COLLECTED POEMS

1950-2012

ADRIENNE

RICH

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CONTENTS

Introduction by Claudia Rankine

Editor’s Note

A CHANGE OF WORLD (1951)

Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Vertigo

The Ultimate Act

What Ghosts Can Say

The Kursaal at Interlaken

Reliquary

Purely Local

A View of the Terrace

By No Means Native

Air without Incense

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

A Clock in the Square

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour

This Beast, This Angel

Eastport to Block Island

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

Afterward

The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

Boundary

Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill

From a Chapter on Literature

An Unsaid Word

Mathilde in Normandy

At a Bach Concert

The Rain of Blood

Stepping Backward

Itinerary

A Revivalist in Boston

The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

The Springboard

A Change of World

Unsounded

Design in Living Colors

Walden 1950

Sunday Evening

The Innocents

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust”

Life and Letters

For the Conjunction of Two Planets

POEMS (1950–1951)

The Prisoners

Night

The House at the Cascades

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS (1955)

The Roadway

Pictures by Vuillard

Orient Wheat

Versailles

Annotation for an Epitaph

Ideal Landscape

The Celebration in the Plaza

The Tourist and the Town

Bears

The Insusceptibles

Lucifer in the Train

Recorders in Italy

At Hertford House

The Wild Sky

The Prospect

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell

Villa Adriana

The Explorers

Landscape of the Star

Letter from the Land of Sinners

Concord River

Apology

Living in Sin

Autumn Equinox

The Strayed Village

The Perennial Answer

The Insomniacs

The Snow Queen

Love in the Museum

I Heard a Hermit Speak

Colophon

A Walk by the Charles

New Year Morning

In Time of Carnival

The Middle-Aged

The Marriage Portion

The Tree

Lovers Are Like Children

When This Clangor in the Brain

A View of Merton College

Holiday

The Capital

The Platform

Last Song

The Diamond Cutters

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW (1963)

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1. You, once a belle in Shreveport,

2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

4. Knowing themselves too well in one another:

5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

6. When to her lute Corinna sings

7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay

8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

9. Not that it is done well, but

10. Well,

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

I. Wedged in by earthworks

II. Let me take you by the hair

III. Spirit like water

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

I. The Evil Eye

II. The Confrontation

III. Memorabilia

IV. Consanguinity

V. The Mirror

VI. The Covenant

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’Sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

The Classmate

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

The Lag

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

POEMS (1955–1957)

At the Jewish New Year

Moving in Winter

NECESSITIES OF LIFE (1966)

PART ONE: POEMS 1962–1965

Necessities of Life

In the Woods

The Corpse-Plant

The Trees

Like This Together

1. Wind rocks the car.

2. They’re tearing down, tearing up

3. We have, as they say,

4. Our words misunderstand us.

5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

Open-Air Museum

Two Songs

1. Sex, as they harshly call it,

2. That “old last act”!

The Parting

Night-Pieces: For a Child

The Crib

Her Waking

The Stranger

After Dark

I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

II. Now let’s away from prison—

Mourning Picture

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

Halfway

Autumn Sequence

1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned

3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Noon

Not Like That

The Knot

Any Husband to Any Wife

Side by Side

Spring Thunder

1. Thunder is all it is, and yet

2. Whatever you are that weeps

3. The power of the dinosaur

4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

Moth Hour

Focus

Face to Face

PART TWO: TRANSLATIONS FROM THE DUTCH

Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees

Hendrik de Vries, My Brother

Hendrik de Vries, Fever

Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer

Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability

Gerrit Achterberg, Statue

Leo Vroman, Our Family

Chr. J. van Geel, Homecoming

Chr. J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

POEMS (1962–1965)

To Judith, Taking Leave

Roots

The Parting: II

Winter

LEAFLETS (1969)

PART ONE: NIGHT WATCH

Orion

Holding Out

Flesh and Blood

In the Evening

Missing the Point

City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

The Demon Lover

Jerusalem

Charleston in the 1860’s

Night Watch

There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

For a Russian Poet

1. The Winter Dream

2. Summer in the Country

3. The Demonstration

Night in the Kitchen

5:30 A.M.

The Break

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

2. On the terrace, violins played

The Key

Picnic

The Book

Abnegation

PART TWO: LEAFLETS

Women

Implosions

To Frantz Fanon

Continuum

On Edges

Violence

The Observer

Nightbreak

Gabriel

Leaflets

1. The big star, and that other

2. Your face

3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

4. Crusaders’ wind glinting

5. The strain of being born

The Rafts

PART THREE: GHAZALS (HOMAGE TO GHALIB)

The clouds are electric in this university.

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

Did you think I was talking about my life?

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

So many minds in search of bodies

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

From here on, all of us will be living

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

POEMS (1967–1969)

Postcard

White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

The Days: Spring

Tear Gas

THE WILL TO CHANGE (1971)

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, …

2. To imagine a time of silence

3. “People suffer highly in poverty …

4. We lie under the sheet

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, …

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Violently asleep in the old house.

One day of equinoctial light after another,

A man, a woman, a city.

Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

There are days when I seem to have nothing

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

Pain made her conservative.

Pierrot Le Fou

1. Suppose you stood facing

2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

3. Suppose we had time

4. The island blistered our feet.

5. When I close my eyes

6. To record

Letters: March 1969

1. Foreknown. The victor

2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

3. “I am up at sunrise

4. Six months back

Pieces

1. Breakpoint

2. Relevance

3. Memory

4. Time and Place

5. Revelation

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

Stand Up

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke

2. Knocked down in the canefield

3. Beardless again, phoning

4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

1. Language as city:: Wittgenstein

2. To know the extremes of light

3. To love, to move perpetually

4. At the end of Alphaville

5. Interior monologue of the poet:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

PART I: 11/69–2/70

1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib)

3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; …

6. You are beside me like a wall; …

7. Picking the wax to crumbs …

PART II: 3–7/70

8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds …

9. (Newsreel)

10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

13. We are driven to odd attempts; …

14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier …

DIVING INTO THE WRECK (1971–1972)

I.

Trying to Talk with a Man

When We Dead Awaken

Waking in the Dark

Incipience

After Twenty Years

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

From the Prison House

The Stranger

Song

Dialogue

Diving into the Wreck

II. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANGER

The Phenomenology of Anger

III.

Merced

A Primary Ground

Translations

Living in a Cave

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

Rape

Burning Oneself In

Burning Oneself Out

For a Sister

For the Dead

From a Survivor

August

IV. MEDITATIONS FOR A SAVAGE CHILD

Meditations for a Savage Child

POEMS (1973–1974)

Dien Bien Phu

Essential Resources

Blood-Sister

The Wave

Re-forming the Crystal

The Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect

The Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell

White Night

Amnesia

For L.G.: Unseen for Twenty Years

Family Romance

From an Old House in America

The Fact of a Doorframe

THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE (1974–1977)

I. POWER

Power

Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev

Origins and History of Consciousness

Splittings

Hunger

To a Poet

Cartographies of Silence

The Lioness

II. TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS

I. Wherever in this city, screens flicker

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

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

IV. I come home from you through the early light of spring

V. This apartment full of books could crack open

VI. Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

VII. What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

VIII. I can see myself years back at Sunion,

IX. Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

X. Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

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

XII. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

XIII. The rules break like a thermometer,

XIV. It was your vision of the pilot

(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

XV. If I lay on that beach with you

XVI. Across a city from you, I’m with you,

XVII. No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

XVIII. Rain on the West Side Highway,

XIX. Can it be growing colder when I begin

XX. That conversation we were always on the edge

XXI. The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

III. NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE, BUT HERE

Not Somewhere Else, But Here

Upper Broadway

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

Nights and Days

Sibling Mysteries

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Mother-Right

Natural Resources

Toward the Solstice

Transcendental Etude

A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR (1978–1981)

The Images

Coast to Coast

Integrity

Culture and Anarchy

For Julia in Nebraska

Transit

For Memory

What Is Possible

For Ethel Rosenberg

Mother-in-Law

Heroines

Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones

2. Hattie Rice Rich

3. Granddaughter

The Spirit of Place

I. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

II. The mountain laurel in bloom

III. Strangers are an endangered species

IV. The river-fog will do for privacy

V. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

Frame

Rift

A Vision

Turning the Wheel

1. Location

2. Burden Baskets

3. Hohokam

4. Self-hatred

5. Particularity

6. Apparition

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

8. Turning the Wheel

YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE (1981–1985)

I. SOURCES

Sources

II. NORTH AMERICAN TIME

For the Record

North American Time

Education of a Novelist

Virginia 1906

Dreams Before Waking

When/Then

Upcountry

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

In the Wake of Home

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

For an Occupant

Emily Carr

Poetry: I

Poetry: II, Chicago

Poetry: III

Baltimore:a fragment from the Thirties

New York

Homage to Winter

Blue Rock

Yom Kippur 1984

Edges

III. CONTRADICTIONS: TRACKING POEMS

1. Look:this is Januarythe worst onslaught

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

3. My mouth hovers across your breasts

4. He slammed his hand across my faceand I

5. She is carrying my madnessand I dread her

6. Dear Adrienne:I’m calling you up tonight

7. Dear Adrienne,I feel signified by pain

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

9. Tearing but not yet torn:this page

10. Nightover the great and the little worlds

11. I came out of the hospital like a woman

12. Violence as purification:the one idea.

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

14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

15. You who think I find words for everything,

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

17. I have backroads I taketo places

18. The problem, unstated till now, is how

19. If to feel is to be unreliable

20. The tobacco fields lie fallowthe migrant pickers

21. The cat-tails blaze in the cornersunflowers

22. In a bald skull sits our friendin a helmet

23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

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

25. Did anyone ever know who we were

26. You:air-drivenreftfrom the tuber-bitten soil

27. The Tolstoyansthe Afro-American slaves

28. This high summer we love will pour its light

29. You who think I find words for everything

TIME’S POWER (1985–1988)

Solfeggietto

This

Love Poem

Negotiations

In a Classroom

The Novel

A Story

In Memoriam: D.K.

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

SleepwalkingNext to Death

Letters in the Family

The Desert as Garden of Paradise

Delta

6/21

For an Album

Dreamwood

Walking Down the Road

The Slides

Harpers Ferry

One Life

Divisions of Labor

Living Memory

Turning

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD (1988–1991)

I. AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

I. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

II. Here is a map of our country:

III. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, …

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

V. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

VI. A potato explodes in the oven.Poetry and famine:

VII. (The Dream-Site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

VIII. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:

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

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

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

XII. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

XIII. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem

II.

She

That Mouth

Marghanita

Olivia

Eastern War Time

1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,

2. Girl between home and school,what is that girl

3. How telegrams used to come:ring

4. What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push

5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

7. A woman of sixtydriving

8. A woman wired in memories

9. Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners

10. Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

Tattered Kaddish

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

II. Showering after ’flu; stripping the bed;

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

IV. That light of outrage is the light of history

V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:

For a Friend in Travail

1948: Jews

Two Arts

1. I’ve redone you by daylight.

2. Raise it up there and it will

Darklight

I. Early day.Grey the air.

II. When heat leaves the walls at last

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

1. Not what you thought:just a turn-off

2. Calle Visiónsand in your teeth

3. Lodged in the difficult hotel

4. Calle Visiónyour heart beats on unbroken

5. Ammonia

6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering

7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap

8. In the roomin the house

9. In the black net

10. On the road there is a house

Reversion

Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993)

THEN OR NOW

Food Packages: 1947

Innocence: 1945

Sunset, December, 1993

Deportations

And Now

Sending Love

Voice

Sending love:Molly sends it

Sending love is harmless

Terrence years ago

Take

Late Ghazal

Six Narratives

1. You drew up the story of your life

2. You drew up a story about me

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

From Piercéd Darkness

INSCRIPTIONS

One:comrade

Two:movement

Three:origins

Four:history

Five:voices

Six:edgelit

MIDNIGHT SALVAGE (1995–1998)

The Art of Translation

For an Anniversary

Midnight Salvage

Char

Modotti

Shattered Head

1941

Letters to a Young Poet

Camino Real

Plaza Street and Flatbush

Seven Skins

“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”

Rusted Legacy

A Long Conversation

FOX (1998–2000)

Victory

Veterans Day

For This

Regardless

Signatures

Nora’s Gaze

Architect

Fox

Messages

Fire

Twilight

Octobrish

Second Sight

Grating

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

1999

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)

I.

Centaur’s Requiem

Equinox

Tell Me

For June, in the Year 2001

The School Among the Ruins

This evening let’s

Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet

Delivered Clean

The Eye

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

II.

USonian Journals 2000

III. TERRITORY SHARED

Address

Transparencies

Livresque

Collaborations

Ritual Acts

Point in Time

IV. ALTERNATING CURRENT

Sometimes I’m back in that city

No bad dreams.Night, the bed, the faint clockface.

