Beginning with the woman:
the body;
a litany of penises,
a private-diary song,
sung like the marginalia
of Pre-Algebra homework;
addiction: to touch, to pills,
to the many great spaces of silences;
men of many kinds, and a daughter,
too.
imagines the biblical figure—
a mother on the couch
down the sidewalk
in the sea during “Low Tide, Late August”
“I rested my chin on his shoulder looking toward the shore
As he must have been looking over my shoulder, to where the water deepened
and the small boats tugged on their anchors.”
—of Mary Magdalene—
a martyr breaking plates;
hitting nameless men;
sleeping with someone who’s supposed
to be the son of God, I think, in “What I Did Wrong”
“Slapped the man’s face, then slapped it again,
broke the plate, broke the glass, pushed the cat
from the couch with my feet.”
—as a woman who embodies the spiritual and the sensual, alive in a contemporary landscape…
this “contemporary landscape” (city, living room, etc.) borne
on the back of a ravenous “I,” which begins with the beginning that has no start,
asking of: identity, and belonging, and demanding answers with
stigmatic hands, and the righteous redemption and/or blasphemous joy of sex
with the holy trinity, and funeral manners, and channel surfing
with mothers with daughters:
“Before the Beginning”
Was I ever virgin?
Did someone touch me before I could speak?
(Howe wonders who and why and where the Fallen Woman is,
assigned a role impossible to play when skin is always already
played with by someone who wants to be the first to touch, to have, to soil.
Howe prefigures the image before language, establishes the ontological
over the linguistic in missionary position.)
Who had me before I knew I was an I?
(Birth and belonging, sex and sense of self—Howe
takes Lacan to task, before Lacan even knew what it meant
to be taken at all, before there was a(n) (m)other. The first poem raises
every question necessary for the rest of the collection: giving her words
a place to go, to return, to beg for answers, even if none are delivered.)
So that I wanted that touch again and again
without ever knowing who or why or from whence it came?
(Again, “Before the Beginning” sets
itself up as the touchstone of the collection,
asking: who? why? where? I?)
…the subject of her own life, fully human and alive to the scared in the mortal world.
Ending with silence:
which was thrust onto woman
so Magdalene wrapped her
bare skin up in “it” and called “it” an “I,”
cloth to cover up herself;
space;
the Theopoetics Conference;
“One Day,” where Walt Whitman
fingers I, thumbing I in his pocket,
spending and spent for a soda,
“to be spent for something somebody wanted and drank and found delicious.”
Revelations not of the extraordinary, but the painful
and awkward and banal made almost sacred.