response poem for wide sargasso sea [it's really long]

It’s April, and the blossoms are being put out all around us like calves’ tongues. Who knows what kind of strangeness is in them? We shouldn’t forget that, in order to spread out and photosynthesize, the minute new leaves have to break open the waxy scales that shut them in all winter, like hands cupped tightly over a flame. The little blossoms, severed by winds, fragrant, even a little phosphorescent in the sodium lamps that burn down by the river all night, lap at the air and at our hands, desirous of something as strange and terrible and transitory as they. It’s April. I read Wide Sargasso Sea to remind me that sitting in the heart of a blossom like a pretty cat on a lap is a kernel of madness, and each stem is like a little bone plucked out of a defenseless animal. What am I? A woman in love? Where do I sit? By the river? What am I, hungry, dreaming of Caribbean seas, of merciless thunders? Here the year droops blackly through its months, sunk low in cold; it’s so prostrate it doesn’t believe in itself, its presence, just like the mad young woman didn’t believe she was in England. Being in love in spring it’s easy to remember how we bewitch each other, we tear into each other’s hearts like a new leaf into its hard containing scales. And what does it mean to love? What’s the difference between love and enchantment? Mr. Rochester never knew the difference, he sat in the rain-gutted house and when he spoke bronze coins fell from his lips, he didn’t know whether he loved her for her money, her hair, and what the blossoms, white as gold-ore, had to say in the matter. We can gut a chicken for obeah, scatter its blood, hope the drops turn to blossoms that nod in a code we can decipher, telling us what our love is, and where our twinned bodies begin and end.

It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like bones to me. A field of unbearable bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.

Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.