Take one, take two

What’s suffered in laughterin aroused afternoons

A deluxe blending machine

As finally by wind or grass

When we are shaken out

V.

Memorize This

The Painter’s House

After Apollinaire & Brassens

Slashes

Trace Elements

Bract

VI. DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS

1 Still learning the word

2 In a vast dystopic space the small things

3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

4 For recalcitrancy of attitude

5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain

6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table

7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

VII.

Five O’Clock, January 2003

Wait

Don’t Take Me

To Have Written the Truth

Screen Door

VIII. TENDRIL

Tendril

TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH (2004–2006)

I.

Voyage to the Denouement

Calibrations

Skeleton Key

Wallpaper

In Plain Sight

Behind the Motel

Melancholy Piano (extracts)

II.

Archaic

Long After Stevens

Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme”

Rhyme

Hotel

Three Elegies

I. Late Style

II. As Ever

III. Fallen Figure

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

This Is Not the Room

Unknown Quantity

Tactile Value

Midnight, the Same Day

I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

II. Try to rest now, says a voice

Even Then Maybe

Director’s Notes

Rereading The Dead Lecturer

III.

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

IV.

If/As Though

Time Exposures

I. Glance into glittering moisture

II. Is there a doctor in the house

III. They’d say she was humorless

IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

V. You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede

Via Insomnia

A Burning Kangaroo

Ever, Again

V.

Draft #2006

VI.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE (2007–2010)

I.

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

Benjamin Revisited

Innocence

Domain

Fracture

Turbulence

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

II.

Scenes of Negotiation

III.

From Sickbed Shores

IV. AXEL AVÁKAR

Axel Avákar

Axel: backstory

Axel, in thunder

I was there, Axel

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

V.

Ballade of the Poverties

Emergency Clinic

Confrontations

Circum/Stances

Winterface

Quarto

Don’t Flinch

Black Locket

Generosity

VI.

You, Again

Powers of Recuperation

LATER 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

Index of Titles and First Lines

INTRODUCTION

BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?” Adrienne Rich once answered:

Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire…. [I]n poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.

There are many great poets, but not all of them alter the ways in which we understand the world we live in; not all of them suggest that words can be held responsible. Remarkably, Adrienne Rich did this and continues to do this for generations of readers. In her Collected Poems 1950–2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self.

Rich’s desire for a transformative writing that would invent new ways to be, to see, and to speak drew me to her work in the early 1980s while I was a student at Williams College. Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s 1962 The Fire Next Time and two collections by Rich, her 1969 Leaflets and her 1971–1972 Diving into the Wreck. In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following: “Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.”

Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my first encounter with her work. Leaflets, Diving into the Wreck, and The Dream of a Common Language were all examples of her interrogation, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life…. Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.

In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in both Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

Rich claimed that Baldwin was the “first writer I read who suggested that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet” [1984]). It was Rich who suggested to me that silence, too, was poisonous and destructive to our social interactions and self-knowledge. Her understanding that the ethicacy of our personal relationships was dependent on the ethics of our political and cultural systems was demonstrated not only in her poetry but also in her essays, interviews, and in conversations like the extended one she conducted with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde.

Despite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. As self-identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities. Stunningly, they showed us that, if you listen closely enough, language “is no longer personal,” as Rich writes in “Meditations for a Savage Child,” but stains and is stained by the political.

In the poem “Hunger” (1974–1975), which is dedicated to Audre Lorde, Rich writes, “I’m wondering / whether we even have what we think we have / … even our intimacies are rigged with terror. / Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open, / I stand convicted by all my convictions—you, too …” And as if in the form of an answer, Lorde wrote in “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” an essay published in 1981, “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

By my late twenties, the early 1990s, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World. I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term “ethical loneliness” would come to me years later from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, “abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.”

Perhaps because of its pithy, if riddling, directness, the opening stanza of the last poem in An Atlas of the Difficult World, “Final Notations,” willed its way into my memory like a popular song. This shadow sonnet, with its intricate and entangled complexity seemed to have come a far distance from the tidiness of the often-anthologized “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that appeared in her first collection. The open-ended pronoun “it” seemed as likely to land in “change” as in “poetry” or “life” or “childbirth”:

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

As readers, when we are lucky, we can experience a poet’s changes through language over a lifetime. For me, these lines enacted Rich’s statement in “Images for Godard” (1970) that “the moment of change is the only poem.” Rich’s own transformations brought her closer to the ethical lives of her readers even as she wrote poems that at times lost patience with our culture’s inability to change with her.

Arriving at Radcliffe, the daughter of a Southern Protestant pianist mother and a Jewish doctor father, Rich initially excelled at being exceptional in accepted ways. Often working in traditional form in her early writing, she, even in these nascent poems, was already addressing the frustration of being constrained by forces that traditionally were not inclusive. Consequently, Rich was never primarily invested in traditional meter and form, though she employed them early on. Some of her earliest poems suggest she was already grasping toward what could not yet be described as “liberative language.” Her poems often found ways to critique existing expectations for one’s femininity, sexuality, and a decorum that did not include speaking her truth to power.

Rich began her public poetic career as the 1951 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, A Change of World. W. H. Auden selected Rich’s volume and brought to the world’s attention Rich’s first thorny questions, embedded in lyrics, addressing a culture’s disengagement with its embattled selves. A poem like “A Clock in the Square,” published in that volume, finds its inspiration in a “handless clock” that refuses, rather than is unable, “to acknowledge the hour”:

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,

Refusing to acknowledge any hour,

But what can one clock do to stop the game

When others go on striking just the same?

Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,

Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,

Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing

From all the restless ways we must be going

And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,

Whether around a clockface or a world.

The clock appears initially to be broken, but its handlessness proves an ineffective strategy against the “game.” Silence as a form of rebellion proves inadequate to the moment.

Auden praised A Change of World for, among other things, its “detachment from the self and its emotions,” as is demonstrated in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that has always been coupled in my mind with Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther.” “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” projects freedom onto the image of the tigers the poem’s protagonist stitches into her needlework. This is in contrast to Rilke’s portrayal of the panther as imprisoned and behind bars. Rilke depicts the panther’s very will as having been paralyzed:

The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,

that in the very smallest circle turns,

is like a dance of strength around a center

in which stupefied a great will stands

Rich’s dialectical use of the tigers to contrast the paralysis intrinsic to Aunt Jennifer’s domestic life speaks gently to her early “absolutist approach to the universe,” as she herself observed in a 1964 essay. She would come to understand society’s limits as touching all our lives. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” ends with the quatrain:

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Those “terrified hands,” “ringed” and “mastered,” also could imagine and create a fantastical reflection of life, those tigers, that were “proud and unafraid.”

Rich came of age in a postwar America where civil rights and antiwar movements were either getting started or were on the horizon. Poets like Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, among others, were abandoning the illusionary position of objectivity and finding their way to the use of the first person and gaining access to their emotional as well as political lives on the page. Rich’s reach for objectivity would be similarly short-lived.

Rich joined poets engaged in political-poetic resistance to the Vietnam War, as can be seen in “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1968), which includes lines like “Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s.” She began to elide traditions in order to speak from a more integrated history. “Even before I called myself a feminist or a lesbian,” Rich wrote in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” “I felt driven—for my own sanity—to bring together in my poems the political world ‘out there’—the world of children dynamited or napalmed, of the urban ghetto and militarist violence—and the supposedly private, lyrical world of sex and of male/female relationships.”

With Rich came the formulation of an alternate poetic tradition that distrusted and questioned paternalistic, hetero-normative, and hierarchical notions of what it meant to have a voice, especially for female writers. All of culture found its way into Rich’s poems, and as her work evolved, she made it almost impossible for any writers mentored by her poetry and essays to experience their own work as “sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own,” to quote from her foreword to the 1979 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

A dozen years after A Change of World was published, Rich would look back on her earlier work—which includes her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, and its metrical and imagistic tidiness—and admit that “in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order.” This understanding that disruption seen and negotiated inside the poem might be closer to her actual experience of the world changed the content, form, and voice of her poetics. In her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), a restlessness settles into the poems that explore marriage and childrearing. It’s here the exasperation of a “thinking woman” begins the fight “with what she partly understood. / Few men about her would or could do more, / hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore,” as Rich writes in the title poem.

The 1970s saw the publication of some of Rich’s most memorable and powerful poems. She developed in her writing the appearance of the unadorned simplicity of a mind in rigorous thought. In a 1971 conversation with Stanley Plumly, Rich said she was “interested in the possibilities of the ‘plainest statement’ at times, the kind of things that people say to each other at moments of stress.” In poems like the groundbreaking “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich clearly chooses reality over myth in order to create room within the poems to confront what was broken in our common lives:

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

When Diving into the Wreck won the National Book Award in 1974, Rich accepted the prize in solidarity with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde:

The statement I am going to read was prepared by three of the women nominated for the National Book Award for poetry, with the agreement that it would be read by whichever of us, if any, was chosen.

We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. We believe that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other; and that poetry—if it is poetry—exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically join together here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women. We appreciate the good faith of the judges for this award, but none of us could accept this money for herself, nor could she let go unquestioned the terms on which poets are given or denied honor and livelihood in this world, especially when they are women. We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet; the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.

In 1997, over twenty years later, Rich declined the National Medal for the Arts, this country’s highest artistic honor, because she believed “the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” In her July 3 letter to the Clinton administration and Jane Alexander, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she wrote:

I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal. Anyone familiar with my work from the early sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Positioned as a teacher, as I often am now, at the front of a classroom, I was struck by reading a line in “Draft #2006” from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. The line—“Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon.”—reminded me that this urgency, apprehension, and questioning has characterized all of Rich’s poems. Still it seems she responds in time, as she will always be once and future, and her work always relevant.

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.

In her Collected Poems 1950—2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self, to refer back to Baldwin. As the poet Marilyn Hacker as written,

Rich’s body of work establishes, among other things, an intellectual autobiography, which is interesting not as the narrative of one life (which it’s not) and still less as intimate divulgence, but as the evolution and revolutions of an exceptional mind, with all its curiosity, outreaching, exasperation and even its errors.

One of our best minds writes her way through the changes that have brought us here, in all the places that continue to entangle our liberties in the twenty-first century. And here is not “somewhere else but here,” Rich writes. We remain in “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own way of making people disappear.”

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.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This is the first collection of Adrienne Rich’s poetry to be published without her active involvement. However, in certain ways it is based on similar collected works that she edited at intervals over the course of her career. She undertook the last of these in the year leading up to her death in 2012—going through all the work she’d published since The Will to Change in 1971 and adding ten new poems to create Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012.

Rich had already gone through this process several times during the previous fifty years: looking through the books of poetry she had published up to that point to choose representative work for a volume of “selected” poems. In 1975, just a year after her pivotal book Diving into the Wreck, W. W. Norton published the first such volume, Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974. Nearly ten years later, in 1984, she repeated the process with The Fact of a Doorframe, followed in 1993 by Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, which consists of the full text of her first six books.

In each case, along with selections from earlier books, she chose what she called “uncollected” work: poems that she had previously held back or had only published in magazines but never included in a book. She also added new work; important poems like “The Fact of a Doorframe” and “From an Old House in America” first appeared in Poems: Selected and New. In the foreword to that book, she described her selection as “the graph of a process still going on,” a statement equally true of The Fact of a Doorframe when it was first published in 1984 and also when she updated it for W. W. Norton more than fifteen years later.

Those books are the basis for the present collection, except that now nothing has been omitted: all of Rich’s published poetry appears here in one volume, including all of the uncollected poems. Explanatory notes that she provided for some of her poems are compiled and appear here in a single section at the back. There were a few instances where she changed words or lines in an earlier poem when preparing to include it in one of the “selected” books. These alterations were described in her notes, and this collection preserves the later versions.

Except for Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012, she also wrote short forewords for each of the “selected” volumes, describing how she made her selections and offering an account of her experience as the person who wrote those poems and of the world in which she found herself at work. The forewords are often self-critical, and they emphasize her place in a wider current of language, poetry, and events. These short essays aren’t included in the present book, but some information from them, specific to individual poems, is incorporated into the endnotes of the present collection.

In omitting any appendix of drafts or discarded poems, this volume respects Rich’s own directions regarding the papers she donated to Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women. There she notes that over the years, in collecting poems for her books, she had “weeded out work I felt was not to my own standards or was repetitive,” and specifies that those discards and drafts are not for publication.

However, the otherwise “uncollected” poems that appeared only in Poems: Selected and New, The Fact of a Doorframe, and Collected Early Poems are all here. Likewise, the major poems from the late 1970s and early 1980s that she left out of her final selected volume—“From an Old House in America,” “Transcendental Etude,” and “Natural Resources”—can now be read in their fullest possible context.

