Later Poems:

Selected and New

1971 – 2012

ADRIENNE RICH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Also by Adrienne Rich

Diving into the Wreck (1971–1972)

Trying to Talk with a Man

When We Dead Awaken

Incipience

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

From the Prison House

Diving into the Wreck

The Phenomenology of Anger

For a Sister

For the Dead

Meditations for a Savage Child

The Dream of a Common Language (1974–1977)

Power

Origins and History of Consciousness

Hunger

Cartographies of Silence

Twenty-one Love Poems

Upper Broadway

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Toward the Solstice

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1978–1981)

Coast to Coast

Integrity

Transit

For Memory

What Is Possible

For Ethel Rosenberg

Heroines

Grandmothers

The Spirit of Place

Frame

A Vision

Your Native Land, Your Life (1981–1985)

Sources

For the Record

North American Time

Virginia 1906

Dreams Before Waking

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be

Poetry: I; II, Chicago; III

Baltimore:    a fragment from the Thirties

Homage to Winter

Blue Rock

Yom Kippur 1984

Edges

Contradictions: Tracking Poems

Time’s Power (1985–1988)

Solfeggietto

This

Negotiations

In a Classroom

The Novel

In Memoriam: D.K.

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

Sleepwalking      Next to Death

Delta

6/21

Dreamwood

Harpers Ferry

Living Memory

An Atlas of the Difficult World (1988–1991)

An Atlas of the Difficult World

That Mouth

Marghanita

Tattered Kaddish

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

Darklight

For a Friend in Travail

Final Notations

Dark Fields of the Republic (1991–1995)

What Kind of Times Are These

What Kind of Times Are These

In Those Years

To the Days

Miracle Ice Cream

Rachel

Amends

Calle Visión

Reversion

Then or Now

Food Packages: 1947

Innocence: 1945

Sunset, December, 1993

Deportations

And Now

Six Narratives

1. You drew up the story of your life      I was in that story

2. You drew up a story about me      I fled that story

3. You were telling a story about women to young men

4. You were telling a story about love

5. I was telling you a story about love

6. You were telling a story about war      it is our story

Inscriptions

One:      comrade

Two:      movement

Three:   origins

Four:     history

Five:      voices

Six:        edgelit

Midnight Salvage (1995–1998)

The Art of Translation

Midnight Salvage

Char

Modotti

Shattered Head

Letters to a Young Poet

Camino Real

Seven Skins

Rusted Legacy

A Long Conversation

Fox (1998–2000)

Victory

For This

Regardless

Architect

Fox

Messages

Fire

Grating

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

Terza Rima

Four Short Poems

Rauschenberg’s Bed

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

Ends of the Earth

The School Among the Ruins (2000–2004)

Centaur’s Requiem

Equinox

Tell Me

The School Among the Ruins

This Evening Let’s

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

Usonian Journals 2000

Transparencies

Ritual Acts

Alternating Current

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios

Wait

Screen Door

Tendril

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2004–2006)

Voyage to the Denouement

Calibrations

Wallpaper

In Plain Sight

Behind the Motel

Archaic

Long After Stevens

Rhyme

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

This Is Not the Room

Unknown Quantity

Tactile Value

Director’s Notes

Rereading The Dead Lecturer

Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede

Draft #2006

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2007–2010)

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Scenes of Negotiation

From Sickbed Shores

Axel Avákar

Ballade of the Poverties

Emergency Clinic

Confrontations

Circum/Stances

Winterface

Quarto

Black Locket

Generosity

Powers of Recuperation

New and Unpublished Poems (2010–2012)

Itinerary

For the Young Anarchists

Fragments of an Opera

Liberté

Teethsucking Bird

Undesigned

Suspended Lines

Tracings

From Strata

Endpapers

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgments

Index of Titles and First Lines

Copyright

These selections were chosen by Adrienne Rich before her death.

The volume was assembled by her editor, and in creating the collection some reformatting of pages was necessary.

Also by Adrienne Rich

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010

A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000

Fox: Poems 1998–2000

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985

Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

Sources

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970

Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954–1962

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems

A Change of World

Diving into the Wreck

Trying to Talk with a Man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river

forcing its way between deformed cliffs

an acute angle of understanding

moving itself like a locus of the sun

into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here—

whole LP collections, films we starred in

playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows

full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,

the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,

afternoons on the riverbank

pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert

we meant to change the face of

driving among dull green succulents

walking at noon in the ghost town

surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place

except that it came with us

and is familiar

and everything we were saying until now

was an effort to blot it out—

Coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless

with you than without you

You mention the danger

and list the equipment

we talk of people caring for each other

in emergencies—laceration, thirst—

but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power

your eyes are stars of a different magnitude

they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT

when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger

as if it were not ourselves

as if we were testing anything else.

1971

When We Dead Awaken

(for E. Y.

1.

Trying to tell you how

the anatomy of the park

through stained panes, the way

guerrillas are advancing

through minefields, the trash

burning endlessly in the dump

to return to heaven like a stain—

everything outside our skins is an image

of this affliction:

stones on my table, carried by hand

from scenes I trusted

souvenirs of what I once described

as happiness

everything outside my skin

speaks of the fault that sends me limping

even the scars of my decisions

even the sunblaze in the mica-vein

even you, fellow-creature, sister,

sitting across from me, dark with love,

working like me to pick apart

working with me to remake

this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,

this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.

2.

The fact of being separate

enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture

—a chest of seventeenth-century wood

from somewhere in the North.

It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head

but the key has not been found.

In the compartments are other keys

to lost doors, an eye of glass.

Slowly you begin to add

things of your own.

You come and go reflected in its panels.

You give up keeping track of anniversaries,

you begin to write in your diaries

more honestly than ever.

3.

The lovely landscape of southern Ohio

betrayed by strip mining, the

thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger

the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station

are causes for hesitation.

Here in the matrix of need and anger, the

disproof of what we thought possible

failures of medication

doubts of another’s existence

—tell it over and over, the words

get thick with unmeaning—

yet never have we been closer to the truth

of the lies we were living, listen to me:

the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

1971

Incipience

1.     To live, to lie awake

under scarred plaster

while ice is forming over the earth

at an hour when nothing can be done

to further any decision

to know the composing of the thread

inside the spider’s body

first atoms of the web

visible tomorrow

to feel the fiery future

of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done

but by inches. I write out my life

hour by hour, word by word

gazing into the anger of old women on the bus

numbering the striations

of air inside the ice cube

imagining the existence

of something uncreated

this poem

our lives

2.

A man is asleep in the next room

We are his dreams

We have the heads and breasts of women

the bodies of birds of prey

Sometimes we turn into silver serpents

While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live

he turns on the bed and murmurs

A man is asleep in the next room

A neurosurgeon enters his dream

and begins to dissect his brain

She does not look like a nurse

she is absorbed in her work

she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie

She is not/might be either of us

A man is asleep in the next room

He has spent a whole day

standing, throwing stones into the black pool

which keeps its blackness

Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill

hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other

over the scarred volcanic rock

1971

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

1.

She is the one you call sister.

Her simplest act has glamor,

as when she scales a fish the knife

flashes in her long fingers

no motion wasted or when

rapidly talking of love

she steel-wool burnishes

the battered kettle

Love-apples cramp you sideways

with sudden emptiness

the cereals glutting you, the grains

ripe clusters picked by hand

Love: the refrigerator

with open door

the ripe steaks bleeding

their hearts out in plastic film

the whipped butter, the apricots

the sour leftovers

A crate is waiting in the orchard

for you to fill it

your hands are raw with scraping

the sharp bark, the thorns

of this succulent tree

Pick, pick, pick

this harvest is a failure

the juice runs down your cheekbones

like sweat or tears

2.

She is the one you call sister

you blaze like lightning about the room

flicker around her like fire

dazzle yourself in her wide eyes

listing her unfelt needs

thrusting the tenets of your life

into her hands

She moves through a world of India print

her body dappled

with softness, the paisley swells at her hip

walking the street in her cotton shift

buying fresh figs because you love them

photographing the ghetto because you took her there

Why are you crying dry up your tears

we are sisters

words fail you in the stare of her hunger

you hand her another book

scored by your pencil

you hand her a record

of two flutes in India reciting

3.

Late summer night the insects

fry in the yellowed lightglobe

your skin burns gold in its light

In this mirror, who are you? Dreams of the nunnery

with its discipline, the nursery

with its nurse, the hospital

where all the powerful ones are masked

the graveyard where you sit on the graves

of women who died in childbirth

and women who died at birth

Dreams of your sister’s birth

your mother dying in childbirth over and over

not knowing how to stop

bearing you over and over

your mother dead and you unborn

your two hands grasping your head

drawing it down against the blade of life

your nerves the nerves of a midwife

learning her trade

1971

From the Prison House

Underneath my lids another eye has opened

it looks nakedly

at the light

that soaks in from the world of pain

even when I sleep

Steadily it regards

everything I am going through

and more

it sees the clubs and rifle-butts

rising and falling

it sees

detail not on TV

the fingers of the policewoman

searching the cunt of the young prostitute

it sees

the roaches dropping into the pan

where they cook the pork

in the House of D

it sees

the violence

embedded in silence

This eye

is not for weeping

its vision

must be unblurred

though tears are on my face

its intent is clarity

it must forget

nothing

September 1971

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it’s a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

1972

The Phenomenology of Anger

1.     The freedom of the wholly mad

to smear & play with her madness

write with her fingers dipped in it

the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom

you have, walking on Broadway

to stop & turn back or go on

10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe

to the compromised

curled in the placenta of the real

which was to feed & which is strangling her.

2.     Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp

as long as this house has stood:

even with dry sticks I can’t get started

even with thorns.

I twist last year into a knot of old headlines

—this rose won’t bloom.

How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on

feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?

Each day during the heat-wave

they took the temperature of the haymow.

I huddled fugitive

in the warm sweet simmer of the hay

muttering: Come.

3.     Flat heartland of winter.

The moonmen come back from the moon

the firemen come out of the fire.

Time without a taste: time without decisions.

Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind.

The shallowness of a life lived in exile

even in the hot countries.

Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives.

4.     White light splits the room.

Table.    Window.    Lampshade.    You.

My hands, sticky in a new way.

Menstrual blood

seeming to leak from your side.

Will the judges try to tell me

which was the blood of whom?

5.     Madness.    Suicide.    Murder.

Is there no way out but these?

The enemy, always just out of sight

snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

in a snowy blur, abominable snowman

—at once the most destructive

and the most elusive being

gunning down the babies at My Lai

vanishing in the face of confrontation.

The prince of air and darkness

computing body counts, masturbating

in the factory

of facts.

6.     Fantasies of murder: not enough:

to kill is to cut off from pain

but the killer goes on hurting

Not enough. When I dream of meeting

the enemy, this is my dream:

white acetylene

ripples from my body

effortlessly released

perfectly trained

on the true enemy

raking his body down to the thread

of existence

burning away his lie

leaving him in a new

world; a changed

man

7.     I suddenly see the world

as no longer viable:

you are out there burning the crops

with some new sublimate

This morning you left the bed

we still share

and went out to spread impotence

upon the world

I hate you.

I hate the mask you wear, your eyes

assuming a depth

they do not possess, drawing me

into the grotto of your skull

the landscape of bone

I hate your words

they make me think of fake

revolutionary bills

crisp imitation parchment

they sell at battlefields.

Last night, in this room, weeping

I asked you: what are you feeling?

do you feel anything?

Now in the torsion of your body

as you defoliate the fields we lived from

I have your answer.

8.     Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon.

A pale cross-hatching of silver

lies like a wire screen on the black

water. All these phenomena

are temporary.

I would have loved to live in a world

of women and men gaily

in collusion with green leaves, stalks,

building mineral cities, transparent domes,

little huts of woven grass

each with its own pattern—

a conspiracy to coexist

with the Crab Nebula, the exploding

universe, the Mind—

9.     “The only real love I have ever felt

was for children and other women.

Everything else was lust, pity,

self-hatred, pity, lust.”

This is a woman’s confession.

Now, look again at the face

of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,

the Judith of Chartres

with her so-called smile.

10.     how we are burning up our lives

testimony:

the subway

hurtling to Brooklyn

her head on her knees

asleep or drugged

la vía del tren subterráneo

es peligrosa

many sleep

the whole way

others sit

staring holes of fire into the air

others plan rebellion:

night after night

awake in prison, my mind

licked at the mattress like a flame

till the cellblock went up roaring

Thoreau setting fire to the woods

Every act of becoming conscious

(it says here in this book)

is an unnatural act

1972

For a Sister

(Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others

I trust none of them. Only my existence

thrown out in the world like a towchain

battered and twisted in many chance connections,

being pulled this way, pulling in that.

I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,

milk souring in your pantry

after they came and took you.

I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.

A few paragraphs in the papers,

allowing for printers’ errors, wilful omissions,

the trained violence of doctors.

I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.

Little by little out of the blurred conjectures

your face clears, a sunken marble

slowly cranked up from underwater.

I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.

They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.

A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.

Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,

try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.

My images. This metaphor for what happens.

A geranium in flames on a green cloth

becomes yours. You, coming home after years

to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again. Your story.

1972

For the Dead

I dreamed I called you on the telephone

to say: Be kinder to yourself

but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way

trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover

energy, water rushing down a hill

long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from

but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down

the red coals more extreme, more curious

in their flashing and dying

than you wish they were

sitting there long after midnight

1972

Meditations for a Savage Child

(The prose passages are from J-M Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey)

I

There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still . . . so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields . . . that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken . . .

In their own way, by their own lights

they tried to care for you

tried to teach you to care

for objects of their caring:

glossed oak planks, glass

whirled in a fire

to impossible thinness

to teach you names

for things

you did not need

muslin shirred against the sun

linen on a sack of feathers

locks, keys

boxes with coins inside

they tried to make you feel

the importance of

a piece of cowhide

sewn around a bundle

of leaves impressed with signs

to teach you language:

the thread their lives

were strung on

II

When considered from a more general and philosophic point of view, these scars bear witness . . . against the feebleness and insufficiency of man when left entirely to himself, and in favor of the resources of nature which . . . work openly to repair and conserve that which she tends secretly to impair and destroy.

I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear

which stands for music, which stands for balance—

or the cat’s ear which I can study better

the whorls and ridges exposed

It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull

which I cannot see

lobe, zone, that part of the brain

which is pure survival

The most primitive part

I go back into at night

pushing the leathern curtain

with naked fingers

then

with naked body

There where every wound is registered

as scar tissue

A cave of scars!

ancient, archaic wallpaper

built up, layer on layer

from the earliest, dream-white

to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl

a red mouth slowly closing

Go back so far there is another language

go back far enough the language

is no longer personal

these scars bear witness

but whether to repair

or to destruction

I no longer know

III

It is true that there is visible on the throat a very extended scar which might throw some doubt upon the soundness of the underlying parts if one were not reassured by the appearance of the scar . . .

When I try to speak

my throat is cut

and, it seems, by his hand

The sounds I make are prehuman, radical

the telephone is always

ripped-out

and he sleeps on

Yet always the tissue

grows over, white as silk

hardly a blemish

maybe a hieroglyph for scream

Child, no wonder you never wholly

trusted your keepers

IV

A hand with the will rather than the habit of crime had wished to make an attempt on the life of this child . . . left for dead in the woods, he will have owed the prompt recovery of his wound to the help of nature alone.

In the 18th century infanticide

reaches epidemic proportions:

old prints attest to it: starving mothers

smothering babies in sleep

abandoning newborns in sleet

on the poorhouse steps

gin-blurred, setting fire to the room

I keep thinking of the flights we used to take

on the grapevine across the gully

littered with beer-bottles where dragonflies flashed

we were 10, 11 years old

wild little girls with boyish bodies

flying over the moist

shadow-mottled earth

till they warned us to stay away from there

Later they pointed out

the venetian blinds

of the abortionist’s house

we shivered

Men can do things to you

was all they said

V

And finally, my Lord, looking at this long experiment . . . whether it be considered as the methodical education of a savage or as no more than the physical and moral treatment of one of those creatures ill-favored by nature, rejected by society and abandoned by medicine, the care that has been taken and ought still to be taken of him, the changes that have taken place, and those that can be hoped for, the voice of humanity, the interest inspired by such a desertion and a destiny so strange—all these things recommend this extraordinary young man to the attention of scientists, to the solicitude of administrators, and to the protection of the government.

1.

The doctor in “Uncle Vanya”:

They will call us fools,

blind, ignorant, they will

despise us

devourers of the forest

leaving teeth of metal in every tree

so the tree can neither grow

nor be cut for lumber

Does the primeval forest

weep

for its devourers

does nature mourn

our existence

is the child with arms

burnt to the flesh of its sides

weeping eyelessly for man

2.

At the end of the distinguished doctor’s

lecture

a young woman raises her hand:

You have the power

in your hands, you control our lives—

why do you want our pity too?

Why are men afraid

why do you pity yourselves

why do the administrators

lack solicitude, the government

refuse protection,

why should the wild child

weep for the scientists

why

The Dream of a

Common Language

Power

Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history

Today a backhoe divulged    out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle    amber    perfect a hundred-year-old

cure for fever    or melancholy    a tonic

for living on this earth    in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered    from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years    by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin    of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold    a test-tube or a pencil

She died    a famous woman    denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

1974

Origins and History of Consciousness

I

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon

sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,

dissected, their bird-wings severed

like trophies. No one lives in this room

without living through some kind of crisis.

No one lives in this room

without confronting the whiteness of the wall

behind the poems, planks of books,

photographs of dead heroines.

Without contemplating last and late

the true nature of poetry. The drive

to connect. The dream of a common language.

Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their

experienced crucifixions,

my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed

as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood

white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.

My bare feet are numbed already by the snow

but the water

is mild, I sink and float

like a warm amphibious animal

that has broken the net, has run

through fields of snow leaving no print;

this water washes off the scent—

You are clear now

of the hunter, the trapper

the wardens of the mind—

yet the warm animal dreams on

of another animal

swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,

and wakes, and sleeps again.

No one sleeps in this room without

the dream of a common language.

II

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes

into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known

from the first. . . . It was simple to touch you

against the hacked background, the grain of what we

had been, the choices, years. . . . It was even simple

to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.

What is not simple: to wake from drowning

from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth

into this common, acute particularity

these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—

to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass

sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream

of someone beaten up far down in the street

causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream

knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged

as any woman must who stands to survive this city,

this century, this life . . .

each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty

better than trees or music (yet loving those too

as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh

of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).

III

It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,

dress, go out, drink coffee,

enter a life again. It isn’t simple

to wake from sleep into the neighborhood

of one neither strange nor familiar

whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,

we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves

downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered

over the unsearched. . . . We did this. Conceived

of each other, conceived each other in a darkness

which I remember as drenched in light.

I want to call this, life.

But I can’t call it life until we start to move

beyond this secret circle of fire

where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall

where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps

like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

1972–1974

Hunger

(for Audre Lorde)

1.

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,

intimacy rigged with terrors,

a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter’s ink-stick planned,

a scene of desolation comforted

by two human figures recklessly exposed,

leaning together in a sticklike boat

in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,

I don’t know. I’m wondering

whether we even have what we think we have—

lighted windows signifying shelter,

a film of domesticity

over fragile roofs. I know I’m partly somewhere else—

huts strung across a drought-stretched land

not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother

watching my children shrink with hunger.

I live in my Western skin,

my Western vision, torn

and flung to what I can’t control or even fathom.

Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.

2.

They cán rule the world while they can persuade us

our pain belongs in some order.

Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,

than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,

if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius

starves herself to feed others,

self-hatred battening on her body?

Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive

is raging under the name of an “act of god”

in Chad, in Niger, in the Upper Volta—

yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,

that male State that acts on us and on our children

till our brains are blunted by malnutrition,

yet sharpened by the passion for survival,

our powers expended daily on the struggle

to hand a kind of life on to our children,

to change reality for our lovers

even in a single trembling drop of water.

3.

We can look at each other through both our lifetimes

like those two figures in the sticklike boat

flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;

even our intimacies are rigged with terror.

Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,

I stand convicted by all my convictions—

you, too. We shrink from touching

our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves

and each other, we’re scared shitless

of what it could be to take and use our love,

hose it on a city, on a world,

to wield and guide its spray, destroying

poisons, parasites, rats, viruses—

like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

4.

The decision to feed the world

is the real decision. No revolution

has chosen it. For that choice requires

that women shall be free.

I choke on the taste of bread in North America

but the taste of hunger in North America

is poisoning me. Yes, I’m alive to write these words,

to leaf through Kollwitz’s women

huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms

the “mothers” drained of milk, the “survivors” driven

to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision

bitter, concrete, and wordless.

I’m alive to want more than life,

want it for others starving and unborn,

to name the deprivations boring

into my will, my affections, into the brains

of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire

of terrorists of the mind.

In the black mirror of the subway window

hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.

Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,

a woman shields a dead child from the camera.

The passion to be inscribes her body.

Until we find each other, we are alone.

1974–1975

Cartographies of Silence

1.

A conversation begins

with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels

the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against

a force of nature

A poem can begin

with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws

recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn

up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus

the isolation it denies.

2.

The classical music station

playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up

and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering

the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar

living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror

beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of silence

The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms

silence not absence

of words or music or even

raw sounds

Silence can be a plan

rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence

it has a history    a form

Do not confuse it

with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words

begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger

Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you

there is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?

to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence that strips bare:

In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography

mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen

not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like a skin over meanings

but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people

have talked till dawn

6.

The scream

of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore

it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you

I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them

This is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me:

Language cannot do everything—

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets

lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem

could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head

alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face

with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,

were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust,

these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy

like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth

violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago

taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack

or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy

the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica

if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant

holding up a simple ear of grain

for return to the concrete and everlasting world

what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations

from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

1975

Twenty-one Love Poems

I

Wherever in this city, screens flicker

with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,

victimized hirelings bending to the lash,

we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk

through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

of our own neighborhoods.

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement sill six stories high,

or the long-legged young girls playing ball

in the junior highschool playground.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,

sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,

our animal passion rooted in the city.

II

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I’ve been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You’ve kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

III

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time

for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp

in time tells me we’re not young.

Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,

my limbs streaming with a purer joy?

did I lean from any window over the city

listening for the future

as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?

And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.

Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark

of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,

the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.

At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.

At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,

and somehow, each of us will help the other live,

and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

IV

I come home from you through the early light of spring

flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,

the Discount Wares, the shoe-store. . . . I’m lugging my sack

of groceries, I dash for the elevator

where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed

lets the door almost close on me. —For god’s sake hold it!

I croak at him. —Hysterical,—he breathes my way.

I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,

make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone

singing Here comes the sun. . . . I open the mail,

drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,

my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail

lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man

aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:

My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display

they keep me constantly awake with the pain . . .

Do whatever you can to survive.

You know, I think that men love wars . . .

And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds

break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

V

This apartment full of books could crack open

to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes

of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face

the underside of everything you’ve loved—

the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag

even the best voices have had to mumble through,

the silence burying unwanted children—

women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.

Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books

so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;

yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift

loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,

Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,

and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—

of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,

centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;

and we still have to stare into the absence

of men who would not, women who could not, speak

to our life—this still unexcavated hole

called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

VI

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands

I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,

handling power-tools or steering-wheel

or touching a human face. . . . Such hands could turn

the unborn child rightways in the birth canal

or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship

through icebergs, or piece together

the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup

bearing on its sides

figures of ecstatic women striding

to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—

such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence

with such restraint, with such a grasp

of the range and limits of violence

that violence ever after would be obsolete.

VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

What atonement is this all about?

—and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,

that modulated cantata of the wild?

or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

to escape writing of the worst thing of all—

not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

VIII

I can see myself years back at Sunion,

hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes

in woman’s form, limping the long path,

lying on a headland over the dark sea,

looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl

of white told me a wave had struck,

imagining the pull of that water from that height,

knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,

yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.

Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished

her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

but I want to go on from here with you

fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

IX

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,

even your face at another age.

Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—

a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,

a key. . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom

deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,

this inarticulate life. I’m waiting

for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water

for once, and show me what I can do

for you, who have often made the unnameable

nameable for others, even for me.

X

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies

our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know?

If in my human arrogance I claim to read

her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:

that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,

that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh

further than the dense brain could have foretold,

that the planetary nights are growing cold for those

on the same journey who want to touch

one creature-traveler clear to the end;

that without tenderness, we are in hell.

XI

Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,

making them eternally and visibly female.

No height without depth, without a burning core,

though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.

I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain

smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod,

I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,

to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,

never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower

unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,

that clings to the slowly altering rock—

that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,

was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.

XII

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

rotating in their midnight meadow:

a touch is enough to let us know

we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:

the dream-ghosts of two worlds

walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.

I’ve wakened to your muttered words

spoken light- or dark-years away

as if my own voice had spoken.

But we have different voices, even in sleep,

and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different

and the past echoing through our bloodstreams

is freighted with different language, different meanings—

though in any chronicle of the world we share

it could be written with new meaning

we were two lovers of one gender,

we were two women of one generation.

XIII

The rules break like a thermometer,

quicksilver spills across the charted systems,

we’re out in a country that has no language

no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren

through gorges unexplored since dawn

whatever we do together is pure invention

the maps they gave us were out of date

by years . . . we’re driving through the desert

wondering if the water will hold out

the hallucinations turn to simple villages

the music on the radio comes clear—

neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung

but a woman’s voice singing old songs

with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute

plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

XIV

It was your vision of the pilot

confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps

on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose

while we crouched in the open hatchway

vomiting into plastic bags

for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon.

I never felt closer to you.

In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples

huddled in each other’s laps and arms

I put my hand on your thigh

to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine,

we stayed that way, suffering together

in our bodies, as if all suffering

were physical, we touched so in the presence

of strangers who knew nothing and cared less

vomiting their private pain

as if all suffering were physical.

(THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)

Whatever happens with us, your body

will haunt mine—tender, delicate

your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond

of the fiddlehead fern in forests

just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs

between which my whole face has come and come—

the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—

the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—

your touch on me, firm, protective, searching

me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers

reaching where I had been waiting years for you

in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.

XV

If I lay on that beach with you

white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream

and lying on that beach we could not stay

because the wind drove fine sand against us

as if it were against us

if we tried to withstand it and we failed—

if we drove to another place

to sleep in each other’s arms

and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots

and we were tired and did not sleep together

and this was what we found, so this is what we did—

was the failure ours?

If I cling to circumstances I could feel

not responsible. Only she who says

she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

XVI

Across a city from you, I’m with you,

just as an August night

moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,

the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table

cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight—

or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side

watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,

G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,

falling asleep to the music of the sea.

This island of Manhattan is wide enough

for both of us, and narrow:

I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face

lies upturned, the halflight tracing

your generous, delicate mouth

where grief and laughter sleep together.

XVII

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,

they happen in our lives like car crashes,

books that change us, neighborhoods

we move into and come to love.

Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,

women at least should know the difference

between love and death. No poison cup,

no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder

should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder

not merely played but should have listened to us,

and could instruct those after us:

this we were, this is how we tried to love,

and these are the forces they had ranged against us,

and these are the forces we had ranged within us,

within us and against us, against us and within us.

XVIII

Rain on the West Side Highway,

red light at Riverside:

the more I live the more I think

two people together is a miracle.

You’re telling the story of your life

for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.

The story of our lives becomes our lives.

Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure

Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea.

Those are the words that come to mind.

I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn

pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—?

Close between grief and anger, a space opens

where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin

to touch myself again, adhesions pull away?

When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward

and looks into the present,

the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death

and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living?

Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream

or in this poem, There are no miracles?

(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,

this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)

If I could let you know—

two women together is a work

nothing in civilization has made simple,

two people together is a work

heroic in its ordinariness,

the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch

where the fiercest attention becomes routine

—look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

XX

That conversation we were always on the edge

of having, runs on in my head,

at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light

polluted water yet reflecting even

sometimes the moon

and I discern a woman

I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat

and choking her like hair. And this is she

with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head

turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper

where it cannot hear me,

and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

XXI

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

of the great round rippled by stone implements

the midsummer night light rising from beneath

the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”

I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge

simply nor any place but the mind

casting back to where her solitude,

shared, could be chosen without loneliness,

not easily nor without pains to stake out

the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.

I choose to be a figure in that light,

half-blotted by darkness, something moving

across that space, the color of stone

greeting the moon, yet more than stone:

a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

1974–1976

Upper Broadway

The leafbud straggles forth

toward the frigid light of the airshaft    this is faith

this pale extension of a day

when looking up    you know    something is changing

winter has turned    though the wind is colder

Three streets away    a roof collapses    onto people

who thought they still had time    Time out of mind

I have written so many words

wanting to live inside you

to be of use to you

Now I must write for myself    for this blind

woman scratching the pavement with    her wand of thought

this slippered crone    inching on icy streets

reaching into wire trashbaskets    pulling out

what was thrown away    and infinitely precious

I look at my hands and see    they are still unfinished

I look at the vine and see the leafbud

inching towards life

I look at my face in the glass    and see

a halfborn woman

1975

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

Paula Becker 1876–1907

Clara Westhoff 1878–1954

became friends at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899. In January 1900, spent a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted and Clara studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to Worpswede, and spent the next winter together in Berlin. In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; soon after, Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn. She died in a hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a pity!

The autumn feels slowed down,

summer still holds on here, even the light

seems to last longer than it should

or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge.

The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child.

You’re the only one I’ve told.

I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.

Otto has a calm, complacent way

of following me with his eyes, as if to say

Soon you’ll have your hands full!

And yes, I will; this child will be mine

not his, the failures, if I fail

will be all mine. We’re not good, Clara,

at learning to prevent these things,

and once we have a child, it is ours.

But lately, I feel beyond Otto or anyone.

I know now the kind of work I have to do.

It takes such energy! I have the feeling I’m

moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,

in my loneliness. I’m looking everywhere in nature

for new forms, old forms in new places,

the planes of an antique mouth, let’s say, among the leaves.

I know and do not know

what I am searching for.

Remember those months in the studio together,

you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,

I trying to make something of the strange impressions

assailing me—the Japanese

flowers and birds on silk, the drunks

sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,

those faces. . . . Did we know exactly

why we were there? Paris unnerved you,

you found it too much, yet you went on

with your work . . . and later we met there again,

both married then, and I thought you and Rilke

both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness

between you. Of course he and I

have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous

of him, to begin with, taking you from me,

maybe I married Otto to fill up

my loneliness for you.

Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,

he believes in women. But he feeds on us,

like all of them. His whole life, his art

is protected by women. Which of us could say that?

Which of us, Clara, hasn’t had to take that leap

out beyond our being women

to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died

giving birth to the child.

I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.

My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny

in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—

a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.

I was your friend

but in the dream you didn’t say a word.

In the dream his poem was like a letter

to someone who has no right

to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest

who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don’t I dream of you?

That photo of the two of us—I have it still,

you and I looking hard into each other

and my painting behind us. How we used to work

side by side! And how I’ve worked since then

trying to create according to our plan

that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power

to every subject. Hold back nothing

because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies

in the things we used to talk about:

how life and death take one another’s hands,

the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.

And now I feel dawn and the coming day.

I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures

come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel

it is myself that kicks inside me,

myself I must give suck to, love . . .

I wish we could have done this for each other

all our lives, but we can’t . . .

They say a pregnant woman

dreams of her own death. But life and death

take one another’s hands. Clara, I feel so full

of work, the life I see ahead, and love

for you, who of all people

however badly I say this

will hear all I say and cannot say.

1975–1976

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

1.

Your breasts/    sliced-off    The scars

dimmed    as they would have to be

years later

All the women I grew up with are sitting

half-naked on rocks    in sun

we look at each other and

are not ashamed

and you too have taken off your blouse

but this was not what you wanted:

to show your scarred, deleted torso

I barely glance at you

as if my look could scald you

though I’m the one who loved you

I want to touch my fingers

to where your breasts had been

but we never did such things

You hadn’t thought everyone

would look so perfect

unmutilated

you pull on

your blouse again:    stern statement:

There are things I will not share

with everyone

2.

You send me back to share

my own scars    first of all

with myself

What did I hide from her

what have I denied her

what losses suffered

how in this ignorant body

did she hide

waiting for her release

till uncontrollable light began to pour

from every wound and suture

and all the sacred openings

3.

Wartime.    We sit on warm

weathered, softening grey boards

the ladder glimmers where you told me

the leeches swim

I smell the flame

of kerosene    the pine

boards where we sleep side by side

in narrow cots

the night-meadow exhaling

its darkness    calling

child into woman

child into woman

woman

4.

Most of our love from the age of nine

took the form of jokes and mute

loyalty:    you fought a girl

who said she’d knock me down

we did each other’s homework

wrote letters    kept in touch, untouching

lied about our lives:    I wearing

the face of the proper marriage

you the face of the independent woman

We cleaved to each other across that space

fingering webs

of love and estrangement    till the day

the gynecologist touched your breast

and found a palpable hardness

5.

You played heroic, necessary

games with death

since in your neo-protestant tribe the void

was supposed not to exist

except as a fashionable concept

you had no traffic with

I wish you were here tonight    I want

to yell at you

Don’t accept

Don’t give in

But would I be meaning your brave

irreproachable life, you dean of women, or

your unfair, unfashionable, unforgivable

woman’s death?

6.

You are every woman I ever loved

and disavowed

a bloody incandescent chord strung out

across years, tracts of space

How can I reconcile this passion

with our modesty

your calvinist heritage

my girlhood frozen into forms

how can I go on this mission

without you

you, who might have told me

everything you feel is true?

7.

Time after time in dreams you rise

reproachful

once from a wheelchair pushed by your father

across a lethal expressway

Of all my dead it’s you

who come to me unfinished

You left me amber beads

strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave

I wear them wondering

How am I true to you?

I’m half-afraid to write poetry

for you    who never read it much

and I’m left laboring

with the secrets and the silence

In plain language:    I never told you how I loved you

we never talked at your deathbed of your death

8.

One autumn evening in a train

catching the diamond-flash of sunset

in puddles along the Hudson

I thought:    I understand

life and death now, the choices

I didn’t know your choice

or how by then you had no choice

how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells

Most of our love took the form

of mute loyalty

we never spoke at your deathbed of your death

but from here on

I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening

We stayed mute and disloyal

because we were afraid

I would have touched my fingers

to where your breasts had been

but we never did such things

1974–1977

Toward the Solstice

The thirtieth of November.

Snow is starting to fall.

A peculiar silence is spreading

over the fields, the maple grove.

It is the thirtieth of May,

rain pours on ancient bushes, runs

down the youngest blade of grass.

I am trying to hold in one steady glance

all the parts of my life.

A spring torrent races

on this old slanting roof,

the slanted field below

thickens with winter’s first whiteness.

Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind

stand nakedly in the green,

stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,

field.

My brain glows

more violently, more avidly

the quieter, the thicker

the quilt of crystals settles,

the louder, more relentlessly

the torrent beats itself out

on the old boards and shingles.

It is the thirtieth of May,

the thirtieth of November,

a beginning or an end,

we are moving into the solstice

and there is so much here

I still do not understand.

If I could make sense of how

my life is still tangled

with dead weeds, thistles,

enormous burdocks, burdens

slowly shifting under

this first fall of snow,

beaten by this early, racking rain

calling all new life to declare itself strong

or die,

if I could know

in what language to address

the spirits that claim a place

beneath these low and simple ceilings,

tenants that neither speak nor stir

yet dwell in mute insistence

till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.

If history is a spider-thread

spun over and over though brushed away

it seems I might some twilight

or dawn in the hushed country light

discern its greyness stretching

from molding or doorframe, out

into the empty dooryard

and following it climb

the path into the pinewoods,

tracing from tree to tree

in the failing light, in the slowly

lucidifying day

its constant, purposive trail,

till I reach whatever cellar hole

filling with snowflakes or lichen,

whatever fallen shack

or unremembered clearing

I am meant to have found

and there, under the first or last

star, trusting to instinct

the words would come to mind

I have failed or forgotten to say

year after year, winter

after summer, the right rune

to ease the hold of the past

upon the rest of my life

and ease my hold on the past.

