The Boundaries of the Body

1. Lament

I separated from myself as one who is dying slips through the boundaries of her body,
            becomes an audience to her own thoughts.
            I opened the wire door of my mind,
            freed to ride the air.

For decades, there was love, but no children—
            The long marriage, the very lungs of which gasped still no child.

Too old to wish, I asked Abram, my love, make Hagar, our maid,
            my surrogate.

I mouthed the words; my legs became plinths from which my chest
            could have toppled in the slightest breeze.

As if my lips were no longer part of my face,
            as if they belonged to a nemesis using my syllables against me,
            flinging them at me like stones.

There are things one can’t take back.

I had reflected on my plan before sending it like a foot soldier
            along the scorching sand of my need to please my husband.
            How would I feel if it became real? Hagar mothering a child for us,

the word “mother” nudging me with the subtle slope of its muscles,
            gleaming like polished jade, smooth around my neck.
            My inflamed childlessness.

I become my own laboratory, a place to test what my heart can bear:
            May their baby be a field of solace: Ishmael.

She bloomed like a peony, let the dross of her petals fall on me.

            I grew electric with fever.

2. To Learn Peace

I washed my feet,
then my hands, scratched
and stained from picking fruit

off the prickly branches.
Bittersweet.
Had I sought distraction or forbearance?

The bees whirred the air.
Barren —
what could I bear?

I am old. I was, to Hagar,
merciless, as her face
shone, alabaster and berry,

hard and bright as a prism
shifted by wind,
and after the boy came,
did look down on me.

Envy took me apart
as I took the plum’s flesh
from its pit.
And I entered a dark tunnel.

I caused this.

*

But now I see how
pain tendered me,
showed me
the vanity of selflessness;
that always clinging like bees
to the hot breeze
is our truer nature.

Hagar returned and, submissive,
indulged this in me.
I was glad she became, again,
the shadow to my mountain.
So that we might stay one
and for our silver-edged
son, I tried to learn peace.

3. To Hagar

I’m not afraid of you Hagar;
            I’m afraid of this cloud

split like a womb.
            My pain so simple, it is glass

rising barren above
            your body’s soft road.

Losing faith. I mustn’t —
            Must make provisions

for our boy with the book
            of my hand.

Eternity is mimicked
            in his thumbprint.

You named him Ishmael
            because you believe God listens...

He is mine now too.
            I orbit your gate opening

to the globe of his head
            See the short threads

in his fingers, like hair, like lace,
            smallest arches.

Let me be a pitcher
            pouring forth our sadness,

a circuitry of veins
            to the boy, our harvest —

I tremble in this web —
            to his windblown fleece:

articulation of our trembling
            nations.

Though I cannot console myself,
            if what’s in the marrow makes us

4. The Dominion of the Name

I was a moth, Hagar’s
motherhood the light
that burnt me.

A wound, the calendar made me
feel shame,

my bones scuffed with time,
barely useful.

Then God changed our names:
to Sarah and Abraham.
And we laughed until our throats hurt

when we learned I’d give birth,
although we knew we might never
live to see our child grown.

I’d thought it could work:
our two boys raised together.

Might it have worked?

Ishmael and Isaac —
one river splitting at the mouth
to an interminably violent sea.

Reeling: Looking Backwards
           

                                                God after Creation

What life is: a tusk-white sheaf
erased, memory hobbled.
Consciousness snagged on that

feral matter, liquid havoc.
So I could finally sew
sleeves of light and gladly saw

from the void — seas, trees;
cobble firmament; knit the sky;
cut the surface of memory;

breathe wrinkles on water;
and rake consolation
from what was forgotten.

Such clemency—
whales and wings,
the creeping things. I bless

as if to finger raw silk,
raw human. Bless
the woman, the man, the ember,

the feather, mustard-seed, red
poppy, frost. Bless forgetting:
unmerciful principalities.

This is my pilgrimage
to loss,
where everything started.

Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first book, Forms of Gone, published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published in January 2008, also by Sheep Meadow, and was presented as a recommended book at the National Book Critics Circle Good Reads Discussion.

Her poems, translations and articles have appeared widely, and she is the recipient of numerous national poetry prizes, most recently the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Canada Council Grant for Creative Writers. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University, and she is Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. For further information, please visit her blog at: http://yerrasugarman.blogspot.com/