BLEEDTHROUGH

BLEEDTHROUGH

BLEEDTHROUGH

As when, in bright daylight, she closes
                           her eyes
          but doesn’t turn her face away,

or—this is more like it—closes her eyes
                           in order
          to take the brightness in,

and the sun-struck coursing of blood through the
                           lids
          becomes an exorbitant field to which

there is
                           no outside,
          this first plague of being-in-place, this stain

of chemical proneness, leaves so little
                           room
          for argument. You’d think

the natural ground of seeing when we see
                           no object
          but the self were rage.



My daughter has a trick now of composing
                           her face
          and her shoulders and arms in a terrible be-

seeching shape—it all
                           takes just
          the blink of an eye—I love

you, Mama, she says, I like
                           this food,
          it’s good, it’s fine, I

can’t even taste the burnt part, and she means
                           Don’t rain
          down fire again. She’s nine.

And every penitent reparation—Do you like
                           me, reader?
          Do you like me sorry now?—ensnares

her more and makes her shoulder
                           more
          of this im-

partible estate. It seemed like
                           Mars
          to me when I was young, that other



world of women with its four fleshed walls
                           of love.
          My mother, who can turn the most un-

likely raw materials to gladness used
                           to call
          her monthly blood “the curse.” I

know, I know, our arsenal of pills
                           is new,
          our tampons and detergents, all

our euphemizing gear; the body
                           in even its
          flourishing seethes and cramps. When the

painter, for example, looks for
                           leverage
          on a metaphor, nine-

tenths of her labor is in-the-flesh. The wash
                           of acrylic,
          the retinal flare: we say

that the surfeited pigment “bleeds.” And
                           every
          counter-argument—the margin of shoreline,

the margin of black, the four-
                           fold
          margin she’s stretched the canvas to com-

prehend—undoes itself a little in its straining after
                           emphasis.
          I can tell, says my daughter, the difference between



the morning light and light at the end
                           of the day.
          And from room to room in the crowded

museum she blazons her facility. That’s night. That’s
                           not. That’s
          Sunset Corner, says the plaque. As though

the vaults of fire had found their
                           boundary
          in an act of wit, or California’s amplitude

in glib suburban pavement. Or have I
                           missed
          the point again? Out-

flanking the painter’s luxuriant brushwork
                           (maybe
          I’ve loved this grief too well) is

something more quotidian and harder
                           won.
          The fretted cloth on the third or fourth rinsing goes

yellow, goes brown, the young
                           girl’s hands
          —she's just pubescent—ache

with cold. Some parts—
                           the red’s
          bare memory now—were never bad. The sound

of the water, for instance, the smell,
                           the rim
          of the stain that’s last to go.