If some rite of separation

is still unaccomplished

between myself and the long-gone

tenants of this house,

between myself and my childhood,

and the childhood of my children,

it is I who have neglected

to perform the needed acts,

set water in corners, light and eucalyptus

in front of mirrors,

or merely pause and listen

to my own pulse vibrating

lightly as falling snow,

relentlessly as the rainstorm,

and hear what it has been saying.

It seems I am still waiting

for them to make some clear demand

some articulate sound or gesture,

for release to come from anywhere

but from inside myself.

A decade of cutting away

dead flesh, cauterizing

old scars ripped open over and over

and still it is not enough.

A decade of performing

the loving humdrum acts

of attention to this house

transplanting lilac suckers,

washing panes, scrubbing

wood-smoke from splitting paint,

sweeping stairs, brushing the thread

of the spider aside,

and so much yet undone,

a woman’s work, the solstice nearing,

and my hand still suspended

as if above a letter

I long and dread to close.

1977

A Wild Patience Has

Taken Me This Far

Coast to Coast

There are days when housework seems the only

outlet    old funnel I’ve poured caldrons through

old servitude    In grief and fury bending

to the accustomed tasks    the vacuum cleaner plowing

realms of dust    the mirror scoured    grey webs

behind framed photographs    brushed away

the grey-seamed sky enormous in the west

snow gathering in corners    of the north

Seeing through the prism

you who gave it me

You, bearing ceaselessly

yourself    the witness

Rainbow dissolves the Hudson    This chary, stinting

skin of late winter    ice    forming and breaking up

The unprotected seeing it through

with their ordinary valor

Rainbow composed of ordinary light

February-flat

grey-white of a cheap enamelled pan

breaking into veridian, azure, violet

You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing. . . .

I think of the word protection

who it is we try to protect    and why

Seeing through the prism    Your face, fog-hollowed    burning

cold of eucalyptus hung with butterflies

lavender of rockbloom

O and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer

shattering the fog    lances of sun

piercing the grey Pacific    unanswerable tide

carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock

Beauty of your breasts    your hands

turning a stone a shell a weed a prism    in coastal light

traveller and witness

the passion of the speechless

driving your speech

protectless

If you can read and understand this poem

send something back: a burning strand of hair

a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood

a shell

thickened from being battered year on year

send something back.

1978

Integrity

the quality or state of being complete: unbroken condition: entirely

—Webster

A wild patience has taken me this far

as if I had to bring to shore

a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor

old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books

tossed in the prow

some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.

Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.

Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain

in a sun blotted like unspoken anger

behind a casual mist.

The length of daylight

this far north, in this

forty-ninth year of my life

is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this

long-dreamed, involuntary landing

on the arm of an inland sea.

The glitter of the shoal

depleting into shadow

I recognize: the stand of pines

violet-black really, green in the old postcard

but really I have nothing but myself

to go by; nothing

stands in the realm of pure necessity

except what my hands can hold.

Nothing but myself? . . . My selves.

After so long, this answer.

As if I had always known

I steer the boat in, simply.

The motor dying on the pebbles

cicadas taking up the hum

dropped in the silence.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.

Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius

to spin and weave in the same action

from her own body, anywhere—

even from a broken web.

The cabin in the stand of pines

is still for sale. I know this. Know the print

of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked that door,

then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis

back on the trellis

for no one’s sake except its own.

I know the chart nailed to the wallboards

the icy kettle squatting on the burner.

The hands that hammered in those nails

emptied that kettle one last time

are these two hands

and they have caught the baby leaping

from between trembling legs

and they have worked the vacuum aspirator

and stroked the sweated temples

and steered the boat here through this hot

misblotted sunlight, critical light

imperceptibly scalding

the skin these hands will also salve.

1978

Transit

When I meet the skier she is always

walking, skis and poles shouldered, toward the mountain

free-swinging in worn boots

over the path new-sifted with fresh snow

her greying dark hair almost hidden by

a cap of many colors

her fifty-year-old, strong, impatient body

dressed for cold and speed

her eyes level with mine

And when we pass each other I look into her face

wondering what we have in common

where our minds converge

for we do not pass each other, she passes me

as I halt beside the fence tangled in snow,

she passes me as I shall never pass her

in this life

Yet I remember us together

climbing Chocorua, summer nineteen-forty-five

details of vegetation beyond the timberline

lichens, wildflowers, birds,

amazement when the trail broke out onto the granite ledge

sloped over blue lakes, green pines, giddy air

like dreams of flying

When sisters separate they haunt each other

as she, who I might once have been, haunts me

or is it I who do the haunting

halting and watching on the path

how she appears again through lightly-blowing

crystals, how her strong knees carry her,

how unaware she is, how simple

this is for her, how without let or hindrance

she travels in her body

until the point of passing, where the skier

and the cripple must decide

to recognize each other?

1979

For Memory

Old words:    trust    fidelity

Nothing new yet to take their place.

I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass

painfully green beneath the gold

and in this silent labor thoughts of you

start up

I hear your voice:    disloyalty    betrayal

stinging the wires

I stuff the old leaves into sacks

and still they fall and still

I see my work undone

One shivering rainswept afternoon

and the whole job to be done over

I can’t know what you know

unless you tell me

there are gashes in our understandings

of this world

We came together in a common

fury of direction

barely mentioning difference

(what drew our finest hairs

to fire

the deep, difficult troughs

unvoiced)

I fell through a basement railing

the first day of school and cut my forehead open—

did I ever tell you? More than forty years

and I still remember smelling my own blood

like the smell of a new schoolbook

And did you ever tell me

how your mother called you in from play

and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust

that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from

to which we must return simply to say

this is where I came from

this is what I knew

The past is not a husk    yet change goes on

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

1979

What Is Possible

A clear night    if the mind were clear

If the mind were simple, if the mind were bare

of all but the most classic necessities:

wooden spoon    knife    mirror

cup    lamp    chisel

a comb passing through hair beside a window

a sheet

thrown back by the sleeper

A clear night in which two planets

seem to clasp each other    in which the earthly grasses

shift like silk in starlight

If the mind were clear

and if the mind were simple    you could take this mind

this particular state    and say

This is how I would live if I could choose:

this is what is possible

A clear night.    But the mind

of the woman imagining all this the mind

that allows all this    to be possible

is not clear as the night

is never simple    cannot clasp

its truths as the transiting planets clasp each other

does not so easily

work free from remorse

does not so easily

manage the miracle

for which mind is famous

or used to be famous

does not at will become abstract and pure

this woman’s mind

does not even will that miracle

having a different mission

in the universe

If the mind were simple    if the mind were bare

it might resemble a room    a swept interior

but how could this now be possible

given the voices of the ghost-towns

their tiny and vast configurations

needing to be deciphered

the oracular night

with its densely working sounds

If it could ever come down to anything like

a comb passing through hair beside a window

no more than that

a sheet

thrown back by the sleeper

but the mind

of the woman thinking this    is wrapped in battle

is on another mission

a stalk of grass    dried feathery weed    rooted in snow

in frozen air stirring    a fierce wand graphing

Her finger also tracing

pages of a book

knowing better than the poem she reads

knowing through the poem

through ice-feathered panes

the winter

flexing its talons

the hawk-wind

poised to kill

1980

For Ethel Rosenberg

convicted, with her husband, of “conspiracy to commit espionage”: killed in the electric chair June 19, 1953

1.

Europe 1953:

throughout my random sleepwalk

the words

scratched on walls, on pavements

painted over railway arches

Liberez les Rosenberg!

Escaping from home I found

home everywhere:

the Jewish question, Communism

marriage itself

a question of loyalty

or punishment

my Jewish father writing me

letters of seventeen pages

finely inscribed harangues

questions of loyalty

and punishment

One week before my wedding

that couple gets the chair

the volts grapple her, don’t

kill her fast enough

Liberez les Rosenberg!

I hadn’t realized

our family arguments were so important

my narrow understanding

of crime    of punishment

no language for this torment

mystery of that marriage

always both faces

on every front page in the world

Something so shocking    so

unfathomable

it must be pushed aside

2.

She sank however into my soul    A weight of sadness

I hardly can register how deep

her memory has sunk    that wife and mother

like so many

who seemed to get nothing out of any of it

except her children

that daughter    of a family

like so many

needing its female monster

she, actually wishing to be    an artist

wanting out of poverty

possibly also really wanting

revolution

that woman    strapped in the chair

no fear and no regrets

charged by posterity

not with selling secrets to the Communists

but with wanting    to distinguish

herself    being a bad daughter    a bad mother

And I    walking to my wedding

by the same token a bad daughter    a bad sister

my forces focussed

on that hardly revolutionary effort

Her life and death    the possible

ranges of disloyalty

so painful    so unfathomable

they must be pushed aside

ignored for years

3.

Her mother testifies against her

Her brother testifies against her

After her death

she becomes a natural prey for pornographers

her death itself a scene

her body    sizzling half-strapped    whipped like a sail

She becomes the extremest victim

described nonetheless as rigid of will

what are her politics by then    no one knows

Her figure sinks into my soul

a drowned statue

sealed in lead

For years it has lain there    unabsorbed

first as part of that dead couple

on the front pages of the world    the week

I gave myself in marriage

then slowly severing    drifting apart

a separate death    a life unto itself

no longer the Rosenbergs

no longer the chosen scapegoat

the family monster

till I hear how she sang

a prostitute to sleep

in the Women’s House of Detention

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg    would you

have marched to take back the night

collected signatures

for battered women who kill

What would you have to tell us

would you have burst the net

4.

Why do I even want to call her up

to console my pain    (she feels no pain at all)

why do I wish to put such questions

to ease myself    (she feels no pain at all

she    finally burned to death    like so many)

why all this exercise of hindsight?

since    if I imagine her at all

I have to imagine first

the pain inflicted on her    by women

her mother testifies against her

her sister-in-law testifies against her

and how she sees it

not the impersonal forces

not the historical reasons

why they might have hated her strength

If I have held her at arm’s length till now

if I have still believed it was

my loyalty, my punishment at stake

if I dare imagine her surviving

I must be fair to what she must have lived through

I must allow her to be at last

political in her ways    not in mine

her urgencies perhaps    impervious to mine

defining revolution as she defines it

or, bored to the marrow of her bones

with “politics”

bored with the vast boredom of long pain

small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties

liking her room    her private life

living alone perhaps

no one you could interview

maybe filling a notebook herself

with secrets she has never sold

1980

Heroines

Exceptional

even deviant

you draw your long skirts

across the nineteenth century

Your mind

burns long after death

not like the harbor beacon

but like a pyre of driftwood

on the beach

You are spared

illiteracy

death by pneumonia

teeth which leave the gums

the seamstress’ clouded eyes

the mill-girl’s shortening breath

by a collection

of circumstances

soon to be known as

class privilege

The law says you can possess nothing

in a world

where property is everything

You belong first to your father

then to him who

chooses you

if you fail to marry

you are without recourse

unable to earn

a workingman’s salary

forbidden to vote

forbidden to speak

in public

if married you are legally dead

the law says

you may not bequeath property

save to your children

or male kin

that your husband

has the right

of the slaveholder

to hunt down and re-possess you

should you escape

You may inherit slaves

but have no power to free them

your skin is fair

you have been taught that light

came

to the Dark Continent

with white power

that the Indians

live in filth

and occult animal rites

Your mother wore corsets

to choke her spirit

which if you refuse

you are jeered for refusing

you have heard many sermons

and have carried

your own interpretations

locked in your heart

You are a woman

strong in health

through a collection

of circumstances

soon to be known

as class privilege

which if you break

the social compact

you lose outright

When you open your mouth in public

human excrement

is flung at you

you are exceptional

in personal circumstance

in indignation

you give up believing

in protection

in Scripture

in man-made laws

respectable as you look

you are an outlaw

Your mind burns

not like the harbor beacon

but like a fire

of fiercer origin

you begin speaking out

and a great gust of freedom

rushes in with your words

yet still you speak

in the shattered language

of a partial vision

You draw your long skirts

deviant

across the nineteenth century

registering injustice

failing to make it whole

How can I fail to love

your clarity and fury

how can I give you

all your due

take courage from your courage

honor your exact

legacy as it is

recognizing

as well

that it is not enough?

1980

Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,

always the formal guest under my father’s roof:

you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.

I see you walking up and down the garden,

restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem

my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.

You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,

yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,

ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.

One summer night you sat with my sister and me

in the wooden glider long after twilight,

holding us there with streams of pent-up words.

You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,

had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,

your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.

You married straight out of the convent school,

your background was country, you left an unperformed

typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,

you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared

about your mind, you might have ended

elsewhere than in that glider

reciting your unwritten novels to the children.

2. Hattie Rice Rich

Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me,

you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china,

lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom

summer and fall, then took the Pullman train

in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama,

shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter.

Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone,

how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg,

fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread,

took the street-car downtown shopping

endlessly for your son’s whims, the whims of genius,

kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily.

All through World War Two the forbidden word

Jewish was barely uttered in your son’s house;

your anger flared over inscrutable things.

Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed,

knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing

your one brief memorable scene of rebellion:

you didn’t want to go back South that year.

You were never “Grandmother Rich” but “Anana”;

you had money of your own but you were homeless,

Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch,

dispersed among the children and grandchildren.

3. Granddaughter

Easier to encapsulate your lives

in a slide-show of impressions given and taken,

to play the child or victim, the projectionist,

easier to invent a script for each of you,

myself still at the center,

than to write words in which you might have found

yourselves, looked up at me and said

“Yes, I was like that; but I was something more. . . .”

Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi;

the “war between the states” a living memory

its aftermath the plague-town closing

its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons.

I can almost touch that little town. . . .

a little white town rimmed with Negroes,

making a deep shadow on the whiteness.

Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind

—twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—

in those defended hamlets of half-truth

broken in two by one strange idea,

“blood” the all-powerful, awful theme—

what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe

the daughter of one of you—Amnesia was the answer.

1980

The Spirit of Place

For Michelle Cliff

I.

Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

driving with you in spring    road

like a streambed unwinding downhill

fiddlehead ferns uncurling

spring peepers ringing sweet and cold

while we talk yet again

of dark and light, of blackness, whiteness, numbness

rammed through the heart like a stake

trying to pull apart the threads

from the dried blood of the old murderous uncaring

halting on bridges in bloodlight

where the freshets call out freedom

to frog-thrilling swamp, skunk-cabbage

trying to sense the conscience of these hills

knowing how the single-minded, pure

solutions bleached and dessicated

within their perfect flasks

for it was not enough to be New England

as every event since has testified:

New England’s a shadow-country, always was

it was not enough to be for abolition

while the spirit of the masters

flickered in the abolitionist’s heart

it was not enough to name ourselves anew

while the spirit of the masters

calls the freedwoman to forget the slave

With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

If there’s a conscience in these hills

it hurls that question

unquenched, relentless, to our ears

wild and witchlike

ringing every swamp

II.

The mountain laurel in bloom

constructed like needlework

tiny half-pulled stitches piercing

flushed and stippled petals

here in these woods it grows wild

midsummer moonrise turns it opal

the night breathes with its clusters

protected species

meaning endangered

Here in these hills

this valley    we have felt

a kind of freedom

planting the soil    have known

hours of a calm, intense and mutual solitude

reading and writing

trying to clarify    connect

past and present    near and far

the Alabama quilt

the Botswana basket

history    the dark crumble

of last year’s compost

filtering softly through your living hand

but here as well we face

instantaneous violence    ambush    male

dominion on a back road

to escape in a locked car    windows shut

skimming the ditch    your split-second

survival reflex taking on the world

as it is    not as we wish it

as it is    not as we work for it

to be

III.

Strangers are an endangered species

In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst

cocktails are served    the scholars

gather in celebration

their pious or clinical legends

festoon the walls like imitations

of period patterns

(. . . and, as I feared, my “life” was made a “victim”)

The remnants pawed    the relics

the cult assembled in the bedroom

and you    whose teeth were set on edge by churches

resist your shrine

escape

are found

nowhere

unless in words    (your own)

All we are strangers—dear—The world is not

acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted

with her. And Pilgrims!—Do you hesitate? and

Soldiers oft—some of us victors, but those I do

not see tonight owing to the smoke.—We are hungry,

and thirsty, sometimes—We are barefoot—and cold—

This place is large enough for both of us

the river-fog will do for privacy

this is my third and last address to you

with the hands of a daughter I would cover you

from all intrusion    even my own

saying    rest to your ghost

with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands

open or closed as they prefer to lie

and ask no more of who or why or wherefore

with the hands of a mother I would close the door

on the rooms you’ve left behind

and silently pick up my fallen work

IV.

The river-fog will do for privacy

on the low road a breath

here, there, a cloudiness floating on the blacktop

sunflower heads turned black and bowed

the seas of corn a stubble

the old routes flowing north, if not to freedom

no human figure now in sight

(with whom do you believe your lot is cast?)

only the functional figure of the scarecrow

the cut corn, ground to shreds, heaped in a shape

like an Indian burial mound

a haunted-looking, ordinary thing

The work of winter starts fermenting in my head

how with the hands of a lover or a midwife

to hold back till the time is right

force nothing, be unforced

accept no giant miracles of growth

by counterfeit light

trust roots, allow the days to shrink

give credence to these slender means

wait without sadness and with grave impatience

here in the north where winter has a meaning

where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen

where nothing is promised

learn what an underground journey

has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code

let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.

V.

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

over the Mohawk Trail    a parallelogram

slashed with two cuts of steel

A night so clear that every constellation

stands out from an undifferentiated cloud

of stars, a kind of aura

All the figures up there look violent to me

as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

I want our own earth    not the satellites, our

world as it is    if not as it might be

then as it is:    male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom

the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch

watching:    will we do better?

The tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits

of place    who understand travel but not amnesia

The world as it is:    not as her users boast

damaged beyond reclamation by their using

Ourselves as we are    in these painful motions

of staying cognizant:    some part of us always

out beyond ourselves

knowing    knowing    knowing

Are we all in training for something we don’t name?

to exact reparation for things

done long ago to us and to those who did not

survive what was done to them    whom we ought to honor

with grief    with fury    with action

On a pure night    on a night when pollution

seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn

like a bowl of crystal in black ether

they are the piece of us that lies out there

knowing    knowing    knowing

1980

Frame

Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-

oratory, last class of the day

a pile of notebooks slung in her knapsack, coat

zipped high against the already swirling

evening sleet. The wind is wicked and the

busses slower than usual. On her mind

is organic chemistry and the issue

of next month’s rent and will it be possible to

bypass the professor with the coldest eyes

to get a reference for graduate school,

and whether any of them, even those who smile

can see, looking at her, a biochemist

or a marine biologist, which of the faces

can she trust to see her at all, either today

or in any future. The busses are worm-slow in the

quickly gathering dark. I don’t know her. I am

standing though somewhere just outside the frame

of all this, trying to see. At her back

the newly finished building suddenly looks

like shelter, it has glass doors, lighted halls

presumably heat. The wind is wicked. She throws a

glance down the street, sees no bus coming and runs

up the newly constructed steps into the newly

constructed hallway. I am standing all this time

just beyond the frame, trying to see. She runs

her hand through the crystals of sleet about to melt

on her hair. She shifts the weight of the books

on her back. It isn’t warm here exactly but it’s

out of that wind. Through the glass

door panels she can watch for the bus through the thickening

weather. Watching so, she is not

watching for the white man who watches the building

who has been watching her. This is Boston 1979.

I am standing somewhere at the edge of the frame

watching the man, we are both white, who watches the building

telling her to move on, get out of the hallway.

I can hear nothing because I am not supposed to be

present but I can see her gesturing

out toward the street at the wind-raked curb

I see her drawing her small body up

against the implied charges. The man

goes away. Her body is different now.

It is holding together with more than a hint of fury

and more than a hint of fear. She is smaller, thinner

more fragile-looking than I am. But I am not supposed to be

there. I am just outside the frame

of this action when the anonymous white man

returns with a white police officer. Then she starts

to leave into the wind-raked night but already

the policeman is going to work, the handcuffs are on her

wrists he is throwing her down his knee has gone into

her breast he is dragging her down the stairs I am unable

to hear a sound of all this all that I know is what

I can see from this position there is no soundtrack

to go with this and I understand at once

it is meant to be in silence that this happens

in silence that he pushes her into the car

banging her head in silence that she cries out

in silence that she tries to explain she was only

waiting for a bus

in silence that he twists the flesh of her thigh

with his nails in silence that her tears begin to flow

that she pleads with the other policeman as if

he could be trusted to see her at all

in silence that in the precinct she refuses to give her name

in silence that they throw her into the cell

in silence that she stares him

straight in the face in silence that he sprays her

in her eyes with Mace in silence that she sinks her teeth

into his hand in silence that she is charged

with trespass assault and battery in

silence that at the sleet-swept corner her bus

passes without stopping and goes on

in silence. What I am telling you

is told by a white woman who they will say

was never there. I say I am there.

1980

A Vision

(thinking of Simone Weil)

You. There, with your gazing eyes

Your blazing eyes

A hand or something passes across the sun. Your eyeballs slacken,

you are free for a moment. Then it comes back: this

test of the capacity to keep in focus

this

unfair struggle with the forces of perception

this enforced

(but at that word your attention changes)

this enforced    loss of self

in a greater thing of course, who has ever

lost herself in something smaller?

You with your cornea and iris and their power

you with your stubborn lids that have stayed open

at the moment of pouring liquid steel

you with your fear of blinding

Here it is. I am writing this almost

involuntarily on a bad, a junky typewriter that skips

and slides the text

Still these are mechanical problems, writing to you

is another kind of problem

and even so the words create themselves

What is your own will that it

can so transfix you

why are you forced to take this test

over and over and call it God

why not call it you and get it over

you with your hatred of enforcement

and your fear of blinding?

1981

Your Native Land, Your Life

Sources

For Helen Smelser

since 1949

I

Sixteen years.    The narrow, rough-gullied backroads

almost the same.    The farms:    almost the same,

a new barn here, a new roof there, a rusting car,

collapsed sugar-house, trailer, new young wife

trying to make a lawn instead of a dooryard,

new names,    old kinds of names: Rocquette, Desmarais,

Clark, Pierce, Stone.    Gossier.    No names of mine.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5

south of Willoughby:    long dead.    She was an omen

to me, surviving, herding her cubs

in the silvery bend of the road

in nineteen sixty-five.

Shapes of things:    so much the same

they feel like eternal forms:    the house and barn

on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;

the face of milkweed blooming,

brookwater pleating over slanted granite,

boletus under pine, the half-composted needles

it broke through patterned on its skin.

Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.

Bladder-campion veined with purple.

Multifoliate heal-all.

II

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.

Everything that has ever

helped me has come through what already

lay stored in me.    Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong

across my heart.

This is from where

my strength comes, even when I miss my strength

even when it turns on me

like a violent master.

III

From where?    the voice asks coldly.

This is the voice in cold morning air

that pierces dreams.    From where does your strength come?

Old things . . .

From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew?

split at the root, raised in a castle of air?

Yes.    I expected this.    I have known for years

the question was coming.        From where

(not from these, surely,

Protestant separatists, Jew-baiters, nightriders

who fired in Irasburg in nineteen-sixty-eight

on a black family newly settled in these hills)

From where

the dew grows thick late August on the fierce green grass

and on the wooden sill and on the stone

the mountains stand in an extraordinary

point of no return    though still are green

collapsed shed-boards gleam like pewter in the dew

the realms of touch-me-not    fiery with tiny tongues

cover the wild ground of the woods

IV

With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

From where does your strength come?

I think somehow, somewhere

every poem of mine must repeat those questions

which are not the same.    There is a whom, a where

that is not chosen    that is given    and sometimes falsely given

in the beginning we grasp whatever we can

to survive

V

All during World War II

I told myself I had some special destiny:

there had to be a reason

I was not living in a bombed-out house

or cellar    hiding out with rats

there had to be a reason

I was growing up safe, American

with sugar rationed in a Mason jar

split at the root    white-skinned social christian

neither gentile nor Jew

through the immense silence

of the Holocaust

I had no idea of what I had been spared

still less of the women and men    my kin

the Jews of Vicksburg or Birmingham

whose lives must have been strategies no less

than the vixen’s on Route 5

VI

If they had played the flute, or chess

I was told    I was not told what they told

their children when the Klan rode

how they might have seen themselves

a chosen people

of shopkeepers

clinging by strategy to a way of life

that had its own uses for them

proud of their length of sojourn in America

deploring the late-comers    the peasants from Russia

I saw my father building

his rootless ideology

his private castle in air

in that most dangerous place, the family home

we were the chosen people

In the beginning we grasp whatever we can

VII

For years I struggled with you:    your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love.    For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you.    I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him.    All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.

After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers.    I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me.    It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.

VIII

Back there in Maryland the stars

showed liquescent, diffuse

in the breathless summer nights

the constellations melted

I thought I was leaving a place of enervation

heading north where the Drinking Gourd

stood cold and steady at last

pointing the way

I thought I was following a track of freedom

and for awhile it was

IX

Why has my imagination stayed

northeast with the ones who stayed

Are there spirits in me, diaspora-driven

that wanted to lodge somewhere

hooked into the “New” Englanders who hung on

here in this stringent space

believing their Biblical language

their harping on righteousness?

And, myself apart, what was this like for them,

this unlikely growing season

after each winter so mean, so mean

the tying-down of the spirit

and the endless rocks in the soil, the endless

purifications of self

there being no distance, no space around

to experiment with life?

X

These upland farms are the farms

of invaders, these villages

white with rectitude and death

are built on stolen ground

The persecuted, pale with anger

know how to persecute

those who feel destined, under god’s eye

need never ponder difference

and if they kill others for being who they are

or where they are

is this a law of history

or simply, what must change?

XI

If I try to conjure their lives

—who are not my people by any definition—

Yankee Puritans, Québec Catholics

mingled within sight of the Northern Lights

I am forced to conjure a passion

like the tropism in certain plants

bred of a natural region’s

repetitive events

beyond the numb of poverty

christian hypocrisy, isolation

—a passion so unexpected

there is no name for it

so quick, fierce, unconditional

short growing season is no explanation.

XII

And has any of this to do with how

Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?.

is the passion I connect with in this air

trace of the original

existences that knew this place

is the region still trying to speak with them

is this light a language

the shudder of this aspen-grove a way

of sending messages

the white mind barely intercepts

are signals also coming back

from the vast diaspora

of the people who kept their promises

as a way of life?

XIII

Coming back after sixteen years

I stare anew at things

that steeple pure and righteous

that clapboard farmhouse

seeing what I hadn’t seen before

through barnboards, crumbling plaster

decades of old wallpaper roses

clinging to certain studs

—into that dangerous place

the family home:

There are verbal brutalities

borne thereafter like any burn or scar

there are words pulled down from the walls

like dogwhips

the child backed silent against the wall

trying to keep her eyes dry;    haughty;    in panic

I will never let you know

I will never

let you know

XIV

And if my look becomes the bomb that rips

the family home apart

is this betrayal, that the walls

slice off, the staircase shows

torn-away above the street

that the closets where the clothes hung

hang naked, the room the old

grandmother had to sleep in

the toilet on the landing

the room with the books

where the father walks up and down

telling the child to work, work

harder than anyone has worked before?

—But I can’t stop seeing like this

more and more I see like this everywhere.

XV

It’s an oldfashioned, an outrageous thing

to believe one has a “destiny”

—a thought often peculiar to those

who possess privilege—

but there is something else:    the faith

of those despised and endangered

that they are not merely the sum

of damages done to them:

have kept beyond violence the knowledge

arranged in patterns like kente-cloth

unexpected as in batik

recurrent as bitter herbs and unleavened bread

of being a connective link

in a long, continuous way

of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire

and the nearness of chaos.

XVI

The Jews I’ve felt rooted among

are those who were turned to smoke

Reading of the chimneys against the blear air

I think I have seen them myself

the fog of northern Europe licking its way

along the railroad tracks

to the place where all tracks end

You told me not to look there

to become

a citizen of the world

bound by no tribe or clan

yet dying you followed the Six Day War

with desperate attention

and this summer I lie awake at dawn

sweating the Middle East through my brain

wearing the star of David

on a thin chain at my breastbone

XVII

But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.    The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.    The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There’s nothing left now but the food and the humor.        The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.    Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.        For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it’s your likeness that stares me in the face.        There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:        there is something more.

XVIII

There is something more than self-hatred. That still outlives

these photos of the old Ashkenazi life:

we are gifted children at camp in the country

or orphaned children in kindergarten

we are hurrying along the rare book dealers’ street

with the sunlight striking one side

we are walking the wards of the Jewish hospital

along diagonal squares    young serious nurses

we are part of a family group

formally taken in 1936

with tables, armchairs, ferns

(behind us, in our lives, the muddy street

and the ragged shames

the street-musician, the weavers lined for strike)

we are part of a family wearing white head-bandages

we were beaten in a pogrom

The place where all tracks end

is the place where history was meant to stop

but does not stop    where thinking

was meant to stop but does not stop

where the pattern was meant to give way at last

but only

becomes a different pattern

terrible, threadbare

strained    familiar    on-going

XIX

They say such things are stored

in the genetic code—

half-chances, unresolved

possibilities, the life

passed on because unlived—

a mystic biology?—

I think of the women who sailed to Palestine

years before I was born—

halutzot, pioneers

believing in a new life

socialists, anarchists, jeered

as excitable, sharp of tongue

too filled with life

wanting equality in the promised land

carrying the broken promises

of Zionism in their hearts

along with the broken promises

of communism, anarchism—

makers of miracle who expected miracles

as stubbornly as any housewife does

that the life she gives her life to

shall not be cheap

that the life she gives her life to

shall not turn on her

that the life she gives her life to

shall want an end to suffering

Zion by itself is not enough.

XX

The faithful drudging child

the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,

hard work, style will win her prizes

becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes

but to change the laws of history.

How she gets this mission

is not clear, how the boundaries of perfection

explode, leaving her cheekbone grey with smoke

a piece of her hair singed off, her shirt

spattered with earth . . . Say that she grew up in a house

with talk of books, ideal societies—

she is gripped by a blue, a foreign air,

a desert absolute:    dragged by the roots of her own will

into another scene of choices.

XXI

YERUSHALAYIM:    a vault of golden heat

hard-pulsing from bare stones

the desert’s hard-won, delicate green

the diaspora of the stars

thrilling like thousand-year-old locusts

audible yet unheard

a city on a hill

waking with first light to voices

piercing, original, intimate

as if my dreams mixed with the cries

of the oldest, earliest birds

and of all whose wrongs and rights

cry out for explication

as the night pales and one more day

breaks on this Zion of hope and fear

and broken promises

this promised land

XXII

I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me.    It’s been different with my father:    he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead.    But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists.    I hate the way they use the dead.

Yet I can’t finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you.    You knew there was more left than food and humor.    Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain.    The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; bowls of sour cream mixed with cut radishes, cucumber, scallions; green tomatoes and kosher dill pickles in half-translucent paper; these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.

That’s why I want to speak to you now.    To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.    There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.    (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)    I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

XXIII

Sixteen years ago I sat in this northeast kingdom

reading Gilbert White’s Natural History

of Selborne    thinking

I can never know this land I walk upon

as that English priest knew his

—a comparable piece of earth—

rockledge    soil    insect    bird    weed    tree

I will never know it so well because . . .

Because you have chosen

something else:    to know other things

even the cities which

create of this a myth

Because you grew up in a castle of air

disjunctured

Because without a faith

you are faithful

I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I cán name, both here and in other tracts of the globe.    But there is no finite knowing, no such rest.    Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices. leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices:    and here I write the words, in their fullness:

powerful;    womanly.

August 1981–

August 1982

For the Record

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war

the brooks gave no information

if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river

it was not taking sides

the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf

had no political opinions

and if here or there a house

filled with backed-up raw sewage

or poisoned those who lived there

with slow fumes, over years

the houses were not at war

nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter

to homeless old women and roaming children

they had no policy to keep them roaming

or dying, no, the cities were not the problem

the bridges were non-partisan

the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire

stretched around crouching temporary huts

designed to keep the unwanted

at a safe distance, out of sight

even the boards that had to absorb

year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears

slow-soaking blood

had not offered themselves for this

The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards

nor the thorns for tearing flesh

Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature

is stamped on the orders, traced

in the corner of the building plans

Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied

women were, the drunks and crazies,

the ones you fear most of all:    ask where you were.

1983

North American Time

I

When my dreams showed signs

of becoming

politically correct

no unruly images

escaping beyond borders

when walking in the street I found my

themes cut out for me

knew what I would not report

for fear of enemies’ usage

then I began to wonder

II

Everything we write

will be used against us

or against those we love.

These are the terms,

take them or leave them.

Poetry never stood a chance

of standing outside history.

One line typed twenty years ago

can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint

to glorify art as detachment

or torture of those we

did not love but also

did not want to kill

We move        but our words stand

become responsible

for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

III

Try sitting at a typewriter

one calm summer evening

at a table by a window

in the country, try pretending

your time does not exist

that you are simply you

that the imagination simply strays

like a great moth, unintentional

try telling yourself

you are not accountable

to the life of your tribe

the breath of your planet

IV

It doesn’t matter what you think.

Words are found responsible

all you can do is choose them

or choose

to remain silent.        Or, you never had a choice,

which is why the words that do stand

are responsible

and this is verbal privilege

V

Suppose you want to write

of a woman braiding

another woman’s hair—

straight down, or with beads and shells

in three-strand plaits or corn-rows—

you had better know the thickness

the length        the pattern

why she decides to braid her hair

how it is done to her

what country it happens in

what else happens in that country

You have to know these things

VI

Poet, sister:    words—

whether we like it or not—

stand in a time of their own.

No use protesting        I wrote that

before Kollontai was exiled

Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm,

Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,

before Treblinka, Birkenau,

Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,

Biafra, Bangladesh, Boston,

Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam

—those faces, names of places

sheared from the almanac

of North American time

VII

I am thinking this in a country

where words are stolen out of mouths

as bread is stolen out of mouths

where poets don’t go to jail

for being poets, but for being

dark-skinned, female, poor.

I am writing this in a time

when anything we write

can be used against those we love

where the context is never given

though we try to explain, over and over

For the sake of poetry at least

I need to know these things

VIII

Sometimes, gliding at night

in a plane over New York City

I have felt like some messenger

called to enter, called to engage

this field of light and darkness.

A grandiose idea, born of flying.

But underneath the grandiose idea

is the thought that what I must engage

after the plane has raged onto the tarmac

after climbing my old stairs, sitting down

at my old window

is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

IX

In North America time stumbles on

without moving, only releasing

a certain North American pain.

Julia de Burgos wrote:

That my grandfather was a slave

is my grief;         had he been a master

that would have been my shame.

A poet’s words, hung over a door

in North America, in the year

nineteen-eighty-three.

The almost-full moon rises

timelessly speaking of change

out of the Bronx, the Harlem River

the drowned towns of the Quabbin

the pilfered burial mounds

the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

and I start to speak again

1983

Virginia 1906

A white woman dreaming of innocence,

of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,

is held in a DC-10 above the purity

of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.

She feels safe.    Here, no one can reach her.

Neither men nor women have her in their power.

Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,

I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash

cruelly, when she does what I don’t want to see.

I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,

sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.

Nothing has told me how to think of her power.

Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts

across rough earth, small trees contort and twist

making their own shapes, wild.    Why should we love purity?

Can the woman in the DC-10 see this

and would she call this innocence?    If no one can reach her

she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.

This woman I have been and recognize

must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies

a hated nation, hers,

earth whose wet places call to mind

still-open wounds:        her country.

Do we love purity?    Where do we turn for power?

Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says

But I was not culpable,

I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,

the susceptible one, I was sick,

the one who simply had to get out, and did

: I am still trying how to think of her power.

And if she was forced, this woman, by the same

white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey

her ignored dark sisters?        What if at five years old

she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open

what if forever after, in every record

she wants her name inscribed as innocent

and will not speak, refuses to know, can say

I have been numb for years

does not want to hear of any violation

like or unlike her own, as if the victim

can be innocent only in isolation

as if the victim dare not be intelligent

(I have been numb for years):     and if this woman

longs for an intact world, an intact soul,

longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?

What has she smelled of power without once

tasting it in the mouth? For what protections

has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?

There is a porch in Salem, Virginia

that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,

honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,

a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down

to the orchards, apple and peach,

divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.

