, no one was in them, except,
    sometimes, a glimpse of police. They found
    her body in the summer, the girl in our class
    missing since winter, in the paper they printed
    the word in French,
brassiere
, I felt a little
    glad she had still been wearing it,
    as if a covering, of any
    kind, could be a hopeless dignity
    But now they are saying that her bra was buried
    in the basement of his house—when she was pulled down into
    the ground, she was naked. For a moment I am almost half
    glad they tore him apart with Actaeon
    electric savaging. In the photo,
    the shoulder straps seem to be making
    wavering O’s, and the sorrow’s cups
    are O’s, and the bands around to the hook
    and eye in the back make a broken O.
    It looks like something taken down
    to the bones—God’s apron—God eviscerated—
    its plain, cotton ribbons rubbed
    with earth. When he said, In as much as ye have
    done it unto one of the least
    of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
    me, he meant girls—or if he’d known better
    he would have meant girls.

The Couldn’t
    And then, one day, though my mother had sent me
    upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer
    opposable, they would not hook into
    the waistband, they swung, limp—under my
    underpants was the Y of elastic, its
    metal teeth gripping the pad,
    I couldn’t be punished, unless I was bare, but