Elements of typography and page design varied over the years from one book to another and are here made uniform. But I have tried to preserve as nearly as possible the structure of each book as it appeared for the first time, including all dedications and epigraphs, as well as the division of poems into separate numbered sections.

Even after she submitted her book manuscripts, Rich continued to work with tremendous care and precision, collaborating with her editors, book designers, proofreaders, and everyone else at W. W. Norton associated with her work over thirty-one volumes of poetry and prose. In assembling Collected Poems, I benefited from her example and from the collaboration of a publisher with a deep connection to this body of work.

I grew up hearing the keystrokes and carriage returns of my mother’s typewriter as she worked on some of these poems. Some I saw for the first time when they arrived enclosed with her letters and some I first heard in her own voice at public readings. In editing this collection, I was struck over and over by how these poems change in sound and meaning when read at different times and in different settings. This is Adrienne Rich’s poetry from over sixty years, and although it’s now gathered under one cover, the poems continue to breathe, reaching forward to find new and different readers.

—PABLO CONRAD

A CHANGE

OF WORLD

(1951)

For Theodore Morrison

STORM WARNINGS

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,

And knowing better than the instrument

What winds are walking overhead, what zone

Of gray unrest is moving across the land,

I leave the book upon a pillowed chair

And walk from window to closed window, watching

Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air

Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,

How with a single purpose time has traveled

By secret currents of the undiscerned

Into this polar realm. Weather abroad

And weather in the heart alike come on

Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change

Lies all the mastery of elements

Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.

Time in the hand is not control of time,

Nor shattered fragments of an instrument

A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,

We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black

And set a match to candles sheathed in glass

Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine

Of weather through the unsealed aperture.

This is our sole defense against the season;

These are the things that we have learned to do

Who live in troubled regions.

AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

VERTIGO

As for me, I distrust the commonplace;

Demand and am receiving marvels, signs,

Miracles wrought in air, acted in space

After imagination’s own designs.

The lion and the tiger pace this way

As often as I call; the flight of wings

Surprises empty air, while out of clay

The golden-gourded vine unwatered springs.

I have inhaled impossibility,

And walk at such an angle, all the stars

Have hung their carnival chains of light for me:

There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars.

I shall be seeing you, my darling, there,

Or at the burning bush in Harvard Square.

THE ULTIMATE ACT

What if the world’s corruption nears,

The consequence they dare not name?

We shall but realize our fears

And having tasted them go on,

Neither from hope of grace nor fame,

Delivered from remorse and shame,

And do the things left to be done

For no sake other than their own.

The quarry shall be stalked and won,

The bed invaded, and the game

Played till the roof comes tumbling down

And win or lose are all the same.

Action at such a pitch shall flame

Only beneath a final sun.

WHAT GHOSTS CAN SAY

When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost,

As bearded and immense as once in life,

Bending above his bed long after midnight,

He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow

Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns

To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.

The smell of his father’s leather riding crop

And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.

Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost

If not to prove it came on serious business?

His father always had meant serious business,

But never so wholly in his look and gesture

As when he beat the boy’s uncovered thighs

Calmly and resolutely, at an hour

When Harry never had been awake before.

The man who could choose that single hour of night

Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;

Mortality would quail at such a man.

An older Harry lost his childish notion

And only sometimes wondered if events

Could echo thus long after in a dream.

If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.

But why the actual punishment had fallen,

For what offense of boyhood, he could try

For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say—

Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely.

What if the terror stays without the meaning?

THE KURSAAL AT INTERLAKEN

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers

The violins are tuning for the evening

Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,

Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.

The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters

Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.

The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,

The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,

And operetta waltzes gild the air

With the capricious lilt of costume music.

You will perhaps make love to me this evening,

Dancing among the circular green tables

Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain

Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.

Reality is no stronger than a waltz,

A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,

A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German

Or French, or any language but our own.

Reality would call us less than friends,

And therefore more adept at making love.

What is the world, the violins seem to say,

But windows full of bears and music boxes,

Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,

And calendars of French and German days—

Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,

Days where we speak all languages but our own?

So in this evening of a mythical summer

We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,

All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,

Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.

The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,

And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection

The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,

Shall we pursue this mood into the night,

Play this charade out in the silver street

Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?

If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,

The mountain like a sword against the night

Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,

What is she but a local tour de force?

The air is bright with after-images.

The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,

The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,

The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.

Against the splinters of a reeling landscape

This image still pursues us into time:

Jungfrau, the legendary virgin spire,

Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.

RELIQUARY

The bones of saints are praised above their flesh,

That pale rejected garment of their lives

In which they walked despised, uncanonized.

Brooding upon the marble bones of time

Men read strange sanctity in lost events,

Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays,

And in the dust of actions once reviled

Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.

PURELY LOCAL

Beside this door a January tree

Answers a few days’ warmth with shoots of green;

And knowing what the winds must do, I see

A hint of something human in the scene.

No matter how the almanacs have said

Hold back, distrust a purely local May,

When did we ever learn to be afraid?

Why are we scarred with winter’s thrust today?

A VIEW OF THE TERRACE

Under the green umbrellas

Drinking golden tea,

There sit the porcelain people

Who care for you but little

And not at all for me.

The afternoon in crinkles

Lies stiffly on the lawn

And we, two furtive exiles,

Watch from an upper window

With shutters not quite drawn.

The gilt and scalloped laughter

Reaches us through a glaze,

And almost we imagine

That if we threw a pebble

The shining scene would craze.

But stones are thrown by children,

And we by now too wise

To try again to splinter

The bright enamel people

Impervious to surprise.

BY NO MEANS NATIVE

“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same.”

He found it understated when he came.

His tongue, in hopes to find itself at home,

Caught up the twist of every idiom.

He learned the accent and the turn of phrase,

Studied like Latin texts the local ways.

He tasted till his palate knew their shape

The country’s proudest bean, its master grape.

He never talked of fields remembered green,

Or seasons in his land of origin.

And still he felt there lay a bridgeless space

Between himself and natives of the place.

Their laughter came when his had long abated;

He struggled in allusions never stated.

The truth at last cried out to be confessed:

He must remain eternally a guest,

Never to wear the birthmark of their ways.

He could be studying native all his days

And die a kind of minor alien still.

He might deceive himself by force of will,

Feel all the sentiments and give the sign,

Yet never overstep that tenuous line.

What else then? Wear the old identity,

The mark of other birth, and when you die,

Die as an exile? it has done for some.

Others surrender, book their passage home,

Only to seek their exile soon again,

No greater strangers than their countrymen.

Yet man will have his bondage to some place;

If not, he seeks an Order, or a race.

Some join the Masons, some embrace the Church,

And if they do, it does not matter much.

As for himself, he joined the band of those

Who pick their fruit no matter where it grows,

And learn to like it sweet or like it sour

Depending on the orchard or the hour.

By no means native, yet somewhat in love

With things a native is enamored of—

Except the sense of being held and owned

By one ancestral patch of local ground.

AIR WITHOUT INCENSE

We eat this body and remain ourselves.

We drink this liquor, tasting wine, not blood.

Among these triple icons, rites of seven,

We know the feast to be of earth, not heaven:

Here man is wounded, yet we speak of God.

More than the Nazarene with him was laid

Into the tomb, and in the tomb has stayed.

Communion of no saints, mass without bell,

Air without incense, we implore at need.

There are questions to be answered, and the sky

Answers no questions, hears no litany.

We breathe the vapors of a sickened creed.

Ours are assassins deadlier than sin;

Deeper disorders starve the soul within.

If any writ could tell us, we would read.

If any ghost dared lay on us a claim,

Our fibers would respond, our nerves obey;

But revelation moves apart today

From gestures of a tired pontifical game.

We seek, where lamp and kyrie expire,

A site unscourged by wasting tongues of fire.

FOR THE FELLING OF AN ELM IN THE HARVARD YARD

They say the ground precisely swept

No longer feeds with rich decay

The roots enormous in their age

That long and deep beneath have slept.

So the great spire is overthrown,

And sharp saws have gone hurtling through

The rings that three slow centuries wore;

The second oldest elm is down.

The shade where James and Whitehead strolled

Becomes a litter on the green.

The young men pause along the paths

To see the axes glinting bold.

Watching the hewn trunk dragged away,

Some turn the symbol to their own,

And some admire the clean dispatch

With which the aged elm came down.

A CLOCK IN THE SQUARE

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,

Refusing to acknowledge any hour.

But what can one clock do to stop the game

When others go on striking just the same?

Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,

Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,

Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing

From all the restless ways we must be going

And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,

Whether around a clockface or a world.

WHY ELSE BUT TO FORESTALL THIS HOUR

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed

Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,

Swam only in familiar depths, and played

No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;

A score of cousins wilted in my sight.

I heard the steeples clang for each new year,

Then drew my shutters close against the night.

Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;

Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.

I did not chide them with the things I knew:

Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

I am the man who has outmisered death,

In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.

Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;

I am too full of years to reason why.

THIS BEAST, THIS ANGEL

No: this, my love, is neither you nor I.

This is the beast or angel, changing form,

The will that we are scourged and nourished by.

The golden fangs, the tall seraphic sword,

Alike unsheathed, await the midnight cry,

Blazon their answer to the stammered word.

Beneath this gaze our powers are fused as one;

We meet these eyes under the curve of night.

This is the transformation that is done

Where mortal forces slay mortality

And, towering at terrible full height,

This beast, this angel is both you and I.

EASTPORT TO BLOCK ISLAND

Along the coastal waters, signals run

In waves of caution and anxiety.

We’ll try the catboat out another day.

So Danny stands in sea-grass by the porch

To watch a heeling dinghy, lone on grey,

Grapple with moods of wind that take the bay.

One year we walked among the shipwrecked shingles

Of storm-crazed cottages along the dune.

Rosa Morelli found her husband’s boat

Ruined on the rocks; she never saw him dead,

And after seven years of stubborn hope

Began to curse the sight of things afloat.

The mother of the Kennedy boys is out

Stripping the Monday burden from the line

And looking for a rowboat round the headland.

Wonder if they stopped for bait at Mory’s

And if the old man made them understand

This is a day for boys to stay on land?

Small craft, small craft, stay in and wait for tidings.

The word comes in with every hour of wind.

News of a local violence pricks the air,

And we who have seen the kitchen blown away,

Or Harper’s children washed from sight, prepare

As usual in these parts for foul, not fair.

AT A DEATHBED IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND

I bid you cast out pity.

No more of that: let be

Impotent grief and mourning.

How shall a man break free

From this deathwatch of earth,

This world estranged from mirth?

Show me gay faces only.

I call for pride and wit—

Men who remember laughter,

Brave jesters to befit

An age that would destroy

Its last outpost of joy.

No longer condolence

And wailing on the tongue.

An old man bids you laugh;

This text I leave the young:

Your rage and loud despair

But shake a crumbling stair.

Laughter is what men learn

At seventy years or more,

Weary of being stern

Or violent as before.

Laughter to us is left

To light that darkening rift

Where little time is with us,

Let us enact again

Not Oedipus but The Clouds.

Summon the players in.

Be proud on a sorry earth:

Bring on the men of mirth.

AFTERWARD

Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand

At last believing and resigned,

And none of us who touch your hand

Know how to give you back in kind

The words you flung when hopes were proud:

Being born to happiness

Above the asking of the crowd,

You would not take a finger less.

We who know limits now give room

To one who grows to fit her doom.

THE UNCLE SPEAKS IN THE DRAWING ROOM

I have seen the mob of late

Standing sullen in the square,

Gazing with a sullen stare

At window, balcony, and gate.

Some have talked in bitter tones,

Some have held and fingered stones.

These are follies that subside.

Let us consider, none the less,

Certain frailties of glass

Which, it cannot be denied,

Lead in times like these to fear

For crystal vase and chandelier.

Not that missiles will be cast;

None as yet dare lift an arm.

But the scene recalls a storm

When our grandsire stood aghast

To see his antique ruby bowl

Shivered in a thunder-roll.

Let us only bear in mind

How these treasures handed down

From a calmer age passed on

Are in the keeping of our kind.

We stand between the dead glass-blowers

And murmurings of missile-throwers.

BOUNDARY

What has happened here will do

To bite the living world in two,

Half for me and half for you.

Here at last I fix a line

Severing the world’s design

Too small to hold both yours and mine.

There’s enormity in a hair

Enough to lead men not to share

Narrow confines of a sphere

But put an ocean or a fence

Between two opposite intents.

A hair would span the difference.

FIVE O’CLOCK, BEACON HILL

Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry

In the receptive twilight of the vines

And potted exile shrubs with sensitive spines

Greening the glass of the conservatory.

Curtis, in sand-grey coat and tie of madder,

Meets elder values with polite negation.

I, between yew and lily, in resignation

Watch lime-green shade across his left cheek spatter.

Gazing beyond my elbow, he allows

Significance of sorts to Baudelaire.

His phrases float across the lucent air

Like exotic leaves detached from waxy boughs.

