Noy Holland - What begins with bird

I’ll give you tired, what the fuck. I’ll give you nothing.

Sit down, sit down. You think I’m finished?

“I amn’t finished,” says our boy.

We’ll make a night of it — the wide belts, the tools. The wonder, the stunt.

Our poet has got her papers out, the dog-eared book. She’ll get up here, find her page. Proclaim the miracle. Another living body in her living body yada yada yada yada nothing but give give give.

YOU SIT.

Let a man have a little fun, why not? Air his mind some. I amn’t finished.

“I amn’t going to hit you,” our boy says. “I amn’t going to kiss you. I amn’t going to get a sword and chop you in two.”

“Into what?” I ask.

“A zillion pieces.”

My mother’s dead now. Which makes life simpler. It is not a joke, it’s true.

When my old man was away — he was away quite a bit — I used to go to my mother in her bed. I never asked could I. We never spoke of it. She wore a nightgown the planets were pictured on and I knew in the morning, when my father was away, that she would lie in bed and let me pick at the sleeve, at the small gray beads of cloth I came to keep with the hair from her pillow I found and the skiff of foam kneaded to dust that I tapped from the toes of her slippers. I lay in the dark in the bedheat, in the wet bready smell of her, not moving, pretending to sleep. I was a boy, and then not, too old for it, mommy’s boy, and disgusted. In my disgust it grew easier for me to picture my mother in stirrups strapped in, laboring, gassed, while the waxy, molten globe of my head burned through her.

I never touched her: if I touched her she would burst into flames. I lay away from her and felt the seed move in me, heating up, pearly, the flashing tails, the race to the sea. The bliss of sleep mired.

I slept mired, in the puddle I had made, happy and ashamed.

My brother served us waffles each morning and we lay propped up with the TV on and ate them with our hands. I wouldn’t speak to her. I wanted to throttle her. I could not stand it: to have a mother: to have grown my arms and legs in her, my cock and balls, gill and lung, every pore and socket.

I wanted to come from nothing, from air, a cloud, the heavens jewelled. The tinted distance.

She sweeps in, my wife. Hello, hello . She’s a special event, she’s a goer.

I report on the daily doings, tell her what she has missed. The shitty baths. The scabs, some stunt. Some funny little peep her baby makes.

I say, “She spent the day on her backside, lying there hoping to grow.”

My wife hovers, coodle coo. Then to bed. She’s spent. Asleep by the time I get there dreaming, I guess, of you. Some one of you tamping burning coals deep into her nostrils. You’ve pulled her teeth out.

And her a mother!

Full grown. Pushing forty, my wife.

“Those are longing,” says my boy, and he swats at her breasts. It’s not a joke, it’s true.

What I’d like?

I’d like a day on that fellow’s pontoon boat, a radio, the white-hot marvelous sun. I would lash the helm, keep her circling. Sun on my ass, blister my nose. Sit and drink some. Think a few gothic thoughts through.

We got fathers out there? You a father?

See? He’s going, yeah. Baby, yeah. Fucking sit there .

“I mean it,” says my boy, “I’m honest. I’m just standing here, I’m honest.”

He’s at the bedside, the baby howling. His crayons poking out of his pockets.

Sweet doll. Sugar girl .

He’ll make it up to her, he’ll saw at his trousers with a Lego. He said, “I’m gonna make these littler so when Noodle ever has a baby then her baby can grow into them. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

He puts a dress on, very flowery, a lacy thing she is to grow into, should she grow. “And what shall we call you?” I ask him.

He’s sitting on the pot, thinking. “I’d like to be Glorious Angel.”

And so he is, spinning through the kitchen with his dress lofting up.

And I am Claybrain, Hiccalump, Clumpfoot, Tuk.

A man in need. Could stand a drink. Stand to sit down.

“We lived in Florida?” he asks. “I was a baby?”

“Yes.”

We lived in the land of the halter top. We snived in the snand of the laker snop. Hip. Pop. Pifflewop.

How nice to see you. You’re very tall.

I brought pictures. The boy, a girl. You see they’re lovely. They are. We keep her dress pulled down. You can imagine — the little stirrups, fresh out, a new girl from the womb. Her feet folded against her shinbone. Stuffed in. She’s fileted, looks like, laid open, very clean. Little clean plump butterflied lamb.

Still look. The look on her! Such a beauty.

You drut. Get out, get out, don’t think you’re sneaking. You and your sneaky friends. You, man. Up. Make tracks.

“Let’s get a knife for ourselves,” my boy says, “and run out there and stick them.”

HA. The rest of you can stay.

Tell you what, here’s a tip, we go to market.

Take the baby when you go to market, boys, take her anywhere there are girls. It’s a charm. Look at that. Little buddings. You let them pet her. I take the baby down to the pool. You get a daddy in the pool they’re a swarm, watch me, little humpy strokes, the water frothing, they walk on their hands, be a horsie, swim me where I can’t swim.

I do, and they are kicking, they are breathing fast in my ear.

“And we lived beside a lake?” my boy wants to know.

“We lived beside a lake.”

He’s forgotten. He’s down to stories. Suspicions, omissions. A foreign view.

“And my mother took me out in my bucket?”

“And your mother took you out in your bucket.”

“And my mother loved me very much?”

“And your mother loved you very much. And you were her prince. Her angel. And she loved you. And you were all she saw or could think of. And she loved you. You said ngogn ngogn . And I loved you. Your papa loved you.”

“And my mother set me down in my bucket.”

Firstborn, boychild, hoyden.

Mama, Papa, Clumpfoot, Tuk. We make mistakes, give us that. We’re only human.

Pin her down, cinch her up. Man the fires. Sweep the floors.

They say a year, tops. That’s consolation. They say, “It is all she has ever known.”

I say she used to breathe underwater. She was gilled, webbed, rock, a frog. Amphibious. She was larval. Boiled in the heart of a dying star. She knows plenty.

So they forget: what is that?

The child knows plenty.

He is lava, lightning, Black Bart, bear. He’s a worm, torn up, a withered heart. T. rex and the woods are burning.

That’s him in the tub, hollering— hollowing , he calls it, a pirate song: hardee-eye-yay, hoodee-eye-yoo . He’s got his face bunched up around his eyepatch. He’s using his mother’s diaphragm for an eyepatch.

“For a boat,” he says, “to kill Noodle with. Kill Noodle.”

He has got us racing, on the move: marks get set. “You just keep getting faster and faster,” I tell him.

He looks up at me — a long look, sweetly, and says, “And you are getting slower and slower, right?”

He wears his tassled hat — which makes the wind blow — which sparks a lightning — which fells a tree.

His mother took him out into the trees one day. This was lakeside — heat and strangler fig, every manner of insect living. Great mounds. She can’t get past it. Carried him out in his bucket — a boy in the cool of her shadow, a babe in his mother’s arms. Let it go, I say. Well it’s hard, it’s hard. Hand of God, you could say, but she won’t say it.

It has come to me to say it.

Our boy says, “You have to say I forgive you.”

Forgive me. Shameful of me.