Electra Redux

For your sake, I made myself into a little clay Electra,
all dirt elbows and mute bones, oil-spill pupils empty of all
save that mythic plasticene father-king
who came home scratching at foot-rot from army boots
and twenty years worth of lice-swarmed beard.

You gave me this mewling rubber Orestes to love
smeared his homunculus-mouth with honey
and shoved him at me, infant pharaoh draped in linen --
then vanished, in a flash paper holocaust
sounded by the backstage cackle of a tin sheet.

So I put my fist in his fontanel and carried him
like a potted geranium. He hung at my wrist for years
while you turned into a ghost,
my night-visitor, ejaculating hexameters onto my loamy
nipples. And my breasts grew full as bullfrogs on that milk --
the mass for the dead you spat into my body.

For your sake I became this golem-girl
sloughing wetly across your stage,
hungry for the bath-scene. I’ve got your initials
etched in my gut -- your boot-black alpha striding across
ovary-meat, graffiti on a dirty glass womb.
And this gramophone-mouth blares the same tired tune:
Scatter, O Father, this darkness from my heart.

The paper-machê chorus burst open their kneecaps
crouching to suck your peat moss-toes --
and I died in their white dust
still clutching in fists these molded lungs,
earthen jars not fit to hold
the screams you shoveled into me
like blue-lipped fetuses.

For you I am this corpse-daughter,
your own manufacture -- blood,
this bile, this sour marrow -- immaculate
conception, swimming in pitch-boil and semen.
I am the paean sung at your homecoming --
a violet fugue squeezing your throat
like two wax hands.