Walls of gloom,
stink of damp.
Wish I'd brought
my Coleman lamp.

Down I go,
no moss on my back.
Will it never end?
Will I ever get back?

Wait, here's water,
black as a bruise.
I may take
a long cruise,

I just might choose
to live here forever.
You think I've got
a head full of fever

but let me say this—
nobody fools
a woman who's plumbed
her own depths. (And hell's.)

should contain utility knife
trouble light
curved-claw hammer
wrench
and rib-joint pliers.

A little putty helps.

Hack saw and coping saw (coping saw!)
caulking gun
screwdrivers (with orange juice)—

Don't forget those rib-joint pliers.

The Power Drill

is a prerequisite for almost anything
you may wish to do: hang curtains,
pictures of your last lover,
your last lover.

Some Nails

Common ones have a large head, thick shaft. Good for the widest variety of purposes. Box nails are thinner and may be used where the common nail would cause splits. Roofing nails have an extra large head and barbed shaft. The spiral shank of the screw-nail gives it a tenacious grip. Duplex nails are temporary. Do not expect a duplex nail to hold permanently. This is a mistake many women make.

Types of Screws

The two universal slot designs are the straight slot and the Phillips. Both are available in most types of screws. Look for bright steel, dipped, galvanized, brass- or chrome-plated and solid brass screws. Stainless steel screws are also made but they are not always easy to find.

From time to time, you may have to call in a professional.

Painting the Ceiling

Wear goggles and mask when painting the ceiling
or going anywhere your ex-lover may be seen with his new wife.
A roller with a splash shield is also good,
whether you paint with latex
or heart's blood.

Drywall

Studs should be sixteen inches apart
but are often fewer and farther between
and let's face it, you may have seen your last stud.
In that case, use an anchor
in plaster or drywall
and repair minor cracks
by filling the voids.
Feather each coat of spackle into the surrounding area
to help hide the seam.
Soon the surface will be flawless.

Plumbing

The shit goes down the drain.

Class Commencement

Now you can begin
to put your house in order:
caulk your windows against incoming drafts,
drain outside faucets, dig up bulbs.
Prepare your bed.
Clouds are blowing in from the west, over the lake.
Winter is on its way.

Ladies, you are about to find out
just how much really rough
weather
your house can take.

On a wall in a room to the right,
a moon by Magritte hangs from a tree like a leaf.

Birds fly over the pillows.
Sunlight falls downstairs.

The bedroom is very large and very empty.
The study is small and cluttered with papers
on which directions have been printed
to keep people from becoming lost in houses.

All night, the books on their shelves lean toward one another,
conspiring.

The desk, discreet,
Discloses nothing.

Rough drafts live
A roustabout life,
Tumbling from shelves,

While books, published
And smugly replete,
No longer feel the need
To compete.

Stationery sprawls,
Casual as sunbathers.

In the locked drawer,
Love letters lie.

Would be, if angels had feet, But not so bright-a certain blueness haunts the house,
Hangs in the closet with clothes,
Shades the windows facing the street.

Silently, silently, they love each other,
Those bodiless waves of light, kissing nothing.
Love is a purgatorial flight from everything
Through memory, a return to the lost mother

Who chastens us in our beds.
Submit, submit. The darkening angels crowd
Around you like a gathering cloud.
Day ends in night. And this daughter never weds.

Facing it, your face sags like a punctured balloon.
You are simultaneously tensed and paralyzed.
You can't claim you're surprised,

Quite, since you knew it all along.
But how will you stand the fear, the fear
And the emptiness? Let me make myself perfectly clear

About this last point. Nothing in the world
Will help, because the world is not real
Enough to contain even all that you do not feel

And what you feel is an absence
Of being, so spreading and here it is as if everyone thought you died
Of a sickness, but you are as painfully alive as a bride

Unmet at the altar.
You are dressed in shame, you wear
Your great failure like seedpearls in your hair.

how he lay there, legs like sticks
of kindling, drinking six-

pack beer or "tonic water."
My eye. Later,

how he insisted on standing and taking her
in his arms, after making clear

how deeply he felt she'd let him down,
and said he loved her anyway, but soon

she pulled away, feeling caught
in the embrace she had fought

so hard to free herself from,
and he lay back down on the bed and said, "Come

again, you hear?"—softly mocking
the Southern sense of what is kindly, what is shocking—

and turned the TV on again,
the black-and-white portable, when

she left, as if denying—
oh!—everything.

