Four Improvisations on Ursa Corregidora

by Gregory Pardlo

after Gayl Jones

My husband Mutt backhanded me down the fire

escape out back a blues bar called Happy’s. Nothing

holds a family together like irony and a grudge.

Depends on what you call family. What’s left now

of the generation I hadn’t known I made is just a scar

squoze shut like a mouth that won’t eat, a score

where doctors had to retrieve the fetus, its tub

and my plumbing altogether. Now I’m soundproof,

and now I’m forever hollow as a plaster statue.

Just as I can’t go back to where my mothers cast

me out to flatter their memories chiming, echoing,

braiding the wind with their eccentric melody, Mutt

can’t come back to me no more. I can picture him though

harassing the shadows of my voice, drunk as a judge.

My husband Mutt handled the hose that doused the fire,

the reason I can’t make babies. I’ve claimed the blues

is a current like electricity, but mine was a combustion

engine cutting shapes out of noise. Lying at the bottom

of those stairs I could already feel my machine slipping

into pictures of still water. I began swallowing water-

melon seeds by the handful hoping something take root:

a vine, a silence. I was reborn at the crime scene;

I survived the rent in time to look back on it squeezing

shut like a fist. A refrain: echolalia: bad penny: menses.

Evidence of a pattern we are determined to reveal

when we find ourselves standing before the judge.

Evidence of the devil we’re determined to reveal

when we’re testifying for the jury and the judge.

My husband Mutt stared back down the barrel of his years,

came up loaded and hapless. I was determined

to take him in spite of my history, to refrain from adding

to the pattern emerging from the rueful chorus: my mothers

cast me as amanuensis to record their versions

of the crime. Once upon a time means once and for always

and for wherever you are and now I’m singing blues

in a bar revealing as much skin as you should

be willing to reveal when you pouring your seed

into the electric element. We are given two names:

one to work like witness protection, and one to carry

mechanically to the grave. I never took my husband’s name.

I imagine that would be as useful as a newspaper covering

my head in the rain. Useful as letting my eyes be the judge.

My husband Mutt handed me back all the love he felt

I had failed to give him. That’s saying something close

to nothing. “Do nothing til you hear from me,” he said,

and smiled. Whoever owns these blues is a matter

of some debate. The story of my people unfolds

each day like a newspaper detailing the catechism

that connects me to history: Are you hurt? Yes, I am

the hurt, the silent mouth is the barter. What’s a husband

good for? Seed money. Generations working the fields. Why

do we make dreams? A little ritual. A little lining for the purse.

each song is a number of the seven veils: each number is

a revelation of skin measuring degrees of distance from

the crime and from the guilt of the crime. Corregidora:

as much kin as we’re willing to reveal lest we be judged.

from DigestFind more by Gregory Pardlo at the library