This is the key to
it.
This is the key to everything.
Preciously.
I am worse
than the gamekeeper's children
picking for dust and bread.
Here
I am drumming up perfume.
Let me go down on your carpet,
your
straw mattress -- whatever's at hand
because the child in me is
dying, dying.
It is not that I am cattle to be eaten.
It is not
that I am some sort of street.
But your hands found me like an
architect.
Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago
when I lived
in the valley of my bones,
bones dumb in the swamp. Little
playthings.
A xylophone maybe with skin
stretched over it
awkwardly.
Only later did it become something real.
Later I
measured my size against movie stars.
I didn't measure up. Something
between
my shoulders was there. But never enough.
Sure, there
was a meadow,
but no yound men singing the truth.
Nothing to
tell truth by.
Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters
and
rising out of the ashes I cried
my sex will be
transfixed!
Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new
thing -- a snail, a nest.
I am alive when your fingers are.
I
wear silk -- the cover to uncover --
because silk is what I want you
to think of.
But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern.
So tell
me anything but track me like a climber
for here is the eye, here is
the jewel,
here is the excitement the nipple learns.
I am
unbalanced -- but I am not mad with snow.
I am mad the way young
girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering...
I burn the way money burns.