I drink old sherry and look at Curtis’ nose—

Intelligent Puritan feature, grave, discreet,

Unquestionably a nose that one might meet

In portraits of antique generalissimos.

The study seems sufficient recompense

For Curtis’ dissertations upon Gide.

What rebel breathes beneath his mask, indeed?

Avant-garde in tradition’s lineaments!

FROM A CHAPTER ON LITERATURE

After the sunlight and the fiery vision

Leading us to a place of running water,

We came into a place by water altered.

Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept

And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist

Crawled like a snail across the land, and left

A snail’s moist trace; and everything there thriving

Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth

And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.

There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,

Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,

It had forgotten fire and aspiration,

Becoming sodden with appetite alone.

There in the green-grey thickness of the air

Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,

Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect

Hung heavily from the boughs to testify

Against all simple sensualities,

Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,

Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol

By unrelenting watery permeations.

So from promethean hopes we came this far,

This far from lands of sun and racing blood.

Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,

Behind us too the vulture and the rock—

The tragic labor and the heroic doom—

For without passion the rock also crumbles

And the wet twilight scares the bird away.

AN UNSAID WORD

She who has power to call her man

From that estranged intensity

Where his mind forages alone,

Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,

And when his thoughts to her return

Stands where he left her, still his own,

Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

MATHILDE IN NORMANDY

From the archaic ships the green and red

Invaders woven in their colored hosts

Descend to conquer. Here is the threaded headland,

The warp and woof of a tideless beach, the flight,

Recounted by slow shuttles, of swift arrows,

And the outlandish attitudes of death

In the stitched soldiery. That this should prove

More than the personal episode, more than all

The little lives sketched on the teeming loom

Was then withheld from you; self-conscious history

That writes deliberate footnotes to its action

Was not of your young epoch. For a pastime

The patient handiwork of long-sleeved ladies

Was esteemed proper when their lords abandoned

The fields and apple trees of Normandy

For harsher hunting on the opposite coast.

Yours was a time when women sat at home

To the pleasing minor airs of lute and hautbois,

While the bright sun on the expensive threads

Glowed in the long windless afternoons.

Say what you will, anxiety there too

Played havoc with the skein, and the knots came

When fingers’ occupation and mind’s attention

Grew too divergent, at the keen remembrance

Of wooden ships putting out from a long beach,

And the grey ocean dimming to a void,

And the sick strained farewells, too sharp for speech.

AT A BACH CONCERT

Coming by evening through the wintry city

We said that art is out of love with life.

Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,

Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,

Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—

The vital union of necessity

With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.

Only such proud restraining purity

Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

THE RAIN OF BLOOD

In the dark year an angry rain came down

Blood-red upon the hot stones of the town.

Beneath the pelting of that liquid drought

No garden stood, no shattered stalk could sprout,

As from a sunless sky all day it rained

And men came in from streets of terror stained

With that unnatural ichor. Under night

Impatient lovers did not quench the light,

But listening heard above each other’s breath

That sound the dying heard in rooms of death.

Each loudly asked abroad, and none dared tell

What omen in that burning torrent fell.

And all night long we lay, while overhead

The drops rained down as if the heavens bled;

And every dawn we woke to hear the sound,

And all men knew that they could stanch the wound,

But each looked out and cursed the stricken town,

The guilty roofs on which the rain came down.

STEPPING BACKWARD

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,

Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.

This is the leave we never really take.

If you were dead or gone to live in China

The event might draw your stature in my mind.

I should be forced to look upon you whole

The way we look upon the things we lose.

We see each other daily and in segments;

Parting might make us meet anew, entire.

You asked me once, and I could give no answer,

How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,

Official treacheries of face and name,

Have out our true identity? I could hazard

An answer now, if you are asking still.

We are a small and lonely human race

Showing no sign of mastering solitude

Out on this stony planet that we farm.

The most that we can do for one another

Is let our blunders and our blind mischances

Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.

We might as well be truthful. I should say

They’re luckiest who know they’re not unique;

But only art or common interchange

Can teach that kindest truth. And even art

Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville

Or calmed a Mahler’s frenzy; you and I

Still look from separate windows every morning

Upon the same white daylight in the square.

And when we come into each other’s rooms

Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,

We hover awkwardly about the threshold

And usually regret the visit later.

Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers—

And once in a while two with the grace of lovers—

Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion

And let each other freely come and go.

Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards

The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,

The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.

The door may open, but the room is altered;

Not the same room we look from night and day.

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom

To learn that those we marked infallible

Are tragic-comic stumblers like ourselves.

The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,

Demanding more than we know how to render.

Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;

The human act will make us real again,

And then perhaps we come to know each other.

Let us return to imperfection’s school.

No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost,

Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,

We must at last renounce that ultimate blue

And take a walk in other kinds of weather.

The sourest apple makes its wry announcement

That imperfection has a certain tang.

Maybe we shouldn’t turn our pockets out

To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,

But all we can confess of what we are

Has in it the defeat of isolation—

If not our own, then someone’s anyway.

So I come back to saying this good-by,

A sort of ceremony of my own,

This stepping backward for another glance.

Perhaps you’ll say we need no ceremony,

Because we know each other, crack and flaw,

Like two irregular stones that fit together.

Yet still good-by, because we live by inches

And only sometimes see the full dimension.

Your stature’s one I want to memorize—

Your whole level of being, to impose

On any other comers, man or woman.

I’d ask them that they carry what they are

With your particular bearing, as you wear

The flaws that make you both yourself and human.

ITINERARY

The guidebooks play deception; oceans are

A property of mind. All maps are fiction,

All travelers come to separate frontiers.

The coast, they said, is barren; birds go over

Unlighting, in search of richer inland gardens.

No green weed thrusts its tendril from the rock face.

Visit it if you must; then turn again

To the warm pleasing air of colored towns

Where rivers wind to lace the summer valleys.

The coast is naked, sharp with cliffs, unkind,

They said; scrub-bitten. Inland there are groves

And fêtes of light and music.

But I have seen

Such denizens of enchantment print these sands

As seldom prowl the margins of old charts:

Stallions of verd antique and wild brown children

And tails of mermaids glittering through the sea!

A REVIVALIST IN BOSTON

But you shall walk the golden street,

And you unhouse and house the Lord.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Going home by lamplight across Boston Common,

We heard him tell how God had entered in him,

And now he had the Word, and nothing other

Would do but he must cry it to his brother.

We stood and listened there—to nothing new.

Yet something loosed his tongue and drove him shouting.

Compulsion’s not play-acted in a face,

And he was telling us the way to grace.

Somehow we saw the youth that he had been,

Not one to notice; an ordinary boy—

Hardly the one the Lord would make His tool—

Shuffling his feet in Baptist Sunday school.

And then transfiguration came his way;

He knew the secret all the rest were seeking.

He made the tale of Christendom his own,

And hoarsely called his brethren to the throne.

The same old way; and yet we knew he saw

The angelic hosts whose names he stumbled over.

He made us hear the ranks of shining feet

Treading to glory’s throne up Tremont Street.

THE RETURN OF THE EVENING GROSBEAKS

The birds about the house pretend to be

Penates of our domesticity.

And when the cardinal wants to play at prophet

We never tell his eminence to come off it.

The crows, too, in the dawn prognosticate

Like ministers at a funeral of state.

The pigeons in their surplices of white

Assemble for some careful Anglican rite.

Only these guests who rarely come our way

Dictate no oracles for us while they stay.

No matter what we try to make them mean

Their coming lends no answer to our scene.

We scatter seed and call them by their name,

Remembering what has changed since last they came.

THE SPRINGBOARD

Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump

That sets the taut board bounding underfoot

Clean as an axe blade driven in a stump;

But afterward what makes the body shoot

Into its pure and irresistible curve

Is of a force beyond all bodily powers.

So action takes velocity with a verve

Swifter, more sure than any will of ours.

A CHANGE OF WORLD

Fashions are changing in the sphere.

Oceans are asking wave by wave

What new shapes will be worn next year;

And the mountains, stooped and grave,

Are wondering silently range by range

What if they prove too old for the change.

The little tailors busily sitting

Flashing their shears in rival haste

Won’t spare time for a prior fitting—

In with the stitches, too late to baste.

They say the season for doubt has passed:

The changes coming are due to last.

UNSOUNDED

Mariner unpracticed,

In this chartless zone

Every navigator

Fares unwarned, alone.

Each his own Magellan

In tropics of sensation:

Not a fire-scorched stone

From prior habitation,

Not an archaic hull

Splintered on the beach.

These are latitudes revealed

Separate to each.

DESIGN IN LIVING COLORS

Embroidered in a tapestry of green

Among the textures of a threaded garden,

The gesturing lady and her paladin

Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden

Upon the formal attitudes of trees

By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,

Against the background of a figured frieze

In an eternal summer afternoon.

So you and I in our accepted frame

Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers

And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame

Among the panels of familiar hours.

Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal

A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,

Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel

And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?

If you should pick me at my whim a rose,

Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,

How should I know what crimson meaning grows

Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?

And how should I believe, the meaning clear,

That we are children of disordered days?

That fragmentary world is mended here,

And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.

The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,

All images once separate and alone,

Become the creatures of a tapestry

Miraculously stirred and made our own.

We are the denizens of a living wood

Where insight blooms anew on every bough,

And every flower emerges understood

Out of a pattern unperceived till now.

WALDEN 1950

Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord,

Finds the town like all towns, much the same—

A little less remote, less independent.

The cars hurl through from dawn to dawn toward Boston

Paying out speed like a lifeline between towns.

Some of them pause to look at Alcott’s house.

No farmer studies Latin now; the language

Of soil and market would confound a scholar;

And any Yankee son with lonesome notions

Would find life harder in the town today.

Under the trees by Walden Pond, the stalls

Where summer pilgrims pause beside the road,

Drown resinous night in busy rivalry

While the young make boisterous love along the shores.

He used to hear the locomotive whistle

Sound through the woods like a hawk’s restless cry.

Now the trains run through Concord night and day,

And nobody stops to listen. The ghost might smile—

The way a man in solitude would smile—

Remembering all the sounds that passed for sound

A century ago.

He would remain

Away from houses other ghosts might visit,

Not having come to tell a thing or two

Or lay a curse (what curse could frighten now?)

No tapping on the windowpane for him

Or twilight conversation in the streets

With some bewildered townsman going home.

If he had any errand, it would be

More likely curiosity of his own

About the human race, at least in Concord.

He would not come so far from distant woods

Merely to set them wondering again.

SUNDAY EVENING

We are two acquaintances on a train,

Rattling back through darkening twilight suburbs

From a weekend in the country, into town.

The station lights flare past us, and we glance

Furtively at our watches, sit upright

On leather benches in the smoke-dim car

And try to make appropriate conversation.

We come from similar streets in the same city

And have spent this same hiatus of three days

Escaping streets and lives that we have chosen.

Escape by deck chairs sprawled on evening lawns,

By citronella and by visitant moths;

Escape by sand and water in the eyes,

And sea-noise drowned in weekend conversation.

Uneasy, almost, that we meet again,

Impatient for this rattling ride to end,

We still are stricken with a dread of passing

Time, the coming loneliness of travelers

Parting in hollow stations, going home

To silent rooms in too-familiar streets

With unknown footsteps pacing overhead.

For there are things we might have talked about,

And there are signs we might have shared in common.

We look out vainly at the passing stations

As if some lamplit shed or gleaming roof

Might reawake the sign in both of us.

But this is only Rye or Darien,

And whoever we both knew there has moved away.

And I suppose there never will be time

To speak of more than this—the change in weather,

The lateness of the train on Sunday evenings—

Never enough or always too much time.

Life lurches past us like a windowed twilight

Seen from a train that halts at little junctions

Where weekend half-acquaintances say good-by.

THE INNOCENTS

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:

With dust implicit in the uncurled green

First leaf, and all the early garden knowing

That after rose-red petals comes the bleak

Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf

Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be

Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,

A little cognizant of rooted death.

And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs

Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,

We supple children played at golden age,

And knelt upon the curving steps to snare

The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax

The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell

In lemon sunlight on the balcony.

And only pedagogues and the brittle old

Existed to declare mortality,

And they were beings removed in walk and speech.

For apprehension feeds on intellect:

Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—

While innocent sensuality abides

In charmed perception of an hour, a day,

Ingenuous and unafraid of time.

So in the garden we were free of fear,

And what the saffron roses or the green

Imperial dragonflies above the lake

Knew about altered seasons, boughs despoiled,

They never murmured; and to us no matter

How in the drawing room the elders sat

Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,

While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes

Impaled the air with splintered chips of time

Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,

An organpoint to desperate animation.

They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;

They knew what we would never have believed.

“HE REMEMBERETH THAT WE ARE DUST”

And when was dust a thing so rash?

Or when could dust support the lash

And stand as arrogant as stone?

