Diane Seuss
Gender is my work, the work of my poetry and the thematic mission of my life. I cannot understand the trajectory of my life without the narrative of my deepening relationship with my femaleness, in relation to other women, to men, to the natural world, to history, and to memory, and every poem I've ever written is part of that project. The body of my work is the work of my very female body.
Baby goodbye
That was the summer it was just me
and Elmore James. The summer I had to
get my house in order. When I should have been
fixing the shattered glass in the garage windows
I lay there on the porch in my wicker love
seat listening to Elmore James, reading People
magazine and drinking cognac.
I'll tell you, I needed
to learn some things. He's beautiful, for instance,
but it's over. Be pissed, but accept the diamonds.
Look at the ways in which a girl can busy herself.
She can make sachets out of lavender and maxi pads.
That summer I had to get down to it. Pay the bills.
Kiss the man's ass if it needs to be kissed
in order to keep cable.
God says, caretake that house. Jesus, I
can feel myself dead
and gone, a family of blondes overtaking my home.
Elmore says, Sweep, devilwoman. I say, You're
cute. You beyond cute, he says, but check this
out: I'm dead. When I was alone,
I'd walk around narrating: The girl is walking down
the hall. The girl is removing her bra. The girl lowers
her copious tits into the bathwater. The girl is drinking
cognac out of a parfait glass. Yes I love her,
oh yes I love her, sure nuff I do. He strums
a guitar string like a clitoris.
I gotta leave you baby, please don't make me stay.
You sing that shit it's like you're digging your own
grave. You're not seeking a cure, not sewing
up the seams or saying your Hail Marys. You don't
even dream of getting into heaven. Heaven.
Dreamhouse. A garden party in the back yard starring
a cleaned up Mr. James in his uncomfortable tuxedo.
Fuck it. You dig until you die. You carve a hole
for your sadness and dance inside it, like a worm
in a jumping bean. Feel bad this morning. Feel
like I wanna cry. My lover's hair was blue-black.
He presented the jewels to me in a blue velvet box.
Stars, he said, for the movie star. Tonight
my house roars with music. The noise ordinance
cops are on their way in their deep blue cars.
It's deep. So deep, I whispered, biting down on his
ear lobe. I was a pit and he was falling.
My hands on his warm ass. My chest is a guitar hole
and I'm jacking up the music until the windows break.
Gargle with cognac, with
semen, with sweat. Me and Elmore, a couple
of ghosts leaning on each other.
Tomorrow we'll paint the whole house blue.
Glue dimes on the walls to look like stars. I'm wearing
his hat, his tie. His slick shoes.
I've lost my baby, almost lost my mind.
In search of the molecular structure of benzene
i got nothin to eat in this old house/ i gotta go out and catch a mouse/
i can't be wrong so i gotta be right/ it's eat or be eaten
– Iggy Pop, “Eat or Be Eaten”
Set the eggs on the stove to boil,
peeled the shells off the eggs, sliced
them in half with a little
pepper, realized they tasted
like me. It’s like I caught my own
egg just as it flew out of the fallopian,
like I was eating myself. I read somewhere
that the uterus is the size of a golf ball.
I pictured it as big as the seat of a 1958
Schwinn Hornet, a pink one,
and the fallopian tubes as long and glossy
as chrome handlebars. Snakes eat their own
tails; the alchemists said so. Ouroboros,
they call it. A German chemist
took a despair-nap when he had hit the wall
in his search for the molecular structure
of benzene. He dreamed of a snake
eating its own tail and woke
to understanding: the structure
was a closed carbon ring. Benzene
apparently smells like lilacs and occurs
naturally as a result of volcanic eruption.
You want some benzene, visit a volcano
on the edge of a grove of lilacs. The ovaries
of women who breathe benzene
shrink. Generally, ovaries are no bigger
than an almond. An almond, and yet they cause
so much trouble. What’s smaller than an almond?
When I was une pucelle I became addicted
to the egg sacs of fresh water fishes. I lived
in an ice fishing shack for awhile during the summer,
a sort of rattletrap floating monastery
for a teenage Buddhist nun who liked masturbation
and egg sacs, though not necessarily in that
order. All I had to do to catch a fish was to open
the hatch in the floor and drop in the hook.
Sunfish egg sacs turn the color of sunrise
when fried in safflower oil. It was egg sacs
and Oreo cookies and eternity, all summer
long. I hadn’t even started bleeding yet.
I figured out a new way to play Solitaire
but I no longer remember how it’s done.
Somehow the deck of cards consumed itself
and licked its own fingers by midnight.
Then I put the kerosene down
on the floorboards and opened
the hatch. I swear I could see stars
down there. I could see myself, my black-green
seaweed hair. Love wasn’t an issue; I knew
what I wanted and I knew how to get it.
Then, late in the summer, the blue racers
arrived, sunning themselves on my rocks.
I was walking around the pond backwards
and I stepped into the center of a hot,
coiled up racer. It tightened
around my ankle and laid its fangs in,
right up to the bone. I knew the thing
didn’t have the poison to kill me, went
chasing after it through the horse fields
which seemed to be covered in blue
racers sunning themselves, all mindless
and happy, and horses staring me down
like churchgoers. The lilacs were fried,
volcanoes dormant. Sun was setting,
the usual orange. I felt sad, impregnated
with sorrow. The shells of dead turtles
floated aimless over the pond. I dove
to the mucky bottom of that body
of water with my eyes wide open.
It was the same temperature
as I was, a restless 98.6. I was trying
to escape myself but all I knew how to do
was to swim deeper into myself
and I wasn’t enough for myself anymore.
Ouroboros. I napped down there, dreamed
I opened the carbon ring. Packed my reptile
suitcase, left my skin behind.
"In search of the molecular structure of benzene" first published in the North American Review.
Diane Seuss's new collection of poems, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, won the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2010. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Blackbird. She is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.