Mother and Jack and the Rain

Lyrics

I have a room of my own. Rain drops onto it. Rain drops down like worms from the trees onto my frontal bone. Haunted, always haunted by rain, the room affirms the words that I will make alone. I come like the blind feeling for shelves, feeling for wood as hard as an apple, fingering the pen lightly, my blade. With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made. Rain is a finger on my eyeball. Rain drills in with its old unnecessary stories . . . I wеnt to bed like a horse to its stall. On my damp summеr bed I cradled my salty knees and heard father kiss me through the wall and heard mother's heart pump like the tides. The fog horn flattened the sea into leather. I made no voyages, I owned no passport. I was the daughter. Whiskey fortified my father in the next room. He outlasted the weather, counted his booty and brought his ship into port. Rain, rain, at sixteen where I lay all night with Jack beside a tiny lake and did nothing at all, lay as straight as a bean. We played bridge and beer games for their own sake, filled up the lamp with kerosene, brushed our teeth, made sandwiches and tea and lay down on the cabin bed to sleep. I lay, a blind lake, feigning sleep while Jack pulled back the wooly covers to see my body, that invisible body that girls keep. All that sweet night we rode out the storm back to back. Now Jack says the Mass and mother died using her own bones for crutches. There is rain on the wood, rain on the glass and I'm in a room of my own. I think too much. Fish swim from the eyes of God. Let them pass. Mother and Jack fill up heaven; they endorse my womanhood. Near land my ship comes about. I come to this land to ride my horse, to try my own guitar, to copy out their two separate names like sunflowers, to conjure up my daily bread, to endure, somehow to endure.