The Two Elizas, 2009

(after 'Two Fridas', 1939)

Be near me & tell
where the blood is going.

Too often bull-bellied clouds slow
drag our hips, fracturing
both girl & woman.

Barbed ideals conjoin
& coil their righteous dreams through
arteries, thick as autumn vines
that keep light out. And I must take

my own hand, must hold my own
hand, as if it were a stave of notes
scattered from a razed moon: brokenly beating

the rhythm of a thousand-throated
hummingbirds beneath a dress of tulle.

Listen to us: these women
say to ourselves: Eliza: Eliza.

The men have left & in a dusky corner
the women you have been
are piled like a beige heap of slips
to be ironed & mended, hung.

All mothers have left you
& in their shadows blood
drips from the chandelier
to the floor where your body
rocks in its cradle.

Eliza: you: Eliza: me.

Which if I'm answering
each of you

there's light in my lungs
where screams are smeared

I wear golden lamps
that open after midnight.

Four lips of light opening towards
testament & earth. Our imagination
& plague.

The things that hold.
Hold me now
before I am no more
of a fragment
than the clouds behind me.

The body expands
its luminous stain.

Melancholic now, one Eliza.
Inconsolable: you: the Others.

Be near me & tell
us where the blood is going.

Be near me & tell Beauty
I was once unbearable.