POET'S ANATOMY
425
firemen pulling hoses all over the porch, the poem never got finished.
But when the firemen, chopping and dousing away, had saved about
three-quarters of the house, Daddy said, "What the
hell
was she
writing poetry for?" And Mother hit me hysterically in the back of
the head and said, "Why didn't you tell us?" But even after Uncle
Lemmie had explained about the rhyme, they didn't understand.
Now I believe that the act of poetry is always utilitarian. For
them,
of course, my wanting to communicate in poetry at all, and
my searching so hard for the perfect rhyme to do it with, remained
-forever-a purpose mysterious, rankling, insolubly perverse. But
that was because I never told them that it was I who had set the fire.
I was a fat little girl-wretchedly fat. In the photographs I
have, I look blonde, bloated, and worried. There was so much of
me that I thought I was a freak, and I was preoccupied with my
physical being-in fact, my earliest memories are not of people
at all, but of sensations. A deeply buried excitement as of a smaller
body within my own body, gradually expanding to giant proportions
-that's the earliest. It happened only during absolute darkness,
silence, rest, probably as I was falling asleep in my crib, and carne
of itself, like grace. Something within me formed and grew-swelling,
swelling out of all belief, doubling, tripling the limits of my already
puffed tiny body as I lay overpowered and rigid, exulting unpardon–
ably in my size but helpless with the fear that any moment I would
burst.
Another-a burning sensation which began in the mouth and ran
quickly through the rest of me, inside and out, as though I were on
fire-happened only once, I think, in infancy, but recurred in
later life quite often, in moments of feared passion, usually as a
prelude to lovemaking. (According to my mother it can be traced
back to my first summer, to the time my father drew the water for
my bath. He had boiled the water on the stove and added it to the
basin, assuming my mother would add cold as needed. She assumed
that he had already adjusted the temperature, and proceeded to add
me, instead. I screamed in time as my heel went in, and the result
was only .a kind of reverse Achilles' heel, a blister which became a ·
permanent tough scar. But in my own opinion this episode can't
account for the flaming sensation I remember, and later on have
experienced again, since this always begins in the mouth.)
