Graduating to Wet Stones

You Are My Answer I am tired of the knives and the pots, tired of my lips and my breasts, tired of the perfume and the dresses. There have been men who have come to my table, encircling the bowl I offered up, like flies hovering any pungent scent. A bowl filled with dark red grapes-- even mother's brother came once, twice, three-- no sense counting. Last night I had a dream-- I said to it, "You are my answer, you will outlast lovers, fathers, uncles." In the dream there was a city made of chains where Joan burned in men's clothes and the nature of the angels went unexplained: one without a nose, one with a eye in its hand, one chewing a comet and recording its orbit. Each one like a poem obeying itself. "You are my answer," I said, and entered, lying down just inside the gates. Adam on my left, Eve on the right, both perfectly inconsistent with the new world. We wove our arms together and melted under the sun. I was no longer a woman-- not one thing, not the other. Daughters of Mesopotamia, your king has invited me into his chamber-- I am dark as sable and exquisite. I have been opened and unfettered. I have no clefts to fill, no feature reckoning me foul, Other, or inferior. I am all one skin like a dark red grape. No more a woman than Christ was a man.

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