A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia

refuses to come down, at last comes down

for a neighbor’s lying bribe.    Now, if that child, grown old

feels safe in a DC-10 above thick white clouds

and no one can reach her

and if that woman’s child, another woman

chooses another way, yet finds the old vines

twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks

how does she stop dreaming the dream

of protection, how does she follow her own wildness

shedding the innocence, the childish power?

How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?

1983

Dreams Before Waking

Despair is the question.

—Elie Wiesel

Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo.

—Nancy Morejón

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

though the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal flashing

in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it’s the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway—wasn’t she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash—

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

What will make it for you?

You don’t want to know the stages

and those who go through them don’t want to tell

You have your four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

if you don’t speak of despair.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other’s despair into hope?—

You yourself must change it.—

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing?—

You yourself must change it.—

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it mean to stand on the first

page of the end of despair?

1983

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

1.

From 1964: a color snapshot:      you

riding a camel past the Great Pyramid

its rough earthy diagonal shouldering

the blue triangle of sky

I know your white shirt     dark skirt     your age

thirty-five     as mine was then

your ignorance like mine

in those years     and your curious mind

throw of your head      bend of your gilt knees

the laugh exchanged with whoever took the picture

I don’t know how you were talking to yourself

I know I was thinking

with a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude

this will be the deciding year

I am sick of drift

Weren’t we always trying to do better?

Then the voices began to say:      Your plans

are not in the book of plans

written, printed and bound while you

were absent

no, not here nor in Egypt

will you ever catch up

2.

So, then      as if by plan

I turn      and you are lost

How have I lived      knowing

that day of your laugh      so alive/so nothing

even the clothes you wore then

rotted away      How can I live believing

any year can be the deciding year

when I know the book of plans

how it disallows us

time for change      for growing older

truthfully      in our own way

3.

I used to think you ought to be

a woman      in charge      in a desperate time

of whole populations

such seemed the power of your restlessness

I saw you a rescuer

amid huge events      diasporas

scatterings and returnings

I needed this for us

I would have gone to help you

flinging myself into the fray

both of us treading free

of the roads we started on

4.

In the book of plans it is written

that our lifelines shall be episodic

faithless      frayed      lived out

under impure violent rains

and rare but violent sun

It is written there that we may reach

like wan vines across a window

trying to grasp each other

but shall lack care and tending

that water and air shall betray us

that the daughter born a poet

will die of dysentery

while the daughter born to organize

will die of cancer

5.

In the book of plans it says no one

will speak of the book of plans

the appearance will continue

that all this is natural

It says my grief for you is natural

but my anger for us is not

that the image of a white curtain trembling

across a stormy pane

is acceptable      but not

the image I make of you

arm raised hurling      signalling

the squatters      the refugees

storming the food supply

The book of plans says only that you must die

that we all, very soon, must die

6.

Well, I am studying a different book

taking notes wherever I go

the movement of the wrist does not change

but the pen plows deeper

my handwriting flows into words

I have not yet spoken

I’m the sole author of nothing

the book moves from field to field

of testimony      recording

how the wounded teach each other      the old

refuse to be organized

by fools      how the women say

in more than one language      You have struck a rock—

prepare to meet the unplanned

the ignored      the unforeseen      that which breaks

despair      which has always travelled

underground      or in the spaces

between the fixed stars

gazing full-faced      wild

and calm      on the Revolution

7.

Love:      I am studying a different book

and yes, a book is a finite thing

In it your death will never be reversed

the deaths I have witnessed since      never undone

The light drained from the living eyes

can never flash again from those same eyes

I make you no promises

but something’s breaking open here

there were certain extremes we had to know

before we could continue

Call it a book, or not

call it a map of constant travel

Call it a book, or not

call it a song      a ray

of images thrown on a screen

in open lots      in cellars

and among those images

one woman’s meaning to another woman

long after death

in a different world

1983

What Was, Is;

What Might Have Been, Might Be

What’s kept.      What’s lost.      A snap decision.

Burn the archives.      Let them rot.

Begin by going ten years back.

A woman walks downstairs in a brownstone

in Brooklyn.      Late that night, some other night

snow crystals swarm in her hair

at the place we say, So long.

I’ve lost something.      I’m not sure what it is.

I’m going through my files.

Jewel-weed flashing

blue fire against an iron fence

Her head bent to a mailbox

long fingers ringed in gold      in red-eyed

golden serpents

the autumn sun

burns like a beak off the cars

parked along Riverside      we so deep in talk

in burnt September grass

I’m trying for exactitude

in the files I handle worn and faded labels

And how she drove, and danced, and fought, and worked

and loved, and sang, and hated

dashed into the record store      then out

with the Stevie Wonder      back in the car

flew on

Worn and faded labels . . . This was

our glamor for each other

underlined in bravado

Could it have been another way:

could we have been respectful comrades

parallel warriors      none of that

fast-falling

could we have kept a clean

and decent slate

1984

Poetry: I

Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp

is studying the history of poetry.

Someone in the library at closing-time

has learned to say modernism,

trope, vatic, text.

She is listening for shreds of music.

He is searching for his name

back in the old country.

They cannot learn without teachers.

They are like us      what we were

if you remember.

In a corner of night a voice

is crying in a kind of whisper:

More!

Can you remember?      when we thought

the poets taught      how to live?

That is not the voice of a critic

nor a common reader

it is someone young      in anger

hardly knowing what to ask

who finds our lines      our glosses

wanting      in this world.

1985

Poetry: II, Chicago

Whatever a poet is

at the point of conception      is

conceived in these projects

of beige and grey bricks      Yes, poets are born

in wasted tracts like these      whatever color, sex

comes to term in this winter’s driving nights

And the child pushes like a spear

a cry      through cracked cement      through zero air

a spear, a cry of green      Yes, poets endure

these schools of fear      balked yet unbroken

where so much gets broken:      trust

windows      pride      the mothertongue

Wherever a poet is born      enduring

depends on the frailest of chances:

Who listened to your murmuring

over your little rubbish      who let you be

who gave you the books

who let you know you were not

alone      showed you the twist

of old strands      raffia, hemp or silk

the beaded threads      the fiery lines

saying:      This belongs to you      you have the right

you belong to the song

of your mothers and fathers      You have a people

1984

Poetry: III

Even if we knew the children were all asleep

and healthy      the ledgers balanced      the water running

clear in the pipes

and all the prisoners free

Even if every word we wrote by then

were honest      the sheer heft

of our living behind it

not these sometimes

lax, indolent lines

these litanies

Even if we were told      not just by friends

that this was honest work

Even if each of us didn’t wear

a brass locket with a picture

of a strangled woman      a girlchild sewn through the crotch

Even if someone had told us, young:      This is not a key

nor a peacock feather

not a kite nor a telephone

This is the kitchen sink      the grinding-stone

would we give ourselves

more calmly over      feel less criminal joy

when the thing comes      as it does come

clarifying grammar

and the fixed and mutable stars—?

1984

Baltimore:    a fragment from the Thirties

Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window.

Outside, it’s summer.    Heat

swamping stretched awnings, battering dark-green shades.

The Depression, Monument Street,

ice-wagons trailing melt, the Hospital

with its segregated morgues . . .

I’m five years old and trying to be perfect

walking hand-in-hand with my father.

A Black man halts beside us

croaks in a terrible voice, I’m hungry . . .

I’m a lucky child but I’ve read about beggars—

how the good give, the evil turn away.

But I want to turn away.    My father gives.

We walk in silence.    Why did he sound like that?

Is it evil to be frightened?    I want to ask.

He has no roof in his mouth,

my father says at last.

1985

Homage to Winter

You:     a woman too old

for passive contemplation

caught staring out a window

at bird-of-paradise spikes

jewelled with rain, across an alley

It’s winter in this land

of roses, roses          sometimes

the fog lies thicker around you than your past

sometimes the Pacific radiance

scours the air to lapis

In this new world you feel

backward along the hem of your whole life

questioning every breadth

Nights you can watch the moon shed skin after skin

over and over, always a shape

of imbalance except

at birth and in the full

You, still trying to learn

how to live, what must be done

though in death you will be complete

whatever you do

But death is not the answer.

On these flat green leaves

light skates like a golden blade

high in the dull-green pine

sit two mushroom-colored doves

afterglow overflows

across the bungalow roof

between the signs for the three-way stop

over everything that is:

the cotton pants stirring on the line, the

empty Coke can by the fence

onto the still unflowering

mysterious acacia

and a sudden chill takes the air

Backward you dream to a porch

you stood on a year ago

snow flying quick as thought

sticking to your shoulder          gone

Blue shadows, ridged and fading

on a snow-swept road

the shortest day of the year

Backward you dream to glare ice

and ice-wet pussywillows

to Riverside Drive, the wind

cut loose from Hudson’s Bay

driving tatters into your face

And back you come at last to that room

without a view, where webs of frost

blinded the panes at noon

where already you had begun

to make the visible world your conscience

asking things:          What can you tell me?

what am I doing?     what must I do?

1985

Blue Rock

For Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz

Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain

blue into the wineglass on the table

the full moon moving up the sky is plain

as the dead rose and the live buds on one stem

No, this isn’t Persian poetry I’m quoting:

all this is here in North America

where I sit trying to kindle fire

from what’s already on fire:

the light of a blue rock from Chile swimming

in the apricot liquid called “eye of the swan”.

This is a chunk of your world, a piece of its heart:

split from the rest, does it suffer?

You needn’t tell me. Sometimes I hear it singing

by the waters of Babylon, in a strange land

sometimes it just lies heavy in my hand

with the heaviness of silent seismic knowledge

a blue rock in a foreign land, an exile

excised but never separated

from the gashed heart, its mountains,

winter rains, language, native sorrow.

At the end of the twentieth century

cardiac graphs of torture reply to poetry

line by line:      in North America

the strokes of the stylus continue

the figures of terror are reinvented

all night, after I turn the lamp off, blotting

wineglass, rock and roses, leaving pages

like this scrawled with mistakes and love,

falling asleep; but the stylus does not sleep,

cruelly the drum revolves, cruelty writes its name.

Once when I wrote poems they did not change

left overnight on the page

they stayed as they were and daylight broke

on the lines, as on the clotheslines in the yard

heavy with clothes forgotten or left out

for a better sun next day

But now I know what happens while I sleep

and when I wake the poem has changed:

the facts have dilated it, or cancelled it;

and in every morning’s light, your rock is there.

1985

Yom Kippur 1984

I drew solitude over me, on the lone shore.

—Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

For whoever does not afflict his soul throughout this day, shall be cut off from his people.

—Leviticus 23:29

What is a Jew in solitude?

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid

far from your own or those you have called your own?

What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?

In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert

what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs

with its electric gate, its perfected privacy

is not what I mean

the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan

Heights

is not what I mean

the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to

the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her

attack dog suddenly risen

is not what I mean

Three thousand miles from what I once called home

I open a book searching for some lines I remember

about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the

dooryard once

bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,

something that bloomed and faded and was written down

in the poet’s book, forever:

Opening the poet’s book

I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed

and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have

them

Robinson Jeffers, multitude

is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys

and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines

are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling

its scrolls of surf,

and the separate persons, stooped

over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering

skies of harvest

who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams

Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape,

scour, belong to a brain like no other

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend

a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final

solution, have I a choice?

To wander far from your own or those you have called your own

to hear strangeness calling you from far away

and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk

to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection

nowhere on your mind

(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another

Jew

the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make

those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a

woman’s god)

Find someone like yourself. Find others.

Agree you will never desert each other.

Understand that any rift among you

means power to those who want to do you in.

Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.

But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say

that to be with my people is my dearest wish

but that I also love strangers

that I crave separateness

I hear myself stuttering these words

to my worst friends and my best enemies

who watch for my mistakes in grammar

my mistakes in love.

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?

If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about

privilege

about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,

a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,

who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy

river, woman dragged from her stalled car

into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death

young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening

walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing

availing his Blackness

Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion,

the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has

turned her back

on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her

breasts) hiking alone

found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs

(did she die as queer or as Jew?)

Solitude, O taboo, endangered species

on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend

you

In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:

your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread

her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true

And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?

have I traded off something I don’t name?

To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?

What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for

her spirit-vision

far from the protection of those she has called her own?

Will I find O solitude

your plumes, your breasts, your hair

against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s

singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?

in the old places, anywhere?

What is a Jew in solitude?

What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?

When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock,

crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide

into the sea

when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger

when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities

crushed together on which the world was founded

when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our

loneliness within the tribes

when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and

forbidden city

when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are

chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in

multitude

in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will

solitude mean?

1984–1985

Edges

In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream

the kingfisher cuts through      flashing

spirit-fire from his wings      bluer than violet’s edge

the slice of those wings

5 a.m., first light, hoboes of the past

are leaning through the window, what freightcars

did they hop here      I thought I’d left behind?

Their hands are stretched out but not for bread

they are past charity, they want me to hear      their names

Outside in the world where so much is possible

sunrise rekindles and the kingfisher—

the living kingfisher, not that flash of vision—

darts where the creek drags her wetness over stump and stone

where poison oak reddens      acacia pods collect

curled and secretive against the bulkhead

and the firstlight ghosts go transparent

while the homeless line for bread

1985

Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.

Look:      this is January      the worst onslaught

is ahead of us      Don’t be lured

by these soft grey afternoons      these sunsets cut

from pink and violet tissue-paper      by the thought

the days are lengthening

Don’t let the solstice fool you:

our lives will always be

a stew of contradictions

the worst moment of winter can come in April

when the peepers are stubbornly still      and our bodies

plod on without conviction

and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer

arsenal of everything that tries us:

this battering, blunt-edged life

2.

Heart of cold.      Bones of cold.      Scalp of cold.

the grey      the black      the blond      the red

hairs on a skull of cold.      Within that skull

the thought of war      the sovereign thought

the coldest of all thought.      Dreaming shut down

everything kneeling down to cold      intelligence

smirking with cold      memory

squashed and frozen cold      breath

half held-in for cold.      The freezing people

of a freezing nation      eating

luxury food or garbage

frozen tongues licking the luxury meat

or the pizza-crust      the frozen eyes

welded to other eyes      also frozen

the cold hands trying to stroke      the coldest sex.

Heart of cold      Sex of cold      Intelligence of cold

My country      wedged fast in history

stuck in the ice

3.

My mouth hovers across your breasts

in the short grey winter afternoon

in this bed      we are delicate

and tough      so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

tough      and delicate      we play rings

around each other      our daytime candle burns

with its peculiar light      and if the snow

begins to fall outside      filling the branches

and if the night falls      without announcement

these are the pleasures of winter

sudden, wild and delicate      your fingers

exact      my tongue exact at the same moment

stopping to laugh at a joke

my love      hot on your scent      on the cusp of winter

4.

He slammed his hand across my face      and I

let him do that until      I stopped letting him do it

so I’m in for life.

. . . . he kept saying I was crazy, he’d lock me up

until I went to Women’s Lib and they

told me he’d been abusing me as much

as if he’d hit me:      emotional abuse.

They told me how to answer back.      That I could

answer back.      But my brother-in-law’s a shrink

with the State.      I have to watch my step.

If I stay just within bounds they can’t come and get me.

Women’s Lib taught me the words to say

to remind myself and him I’m a person with rights

like anyone.      But answering back’s no answer.

5.

She is carrying my madness      and I dread her

avoid her when I can

She walks along I.S. 93      howling

in her bare feet

She is number 6375411

in a cellblock in Arkansas

and I dread what she is paying for      that is mine

She has fallen asleep at last in the battered

women’s safe-house      and I dread

her dreams      that I also dream

If never I become exposed or confined like this

what am I hiding

O sister of nausea      of broken ribs      of isolation

what is this freedom I protect      how is it mine

6.

Dear Adrienne:

I’m calling you up tonight

as I might call up a friend      as I might call up a ghost

to ask what you intend to do

with the rest of your life.      Sometimes you act

as if you have all the time there is.

I worry about you when I see this.

The prime of life, old age

aren’t what they used to be;

making a good death isn’t either,

now you can walk around the corner of a wall

and see a light

that already has blown your past away.

Somewhere in Boston      beautiful literature

is being read around the clock

by writers      to signify

their dislike of this.

I hope you’ve got something in mind.

I hope you have some idea

about the rest of your life.

In sisterhood,

Adrienne

7.

Dear Adrienne,

I feel signified by pain

from my breastbone through my left shoulder down

through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain

I am typing this instead of writing by hand

because my wrist on the right side

blooms and rushes with pain

like a neon bulb

You ask me how I’m going to live

the rest of my life

Well, nothing is predictable with pain

Did the old poets write of this?

—in its odd spaces, free,

many have sung and battled—

But I’m already living the rest of my life

not under conditions of my choosing

wired into pain

rider on the slow train

Yours, Adrienne

8.

I’m afraid of prison.      Have been all these years.

Afraid they’ll take my aspirin away

and of other things as well:

beatings      damp and cold      I have my fears.

Unable one day to get up and walk

to do what must be done

Prison as idea      it fills me

with fear      this exposure to my own weakness

at someone else’s whim

I watched that woman go over the barbed-wire fence

at the peace encampment

the wheelchair rider

I didn’t want to do what she did

I thought, They’ll get her for this

I thought, We are not such victims.

9.

Tearing but not yet torn:      this page

The long late-winter rage

wild rain on the windshield

clenched stems      unyielding sticks

of maple, birch      bleached grass      the range

of things resisting change

And this is how I am

and this is how you are

when we resist the charmer’s open sesame

the thief’s light-fingered touch

staying closed because we will

not give ourselves away

until the agent      the manipulator      the false toucher

has left      and it is May

10.

Night      over the great and the little worlds

of Brooklyn      the shredded communities

in Chicago      Argentina      Poland

in Holyoke Massachusetts      Amsterdam      Manchester England

Night falls      the day of atonement begins

in how many divided hearts      how many defiant lives

Toronto      Managua      St. Johnsbury

and the great and little worlds of the women

Something ancient passes across the earth

lifting the dust of the blasted ghettos

You ask if I will eat and I say, Yes,

I have never fasted

but something crosses my life

not a shadow      the reflection of a fire

11.

I came out of the hospital like a woman

who’d watched a massacre

not knowing how to tell

my adhesions      the lingering infections

from the pain on the streets

In my room on Yom Kippur they took me off morphine

I saw shadows on the wall      the dying and the dead

They said Christian Phalangists did it

then Kol Nidre on the radio      and my own

unhoused spirit      trying to find a home

Was it then or another day

in what order did it happen

I thought      They call this elective surgery

but we all have died of this.

12.

Violence as purification:      the one idea.

One massacre great enough to undo another

one last-ditch operation to solve the problem

of the old operation that was bungled

Look:      I have lain on their tables under their tools

under their drugs      from the center of my body

a voice bursts      against these methods

(wherever you made a mistake

batter with radiation      defoliate      cut away)

and yes, there are merciful debridements

but burns turn into rotting flesh

for reasons of vengeance and neglect.

I have been too close to septic too many times

to play with either violence or non-violence.

13.

Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,

feelings are always about more than one thing.

You drag yourself back home and it is autumn

you can’t concentrate, you can’t lie on the couch

so you drive yourself for hours on the quiet roads

crying at the wheel      watching the colors

deepening, fading      and winter is coming

and you long for one idea

one simple, huge idea to take this weight

and you know you will never find it, never

because you don’t want to find it

You will drive and cry and come home and eat

and listen to the news

and slowly even at winter’s edge

the feelings come back in their shapes

and colors      conflicting      they come back

they are changed

14.

Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

meaningless in ordinary American

like, Your mother, too, was a missionary of poets

and in another dream one of my old teachers

shows me a letter of reference

he has written for me, in a language

I know to be English but cannot understand,

telling me it’s in “transformational grammar”

and that the student who typed the letter

does not understand this grammar either.

Lately I dreamed about my father,

how I found him, alive, seated on an old chair.

I think what he said to me was,

You don’t know how lonely I am.

15.

You who think I find words for everything,

and you for whom I write this,

how can I show you what I’m barely

coming into possession of, invisible luggage

of more than fifty years, looking at first

glance like everyone else’s, turning up

at the airport carousel

and the waiting for it, knowing what nobody

would steal must eventually come round—

feeling obsessed, peculiar, longing?

16.

It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived

watching myself in the act of loss—the art of losing,

Elizabeth Bishop called it, but for me no art

only badly-done exercises

acts of the heart forced to question

its presumptions in this world      its mere excitements

acts of the body forced to measure

all instincts against pain

acts of parting      trying to let go

without giving up      yes Elizabeth      a city here

a village there      a sister, comrade, cat

and more      no art to this but anger

17.

I have backroads I take      to places

like the hospital where night pain

is never tended enough but I can drive

under the overlacing boughs

of wineglass elm, oak, maple

from Mosquitoville to Wells River

along the double track with the greened hump

the slope with the great sugar-grove

New Age talk calls it “visualizing”      but I know

under torture I would travel

from the West Barnet burying-ground

to Joe’s Brook      by heart      I know

all of those roads by heart

by heart I know what, and all, I have left behind

18.

The problem, unstated till now, is how

to live in a damaged body

in a world where pain is meant to be gagged

uncured      un-grieved-over      The problem is

to connect, without hysteria, the pain

of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world

For it is the body’s world

they are trying to destroy forever

The best world is the body’s world

filled with creatures      filled with dread

misshapen so      yet the best we have

our raft among the abstract worlds

and how I longed to live on this earth

walking her boundaries      never counting the cost

19.

If to feel is to be unreliable

don’t listen to us

if to be in pain is to be predictable

embittered      bullying

then don’t listen to us

If we’re in danger of mistaking

our personal trouble for the pain on the streets

don’t listen to us

if my fury at being grounded frightens you

take off on your racing skis

in your beautiful tinted masks

Trapped in one idea, you can’t have feelings

Without feelings perhaps you can feel like a god

20.

The tobacco fields lie fallow      the migrant pickers

no longer visible

where undocumented intelligences travailed

on earth they had no stake in

though the dark leaves growing beneath white veils

were beautiful      and the barns opened out like fans

All this of course could have been done differently

This valley itself:      one more contradiction

the paradise fields      the brute skyscrapers

the pesticidal wells

I have been wanting for years

to write a poem      equal to these

material forces

and I have always failed

I wasn’t looking for a muse

only a reader by whom      I could not be mistaken

21.

The cat-tails blaze in the corner      sunflowers

shed their pale fiery dust      on the dark stove-lid

others stand guard      heads bowed      over the garden

the fierce and flaring garden you have made

out of your woes and expectations

tilled into the earth      I circle close to your mind

crash into it sometimes      as you crash into mine

Given this strip of earth      given mere love

should we not be happy?

but happiness comes and goes as it comes and goes

the safe-house is temporary      the garden

lies open to vandals

this whole valley is one more contradiction

and more will be asked of us      we will ask more

22.

In a bald skull sits our friend      in a helmet

of third-degree burns

her quizzical melancholy grace

her irreplaceable self      in utter peril

In the radioactive desert walks a woman

in a black dress      white-haired      steady

as the luminous hand of a clock

in circles she walks      knitting

and unknitting her scabbed fingers

Her face is expressionless      shall we pray to her

shall we speak of the loose pine-needles      how they shook

like the pith of country summers

from the sacks of pitchblende ore in the tin-roofed shack

where it all began

Shall we accuse her of denial

first of the self      then of the mixed virtue

of the purest science      shall we be wise for her

in hindsight      shall we scream It has come to this

Shall we praise her      shall we let her wander

the atomic desert      in peace?

23.

You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

the chemical industries      and pay

that hush-money to the men

who landed out there at twenty      not for belief

but because of who they were      and were called psychos

when they said their bodies contained dioxin

like memories they didn’t want to keep

whose kids came out deformed

You know nothing has changed      no respect or grief

for the losers of a lost war everyone hated

nobody sent them to school like heroes

if they started sueing for everything that was done

there would be no end      there would be a beginning

My country      wedged fast in history

stuck in the ice

24.

Someone said to me:      It’s just that we don’t

know how to cope with the loss of memory.

When your own grandfather doesn’t know you

when your mother thinks you’re somebody else

it’s a terrible thing.

Now just like that is this idea

that the universe will forget us, everything we’ve done

will go nowhere

no one will know who we were.

No one will know who we were!

Not the young who will never      Nor even the old folk

who knew us when we were young      insatiable

for recognition from them

trying so fiercely not to be them

counting on them to know us      anywhere

25.

Did anyone ever know who we were

if we means more than a handful?

flower of a generation      young white men

cut off in the named, commemorated wars

I stare      Jewish      into that loss

for which all names become unspeakable

not ever just the best and brightest

but the most wretched and bedevilled

the obscure      the strange      the driven

the twins      the dwarfs      the geniuses      the gay

But ours was not the only loss

(to whom does annihilation speak

as if for the first time?)

26.

You:      air-driven      reft      from the tuber-bitten soil

that was your portion      from the torched-out village

the Marxist study-group      the Zionist cell

café or cheder      Zaddik or Freudian      straight or gay

woman or man      O you

stripped      bared      appalled

stretched to mere spirit      yet still physical

your irreplaceable knowledge      lost

at the mud-slick bottom of the world

how you held fast      with your bone-meal fingers

to yourselves      each other      and strangers

how you touched      held-up from falling

what was already half-cadaver

how your life-cry taunted extinction

with its wild, crude      so what?

Grief for you has rebellion at its heart

it cannot simply mourn

You:      air-driven:      reft:      are yet our teachers

trying to speak to us in sleep

trying to help us wake

27.

The Tolstoyans      the Afro-American slaves

knew this:      you could be killed

for teaching people to read and write

I used to think the worst affliction

was to be forbidden pencil and paper

well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

for years of the Cultural Revolution

and truly, the magic of written characters

looms and dwindles      shrinks small      grows swollen

depending on where you stand

and what is in your hand

and who can read and why

I think now the worst affliction

is not to know who you are or have been

I have learned this in part

from writers      Reading and writing

aren’t sacred      yet people have been killed

as if they were

28.

This high summer we love will pour its light

the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment

then before we’re ready will crash into autumn

with a violence we can’t accept

a bounty we can’t forgive

Night frost will strike when the noons are warm

the pumpkins wildly glowing      the green tomatoes

straining huge on the vines

queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty

as the milkweed stakes her claim

she who will stand at last      dark sticks barely rising

up through the snow      her testament of continuation

We’ll dream of a longer summer

but this is the one we have:

I lay my sunburnt hand

on your table:      this is the time we have

29.

You who think I find words for everything

this is enough for now

cut it short      cut loose from my words

You for whom I write this

in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage

sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones

when the insect of detritus crawls

from shoulder to elbow to wristbone

remember:      the body’s pain and the pain on the streets

are not the same      but you can learn

from the edges that blur      O you who love clear edges

more than anything      watch the edges that blur

1983–1985

Time’s Power

Solfeggietto

1.

Your windfall at fifteen      your Steinway grand

paid for by fire insurance

came to me as birthright      a black cave

with teeth of ebony and ivory

twanging and thundering over the head

of the crawling child      until

that child was set on the big book on the chair

to face the keyboard world of black and white

—already knowing the world was black and white

The child’s hands      smaller than a sand-dollar

set on the keys      wired to their mysteries

the child’s wits facing the ruled and ruling staves

2.

For years we battled over music lessons

mine, taught by you      Nor did I wonder

what that keyboard meant to you

the hours of solitude      the practising

your life of prize-recitals      lifted hopes

Piatti’s nephew praising you at sixteen

scholarships to the North

Or what it was to teach

boarding-school girls what won’t be used

shelving ambition      beating time

to “On the Ice at Sweet Briar” or

“The Sunken Cathedral” for a child

counting the minutes and the scales to freedom

3.

Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me?

—Summers of ’36, ’37, Europe untuned

what I remember isn’t lessons

not Bach or Brahms or Mozart

but the rented upright in the summer rental

One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack

And so you played, evenings      and so we sang

“Steal Away” and “Swanee River,”

“Swing Low,” and most of all

“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”

How we sang out the chorus      how I loved

the watchfires of the hundred circling camps

and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free

4.

Piano lessons      The mother and the daughter

Their doomed exhaustion      their common mystery

worked out in finger-exercises      Czerny, Hanon

The yellow Schirmer albums      quarter-rests      double-holds

glyphs of an astronomy      the mother cannot teach

the daughter because this is not the story

of a mother teaching magic to her daughter

Side by side I see us locked

My wrists      your voice      are tightened

Passion lives in old songs      in the kitchen

where another woman cooks      teaches      and sings

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd

and in the booklined room

where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches

Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs

The daughter struggles with the strange notations

—dark chart of music’s ocean      flowers and flags

but would rather learn by ear and heart      The mother

says she must learn to read by sight      not ear and heart

5.

Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—

even today a scrip of music balks me—

I feel illiterate in this

your mother-tongue      Had it been Greek or Slovak

no more could your native alphabet have baffled

your daughter      whom you taught for years

held by a tether      over the ivory

and ebony teeth of the Steinway

It is

the three hundredth anniversary of Johann

Sebastian Bach      My earliest life

woke to his English Suites      under your fingers

I understand a language I can’t read

Music you played streams on the car radio

in the freeway night

You kept your passions deep      You have them still

I ask you, both of us

—Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?

Did I see power in yours?

What was worth fighting for?      What did you want?

What did I want from you?

1985–1988

This

Face flashing free      child-arms

lifting the collie pup

torn paper on the path

Central Park      April ’72

behind you      minimal

those benches and that shade

that brilliant light in which

you laughed longhaired

and I’m the keeper of

this little piece of paper

this little piece of truth

I wanted this from you—

laughter      a child turning

into a boy      at ease

in the spring light      with friends

I wanted this for you

I could mutter      Give back

that day      give me again

that child      with the chance

of making it all right

I could yell      Give back that light

on the dog’s teeth      the child’s hair

but no rough drafts are granted

—Do you think I don’t remember?

did you think I was all-powerful

unimpaired      unappalled?

yes      you needed that from me

I wanted this from you

1985

Negotiations

Someday if someday comes we will agree

that trust is not about safety

that keeping faith is not about deciding

to clip our fingernails exactly

to the same length or wearing

a uniform that boasts our unanimity

Someday if someday comes we’ll know

the difference between liberal laissez-faire

pluralism and the way you cut your hair

and the way I clench my hand

against my cheekbone

both being possible gestures of defiance

Someday if there’s a someday we will

bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought

I’ll say Have some in the name of our

trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?

We’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit

we’ve tasted stranger

Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go

back and reread those poems and manifestos

that so enraged us in each other’s hand

I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I

couldn’t write it off      You’ll say

I read you always, even when I hated you

1986

In a Classroom

Talking of poetry, hauling the books

arm-full to the table where the heads

bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,

talking of consonants, elision,

caught in the how, oblivious of why:

I look in your face, Jude,

neither frowning nor nodding,

opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:

a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking

What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

1986

The Novel

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and

Peace

Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield

were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound

like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers

You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary

as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand

on the slight strand that held your tattered mind

blown like an old stocking from a wire

on the wind between two rivers.

All winter you asked nothing

of that book though it lay heavy on your knees

you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk

you were old woman, child, commander

you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing

you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages

you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-

hand growing few, you knew the end was coming

you knew beyond the ending lay

your own, unwritten life

1986

In Memoriam: D.K.

A man walking on the street

feels unwell      has felt unwell

all week, a little      Yet the flowers crammed

in pots on the corner:      furled anemones:

he knows they open

burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo

all the way to their velvet cores

The flowers hanging over the fence:      fuchsias:

each tongued, staring,      all of a fire:

the flowers      He who has

been happy oftener than sad

carelessly happy      well oftener than sick

one of the lucky      is thinking about death

and its music      about poetry

its translations of his life

And what good will it do you

to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?

Read Keats?      How will culture cure you?

Poor, unhappy

unwell culture      what can it sing or say

six weeks from now, to you?

Give me your living hand      If I could take the hour

death moved into you      undeclared, unnamed

—even if sweet, if I could take that hour

between my forceps      tear at it like a monster

wrench it out of your flesh      dissolve its shape in quicklime

and make you well again

no, not again

but still. . . .

1986

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

Two green-webbed chairs

a three-legged stool between

Your tripod

Spears of grass

longer than your bare legs

cast shadows on your legs

drawn up

from the red-and-black

cardboard squares

the board of play

the board of rules

But you’re not playing, you’re talking

It’s midsummer

and greater rules are breaking

It’s the last

innocent summer you will know

and I

will go on awhile pretending that’s not true

When I have done pretending

I can see this:

the depth of the background

shadows

not of one moment only

erased and charcoaled in again

year after year

how the tree looms back behind you

the first tree of the forest

the last tree

from which the deer step out

from protection

the first tree

into dreadfulness

The last and the first tree

1987

Sleepwalking     Next to Death

Sleep      horns of a snail

protruding, retracting

What we choose to know

or not know

all these years

sleepwalking

next to death

I

This snail could have been eaten

This snail could have been crushed

This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet

This snail could have driven fast at night

putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:

This snail could have ridden

in the back of the pick-up, handing guns

II

Knows, chooses not to know

It has always

been about death and chances

The Dutch artist wrote and painted

one or more strange and usable things

For I mean to meet you

in any land      in any language

This is my promise:

I will be there

if you are there

III

In between this and that there are different places

of waiting, airports mostly where the air

is hungover, visibility low      boarding passes not guaranteed

If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi

I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth

I would begin reading you like a dream

That’s how extreme it feels

that’s what I have to do

IV

Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

at this time in your life      Relentlessly

you tell me their names and furiously I

forget their names      Forgetting the names of the stones

you love, you lover of stones

what is it I do?

V

What is it I do? I refuse to take your place

in the world      I refuse to make myself

your courier      I refuse so much

I might ask, what is it I do?

I will not be the dreamer for whom

you are the only dream

I will not be your channel

I will wrestle you to the end

for our difference (as you have wrestled me)

I will change your name and confuse

the Angel

VI

I am stupid with you and practical with you

I remind you to take a poultice      forget a quarrel

I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you

vitamins you hate to take

VII

Calmly you look over my shoulder      at this page      and say

It’s all about you      None of this

tells my story

VIII

Yesterday noon I stood by a river

and many waited to cross over

from the Juarez barrio

to El Paso del Norte

First day of spring      a stand of trees

in Mexico were in palegreen leaf

a man casting a net

into the Rio Grande

and women, in pairs, strolling

across the border

as if taking a simple walk

Many thousands go

I stood by the river and thought of you

young      in Mexico      in a time of hope

IX

The practical nurse is the only nurse

with her plastic valise of poultices and salves

her hands of glove leather and ebony

her ledgers of pain

The practical nurse goes down to the river

in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace

eating a burrito in hand

it will be a long day

a long labor

the midwife will be glad to see her

it will be a long night      someone bleeding

from a botched abortion      a beating      Will you let her touch you

now?

Will you tell her you’re fine?

X

I’m afraid of the border patrol

Not those men

of La Migra who could have run us

into the irrigation canal with their van

I’m afraid

of the patrollers

the sleepwalker in me

the loner in you

XI

I want five hours with you

in a train running south

maybe ten hours

in a Greyhound bound for the border

the two seats side-by-side that become a home

an island of light in the continental dark

the time that takes the place of a lifetime

I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down

I will not be lulled

Promise you won’t jump the train

vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.

that you won’t defect

that we’ll travel

like two snails

our four horns erect

1987

Delta

If you have taken this rubble for my past

raking through it for fragments you could sell

know that I long ago moved on

deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:

my story flows in more than one direction

a delta springing from the riverbed

with its five fingers spread

1987

6/21

It’s June and summer’s height

the longest bridge of light

leaps from all the rivets

of the sky

Yet it’s of earth

and nowhere else I have to speak

Only on earth has this light taken on

these swivelled meanings, only on this earth

where we are dying befouled, gritting our teeth

losing our guiding stars

has this light

found an alphabet      a mouth

1987

Dreamwood

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

or the child’s older self,

a woman dreaming when she should be typing

the last report of the day.      If this were a map,

she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

because she might be walking it, it shows

ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,

here and there a sign of aquifers

and one possible watering-hole.      If this were a map

it would be the map of the last age of her life,

not a map of choices but a map of variations

on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

she could see the end of touristic choices,

of distances blued and purpled by romance,

by which she would recognize that poetry

isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

why it must come.      If this cheap, massproduced

wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

massproduced yet durable, being here now,

is what it is yet a dream-map

so obdurate, so plain,

she thinks, the material and the dream can join

and that is the poem and that is the late report.