And where has revelation shown

Conceit and rage so interfused

In dust, that suns have stood bemused

To watch the reckless consequence?

And when did dust break reticence

To sing aloud with all its might

In egotistical delight?

Yet when the tale is told of wind

That lifted dust and drove behind

To scoop the valleys from their sleep

And bury landscapes inches deep

Till there must follow years of rain

Before the earth could breathe again—

Or when the appetite of fire

Blazes beyond control and higher,

Then sinks into the sullen waste

Of what, devouring, it effaced,

And thinly in my palm I hold

The dust of ash grown wan and cold,

I know what element I chose

To build such anger, mould such woes.

LIFE AND LETTERS

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city

Where here and there against the febrile sky

The shaft of an unbroken column rises,

And in the sands indifferent lizards keep

The shattered traces of old monuments.

Here where the death of the imagination

Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes

Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out

In their last violence of illumination.

By day his valet rules him, forcing him

With milk and medicines, a deference

Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here

During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,

You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”

He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,

Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way

To join a lounging crony belowstairs.

(“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)

The ivory body in the dressing gown

(Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills

His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)

Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair

And looks on summer sunlight in the square.

Below, the fat concierge points out his window

With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.

There are a few who make the pilgrimage;

They stand and gaze and go away again.

Something to say that one has stood beneath

His window, though they never see himself.

The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.

He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.

“He always says he means to read them later,

But I should say his reading days are finished.

All he does now is watch the square below.

He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.

An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”

The letters still arrive from universities,

Occasionally a charitable cause,

A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.

But now it seems no answers are expected

From one whose correspondence is collected

In two large volumes, edited with notes.

What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve

Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite

To vindicate its final quarter-decade?

No; he has written all that can be known.

If anything, too much; his greedy art

Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth

From fastening on every life he touched.

(Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)

But now the art has left the man to rest.

The failing searchlight of his mind remains

To throw its wavering cone of recognition

Backward upon those teeming images.

New York invades the memory again:

A million jewels crowd the boyish brain

With apprehension of an unmastered world.

The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,

The bridges leap like fountains into noon.

Again the train goes rocking across-country

Past midnight platforms where the reddish light

Plays on a game of checkers through the window,

Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.

Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes

Beside him in the heat of August dark,

Still weeping from a nightmare.

So by day

He looks on summer sunlight in the square.

The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd

A thin bright spume of water in the basin,

While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops

Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air

Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.

The old man who has come to Rome to die

Ignores the death of still another day.

So many days have died and come to life

That time and place seem ordered by his valet;

He puts them on and off as he is told.

Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk

While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,

And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin

Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune

Make love to him that night; and he recalls

Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice

With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur …”

Louis, who could have made the world more sane,

But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,

His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.

The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings

With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,

Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.

And the incessant tapping of her heels

Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:

Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.

Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall

Begins his evening agony of coughing

Till one is ready to scream him into silence.

And the accordion on the river steamer

Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;

Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.

Life has the final word; he cannot rule

Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,

Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,

The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,

Reciprocates experience with art.

No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,

The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,

And winds sweep through and shatter. Here at last

Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles

The fallen architecture of the mind.

FOR THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO PLANETS

We smile at astrological hopes

And leave the sky to expert men

Who do not reckon horoscopes

But painfully extend their ken

In mathematical debate

With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,

Some corner of the mind retains

The medieval man, who still

Keeps watch upon those starry skeins

And drives us out of doors at night

To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law

Is drawn in digits for these two,

Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,

Wardens of brilliance, as they do

Their dual circuit of the west—

The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust

From darkness on our lifted faces

A sign of something we can trust,

Or is it that in starry places

We see the things we long to see

In fiery iconography?

POEMS

(1950–1951)

THE PRISONERS

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood,

Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree,

We seek in hopeless war each other’s blood

Though suffering in one identity.

Each to the other prey and huntsman known,

Still driven together, lonelier that alone.

Strange mating of the loser and the lost!

With faces stiff as mourners’, we intrude

Forever on the one each turns from most,

Each wandering in a double solitude.

The unpurged ghosts of passion bound by pride

Who wake in isolation, side by side.

1950

NIGHT

The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm

Were these: the tick and whisper of a shade

Against the sill; a cobweb-film that hung

Aslant a corner moulding, too elusive

For any but the gaze of straitened eyes;

The nimbus of the night-lamp, where a moth

Uneasily explored the edge of light

Through hours of fractured darkness. She alone

Knew that the room contained these things; she lay

Hearing the almost imperceptible sound

(As if a live thing shivered behind the curtains)

Watching the thread that frayed in gusts of air

More delicate than her breathing, or by night

Sharing a moth’s perplexity at light

Too frail to drive out dark: minutiae

Held in the vise of sense about to die.

1950

THE HOUSE AT THE CASCADES

All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled

By infantries of ants, by roots and storms,

The pillars tugged by vines, the porte-cochère

A passageway for winds, the solemn porches

Warped into caricatures.

We came at evening

After the rain, when every drunken leaf

Was straining, swelling in a riot of green.

Only the house was dying in all that life,

As if a triumph of emerald energy

Had fixed its mouth upon the walls and stones.

The tamest shrub remembered anarchy

And joined in appetite with the demagogue weed

That springs where order falls; together there

They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man

Whose empire wars against him when he turns

A moment from the yoke. So, turning back,

He sees his rooftree fall to furious green,

His yard despoiled, and out of innocent noon

The insect-cloud like thunder on the land.

1951

THE DIAMOND

CUTTERS

(1955)

For A.H.C.

THE ROADWAY

When the footbridge washes away,

And the lights along the bank

Accost each other no longer,

But the wild grass grows up rank,

And no one comes to stand

Where neighbor and neighbor stood,

And each house is drawn in to itself

And shuttered against the road,

Under each separate roof

The familiar life goes on:

The hearth is swept up at night,

The table laid in the dawn,

And man and woman and child

Eat their accustomed meal,

Give thanks and turn to their day

As if by an act of will.

Nowhere is evil spoken,

Though something deep in the heart

Refuses to mend the bridge

And can never make a start

Along the abandoned path

To the house at left or at right,

Where neighbor and neighbor’s children

Awake to the same daylight.

Good men grown long accustomed

To inflexible ways of mind—

Which of them could say clearly

What first drove kind from kind?

Courteous to any stranger,

Forbearing with wife and child—

Yet along the common roadway

The wild grass still grows wild.

PICTURES BY VUILLARD

Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree,

The broken ribbons of the green-and-gold

Portfolio, with sketches from an old

Algerian campaign; the placid three

Women at coffee by the window, fates

Of nothing ominous, waiting for the ring

Of the postman’s bell; we harbor everything—

The cores of fruit left on the luncheon plates.

We are led back where we have never been,

Midday where nothing’s tragic, all’s delayed

As it should have been for us as well—that shade

Of summer always, Neuilly dappled green!

But we, the destined readers of Stendhal,

In monstrous change such consolations find

As restless mockery sets before the mind

To deal with what must anger and appall.

Much of the time we scarcely think of sighing

For afternoons that found us born too late.

Our prudent envy rarely paces spying

Under those walls, that lilac-shadowed gate.

Yet at this moment, in our private view,

A breath of common peace, like memory,

Rustles the branches of the wild pear-tree—

Air that we should have known, and cannot know.

ORIENT WHEAT

Our fathers in their books and speech

Have made the matter plain:

The green fields they walked in once

Will never grow again.

The corn lies under the locust’s tooth

Or blistered in the sun;

The faces of the old proud stock

Are gone where their years are gone.

The park where stags lay down at noon

Under the great trees

Is shrill with Sunday strollers now,

Littered with their lees.

Poachers have trampled down the maze

And choked the fountains dry;

The last swan of a score and ten

Goes among reeds to die.

We were born to smells of plague,

Chalk-marks on every door;

We never have heard the hunting-horn

Or feet on the gallery floor—

The high-arched feet of dancers

Who knew how to step and stand.

We were born of a leaning house

In a changed, uneasy land.

Our fathers curse the crooked time

And go to their graves at last;

While some of us laugh at doting men,

And others sigh for the past.

And the dazzled lovers lie

Where summer burns blue and green,

In the green fields they’ll be saying

Can never grow again.

VERSAILLES

(Petit Trianon)

Merely the landscape of a vanished whim,

An artifice that lasts beyond the wish:

The grotto by the pond, the gulping fish

That round and round pretended islands swim,

The creamery abandoned to its doves,

The empty shrine the guidebooks say is love’s.

What wind can bleaken this, what weather chasten

Those balustrades of stone, that sky stone-pale?

A fountain triton idly soaks his tail

In the last puddle of a drying basin;

A leisure that no human will can hasten

Drips from the hollow of his lifted shell.

When we were younger gardens were for games,

But now across the sungilt lawn of kings

We drift, consulting catalogues for names

Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings

For us and for the couples in the wood

And all good children who are all too good.

O children, next year, children, you will play

With only half your hearts; be wild today.

And lovers, take one long and fast embrace

Before the sun that tarnished queens goes down,

And evening finds you in a restless town

Where each has back his old restricted face.

ANNOTATION FOR AN EPITAPH

A fairer person lost not heaven.

—Paradise Lost

These are the sins for which they cast out angels,

The bagatelles by which the lovely fall:

A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling—

These and a few besides: you had them all.

Beneath this cherubed stone reclines the beauty

That cherubs at the Chair will never see,

Shut out forever by the gold battalions

Stern to forgive, more rigorous than we.

Oh, we were quick to hide our eyes from foible

And call such beauty truth; what though we knew?

Never was truth so sweet and so outrageous;

We loved you all the more because untrue.

But in the baroque corridors of heaven

Your lively coming is a hope destroyed.

Squadrons of seraphs pass the news and ponder,

And all their luxury glitters grand and void.

IDEAL LANDSCAPE

We had to take the world as it was given:

The nursemaid sitting passive in the park

Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.

The mornings happened similar and stark

In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay

Watching today unfold like yesterday.

Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,

Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered

Now and again when most we sought perfection,

Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.

The human rose to haunt us everywhere,

Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

And always time was rushing like a tram

Through streets of a foreign city, streets we saw

Opening into great and sunny squares

We could not find again, no map could show—

Never those fountains tossed in that same light,

Those gilded trees, those statues green and white.

THE CELEBRATION

IN THE PLAZA

The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon

Meandering into air. The crowd applauds.

The mayor eats ices with a cardboard spoon.

See how that color charms the sunset air;

A touch of lavender is what was needed.—

Then, pop! no floating lavender anywhere.

Hurrah, the pyrotechnic engineer

Comes with his sparkling tricks, consults the sky,

Waits for the perfect instant to appear.

Bouquets of gold splash into bloom and pour

Their hissing pollen downward on the dusk.

Nothing like this was ever seen before.

The viceroy of fireworks goes his way,

Leaving us with a sky so dull and bare

The crowd thins out: what conjures them to stay?

The road is cold with dew, and by and by

We see the constellations overhead.

But is that all? some little children cry.

All we have left, their pedagogues reply.

THE TOURIST AND THE TOWN

(San Miniato al Monte)

Those clarities detached us, gave us form,

Made us like architecture. Now no more

Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,

We knew where we began and ended. There

We were the campanile and the dome,

Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,

Climate whose light reformed our random line,

Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.

Could it be always so—a week of sunlight,

Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way

Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all

The promised vista, once!—The light has changed

Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:

We are only tourists under that blue sky,

Reading the posters on the station wall—

Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

There is a mystery that floats between

The tourist and the town. Imagination

Estranges it from her. She need not suffer

Or die here. It is none of her affair,

Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.

Her bargains with disaster have been sealed

In another country. Here she goes untouched,

And this is alienation. Only sometimes

In certain towns she opens certain letters

Forwarded on from bitter origins,

That send her walking, sick and haunted, through

Mysterious and ordinary streets

That are no more than streets to walk and walk—

And then the tourist and the town are one.

To work and suffer is to be at home.

All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,

The skaters in the sunset on the lake

At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,

The singular clear stars at Castellane.

To work and suffer is to come to know

The angles of a room, light in a square,

As convalescents know the face of one

Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street,

The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells

Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,

The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road

To the post-office. Once upon a time

All these for you were fiction. Now, made free

You live among them. Your breath is on this air,

And you are theirs and of their mystery.

BEARS

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,

Where are you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,

Your eyes’ veiled imperious light?

Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,

White opalescent bears whose fur stood out

Electric in the deepening dusk,

And great black bears who seemed more blue than black,

More violet than blue against the dark—

Where are you now? upon what track

Mutter your muffled paws, that used to tread

So softly, surely, up the creakless stair

While I lay listening in bed?

When did I lose you? whose have you become?

Why do I wait and wait and never hear

Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?

My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?

THE INSUSCEPTIBLES

Then the long sunlight lying on the sea

Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we

Took up our decks of cards, our parasols,

The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls

And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two

Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do,

And took a different road. For us the night

Was final, and by artificial light

We came indoors to sleep. No envy there

Of those who might be watching anywhere

The lustres of the summer dark, to trace

Some vagrant splinter blazing out of space.

