rachel zucker – drunken library

“Diary [Underworld]” – Rachel Zucker

Only a mother could manufacture such a story:
the earth opened and pulled her down.

She shows my picture all over town
and worries the details of my molestation.

Terrified she screamed for mother. . .
but I did not scream.

She says it is like having an arm ripped
from her body. But think, Mother,

what it is to be an arm ripped from a body.
Bloody shoulder bulb, fingers twitching, useless.

Did she expect me to starve?
To wither away, mourning the tulip, primrose, crocus?

And if I have changed, so be it.
He did not choose me for my slim ankles or silken tresses.

She moans and tears her hair Unfair!
There was so much I longed to teach her.

Sad Mother, who thinks she knows so much–
teach the farmer to grow seed.

The fields await instruction.

In him is a loneliness so complete he cannot feel it.
I grow to fit it.

My hips, under his, give way.

Everywhere the air is thin with ghosts–they float
like mist across the edges of the eye, gone

when the head turns to acknowledge. Their courtesy
makes a path for me to pass, a cleaner atmosphere.

We are not just lovers,
but no one understands this.

My mother lies with Poseidon, Dionysus, Helios, Hermes
and is unchanged. I am

becoming something
other than I was.

A consort. A Queen.

No more a maiden but still with maiden hands.
It’s true that I am less without him

but when he sees me

all the gold of this world glows against the marble walls
and the veins of the deep stones blush with color.

His bones make a soft place for me on his granite bed.
His touch is the sweet glance of the past, but his laugh–

he has always been expecting me.

He gives me the wedding band of the real world
a story with pockets and mirrors

woos me with music that could kill insects
its frequency

reveals men in the distance forging the bridge
between nether and either

when night sets, the stones return to the earth

and in the morning, work again:
swimming through chaos to find the world