1987

Harpers Ferry

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads

glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading

across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,

rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills

and a white girl running away from home

who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how

do I know how the light quails from the trembling

waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge

how behind the gunmetal pines the guns

are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?

I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky

crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck

on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale

like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now

are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership

in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from

the ones who can get it to the ones

who have been refused. It’s a simple act,

to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought

it.

Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought

and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper

snows

than she has ever pictured

but this is one exact and definite place,

a wooden village at the junction of two rivers

two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,

low houses crawling up the mountains.

Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pine’s tooth, ties the leg

in a kerchief

knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town

has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will

know her family face

lies with her throbbing leg on the vined verandah where the woman

of the house

wanted her out of there, that was clear

yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned above her

with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring, mint from the same

source

later with rags wrung from a boiling kettle

and studying, staring eyes. Eyes ringed with watching. A peachtree

shedding yellowy leaves

and a houseful of men who keep off. So great a family of men, and

then this woman

who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.

But this girl is expert in overhearing

and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,

the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl

with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?

Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg

without which she won’t get past Virginia, though she’s running

north.

Whatever gave the girl the idea you could run away

from a family quarrel? Displace yourself, when nothing else

would change? It wasn’t books:

it was half-overheard, a wisp of talk:

escape      flight      free soil

softing past her shoulder

She has never dreamed of arsenals, though

she’s a good rifle-shot, taken at ten

by her brothers, hunting

and though they’ve climbed her over and over

leaving their wet clots in her sheets

on her new-started maidenhair

she has never reached for a gun to hold them off

for guns are the language of the strong to the weak

—How many squirrels have crashed between her sights

what vertebrae cracked at her finger’s signal

what wings staggered through the boughs

whose eyes, ringed and treed, has she eyed as prey?

There is a strategy of mass flight

a strategy of arming

questions of how, of when, of where:

the arguments soak through the walls

of the houseful of men where running from home

the white girl lies in her trouble.

There are things overheard and things unworded, never sung

or pictured, things that happen silently

as the peachtree’s galactic blossoms open in mist, the frost-star

hangs in the stubble, the decanter of moonlight pours its mournless

liquid down

steadily on the solstice fields

the cotton swells in its boll and you feel yourself engorged,

unnameable

you yourself feel encased and picked-open, you feel yourself

unenvisaged

There is no quarrel possible in this silence

You stop yourself listening for a word that will not be spoken:

listening instead to the overheard

fragments, phrases melting on air: No more      Many thousand go

And you know they are leaving as fast as they can, you whose child’s

eye followed each face wondering

not how could they leave but when: you knew they would leave

and so could you but not with them, you were not their child, they

had their own children

you could leave the house where you were daughter, sister, prey

picked open and left to silence, you could leave alone

This would be my scenario of course: that the white girl understands

what I understand and more, that the leg torn in flight

had not betrayed her, had brought her to another point of struggle

that when she takes her place she is clear in mind and her anger

true with the training of her hand and eye, her leg cured on the

porch of history

ready for more than solitary defiance. That when the General passes

through

in her blazing headrag, this girl knows her for Moses, pleads to

stand with the others in the shortened light

accepts the scrutiny, the steel-black gaze; but Moses passes and is

gone to her business elsewhere

leaving the men to theirs, the girl to her own.

But who would she take as leader?

would she fade into the woods

will she die in an indefensible position, a miscarried raid

does she lose the family face at last

pressed into a gully above two rivers, does Shenandoah or Potomac

carry her

north or south, will she wake in the mining camps to stoke the

stoves

and sleep at night with her rifle blue and loyal under her hand

does she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?

1988

Living Memory

Open the book of tales you knew by heart,

begin driving the old roads again,

repeating the old sentences, which have changed

minutely from the wordings you remembered.

A full moon on the first of May

drags silver film on the Winooski River.

The villages are shut

for the night, the woods are open

and soon you arrive at a crossroads

where late, late in time you recognize

part of yourself is buried.      Call it Danville,

village of water-witches.

From here on instinct is uncompromised and clear:

the tales come crowding like the Kalevala

longing to burst from the tongue.      Under the trees

of the backroad you rumor the dark

with houses, sheds, the long barn

moored like a barge on the hillside.

Chapter and verse.      A mailbox.      A dooryard.

A drink of springwater from the kitchen tap.

An old bed, old wallpaper.      Falling asleep like a child

in the heart of the story.

Reopen the book.      A light mist soaks the page,

blunt naked buds tip the wild lilac scribbled

at the margin of the road, no one knows when.

Broken stones of drywall mark the onset

of familiar paragraphs slanting up and away

each with its own version, nothing ever

has looked the same from anywhere.

We came like others to a country of farmers—

Puritans, Catholics, Scotch Irish, Québecois:

bought a failed Yankee’s empty house and barn

from a prospering Yankee,

Jews following Yankee footprints,

prey to many myths but most of all

that Nature makes us free.      That the land can save us.

Pioneer, indigenous; we were neither.

You whose stories these farms secrete,

you whose absence these fields publish,

all you whose lifelong travail

took as given this place and weather

who did what you could with the means you had—

it was pick and shovel work

done with a pair of horses, a stone boat

a strong back, and an iron bar: clearing pasture—

Your memories crouched, foreshortened in our text.

Pages torn.      New words crowding the old.

I knew a woman whose clavicle was smashed

inside a white clapboard house with an apple tree

and a row of tulips by the door.      I had a friend

with six children and a tumor like a seventh

who drove me to my driver’s test and in exchange

wanted to see Goddard College, in Plainfield.      She’d heard

women without diplomas could study there.

I knew a woman who walked

straight across cut stubble in her bare feet away,

women who said, He’s a good man, never

laid a hand to me as living proof.

A man they said fought death

to keep fire for his wife for one more winter, leave

a woodpile to outlast him.

I was left the legacy of a pile of stovewood

split by a man in the mute chains of rage.

The land he loved as landscape

could not unchain him.      There are many,

Gentile and Jew, it has not saved.      Many hearts have burst

over these rocks, in the shacks

on the failure sides of these hills.      Many guns

turned on brains already splitting

in silence.      Where are those versions?

Written-across like nineteenth-century letters

or secrets penned in vinegar, invisible

till the page is held over flame.

I was left the legacy of three sons

—as if in an old legend of three brothers

where one changes into a rufous hawk

one into a snowy owl

one into a whistling swan

and each flies to the mother’s side

as she travels, bringing something she has lost,

and she sees their eyes are the eyes of her children

and speaks their names and they become her sons.

But there is no one legend and one legend only.

This month the land still leafless, out from snow

opens in all directions, the transparent woods

with sugar-house, pond, cellar-hole unscreened.

Winter and summer cover the closed roads

but for a few weeks they lie exposed,

the old nervous-system of the land.      It’s the time

when history speaks in a row of crazy fence-poles

a blackened chimney, houseless, a spring

soon to be choked in second growth

a stack of rusting buckets, a rotting sledge.

It’s the time when your own living

laid open between seasons

ponders clues like the One Way sign defaced

to Bone Way, the stones

of a graveyard in Vermont, a Jewish cemetery

in Birmingham, Alabama.

How you have needed these places,

as a tall gaunt woman used to need to sit

at the knees of bronze-hooded Grief

by Clover Adams’ grave.

But you will end somewhere else, a sift of ashes

awkwardly flung by hands you have held and loved

or, nothing so individual, bones reduced

with, among, other bones, anonymous,

or wherever the Jewish dead

have to be sought in the wild grass overwhelming

the cracked stones.      Hebrew spelled in wilderness.

All we can read is life.      Death is invisible.

A yahrzeit candle belongs

to life.      The sugar skulls

eaten on graves for the Day of the Dead

belong to life.      To the living.      The Kaddish is to the living,

the Day of the Dead, for the living.      Only the living

invent these plumes, tombs, mounds, funeral ships,

living hands turn the mirrors to the walls,

tear the boughs of yew to lay on the casket,

rip the clothes of mourning.      Only the living

decide death’s color: is it white or black?

The granite bulkhead

incised with names, the quilt of names, were made

by the living, for the living.

I have watched

films from a Pathé camera, a picnic

in sepia, I have seen my mother

tossing an acorn into the air;

my grandfather, alone in the heart of his family;

my father, young, dark, theatrical;

myself, a six-month child.

Watching the dead we see them living

their moments, they were at play, nobody thought

they would be watched so.

When Selma threw

her husband’s ashes into the Hudson

and they blew back on her and on us, her friends,

it was life.      Our blood raced in that gritty wind.

Such details get bunched, packed, stored

in these cellar-holes of memory

so little is needed

to call on the power, though you can’t name its name:

It has its ways of coming back:

a truck going into gear on the crown of the road

the white-throat sparrow’s notes

the moon in her fullness standing

right over the concrete steps the way

she stood the night they landed there.

From here

nothing has changed, and everything.

The scratched and treasured photograph Richard showed me

taken in ’29, the year I was born:

it’s the same road I saw

strewn with the Perseids one August night,

looking older, steeper than now

and rougher, yet I knew it.      Time’s

power, the only just power—would you

give it away?

1988

An Atlas of the

Difficult World

An Atlas of the Difficult World

I

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

—a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or

voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast

past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires

THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes

dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand

in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,

Malathion in the throat, communion,

the hospital at the edge of the fields,

prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,

the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching

planes dusting rows of pickers.

Elsewhere declarations are made:      at the sink

rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market

one says: “On the pond this evening is a light

finer than my mother’s handkerchief

received from her mother, hemmed and initialled

by the nuns in Belgium.”

One says:      “I can lie for hours

reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.

I’d rather lie awake and read.”      One writes:

“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks

in this cabin’s walls, the road

in winter is often impassable,

I live here so I don’t have to go out and act,

I’m trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing.”

One says: “I never knew from one day to the next

where it was coming from:      I had to make my life happen

from day to day.      Every day an emergency.

Now I have a house, a job from year to year.

What does that make me?”

In the writing workshop a young man’s tears

wet the frugal beard he’s grown to go with his poems

hoping they have redemption stored

in their lines, maybe will get him home free.      In the classroom

eight-year-old faces are grey. The teacher knows which children

have not broken fast that day,

remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal.

•   •   •

I don’t want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,

tore up her writing, threw the kerosene

lantern into her face waiting

like an unbearable mirror of his own.      I don’t

want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer

how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck

and backed it into her.      I don’t want to think

how her guesses betrayed her—that he meant well, that she

was really the stronger and ought not to leave him

to his own apparent devastation.      I don’t want to know

wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials

and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly

over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in

another season, light and music still pouring over

our fissured, cracked terrain.

•   •   •

Within two miles of the Pacific rounding

this long bay, sheening the light for miles

inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over

strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind

returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with

ever-changing words, always the same language

—this is where I live now.      If you had known me

once, you’d still know me now though in a different

light and life.      This is no place you ever knew me.

But it would not surprise you

to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean

eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always

I fix on the land.      I am stuck to earth.      What I love here

is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks

small canyons running through pitched hillsides

liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading

to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle

on their blond hills.      I drive inland over roads

closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons

roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light

where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled

to death with lowstruck boughs.      These are not the roads

you knew me by.      But the woman driving, walking, watching

for life and death, is the same.

II

Here is a map of our country:

here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt

This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin

we dare not taste its water

This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms

This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms

This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy

This is the cemetery of the poor

who died for democracy      This is a battlefield

from a nineteenth-century war      the shrine is famous

This is the sea-town of myth and story      when the fishing fleets

went bankrupt here is where the jobs were      on the pier

processing frozen fishsticks      hourly wages and no shares

These are other battlefields      Centralia      Detroit

here are the forests primeval      the copper      the silver lodes

These are the suburbs of acquiescence      silence rising fumelike

from the streets

This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires

flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling

whose children are drifting blind alleys pent

between coiled rolls of razor wire

I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural

then yes let it be      these are small distinctions

where do we see it from is the question

III

Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, bought at the

Ben Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one

chipped

—now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between

a spider is working, the third point of her filamental passage

a wicker basket-handle.      All afternoon I’ve sat

at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in

slivers

and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows

at the long scribble of lake due south

where the wind and weather come from.      There are bottles set in

the windows

that children dug up in summer woods or bought for nickels and

dimes

in dark shops that are no more, gold-brown, foam-green or

cobalt glass, blue that gave way to the cobalt

bomb.      The woods

are still on the hill behind the difficult unknowable

incommensurable barn.      The wind’s been working itself up

in low gusts gnashing the leaves left chattering on branches

or drifting over still-green grass;      but it’s been a warm wind.

An autumn without a killing frost so far, still warm

feels like a time of self-deception, a memory of pushing

limits in youth, that intricate losing game of innocence long

overdue.

Frost is expected tonight, gardens are gleaned, potplants taken in,

there is talk of withering, of wintering-over.

•   •   •

North of Willoughby the back road to Barton

turns a right-hand corner on a high plateau

bitten by wind now and rimed grey-white

—farms of rust and stripping paint, the shortest growing season

south of Quebec, a place of sheer unpretentious hardship, dark

pines stretching away

toward Canada.      There was a one-room schoolhouse

by a brook where we used to picnic, summers, a little world

of clear bubbling water, cowturds, moss, wild mint, wild mush

rooms under the pines.

One hot afternoon I sat there reading Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte

Brontë—the remote

upland village where snow lay long and late, the deep-rutted

roads, the dun and grey moorland

—trying to enfigure such a life, how genius

unfurled in the shortlit days, the meagre means of that house. I

never thought

of lives at that moment around me, what girl dreamed

and was extinguished in the remote back-country I had come to

love,

reader reading under a summer tree in the landscape

of the rural working poor.

Now the panes are black and from the south the wind still staggers,

creaking the house:

brown milkweeds toss in darkness below but I cannot see them

the room has lost the window and turned into itself: two corner

shelves of things

both useful and unused, things arrived here by chance or choice,

two teapots, one broken-spouted, red and blue

came to me with some books from my mother’s mother, my

grandmother Mary

who travelled little, loved the far and strange, bits of India, Asia

and this teapot of hers was Chinese or she thought it was

—the other given by a German Jew, a refugee who killed herself

Midlands flowered ware, and this too cannot be used because

coated inside—why?—with flaking paint:

“You will always use it for flowers,” she instructed when she

gave it.

In a small frame, under glass, my father’s bookplate, engraved in

his ardent youth, the cleft tree-trunk and the wintering ants:

Without labor, no sweetness—motto I breathed in from him and

learned in grief and rebellion to take and use

—and later learned that not all labor ends in sweetness.

A little handwrought iron candlestick, given by another German

woman

who hidden survived the Russian soldiers beating the walls in

1945,

emigrated, married a poet.      I sat many times at their table.

They are now long apart.

Some odd glasses for wine or brandy, from an ignorant, passionate

time—we were in our twenties—

with the father of the children who dug for old medicine bottles

in the woods

—afternoons listening to records, reading Karl Shapiro’s Poems

of a Jew and Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health”

aloud, using the poems to talk to each other

—now it’s twenty years since last I heard that intake

of living breath, as if language were too much to bear,

that voice overcast like klezmer with echoes, uneven, edged,

torn, Brooklyn street crowding Harvard Yard

—I’d have known any syllable anywhere.

Stepped out onto the night-porch.      That wind has changed,

though still from the south

it’s blowing up hard now, no longer close to earth but driving

high

into the crowns of the maples, into my face

almost slamming the stormdoor into me.      But it’s warm, warm,

pneumonia wind, death of innocence wind, unwinding wind,

time-hurtling wind.      And it has a voice in the house.      I hear

conversations that can’t be happening, overhead in the bedrooms

and I’m not talking of ghosts.      The ghosts are here of course but

they speak plainly

—haven’t I offered food and wine, listened well for them all

these years,

not only those known in life but those before our time

of self-deception, our intricate losing game of innocence long

overdue?

•   •   •

The spider’s decision is made, her path cast, candle-wick to

wicker handle to candle,

in the air, under the lamp, she comes swimming toward me

(have I been sitting here so long?)      she will use everything,

nothing comes without labor, she is working so

hard and I know

nothing all winter can enter this house or this web, not all labor

ends in sweetness.

But how do I know what she needs?      Maybe simply

to spin herself a house within a house, on her own terms

in cold, in silence.

IV

Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

the map of this country together:      the girasol, orange gold-

petalled

with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to

California

runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences

milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations

truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards

of veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the

jerusalem artichoke

that has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.

Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for

a plant so generous?      Spendtbrift we say, as if

accounting nature’s waste.      Ours darkens

the states to their strict borders, flushes

down borderless streams, leaches from lakes to the curdled foam

down by the riverside.

Waste.      Waste.      The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the

builder severed, brain of the maker starved

those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish

now at risk in this segregate republic

locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside

those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments

those urgently needed for the work of perception

work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of

new streets

work of the speaker who also listens

meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate

woman, the desperate man

—never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair—it cannot

be done without them

and where are they now?

V

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox

Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon

the ex-Army nurse hitch-hiking from the debriefing center; medal

of spit on the veteran’s shoulder

—catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause

earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks

these pilgrim ants pouring out from the bronze eyes, ears,

nostrils,

the mouth of Liberty

over the chained bay waters

San Quentin:

once we lost our way and drove in under the searchlights to the

gates

end of visiting hours, women piling into cars

the bleak glare aching over all

Where are we moored?      What

are the bindings?      What be-

hooves us?

Driving the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

no monument’s in sight but fog

prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz

poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog

no icon lifts a lamp here

history’s breath blotting the air

over Gold Mountain      a transfer

of patterns like the transfer of African appliqué

to rural Alabama      voices alive in legends, curses

tongue-lashings

poems on a weary wall

And when light swivels off Angel Island and Alcatraz

when the bays leap into life

views of the Palace of Fine Arts,

TransAmerica

when sunset bathes the three bridges

still

old ghosts crouch hoarsely whispering

under Gold Mountain

•   •   •

North and east of the romantic headlands there are roads into tule

fog

places where life is cheap poor quick unmonumented

Rukeyser would have guessed it coming West for the opening

of the great red bridge      There are roads to take she wrote

when you think of your country      driving south

to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it

heaped like snow, death-angel white

—poet journalist pioneer mother

uncovering her country:      there are roads to take

•   •   •

I don’t want to know how he tracked them

along the Appalachian Trail, hid close

by their tent, pitched as they thought in seclusion

killing one woman, the other

dragging herself into town      his defense they had teased his

loathing

of what they were      I don’t want to know

but this is not a bad dream of mine      these are the materials

and so are the smell of wild mint and coursing water remembered

and the sweet salt darkred tissue I lay my face

upon, my tongue within.

A crosshair against the pupil of an eye

could blow my life from hers

a cell dividing without maps, sliver of ice beneath a wheel

could do the job.      Faithfulness isn’t the problem.

VI

A potato explodes in the oven.      Poetry and famine:

the poets who never starved, whose names we know

the famished nameless taking ship with their hoard of poetry

Annie Sullivan half-blind in the workhouse enthralling her child-

mates

with lore her father had borne in his head from Limerick along

with the dream of work

and hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire. But a poetry older

than hatred. Poetry

in the workhouse, laying of the rails, a potato splattering oven

walls

poetry of cursing and silence, bitter and deep, shallow and

drunken

poetry of priest-talk, of I.R.A.-talk, kitchen-talk, dream-talk,

tongues despised

in cities where in a mere fifty years language has rotted to jargon,

lingua franca of inclusion

from turns of speech ancient as the potato, muttered at the coals

by women and men

rack-rented, harshened, numbed by labor ending

in root-harvest rotted in field. 1847. No relief. No succour.

America. Meat three times a day, they said.      Slaves—You would

not be that.

VII (The Dream-Site)

Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

and others known and unknown there, long sweet summer evening

on the tarred roof:

leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars

the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands

every known constellation flinging out fiery threads

and you could distinguish all

—cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars

coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between

—you knew your way among them, knew you were part of them

until, neck aching, you sat straight up and saw:

It was New York, the dream-site

the lost city the city of dreadful light

where once as the sacks of garbage rose

like barricades around us we

stood listening to riffs from Pharaoh Sanders’ window

on the brownstone steps

went striding the avenues in our fiery hair

in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading

or pressed against other bodies

feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan

The Bronx unscrolling in the long breakneck

express plunges

as darkly we felt our own blood

streaming      a living city overhead

coherently webbed and knotted      bristling

we and all the others

known and unknown

living its life

VIII

He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him.

He depended on that:

the cuts would be made by someone else, the direction

come from somewhere else, arrows flashing on the freeway.

That he’d end somewhere gazing

straight into It was what he imagined and nothing beyond.

That he’d end facing as limit a thing without limits and so he

flung

and burned and hacked and bled himself toward that (if I

understand

this story at all). What he found: FOR SALE: DO NOT

DISTURB

OCCUPANT on some cliffs;      some ill-marked, ill-kept roads

ending in warnings about shellfish in Vietnamese, Spanish and

English.

But the spray was any color he could have dreamed

—gold, ash, azure, smoke, moonstone—

and from time to time the ocean swirled up through the eye of a

rock and taught him

limits.      Throwing itself backward, singing and sucking, no

teacher, only its violent

self, the Pacific, dialectical waters rearing

their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient.

•   •   •

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?

What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother

on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight

out

into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of

the father

facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide,

what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?

•   •   •

If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the

rocks

what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a

bottled message

from the sunken slaveships?      what of the huge sun slowly de-

faulting into the clouds

what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the

moon, the basket

with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal

packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling

ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood

all picnics are eaten on the grave?

IX

On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely.

Lonely in the bar, on the shore of the coastal river

with your best friend, his wife, and your wife, fishing

lonely in the prairie classroom with all the students who love

you. You know some ghosts

come everywhere with you yet leave them unaddressed

for years.      You spend weeks in a house

with a drunk, you sober, whom you love, feeling lonely.

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in

loneliness.

I wonder if this is a white man’s madness.

I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that.

What have I learned from stories of the hunt, of lonely men in

gangs?

But there were other stories:

one man riding the Mohave Desert

another man walking the Grand Canyon.

I thought those solitary men were happy, as ever they had been.

Indio’s long avenues

of Medjool date-palm and lemon sweep to the Salton Sea

in Yucca Flats the high desert reaches higher, bleached and spare

of talk.

At Twentynine Palms I found the grave

of Maria Eleanor Whallon, eighteen years, dead at the watering-

hole in 1903, under the now fire-branded palms

Her mother travelled on alone to cook in the mining camps.

X

Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat.

Winter sun in the rosetrees.

An old Mexican with a white moustache prunes them back

spraying

the cut branches with dormant oil.      The old paper-bag-brown

adobe walls

stretch apart from the rebuilt mission, in their own time.      It is

lonely here

in the curve of the road winding through vast brown fields

machine-engraved in furrows

of relentless precision.      In the small chapel

La Nuestra Señora de la Soledad dwells in her shallow arch

painted on either side with columns.      She is in black lace crisp as

cinders

from head to foot.      Alone, solitary, homesick

in her lonely retreat.      Outside black olives fall and smash

littering and staining the beaten path.      The gravestones of the

padres

are weights pressing down on the Indian artisans.      It is the sixth

day of another war.

•   •   •

Across the freeway stands another structure

from the other side of the mirror      it destroys

the logical processes of the mind, a man’s thoughts

become completely disorganized, madness streaming from every throat

frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls

the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, the smells, the human waste.

To determine how men will behave once they enter prison

it is of first importance to know that prison.      (From the freeway

gun-turrets planted like water-towers in another garden,

outbuildings spaced in winter sun

and the concrete mass beyond:      who now writes letters deep

inside that cave?)

If my instructor tells me that the world and its affairs

are run as well as they possibly can be, that I am governed

by wise and judicious men, that I am free and should be happy,

and if when I leave the instructor’s presence and encounter

the exact opposite, if I actually sense or see confusion, war,

recession, depression, death and decay, is it not reasonable

that I should become perplexed?

From eighteen to twenty-eight

of his years

a young man schools himself, argues,

debates, trains, lectures to himself,

teaches himself Swahili, Spanish, learns

five new words of English every day,

chainsmokes, reads, writes letters.

In this college of force he wrestles bitterness,

self-hatred, sexual anger, cures his own nature.

Seven of these years in solitary.      Soledad.

But the significant feature of the desperate man reveals itself

when he meets other desperate men, directly or vicariously;

and he experiences his first kindness, someone to strain with him,

to strain to see him as he strains to see himself,

someone to understand, someone to accept the regard,

the love, that desperation forces into hiding.

Those feelings that find no expression in desperate times

store themselves up in great abundance, ripen, strengthen,

and strain the walls of their repository to the utmost;

where the kindred spirit touches this wall it crumbles—

no one responds to kindness, no one is more sensitive to it

than the desperate man.

XI

One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:

a precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-

moon

in arrest:      the hardiest plants crouch shrunken, a “killing frost”

on bougainvillea, Pride of Madeira, roseate black-purple succu-

lents bowed

juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing

slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels

—into the streets of the universe, now!

Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war

Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming

and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.

The history of this earth and the bones within it?

Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of

shame and of hope?

Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?

Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?

Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule

fibre, one woman

like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of

her task?

One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in

passing

—each of us now a driven grain, a nucleus, a city in crisis

some busy constructing enclosures, bunkers, to escape the com-

mon fate

some trying to revive dead statues to lead us, breathing their

breath against marble lips

some who try to teach the moment, some who preach the

moment

some who aggrandize, some who diminish themselves in the face

of half-grasped events

—power and powerlessness run amuck, a tape reeling backward

in jeering, screeching syllables—

some for whom war is new, others for whom it merely continues

the old paroxysms of time

some marching for peace who for twenty years did not march for

justice

some for whom peace is a white man’s word and a white man’s

privilege

some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of

powerlessness and power

as the nurse learns hip and thigh and weight of the body he has

to lift and sponge, day upon day

as she blows with her every skill on the spirit’s embers still burn-

ing by their own laws in the bed of death.

A patriot is not a weapon.      A patriot is one who wrestles for the

soul of her country

as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country

(gazing through the great circle at Window Rock into the sheen

of the Viet Nam Wall)

as he wrestles for his own being.      A patriot is a citizen trying to

wake

from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare

of the white general and the Black general posed in their

camouflage,

to remember her true country, remember his suffering land:

remember

that blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth

to meet again in mourning

that the internal emigrant is the most homesick of all women and

of all men

that every flag that flies today is a cry of pain.

Where are we moored?

What are the bindings?

What behooves us?

XII

What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

from inside out, executing the blueprints of resistance and mercy

drawn up in childhood, in that little girl, round-faced with

clenched fists, already acquainted with mourning

in the creased snapshot you gave me?      What homage will be

paid to beauty

that insists on speaking truth, knows the two are not always the

same,

beauty that won’t deny, is itself an eye, will not rest under

contemplation?

Those low long clouds we were driving under a month ago in

New Mexico, clouds an arm’s reach away

were beautiful and we spoke of it but I didn’t speak then

of your beauty at the wheel beside me, dark head steady, eyes

drinking the spaces

of crimson, indigo, Indian distance, Indian presence,

your spirit’s gaze informing your body, impatient to mark what’s

possible, impatient to mark

what’s lost, deliberately destroyed, can never any way be

returned,

your back arched against all icons, simulations, dead letters

your woman’s hands turning the wheel or working with shears,

torque wrench, knives, with salt pork, onions, ink

and fire

your providing sensate hands, your hands of oak and silk, of

blackberry juice and drums

—I speak of them now.

(FOR M.)

XIII (Dedications)

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour.      I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet.      I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age.      I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your

hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

1990–1991

That Mouth

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste

daughters, not sons, obtain:

These are the lips, powerful rudders

pushing through groves of kelp,

the girl’s terrible, unsweetened taste

of the whole ocean, its fathoms: this is that taste.

This is not the father’s kiss, the mother’s:

a father can try to choke you,

a mother drown you to save you:

all the transactions have long been enacted.

This is neither a sister’s tale nor a brother’s:

strange trade-offs have long been made.

This is the swallow, the splash

of krill and plankton, that mouth

described as a girl’s—

enough to give you a taste:

Are you a daughter, are you a son?

Strange trade-offs have long been made.

1988

Marghanita

at the oak table under the ceiling fan

Marghanita at the table counting up

a dead woman’s debts.

Kicks off a sandal, sips

soda from a can, wedges the last bills

under the candelabrum.      She is here

because no one else was there when worn-to-skeleton

her enemy died.      Her love.      Her twin.

Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive

the stainless steel

before she ever saw them.      She’s not practical,

you know, they used to say.

She’s the artist, she got away.

In her own place Marghanita glues bronze

feathers into wings, smashes green and clear

bottles into bloodletting particles

crushed into templates of sand

scores mirrors till they fall apart and sticks them up

in driftwood boughs, drinks golden

liquid with a worm’s name, forgets

her main enemy, her twin;

scores her wrist on a birthday

dreams the hospital dream.

When they were girl and boy together, boy and girl

she pinned his arm against his back

for a box containing false

lashes and fingernails, a set of veils, a string of pearls,

she let go and listened to his tales

she breathed their breath, he hers,

they each had names only the other knew.

Marghanita in the apartment everyone has left:

not a nephew, not a niece,

nobody from the parish

—gone into hiding, emigrated, lost?

where are the others?

Marghanita comes back because she does,

adding up what’s left:

a rainsoaked checkbook, snapshots

razed from an album,

colors ground into powder, brushes, wands

for eyelids, lashes, brows,

beads of bath-oil, tubes of glycerin

—a dead woman’s luxuries.

Marghanita will

take care of it all.      Pay if nothing else

the last month’s rent.      The wings of the fan

stir corners of loose paper,

light ebbs from the window-lace,

she needs to go out and eat.      And so

hating and loving come down

to a few columns of figures,

an aching stomach, a care taken:      something done.

1989

Tattered Kaddish

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field

messenger from earthmire gleaning

transcripts of fog

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month

speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel

on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut

on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved

loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot

on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason

to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

1989

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

I

Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

between winter-stiff, ranged apple-trees

each netted in transparent air,

thin sinking light, heartsick within and filmed

in heartsickness around you, gelatin cocoon

invisible yet impervious—to the hawk

steering against the cloudbank, to the clear

oranges burning at the rancher’s gate

rosetree, agave, stiff beauties holding fast

with or without your passion,

the pruners freeing up the boughs

in the unsearched faith these strange stiff shapes will bear.

II

Showering after ’flu;      stripping the bed;

running the shrouds of sickness through the wash;

airing the rooms;      emptying the trash;

it’s as if part of you had died in the house

sometime in that last low-lit afternoon

when your dreams ebbed salt-thick into the sheets

and now this other’s left to wash the corpse,

burn eucalyptus, turn the mirrors over—

this other who herself barely came back,

whose breath was fog to your mist, whose stubborn shadow

covered you as you lay freezing, she survived

uncertain who she is or will be without you.

III

If you know who died in that bed, do you know

who has survived?      If you say, she was weaker,

held life less dear, expected others

to fight for her      if pride lets you name her

victim      and the one who got up and threw

the windows open, stripped the bed, survivor

—what have you said, what do you know

of the survivor when you know her

only in opposition to the lost?

What does it mean to say I have survived

until you take the mirrors and turn them outward

and read your own face in their outraged light?

IV

That light of outrage is the light of history

springing upon us when we’re least prepared,

thinking maybe a little glade of time

leaf-thick and with clear water

is ours, is promised us, for all we’ve hacked

and tracked our way through:      to this:

What will it be?      Your wish or mine?      your

prayers or my wish then:      that those we love

be well, whatever that means, to be well.

Outrage:      who dare claim protection for their own

amid such unprotection?      What kind of prayer

is that?      To what kind of god?      What kind of wish?

V

She who died on that bed sees it her way:

She who went under peers through the translucent shell

cupping her death and sees her other well,

through a long lens, in silvered outline, well

she sees her other and she cannot tell

why when the boom of surf struck at them both

she felt the undertow and heard the bell,

thought death would be their twinning, till the swell

smashed her against the reef, her other still

fighting the pull, struggling somewhere away

further and further, calling her all the while:

she who went under summons her other still.

1989–1990

Darklight

I

Early day.      Grey the air.

Grey the boards of the house, the bench,

red the dilated potflower’s petals

blue the sky that will rend through

this fog.

Dark summer’s outer reaches:

thrown husk of a moon

sharpening

in the last dark blue.

I think of your eye

(dark the light

that washes into a deeper dark).

An eye, coming in closer.

Under the lens

lashes and veins grow huge

and huge the tear that washes out the eye,

the tear that clears the eye.

II

When heat leaves the walls at last

and the breeze comes

or seems to come, off water

or off the half-finished moon

her silver roughened by a darkblue rag

this is the ancient hour

between light and dark, work and rest

earthly tracks and star-trails

the last willed act of the day

and the night’s first dream

If you could have this hour

for the last hour of your life.

1988–1990

For a Friend in Travail

Waking from violence:      the surgeon’s probe left in the foot

paralyzing the body from the waist down.

Dark before dawn:      wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house

the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,

half-slice of moon to the south

through dark panes.      A time to speak to you.

What are you going through? she said, is the great question.

Philosopher of oppression, theorist

of the victories of force.

We write from the marrow of our bones.      What she did not

ask, or tell:      how victims save their own lives.

That crawl along the ledge, then the ravelling span of fibre strung

from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.

Waking, not sure we made it.      Relief, appallment, of waking.

Consciousness.      O, no.      To sleep again.

O to sleep without dreaming.

How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon

melting into moon-colored air

moist and sweet, here on the western edge.

Love for the world, and we are part of it.

How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes

she did not tell.

What are you going through, there on the other edge?

1990

Final Notations

it will not be simple, it will not be long

it will take little time, it will take all your thought

it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath

it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart

it will not be long, it will occupy your thought

as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

you are taking parts of us into places never planned

you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath

it will not be simple, it will become your will

1991

Dark Fields of the Republic

What Kind of Times Are These

What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows

uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but

don’t be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

1991

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves

reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I

1991

To the Days

From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,

all of it—the newscasts’ terrible stories

of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,

much worse—the knowing what it means to be lied to.

Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,

coffee and bread with sour plum jam.

Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.

Lives ticking on as if.

A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.

Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.

Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.

Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.

Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.

To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.

To know the bodies drifting underwater.

To be human, said Rosa—I can’t teach you that.

A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds—his moment.

Surely the love of life is never-ending,

the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?

I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.

Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn

in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.

Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment

with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.

1991

Miracle Ice Cream

MIRACLE’S truck comes down the little avenue,

Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,

and, yes, you can feel happy

with one piece of your heart.

Take what’s still given: in a room’s rich shadow

a woman’s breasts swinging lightly as she bends.

Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.

Late, you sit weighing the evening news,

fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,

the rest of your heart.

1992

Rachel

There’s a girl born in abrupt August light

far north, a light soon to be peeled

like an onion, down to nothing. Around her ions are falling

in torrents, glacial eyes are staring, the monster’s body

trapped in the bay goes through its spasms.

What she opens her gray eyes on

is drastic. Even the man and woman gazing

into her unfocused gaze, searching for focus,

are drastic.

It’s the end of a century.

If she gets to grow old, if there’s anything

: anyone to speak, will they say of her,

She grew up to see it, she was our mother, but

she was born one of them?

1992

Amends

Nights like this:      on the cold apple-bough

a white star, then another

exploding out of the bark:

on the ground, moonlight picking at small stones

as it picks at greater stones, as it rises with the surf

laying its cheek for moments on the sand

as it licks the broken ledge, as it flows up the cliffs,

as it flicks across the tracks

as it unavailing pours into the gash

of the sand-and-gravel quarry

as it leans across the hangared fuselage

of the crop-dusting plane

as it soaks through cracks into the trailers

tremulous with sleep

as it dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers

as if to make amends

1992

Calle Visión

1

Not what you thought:      just a turn-off

leading downhill not up

narrow, doesn’t waste itself

has a house at the far end

scrub oak and cactus in the yard

some cats      some snakes

in the house there is a room

in the room there is a bed

on the bed there is a blanket

that tells the coming of the railroad

under the blanket there are sheets

scrubbed transparent here and there

under the sheets there’s a mattress

the old rough kind, with buttons and ticking

under the mattress is a frame

of rusting iron      still strong

the whole bed smells of soap and rust

the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

this is your room

in Calle Visión

if you took the turn-off

it was for you

2

Calle Visión      sand in your teeth

granules of cartilage in your wrists

Calle Visión      firestorm behind

shuttered eyelids      fire in your foot

Calle Visión      rocking the gates

of your locked bones

Calle Visión      dreamnet dropped

over your porous sleep

3

Lodged in the difficult hotel

all help withheld

a place not to live but to die in

not an inn but a hospital

a friend’s love came to me

touched and took me away

in a car      love

of a curmudgeon, a short-fuse

and as he drove      eyes on the road

I felt his love

and that was simply the case      the way things were

unstated and apparent

and like the rest of it

clear as a dream

4

Calle Visión      your heart beats on unbroken

how is this possible

Calle Visión      wounded knee

wounded spine      wounded eye

Have you ever worked around metal?