No thought of them, save in a lower room

To leave a light for them when they should come.

LUCIFER IN THE TRAIN

Riding the black express from heaven to hell

He bit his fingers, watched the countryside,

Vernal and crystalline, forever slide

Beyond his gaze: the long cascades that fell

Ribboned in sunshine from their sparkling height,

The fishers fastened to their pools of green

By silver lines; the birds in sudden flight—

All things the diabolic eye had seen

Since heaven’s cockcrow. Imperceptibly

That landscape altered: now in paler air

Tree, hill and rock stood out resigned, severe,

Beside the strangled field, the stream run dry.

Lucifer, we are yours who stiff and mute

Ride out of worlds we shall not see again,

And watch from windows of a smoking train

The ashen prairies of the absolute.

Once out of heaven, to an angel’s eye

Where is the bush or cloud without a flaw?

What bird but feeds upon mortality,

Flies to its young with carrion in its claw?

O foundered angel, first and loneliest

To turn this bitter sand beneath your hoe,

Teach us, the newly-landed, what you know;

After our weary transit, find us rest.

RECORDERS IN ITALY

It was amusing on that antique grass,

Seated halfway between the green and blue,

To waken music gentle and extinct

Under the old walls where the daisies grew

Sprinkled in cinquecento style, as though

Archangels might have stepped there yesterday.

But it was we, mortal and young, who strolled

And fluted quavering music, for a day

Casual heirs of all we looked upon.

Such pipers of the emerald afternoon

Could only be the heirs of perfect time

When every leaf distinctly brushed with gold

Listened to Primavera speaking flowers.

Those scherzos stumble now; our journeys run

To harsher hillsides, rockier declensions.

Obligatory climates call us home.

And so shall clarity of cypresses,

Unfingered by necessity, become

Merely the ghost of half-remembered trees,

A trick of sunlight flattering the mind?—

There were four recorders sweet upon the wind.

AT HERTFORD HOUSE

Perfection now is tended and observed,

Not used; we hire the spawn of Caliban

For daily service. In our careful world

Inlay of purple-wood and tulip, curved

To mime the sheen of plumes and peacocks’ eyes,

Exists for inspection only. And the jars

Of apple-green and white, where wooing’s done

In panels after Boucher—such we prize

Too well to fill with roses. Chocolate, too,

Will not again be frothed in cups like these;

We move meticulously, ill at ease

Amid perfections. Why should a porcelain plaque

Where Venus pulls her pouting Adon on

Through beds of blushing flowers, seem unfit

For casual thumbprint? Ease is what we lack.

There’s a division nothing can make sweet

Between the clods of usage and the toys

We strum our senses with. But Antoinette

Ran her long tortoise-shell and silver comb

Through powdered yellow hair, and would have laughed

To think that use too mean for art or craft.

THE WILD SKY

Here from the corridor of an English train,

I see the landscape slide through glancing rain,

A land so personal that every leaf

Unfolds as if to witness human life,

And every aging milestone seems to know

That human hands inscribed it, long ago.

Oasthouse and garden, narrow bridge and hill—

Landscape with figures, where a change of style

Comes softened in a water-colour light

By Constable; and always, shire on shire,

The low-pitched sky sags like a tent of air

Beneath its ancient immaterial weight.

The weather in these gentle provinces

Moves like the shift of daylight in a house,

Subdued by time and custom. Sun and rain

Are intimate, complaisant to routine,

Guests in the garden. Year on country year

Has worn the edge of wildness from this air.

And I remember that unblunted light

Poured out all day from a prodigious height—

My country, where the blue is miles too high

For minds of men to graze the leaning sky.

The telegraph may rise or timber fall,

That last frontier remains, the vertical.

Men there are beanstalk climbers, all day long

Haunted by stilts they clattered on when young.

Giants no longer, now at mortal size

They stare into that upward wilderness.

The vertical reminds them what they are,

And I remember I am native there.

THE PROSPECT

You promise me when certain things are done

We’ll close these rooms above a city square,

And stealing out by half-light, will be gone

When next the telephone breaks the waiting air.

Before they send to find us, we shall be

Aboard a blunt-nosed steamer, at whose rail

We’ll watch the loading of the last brown bale

And feel the channel roughening into sea.

And after many sunlit days we’ll sight

The coast you tell me of. Along that shore

Rare shells lie tumbled, and the seas of light

Dip past the golden rocks to crash and pour

Upon the bowl-shaped beach. In that clear bay

We’ll scoop for pebbles till our feet and hands

Are gilded by the wash of blending sands;

And though the boat lift anchor, we shall stay.

You will discover in the woods beyond

The creatures you have loved on Chinese silk:

The shell-gray fox, gazelles that at your sound

Will lift their eyes as calm as golden milk.

The leaves and grasses feathered into plumes

Will shadow-edge their pale calligraphy;

And in the evening you will come to me

To tell of honey thick in silver combs.

Yet in the drift of moments unendeared

By sameness, when the cracks of morning show

Only a replica of days we’ve marred

With still the same old penances to do,

In furnished rooms above a city square,

Eating the rind of fact, I sometimes dread

The promise of that honey-breeding air,

Those unapportioned clusters overhead.

EPILOGUE FOR A

MASQUE OF PURCELL

Beast and bird must bow aside,

Grimbald limp into the wings.

All that’s lovely and absurd,

All that dances, all that sings

Folded into trunks again—

The haunted grove, the starlit air—

All turns workaday and plain,

Even the happy, happy pair.

Harpsichord and trumpet go

Trundling down the dusty hall.

That airy joy, that postured woe

Like the black magician’s spell

Fall in pieces round us now,

While the dancer goes to lie

With the king, and need not know

He will jilt her by and by.

We were young once and are old;

Have seen the dragon die before;

Knew the innocent and bold,

Saw them through the cardboard door

Kiss the guilty and afraid,

Turning human soon enough.

We have wept with the betrayed,

Never known them die for love.

Yet, since nothing’s done by halves

While illusion’s yet to do,

May we still forgive ourselves,

And dance again when trumpets blow.

VILLA ADRIANA

When the colossus of the will’s dominion

Wavers and shrinks upon a dying eye,

Enormous shadows sit like birds of prey,

Waiting to fall where blistered marbles lie.

But in its open pools the place already

Lay ruined, before the old king left it free.

Shattered in waters of each marble basin

He might have seen it as today we see.

Dying in discontent, he must have known

How, once mere consciousness had turned its back,

The frescoes of his appetite would crumble,

The fountains of his longing yawn and crack.

And all his genius would become a riddle,

His perfect colonnades at last attain

The incompleteness of a natural thing;

His impulse turn to mystery again.

Who sleeps, and dreams, and wakes, and sleeps again

May dream again; so in the end we come

Back to the cherished and consuming scene

As if for once the stones will not be dumb.

We come like dreamers searching for an answer,

Passionately in need to reconstruct

The columned roofs under the blazing sky,

The courts so open, so forever locked.

And some of us, as dreamers, excavate

Under the blanching light of sleep’s high noon,

The artifacts of thought, the site of love,

Whose Hadrian has given the slip, and gone.

THE EXPLORERS

Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea

Where water never was, sit down with me,

And let us talk of Earth, where long ago

We drank the air and saw the rivers flow

Like comets through the green estates of man,

And fruit the colour of Aldebaran

Weighted the curving boughs. The route of stars

Was our diversion, and the fate of Mars

Our grave concern; we stared throughout the night

On these uncolonized demesnes of light.

We read of stars escaping Newton’s chain

Till only autographs of fire remain;

We aimed our mortal searchlights into space

As if in hopes to find a mortal face.

O little Earth, our village, where the day

Seemed all too brief, and starlight would not stay,

We were provincials on the grand express

That whirled us into dark and loneliness.

We thought to bring you wonder with a tale

Huger than those that turned our fathers pale.

Here in this lunar night we watch alone

Longer than ever men have watched for dawn.

Beyond this meteor-bitten plain we see

More starry systems than you dream to be,

And while their clockwork blazes overhead,

We speak the names we learned as we were bred,

We tell of places seen each day from birth—

Obscure and local, patois of the Earth!

O race of farmers, plowing year by year

The same few fields, I sometimes seem to hear

The far-off echo of a cattle-bell

Against the cratered cliff of Arzachel,

And weep to think no sound can ever come

Across that outer desert, from my home.

LANDSCAPE OF THE STAR

The silence of the year. This hour the streets

Lie empty, and the clash of bells is scattered

Out to the edge of stars. I heard them tell

Morning’s first change and clang the people home

From crèche and scented aisle. Come home, come home,

I heard the bells of Christmas call and die.

This Christmas morning, in the stony streets

Of an unaccustomed city, where the gas

Quivers against the darkly-shuttered walls,

I walk, my breath a veil upon the cold,

No longer sick for home nor hunted down

By faces loved, by gate or sill or tree

That once I used to wreathe in red and silver

Under the splintered incense of the fir.

I think of those inscrutables who toiled,

Heavy and brooding in their camel-train,

Across the blue-wrapped stretches. Home behind,

Kingdoms departed from, the solemn journey

Their only residence: the starlit hour,

The landscape of the star, their time and place.

O to be one of them, and feel the sway

Of rocking camel through the Judaean sand,—

Ride, wrapped in swathes of damask and of silk,

Hear the faint ring of jewel in silver mesh

Starring the silence of the plain; and hold

With rigid fingers curved as in oblation

The golden jar of myrrh against the knees.

To ride thus, bearing gifts to a strange land,

To a strange King; nor think of fear and envy,

Being so bemused by starlight of one star,

The long unbroken journey, that all questions

Sink like the lesser lights behind the hills;

Think neither of the end in sight, nor all

That lies behind, but dreamlessly to ride,

Traveller at one with travelled countryside.

How else, since for those Magi and their train

The palaces behind have ceased to be

Home, and the home they travel toward is still

But rumor stoking fear in Herod’s brain?

What else for them but this, since never more

Can courts and states receive them as they were,

Nor have the trampled earth, the roof of straw

Received the kings as they are yet to be?

The bells are silent, silenced in my mind

As on the dark. I walk, a foreigner,

Upon this night that calls all travellers home,

The prodigal forgiven, and the breach

Mended for this one feast. Yet all are strange

To their own ends, and their beginnings now

Cannot contain them. Once-familiar speech

Babbles in wayward dialect of a dream.

Our gifts shall bring us home: not to beginnings

Nor always to the destination named

Upon our setting-forth. Our gifts compel,

Master our ways and lead us in the end

Where we are most ourselves; whether at last

To Solomon’s gaze or Sheba’s silken knees

Or winter pastures underneath a star,

Where angels spring like starlight in the trees.

LETTER FROM THE LAND

OF SINNERS

I write you this out of another province

That you may never see:

Country of rivers, its topography

Mutable in detail, yet always one,

Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,

There by the work of man.

The fishers by the water have no boast

Save of their freedom; here

A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure

And think his days rewarded if he sight

Now and again the prize, unnetted, flicking

Its prism-gleams of light.

The old lord lived secluded in his park

Until the hall was burned

Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned

Better since then, and now our children run

To greet him. Quail and hunter have forgotten

The echo of the gun.

I said there are blasted places: we have kept

Their nakedness intact—

No marble to commemorate an act

Superhuman or merely rash; we know

Why they are there and why the seed that falls there

Is certain not to grow.

We keep these places as we keep the time

Scarred on our recollection

When some we loved broke from us in defection,

Or we ourselves harried to death too soon

What we could least forgo. Our memories

Recur like the old moon.

But we have made another kind of peace,

And walk where boughs are green,

Forgiven by the selves that we have been,

And learning to forgive. Our apples taste

Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,

And need not be replaced.

CONCORD RIVER

The turtles on the ledges of July

Heard our approach and splashed. Now in the mud

Lie like the memory of fecund summer

Their buried eggs. The river, colder now,

Has other, autumn tales to carry on

Between the banks where lovers used to lie.

Lovers, or boys escaped from yard and farm

To drown in sensual purities of sun—

No matter which; for single fisherman

Casting into the shade, or those absorbed

In human ardor, summer was the same,

Impervious to weariness or alarm.

The fisherman, by craft and love removed

From meanness, has an almanac at home

Saying the season will be brief this year

And ice strike early; yet upon its shelf

The book is no despoiler of this day

In which he moves and ponders, most himself.

That boy, watching for turtles by the shore,

Steeped in his satisfactory loneliness,

If asked could tell us that the sun would set,

Or autumn drive him back to games and school—

Tell us at second-hand, believing then

Only midsummer and the noonstruck pool.

And we, who floated through the sunlit green,

Indolent, voluntary as the dance

Of dragon-flies above the skimming leaves—

For us the landscape and the hour became

A single element, where our drifting silence

Fell twofold, like our shadows on the water.

