Setting Loose the Icons

this is the year i have given up old icons
or else had them rudely snatched from my hands
making the two-day trek eastward by train
all my belongings in sealed parcels
or the loaded baggage
the cabbies refused to lift
coming finally to a stopping place
where the pain continues
and i am left with oddly turned streets
only vaguely like home
volumes of biography
weighting the front-end of my brain.

the first one:
i search among the junk and jewelry shops
for the right stone
smooth and cool
like your hands those thursday evenings
because we never were together weekends
because i wanted you well enough to accept it all
without becoming the hero
of an affair i built from scratch
inventing as i went along.
how well you played it
like a blues your best friend listens to again
because it masks his growing fear
of being abandoned on some dance floor
around three a.m.
going home to the empty house
no one waiting up
sheet music strewn across the piano bench
in his house that smells only
of a man who lives alone.
small rituals you go through uptown after midnight
rooms shrouded in palms
the pine tree i left you
your shadow strewn across a glass of scotch
too strong for your aging constitution.
onyx set in silver
a lover i took some years ago
because i was young and firm
because i could
because i was beautiful and you would not refuse me.
so much has happened
between then and the hospital stretcher
where they force-fed me oxygen
two lovers looking on
the numbness in my hands and feet
my eyes running tears of shock perhaps self-pity
the young animal in me wounded
the groan like a broken record
no one bothers to correct.
small retribution for the intensity of my life--
the smell of you as near to me as death.
tell the truth
what did you see that night?

what did you see?
something says you will not tell.
it will perhaps cease to matter
while the japanese girl behind the counter
smiles as i finger each stone
bringing it to my face
my lips
rubbing it along
the red-brown skin along the back of my hand
i make the uneven exchange:
paper money
for the smooth stone that binds you to me
binding fast the wanga
no one has set free in years and years.

the second one:
the telephone receiver lies dead in my right hand
the childhood smell of cold new plastic
distance
distance
there is nothing i can exchange for you
my heart strung round with glass beads
counted like a rosary
in the empty half of your house there on burgundy
death walking like a grown woman
searching through the miscellany
of your dead and dying parents' belongings.

give me back my life
give me back my life damn it.

i fold up the edges of the photograph
and place it face down in its little grave
the glass beads around my heart
like the prayers of a young widow

the hardest thing
is the turning away
the hardest thing
to live long enough
to bury your own dead.

the other one:
father father father
it becomes a kind of song
beneath bright lights
across a hardwood floor.
when the choir in me dries up
like dust from an indian clay vessel
tossed casually to the floor
when i stop dancing
my legs confined to the corridors
of the insane ward of the private hospital
uptown where no one knows me
where a lover's mother lies speechless
preparing to die
when i am no longer the precious fledgling
but a grown woman whose life hurts and breaks
a grown woman scraping the blues for some answer
that is nothing but a cry
that comes as close to saying help me
as a proud woman can manage
there is only that stillness in...