Are there particles under your skin?

Calle Visión      but your heart is still whole

how is this possible

since what can be      will be taken

when not offered in trust and faith

by the collectors of collectibles

the professors of what-has-been-suffered

The world is falling down hold my hand

It’s a lonely sound hold my hand

Calle Visión      never forget

the body’s pain

never divide it

5

Ammonia

carbon dioxide

carbon monoxide

methane

hydrogen sulfide

:     the gasses that rise from urine and feces

in the pig confinement units known as nurseries

can eat a metal doorknob off in half a year

pig-dander

dust from dry manure

—lung-scar:      breath-shortedness an early symptom

And the fire shall try

every man’s work      :Calle Visión:

and every woman’s

if you took the turn-off

this is your revelation      this the source

6

The repetitive motions of slaughtering

—fire in wrists      in elbows—

the dead birds coming at you along the line

—how you smell them in your sleep—

fire in your wrist      blood packed

under your fingernails      heavy air

doors padlocked on the outside

—you might steal a chicken—

fire in the chicken factory fire

in the carpal tunnel      leaping the frying vats

yellow smoke from soybean oil

and wasted parts and insulating wire

—some fleeing to the freezer some

found “stuck in poses of escape”—

7

You can call on beauty still and it will leap

from all directions

you can write beauty into the cruel file

of things done      things left undone      but

once we were dissimilar

yet unseparate      that’s beauty      that’s what you catch

in the newborn’s midnight gaze

the fog that melts the falling stars

the virus from the smashed lianas driven

searching now for us

8

In the room      in the house

in Calle Visión

all you want      is to lie down

alone on your back      let your hands

slide lightly over your hipbones

But she’s there with her remnants her cross-sections

trying to distract you

with her childhood her recipes her

cargo of charred pages her

carved and freckled neck-stones

her crying-out-for-witness her

backward-forward timescapes

her suitcase in Berlin

and the one lost and found

in her island go-and-come

—is she terrified you will forget her?

9

In the black net

of her orange wing

the angry nightblown butterfly

hangs on a piece of lilac in the sun

carried overland like her

from a long way off

She has travelled hard and far

and her interrogation goes:

—Hands dripping with wet earth

head full of shocking dreams

O what have you buried all these years

what have you dug up?

•   •   •

This place is alive with the dead and with the living

I have never been alone here

I wear my triple eye as I walk along the road

past, present, future all are at my side

Storm-beaten, tough-winged passenger

there is nothing I have buried that can die

10

On the road there is a house

scrub oak and cactus in the yard

lilac carried overland

from a long way off

in the house there is a bed

on the bed there is a blanket

telling the coming of the railroad

under the mattress there’s a frame

of rusting iron      still strong

the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

the window smells of old

tobacco-dust and rain

1992–1993

Reversion

This woman/      the heart of the matter.

This woman flung into solitary by the prayers of her tribe.

This woman waking/      reaching for scissors/      starting to cut her hair

Hair long shaven/      growing out.

To snip to snip to snip/      creak of sharpness meeting itself against the roughness of her hair.

This woman whose voices drive her into exile.

(Exile, exile.)

Drive her toward the other side.

By train and foot and ship, to the other side.

Other side.      Of a narrow sea.

This woman/      the heart of the matter.

Heart of the law/      heart of the prophets.

Their voices buzzing like raspsaws in her brain.

Taking ship without a passport.

How does she do it.      Even the ships have eyes.

Are painted like birds.

This woman has no address book.

This woman perhaps has a toothbrush.

Somewhere dealing for red/blue dyes to crest her rough-clipped hair.

On the other side:      stranger to women and to children.

Setting her bare footsole in the print of the stranger’s bare foot in the sand.

Feeding the stranger’s dog from the sack of her exhaustion.

Hearing the male prayers of the stranger’s tribe/      rustle of the stranger’s river.

Lying down asleep and dreamless in one of their doorways.

She has long shed the coverings.

On the other side she walks bare-armed, bare-legged, clothed in voices.

Here or there picks up a scarf/      a remnant.

Day breaks cold on her legs and in her sexual hair.

Her punk hair/      her religious hair.

Passing the blue rectangles of the stranger’s doors.

Not one opens to her.

Threading herself into declining alleys/      black on white plaster olive on violet.

To walk to walk to walk.

To lie on a warm stone listening to familiar insects.

(Exile, exile.)

This woman/      the heart of the matter.

Circling back to the city where her name crackles behind creviced stones.

This woman who left alone and returns alone.

Whose hair again is covered/      whose arms and neck are covered/ according to the law.

Underneath her skin has darkened/      her footsoles roughened.

Sand from the stranger’s doorway sifting from her plastic

carry-all/      drifting into the sand

whirling around in her old quarter.

1993

Then or Now

Is it necessary for me to write obliquely

about the situation? Is that what

you would have me do?

Food Packages: 1947

Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea,

salamis, aspirin:

Four packages a month to her old professor in Heidelberg

and his Jewish wife:

Europe is trying to revive an intellectual life

and the widow of the great sociologist needs flour.

Europe is trying/to revive/

with the Jews somewhere else.

The young ex-philosopher tries to feed her teachers

all the way from New York, with orders for butter from Denmark,

sending dispatches into the fog

of the European spirit:

I am no longer German. I am a Jew and the German language

was once my home.

1993

Innocence: 1945

“The beauty of it was the guilt.

It entered us, quick schnapps,

forked tongue of ice.      The guilt

made us feel innocent again.

We had done nothing while some

extreme measures were taken.      We drifted.      In the

Snow Queen’s huge ballroom had dreamed

of the whole world and a new pair of skates.

But we had suffered too.

The miracle was:      felt

nothing.      Felt we had done

nothing.      Nothing to do.      Felt free.

And we had suffered, too.

It was that freedom we craved,

cold needle in the bloodstream.

Guilt after all was a feeling.”

1993

Sunset, December, 1993

Dangerous of course to draw

parallels      Yet more dangerous to write

as if there were a steady course, we and our poems

protected:      the individual life, protected

poems, ideas, gliding

in mid-air, innocent

I walked out on the deck and every board

was luminous with cold dew      It could freeze tonight

Each board is different of course but each does gleam

wet, under a complicated sky:      mounds of swollen ink

heavy gray unloading up the coast

a rainbow suddenly and casually

unfolding its span

Dangerous not to think

how the earth still was      in places

while the chimneys shuddered with the first dischargements

1993

Deportations

It’s happened already while we were still

searching for patterns      A turn of the head

toward a long horizontal window overlooking the city

to see people being taken

neighbors, vendors, paramedicals

hurried from their porches, their tomato stalls

their auto-mechanic arguments

and children from schoolyards

There are far more of the takers-away than the taken

at this point anyway

Then:      dream-cut:      our house:

four men walk through the unlatched door

One in light summer wool and silken tie

One in work clothes browned with blood

One with open shirt, a thin

thong necklace hasped with silver around his neck

One in shorts naked up from the navel

And they have come for us, two of us and four of them

and I think, perhaps they are still human

and I ask them      When do you think this all began?

as if trying to distract them from their purpose

as if trying to appeal to a common bond

as if one of them might be you

as if I were practicing for something

yet to come

1994

And Now

And now as you read these poems

—you whose eyes and hands I love

—you whose mouth and eyes I love

—you whose words and minds I love—

don’t think I was trying to state a case

or construct a scenery:

I tried to listen to

the public voice of our time

tried to survey our public space

as best I could

—tried to remember and stay

faithful to details, note

precisely how the air moved

and where the clock’s hands stood

and who was in charge of definitions

and who stood by receiving them

when the name of compassion

was changed to the name of guilt

when to feel with a human stranger

was declared obsolete.

1994

Six Narratives

1

You drew up the story of your life      I was in that story

Nights on the coast I’d meet you flashlight in hand

curving my soles over musseled rocks      cracked and raw we’d lick

inside the shells for danger

You’d drop into the bar      I’d sit upstairs at my desk writing

the pages

you hoped would make us famous      then in the face of my

turned back

you went to teach at the freedom school as if

you were teaching someone else to get free from me      this was

your story

Like a fogsmeared planet over the coast

I’d walked into, served, your purposeful longings      I knew, I did

not stop      till I turned my back

2

You drew up a story about me      I fled that story

Aching in mind I noticed names on the helms of busses:

COP CITY      SHEEPSHEAD BAY

I thought I saw the city where the cops came home

to lay kitchen linoleum      barbecue on balconies

I saw the bloodied head of the great sheep dragged through

the underpasses

trucked to the bay where the waters would not touch it

left on the beach in its shroud of flies

On the bus to La Guardia my arms ached with all my findings

anchored under my breasts with all my will

I cried sick day, O sick day, this is my day and I, for this I will

not pay

as the green rushed bleeding out through the snarled cracks of

the expressway

3

You were telling a story about women to young men      It was

not my story

it was not a story about women it was a story about men

Your hunger a spear gripped in hand a tale unspun in your

rented campground

clothed in captured whale-songs tracked with synthesized

Andes flutes

it was all about you      beaded and bearded      misfeathered and

miscloaked

where the TV cameras found you in your sadness

4

You were telling a story about love      it was your story

I came and stood outside

listening :      : death was in the doorway

death was in the air but the story

had its own life      no pretenses

about women in that lovesong for a man

Listening I went inside the bow scraping the bass-string

inside the horn’s heartbroken cry

I was the breath’s intake the bow’s rough mutter:

Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Vigil for comrade swiftly slain . . .

5

I was telling you a story about love

how even in war it goes on speaking its own language

Yes you said but the larynx is bloodied

the knife was well-aimed into the throat

Well I said love is hated      it has no price

No you said      you are talking about feelings

Have you ever felt nothing?      that is what war is now

Then a shadow skimmed your face

Go on talking in a normal voice      you murmured

Nothing is listening

6

You were telling a story about war      it is our story

an old story      and still it must be told

the story of the new that fled the old

how the big dream strained and shifted

the ship of hope shuddered on the iceberg’s breast

the private affections swayed and staggered

So we are thrown together      so we are racked apart

in a republic shivering on      its glassy lips

parted      as if the fundamental rift

had not been calculated from the first into the mighty scaffold.

1994

Inscriptions

One:      comrade

Little as I knew you I know you:      little as you knew me you

know me

—that’s the light we stand under when we meet.

I’ve looked into flecked jaws

walked injured beaches footslick in oil

watching licked birds stumble in flight

while you drawn through the pupil of your eye

across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief

headlong and by choice took on the work of charting

your city’s wounds ancient and fertile

listening for voices within and against.

My testimony:      yours:      Trying to keep faith

not with each other exactly yet it’s the one known and unknown

who stands for, imagines the other      with whom faith could

be kept.

In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope

(no stranger to bleakness you:      worms have toothed at

your truths

but you were honest regarding that).

You conspired to compile the illegal discography

of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.

If there were ethical flowers one would surely be yours

and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines

across city’s whyless sleeplight I’d hand it

purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty afloat

on the bacterial waters.

When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous

when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.

The self unlocked to many selves.

A mirror handed to one who just released

from the locked ward from solitary from preventive detention

sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows

whole populations.

One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of home

at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult of his

own eye

how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote it.

Two:      movement

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light

Talking of angles of vision      movements      a black or a red tulip

opening

Times of walking across a street      thinking

not I have joined a movement but      I am stepping in this deep current

Part of my life washing behind me      terror I couldn’t swim with

part of my life waiting for me      a part I had no words for

I need to live each day through      have them and know them all

though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

•   •   •

When does a life bend toward freedom?      grasp its direction?

How do you know you’re not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,

stagnation

but entering that deep current      malachite, colorado

requiring all your strength wherever found

your patience and your labor

desire pitted against desire’s inversion

all your mind’s fortitude?

Maybe through a teacher:      someone with facts with numbers

with poetry

who wrote on the board:      IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES

OUR DREAMS.

Maybe a student:      one mind unfurling like a redblack peony

quenched into percentile, dropout, stubbed-out bud

—Your journals Patricia:      Douglas your poems:      but the repetitive blows

on spines whose hope you were, on yours:

to see that quenching and decide.

—And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in

the new classroom

new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:

Race, class . . . all that . . . but isn’t all that just history?

Aren’t people bored with it all?

She could be

myself at nineteen      but free of reverence for past ideas

ignorant of hopes piled on her      She’s a mermaid

momentarily precipitated from a solution

which could stop her heart      She could swim or sink

like a beautiful crystal.

Three:      origins

Turning points.      We all like to hear about those.      Points

on a graph.

Sudden conversions.      Historical swings.      Some kind of

dramatic structure.

But a life doesn’t unfold that way      it moves

in loops      by switchbacks loosely strung

around the swelling of one hillside toward another

one island toward another

A child’s knowing      a child’s forgetting      remain childish

till you meet them      mirrored and echoing      somewhere else

Don’t ask me when I learned love

Don’t ask me when I learned fear

Ask about the size of rooms how many lived in them

what else the rooms contained

what whispers of the histories of skin

Should I simplify my life for you?

The Confederate Women of Maryland

on their dried-blood granite pedestal incised

IN DIFFICULTY AND IN DANGER . . .

“BRAVE AT HOME”

—words a child could spell out

standing in wetgreen grass stuck full of yellow leaves

monumental women bandaging wounded men

Joan of Arc in a book      a peasant in armor

Mussolini      Amelia Earhart      the President on the radio

—what’s taught, what’s overheard

Four:      history

Should I simplify my life for you?

Don’t ask how I began to love men.

Don’t ask how I began to love women.

Remember the forties songs, the slowdance numbers

the small sex-filled gas-rationed Chevrolet?

Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?

Cigarette smoke of the movies, silver-and-gray

profiles, dreaming the dreams of he-and-she

breathing the dissolution of the wisping silver plume?

Dreaming that dream we leaned applying lipstick

by the gravestone’s mirror when we found ourselves

playing in the cemetery.      In Current Events she said

the war in Europe is over, the Allies

and she wore no lipstick have won the war

and we raced screaming out of Sixth Period.

Dreaming that dream

we had to maze our ways through a wood

where lips were knives breasts razors and I hid

in the cage of my mind scribbling

this map stops where it all begins

into a red-and-black notebook.

Remember after the war when peace came down

as plenty for some and they said we were saved

in an eternal present and we knew the world could end?

—remember after the war when peace rained down

on the winds from Hiroshima Nagasaki Utah Nevada?

and the socialist queer Christian teacher jumps from the

hotel window?

and L.G. saying I want to sleep with you but not for sex

and the red-and-black enamelled coffee-pot dripped slow through

the dark grounds

—appetite terror power tenderness

the long kiss in the stairwell the switch thrown

on two Jewish Communists married to each other

the definitive crunch of glass at the end of the wedding?

(When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,

We cannot choose what we are free to love?)

Five:      voices

“That year I began to understand the words burden of proof

—how the free market of ideas depended

on certain lives laboring under that burden.

I started feeling in my body

how that burden was bound to our backs

keeping us cramped in old repetitive motions

crouched in the same mineshaft year on year

or like children in school striving to prove

proofs already proven over and over

to get into the next grade

but there is no next grade no movement onward only this

and the talk goes on, the laws, the jokes, the deaths, the way of

life goes on

as if you had proven nothing as if this burden were what

you are.”

•   •   •

(Knotted crowns of asparagus lowered by human hands

into long silver trenches fogblanched mornings

the human spine translated into fog’s

almost unbearable rheumatic beauty flattering pain

into a daze a mystic text of white and white’s

absolute faceless romance      :     :      the photographer’s

darkroom thrill discerning two phantoms caught

trenchside deep in the delicate power

of fog      :     :      phantoms who nonetheless have to know

the length of the silvery trenches how many plants how long

this bending can go on and for what wage and what

that wage will buy in the Great Central Valley 1983.)

•   •   •

“Desire disconnected      meetings and marches

for justice and peace      the sex of the woman

the bleached green-and-gold      of the cotton print bedspread

in the distance the sound      of the week’s demonstration

July sun louvered shutters      off Riverside Drive

shattered glass in the courtyard      the sex of the woman

her body entire aroused to the hair

the sex of the women our bodies entire

molten in purpose each body a tongue

each body a river and over and over

and after to walk      in the streets still unchanging

a stormy light, evening      tattered emblems, horse-droppings

DO NOT CROSS POLICE BARRIER      yellow boards kicked awry

the scattering crowds      at the mouth of the subway

A thumbprint on a glass of icy water

memory that scours and fogs

nights when I threw my face

on a sheet of lithic scatter

wrapped myself in a sack of tears”

•   •   •

“My thief my counsellor

tell me how it was then under the bridge

in the long cashmere scarf

the opera-lover left

silken length rough flesh violet light meandering

the splash that trickled down the wall

O tell me what you hissed to him and how he groaned to you

tell me the opera-lover’s body limb by limb and touch by touch

how his long arms arched dazzling under the abutment

as he played himself to the hilt

cloak flocked with light

My thief my counsellor

tell me was it good or bad, was it good and bad, in the

unbefriended archway of your first ardor?

was it an oilstain’s thumbprint on moving water?

the final drench and fizzle on the wall?

was it freedom from names from rank from color?

Thieving the leather trenchcoat of the night, my counsellor?

Breathing the sex of night of water never having to guess its

source, my thief?

O thief

I stand at your bedside      feed you segments of orange

O counsellor

you have too many vanishing children to attend

There were things I was meant to learn from you      they wail out

like a train leaving the city

Desire the locomotive      death the tracks      under the bridge

the silken roughness drench of freedom the abruptly

floodlit parapet

LOVE CONQUERS ALL spelled out in flickering graffiti

—my counsellor, my thief”

•   •   •

“In the heart of the capital of Capital

against banked radiations of azalea

I found a faux-marble sarcophagus inscribed

HERE LIES THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE

I had been wondering why for so long so little

had been heard from that quarter.

I found myself there by deepest accident

wandering among white monuments

looking for the Museum of Lost Causes.

A strangely focused many-lumened glare

was swallowing alive the noon.

I saw the reviewing stand the podium draped and swagged

the huge screen all-enhancing and all-heightening

I heard the martial bands the choirs the speeches

amplified in the vacant plaza

swearing to the satellites it had been a natural death.”

Six:      edgelit

Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love

I could have forgotten other women I desired

so much I wanted to love them but

here are some reasons love would not let me:

One had a trick of dropping her lashes along her cheekbone

in an amazing screen so she saw nothing.

Another would stand in summer arms rounded and warm

catching wild apricots that fell

either side of a broken fence but she caught them on one

side only.

One, ambitious, flushed

to the collarbone, a shapely coward.

One keen as mica, glittering,

full at the lips, absent at the core.

One who flirted with danger

had her escape route planned when others had none

and disappeared.

One sleepwalking on the trestle

of privilege dreaming of innocence

tossing her cigarette into the dry gully

—an innocent gesture.

•   •   •

Medbh’s postcard from Belfast:

one’s poetry seems aimless

covered in the blood and lies

oozing corrupt & artificial

but of course one will continue . . .

This week I’ve dredged my pages

for anything usable

head, heart, perforated

by raw disgust and fear

If I dredge up anything it’s suffused

by what it works in, “like the dyer’s hand”

I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy

and I go on

In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:

it can eat or be eaten by experience

Medbh, poetry means refusing

the choice to kill or die

but this life of continuing is for the sane mad

and the bravest monsters

•   •   •

The bright planet that plies her crescent shape

in the western air      that through the screendoor gazes

with her curved eye now speaks:      The beauty of darkness

is how it lets you see.      Through the screendoor

she told me this and half-awake I scrawled

her words on a piece of paper.

She is called Venus but I call her You

You      who sees me      You      who calls me to see

You      who has other errands far away in space and time

You      in your fiery skin      acetylene

scorching the claims of the false mystics

You      who like the moon arrives in crescent

changeable changer      speaking truth from darkness

•   •   •

Edgelit:      firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds

blue-green agave      grown huge in flower

cries of birds streaming over

The night of the eclipse the full

moon

swims clear between flying clouds until

the hour of the occlusion      It’s not of aging

anymore and its desire

which is of course unending

it’s of dying      young or old

in full desire

Remember me . . . . O, O, O,

O, remember me

these vivid stricken cells

precarious living marrow

this my labyrinthine filmic brain

this my dreaded blood

this my irreplaceable

footprint vanishing from the air

dying in full desire

thirsting for the coldest water

hungering for hottest food

gazing into the wildest light

edgelight from the high desert

where shadows drip from tiniest stones

sunklight of bloody afterglow

torque of the Joshua tree

flinging itself forth in winter

factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness

These are the extremes I stoke

into the updraft of this life

still roaring

into thinnest air

1993–1994

Midnight Salvage

The Art of Translation

1

To have seen you exactly, once:

red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway

your lingo, your daunting and dauntless

eyes. But then to lift toward home, mile upon mile

back where they’d barely heard your name

—neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you—

to wing it back to my country bearing

your war-flecked protocols—

that was a mission, surely: my art’s pouch

crammed with your bristling juices

sweet dark drops of your spirit

that streaked the pouch, the shirt I wore

and the bench on which I leaned.

2

It’s only a branch like any other

green with the flare of life in it

and if I hold this end, you the other

that means it’s broken

broken between us, broken despite us

broken and therefore dying

broken by force, broken by lying

green, with the flare of life in it

3

But say we’re crouching on the ground like children

over a mess of marbles, soda caps, foil, old foreign coins

—the first truly precious objects. Rusty hooks, glass.

Say I saw the earring first but you wanted it.

Then you wanted the words I’d found. I’d give you

the earring, crushed lapis if it were,

I would look long at the beach glass and the sharded self

of the lightbulb. Long I’d look into your hand

at the obsolete copper profile, the cat’s-eye, the lapis.

Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever

existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,

like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.

4

The trade names follow trade

the translators stopped at passport control:

Occupation: no such designation—

Journalist, maybe spy?

That the books are for personal use

only—could I swear it?

That not a word of them

is contraband—how could I prove it?

1995

Midnight Salvage

1

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I

sought the light of a so-called heavenly body

: : a planet or our moon in some event and caught

nothing nothing but a late wind

pushing around some Monterey pines

themselves in trouble and rust-limbed

Nine o’clock : : July : the light

undrained : : that blotted blue

that lets has let will let

thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time

darkred behind darkblue

bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them”

And all I wanted was to find an old

friend an old figure an old trigonometry

still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold

2

Under the conditions of my hiring

I could profess or declare anything at all

since in that place nothing would change

So many fountains, such guitars at sunset

Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s

deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air

in that borrowed chair

with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk

under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask

and the english cemetery all so under control and so eternal

in burnished frames : : or occupy the office

of the marxist-on-sabbatical

with Gramsci’s fast-fading eyes

thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print

of the same cemetery : : had memories

and death masks of my own : : could not any more

peruse young faces already straining for

the production of slender testaments

to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait

for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete

Could not play by the rules

in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing

anything at all

in their hire

3

Had never expected hope would form itself

completely in my time : : was never so sanguine

as to believe old injuries could transmute easily

through any singular event or idea : : never

so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion

of ignorance the contrived discontinuities

the felling of leaders and future leaders

the pathetic erections of soothsayers

But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along

with history’s systole-diastole

twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat

sheltering another heartbeat

plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja

sending up here or there a blowhole signal

and sometimes beached

making for warmer waters

where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it

4

But neither was expecting in my time

to witness this : : wasn’t deep

lucid or mindful you might say enough

to look through history’s bloodshot eyes

into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose

from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : :

To see

not O my Captain

fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand

but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins

in suit of noir Hong Kong silk

pushing his daughter in her famine-

waisted flamingo gown

out on the dance floor with the traffickers

in nerve gas saying to them Go for it

and to the girl Get with it

5

When I ate and drank liberation once I walked

arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me

It was the avenue and the dwellers

free of home : roofless : : women

without pots to scour or beds to make

or combs to run through hair

or hot water for lifting grease or cans

to open or soap to slip in that way

under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs

Oil-drums were alight under the freeway

and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate

and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth

and figures arranging themselves from the wind

Through all this she walked me : : And said

My name is Liberation and I come from here

Of what are you so afraid?

We’ve hung late in the bars like bats

kissed goodnight at the stoplights

—did you think I wore this city without pain?

did you think I had no family?

6

Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down

there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage

He was walking in the road which was always safe

The young driver did not know that road

its curves or that people walked there

or that you could speed yet hold the curve

watching for those who walked there

such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed

but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain

thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind

on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer

between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cowflop odors

lucky I am I hit nobody old or young

killed nobody left no trace

practiced in life as I am

7

This horrible patience which is part of the work

This patience which waits for language for meaning for the

least sign

This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging

the IV up and down the corridor

with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine

Only so can you start living again

waking to take the temperature of the soul

when the black irises lean at dawn

from the mouth of the bedside pitcher

This condition in which you swear I will

submit to whatever poetry is

I accept no limits      Horrible patience

8

You cannot eat an egg      You don’t know where it’s been

The ordinary body of the hen

vouchsafes no safety      The countryside refuses to supply

Milk is powdered      meat’s in both senses high

Old walls the pride of architects      collapsing

find us in crazed niches      sleeping like foxes

we wanters we unwanted we

wanted for the crime of being ourselves

Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food

Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in

weeds and light      redrawing

the City of Expectations

You cannot eat an egg      Unstupefied not unhappy

we braise wild greens and garlic      feed the feral cats

and when the fog’s irregular documents break open

scan its fissures for young stars

in the belt of Orion

1996

Char

1

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry

there is the village where no villager survived

there are the hitlerians there are the foresters

feeding the partisans from frugal larders

there is the moon ablaze in every quarter

there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping

explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets

there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake

there is the table set at every meal

for freedom whose chair stays vacant

the young men in their newfound passions

(Love along with them the ones they love)

Obscurity, code, the invisible existence

of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching

as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket

Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories

A horrible day . . . Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?

The village had to be spared at any price . . .

How can you hear me? I speak from so far . . .

The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist . . .

2

This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with demons as cold-blooded as microbes.

The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother

turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)

all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex-

pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade

shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution

knowing that the random shooting of a revolver

may be the simplest surreal act but never

changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple

The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture

knowing the end of the war

would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul

the young freedom fighters

in love with the Resistance

fed by a thrill for violence

familiar as his own jaw under the razor

3

Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future

I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough

and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green

where the white egret fishes the fragile margins

Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you

several times in my life      You were never just

the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker

of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge

your sense of limits      You saw squirrels crashing

from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded

and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk

the incendiary motives of others were in your charge

and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact

and you decided and lived like that and you

held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped

from a burning meadow a mimosa twig

from still unravaged country      You kept your senses

about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.

1996

Modotti

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper

that typewriter you made famous

my footsteps following you up stair-

wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint

these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths

corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster

if this is where I must look for you

then this is where I’ll find you

From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent

on a curb plastered with newsprint

the headlines aiming straight at your eyes

to a room’s dark breath-smeared light

these footsteps I’m following you with

down tiles of a red corridor

if this is a way to find you

of course this is how I’ll find you

Your negatives pegged to dry in a darkroom

rigged up over a bathtub’s lozenge

your footprints of light on sensitive paper

stacked curling under blackened panes

the always upstairs of your hideout

the stern exposure of your brows

—these footsteps I’m following you with

aren’t to arrest you

The bristling hairs of your eyeflash

that typewriter you made famous

your enormous will to arrest and frame

what was, what is, still liquid, flowing

your exposure of manifestos, your

lightbulb in a scarred ceiling

well if this is how I find you

Modotti so I find you

In the red wash of your darkroom

from your neighborhood of volcanoes

to the geranium nailed in a can

on the wall of your upstairs hideout

in the rush of breath a window

of revolution allowed you

on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye

these

footsteps I’m following you with

1996

Shattered Head

A life hauls itself uphill

through hoar-mist steaming

the sun’s tongue licking

leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid

When?      When? cry the soothseekers

but time is a bloodshot eye

seeing its last of beauty its own

foreclosure

a bloodshot mind

finding itself unspeakable

What is the last thought?

Now I will let you know?

or, Now I know?

(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue

mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast

of a wooded hill

laid down there endlessly so

tendrils soaked into matted compost

become a root

torqued over the faint springhead

groin whence illegible

matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt

volumes of sporic changes

hair long blown into far follicles

blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)

revenge on the mouth

packed with its inarticulate confessions

revenge on the eyes

green-gray and restless

revenge on the big and searching lips

the tender tongue

revenge on the sensual, on the nose the

carrier of history

revenge on the life devoured

in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them

where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid

with belovéd matter

the soothseekers have withdrawn

you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus

when that place utters its worn sigh

let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

I believed I was loved, I believed I loved,

who did this to us?

1996–1997

Letters to a Young Poet

1

Your photograph won’t do you justice

those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus

that lens on the wetlands

five swans chanting overhead

distract your thirst for closure

and quick escape

2

Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say

one word to you: Ineluctable

—meaning, you won’t get quit

of this: the worst of the new news

history running back and forth

panic in the labyrinth

—I will not touch you further:

your choice to freeze or not

to say, you and I are caught in

a laboratory without a science

3

Would it gladden you to think

poetry could purely

take its place beneath lightning sheets

or fogdrip      live its own life

screamed at, howled down

by a torn bowel of dripping names

—composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo

Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

ineluctable

if a woman as vivid as any artist

can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide      Poetry

doesn’t make this happen?

4

From the edges of your own distraction turn

the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous

with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,

annihilating rush

to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear

kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried

in liquid glass

trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,

trying to wade this

undertow of utter repetition

Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it

means, to stand fast; what it means to move

5

Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest

and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen,

becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten.

—Be—infernal prefix of the actionless.

—Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey.

The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain

and lays it at the boot-heel.

You can be like this forever—Be

as without movement.

6

But this is how

I come, anyway, pushing up from below

my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this

head

pushing up out of the ore

this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death

my lips having swum through silt

clearly pronouncing

Hello and farewell

Who, anyway, wants to know

this pale mouth, this stick

of crimson lipsalve Who my

dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat

my overshoulder backglance flung

at the great strophes and antistrophes

my chant my ululation my sacred parings

nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat

my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown

in films by Sappho and Artaud?

Everyone.      For a moment.

7

It’s not the déjà vu that kills

it’s the foreseeing

the head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere

the brain had not yet gone

I wanted not to be

there so alone.

1997

Camino Real

Hot stink of skunk

crushed at the vineyards’ edge

hawk-skied, carrion-clean

clouds ranging themselves

over enormous autumn

that scribble      edged and skunky

as the great road winds on

toward my son’s house seven hours south

Walls of the underpass

smudged and blistered eyes gazing from armpits

THE WANTER WANTED      ARMED IN LOVE AND

DANGEROUS

WANTED FOR WANTING

To become the scholar of : :

: : to list compare contrast events to footnote lesser evils

calmly to note “bedsprings”

describe how they were wired

to which parts of the body

to make clear-eyed assessments of the burnt-out eye: : investigate

the mouth-bit and the mouth

the half-swole slippery flesh the enforced throat

the whip they played you with the backroad games the beatings by

the river

O to list collate commensurate to quantify:

I was the one, I suffered, I was there

never

to trust to memory only

to go back      notebook in hand

dressed as no one there was dressed

over and over to quantify

on a gridded notebook page

The difficulty of proving

such things were done for no reason

that every night

“in those years”

people invented reasons for torture

Asleep now,      head in hands

hands over ears      O you

Who do this work

every one of you

every night

Driving south:      santabarbara’s barbarous

landscaped mind:      lest it be forgotten

in the long sweep downcoast

let it not be exonerated

but O the light

on the raw Pacific silks

Charles Olson:      “Can you afford not to make

the magical study

which happiness is?”

I take him to mean

that happiness is in itself a magical study

a glimpse of the unhandicapped life

as it might be for anyone, somewhere

a kind of alchemy, a study of transformation

else it withers, wilts

—that happiness is not to be

mistrusted or wasted

though it ferment in grief

George Oppen to June Degnan:      “I don’t know how

to measure happiness”

—Why measure? in itself it’s the measure—

at the end of a day

of great happiness if there be such a day

drawn by love’s unprovable pull

I write this, sign it

Adrienne

1997

Seven Skins

1

Walk along back of the library

in 1952

someone’s there to catch your eye

Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair

paraplegic GI—

Bill of Rights Jew

graduate student going in

by the only elevator route

up into the great stacks where

all knowledge should and is

and shall be stored like sacred grain

while the loneliest of lonely

American decades goes aground

on the postwar rock

and some unlikely

shipmates found ourselves

stuck amid so many smiles

Dating Vic Greenberg you date

crutches and a chair

a cool wit an outrageous form:

“—just back from a paraplegics’ conference,

guess what the biggest meeting was about—

Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives—”

In and out of cabs his chair

opening and closing round his

electrical monologue the air

furiously calm around him

as he transfers to the crutches

But first you go for cocktails

in his room at Harvard

he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday

talks about Melville’s vision of evil

and the question of the postwar moment:

Is there an American civilization?

In the bathroom huge

grips and suction-cupped

rubber mats long-handled sponges

the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits

in plainest sight

And this is only memory, no more

so this is how you remember

Vic Greenberg takes you to the best restaurant

which happens to have no stairs

for talk about movies, professors, food

Vic orders wine and tastes it

you have lobster, he Beef Wellington

the famous dessert is baked alaska

ice cream singed in a flowerpot

from the oven, a live tulip inserted there

Chair to crutches, crutches to cab

chair in the cab and back to Cambridge

memory shooting its handheld frames

Shall I drop you, he says, or shall

we go back to the room for a drink?

It’s the usual question

a man has to ask it

a woman has to answer

you don’t even think

2

What a girl I was then what a body

ready for breaking open like a lobster

what a little provincial village

what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells

what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud

what a gone-and-come tidepool

what a look into eternity I took and did not return it

what a book I made myself

what a quicksilver study

bright little bloodstain

liquid pouches escaping

What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump

splitting

into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which

the sun’s eclipse could seem normal

what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask

eager to sink      to be found

to disembody      what a mass of swimmy legs

3

Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face

laying hands first on your head

onto whose thighs pulled down your head

which fear of mine would have wound itself

around which of yours      could we have taken it      nakedness

without sperm      in what insurrectionary

convulsion would we have done it      mouth to mouth

mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus      earlobe to nipple

what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts

what tears boil up through sweat to bathe

what humiliatoriums      what layers of imposture

What heroic tremor

released into pure moisture

might have soaked our shape      two-headed      avid

into your heretic

linen-service

sheets?

1997

Rusted Legacy

Imagine a city where nothing’s

forgiven      your deed adheres

to you like a scar, a tattoo      but almost everything’s

forgotten      deer flattened leaping a highway for food

the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head

the small boys’ punishing of the frogs

—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions

Imagine the architecture      the governance

the men and the women in power

—tell me if it is not true you still

live in that city.

Imagine a city partitioned      divorced from its hills

where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices

a city brailling through fog

thicket and twisted wire

into dark’s velvet dialectic

sewers which are also rivers

art’s unchartered aquifers      the springhead

sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night

I finger the glass beads I strung and wore

under the pines while the arrests were going on

(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)

They brought trays with little glasses of cold water

into the dark park      a final village gesture

before the villages were gutted.

They were trying to save what they could

—tell me if this is not the same city.

I have forced myself to come back like a daughter

required to put her mother’s house in order

whose hands need terrible gloves to handle

the medicinals      the disease packed in those linens

Accomplished criminal I’ve been but

can I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets

into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter

like stone      but with water pleating across

Let water be water let stone be stone

Tell me is this the same city.

