Poems for Infidels

Two Letters from Lavinia

35 Two Letters from Lavinia (written as if she had outlived Titus Andronicus) I. Let Me Go Grind Your Bones To Poetry Do you remember giving me those black exotic pearls? They were so creamy and mysterious— like ink or— sarcophagi of a sort to an impenetrable Buddhist logic. I used to think they hated to be worn and would rather have been swallowed whole than contemplated. They have something to do with the shadows out of which genetic mirrors are fashioned—that kind of destiny and voodoo— tar and quark— which makes them the opposite of the moon. The moon, blessed by eyelessness, has nothing to offer other than density and nacre (white is black, black is white). And you can’t reduce anything— 36 the moon or the little smooth beauties— to a more digestible truth. Nor can you not pity them, both being tongueless, handless daughters of the masculine sea. But you see, Father, only I know what you knew, and the moon: that we are food for the gods. And that these small featureless skulls, these pearls you sent men grunting after madly in the sand, under the clam-dull moonlight, they’re what gets left of our souls (and still we persist in believing that goodness and evil escape being turned into sediment!) You will notice I’ve learned how to type using both of my elbows and feet. In black and white. With immeasurable tenderness, Lavinia. 37 II. Still Thinking of Death and You Santa Catalina Island I keep dislodging with my feet discarded cuneiform— obituary written into the chalky silk of shells— each scrap born from an unwitnessed diligence. Each nomenclature—eggshell, ocher, rose—can be seen as something circling inward toward a disappearance (or eternity, which Rome moved outward toward, but that’s another story, one about the conquering of me by men you, Father, conquered . . . ) These fragments crash up here, on an island you never even dreamed of subduing, and toy with my avidity for symbol—little broken lips of sea-soaked monuments— indications, yet to be interpreted, 38 remembrances of provinces unknown, (untaxed!) their vastnesses and machinations . . . or are they clues as to the beauty of a mathematics not configured yet, the one which proves we’ll meet again, somewhere under new oblivions or through fractile coral thresholds such as these (by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown?), miraculously reimagined . . . ...