The Red Lips of Waves
By Sean Farragher


At first, she was anonymous. The lonely street ran
backward with a red line dividing it, so she snapped
the tape, bristling forward fighting that lonely street --
braids flew behind her head as butterflies churn.

She was a girl girl, complete with jeans, top and too
large eyes that wrestled the corners of buildings, made
choices that were not hers. She said it was a boundary
later in life. She saw the trap of the collapsing floor,
but nothing changed but her uneasy, simple ache.

Older men stared. Boys had no choice. She loved
them all. Attention helped her love her losses.
She sold pictures to Photoplay. Rivers of dark hair
raced down the bow of her spine. In 1946,
she will dye her hair blond, change her name,
make movies, and sleep with dominant, gentle men.

She charted her success. My Mother told me that,
whispering. “I know.” She said, “Marilyn and I talk
every day. I breathe in her ear and she holds my hand,
and yours, Edward. You told me while you were inside
how you felt her face, clean, just married, attendant
at your birth, while I wept and felt both of you pass
through the arguments of sentiment and society.
You never expressed remorse, guilt, nor did I wander
in the mirror looking for the agents of disgrace.


2.
My mother believed she was Marilyn Monroe. In every
trance she carried the woman as a great globe, --
all the stonewoodplaster razed walls broken by fingernails
and knives were the only evidence the world
could bear as it measured the curvature of the spine
and fondled the nipples as simple tools that buzzed
and fed the millions what was sacred and holy.

God came in the night Mother said. She raised me up
and I simply walked softer the next day knowing I was
bound to Marilyn and we would push the swings,
and carefully teach you the melodies that sex sings.
One day I found Mother cutting at the edges of the walls,
chipping at the plaster, destroying the bookshelves
she pretended to love, finally, shattered with that stark death
mask borrowed from the cold war. “Marilyn’s not dead.

Don’t they know? She can’t be. Our fingers lace vulva.
See. You loved when she insisted on you alone. I watched
through the mirror. She brought the lovely demons back
with tentacles intact. We loved you, Edward. You are never
human male. You did not strangle in the obvious ways.
Men slip the noose down our necks set it beside our swallow--
and when we descend through trap doors, we break space --
our necks snap. We believed in paradise turning you over
to run our hands over the hills of your ass to find your male
clit. We even joked that a clit can be as large a child cock.
You were not happy, but we assuaged your terrors,
and all was well in Eden again, and even Oedipus rested.

You grinned. “Admit it,” mother said. “We shared rooms that
bound us; your sister and the tempests and earthquakes
would not hollow guilt even now, many years later wet thighs
and the descent over Niagara into words that Oedipus claimed
was his own domicile. Indifferent to rough talk as foreplay,
when you became the child again and I dry nursed to satisfy
what you had never known, when the world split asunder,
mysterious. Seized by our room, outsiders were manikins.
They could not understand how light was more than Einstein
and had more to come in the physical world where sex rules.
Startled by our affinity shivered. The gentle apocalypse
had still arctic blue eyes while Marilyn realized her intricate,
funny movies. With poise, we anticipated the derelict wave.
It became lines with diminished time, and increasing mass
and when time spoke out of order, nothing happened. Dazed
by the failed conformity, long lakes of sorrow trailed confused
birds when the birds discovered the land was gone – ocean
ruled even the tallest cliff and when they fed from the crest
of lipstick red waves, a monumental sun shone through
cream black clouds that followed the curves of my mother’s
spine. The cups of her breasts pressed together, rode the hips
kissed black icons while surf pounded in ears in disharmony
until the next deadly day when someone ended Marilyn’s
whispers, stripped them far away. At ease, my hands collected
my mother’s legs, parted them – Years later, I can hear breathless
strokes of Camel cigarettes exhaled. The scent of Chanel º 5
and the salted-cherry lips waves drowned in the silk of her gown
opened to reveal the fling of those Sirens bred by Homer for
Odysseus to question the roads home as Joyce did in Dublin.
My Penelope masturbated while I stared, and giggled at the horror
show my Mother had become that schoolgirl I knew at swim camp
much older, who asked me to teach her how to have just one orgasm.