Six Unrhymed Sonnets Diane Seuss 1 I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment but didn’t have the energy to get out of the car. Rental. Blue Ford Focus. I had to stop in a semipublic place to pee on the ground. Just squatted there on the roadside. I don’t know what’s up with my bladder. I pee and then I have to pee and pee again. Instead of sightseeing I climbed into the back seat of the car and took a nap. I’m a little like Frank O’Hara without the handsome nose and penis and the New York School and Larry Rivers. Paid for a day pass at Cape Disappointment thinking hard about that long drop from the lighthouse to the sea. Thought about going into the Ocean Medical Center for a check-up but how do I explain this restless search for beauty or relief? 2 No need to sparkle, Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own,” oh, would that it were true, I loved the kids who didn’t, June, can’t remember her last name, tilt of her head like an off-brand flower on the wane, her little rotten teeth the color of pencil lead, house dresses even in 4th grade, and that boy Danny Davis, gray house, horse, eyes, clothes, fingertips and prints, freckles not copper-colored but like metal shavings you could clean up with a magnet. Now Mrs. LaPointe was a dug-up bone but Miss Edge sparkled, she taught the half- and-half class, 3rd and 4th grades cut down the middle of the room like sheet cake, she wore a lavender chiffon dress with a gauzy cape to school, aquamarine eye shadow, Sweetie, she whispered to me, leaning down, breath a perfume, your daddy’s dead, tears stuck to her cheeks like leeches or jewels. 3 I aborted two daughters, how do I know they were girls, a mother knows, at least one daughter, maybe one daughter and a son, will it hurt I asked the pre-abortion lady and she said, her eyes were so level, I haven’t been stupid enough to need to find out, cruel but she was right, I was and am stupid, please no politics, I’ve never gotten over it, no I don’t regret it, two girls with a stupid penniless mother and a drug-addict father, I don’t think so, I shot a rabbit once for food, I am not pristine, I am not good, I am in no way Jesus, I am in no way even the bad Mary let alone the good, though I have held my living son in the pietà pose, I didn’t know at the time I was doing it but now that I look back, he’d overdosed and nearly died, my heart, he said, his lips blue, don’t worry, I’ve paid. 4 To return from Paradise I guess they call that resurrection. Don’t remember the black cherries’ gleam, bay shine, mountain’s sheen, blissful appalling loneliness. Messy foam at sea’s edge, slurry they call it, where love and death meld into slop, and unaccustomed birds. Forget all the way back to where you were before you were born. When Dyl was a toddler, still finger-sucking, he said he remembered the sound of my blood whooshing past him in utero, maybe the first of many lies, this one with an adorable speech impediment. I always return, it’s my nature, like the man who couldn’t stop liberating the crayfish even though it pinched him hard, that song, that Grand Ole Opry. 5 The best is when you respond only to the absolute present tense, the rain, the rain, rain, rain, and wind, an iridescent cloud, another shooting, this time in a shopping mall in Germany, so this is why people want other people to put their arms around them, I will walk to the bay where there is a kind of peace, even emptiness, the barn swallows’ sharp flight and cry, who now has the luxury of emptiness or peace, the beauty of thunder in a place where there is rarely thunder, the mind like a jackrabbit bounding, bounding, my wet hair against my neck, grandfather’s barber shop, the line-up of hair tonics by color like a spectrum, the pool table removed to make a room for great-grandma to live out her years, my father cutting a semicircle in her kitchen table so it would fit around the stove pipe, rain, rain, fascism in America is loud. 6 Poetry, the only father, landscape, moon, food, the bowl of clam chowder in Nahcotta, was I happy, mountains of oyster shells gleaming silver, poetry, the only gold, or is it, my breasts, feet, my hands, index finger, fingernail, hangnail, paper cut, what is divine, I drove to the sea, wandered aimlessly, I stared at my tree, I said in my mind there’s my tree, there’s my tree I said in my mind, I remember myself before words, thrilled at my parents’ touch, opened milkweed with no agenda, blew the fluff, no reaching for comparison, to be free of signification, wriggle out of the figurative itchy sweater, body, breasts, vulva, little cave of the uterus, clit, need, touch, come, I came before I knew what coming was, iambic pentameter, did I feel it, does language eclipse feeling, does it eclipse the eclipse -- p2: defenestrate --

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