This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust

crammed with memory in a place

of little anecdotes      no one left

to go around gathering the full dissident story?

Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips

yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears

—for one self only? each encysts a city.

1997

A Long Conversation

—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree

could you forget?      do you

remember?      not to

know you were cold?      Altercations

from porches      color still high in your cheeks

the leap for the catch

the game getting wilder as the lights come on

catching your death it was said

your death of cold

something you couldn’t see ahead, you couldn’t see

(energy: Eternal Delight)

a long conversation

between persistence and impatience

between the bench of forced confessions

hip from groin swiveled

apart

young tongues torn in the webbing

the order of the cities

founded on disorder

and intimate resistance

desire exposed and shameless

as the flags go by

Sometime looking backward

into this future, straining

neck and eyes I’ll meet your shadow

with its enormous eyes

you who will want to know

what this was all about

Maybe this is the beginning of madness

Maybe it’s your conscience . . .

as you, straining neck and eyes

gaze forward into this past:

what did it mean to you?

—to receive “full human rights”

or the blue aperture of hope?

Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear

who came in when the nights were

cold and drear and who sat where

well helmeted and who

was showing off his greasy hair

Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly

who spoke thickly or not at all

how you decided what you’d abide

what was proud and thus allowed

how you knew what to do

with all the city threw at you

Mrs. Bartender tell me true

we’ve been keeping an eye on you

and this could be a long conversation

we could have a long accommodation

On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.

Like a little cell. Let’s not aggrandize ourselves; we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.

Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.

A long conversation

pierced, jammed, scratched out:

bans, preventive detention, broken mouths

and on the scarred bench sequestered

a human creature with bloody wings

its private parts

reamed

still trying to speak

A hundred and fifty years. In 1848 a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.

So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil, we can judge. Mildew doesn’t worry us. We don’t want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . it creates a world after its own image.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed—a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

—Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?

She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there’s that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.

Someone: —Technology’s changing the most ordinary forms of human contact—who can’t see that, in their own life?

—But technology is nothing but a means.

—Someone, I say, makes a killing off war. You: —I’ve been telling you, that’s the engine driving the free market. Not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.

Another woman: —But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?

He comes in late, as usual he’s been listening to sounds outside, the tide scraping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn’t speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. —It isn’t nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is there a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?

Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: —I can’t stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re only

as we were      trying

to keep an eye

on the weapons on the street

and under the street

Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc . . . & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.

His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarser undertone.

At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

So now your paledark face thrown up

into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes

on the hurl and flutter of the gulls’ wings

over your dark leggings their leathery legs

flash past your hurling arm one hand

snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close

You, barefoot on that narrow strand

with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier

you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay

in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair

Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening

my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light

. . . small tradespeople,

shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants—

all these sink gradually into the proletariat

partly because their

diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which

modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the

competition with the large capitalists

partly because their specialized

skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.

Thus, the proletariat is recruited

from all classes of the population. . . .

pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay

the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness

1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth:      I wish

you would write a poem

addressed to those who, in consequence

of the complete failure of the French Revolution

have thrown up all hopes

of the amelioration of mankind

and are sinking into an almost epicurean

selfishness, disguising the same

under the soft titles of domestic attachment

and contempt for visionary philosophes

A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:

the visionaries having survived despite

rumors of complete failure

the words have barely begun      to match the desire

when the cold fog blows back in

organized and disordering

muffling words and faces

Your lashes, visionary! screening

in sudden rushes this

shocked, abraded crystal

I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence then, for greeting the newborn.

(—Someplace else. In our hopes.)

But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (swamped, or accounted worthless) I’m one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed “by natural causes.”

The music’s pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of tradition of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.

“it’s the layers of history

we have to choose, along

with our own practice: what must be tried again

over and over and

what must not be repeated

and at what depth      which layer

will we meet others”

the words barely begin

to match the desire

and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify

. . . the eye has become a human eye

when its object has become a human, social object

BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW

FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS

. . . the Arts, you know—they’re Jews, they’re left-wing,

in other words, stay away . . .

So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true

how you still do what you do

your old theories forgiven

—the public understands

it was one thing then but now is now

and everyone says your lungs are bad

and your liver very sad

and the force of your imagination

has no present destination

though subversive has a certain charm

and art can really do no harm

but still they say you get up and go

every morning to the studio

Is it still a thrill?

or an act of will?

Mr. Kunstelaar?

—After so long, to be asked an opinion? Most of that time, the opinions unwelcome. But opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration—never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant—as beauty, as terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own. I also knew they had saved me from it.

—I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.

—I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.

“This is for you

this little song

without much style

because your smile

fell like a red leaf

through my tears

in those fogbound years

when without ado

you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn

when my body was utterly cold

This is for you

who would not applaud

when with a kick to the breast or groin

they dragged us into the van

when flushed faces cheered

at our disgrace

or looked away      this is

for you who stayed

to see us through

delivered our bail and disappeared

This little song

without much style

may it find you

somewhere      well.”

In the dark windowglass

a blurred face

—is it still mine?

Who out there hoped to change me—

what out there has tried?

What sways and presses against the pane

what can’t I see beyond or through—

charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language

is that still you?

1997–1998

Fox

Victory

Something spreading underground won’t speak to us

under skin won’t declare itself

not all life-forms want dialogue with the

machine-gods in their drama      hogging down

the deep bush      clear-cutting refugees

from ancient or transient villages into

our opportunistic fervor      to search

crazily for a host      a lifeboat

Suddenly instead of art we’re eyeing

organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies

cruel blues      embroidered purples      succinct yellows

a beautiful tumor

I guess you’re not alone      I fear you’re alone

There’s, of course, poetry:

awful bridge rising over naked air:      I first

took it as just a continuation of the road:

“a masterpiece of engineering

praised, etc.”      then on the radio:

“incline too steep for ease of, etc.”

Drove it nonetheless because I had to

this being how—      So this is how

I find you:      alive and more

As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)

I’m driving to your side

—an intimate collusion—

packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain

glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck

rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden

poetries, old glue shredding from their spines

my time exposure of the Leonids

over Joshua Tree

As if we’re going to win this O because

If you have a sister I am not she

nor your mother nor you my daughter

nor are we lovers or any kind of couple

except in the intensive care

of poetry and

death’s master plan      architecture-in-progress

draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome

the master left on your doorstep

with a white card in black calligraphy:

Make what you will of this

As if leaving purple roses

If (how many conditionals must we suffer)

I tell you a letter from the master

is lying on my own doorstep

glued there with leaves and rain

and I haven’t bent to it yet

if I tell you I surmise

he writes differently to me:

Do as you will, you have had your life

many have not

signing it in his olden script:

Meister aus Deutschland

In coldest Europe      end of that war

frozen domes      iron railings frozen      stoves lit in the

streets

memory banks of cold

the Nike of Samothrace

on a staircase      wings in blazing

backdraft      said to me

: : to everyone she met

Displaced, amputated never discount me

Victory

indented in disaster striding

at the head of stairs

for Tory Dent

1998

For This

If I’ve reached for your lines      (I have)

like letters from the dead that stir the nerves

dowsed you for a springhead

to water my thirst

dug into my compost skeletons and petals

you surely meant to catch the light:

—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered

stateless underground

have I a plea?

If I’ve touched your finger

with a ravenous tongue

licked from your palm a rift of salt

if I’ve dreamt or thought you

a pack of blood fresh-drawn

hanging darkred from a hook

higher than my heart

(you who understand transfusion)

where else should I appeal?

A pilot light lies low

while the gas jets sleep

(a cat getting toed from stove

into nocturnal ice)

language uncommon and agile as truth

melts down the most intractable silence

A lighthouse keeper’s ethics:

you tend for all or none

for this you might set your furniture on fire

A this we have blundered over

as if the lamp could be shut off at will

rescue denied for some

and still a lighthouse be

1999

Regardless

An idea declared itself between us

clear as a washed wineglass

that we’d love

regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed

my optimism of the will

regardless

your wincing at manifestos

your practice of despair you named

anarchism

: : an idea we could meet

somewhere else      a road

straggling unmarked through ice-plant

toward an ocean      heartless as eternity

Still hungry for freedom      I walked off

from glazed documents      becalmed

passions      time of splintering and sawdust

pieces lying still      I was not myself but

I found a road like that      it straggled

The ocean still

looked like eternity

I drew it on a

napkin mailed it to you

On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened

in liquids your own body has expressed

: : what stiffens hardest?      tears? blood? urine? sweat? the first

drops from the penis?

Your glove then meets my hand      this is our meeting

Which of us has gone furthest?

To meet you like this I’ve had to rise

from love in a room

of green leaves larger than my clitoris or my brain

in a climate where winter never precisely

does or does not engrave its name on the windowpane

while the Pacific lays down its right of way

to the other side of the world

: : to a table where singed manifestos

curl back crying to be reread

but can I even provoke you

joking or

in tears

you      in long-stiffened gloves      still

protector of despair?

for H.C.

1998–1999

Architect

Nothing he had done before

or would try for later

will explain or atone

this facile suggestion of crossbeams

languid elevations traced on water

his stake in white colonnades cramping his talent

showing up in

facsimile mansions overbearing the neighborhood

his leaving the steel rods out of the plinths

(bronze raptors gazing from the boxwood)

You could say he spread himself too thin      a plasterer’s term

you could say he was then

skating thin ice      his stake in white colonnades against the

thinness of

ice itself      a slickened ground

Could say he did not then love

his art enough to love anything more

Could say he wanted the commission so

badly betrayed those who hired him      an artist

who in dreams followed

the crowds who followed him

Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized

hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung

by hands expert and steady on powerful machines

his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the

other (as it did in Egypt)

—while devising the little fountain to run all night

outside the master bedroom

1998–1999

Fox

I needed fox      Badly I needed

a vixen for the long time none had come near me

I needed recognition from a

triangulated face      burnt-yellow eyes

fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail

I needed history of fox      briars of legend it was said she had run through

I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through

I craved to feel on her pelt      if my hands could even slide

past or her body slide between them      sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur

lacerated skin calling legend to account

a vixen’s courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help

on another animal

is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth

come a long way down

Go back far enough it means tearing and torn      endless and sudden

back far enough it blurts

into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child

pushed out of a female      the yet-to-be woman

1998

Messages

I love the infinity of these silent spaces

Darkblue shot with deathrays but only a short distance

Keep of course water and batteries, antibiotics

Always look at California for the last time

We weren’t birds, were we, to flutter past each other

But what were we meant to do, standing or lying down

Together on the bare slope where we were driven

The most personal feelings become historical

Keep your hands knotted deep inside your sweater

While the instruments of force are more credible than beauty

Inside a glass paperweight dust swirls and settles (Manzanar)

Where was the beauty anyway when we shouldered past each other

Where is it now in the hollow lounge

Of the grounded airline where the cameras

For the desouling project are being handed out

Each of us instructed to shoot the others naked

If you want to feel the true time of our universe

Put your hands over mine on the stainless pelvic rudder

No, here      (sometimes the most impassive ones will shudder)

The infinity of these spaces comforts me

Simple textures falling open like a sweater

1999

Fire

in the old city      incendiaries abound

who hate this place stuck to their foot soles

Michael Burnhard is being held and I

can tell you about him      pushed-out and living

across the river      low-ground given to flooding

in a shotgun house

his mother working for a hospital

or restaurant      dumpsters      she said a restaurant

hospital cafeteria who cares

what story

you bring home with the food

I can tell you Michael knows beauty

from the frog-iris in mud

the squelch of ankles

stalking the waterlily

the blues beat flung across water from the old city

Michael Burnhard in Black History Month

not his month only he was born there

not black and almost without birthday one

February 29 Michael Burnhard

on the other side of the river

glancing any night at his mother’s wrists

crosshatched raw

beside the black-opal stream

Michael Burnhard still beside himself

when fire took the old city

lying like a black spider on its back

under the satellites and a few true stars

1999

Grating

I

Not having worn

the pearly choker

of innocence around my throat

willed by a woman

whose leavings I can’t afford

Not having curled up like that girl

in maternal gauze

Not

having in great joy gazing

on another woman’s thick fur

believed I was unsexed for that

Now let me not

you      not I      but who ought to be

hang like a leaf twisting

endlessly toward the past

nor reach for a woman’s skinned-off mask

to hide behind

You

not I but who ought to be

get me out of this, human

through some

air vent, grating

II

There’s a place where beauty names itself:

“I am beauty,” and becomes irreproachable

to the girl transfixed beside the mother

the artist and her mother

There must be a color for the mother’s

Otherness      must be some gate of chalk some slit or stain

through which the daughter sees outside that otherness

Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags

still smelling of umbrage

that can be crushed into a color

there must be such a color

if, lying full length

on the studio floor

the artist were to paint herself

in monochrome

from a mirror in the ceiling

an elongated figure suspended across the room

first horizontal

then straight up and naked

free of beauty

ordinary in fact

III

The task is to row a strong-boned, legally blind

hundred-and-one-year-old woman

across the Yangtze River

An emergency or not, depending

Others will have settled her in the boat with pillows but the arms

wielding the oars will be yours

crepitus of the shoulders yours

the conversation still hers

Three days’ labor

with you . . . that was torture

—to pilot through current and countercurrent

requiring silence and concentration

There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies

—as might have been said

in an older diction

Try to row deadweight someone without

death skills

Shouldering the river a pilot figures

how

The great rock shoulders overlook

in their immensity all decisions

1999–2000

Noctilucent Clouds

Late night on the underside      a spectral glare

abnormal      Everything below

must and will betray itself

as a floodlit truckstop out here

on the North American continent stands revealed

and we’re glad because it’s late evening and no town

but this, diesel, regular, soda, coffee, chips, beer and video

no government no laws but LIGHT in the continental dark

and then      and then      what smallness the soul endures

rolling out on the ramp from such an isle

onto the harborless Usonian plateau

Dear Stranger      can I raise a poem

to justice      you not here

with your sheet-lightning apprehension

of nocturne

your surveyor’s eye for distance

as if any forest’s fallen tree were for you

a possible hypotenuse

Can I wake as I once woke with no thought of you

into the bad light of a futureless motel

This thing I am calling justice:

I could slide my hands into your leather gloves

but my feet would not fit into your boots

Every art leans on some other:      yours

on mine in spasm retching

last shreds of vanity

We swayed together like cripples when the wind

suddenly turned a corner      or was it we who turned

Once more I invite you into this

in retrospect it will be clear

1999

If Your Name Is on the List

If your name is on the list of judges

you’re one of them

though you fought their hardening

assumptions      went and stood

alone by the window while they

concurred

It wasn’t enough to hold your singular

minority opinion

You had to face the three bridges

down the river

your old ambitions

flamboyant in bloodstained mist

You had to carry off under arm

and write up in perfect loneliness

your soul-splitting dissent

Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country

In all the new inhere old judgments

loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke

We want to be part of the future      dragging in

what pure futurity can’t use

Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century

screams      Don’t let me go

Don’t let me die      Do you forget

what we were to each other

1999

Terza Rima

1

Hail-spurting sky      sun

splashing off persimmons left

in the quit garden

of the quit house      The realtor’s swaying name

against this cloudheap this

surrendered acre

I would      so help me      tell you if I could

how some great teacher

came to my side and said:

Let’s go down      into the underworld

—the earth already crazed

Let me take your hand

—but who would that be?

already trembling on the broken crust

who would I trust?

I become the default derailed memory-raided

limping

teacher I never had      I lead and      I follow

2

Call it the earthquake trail:

I lead through live-oak meadows

to the hillside      where the plates shuddered

rewind the seismic story

point to the sundered

fence of 1906      the unmatching rocks

trace the loop under dark bay branches

blurred with moss

behaving like a guide

Like a novice I lag

behind with the little snake

dead on the beaten path

This will never happen again

3

At the end of the beaten path we’re sold free

tickets for the celebration

of the death of history

The last page of the calendar

will go up      a sheet of flame

(no one will be permitted on the bridge)

We’ll assemble by letters

alphabetical

each ticket a letter

to view ourselves as giants

on screen-surround

in the parking lot

figures of men and women firmly pushing

babies in thickly padded prams

through disintegrating malls

into the new era

4

I have lost our way      the fault is mine

ours      the fault belongs

to us      I become      the guide

who should have defaulted

who should have remained the novice

I      as guide      failed

I as novice      trembled

I should have been stronger      held us

together

5

I thought I was

stronger      my will the ice-sail

speeding my runners

along frozen rivers

bloodied by sunset

thought I could be forever

will-ful      my sail filled

with perfect ozone      my blades

flashing clean into the ice

6

Was that youth?      that clear

sapphire on snow

a distinct hour

in Central Park      that smell

on sidewalk and windowsill

fresh and unmixt

the blizzard’s peace and drama

over the city

a public privacy

waiting

in the small steamed-up copy shop

slush tracked in across a wooden floor

then shivering      elated

in twilight

at the bus stop      with others      a public happiness

7

Not simple is it to do

a guide’s work      the novices

irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor

knowing not who they are

every phase of moon an excuse

for fibrillating

besides the need      in today’s world

to consider

outreach      the new thinking

—Or: love will strongly move you

or commerce will

You want a priest?      go to the altar

where eternal bargains are struck

want love?

go down inside your destructible heart

8

In Almodóvar’s film

we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field

to find past and future

elegant      beaten-up and knifed

sex without gender

preyed-on and preying

transactions      zones of play

the circling drivers

in search of their desires

theater of love      Ninth Circle

there are so many teachers

here      no fire can shrink them

Do you understand?      you could get your face

slashed in such a place

Do you think this is a movie?

9

She says: I gave my name and it was taken

I no longer have my name

I gave my word and it was broken

My words are learning

to walk on crutches

through traffic

without stammering

My name is a prisoner

who will not name names

She says:      I gave my tongue

to love      and this

makes it hard to speak

She says:      When my life depended

on one of two

opposite terms

I dared mix beauty with courage

they were my lovers

together they were tortured

10

Sick of my own old poems      caught

on rainshower Fifth Avenue

in a bookstore

I reach to a shelf

and there you are      Pier Paolo

speaking to Gramsci’s ashes

in the old encircling rhyme

Vivo nel non volere

del tramontato dopoguerra:

amando

il mondo che odio . . .

that vernacular voice

intimately political

and that was how you died

so I clasp my book to my heart

as the shop closes

11

Under the blackened dull-metal corners

of the small espresso pot

a jet flares blue

a smell tinctures the room

—some sniff or prescience of

a life that actually could be

lived      a grain of hope

a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway

to pull on our senses

without them we’re prey

to the failed will

its science of despair

12

How I hate it when you ascribe to me

a “woman’s vision”

cozy with coffeepots      drawn curtains

or      leaning in black leather dress

over your chair

black fingernail tracing your lines

overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle

How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”

for mere continuation

when the broken is what I saw

As a woman      do I love

and hate?      as a woman

do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?

Yes.      No.      You too

sexed as you are      hating

this whole thing      you keep on      it remaking

13

Where the novice pulls the guide

across frozen air

where the guide suddenly grips      the shoulder

of the novice      where the moss is golden

the sky sponged with pink at sunset

where the urine of reindeer barely vanished

stings the air like a sharp herb

where the throat of the clear-cut opens

across the surrendered forest

I’m most difficultly

with you      I lead

and I follow

our shadows      reindeer-huge

slip onto the map

of chance and purpose      figures

on the broken crust

exchanging places      bites to eat

a glance

2000

Four Short Poems

1

(driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)

The moon

is not romantic.      No.      It’s

a fact of life and still

we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects

the waves not draws them.      So

I’d compel you as I

have been compelled by you.      On the coast road

between drafts of fog

that face (and yes, it is

expressioned) breaking in and out

doth speak to us

as he did in his courtliness

and operatic mystery.

2

We’re not yet out of the everglades

of the last century

our body parts are still there

though we would have our minds careen and swoop

over the new ocean

with a wild surmise

the bloody strings

tangled and stuck between

become our lyre

3

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano

in a small California town by a boy from Prague

here for a month to learn American

This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning

of the transmissible heritage one evening

then for the whole month droops over the Internet.

4

From the new crudities, from the old

apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,

back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa

or Kafka of the intransmissible

tradition

the stolen secrets in the cleft

reside      and this, beloved poets

is where our hearts, livers and lights still

dwell unbeknownst and vital

for Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi

2000

Rauschenberg’s Bed

How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes

unsleepable site of anarchy      What body holes expressed

their exaltation loathing exhaustion

what horse of night has pawed those sheets

what talk under the blanket raveled

what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion

what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding

and felt stiff tatters under his fingers

How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical

inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow

How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads

while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing

Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts

sometimes eking forth from its laden springs

pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne

Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes

for the nether hole the everywhere

How the children sleep and wake

the children      sleep awake upstairs

How on a single night the driver of roads comes back

into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer

leans toward what’s there for warmth

human limbs      human crust

2000

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

I sat down facing the steep place where

tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the redwoods outstanding all

A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:

“We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing, “and we always bring our food”

Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that speared the redwoods

We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour

found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses

scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers

and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with

a moment if you could help it, illustrating

the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon

Your tour was called and you started upward.      I went back

to my redwood bench

“The mystai streamed”

toward the

mystery

But if anything up there was occult

nothing at ground level was:      tiny beings flashing around

in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby

grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and loved friends

You could see how it was when each tour was called and gathered itself

who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands

the languages all different, English the least of these

I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration

of sunshafts through the redwoods      the great spears folding up

into letters from the sun deposited through dark green slots

each one saying

I love you but

I must draw away      Believe, I will return

Then: happiness! your particular figures

in the descending crowd:      Anne, Jacob, Charlie!

Anne with her sandals off

in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder

2000

Ends of the Earth

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set.

Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.

Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations dissolve

into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/

ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning

I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds

questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My fear.

Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened here.

If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces

lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders

against the white wall after work and after dark

but never saw the hand

how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing

words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware

thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of the earth

web agitating between my life and another’s?

Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?

2000

The School

Among the Ruins

Centaur’s Requiem

Your hooves drawn together underbelly

shoulders in mud      your mane

of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you

your longhaired neck

eyes      jaw yes      and ears

unforgivably human on such a creature

unforgivably what you are

deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion

tender neck and nostrils      teacher      water-lily suction-spot

what you were      marvelous      we could not stand

Night drops      an awaited storm

driving in to wreck your path

Foam on your hide like flowers

where you fell      or fall      desire

2001

Equinox

Time split like a fruit between dark and light

and a usual fog drags

over this landfall

I’ve walked September end to end

barefoot room to room

carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root

or wick      eyes open

to abalone shells      memorial candle flames

split lemons      roses laid

along charring logs      Gorgeous things

: : dull acres of developed land as we had named it:      Nowhere

wetland      burnt garbage looming at its heart

gunmetal thicket      midnightblue blood and

tricking masks      I thought I knew

history was not a novel

So can I say it was not I      listed as Innocence

betrayed you      serving (and protesting always)

the motives of my government

thinking we’d scratch out a place

where poetry      old subversive shape

grew out of Nowhere      here?

where skin could lie on skin

a place “outside the limits”

Can say I was mistaken?

To be so bruised:      in the soft organs      skeins of consciousness

Over and over have let it be

damage to others      crushing of the animate core

that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world

so bruised:      heart      spleen      long inflamed ribbons of the guts

the spine’s vertical necklace swaying

Have let it swarm

through us      let it happen

as it must, inmost

but before this:      long before this      those other eyes

frontally exposed themselves and spoke

2001

Tell Me

1

Tell me, why way toward dawn the body

close to a body familiar as itself

chills—tell me, is this the hour

remembered if outlived

as freezing—no, don’t tell me

Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead

a peculiar hour      the silver mirror-frame’s

quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall

as a truck drives off before dawn

headlights on

Not wanting

to write this up      for the public      not wanting

to write it down      in secret

just to lie here in this cold story

feeling it      trying to feel it through

2

Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail

at the mica bar

where she refills without asking

Crouch into your raingarb      this will be a night

unauthorized shock troops are abroad

this will be a night

the face-ghosts lean

over the banister

declaring the old stories all

froze like beards or frozen margaritas

all the new stories taste of lukewarm

margaritas, lukewarm kisses

3

From whence I draw this:      harrowed in defeats of language

in history to my barest marrow

This:      one syllable then another

gropes upward

one stroke laid on another

sound from one throat then another

never in the making

making beauty or sense

always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in

only to be struck out

is blurt is roughed-up

hot      keeps body

in leaden hour

simmering

2001

The School Among the Ruins

Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.

1

Teaching the first lesson and the last

—great falling light of summer will you last

longer than schooltime?

When children flow

in columns at the doors

BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers

open or close high windows

with hooked poles      drawing darkgreen shades

closets unlocked, locked

questions unasked, asked, when

love of the fresh impeccable

sharp-pencilled      yes

order without cruelty

a street on earth      neither heaven nor hell

busy with commerce and worship

young teachers walking to school

fresh bread and early-open foodstalls

2

When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare

misconstrues day and night when lived-in

rooms from the upper city

tumble cratering lower streets

cornices of olden ornament      human debris

when fear vacuums out the streets

When the whole town flinches

blood on the undersole thickening to glass

Whoever crosses      hunched      knees bent      a contested zone

knows why she does this suicidal thing

School’s now in session day and night

children sleep

in the classrooms      teachers rolled close

3

How the good teacher loved

his school      the students

the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches

lemonade and milk

the classroom      glass cages

of moss and turtles

teaching responsibility

A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk

parents or lesson plans

diarrhea first question of the day

children shivering      it’s September

Second question: where is my mother?

4

One: I don’t know where your mother

is      Two: I don’t know

why they are trying to hurt us

Three: or the latitude and longitude

of their hatred Four: I don’t know if we

hate them as much      I think there’s more toilet paper

in the supply closet      I’m going to break it open

Today this is your lesson:

write as clearly as you can

your name      home street      and number

down on this page

No you can’t go home yet

but you aren’t lost

this is our school

I’m not sure what we’ll eat

we’ll look for healthy roots and greens

searching for water though the pipes are broken

5

There’s a young cat sticking

her head through window bars

she’s hungry like us

but can feed on mice

her bronze erupting fur

speaks of a life already wild

her golden eyes

don’t give quarter      She’ll teach us      Let’s call her

Sister

when we get milk we’ll give her some

6

I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp

All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking

above us to somewhere

Don’t let your faces turn to stone

Don’t stop asking me why

Let’s pay attention to our cat      she needs us

Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens

7

“We sang them to naps told stories made

shadow-animals with our hands

wiped human debris off boots and coats

sat learning by heart the names

some were too young to write

some had forgotten how”

2001

This Evening Let’s

not talk

about my country      How

I’m from an optimistic culture

that speaks louder than my passport

Don’t double-agent-contra my

invincible innocence      I’ve

got my own

suspicions      Let’s

order retsina

cracked olives and bread

I’ve got questions of my own but

let’s give a little

let’s let a little be

If friendship is not a tragedy

if it’s a mercy

we can be merciful

if it’s just escape

we’re neither of us running

why otherwise be here

Too many reasons not

to waste a rainy evening

in a backroom of bouzouki

and kitchen Greek

I’ve got questions of my own but

let’s let it be a little

There’s a beat in my head

song of my country

called Happiness, U.S.A.

Drowns out bouzouki

drowns out world and fusion

with its Get—get—get

into your happiness before

happiness pulls away

hangs a left along the piney shore

weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—

Don’t be proud, run hard for that

enchantment boat

tear up the shore if you must but

get into your happiness because

before

and otherwise

it’s going to pull away

So tell me later

what I know already

and what I don’t get

yet save for another day

Tell me this time

what you are going through

travelling the Metropolitan

Express

break out of that style

give me your smile

awhile

2001

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

The engineer’s story of hauling coal

to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs

between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete

back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows

in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years

The flight attendant’s story murmured

to the flight steward in the dark galley

of her fifth-month loss of nerve

about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen

The story of the forensic medical team’s

small plane landing on an Alaska icefield

of the body in the bag they had to drag

over the ice like the whole life of that body

The story of the man driving

600 miles to be with a friend in another country      seeming

easy when leaving but afterward

writing in a letter difficult truths

Of the friend watching him leave remembering

the story of her body

with his once and the stories of their children

made with other people and how his mind went on

pressing hers like a body

There is the story of the mind’s

temperature neither cold nor celibate

Ardent      The story of

not one thing only.

2002

Usonian Journals 2000

[Usonian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]

Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare

A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.

Day/Job/Mare

. . . to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy . . . He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder . . . she’s here because he is, isn’t she? . . . He’s not likely to make it through . . . Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.

As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.

Document Window

Could I just show what’s happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I’d like you to see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem . . . the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There’s a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.

Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.

Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.

This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn’t ours. Indifferently.

Voices

Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don’t pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That’s history.

The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking . . . Television the first great lesson: against silence. “I thought she’d never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she’ll call you all right and you did”—“ And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it’s only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I’m due on in forty-five?”

A neighbor painting his garage yelling in cell phone from the driveway: voice that penetrates kitchen-window glass. “Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don’t CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she’s HOOKED and I’m supposed to CARE? Do they know what they’ll GET?”

Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: “Marty? Thought I’d never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won’t block you at all. Just give him what we talked about.”

USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.

Mirrors

Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back.

Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand–up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?

You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.

Artworks (I)

Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond Houses of people whose eyes do not meet.

White people doing and seeing no evil.

(Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera unmeeting.) “In fact I’ve lived here all along.”

That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.

Stranger

Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn’t undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)

But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?

Artworks (II)

Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe’s photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we’re collaborators, what’s our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?

This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?

Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.

Incline

Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, its life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.

Mission Statement

The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.

It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.

The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.

Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized that both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.

In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language

because of its known and unknown powers

to bind and to dissociate

because of its capacity

to ostracize the speechless

because of its capacity

to nourish self-deception

because of its capacity

for rebirth and subversion

because of the history

of torture

against human speech

2000–2002

Transparencies

That the meek word like the righteous word can bully

that an Israeli soldier interviewed years

after the first Intifada could mourn on camera

what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse

that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl

on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made

is merely routine      word that would cancel deed

That human equals innocent and guilty

That we grasp for innocence whether or no

is elementary      That words can translate into broken bones

That the power to hurl words is a weapon

That the body can be a weapon

any child on playground knows      That asked your favorite word

in a game

you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river

(never a pronoun never God or War)

is taken for granted      That word and body

are all we have to lay on the line

That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared

by time’s dirty rains, we might argue

likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding

But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face

That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer

That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the

wedding

That I can look through glass

into my neighbor’s house

but not my neighbor’s life

That glass is sometimes broken to save lives

That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot

is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how

you live it

2002

Ritual Acts

i

We are asking for books

No, not—but a list of books

to be given to young people

Well, to young poets

to guide them in their work

He gestures impatiently

They won’t read he says

My time is precious

If they want to they’ll find

whatever they need

I’m going for a walk after lunch

After that I lie down

Then and only then do I read the papers

Mornings are for work

the proofs of the second volume

—my trilogy, and he nods

And we too nod recognition

ii

The buses—packed

since the subways are forbidden

and the highways forsaken

so people bring everything on—

what they can’t do without—

Air conditioners, sculpture

Double baskets of babies

Fruit platters, crematory urns

Sacks of laundry, of books

Inflated hearts, bass fiddles

Bridal gowns in plastic bags

Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks

The tablets of Moses

iii

After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?

Love is the only thing in life

but then you can love too much

or the wrong way, you lose

yourself or you lose

the person

or you strangle each other

Maybe the object of love is

to have loved

greatly

at one time or another

Like a cinema trailer

watched long ago

iv

You need to turn yourself around

face in another direction

She wrapped herself in a flag

soaked it in gasoline and lit a match

This is for the murdered babies

they say she said

Others heard

for the honor of my country

Others remember

the smell and how she screamed

Others say, This was just theater

v

This will not be a love scene

but an act between two humans

Now please let us see you

tenderly scoop his balls

into your hand

You will hold them

under your face

There will be tears on your face

That will be all

the director said

We will not see his face

He wants to do the scene

but not to show

his face

vi

A goat devouring a flowering plant

A child squeezing through a fence to school

A woman slicing an onion

A bare foot sticking out

A wash line tied to a torn-up tree

A dog’s leg lifted at a standpipe

An old man kneeling to drink there

A hand on the remote

We would like to show but to not be obvious

except to the oblivious

We want to show ordinary life

We are dying to show it

2003

Alternating Current

Sometimes I’m back in that city

in its/      not my/      autumn

crossing a white bridge

over a dun-green river

eating shellfish with young poets

under the wrought-iron roof of the great market

drinking with the dead poet’s friend

to music struck

from odd small instruments

walking arm in arm with the cinematographer

through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi

earth and air stretched

to splitting still

his question:

have you ever been in a place like this?

No bad dreams.      Night, the bed, the faint clockface.

No bad dreams.      Her arm or leg or hair.

No bad dreams.      A wheelchair unit screaming

off the block.      No bad dreams.      Pouches of blood: red cells,

plasma.      Not here.      No, none.      Not yet.

Take one, take two

—camera out of focus      delirium swims

across the lens      Don’t get me wrong      I’m not

critiquing your direction

but I was there      saw what you didn’t

take      the care

you didn’t      first of yourself then

of the child      Don’t get me wrong I’m on

your side but standing off

where it rains      not on the set where it’s

not raining yet

take three

What’s suffered in laughter      in aroused afternoons

in nightly yearlong back-to-back

wandering each others’ nerves and pulses

O changing love that doesn’t change

A deluxe blending machine

A chair with truth’s coat of arms

A murderous code of manners

A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand

A small bird stuffed with print and roasted

A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion

A bloodred valentine to power

A watered-silk innocence

A microwaved foie gras

A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations

A used set of satin sheets folded to go

A box at the opera of suffering

A fellowship at the villa, all expenses

A Caterpillar’s tracks gashing the environment

A bad day for students of the environment

A breakdown of the blending machine

A rush to put it in order

A song in the chapel a speech a press release

As finally by wind or grass

drive-ins

where romance always was

an after-dark phenomenon

lie crazed and still

great panoramas lost to air

this time this site of power shall pass

and we remain or not but not remain

as now we think we are

for J.J.

When we are shaken out

when we are shaken out to the last vestige

when history is done with us

when our late grains glitter

salt swept into shadow

indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals

will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)

abides in residue

long as there’s tenderness and solidarity

Could the tempos and attunements of my voice

in a poem or yours      or yours and mine

in telephonic high hilarity

cresting above some stupefied inanity

be more than personal

(and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)

2002–2003

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios

1

Still learning the word

“home”      or what it could mean

say, to relinquish

a backdrop of Japanese maples turning

color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom

where the dahlia tubers were thrown

You must go live in the city now

over the subway though not on

its grating

must endure the foreign music

of the block party

finger in useless anger

the dangling cords of the window blind

2

In a vast dystopic space the small things

multiply

when all the pills run out the pain

grows more general

flies find the many eyes

quarrels thicken then

weaken

tiny mandibles of rumor open and close

blame has a name that will not be spoken

you grasp or share a clot of food

according to your nature

or your strength

love’s ferocity snarls

from under the drenched blanket’s hood

3

City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

whatever it can

casual salutations first

little rivulets of thought

then wanting stronger stuff

sucks at the marrow of selves

the nurse’s long knowledge of wounds

the rabbi’s scroll of ethics

the young worker’s defiance

only the solipsist seems intact

in her prewar building

4

For recalcitrancy of attitude

the surgeon is transferred

to the V.A. hospital      where poverty

is the administrator

of necessity and her

orders don’t necessarily

get obeyed

because

the government

is paying

and the

used-to-be

warriors

are patients

5

Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain

remember Paul Nizan?

You thought you were innocent if you said

“I love this woman and I want to live

in accordance with my love”

but you were beginning the revolution

maybe so, maybe not

look at her now

pale lips papery flesh

at your creased belly      wrinkled sac

look at the scars

reality’s autographs

along your ribs across her haunches

look at the collarbone’s reverberant line

how in a body can defiance

still embrace its likeness

6

Not to get up and go back to the drafting table

where failure crouches accusing

like the math test you bluffed and flunked

so early on

not to drag into the window’s

cruel and truthful light      your blunder

not to start over

but to turn your back, saying

all anyway is compromise

impotence and collusion

from here on I will be no part of it

is one way could you afford it

7

Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

the last domestic traces, cup and towel

awaiting final disposal

—has ironed his shirt for travel

left an envelope for the cleaning woman

on the counter under the iron

internationalist turning toward home

three continents to cross      documents declarations

searches queues

and home no simple matter

of hearth or harbor

bleeding from internal wounds

he diagnosed      physician

without frontiers

2002

Wait

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent      hell’s noise

in your nostrils      crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait      no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why

on earth

they never told you

2003

Screen Door

Metallic slam on a moonless night

A short visit and so we departed.

