Femme’s Dictionary
Poetry
by Carol Guess
A Sampler from
CALYX Books
Fall 2004
SBN 0-934971-86-2 paper $13.95
ISBN 0-934971-87-0 cloth $25.95 X
Poetry/Lesbian Literature/Women’s Literature
Watercolor: Leda
The swan nestles his beak between the woman’s
smallish breasts. His wings curve like orchards,
or the broad flaps of planes that seared
acres of sky in the early months
of the last noticeable war. Returning
from the front, a man lays his head
between his lover’s breasts, listening
for the heart nestled among orchards of skin and bone.
He lets scars drift from him like petals.
He pretends he can forget acres of names.
The most noticeable thing in the picture
is the quiet of the wman’s lips
as the bird comes to her, and she pretends
she will forget warm breath to breast,
beast-touch. But everything returns to haunt,
like obscene pictures, like the heart
of the swan, beating a rhythm out
beneath winged ribs. The murmur of push or drop
through the bird’s heart flaps, the murmur
of beautiful, dead men in their last flights returns
and it is like the return
of the planes at night, when someone’s war
has just begun to drop. The soldier lets his thoughts
nestle among the rhythms of the early front. The woman
rests her forehead between wingspread hands,
and the old hopes drift like petals
shaken from boughs in pre-war orchards,
before the great planes seared their trunks
with scars, obscenely small, like names.
The Driven
Small houses bracket the great cities. In those outskirts
we’re born, riding out on the pain of a woman’s open body.
We die crumpling among seed packets and garden gloves
in dusk, at seventy. The suburbs create us. If we escape, it’s to ride
trains we can’t trust underground, looking for money. Losing sleep
over women. I told my father I was leaving; I was seventeen.
His face crumpled. I told him I was losing sleep
over a woman and his dusky eyes closed:
we bracket our parents’ lives. We want them
secure in small houses, reading and gardening, drinking
warm things from scalloped glasses. How difficult it is
to imagine them gone, or in pain. How difficult
to imagine anything at all, when I am sleeping
in a house in the suburbs where ambition dries like water
on concrete terraces. I told my father a story;
he was half-asleep on the scalloped sofa. Dusk
covered half his face, and for a moment I felt afraid.
I touched his arm, just to be sure. He asked me to read
to him, to bring him something warm to drink and to be sure
never to leave the suburbs. I promised something,
but rain drove me out of terraced gardens and I woke
on a warm train which filled great cities
with the young ambitious. I drank in their stories:
face after face untouchable, but open. The eyes of one man
were bracketed by shadow. He stretched the train’s length,
shaded his face, slept. The ride curved on, as if
it trusted him. From underneath his palms came weeping.
The sound reminded me of rain.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
When you sleep with a gun for the first time,
you interrogate its history like any lover’s,
imagining the deaths it holds in store. When you wed,
the world welcomes your union. Your children’s cries
drag the country in the wake of their echoes.
When the gun goes off, you hold water in your hands.
It moves gracefully through your fingers
as the body you’ve signed becomes a photograph.
Tell no one, another soldier murmurs
as he too takes aim. You breathe and march in unison,
feet stirring the same dry clay into the same dusty spirals.
The songs you exhale make of women the enemy,
their breasts landing sites, their legs
stone columns you must weave your way between.
Nights, you sleep below him on a metal cot
that rocks backwards like a train.
Promise, he says,
but he is talking in his sleep, his boyish voice contorted
by the remnants of compassion. The force of his solitude
reaches you through plaited wire. If you reached for him . . .
But your relation is merely political.
Don’t ask, croons your superior, and reason wavers,
hazy as a target in stark desert sun. But you have a question.
You want to ask what love is, if this is love:
what you feel when anonymous blood runs swiftly,
drizzled in fitful patterns like festive stars.
Bad Sex
Everything tousled, and then the end zone:
that lie you started things off with
haunts us yet. You shrink from my hands
as I become your father;
the TV flies towards the wall
and I’m wholly new, a violent,
desiring man. Meanwhile, in my reality,
your breasts are in my hands,
we’re women overcoming history,
I’m in bliss not wholly new,
violently unaware
that you’re not there.
Now you’re not here:
two hundred miles by interstate.
I write and call to say I miss
what you don’t think we had at all.
But if that’s all, whose hands
did I inhabit when I touched
the deer-brown curve of clavicle
that clothed your pulse? Which ghost
pinned both my hands above my head
and bit down hard, trying to reach
its history through my flesh?
I couldn’t separate your love
from my discomfort; you couldn’t separate
my fierce desire from walking,
evenings, through flooded woods
beside your father. His old brown coat.
Pressing your knee against my throat:
what life in your eyes as you re-live
the trip to the river. I just shiver,
liking the perfume of angry breath.
Femme’s Dictionary
She says she wore a dress that first Saturday,
but I say skirt, skirt,
insistence darkening my lips
as if the difference
between cloth or a zipper at her waist
might’ve held us together longer.
I like to call things by their names.
I like to make my words match,
as much as possible,
the thoughts I’m holding onto.
Not love, but a stranger’s hand
in my jacket pocket. Not aquamarine,
but the color of blood
between a woman’s thighs.
She was different from me.
She enjoyed lying,
the way a hand touching the surface of the water
enjoys the water: its frail and fleeting clasp.
What is it makes impermanence so sensuous?
She liked to watch
me leave, needing the sound of a door
to remind her of where my lips had lingered.
Not bedroom but vestibule,
nine letters to describe the space
she cleared for me. Not quite a room.
Which One of You Is the Man?
The flecked eye of a fish is a window;
the gaze of a cow edging the ramp to slaughter
is a gun. Is sap the same as blood? What I long for
is to see inside the hearts of things and not
incorporate them. I’ve seen a tie undo itself
because it felt the pulse of her throat
and admired the precarious math of human life.
I want to hear in the jutting of car alarms
the music of urban proximity. When I say Take me,
I mean for my body to tell stories about night,
how it feels when the moon strokes its belly.
What I long for are wrists that know enough
to stay away from razors. Which one of us lies
on top of the other, steering until pleasure
feels simple, because detached from choice?
In the grocery, those rows of hearts might be
human, altering forever the meaning of desire.
About the Poet
Carol Guess is the author of two novels and a memoir. Her poetry is published in Poetry Northwest, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Mankato Poetry Review and Bakunin, among others. Her novel Switch was a finalist for the ALA Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Book Award. She teaches at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle. She has a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from Indiana University.
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