Our Joy

(This comes mostly from the latest salacious CNN.com scandal. If this poem doesn't work out, I'm turning the story into a musical. Or a Lifetime movie. http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/10/cloned.dogs.ap/index.html)

You bounded hungry into the world, doggedly hunting

down what it owed you. You never could discern

that line between sweet-talker and a stalker.

In Ireland, on the run, you played deaf and dumb –

your sick heart pinned to him like a star. That cold country,

cold chars of stone in a church courtyard. The bells

pealed out, without melody, a rush of hard, clanging sound

so like the inchoate cries welling up in your own throat.

“I loved him so much,” you told the judge,

“that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a

carnation up my nose if he asked me to.” You were crazy,

said tabloids garish with grimy details –

has-been beauty queen, kidnapping, pair of handcuffs

(mink-lined). Your love’s carnation is rotting,

Joyce. Sugary decay smells like all the pages

of notebooks stuffed in your trunk, your pen tight-clenched

and drilling in scrawls of him, him

pulling into his driveway, him on a park bench,

buttoned shirt and Bible open in square hands,

in dry Utah air. Not like it was. The cottage: Slick meat

of heavy thighs spread on the bed a holy offering.

His thick wrists bound, you fell and felt

warmly received, like a homecoming.

What you get from someone who can’t leave you,

it isn’t quite love but it almost filled you.

You disappeared. But still starving in those decades

for your due, anything that loved you, always more.

Your fat pug you had divided into five,

and in the picture you, too, could have been a clone.

You and the small wriggling pup you clutched tight.

Faces wrinkle-folded, your mouths opened in twin twisted O’s,

yours with joy, blue-dusted eyelids creasing, his, wide, still

with the shock of being born. “That’s our Joy,”

they said. Your face, again, smears across newsprint

in colors tawdry as cheap polyester. Fugitive,

you’re gone, you look out weak and wounded

in dazed amazement. Cheating world.

It offered you platefuls of nothing but air.

(Draft 2) You may not touch

because the painting is old and not yours.

Blazing red, bison hulk

over slim human shapes.

But lines of skull and horn, hoof and calf

are tender as a lover’s traced curve,

her side’s slope from rib to hip.

All red, faded but raw, a bloody color

because it is blood, and fat.

Some once-alive beast, insides ground

with rock to powder. How right –

the rendering made from the real.

The stone would feel ragged, the shapes

smooth, dusky dust-flaking shapes in the palm.

At night, in the park, what I could say

wasn’t enough when I asked my friend,

Do you want to do stuff?

That, she said, meaning the unspoken sex word, that

opens a whole ‘nother can

of words. She messed up her metaphor

but it made more sense, the feeble conversation

spilling out, dark, dirt-clumped and wriggling.

That, she said, wasn’t necessary.

Words are a poor vessel for desire,

but less lonely a place than inside skin.

Through the painted figures winds

a thin red line. Some form of magic,

says the placard on velvet robe cutting me off

from a life preserved and contained.

I am keeping my hands to myself.

I am keeping myself to myself.

The line ties red outline to outline –

umbilical cord, I think,

connecting all of them, all

wrenched from one gaping womb.

What is necessary? Touch is.

Reach into me, remind me

that body, if anything,

is bridgeable. Skin, soft barrier, bare-

ly containing all this living,

can it hold us back from each other?

Reach. And make it hurt.

That pain is duller than our distance.