A short year with many long

days

A long phone call with many      pauses.

It was gesture’s code

we were used to using, we were

awkward without it.

Over the phone:      knocking heard

at a door in another country.

Here it’s tonight:      there tomorrow.

A vast world we used to think small.

That we knew everyone who mattered.

Firefly flicker.      Metallic slam.      A moonless night.      Too dark

for gesture.

But it was gesture’s code we were used to.

Might need again. Urgent

hold-off or beckon.

Fierce supplication. One finger pointing: “Thither.”

Palms flung upward: “What now?”

Hand slicing the air or across the throat.

A long wave to the departing.

2003

Tendril

1

Why does the outstretched finger of home

probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam

on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed

face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home

Why does the young security guard

pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly

Why does he wish he were boarding

as the passengers file past him into the plane

What are they carrying in their bundles

what vanities, superstitions, little talismans

What have the authorities intercepted

who will get to keep it

2

Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin

she configures a gecko

aslant the overhead bin      tendrils of vine

curling up through the cabin floor

buried here in night as in a valley

remote from rescue

Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were

before

now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were

Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green

through the cracks in the fused imperious shell

3

Dreaming a womb’s languor valleyed in death

among fellow strangers

she has merely slept through the night

a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing

the gecko has dashed into some crevice

of her brain, the tendrils retract

orange juice is passed on trays

declarations filled out in the sudden dawn

4

She can’t go on dreaming of mass death

this was not to have been her métier

she says to the mirror in the toilet

a bad light any way you judge yourself

and she’s judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator

of her time

‘s conspiracies of the ignorant

with the ruthless      She’s the one she’s looking at

5

This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic

and besides she’s not confessing

her mind balks      craving wild onions

nostril-chill of eucalyptus

that seventh sense of what’s missing

against what’s supplied

She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin

sunrise crashing through the windows

Cut the harping she tells herself

You’re human, porous like all the rest

6

She was to have sat in a vaulted

library      heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk

for sieving, sifting, translating

all morning      then a quick lunch      thick coffee

then light descending slowly

on earthen-colored texts

but that’s a dream of dust

frail are thy tents      humanity

facing thy monologues of force

She must have fallen asleep reading

7

She must have fallen asleep reading

The woman who mopped the tiles

is deliquescent      a scarlet gel

her ligaments and lungs

her wrought brain      her belly’s pulse

disrupt among others mangled there

the chief librarian the beggar

the man with the list of questions

the scrolls never to be translated

and the man who wheeled the scrolls

8

She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove

a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer

rearranging the past in a blip

coherence smashed into vestige

not for her even the thought

of her children’s children picking up

one shard of tile then another laying

blue against green seeing words

in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers

guessing at what it was

the levantine debris

Not for her but still for someone?

2003

Telephone Ringing

in the Labyrinth

Voyage to the Denouement

A child’s hand smears a wall      the reproof is bitter

wall contrives to linger      child, punisher, gone in smoke

An artisan lays on hues:      lemon, saffron, gold

stare hard before you start covering the whole room

Inside the thigh a sweet mole      on the balding

skull an irregular island      what comes next

After the burnt forests      silhouettes wade

liquid hibiscus air

Velvet rubs down to scrim      iron utensils

discolor unseasoned

Secret codes of skin and hair

go dim      left from the light too long

Because my wish was to have things simpler

than they were      memory too became

a smudge      sediment from a hand

repeatedly lying on the same surface

Call it a willful optimism

from when old ownerships unpeeled      curled out

into the still nameless      new imperium      Call it

haplessness of a creature      not yet ready

for her world-citizen’s papers

(Across the schoolroom mural      bravely

small ships did under sail traverse great oceans)

Rain rededicates the exhumed

African burial ground

traffic lashes its edges

the city a scar a fragment floating

on tidal dissolution

The opal on my finger

fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble

2004

Calibrations

She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl

where she will sit on beds and sing

ballads from when Romany

roamed Spain

•   •   •

A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly

the stem of a glass

or how to stroke a face

is this how far we have come

to make love easy

Ghost limbs go into spasm in the night

You come back from war with the body you have

•   •   •

What you can’t bear

carry endure lift

you’ll have to drag

it’ll come with you the ghostlimb

the shadow      blind

echo of your body spectre of your soul

•   •   •

Let’s not talk yet of making love

nor of ingenious devices

replacing touch

And this is not theoretical:

A poem with calipers to hold a heart

so it will want to go on beating

2004

Wallpaper

1

A room papered with clippings:

newsprint in bulging patches

none of them mentions our names

none from that history then      O red

kite snarled in a cloud

small plane melted in fog:      no matter:

I worked to keep it current

and meaningful:      a job of living I thought

history as wallpaper

urgently selected clipped and pasted

but the room itself      nowhere

gone the address      the house

golden-oak banisters zigzagging

upward, stained glass on the landings

streaked porcelain in the bathrooms

loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried

up to secrete the rash imagination

of a time to come

What we said then, our breath      remains

otherwhere:      in me      in you

2

Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor

Fugitive Variations

discs we played over and over

on the one-armed phonograph

Childish we were in our adoration

of the dead composer

who’d ignored the weather signs

trying to cross the Andes

stupidly      I’d say now

and you’d agree      seasoned

as we are      working stretched

weeks      eating food bought

with ordinary grudging wages

keeping up with rent, utilities

a job of living as I said

3

Clocks are set back      quick dark

snow filters past my lashes

this is the common ground

white-crusted sidewalks      windshield wipers

licking, creaking

to and fro      to and fro

If the word gets out if the word

escapes if the word

flies if it dies

it has its way of coming back

The handwritings on the walls

are vast and coded

the music blizzards past

2004

In Plain Sight

My neighbor moving

in a doorframe      moment’s

reach of her hand      then

withdrawn      As from some old

guilty pleasure

Smile etched like a scar

which must be borne

Smile

in a photograph taken against one’s will

Her son up on a ladder stringing

along the gutter

electric icicles in a temperate zone

If the suffering hidden in plain sight

is of her past her future

or the thin-ice present where

we’re balancing here

or how she sees it

I can’t presume

. . . Ice-thin.      Cold and precarious

the land I live in and have argued not to leave

Cold on the verge of crease

crack without notice

ice-green disjuncture      treasoning us

to flounder cursing each other

Cold and grotesque the sex

the grimaces the grab

A privilege      you say

to live here      A luxury

Everyone still wants to come here!

You want a christmas card, a greeting

to tide us over

with pictures of the children

then you demand a valentine

an easterlily      anything for the grab

a mothersday menu      wedding invitation

It’s not as in a museum that I

observe

and mark in every Face I meet

under crazed surfaces

traces of feeling locked in shadow

Not as in a museum of history

do I pace here      nor as one who in a show

of bland paintings shrugs and walks on      I gaze

through faces      not as an X-ray

nor

as paparazzo shooting

the compromised celebrity

nor archaeologist filming

the looted site

nor as the lover tearing out of its frame

the snapshot to be held to a flame

but as if a mirror

forced to reflect a room

the figures

standing      the figures crouching

2004

Behind the Motel

A man lies under a car half bare

a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth

hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist

a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror

fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer

She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth

that wiped it disintegrate in mist

or dying breath on the skin of a mirror

She has felt her life close like a drawer

has awoken somewhere else, bare

He feels his skin as if it were mist

as if his face would show in no mirror

He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer

crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare

hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth

stares at the woman talking into a mirror

who has shut the phone into the drawer

while over and over with a torn cloth

at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare

motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist

2004

Archaic

Cold wit leaves me cold

this time of the world      Multifoliate disorders

straiten my gait      Minuets don’t become me

Been wanting to get out      see the sights

but the exits are slick with people

going somewhere fast

every one with a shared past

and a mot juste      And me so out of step

with my late-night staircase inspirations      my

utopian slant

Still, I’m alive here

in this village drawn in a tightening noose

of ramps and cloverleafs

but the old directions I drew up

for you

are obsolete

Here’s how

to get to me

I wrote

Don’t misconstrue the distance

take along something for the road

everything might be closed

this isn’t a modern place

You arrived starving at midnight

I gave you warmed-up food

poured tumblers of brandy

put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses

—the only jazz in the house

We talked for hours      of barricades

lesser and greater sorrows

ended up laughing in the thicksilver

birdstruck light

2005

Long After Stevens

A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains

more modern than the will

to be modern      The mountain’s profile

in undefiled snow disdains

definitions of poetry      It was always

indefinite, task and destruction

the laser eye of the poet      her blind eye

her moment-stricken eye      her unblinking eye

She had to get down from the blocked train

lick snow from bare cupped hands

taste what had soared into that air

—local cinders, steam of the fast machine

clear her palate with a breath      distinguish

through tumbling whiteness      figures

frozen      figures advancing

weapons at the ready

for the new password

She had to feel her tongue

freeze and burn at once

instrument searching, probing

toward a foreign tongue

2005

Rhyme

Walking by the fence but the house

not there

going to the river but the

river looking spare

bones of the river spread out

everywhere

O tell me this is home

Crossing the bridge but

some planks not there

looking at the shore but only

getting back the glare

dare you trust the river when there’s

no water there

O tell me is this home

Getting into town seeing

nobody I know

folks standing around

nowhere to go

staring into the air like

they saw a show

O tell me was this my home

Come to the railroad no train

on the tracks

switchman in his shanty

with a great big axe

so what happened here so what

are the facts

So tell me where is my home

2005

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

It should be the most desired sight of all

the person with whom you hope to live and die

walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight

Should be yet I say there is something

more desirable:      the ex-stasis of galaxies

so out from us there’s no vocabulary

but mathematics and optics

equations letting sight pierce through time

into liberations, lacerations of light and dust

exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous

beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream

beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

or life, rage

for order, rage for destruction

—beyond this love which stirs

the air every time she walks into the room

These impersonae, however we call them

won’t invade us as on movie screens

they are so old, so new, we are not to them

we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

of our tilted gazing

but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

for Jack Litewka

2005

This Is Not the Room

of polished tables lit with medalled

torsos bent toward microphones

where ears lean hands scribble

“working the dark side”

—glazed eye meeting frozen eye—

This is not the room where tears down carven

cheeks track rivulets in the scars

left by the gouging tool

where wood itself is weeping

where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye

This is the room

where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet

flings her rag into the bucket

straightens up      spits at the mirror

2005

Unknown Quantity

Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack

of rich compost      Charcoal, your hair

sheds sparks through your muttered dreams

Deep is your sleep in the starless dark

and you wake in your live skin to show me

a tulip      Not the prizewinning Queen of the Night

furled in her jade wrappings

but the Prince of Darkness, the not-yet, the X

crouched in his pale bulb

held out in the palm of your hand

Shall we bury him wait and see what happens

will there be time for waiting and to see

2005

Tactile Value

from crush and splinter

death in the market

jeering robotic

dry-ice disrupt

to conjure this:

perishing

persistent script

scratched-up smeared

and torn

let hair, nail cuttings

nourish the vine and fig tree

let man, woman

eat, be sheltered

•   •   •

Marx the physician laid his ear

on the arhythmic heart

felt the belly

diagnosed the pain

did not precisely write

of lips roaming damp skin

hand plunged in hair bed-laughter

mouth clasping mouth

(what we light with this coalspark

living instantly in us

if it continue

2005–2006

Director’s Notes

You don’t want a harsh outcry here

not to violate the beauty yet

dawn unveiling ochre village

but to show coercion

within that beauty, endurance required

Begin with girl

pulling hand over hand on chain

only sound drag and creak

in time it becomes monotonous

then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony

repetitive motion, repetitive sound

resistance, irritation

increasing for the viewers

sense of what are they here for, anyway

dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch

(they aren’t used to duration

this was a test)

Keep that dislike that boredom as a value

also as risk

so when bucket finally tinks at rim

they breathe a sigh, not so much relief

as finally grasping

what all this was for

dissolve as she dips from bucket

2005

Rereading The Dead Lecturer

Overthrow.      And make new.

An idea.      And we felt it.

A meaning.      And we caught it

as the dimensions spread, gathering

in pre-utopian basements      figured shadows

scrawled with smoke and music.

Shed the dead hand,

let sound be sense.      A world

echoing everywhere, Fanon, Freire, thin pamphlets lining

raincoat pockets, poetry on walls, damp purple mimeos cranking

—the feeling of an idea.      An idea of feeling.

That love could be so resolute

And the past?      Overthrow of systems, forms

could not overthrow the past

nor our

neglect of consequences.

Nor that cold will we misnamed.

There were consequences.      A world

repeating everywhere:      the obliterations.

What’s surreal, hyperreal, virtual,

what’s poetry what’s verse what’s new.      What is

a political art.      If we

(who?) ever were conned

into mere definitions.

If we

accept

(book of a soul contending

2005

Letters Censored

Shredded

Returned to Sender

or Judged Unfit to Send

Unless in quotation marks (for which see Notes on the Poems), the letter fragments are written by various imaginary persons.

“We must prevent this mind from functioning . . .”: words of the prosecutor sentencing Antonio Gramsci to prison, June 2, 1928.

—Could you see me laboring over this

right arm in sling, typing left-handed with one finger—

{On a scale of one to ten what is your pain today}

•   •   •

—shall I measure the split atoms

of pleasure flying outward from the core—

•   •   •

—To think of her naked every day unfreezes me—

•   •   •

Banditry, rapes, burning the woods

“a kind of primitive class struggle

with no lasting or effective results”

—The bakers strike, the needleworkers strike, the mechanics strike,

the miners strike

the great machine coughs out the pieces and hurtles on—

•   •   •

—then there are days all thought comes down to sound:

Rust.      August.      Mattress.      Must.

Chains . . .

—when consciousness + sensation feels like/ = suffering—

•   •   •

—the people, yes, as yet unformed—deformed—no: disinformed—

•   •   •

—What’s realistic fantasy?—Call it hope—

•   •   •

—heard your voice on the news tonight, its minor key

your old-fashioned mindfulness—could have loved you again—

•   •   •

—Autumn invades my body, anger

wrapped in forgiving sunlight, fear of the cold—

•   •   •

—Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—

•   •   •

“this void, this vacuum”

•   •   •

—You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed

of concepts that could become your strength—

•   •   •

—we’re told it’s almost over, but we see no sign of it yet—

•   •   •

“caught between a feeling of immense tenderness for you

which seems . . . a weakness

that could only be consoled

by an immediate physical caress . . .”

[We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years]

“ . . . and these inadequate, cold and colorless words”

•   •   •

—What I meant to write, belov’d critic, then struck it out

thinking you might accuse me of

whatever you would:

I wanted a sensual materialism to utter pleasure

Something beyond a cry that could sound like a groan—

•   •   •

—Vocalizing forbidden syllables—

•   •   •

—our mythologies choke us, we have enthralled ourselves—

•   •   •

[Writing like this for the censors

but I won’t hide behind words]

•   •   •

“my body cells revolve in unison

with the whole universe

The cycle of the seasons, the progression of the solstices

and equinoxes

I feel them as flesh of my flesh

and under the snow the first violets are already trembling

In short, time has seemed to me a thing of flesh

ever since space

ceased to exist for me”

•   •   •

—History = bodies in time—

or, in your language:

H = T

b

•   •   •

—to think of the one asleep

in that field beside the chimney

of the burnt-out house

a thing of flesh, exhausted—

•   •   •

—this flash is all we know . . . . can we shut our eyes to it . . . ?—

•   •   •

—more and more I dread futility—

•   •   •

“The struggle, whose normal external expressions

have been choked,

attaches itself to the structure

of the old class like a destructive gangrene . . .

it takes on morbid forms of mysticism,

sensualism, moral indifference,

physical and psychic pathological depravations . . .

The old structure does not contain and is unable

to satisfy the new needs . . .”

•   •   •

—Trying to hold an inner focus while hoarse laughter

ricochets from the guardroom—

•   •   •

—liquefaction is a word I might use for how I would take you—

•   •   •

—the daunted river finally

undammed?—

[prevent this mind]

2005

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede

Should blue air in its purity let you disdain

the stink of artificial pine

the gaunt architecture

of cheap political solutions

if there are philosophies to argue

the moment when you would

or wouldn’t spring to shield

a friend’s body or jump

into scummed waters after

a stranger caught submerging

or walk off to your parked

car your sandwich your possible orange

if theories rage or dance

about this if in the event      any

can be sure who did

or did not act on principle or impulse

and what’s most virtuous

can we not be nodding smiling

taking down notes like this

and of all places

in a place like this

I’ll work with you on this bad matter      I can

but won’t give you the time of day

if you think it’s hypothetical

2006

Draft #2006

i

Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.

(What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What

would have made you stay? Why wouldn’t you listen?)

—Couldn’t you show us what you meant, can’t we get it right

this time? Can’t you put it another way?—

(You were looking for openings where they’d been walled up—)

—But you were supposed to be our teacher—

(One-armed, I was trying to get you, one by one, out of that

cellar.      It wasn’t enough)

ii

Dreamfaces blurring horrorlands: border of poetry.

Ebb tide sucks out clinging rockpool creatures, no swimming

back into sleep.

Clockface says too early, body prideful and humble shambles

into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual

acts.

Reassembling the anagram scattered nightly, rebuilding daily

the sand city.

iii

What’s concrete for me: from there I cast out further.

But need to be there. On the stone causeway. Baffled and

obstinate.

Eyes probing the dusk. Foot-slippage possible.

iv

Sleeping that time at the philosopher’s house.      Not lovers,

friends from the past.

Music the vertex of our triangle.      Bach our hypotenuse

strung between philosophy and poetry.

Sun loosening fog on the hillside, cantata spun on the

turntable:      Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.

Feeling again, in our mid-forties, the old contrapuntal ten-

sion between our natures.      The future as if still open, like

when we were classmates.

He’d met Heidegger in the Black Forest, corresponded

with Foucault.      We talked about Wittgenstein.

I was on my way to meet the one who said Philosophers have

interpreted the world:      the point is to change it.

v

On a street known for beautiful shops she buys a piece of

antique Japanese silk, a white porcelain egg.

Had abandoned her child, later went after him, found the

child had run away.

Hurt and angry, joined a group to chant through the pain.

They said, you must love yourself, give yourself gifts.

Whatever eases you someone says, lets you forgive yourself,

let go.

America, someone says.

Orphaning, orphaned here, don’t even know it.

vi

Silent limousines meet jets descending over the Rockies.

Steam rooms, pure thick towels, vases of tuberose and jas-

mine, old vintages await the après-skiers.

Rooms of mahogany and leather, conversations open in

international code.      Thighs and buttocks to open later by

arrangement.

Out of sight, out of mind, she solitary wrestles a huge

duvet, resheathes heavy tasselled bolsters.      Bed after bed.

Nights, in her room, ices strained arms.      Rests her legs.

Elsewhere, in Andhra Pradesh, another farmer swallows

pesticide.

vii

Condemned, a clinic coughs up its detritus.

Emergency exit, gurneys lined double, mercy draining

down exhausted tubes.

Drills and cranes clearing way for the new premises.

As if I already stood at their unglazed windows, eyeing the

distressed site through skeletal angles.

Tenant already of the disensoulment projects.

Had thought I deserved nothing better than these stark

towers named for conglomerates?—a line of credit, a give-

away?

viii

They asked me, is this time worse than another.

I said, for whom?

Wanted to show them something.      While I wrote on the

chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.

Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon.

ix

The sheer mass of the thing, its thereness, stuns thought.

Since it exists, it must have existed.      Will exist.      It says so

here.

Excruciating contempt for love.      For the strained fibre of

common affections, mutual assistance

sifted up from landfill, closed tunnels, drought-sheared

riverbeds, street beds named in old census books, choked

under the expressway.

Teachers bricolating scattered schools of trust.      Rootlets

watered by fugitives.

Contraband packets, hummed messages.      Dreams of the

descendants, surfacing.

Hand reaching for its like exposes a scarred wrist.

Numerals.      A bracelet of rust.

In a desert observatory, under plaster dust, smashed lenses

left by the bombardments,

star maps crackle, unscrolling.

2006

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

i

You who can be silent in twelve languages

trying to crease again in paling light

the map you unfurled that morning      if

you in your rearview mirror sighted me

rinsing a green glass bowl

by midsummer nightsun in, say, Reykjavík

if at that moment my hand slipped

and that bowl cracked to pieces

and one piece stared at me like a gibbous moon

if its convex reflection caught you walking

the slurried highway shoulder after the car broke down

if such refractions matter

ii

Well, I’ve held on      peninsula

to continent, climber

to rockface

Sensual peninsula attached so      stroked

by the tides’ pensive and moody hands

Scaler into thin air

seen from below as weed or lichen

improvidently fastened

a mat of hair webbed in a bush

A bush ignited      then

consumed

Violent lithography

smolder’s legacy on a boulder traced

iii

Image erupts from image

atlas from vagrancy

articulation from mammal howl

strangeness from repetition

even this      default location

surveyed again      one more poem

one more Troy or Tyre or burning tire

seared eyeball genitals

charred cradle

but a different turn      working

this passage of the labyrinth

as laboratory

I’d have entered, searched before

but that ball of thread      that clew

offering an exit choice was no gift at all

iv

I found you by design or

was it your design

or: we were drawn, we drew

Midway in this delicate

negotiation      telephone rings

(Don’t stop! . . . they’ll call again . . .)

Offstage the fabulous creature scrapes and shuffles

we breathe its heavy dander

I don’t care how, if it dies      this is not the myth

No ex/interior: compressed

between my throat

and yours, hilarious oxygen

And, for the record, each did sign

our true names on the register

at the mouth of this hotel

v

I would have wanted to say it

without falling back

on words      Desired not

you so much as your life,

your prevailing      Not for me

but for furtherance      how

you would move

on the horizon      You, the person, you

the particle      fierce and furthering

2006

Tonight No Poetry

Will Serve

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Burn me some music      Send my roots rain      I’m swept

dry from inside      Hard winds rack my core

A struggle at the roots of the mind      Whoever said

it would go on and on like this

Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car

palming a notebook scribbled in

contraband calligraphy      against the war

poetry wages against itself

•   •   •

Once under a shed’s eaves

thunder drumming membrane of afternoon

electric scissors slitting the air

thick drops spattering few and far

we could smell it then a long way off

But where’s the rain coming to soak this soil

•   •   •

Burn me some music      There’s a tune

“Neglect of Sorrow”

I’ve heard it hummed or strummed

my whole life long

in many a corridor

waiting for tomorrow

long after tomorrow

should’ve come

on many an ear it should have fallen

but the bands were playing so loud

2007

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

Lurid, garish, gash

rended creature struggles to rise, to

run with dripping belly

Blood making everything more real

pounds in the spearthruster’s arm as in

the gunman’s neck the offhand

moment—Now!—before he

takes the bastards out

•   •   •

Splendor in black and ochre on a grecian urn

Beauty as truth

The sea as background

stricken with black long-oared ships

on shore chariots shields greaved muscled legs

horses rearing      Beauty!      flesh before gangrene

•   •   •

Mind-shifting gods rush back and forth      Delusion

a daughter seized by the hair      swung out to bewilder men

Everything here is conflictual and is called man’s fate

•   •   •

Ugly glory: open-eyed wounds

feed enormous flies

Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze

Horses turn away their heads

weeping equine tears

Beauty?

a wall with names of the fallen

from both sides      passionate objectivity

2009

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Saw you walking barefoot

taking a long look

at the new moon’s eyelid

later spread

sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair

asleep but not oblivious

of the unslept unsleeping

elsewhere

Tonight I think

no poetry

will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane

adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun

submerges the subject

noun is choking

verb      disgraced      goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

2007

Scenes of Negotiation

Z:

I hated that job but      You’d have taken it too if you’d had a family

Y:

Pretty filthy and dangerous though wasn’t it?

Z:

Those years, one bad move, you were down on your knees begging for work

Zz:

If you’d had a family! Who’d you think we were, just people standing around?

Yy:

Filthy and dangerous like the streets I worked before you ever met me?

Zz:

Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a liqht there. Can you see me now?

•   •   •

Hired guards shove metal barriers through plate glass, then prod the first line of protestors in through the fanged opening. Video and cellphone cameras devouring it all. Sucked in and blurted worldwide: “Peace” Rally Turns Violent

Protestors, a mixed bunch, end up in different holding cells where they won’t see each other again

Being or doing: you’re taken in for either, or both. Who you were born as, what or who you chose or became. Facing moral disorder head-on, some for the first time, on behalf of others. Delusion of inalienable rights. Others who’ve known the score all along

Some bailed-out go back to the scene. Some go home to sleep. Others, it’s months in solitary mouthing dialogues with nobody. Imagining social presence. Fending off, getting ready for the social absence called death

•   •   •

This isn’t much more than a shed on two-by-fours over the water. Uncaulked. Someone’s romantic hideaway. We’ve been here awhile, like it well enough. The tide retches over rocks below. Wind coming up now. We liked it better when the others were still here. They went off in different directions. Patrol boats gathered some in, we saw the lights and heard the megaphones. Tomorrow I’ll take the raggedy path up to the road, walk into town, buy a stamp and mail this. Town is a mini-mart, church, oyster-bar-dance-hall, fishing access, roadside cabins. Weekenders, locals, we can blend in. They couldn’t so well. We were trying to stay with the one thing most people agree on. They said there was no such one thing without everything else, you couldn’t make it so simple

Have books, tapes here, and this typewriter voice telling you what I’m telling you in the language we used to share. Everyone still sends love

•   •   •

There are no illusions at this table, she said to me

Room up under the roof. Men and women, a resistance cell ? I thought. Reaching hungrily for trays of folded bread, rice with lentils, brown jugs of water and pale beer. Joking across the table along with alertness, a kind of close mutual attention. One or two picking on small stringed instruments taken down from a wall

I by many decades the oldest person there. However I was there

Meal finished, dishes rinsed under a tap, we climbed down a kind of stair-ladder to the floor below. There were camouflage-patterned outfits packed in cartons; each person shook out and put on a pair of pants and a shirt, still creased from the packing. They wore them like work clothes. Packed underneath were weapons

Thick silverblack hair, eyes seriously alive, hue from some ancient kiln. The rest of them are in profile; that face of hers I see full focus

One by one they went out through a dim doorway to meet whoever they’d been expecting. I write it down from memory. Couldn’t find the house later      yet

—No illusions at this table.      Spoken from her time back into mine.      I’m the dreaming ghost, guest, waitress, watcher, wanting the words to be true.

Whatever the weapons may come to mean

2009

From Sickbed Shores

From shores of sickness:      skin of the globe stretches and snakes

out and in      room sound of the universe bearing

undulant wavelengths to an exhausted ear

(sick body in a sick country:      can it get well?

what is it anyway to exist as

matter      to

matter?)

All, all is remote from here:      yachts carelessly veering

tanker’s beak plunging into the strut of the bridge

slicked encircling waters

wired wrists      jerked-back heads

gagged mouths      flooded lungs

All, all remote and near

Wavelengths—

whose?      mine, theirs, ours      even

yours who haven’t yet put in a word?

•   •   •

So remoteness glazes sickened skin      affliction of distance      so

strangely, easily, clinging like webs spread overnight

by creatures vanished

before we caught them at work

So: to bear this state, this caul which could be hell’s

airborne anaesthetic, exemption from feeling      or

hell’s pure and required definition:

—surrender

to un-belonging, being-for-itself-alone, runged

behind white curtains in an emergency cubicle, taking care of its own

condition

•   •   •

All is matter, of course, matter-of-course      You could have taken

courses in matter all along attending instead of cutting the class

You knew the telephone had wires, you could see them overhead

where sparrows sat and chattered together

you alongside a window somewhere phone in hand

listening to tears thickening a throat in a city somewhere else

you muttering back your faulty formulae

ear tuned to mute vibrations from an occupied zone:

an old, enraged silence still listening for your voice

Did you then holding

the phone tongue your own lips finger your naked shoulder as

if you could liquefy touch into sound through wires      to lips or shoulders      lick

down an entire body in familiar mystery      irregardless laws of matter?

Hopeless imagination of signals not to be

received

•   •   •

From the shores of sickness you lie out on listless

waters with no boundaries      floodplain without horizon

dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not

a water moccasin or floating shoe or tree root to stir interest

Somewhere else being the name of whatever once said your name

and you answered      now the only where is here      this dull floodplain

this body sheathed in indifference      sweat no longer letting the fever out

but coating it in oil      You could offer any soul-tricking oarsman

whatever coin you’re still palming but there’s a divide

between the shores of sickness and the legendary, purifying

river of death      You will have this tale to tell, you will have to live

to tell

this tale

2008

Axel Avákar

Axel Avákar

Axel: backstory

Axel, in thunder

I was there, Axel

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

[Axel Avákar: fictive poet, counter-muse, brother]

Axel Avákar

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar

My roots are not my chains

And I to you:      Whose hands have grown

through mine?      Owl-voiced I cried then:      Who?

But yours was the one, the only eye assumed

Did we turn each other into liars?

holding hands with each others’ chains?

At last we unhook, dissolve, secrete into islands

—neither a tender place—

yours surf-wrung, kelp-strung

mine locked in black ice on a mute lake

I dug my firepit, built a windbreak,

spread a sheepskin, zoned my telescope lens

to the far ledge of the Milky Way

lay down to sleep out the cold

Daybreak’s liquid dreambook:

lines of a long poem pouring down a page

Had I come so far, did I fend so well

only to read your name there, Axel Avákar?

Axel: backstory

Steam from a melting glacier

your profile hovering

there      Axel as if we’d lain prone at fifteen

on my attic bedroom floor      elbow to elbow reading

in Baltimorean August-

blotted air

Axel I’m back to you

brother of strewn books      of late

hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands

Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-

comrade who would love

everything I loved

Without my eyelash glittering piercing

sidewise in your eye

where would you have begun, Axel      how

would the wheel-spoke have whirled

your mind?      What word

stirred in your mouth without my

nipples’ fierce erection?      our

twixt-and-between

Between us yet

my part belonged to me

and when we parted

I left no part behind I knew

how to make poetry happen

Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy

salvaged telephone

Axel, in thunder

Axel, the air’s beaten

like a drumhead here where it seldom thunders

dolphin

lightning

leaps

over the bay      surfers flee

crouching to trucks

climbers hanging

from pitons in their night hammocks

off the granite face

wait out an unforetold storm

while somewhere in all weathers you’re

crawling exposed      not by choice      extremist

hell-bent searching your soul

—O my terrified      my obdurate

my wanderer      keep the trail

I was there, Axel

Pain made her conservative.

Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.

—“The Blue Ghazals”

Pain taught her the language

root of radical

she walked on knives to gain a voice

fished the lake of lost

messages gulping up

from far below and long ago

needed both arms to haul them in

one arm was tied behind her

the other worked to get it free

it hurt itself because

work hurts      I was there Axel

with her in that boat

working alongside

and my decision was

to be in no other way

a woman

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

1

And could it be I saw you

under a roof of glass

in trance

could it be      was passing

by and would translate

too late the strained flicker

of your pupils      your

inert gait      the dark

garb of your reflection

in that translucent place

could be I might have

saved you      still

could      or would ?

2

Laid my ear to your letter trying to hear

Tongue on your words to taste you there

Couldn’t      read what you

had never written there

Played your message over

feeling bad

Played your message over it was all I had

To tell me what and wherefore

this is what it said:

I’m tired of you asking me why

I’m tired of words like the chatter of birds

Give me a pass, let me just get by

3

Back to back our shadows

stalk each other Axel but

not only yours and mine      Thickly lies

the impasto

scrape down far enough you get

the early brushwork      emblems

intimate detail

and scratched lines underneath

—a pictograph

one figure leaning forward

to speak or listen

one figure      backed away

unspeakable

(If that one moved—)

but the I you knew who made

you once can’t save you

my blood won’t even match yours

4

“The dead” we say      as if speaking

of “the people” who

gave up on making history

simply to get through

Something dense and null      groan

without echo      underground

and owl-voiced I cry Who

are these dead these people these

lovers who if ever did

listen no longer answer

: We :

5

Called in to the dead:      why didn’t you write?

What should I have asked you?

—what would have been the true

unlocking code

if all of them failed—

I’ve questioned the Book of Questions

studied gyres of steam

twisting from a hot cup

in a cold sunbeam

turned the cards over      lifted the spider’s foot

from the mangled hexagon

netted the beaked eel from the river’s mouth

asked      and let it go

2007–2008

Ballade of the Poverties

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl

The poverty of to steal food for the first time

The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck

The poverty of sweet charity ladling

Soup for the poor who must always be there for that

There’s poverty of theory poverty of swollen belly shamed

Poverty of the diploma or ballot that goes nowhere

Princes of predation let me tell you

There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration

Poverty of the turned head averted eye

The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex

The poverty of the bounced check poverty of the dumpster dive

The poverty of the pawned horn of the smashed reading glasses

The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke

The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed out on pavement

Princes of finance you who have not lain there

There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door

And the poverty of stories patched up to sell there

There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate

And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war

There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket

And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble

There’s the poverty of coming home not as you left it

And the poverty of how would you ever end it

Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war

There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you

Can’t get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied

There’s the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb

The poverty of the no-contact prison visit

There’s the poverty of yard-sale scrapings spread

And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street

Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words

There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly

Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties

Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words

Here’s a mirror you can look into:      take it:      it’s yours.

for James and Arlene Scully

2009

Emergency Clinic

Caustic implacable

poem      unto and contra:

I do not soothe minor

injuries      I do

not offer      I require

close history

of the case      apprentice-

ship in past and fresh catastrophe

The skin too quickly scabbed

mutters for my debriding

For every bandaged wound

I’ll scrape another      open

I won’t smile

while wiping

your tears

I do not give

simplehearted      love and nor

allow you simply love me

if you accept      regardless

this will be different

Iodine-dark

poem walking to and fro all night

un-gainly

unreconciled

unto and contra

2008

Confrontations

It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile

kept deep

in the cortex of things imagined

Now the imagination comes of age

I see ourselves, full-lipped, blood-flushed

in cold air, still conflicted, still

embraced

boarding the uncharter’d bus of vanishment

backward glances over and done

afterimages

swirl and dissolve along a shoal of footprints

Simple ghouls flitter already among our leavings

fixing labels in their strange language

But

up to now we’re not debris

(only to their fascinated eyes)

2009

Circum/Stances

A crime of nostalgia

—is it—to say

the “objective conditions”

seemed a favoring wind

and we younger then

—objective fact—

also a kind of subjectivity

Sails unwrapped to the breeze

no chart

•   •   •

Slowly repetitiously to prise

up the leaden lid where the forensic

evidence was sealed

cross-section of a slave ship

diagram of a humiliated

mind      high-resolution image

of a shredded lung

color slides of refugee camps

Elsewhere

(in some calm room far from pain)

bedsprings      a trunk empty

but for a scorched

length of electrical cord

how these got here from where

what would have beheld

Migrant assemblage:      in its aura

immense details writhe, uprise

•   •   •

To imagine what      Become

present thén

within the monster

nerveless and giggling

(our familiar      our kin)

who did the scutwork

To differentiate

the common hell

the coils inside the brain

•   •   •

Scratchy cassette ribbon

history’s lamentation song:

Gone, friend I tore at

time after time

in anger

gone, love I could

time upon time

nor live nor leave

gone, city

of spies and squatters

tongues and genitals

All violence is not equal

(I write this

with a clawed hand

2008

Winterface

i. hers

Mute it utters ravage      guernican

mouth in bleak December

Busted-up lines of Poe:

—each separate dying ember

wreaks its ghost upon the floor

January moon-mouth

phosphorescence purged in dark to

swallow up the gone

Too soon

Dawn, twilight, wailing

newsprint, breakfast, trains

all must run their inter-

ruptured course

—So was the girl moving too fast      she was moving fast

across an icy web

Was ice a mirror      well the mirror was icy

And did she see herself in there

ii. his

Someone writes asking about your use

of Bayesian inference

in the history of slavery

What flares now from our burnt-up

furniture

You left your stricken briefcase here

no annotations

phantom frequencies stammer

trying to fathom

how it was inside alone where you were dying

2009

Quarto

1

Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over

The map of my battlefields.      Marathon.

