Death Benefits by Robin Morgan Read Free Book Online Page B

benefited
    from death—and denial of death.
    And thought of cashing it in, more than once,
    really fixing my loved ones for life,
    escaping now, here, eluding what’s due to me
    anyway on its maturity, swiveling once and for all
    beyond any benefits I could accrue
    through denial of what is denied to be life.
    To deny that insurance, of course, breaks
    the scar tissue open, leaking what we yet could
    say, do, hear, think of, understand, dream
    from the containment, leaking a different
    radiance over bared heads.
    What might I do then to get beyond
    dying so many lives of affirming Denial?
    Who is this figure I swivel behind like a shadow?
    Who are the woman and man I’m being drawn back to—
    again, the flaw here, the fall now, the original
    schism, the atom entire?
    Policies lapse. Nothing is sure
    any longer. That fact alone is
    a renegade benefit, something like grace,
    green, mimetic, audacious—daring to bleed,
    sing, embrace simply each other, to find
    in those arms a planet entire, swivelling up
    at us its azure, full face,
    blinking new eyes, yawning into a loud
    rain of relief to be home. Almost as if,
    this late, unveiled and forgiven, even
    Denial might weep again. And if not here,
    where, you ask; if not now, when? Oh my dear,
    who am I to deny?

BATTERY
    The fist meets the face as the stone meets water.
    I want to understand the stone’s parabola
    and where the ripples disappear,
    to make the connections, to trace
    the withholding of love as the ultimate violence.
    Battery : a word with seven letters, seven definitions:
    1) Any unit, apparatus, or grouping
    in which a series or set of parts or components
    is assembled to serve a common end.
    2) Electrical . One or more primary or secondary cells
    operating together as a single source of direct current.
    3) Military . A tactical artillary unit.
    4) A game position . In baseball, the pitcher
    and catcher together.
    5) Law . The illegal beating or touching of another person.
    6) Music . The percussion instruments of an orchestra.
    7) Optics . The group of prisms in a spectroscope.
    I want to understand the connections
    â€”between the tower where Bertha Mason Rochester
    is displayed to Jane Eyre as a warning
    â€”with this place, this city my doorstep
    where I’ve learned to interfere between
    the prostitute’s scream and the pimp’s knife
    is to invite their unified disgust.
    I want to understand the components:
    â€”the stone’s parabola, the percussion instruments,
    the growth of battered children into battered wives
    who beat their children,
    â€”the beating of the fallow deer in Central Park Zoo
    by unknown teenage assailants,
    â€”the beating of these words against the poem:
    to hit, slap, strike, punch, slash, stamp,
    pound, maul, pummel, hammer, bludgeon, batter—
    to hurt, to wound,
    to flex the fist and clench the jaw and withhold love.
    I want to discover the source of direct current,
    to comprehend the way the primary or secondary cells
    operate together as that source:
    â€”the suburban community’s defense of the fugitive Nazi
    discovered to be a neighbor,
    â€”the effect of her father’s way with women
    on the foreign policy of Elizabeth Tudor,
    â€”the volunteers for a Utah firing squad,
    the manner in which kwashiorkor—Red Johnny,
    the Ghanaians call this slow death by starvation—
    turns the hair of children a coppery color
    with the texture of frayed wire.
    I want to follow the refractions of the prism:
    â€”the water’s surface shuddering in anticipation
    of the arching pebble,
    â€”the oilslick mask imposed on the Pacific,
    â€”the women of the Irish peace movement accused
    of being traitors to tactical artillery units on both sides,
    and replying, “We must accept that
    in the next few months we will become their targets.”
    â€”The battering of dolphins against tuna nets,
    â€”the way seloscia, a flower commonly known
    as coxcomb, is bulbous,