Dancing girl, child of surprising good cheer,
Full of rage, full of fear,
But hear how she sings
For her supper-eye of newt, wool-wing of bat.
Slip it in her bubbling vat

And never say she never did you a turn,
Mister Anybody. As for me,
I've got a little money to burn
And time on my hands and murder on my mind.
Just let me recollect who it was I killed.

(She was a young woman with a child.)

In two,
Crumbling into bits—
O my Ritz
Cracker of a brain! Bats flew

Out of my belfry.
I saw them hanging from the walls,
Hundreds of brown bats.
I could almost decipher their sonic calls,
Tickle their bite-sized bat-balls.

They were talking about me;
Now the subject's been changed.
I'm much too deranged
To be of interest, you see,

And the tower they left
Is split and down.
I've an ache in my head, a thorn in my crown.
Bereft,
Bereft,

Night flashes its wings— Leathery and verminous,
Long black ungrammatical dashes—

Swoops into my brain.
It attaches itself upside-down
To a crack in my skull; sense has flown.
(But I know I'm not sane.)

In and out of my head.
I am the person
Who is out of her head.
Who is that person

Who lives in my head
When I am out of my head?
She won't let me in.
I bang on the door of my head,

I hit my head with my fists
Again and again,
Begging to be
Let in.

Go away, I shout
To the person
In my head,
But she won't

Let me in.
I don't even know her name.
The one time I saw her, her hair
Was ribboned with snakes.

Her braids hissed.
Two snakes kissed
A deadly kiss.
I'd have fled, but where?

Those snakes slithered through her hair.
Where where where
Can I go
When I am out of my head?

In the place where bewigged judges disguise themselves as bearded psychiatrists,
In the place of rooms that do not lock and of rooms that lock
Only from the outside, in the place of misery beyond telling, in the place of weeping
And white fluted flowers that bloom in trays at regular hours, a pink or blue
Or golden seed splitting at its heart while the corridors watch your every move,

In the place of the talking doctors whose definitions are all synonyms
And the place of the patients who have nothing to say, since what the patients say,
The doctors translate, thinking, because they have been given degrees and because
Their dictionaries may be modified by majority vote at the APA, that they understand
The language, in the place where the corridors watch your every move,

Someone was saying Help me help me I am frightened
Because the sky has disappeared, leaving nothing in its place.

There's blood on my hands, blood in my hair,
Blood between my pale scissoring legs where
It pools in my underpants-the fancy pair

I bought for him to watch me wear and not wear.
There is blood everywhere
And I am lost in it. Doctor, I breathe blood, not air.

And all that was yours—lost.
All that you loved—gone. Your heart, a crust.
Days you somehow weather in bed,

Unmoving, beyond even shame, even despair.
Waking or sleeping-it's all the same.
And hunger-nothing new there,

Either, it's all the same, the same.
You know this hunger so well, it is like knowing it by name.
And nothing can help. And you don't care.

You must face this unwonted glare,
The disapproving stare,
As you go looking everywhere for night.

Begin by looking for razor blades, pills, booze;
Accept these as clues
To the whereabouts of night

And soon you will find yourself in the dark
Once more, safe and unseen, crouching in the closet with no light
Bulb (because where you are now, sharp items are forbidden,

And you cannot fall off a floor).

Scrawling my name across the page
As if I were not being eaten up by rage,
My brain being bit
By the ambition-gnat,
Feverish with that old contagion.

Whose penis did I squat on,
Or want to? This is not one
Of your rhetorical questions.
God knows how many sessions
With the doctor, his unclean breath hot on

My neck, haven't brought back
The time I lost when the bottom of the grocery sack
That is my mind fell out.
I should have caught
It; I caught hell. A huge Mack

Truck nearly ran over me
When I came to: I was crossing University
Against the light.
Next, it was night,
And someone who was not me

Rose out of my sleep,
Jangling her bracelets, and began to leap
About the room.
I watched her carom
Off the wall like a pool ball, I could barely keep

Her in my line of sight.
This devil danced all night.
When I woke, time was dead;
It had been killed. That devil had fled.
Time's body bled in the cold bright light.