Wounded Knee.      Vicksburg.      Jericho.

Battle of the Overpass.

Victories turned inside out

But no surrender

Cemeteries of remorse

The beaten champion sobbing

Ghosts move in to shield his tears

2

No one writes lyric on a battlefield

On a map stuck with arrows

But I think I can do it if I just lurk

In my tent pretending to

Refeather my arrows

I’ll be right there! I yell

When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus

To recruit me

Crouching over my drafts

Lest they find me out

And shoot me

3

Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart

Doctor, can you see me if I’m naked?

Spent longer in this place than in the war

No one comes but rarely and I don’t know what for

Went to that desert as many did before

Farewell and believing and hope not to die

Hope not to die and what was the life

Did we think was awaiting after

Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills

Doctor can you see me when I’m naked?

4

I’ll tell you about the mermaid

Sheds swimmable tail      Gets legs for dancing

Sings like the sea with a choked throat

Knives straight up her spine

Lancing every step

There is a price

There is a price

For every gift

And all advice

2009

Black Locket

It lies in “the way of seeing the world”: in the technical sacredness of seeing that world.

—Pier Paolo Pasolini, of his film Accatone

The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket

with a chain barely felt for years      clasp I couldn’t open

Inside: photographs of the condemned

Two

mystery planets

invaded from within

•   •   •

Pitcher of ice water thrown in a punched-in face

Eyes burnt back in their sockets

Negative archaeology

•   •   •

Driving the blind curve trapped in the blind alley

my blind spot blots the blinding

beauty of your face

•   •   •

I hear the colors of your voice

2009

Generosity

Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get

(good looks of keen intelligence)

sits poised at the typewriter, her locale, her pedestal

two books, one called Raging Beauty

another Lettera Amorosa, on this table

of drafts arguments letters

Her fine bony fingers go on calmly typing

the years at her turquoise-blue machine

(I say her but who knows death’s gender

as in life there are possible variations)

Anyway he or she sat on your desk in Tucson

in the apartment where you lived then and fed me

champagne, frybread, hominy soup and gave me

her or him      Later at the 7-Eleven we bought

a plastic sack of cotton to pack Death safe for travel

vagabond poet who can work anywhere

now here and of course still working

but startled by something or someone

turns her head      fingers lifted in midair

for Joy Harjo

2009

Powers of Recuperation

i

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—

is writing history backward

her body      the chair she sits in

to be abandoned      repossessed

The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,

second world, third world,

cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,

infectious, maiming, class

war lives on

A done matter she might have thought

ever undone though      plucked

from before her birthyear

and that hyphen coming after

She’s old, old, the incendiary

woman

endless beginner

whose warped wraps you shall find in graves

and behind glass      plundered

ii

Streets empty now      citizen rises      shrugging off

her figured shirt      pulls on her dark generic garment      sheds

identity inklings      watch, rings, ear studs

now to pocket her flashlight      her tiny magnet

shut down heater      finger a sleeping cat

lock inner, outer door      insert

key in crevice      listen once twice

to the breath of the neighborhood

take temperature of the signs      a bird

scuffling      a frost settling

. . . you left that meeting around two a.m.      I thought

someone should walk with you

Didn’t think then I needed that

years ravel out      and now

who’d be protecting whom

I left the key in the old place

in case

iii

Spooky those streets of minds

shuttered against shatter

articulate those walls

pronouncing rage and need

fuck the cops      come jesus

blow me again

Citizen walking catwise

close to the walls

heat of her lungs leaving

its trace upon the air

fingers her tiny magnet

which for the purpose of drawing

particles together will have to do

when as they say the chips are down

iv

Citizen at riverbank      seven bridges

Ministers-in-exile with their aides

limb to limb dreaming underneath

conspiring by definition

Bridges      trajectories arched

in shelter      rendezvous

two banks to every river      two directions

to every bridge

twenty-eight chances

every built thing has its unmeant purpose

v

Every built thing with its unmeant

meaning      unmet purpose

every unbuilt thing

child squatting      civil

engineer      devising

by kerosene flare      in mud

possible tunnels

carves in cornmeal mush      irrigation

canals by index finger

all new learning looks at first

like chaos

the tiny magnet throbs

in citizen’s pocket

vi

Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes

bat-radar-pitched or twanging

off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony

to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo

her documentary alphabet still evolving

Walks up on the bridge      windwhipped      roof and trajectory

shuddering under her catpaw tread

one of seven

built things holds her suspended

between desolation

and the massive figure on unrest’s verge

pondering the unbuilt city

cheek on hand and glowing eyes and

skirted knees apart

2007

New and Unpublished Poems

Itinerary

i.

Burnt by lightning      nevertheless

she’ll walk this terra infinita

lashes singed on her third eye

searching definite shadows      for an indefinite future

Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang

askew as sheltering

some delicate indefensible existence

Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft

a place of origins      as yet unclosured and unclaimed

Writing cursive instructions on abounding air

If you arrive with ripe pears, bring a sharpened knife

Bring cyanide with the honeycomb

call before you come

ii.

Let the face of the bay be violet      black the tumbled torn

kelp necklaces strewn alongshore

Stealthily over time arrives the chokehold

stifling ocean’s guttural chorales

a tangle

of tattered plastic rags

iii.

In a physical world the great poverty would be

to live insensate      shuttered against the fresh

slash of urine on a wall

low-tidal rumor of a river’s yellowed mouth

a tumor-ridden face asleep on a subway train

What would it mean to not possess

a permeable skin

explicit veil to wander in

iv.

A cracked shell crumbles.

Sun moon and salt dissect the faint

last grains

An electrical impulse zings

out      ricochets

in meta-galactic orbits

a streak of nervous energy rejoins the crucible

where origins and endings meld

There was this honey-laden question mark

this thread extracted from the open

throat of existence—Lick it clean!

—let it evaporate—

2011

For the Young Anarchists

Whatever we hunger for

we’re not seagulls, to drop things

smash on the rocks      hurtling beak-down

Think instead the oysterman’s

gauging eyes, torqued wrist

hand sliding the knife into

and away from the valve hinge—

astuteness honed through

generations to extract

the meat      Cut out it can slip

through your fingers      Kicked in the sand

forget it      Only every so often will

diver rise up from stalking grounds

lifting this creature into daylight and

everyone standing around

shrinks      or think they want some      We’ve

fumbled at this before      trammeled

in fury, in hunger      Begin there, yes

—only fury knowing its ground

has staying power—

Then go dead calm remembering

what this operation calls for—

eye, hand, mind      Don’t

listen to chatter, ignore all yells

of haphazard instruction      And

when you taste it don’t

get too elated      There’ll be grit

to swallow      Or spit to the side

2010

Fragments of an Opera

Scene One: Ales, Sardinia, 19——

Child’s voice (Antonio):

from this beam

the doctors think

I can hang straight

in this har

ness dang

ling

dai

ly

grow how

I

should be

Explicator’s voice:

Village doctor on a southern island

Treating one of seven

Children of a

Father in prison

For smalltime

Pecuniary

Crimes, maybe

Framed

Mother’s

Heroic measures:

Knee presses, releases

Presses again the lever

Of a machine

Fingers push

Cloth

Under the needle

A woman stitches

Years months weeks days pass

In this way

Six children

Run and scream

Antonio must hang

From a beam

Recitativo: Neurosurgeon’s voice:

It would have been a kind of traction.      Who knows how it might have been done differently, elsewhere, in another era of medical intervention?      Another country?      Other family?      It was a kind of childhood.      Perhaps rickets?      spina bifida?      scoliosis?

Explicator’s voice:

A kind of mind

That would address

Duress

Outward in larger terms

A mind inhaling exigency

From first breath

Knows poverty

Of mind

As death

Whose body must

Find its own mind

Recitativo: Prosecutor’s voice: from the future:

We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years.

Scene Two:      Turin, Northern Italy

Industrialist’s voice:

Turin, Turin makes tractors for FIAT

Makes armored cars and planes

We’re making, we’re taking,

We’re raising our goals

We can use immigrants

We can use women

Illiterate peasants from the South

There’s a war out there

A World War and it’s buying

Who’s crying?

Liberté

Ankles shackled

metalled and islanded

holding aloft a mirror, feral

lipstick, eye-liner

She’s

a celebrity      a star attraction

A glare effacing

the French Revolution’s

risen juices      vintage taste

the Paris Commune’s

fierce inscriptions

lost in translation

2011

Teethsucking Bird

Doves bleat, crows repeat

ancient scandals

mockingbird’s flown to mock

some otherwhere

Listen, that teethsucking bird’s

back up on the telephone wire

talking times and customs

naming the dead to the half-alive

hardship to lyric and back again

to the open road of the toll-taker’s

booth at the last exit

to skateboarding boys of body bags

to the breaker of hearts of the old-age motel

to the would-be weird of the scalded woman’s

escarpment of a face

And this is the now the then the gone

the means and ends the far and near

the news we hear

from the teethsucking bird

2010

Undesigned

i.

It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—

a torrential cloudburst scattering

mirrors of light :: sunset’s prismatics

in a Tucson parking lot

then the desert’s mute inscrutable

way of going on

but it was like that between us :: those

moments of confrontation caught in dread

of time’s long requirements

. . .

What’s more dreadful than safety

you’re told your life depends on

a helmet through whose eyeholes

your gun is seeing

only what guns can see

—a mask that wove itself without your

having designed it

ii.

On video :: a man exploding

about being sick for no reason

though he knows he knows the reason

:: a video that will travel

around the world

while the man sickens and sickens

. . .

You say we live in freedom

Have you watched the ceiling overhead

descending like Poe’s pendulum

moving down slow and soundless

lower and closer for longer

than we’d thought

The last word in freedom

The first word

2011

Suspended Lines

Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe

Found legacies turn up in splinters      blood-codes, secret sharings

Cracks of light in a sky intent on rain

Reading our words from a time

when to write a line was to know it true

Today your voice :: you can make from this

One-string / blue / speaking / guitar

suspended here

2011

Tracings

This chair delivered yesterday

built for a large heavy man

left me from his estate

lies sidewise legs upturned

He would sit in the chair spooked by his own thoughts

He would say to himself As the fabric shrinks

the pattern changes

and forget to write it

He would want to say The drug that ekes out

life disenlivens life

I would see words float in the mirror

behind his heaped desk

as thought were smoke

•   •   •

The friends I can trust are those who will let me have my death

—traced on a rafter salvaged

from a house marked for demolition

Sky’s a mottled marble slab

webs drift off a railing

There were voices here

once, a defiance that still doesn’t falter

Imagine a mind overhearing language

split open, uncodified as

yet or never

Imagine a mind sprung open to music

—not the pitiless worm of a tune that won’t let you forget it

but a scoreless haunting

2011

From Strata

1

Under this blue

immune unfissured autumn

urbs et orbis      pivot and axis      thrashing

upthrust from strata

deep under : silences

pressed each against

another : sharpened flints

pulverized coral      stoneware crumblings

rusted musket muzzles

chips of China-trade

porcelain      shackled bone

no death unchained

Here at eye-level the new

news new season new

moment’s momentary flare :

floodlit abstractions

root-riven      scrambling

for adulation

Yes, we lived here long and hard

on surfaces stunned by the wrecking ball

where time’s thought’s creature only

and when all’s fallen      even

our remnant renegade selves

—let this too sleep in strata :

the nerve-ends of my footsole

still crave your touch as when

my earlobes glowed between

your quiet teeth

2

Say a pen must write underground      underwater      so be it

The students gather at the site :

Come over here and look at this

Looks like writing      yes      that’s how they did it      thought it

into marks they thought

would outlast them

it would take patience to do that      Anyone

recognize the script?

Could it be music?      a manifesto?

3

Rescuers back off      hands lifted open as in guilt

for the ancestors no one is rescued from :

curated galleried faces staring

off      from behind long-stiffened bandages

but who would meet those lookaway eyes

maybe they’re metal      blind reflectors

maybe only who choose to look can see :

thought finding itself in act

violet olive brush strokes speaking of flesh

leaps diagonals pauses : a long conversation

with others living and dead

palpable and strange

4

Viscous stealth, brutal calm : subterfugal, churning

encrypted in tar      sending expendable

bodies to underworlds unseen      until

catastrophe blows apart

the premises      a spectacle hits

the TV channels      then in a blink

a dense cloth wipes history clean :

but never in beds never to warm again

with the pulsing of arrival      shudder of wordless welcome

the body heat of breadwinners and lovers

5

My hands under your buttocks      your fingers numbering my ribs

how a bow scrapes, a string holds the after-pluck

astonishing variations      hours, bodies without boundaries

Back into that erotic autumn I search my way defiant

through passages of long neglect

6

Throw the handwritten scraps of paper

into the toilet bowl

to work their way spiraling down

the open gullet of advanced barbarism

So : if you thought no good came from any of this

not the resistance nor its penalties

not our younger moments nor the continuing on

then, I say, trash the evidence

So : a scrap of paper      a loved bitter scrawl

swirls under into the confluence

of bodily waste and wasted bodies :

—a shred      absorbed, belonging

7

Weathers drag down and claw up the will :

yellowdust wind      asphalt fog      a green slash

of aurora borealis      or :

a surveillance helicopter’s high-intensity beam

impaling solitudes      ransacking solidarities

In the end no pleas no bargains :

it’s your own humanity you’ll have to drag

over and over, piece by piece

page after page

out of the dark

2010–2011

Endpapers

i.

If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes

continually drifting over

if the night grew green as sun and moon

changed faces and the sea became

its own unlit unlikely sound

consider yourself lucky to have come

this far      Consider yourself

a trombone blowing unheard

tones      a bass string plucked or locked

down by a hand its face articulated

in shadow, pressed against

a chain-link fence      Consider yourself

inside or outside, where-

ever you were when knotted steel

stopped you short      You can’t flow through

as music or

as air

ii.

What holds what binds is breath      is

primal vision in a cloud’s eye

is gauze around a wounded head

is bearing a downed comrade out beyond

the numerology of vital signs

into predictless space

iii.

The signature to a life requires

the search for a method

rejection of posturing

trust in the witnesses

a vial of invisible ink

a sheet of paper held steady

after the end-stroke

above a deciphering flame

2011

Notes on the Poems

Your Native Land, Your Life

SOURCES

The phrase “an end to suffering” was evoked by a sentence in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: “No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.”

NORTH AMERICAN TIME: IX

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953), Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary who died on the streets of New York City.

DREAMS BEFORE WAKING

“Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo” (“Even your country has changed. You yourself have changed it”). These lines, from Morejón’s “Elogio de la Dialéctica,” and Georgina Herrera’s poem “Como Presentaciön, Como Disculpa” can be found in Margaret Randall, ed., Breaking the Silences: Twentieth Century Poetry by Cuban Women (1982). Pulp Press, 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3.

ONE KIND OF TERROR: A LOVE POEM: 6

“Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” Freedom song sung by African women in mass demonstration in Pretoria, 1956, in which 20,000 women gathered to protest the issue of passes to women. See Hilda Bernstein, For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears, International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1975.

YOM KIPPUR 1984

The epigraph and quoted lines from Robinson Jeffers come from The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems (New York: Liveright, 1977).

CONTRADICTIONS: 16

See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 173.

CONTRADICTIONS: 26

See Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 255: “the glorious So What: the life-cry.”

CONTRADICTIONS: 27

Ding Ling, leading Chinese novelist and major literary figure in the Revolutionary government under Mao. Exiled in 1957 for writing too critically and independently. Imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary in 1970; cleared of all charges in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Time’s Power

SLEEPWALKING NEXT TO DEATH

Title and opening words from “Slaapwandelen (naast de dood)” by Chr. J. van Geel, Dutch poet and painter. For the original and my translation, see Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life (New York: Norton, 1966).

HARPERS FERRY

In 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), as a base for slave insurrections. On October 16 of that year, he and his men raided and captured the federal arsenal, but found their escape blocked by local militia; the U.S. marines then seized the arsenal. Ten of Brown’s men were killed in this conflict, and Brown himself was later tried and hanged. Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), Black antislavery activist and strategist, led more than 300 people from slavery to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She was known as “General Moses.” Though in contact with John Brown, she withdrew from participation before the raid. Tubman never actually came to Harpers Ferry; her appearance in this poem is a fiction.

LIVING MEMORY

“it was pick and shovel work . . .”: quoted from Wally Hunt’s Vermont (Brownington, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1983).

An Atlas of the Difficult World

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: V

“over the chained bay waters.” From Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York and London: Liveright, 1989; poem originally published in 1930). “There are roads to take when you think of your country.” From Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. I (New York: Covici Friede, 1938); see also Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). “I don’t want to know how he tracked them.” On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr shot and killed Rebecca Wight, one of two lesbians camping on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. Her lover, Claudia Brenner, suffered five bullet wounds. She dragged herself two miles along the trail to a road, where she flagged a car to take her to the police. In October of that year, Carr was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. During the legal proceedings, it became clear that Carr had attacked the women because they were lesbians. See Gay Community News (August 7 and November 11, 1988).

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: VI

“Hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire.” See Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933), p. 13. “Meat three times a day.” See Frank Murray, “The Irish and Afro-Americans in U.S. History,” Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement 22, no. 1 (1982): 22.

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: X

The passages in italics are quoted from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970), pp. 24, 26, 93, 245

TATTERED KADDISH

“The Reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her” (Moses Cordovero, Or ha-Hammah on Zohar 111, 106a). See Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit, 1984), p. 305.

FOR A FRIEND IN TRAVAIL

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him ‘What are you going through?’ ” Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 115.

Dark Fields of the Republic

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

The title is from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An Die Nachgeborenen” (“For Those Born Later”): What kind of times are these / When it’s almost a crime to talk about trees / Because it means keeping still about so many evil deeds? (For the complete poem, in a different translation, see John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 [New York: Methuen, 1976], pp. 318–320.)

“our country moving closer to its own truth and dread . . .” echoes Osip Mandelstam’s 1921 poem that begins I was washing outside in the darkness and ends The earth’s moving closer to truth and to dread. (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans., Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems [New York: Atheneum, 1974], p. 40.) Mandelstam was forbidden to publish, then exiled and sentenced to five years of hard labor for a poem caricaturing Stalin; he died in a transit camp in 1938.

“To be human, said Rosa . . .”: Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-born middle-class Jew. Early in her abbreviated life she entered the currents of European socialist revolutionary thinking and action. She became one of the most influential and controversial figures in the social-democratic movements of Eastern Europe and Germany. Besides her political essays, she left hundreds of vivid letters to friends and comrades. Imprisoned during World War I for her strongly internationalist and anticapitalist beliefs, she was murdered in Berlin in 1919 by right-wing soldiers, with the passive collusion of a faction from her own party. Her body was thrown into a canal. On December 28, 1916, from prison, she wrote a New Year letter to friends she feared were both backsliding and complaining: “Then see to it that you remain a Mensch! [Yiddish/German for human being] . . . Being a Mensch means happily throwing one’s life ‘on fate’s great scale’ if necessary, but, at the same time, enjoying every bright day and every beautiful cloud. Oh, I can’t write you a prescription for being a Mensch. I only know how one is a Mensch, and you used to know it too when we went walking for a few hours in the Südende fields with the sunset’s red light falling on the wheat. The world is so beautiful even with all its horrors.” The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed., trans. and with an intro. by Stephen Eric Bronner (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 173.

CALLE VISIóN

Calle Visión is the name of a road in the southwestern United States—literally, “Vision Street.”

“that tells the coming of the railroad.” “With the coming of the railroad, new materials and pictorial designs and motifs, including trains themselves, appeared in Navaho weaving (ca. 1880).” (From the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.)

“a place not to live but to die in.” See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1635): “For the World, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live, but to dye in.” (Religio Medici and Other Writings by Sir Thomas Browne [London: Everyman’s Library, J. M. Dent, 1947], p. 83.)

“Have you ever worked around metal? . . .” From a questionnaire filled out before undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

“The world is falling down . . . .” From the song “The World Is Falling Down,” composed by Abbey Lincoln, sung by her on the Verve recording of the same title, 1990 (Moseka Music BMI).

“And the fire shall try . . . .” I Corinthians 3:13: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest . . . and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” Used by Studs Terkel as an epigraph to his Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

REVERSION

This poem is for Nina Menkes and her film The Great Sadness of Zohara.

THEN OR NOW

This sequence of poems derives in part from Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimbel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). While reading these letters, I had been reflecting on concepts of “guilt” and “innocence” among artists and intellectuals like myself in the United States. The poems owe much also to the continuing pressure of events.

SIX NARRATIVES

The narratives are spoken by different voices.

“Vigil for boy of responding kisses, . . .” See Walt Whitman, “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,” in The Essential Whitman, selected and ed. Galway Kinnell (New York: Ecco Press, 1987,) pp. 123–124.

INSCRIPTIONS

“I need to live each day through . . . .” These two lines are quoted from an earlier poem of mine (“8/8/68: I”) in “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)”; see above.

“When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, . . . ?” These two lines are from W. H. Auden’s “Canzone,” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 161.

“Medbh’s postcard from Belfast.” I thank the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian for permission to quote her words from a postcard received in August 1994.

“suffused / by what it works in, ‘like the dyer’s hand.’ ” I had written “suffused,” later began looking up the line I was quoting from memory: was it Coleridge? Keats? Shakespeare? My friend Barbara Gelpi confirmed it was Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. I have kept “suffused” here because to feel suffused by the materials that one has perforce to work in is not necessarily to be subdued, though some might think so.

Midnight Salvage

CHAR

Italicized phrases and some images from Leaves of Hypnos, the journal kept in 1942–1943 by the poet René Char while he was a commander in the French Resistance, and from some of Char’s poems. I have drawn on both Jackson Mathews’s and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem. Char joined the Surrealist movement late and broke with it prior to World War II. It was André Breton who said, “The simplest surrealist act consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random.”

MODOTTI

Tina Modotti (1896–1942): photographer, political activist, revolutionary. Her most significant artistic work was done in Mexico in the 1920s, including a study of the typewriter belonging to her lover, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. Framed for his murder by the fascists in 1929, she was expelled from Mexico in 1930. After some years of political activity in Berlin, the Soviet Union, and Spain, she returned incognito to Mexico, where she died in 1942. In my search for Modotti I had to follow clues she left; I did not want to iconize her but to imagine critically the traps and opportunities of her life and choices.

CAMINO REAL

“Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?” From Charles Olson, “Variations Done for Gerald Van der Wiele,” in Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 83.

“George Oppen to June Degnan: . . .” See George Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 212.

Fox

MESSAGES

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): Le silence éternel de ces espaces m’affraye. (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me). See Pensées of Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman’s Library no. 874 (London: Dent, 1948), p. 61.

NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS

“Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen ‘noctilucent clouds,’ which develop about 50 miles above the earth’s surface—clouds so high that they reflect the sun’s rays long after nightfall. . . . [G]lobal warming seems to be driving them toward the equator. . . . In retrospect it will be clear.” Bill McKibben, “Indifferent to a Planet in Pain,” New York Times, Saturday, 4 September 1999, sec. A.

“Usonian”: The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.

TERZA RIMA: 3

Vivo nel non volare . . . : “I live in the failed will / of the post-war time / loving the world I hate”—Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le Ceneri di Gramsci,” in Lawrence R. Smith, ed. and trans., The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–81. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1982), pp. 10–11.

WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT

“The mystai streamed toward [the Telestrion].” C. Kerényi, Eleusis, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen series 65, vol. 4 (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1967), p. 82.

The School Among the Ruins

TELL ME

“remembered if outlived / as freezing.” Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.

“harrowed in defeats of language.” Michael Heller, “Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If An Ode,” in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.

“in history to my barest marrow.” Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.

THIS EVENING LET’S

“friendship is not a tragedy.” See June Jordan, “Civil Wars” (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.

TRANSPARENCIES

“we are truely sorry . . .”: Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.

ALTERNATING CURRENT

The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers’ club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.

DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS: 5

“You thought you were innocent . . .”: See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

CALIBRATIONS

Landstuhl: American military hospital in Germany.

“You go to war with the army you have.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, December 2004.

HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO

For Sappho, see Greek Lyric, I: Sappho, Alcaeus, trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library 142 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982– ), fragment 16, pp. 66–67: “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. . . . I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry.”

THIS IS NOT THE ROOM

U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001: “we also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side . . . use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

REREADING The Dead Lecturer

See LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer: Poems (New York: Grove, 1967).

LETTERS CENSORED, SHREDDED, RETURNED TO SENDER OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND

Passages in quotes are for Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, trans. Tom Nairn (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 31, 239; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters, ed. and trans. Hamish Henderson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 135; and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeig, trans. Joseph A. Buttigeig and Antonio Callari, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), I, p. 213.

DRAFT #2006: VI

“Out of sight, out of mind.” See Carolyn Jones, “Battle of the Beds,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-1.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

WAITING FOR RAIN, FOR MUSIC

“Send my roots rain.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183.

“A struggle at the roots of the mind.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 212.

READING THE ILIAD (AS IF) FOR THE FIRST TIME

“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors”: Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, (1940), trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 3.

“Delusion / a daughter.” See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 394–395, bk. 19, lines 91–130.

“Horses turn away their heads / weeping.” Homer, pp. 365–366, bk. 17, lines 426–440.

I WAS THERE, AXEL

“The Blue Ghazals.” See Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 24.

BALLADE OF THE POVERTIES

This revival of an old form owes inspiration to François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

BLACK LOCKET

“It lies in ‘the way of seeing the world’ . . .”: Laura Betti, ed., Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (Italy: Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini,” 1989), pp. 19–20.

GENEROSITY

The books mentioned are James Scully, Raging Beauty: Selected Poems (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), and René Char, Lettera Amorosa (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), with illustrations by Georges Braque and Jean Arp.

POWERS OF RECUPERATION

“the massive figure on unrest’s verge.” See Melencolia I, a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. The “I” is thought to refer to “Melencolia Imaginativa,” one of three types of melancholy described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535).

Acknowledgments

Some of the new poems included appeared in the following print and online journals:

Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics: “For the Young Anarchists”

Red Wheelbarrow: “Teethsucking Bird”

Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine: “Liberté”

Granta: “Endpapers”

Tin House: “From Strata”

Paris Review: “Itinerary”

A Public Space: “Tracings”

Kweli Journal: “Undesigned,” “Suspended Lines”

Index of Titles and First Lines

A child’s hand smears a wall     the reproof is bitter, 411

A clear night     if the mind were clear, 82

A conversation begins, 40

A crime of nostalgia, 477

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something, 213

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, 37

A life hauls itself uphill, 304

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken, 366

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and, 189

A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains, 423

Alternating Current, 394

A man lies under a car half bare, 420

A man walking on the street, 190

Amends, 252

An idea declared itself between us, 338

And Now, 266

And now as you read these poems, 266

Ankles shackled, 500

Archaic, 421

Architect, 340

A room papered with clippings, 414

Art of Translation, The, 291

Atlas of the Difficult World, An, 213

at the oak table under the ceiling fan, 234

A white woman dreaming of innocence, 137

A wild patience has taken me this far, 75

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—, 486

Axel Avákar, 464

Ballade of the Poverties, 472

Baltimore:      a fragment from the Thirties, 154

Behind the Motel, 420

Black Locket, 484

Blue Rock, 157

Burn me some music     Send my roots rain     I’m swept, 453

Burnt by lightning     nevertheless, 493

Calibrations, 412

Calle Visión, 253

Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over, 482

Camino Real, 310

Cartographies of Silence, 40

Caustic implacable, 474

Centaur’s Requiem, 369

Char, 299

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest, 192

Circum/Stances, 477

Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare, 382

Coast to Coast, 73

Cold wit leaves me cold, 421

Confrontations, 476

Contradictions: Tracking Poems, 164

—Could you see me laboring over this, 435

Dangerous of course to draw, 264

Darklight, 240

Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get, 485

Delta, 199

Deportations, 265

Despair falls, 140

Director’s Notes, 432

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios, 397

Diving into the Wreck, 14

Doves bleat, crows repeat, 501

Draft #2006, 443

Dreams Before Waking, 140

Dreamwood, 201

Early day. Grey the air, 240

Edges, 163

Emergency Clinic, 474

Endpapers, 511

Ends of the Earth, 366

Equinox, 371

Even if we knew the children were all asleep, 153

Europe 1953, 85

Exceptional, 91

Final Notations, 243

Fire, 344

First having read the book of myths, 14

Food Packages:     1947, 262

For a Friend in Travail, 242

For a Sister, 23

For Ethel Rosenberg, 85

For Memory, 80

For the Dead, 24

For the Record, 130

For the Young Anarchists, 495

For This, 336

Four Short Poems, 361

Fox, 342

Fragments of an Opera, 496

Frame, 105

From 1964: a color snapshot:     you, 143

from crush and splinter, 430

From shores of sickness:     skin of the globe stretches and snakes, 461

From Sickbed Shores, 461

From Strata, 507

From the Prison House, 12

From you I want more than I’ve ever asked, 249

Generosity, 485

Grandmothers, 95

Grating, 346

Hail-spurting sky     sun, 352

Harpers Ferry, 202

Heroines, 91

Homage to Winter, 155

Hot stink of skunk, 310

How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes, 363

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho, 426

Hunger, 37

I dreamed I called you on the telephone, 24

If I’ve reached for your lines     (I have), 336

If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes, 511

If you have taken this rubble for my past, 199

If Your Name Is on the List, 351

If your name is on the list of judges, 351

I love the infinity of these silent spaces, 343

Imagine a city where nothing’s, 317

In a Classroom, 188

Incipience, 7

I needed fox     Badly I needed, 342

In Memoriam: D.K., 190

Innocence:     1945, 263

In paradise every, 402

In Plain Sight, 417

Inscriptions, 273

Integrity, 75

In their own way, by their own lights, 25

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand, 201

in the old city     incendiaries abound, 344

In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream, 163

In Those Years, 248

In those years, people will say, we lost track, 248

I sat down facing the steep place where, 364

Itinerary, 493

I trust none of them. Only my existence, 23

It’s happened already while we were still, 265

It should be the most desired sight of all, 426

It’s June and summer’s height, 200

It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile, 476

It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—, 502

it will not be simple, it will not be long, 243

Late night on the underside     a spectral glare, 349

Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send, 435

Letters to a Young Poet, 306

Liberté, 500

Little as I knew you I know you:     little as you knew me you, 273

Living      in the earth-deposits     of our history, 33

Living Memory, 206

Long After Stevens, 423

Long Conversation, A, 319

Look:          this is January          the worst onslaught, 164

Lurid, garish, gash, 455

Marghanita, 234

Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window, 154

Meditations for a Savage Child, 25

Messages, 343

Metallic slam on a moonless night, 403

Midnight Salvage, 293

Miracle Ice Cream, 250

MIRACLE’S truck comes down the little avenue, 250

Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One, The, 9

Modotti, 302

Mute it utters ravage     guernican, 480

My neighbor moving, 417

Negotiations, 187

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon, 34

Nights like this:     on the cold apple-bough, 252

Noctilucent Clouds, 349

North American Time, 132

Not having worn, 346

not talk, 378

Nothing he had done before, 340

Not what you thought:     just a turn-off, 253

Novel, The, 189

of polished tables lit with medalled, 428

Old words:     trust     fidelity, 80

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem, 143

Open the book of tales you knew by heart, 206

Origins and History of Consciousness, 34

Out in this desert we are testing bombs, 3

Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett, 98

Overthrow.     And make new, 433

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff, 58

Phenomenology of Anger, The, 18

Poetry: I, 151

Poetry: II, Chicago, 152

Poetry: III, 153

Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea, 262

Power, 33

Powers of Recuperation, 486

Quarto, 482

Rachel, 251

Rauschenberg’s Bed, 336

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time, 455

Regardless, 338

Rereading The Dead Lecturer, 433

Reversion, 260

Rhyme, 424

Ritual Acts, 391

Rusted Legacy, 317

Saw you walking barefoot, 457

Scene One:     Ales, Sardinia, 19—, 496

Scenes of Negotiation, 458

School Among the Ruins, The, 374

Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe, 504

Screen Door, 403

Seven Skins, 313

Shattered Head, 304

She is the one you call sister, 9

She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl, 412

Should blue air in its purity let you disdain, 441

Six Narratives, 267

Sixteen years.     The narrow, rough-gullied backroads, 113

6/21, 200

Sleep     horns of a snail, 194

Sleepwalking     Next to Death, 194

Solfeggietto, 183

Someday if someday comes we will agree, 187

Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp, 151

Something spreading underground won’t speak to us, 333

Sometimes I’m back in that city, 394

Sources, 113

Spirit of Place, The, 98

Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack, 429

Still learning the word, 397

Sunset, December, 1993, 264

Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions, 443

Suspended Lines, 504

Tactile Value, 430

Talking of poetry, hauling the books, 188

Tattered Kaddish, 236

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field, 236

Teaching the first lesson and the last, 374

Teethsucking Bird, 501

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, 448

Tell Me, 372

Tell me, why way toward dawn the body, 372

Tendril, 404

Terza Rima, 352

That Mouth, 233

That the meek word like the righteous word can bully, 389

The autumn feels slowed down, 58

“The beauty of it was the guilt, 263

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war, 130

The engineer’s story of hauling coal, 381

The freedom of the wholly mad, 18

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar, 465

The leafbud straggles forth, 57

The moon, 361

The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket, 484

There are days when housework seems the only, 73

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry, 299

There Is No One Story and One Story Only, 381

There’s a girl born in abrupt August light, 251

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows, 247

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted, 472

The thirtieth of November, 67

This, 186

This chair delivered yesterday, 505

This Evening Let’s, 378

This Is Not the Room, 428

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste, 233

This woman/     the heart of the matter, 260

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud, 237

Time split like a fruit between dark and light, 370

To have seen you exactly, once, 291

To live, to lie awake, 7

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, 457

To the Days, 249

Toward the Solstice, 67

Tracings, 505

Transit, 78

Transparencies, 389

Trying to Talk with a Man, 3

Trying to tell you how, 5

Twenty-one Love Poems, 45

Two green-webbed chairs, 192

Underneath my lids another eye has opened, 12

Under this blue, 507

Undesigned, 502

University Reopens as the Floods Recede, The, 441

Unknown Quantity, 429

Upper Broadway, 57

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I, 293

Usonian Journals 2000, 382

Victory, 333

Virginia 1906, 137

Vision, A, 108

Voyage to the Denouement, 411

Wait, 402

Waiting for Rain, for Music, 453

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot, 364

Walk along back of the library, 313

Walking by the fence but the house, 424

Walking from violence:     the surgeon’s probe left in the foot, 242

Wallpaper, 414

—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree, 319

We are asking for books, 391

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you, 95

Whatever a poet is, 152

Whatever we hunger for, 495

What is a Jew in solitude?, 159

What Is Possible, 82

What Kind of Times Are These, 247

What’s kept.     What’s lost.     A snap decision, 149

What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be, 149

When I meet the skier she is always, 78

When my dreams showed signs, 132

When We Dead Awaken, 5

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads, 202

Wherever in this city, screens flicker, 45

Why does the outstretched finger of home, 404

Winterface, 480

Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-, 105

Woman Dead in Her Forties, A, 61

Yom Kippur 1984, 159

You:     a woman too old, 155

You don’t want a harsh outcry here, 432

You drew up the story of your life     I was in that story, 267

Your breasts/     sliced-off     The scars, 61

Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain, 157

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper, 302

Your hooves drawn together underbelly, 369

Your photograph won’t do you justice, 306

Your windfall at fifteen     your Steinway grand, 183

You. There, with your gazing eyes, 108

You who can be silent in twelve languages, 448

Z:     I hated that job but     You’d have taken it too if you’d had a, 458

Copyright

Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 2011, 2007,

2004, 2001, 1999, 1995, 1991, 1989, 1986, 1981 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978,

1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Manufacturing by Courier Westford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Adrienne, 1929–2012.

[Poems. Selections]

Later poems : selected and new, 1971–2012 /

Adrienne Rich. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Poems.

ISBN 978-0-393-08956-1

I. Title.

PS3535.I233A6 2012

811'.54—dc23

2012035461

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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