Deconstruction of the Blues

Syzygy

40 SYZYGY When I read the birth book I got it all but the part about my father The astounding fact that I’d come out of my mother’s belly Ovaries curving off the uterus like horns from a bull’s head The diagram woman whose body opened on the pages who was actually my mother giving birth to me hushed veined urn of her One all black page with a single white speck star of the ovum in micro-space Later I added the invisible sperm swimming there a kind of looming in the blackness curly itch in it and the page detached to an ultimate figure in my mind the birth page stilled magnetic storm eternal moment before the touch of God’s finger But my father had nothing to do with all this He was just play Daddy apart from all creation When he died I flew home plastic bag of his clothes his ashes My mother and I had our last Daddy talk “I decided to have you. He didn’t know anything about it. I just stopped using birth control.” 41 Here in the writing that makes a slow circle back to the birth book her gift to me when I first began to read Nibbling halves of truth in falsehood Then I just listened felt a shock of rightness My mother seemed like a sibyl dredged and windy I knew that she’d pitied him loved him in her way I knew how she’d chafed in her marriage all those years My father dangled like a sad joke between us Moony nervous funny piano player on the road with Ramona and her Men of Music She eleven years younger pretty refined fatlegged It was the seventh year of their marriage somewhere out of town in the US of A “He was very strange, your father. Other men seemed to find me attractive. But he was very standoffish. He could only make love when he was drunk.” I see him laughing wincing away alone at his core catlike timid and wordless I want to embrace him as if to embrace my own shame my jokey baby Daddy off in that wide gray egg of his death Circling slowly back to my power phase bigger faster stronger every day wanting my mother for myself absoluteness of myself 42 But they’re before in a musical landscape goodtime Daddy drinking for courage She having realized this romantic older man is a little boy can never take care of her that she has to take care of herself planning conceiving me bulling towards the future I imagine them my young parents knowing only what she’s told me his side gone which he could never in any case have put into words God’s finger pointed through my father’s shy penis I put these words Mother Father Ovum and sperm on the page these errata to the birth book ...