This is the Concord River, where the ice

Will hold till April: this is the willowed stream

Much threaded by the native cogitators

Who wrote their journals calmly by its shore,

Observing weather and the swing of seasons

Along with personal cosmologies.

Henry Thoreau most nearly learned to live

Within a world his soul could recognize—

Unshaken by accounts of any country

He could not touch with both his hands. He saw

The river moving past the provincial town

And knew each curve of shoreline for his own.

He travelled much, he said—his wayward speech

Sounding always a little insolent,

Yet surer than the rest; they, like ourselves,

Ran off to dabble in a world beyond,

While he exalted the geography

He lived each day: a river and a pond.

For him there was no turning of the ear

To rumored urgencies that sought to rouse

The fisher from his pool, the serious child

From his unconscious wandering: the sound

Of desperate enterprises rang to him

Fictive as ghosts upon old Indian ground.

Lover and child and fisherman, alike

Have in their time been native to this shore

As he would have it peopled: all entranced

By such concerns in their perfected hour

That in their lives the river and the tree

Are absolutes, no longer scenery.

APOLOGY

You, invincibly yourself,

Have nothing left to say.

The stones upon the mountainside

Are not more free,

Bearing all question, all reproach

Without reply.

The dead, who keep their peace intact,

Although they know

Much we might be gainers by,

Are proud like you—

Or, if they spoke, might sound as you

Sounded just now.

For every angry, simple man

The word is but

A shadow, and his motive grows

More still and great

While the world hums around him, wild

That he should explicate.

And Socrates, whose crystal tongue

Perturbs us now,

Left all unsatisfied; the word

Can never show

Reason enough for what a man

Knows he must do.

You told us little, and are done.

So might the dead

Begin to speak of dying, then

Leave half unsaid.

Silence like thunder bears its own

Excuse for dread.

LIVING IN SIN

She had thought the studio would keep itself;

no dust upon the furniture of love.

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

stalking the picturesque amusing mouse

had risen at his urging.

Not that at five each separate stair would writhe

under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

so coldly would delineate the scraps

of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—

envoy from some village in the moldings …

Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,

sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,

rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;

while she, jeered by the minor demons,

pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

a towel to dust the table-top,

and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.

By evening she was back in love again,

though not so wholly but throughout the night

she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

AUTUMN EQUINOX

The leaves that shifted overhead all summer

Are marked for earth now, and I bring the baskets

Still dark with clingings of another season

Up from the cellar. All the house is still,

Now that I’ve left it. Lyman in his study

Peers on a page of Dryden by the window,

Eyes alone moving, like a mended quaint

Piece of old clockwork. When the afternoon

Trails into half-light, he will never notice

Until I come indoors to light the lamps

And rouse him blinking from the brownish type,

The gilt and tarnished spine of volume five

Out of the glass-doored cabinet in the hall.

Why Satires, I have wondered? For I’ve seen

The title-page, and riffled through the volume,

When he was gone. I thought that growing old

Returned one to a vague Arcadian longing,

To Ovid, Spenser, something golden-aged,

Some incorruptible myth that tinged the years

With pastoral flavours. Lyman, too, as gentle

As an old shepherd, half-apologetic

When I come bustling to disturb his dreams—

What in that bitterness can speak to him

Or help him down these final sloping decades

With kindly arm? I’ve never been a scholar—

Reader, perhaps at times, but not a scholar,

Not in the way that Lyman used to be—

And yet I know there’s acid on the page

He pores—that least acidulous of men.

While I, who spent my youth and middle-age

In stubbornness and railing, pass the time

Now, after fifty, raking in the sun

The leaves that sprinkle slowly on the grass,

And feel their gold like firelight at my back,

In slow preoccupation with September.

Sometimes I call across to Alice Hume

And meet her at the fence as women meet

To say the weather’s seasonably fine,

Talk husbands, bargains, or philosophize—

The dry philosophy of neighborhood.

She thinks perhaps how sharp of tongue and quick

I used to be, and how I’ve quieted down,

Without those airs because I’d married Lyman,

Professor at the college, while her husband

Was just another farmer. That was pride

As raw and silly as the girl I was—

Reading too much, sneering at other girls

Whose learning was of cookery and flirtation.

Father would have me clever, sometimes said

He’d let me train for medicine, like a son,

To come into his practice. So I studied

German and botany, and hated both.

What good for me to know the Latin name

For huckleberry, while the others climbed

To pick the fruit and kissed across the bushes?

I never was a scholar, but I had

A woman’s love for men of intellect,

A woman’s need for love of any kind.

So Lyman came to ask me of my father:

Stiff-collared, shy, not quite the man I’d dreamed—

(Byron and Matthew Arnold vaguely mingled

Without the disadvantages of either.)

And yet he seemed superb in his refusal

To read aloud from Bryant to the ladies

Assembled on the boarding-house piazza

Among the moth-wings of a summer evening.

His quick withdrawal won my heart. I smile

Sometimes to think what quirks of vanity

Propel us toward our choices in the end.

The wedding-picture in the bureau drawer

Has on the back in Lyman’s measured writing:

“September twenty-second, nineteen-twelve.”

I keep it in its folder, deckle-edged

And yellowing. I see myself again,

Correct and terrified on our wedding-day,

Wearing the lace my mother wore before me

And buttoned shoes that pinched. I feel again

The trembling of my hand in Lyman’s fingers,

Awkwardly held in that ungainly pose

While aunts around us nodded like the Fates

That nemesis was accomplished. Lyman stood

So thin and ministerial in his black,

I thought he looked a stranger. In the picture

We are the semblance of a bride and groom

Static as figures on a mantelpiece,

As if that moment out of time existed

Then and forever in a dome of glass,

Where neither dust nor the exploring fly

Could speck its dry immutability.

Thus I became his partner in a life

Annual, academic; we observed

Events momentous as the ceremony

To dedicate the chapel carillon

(Memorial to Edward Stephens Hodge,

Class of nineteen-fourteen). There we heard

Those sounds converge upon the rural air

That soon became familiar as a hinge

Creaking and never silenced. In our meadow

The angular young took up their bats and shouted

Throughout the afternoon, while I was pouring

Tea for the dean’s arthritic wife. For Lyman

The world was all the distance he pursued

From home to lecture-room, and home again,

Exchanging nods with colleagues, smiling vaguely

Upon a shirtsleeved trio, tanned and jostling,

Who grinned and gave him room upon the path.

I bit my fingers, changed the parlor curtains

To ones the like of which were never seen

Along our grave and academic street.

I brought them home from Springfield in a bundle

And hung them in defiance. I took a walk

Across the fields one heavy summer night

Until the college from a mile away

Looked sallow, insignificant in the moonlight.

It seemed the moon must shine on finer things

I had not seen, things that could show with pride

Beneath that silver globe. Along the walls

Of Lyman’s study there were steel engravings

Framed in black oak: the crazy tower of Pisa,

The Pyramids, rooted in desert sand,

Cologne Cathedral with its dangerous spires

Piercing the atmosphere. I hated them

For priggishly enclosing in a room

The marvels of the world, as if declaring

Such was the right and fitting rôle of marvels.

Night, and I wept aloud; half in my sleep,

Half feeling Lyman’s wonder as he leaned

Above to shake me. “Are you ill, unhappy?

Tell me what I can do.”

“I’m sick, I guess—

I thought that life was different than it is.”

“Tell me what’s wrong. Why can’t you ever say?

I’m here, you know.”

Half shamed, I turned to see

The lines of grievous love upon his face,

The love that gropes and cannot understand.

“I must be crazy, Lyman—or a dream

Has made me babble things I never thought.

Go back to sleep—I won’t be so again.”

Young lovers talk of giving all the heart

Into each others’ trust: their rhetoric

Won’t stand for analyzing, I’m aware,

But have they thought of this: that each must know

Beyond a doubt what’s given, what received?

Now we are old like Nature; patient, staid,

Unhurried from the year’s wellworn routine,

We wake and take the day for what it is,

And sleep as calmly as the dead who know

They’ll wake to their reward. We have become

As unselfconscious as a pair of trees,

Not questioning, but living. Even autumn

Can only carry through what spring began.

What else could happen now but loss of leaf

And rain upon the boughs? So I have thought,

And wondered faintly where the thought began,

And when the irritable gust of youth

Stopped turning every blade of grass to find

A new dissatisfaction. Meanwhile Lyman

Reads satire in the falling afternoon—

A change for him as well. We finish off

Not quite as we began. I hear the bells

Wandering through the air across the fields.

I’ve raked three bushel baskets full of leaves—

Enough for one September afternoon.

THE STRAYED VILLAGE

He had come nearly half a thousand miles,

And then to find it gone … He knew too well

Ever to be mistaken, where the hills

Dipped to reveal it first: the line of chimneys

Reflected in the unimportant stream,

The monument, worth half a line in guidebooks—

“Tower of a church that Cromwell’s army burned,

Fine early Perpendicular”—itself

Subservient neither to theologies

Nor changing styles of architecture, still

A cipher on the landscape, something clear

In that unostentatious scenery.

Well, if the tower was gone—and who should say,

Depend on any landmark to remain?

He had been too far and known too many losses

Not to be reconciled that even landmarks

Go out like matches when you need them most.

So it could be with this. But not a house,

Not anything reflected in the river

But willows that could grow by any river,

Feminine, non-committal in their postures.

Willows: a bridge then? But the bridge was gone,

The piles had left no trace, no signature

Of stones beside the water. If, indeed,

There ever had been bridge or tower or house.

That was the question that enforeigned him,

Brushed forty years of memory aside

And made of him another obtuse tripper

Staring at signposts to be reassured:

This is the place—where I grew into manhood,

The place I had to leave when I was grown?

So often he had thought a man’s whole life

Most rightly could be written, like his own,

In terms of places he was forced to leave

Because their meaning, passing that of persons,

Became too much for him.

“This is the place?”

He heard himself demand; and heard the other—

A youthful rector, by the look of him,

Pausing upon his evening stroll—reply,

“Oh, yes, this is the place…. The village went,

As I should reckon, twenty years ago.

Across the hill, in our town, there was once

Talk and conjecture; now you might suppose

Only the antiquarians breathe its name.

The memory of man, my friend, is short.”

“Shorter and longer than it’s credited,”

He answered; “but you say the village went?

I hardly care to ask, and yet I ask—

By flood? by fire? There used to be a tower

That Cromwell’s zealots failed to bully down.

But there’s no mark. It went? How did it go?”

“It went away. You’ve heard of men who went,

Suddenly, without partings or annulments,

Not carried off by accident or death,

But simply strayed? That was the way it went.

We went to bed on Thursday and could hear

The bells, as usual on a quiet night,

Across the hill between. On Friday morning

There were no bells. There wasn’t anything.

The landscape stood as if since Magna Carta,

Empty, as it stands now. The village had gone,

Quite without taking leave. Strayed, is the word

We found ourselves as if by acquiescence

Using to speak of it, as if we thought

Someday to come upon it somewhere else

And greet our former neighbors as before.

No one has ever found it, though. One can’t

Advertise for a village that has strayed:

‘Lost, with one early Perpendicular tower,

A village numbering four hundred souls,

With stone and wooden footbridge.’ And, as I say,

Men’s memories grow short like winter daylight.

So much gets strayed that has to be replaced—

Dogs, wits, affections …”

“Yes, so much gets strayed;

But one of all the things a man can lose

I thought would keep till I could come again.

It almost seems it went lest I should come,

Because I always promised I would come,

And had this latest penalty in store,

The last of losses.”

So he said goodbye,

And watched the little rector climb the hill

Back to his parish town. The stream ran on,

And all that walking was to do again.

THE PERENNIAL ANSWER

The way the world came swinging round my ears

I knew what Doctor meant the day he said,

“Take care, unless you want to join your dead;

It’s time to end this battling with your years.”

He knew I’d have the blackest word told straight,

Whether it was my child that couldn’t live,

Or Joel’s mind, thick-riddled like a sieve

With all that loving festered into hate.

Better to know the ways you are accurst,

And stand up fierce and glad to hear the worst.

The blood is charged, the back is stiffened so.

Well, on that day that was a day ago,

And yet so many hours and years ago

Numbered in seizures of a darkening brain,

I started up the attic stairs again—

The fifth time in the hour—not thinking then

That it was hot, but knowing the air sat stiller

Under the eaves than when the idiot killer

Hid in the Matthews barn among the hay

And all the neighbors through one August day

Waited outside with pitchforks in the sun.

Joel waited too, and when they heard the gun

Resound so flatly in the loft above

He was the one to give the door a shove

And climb the ladder. A man not made for love,

But built for things of violence; he would stand

Where lightning flashed and watch with eyes so wide

You thought the prongs of fire would strike inside;

Or sit with some decaying book in hand,

Reading of spirits and the evil-eyed,

And witches’ Sabbaths in a poisoned land.

