Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993

The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary

The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary I. Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners, platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you I emulated there, in that Godawful place. What kind of face to put on it? How simple is a simon's sign? To my mind laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not a pleasantry that spread; instead it's intimate with sheer delirium: spilt brain on split lip, uncontainable interiority— (make no mistake, it is a horror, this inmated, intimated self, revealed as your material: red smear, white swipe). It's said the brain stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery, and then—what's left? a little cartilage for ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps of a delapidated strut—and this is just the sort of stuff, insensate, to which life (which comes again as slime) has always loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't laugh? Your inner life! Your pet pretense! It can't be kept up, can't be kept clean, even in a thought, 20 except a good Woodworks or shitpump keeps it so. II. Out of the mouth comes a tongue, it calls itself linguistic and it never quite effects the cover-up (good Lord, there's much to cover up: so many belches, outcries, upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and coughs)— so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself on being the most intellectual) can't help but come out, snorting. Nothing smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's got teeth to send it off, and spit to keep it company, and rot to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's a grimacing with wind. It will (the will be damned) burst out in bad cacaphonies of brouhaha and borborygma—it's the stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake— the vent of rage and irony, and right there in the very shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean, is sorrow's archery and signature, while flesh is being hoisted and arrayed on roosts of skeleton. III. I saw what good comes to; I saw the figure 21 human being cuts, upon its frame. The laugh was a cry from my own perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted armature. Despite your consternations, oh you meekened warners and polite conventioneers, the thieves were better served upon that day. For the heart is a muscle, where cruelty's humored. The tooth of moral rectitude's a fang. What I gave at the sight of him there was up. What I got of humanity there was the hang . . . 22 ...