So it was Joel that brought the fellow out,

Tarnished with hay and blood. I still can see

The eyes that Joel turned and fixed on me

When it was done—as if by rights his wife

Should go to him for having risked his life

And say—I hardly knew what thing he wanted.

I know it was a thing I never granted,

And what his mind became, from all that woe,

Those violent concerns he lived among,

Was on my head as well. I couldn’t go,

I never went to him, I never clung

One moment on his breast. But I was young.

And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only

Her marriage as a room so strange and lonely

She looked outside for warmth. And in what fashion

Could I be vessel for that somber passion—

For Joel, decreed till death to have me all?

The tortured grandsire hanging in the hall

Depicted by a limner’s crabbed hand

Seemed more a being that I could understand.

How could I help but look beyond that wall

And probe the lawful stones that built it strong

With questions sharper than a pitchfork’s prong?

If Joel knew, he kept his silence long.

But Evans and I were hopeless from the start:

He, collared early by a rigorous creed,

Not man of men but man of God indeed,

Whose eye had seen damnation, and whose heart

Thrust all it knew of passion into one

Chamber of iron inscribed Thy will be done.

Yet sense will have revenge on one who tries

To down his senses with the brand of lies.

The road was empty from the village home,

Empty of all but us and that dark third,

The sudden Northern spring. There must be some

For whom the thrusting blood, so long deferred

In alder-stem and elm, is not the rise

Of flood in their own veins; some who can see

That green unholy dance without surprise.

I only say it has been this for me:

The time of thinnest ice, of casualty

More swift and deadly than the skater’s danger.

The end of March could make me stand a stranger

On my own doorstep, and the daily shapes

Of teapot, ladle, or the china grapes

I kept in winter on the dresser shelf

Rebuked me, made me foreign to myself.

Evans beside me on that moonless road

Walked hard as if he thought behind us strode

Pursuers he had fled through weary ways.

He only said: “Where I was born and grew,

You felt the spring come on you like a daze

Slow out of February, and you knew

The thing you were contending with. But here—”

“Spring is a bolt of lightning on the year,”

I said, “it strikes before you feel it near.”

“The change of seasons is another thing

God put on earth to try us, I believe.

As if the breaking-out of green could bring

Escape from frozen discipline, give us leave

To taste of things by will and law forbidden.”

“Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,”

I said, but faltering, and the words went by

Like flights of moths under that star-soaked sky.

And that was all. He brought me to the door;

The house was dark, but on the upper floor

A light burned in the hallway. “Joel’s asleep,”

I told him, and put out my hand. His touch

Was cold as candles kept unlit in church,

And yet I felt his seeking fingers creep

About my wrist and seize it in their grip

Until they hurt me.

“Neither you nor I

Have lived in Eden, but they say we die

To gain that day at last. We have to live

Believing it—what else can we believe?”

“Why not believe in life?” I said, but heard

Only the sanctioned automatic word

“Eternal life—” perennial answer given

To those who ask on earth a taste of heaven.

The penalty you pay for dying last

Is facing those transactions from the past

That would detain you when you try to go.

All night last night I lay and seemed to hear

The to-and-fro of callers down below,

Even the knocker rattling on the door.

I thought the dead had heard my time was near

To meet them, and had come to tell me so;

But not a footstep sounded on the stair.

If they are gone it means a few days more

Are left, or they would wait. Joel would wait

Down by the dark old clock that told me late

That night from Boston. “Evans walked me home;

We sat together in the train by chance.”

But not a word; only his burning glance.

“We stopped to have some coffee in the station.

Why do you stand like that? What if I come

An hour or so after the time I said?

The house all dark, I thought you’d gone to bed.”

But still that gaze, not anger, indignation,

Nor anything so easy, but a look

As fixed as when he stared upon his book.

No matter if my tale was false or true,

I was a woodcut figure on the page,

On trial for a nameless sin. Then rage

Took him like fire where lightning dives. I knew

That he could kill me then, but what he did

Was wrench me up the stairs, onto the bed.

The night of Joel’s death I slept alone

In this same room. A neighbor said she’d stay,

Thinking the dead man lying down below

Might keep the living from rest. She told me so:

“Those hours before the dawn can lie like stone

Upon the heart—I’ve lain awake—I know.”

At last I had to take the only way,

And said, “The nights he was alive and walking

From room to room and hearing spirits talking,

What sleep I had was likelier to be broken.”

Her face was shocked but I was glad I’d spoken.

“Well, if you feel so—:” She would tell the tale

Next morning, but at last I was alone

In an existence finally my own.

And yet I knew that Evans would find reason

Why we were not our own, nor had our will

Unhindered; that disturbance of a season

So long removed was something he would kill

Yet, if he had not killed it. When I stood

Beside the churchyard fence and felt his glance

Reluctantly compelling mine, the blood

Soared to my face, the tombstones seemed to dance

Dizzily, till I turned. The eyes I met

Accused as they implored me to forget,

As if my shape had risen to destroy

Salvation’s rampart with a hope of joy.

My lips betrayed their Why? but then his face

Turned from me, and I saw him leave the place.

Now Joel and Evans are neighbors, down beneath.

I wonder what we’re bound to after death?

I wonder what’s exacted of the dead,

How many debts of conscience still are good?

Not Evans or his Bible ever said

That spirit must complete what flesh and blood

Contracted in their term. What creditors

Will wait and knock for us at marble doors?

I’d like to know which stays when life is past:

The marriage kept in fear, the love deferred,

The footstep waited for and never heard,

The pressure of five fingers round the wrist

Stopping its beat with pain, the mouth unkissed,

The dream whose waking startles into sight

A figure mumbling by the bed at night,

The hopeless promise of eternal life—

Take now your Scripture, Evans, if you will,

And see how flimsily the pages spill

From spines reduced to dust. What have they said

Of us, to what will they pronounce me wife?

My debt is paid: the rest is on your head.

THE INSOMNIACS

The mystic finishes in time,

The actor finds himself in space;

And each, wherever he has been,

Must know his hand before his face,

Must crawl back into his own skin

As in the darkness after crime

The thief can hear his breath again,

Resume the knowledge of his limbs

And how the spasm goes and comes

Under the bones that cage his heart.

So: we are fairly met, grave friend—

The meeting of two wounds in man.

I, gesturing with practiced hand,

I, in my great brocaded gown,

And you, the fixed and patient one,

Enduring all the world can do.

I, with my shifting masks, the gold,

The awful scarlet, laughing blue,

Maker of many worlds; and you,

Worldless, the pure receptacle.

And yet your floating eyes reveal

What saint or mummer groans to feel:

That finite creatures finally know

The damp of stone beneath the knees,

The stiffness in the folded hands

A duller ache than holy wounds,

The draught that never stirs the sleeve

Of glazed evangelists above,

But drives men out from sacred calm

Into the violent, wayward sun.

My voice commands the formal stage;

A jungle thrives beyond the wings—

All formless and benighted things

That rhetoric cannot assuage.

I speak a dream and turn to see

The sleepness night outstaring me.

My pillow sweats; I wake in space.

This is my hand before my face.

This is the headboard of my bed

Whose splinters stuff my nightmare mouth;

This is the unconquerable drouth

I carry in my burning head.

Not my words nor your visions mend

Such infamous knowledge. We are split,

Done into bits, undone, pale friend,

As ecstasy begets its end;

As we are spun of rawest thread—

The flaw is in us; we will break.

O dare you of this fracture make

Hosannas plain and tragical,

Or dare I let each cadence fall

Awkward as learning newly learned,

Simple as children’s cradle songs,

As untranslatable and true,

We someday might conceive a way

To do the thing we long to do—

To do what men have always done—

To live in time, to act in space

Yet find a ritual to embrace

Raw towns of man, the pockmarked sun.

THE SNOW QUEEN

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye

Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice

Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises.

Under my lids a splinter sharp as his

Has made me wish you lying dead

Whose image digs the needle deeper still.

In the deceptive province of my birth

I had seen yes turn no, the saints descend,

Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,

The stars gone lechering, the village spring

Gush mud and toads—all miracles

Befitting an incalculable age.

To love a human face was to discover

The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow;

Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh

That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,

While at the window peer two crones

Who once were Juliet and Jessica.

No matter, since I kept a little while

One thing intact from that perversity—

Though landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.

In you belonged simplicities of light

To mend distraction, teach the air

To shine, the stars to find their way again.

Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will

Commands me, and your face has lost its power,

Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.

Under my ribs a diamond splinter now

Sticks, and has taken root; I know

Only this frozen spear that drives me through.

LOVE IN THE MUSEUM

Now will you stand for me, in this cool light,

Infanta reared in ancient etiquette,

A point-lace queen of manners. At your feet

The doll-like royal dog demurely set

Upon a chequered floor of black and white.

Or be a Louis’ mistress, by Boucher,

Lounging on cushions, silken feet asprawl

Upon a couch where casual cupids play

While on your arms and shoulders seems to fall

The tired extravagance of a sunset day.

Or let me think I pause beside a door

And see you in a bodice by Vermeer,

Where light falls quartered on the polished floor

And rims the line of water tilting clear

Out of an earthen pitcher as you pour.

But art requires a distance: let me be

Always the connoisseur of your perfection.

Stay where the spaces of the gallery

Flow calm between your pose and my inspection,

Lest one imperfect gesture make demands

As troubling as the touch of human hands.

I HEARD A HERMIT SPEAK

Upon the mountain of the young

I heard a hermit speak:

“Purity is the serpent’s eye

That murders with a look.

Purity’s king of poisons

And duke of deadly night.

Abhor the single-minded man,

The woman lily-white.

Go cold under the heavens,

Run naked through the day,

But never wear the armored shirt

Of total Yea or Nay.

Stare into the looking-glass:

Your enemy stares you back.

Yet never cringe and hide your face;

Hear all that he will speak.

The day that glass dissolves to show

Your own reflection there,

Then change your mirror for the world,

The teeming, streaming air.

O let your human memory end

Heavy with thought and act.

Claim every joy of paradox

That time would keep intact.

Be rich as you are human,”

I heard that hermit cry

To the young men and women

All walking out to die.

COLOPHON

In this long room, upon each western pane

The sunset wreaks its final savage stain;

And we, like masquers costumed in an air

Outcrimsoning the gaudiest cock that crows,

Parade as torches and diabolos

Along the blood-red spiral of the stair.

An imminent amazement of the heart

Constricts our greeting as we meet and part.

A gesture or a word can make us turn

Ready to cry a sudden sharp goodnight;

Yet still delays the dark, still cockerel-bright

Smoulder the dyes in which we wade and burn.

Not tragical, the faces that we wear:

A modern gaiety, fitting as despair

Shall pass the hour till domes and sunsets fall.

Extravagant and ceremonious words

Rise on the air like flights of Chinese birds

Uncaged upon a fiery carnival.

What’s left us in this violent spectacle

But kisses on the mouth, or works of will—

The imagination’s form so sternly wrought,

The flashes of the brain so boldly penned

That when the sunset gutters to its end

The world’s last thought will be our flaring thought?

A WALK BY THE CHARLES

Finality broods upon the things that pass:

Persuaded by this air, the trump of doom

Might hang unsounded while the autumn gloom

Darkens the leaf and smokes the river’s glass.

For nothing so susceptible to death

But on this forenoon seems to hold its breath:

The silent single oarsmen on the stream

Are always young, are rowers in a dream.

The lovers underneath the chestnut tree,

Though love is over, stand bemused to see

The season falling where no fall could be.

You oarsmen, when you row beyond the bend,

Will see the river winding to its end.

Lovers that hold the chestnut burr in hand

Will speak at last of death, will understand,

Foot-deep amid the ruinage of the year,

What smell it is that stings the gathering air.

From our evasion we are brought at last,

From all our hopes of constancy, to cast

One look of recognition at the sky,

The unimportant leaves that flutter by.

Why else upon this bank are we so still?

What lends us anchor but the mutable?

O lovers, let the bridge of your two hands

Be broken, like the mirrored bridge that bends

And shivers on the surface of the stream.

Young oarsmen, who in timeless gesture seem

Continuous, united with the tide,

Leave off your bending to the oar, and glide

Past innocence, beyond these aging bricks

To where the Charles flows in to join the Styx.

NEW YEAR MORNING

The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath

The coldly furious streaks of morning stars

We hear the scraping of the last few cars,

And on the doorstep by the frozen wreath

Return goodnights to night. Dear friends, once more

We’ve held our strength against a straining door,

Again the siege is past, another year

Has lost the battle. You can leave us now.

The hours are done that must be clamored through

Lest darkness think us sleeping, lest we hear

Secret police engendered out of night

Advancing on our little zone of light.

Now each of us can dare to be alone,

His room no longer populous with spies

Bending above the pillow where he lies

To sow his dreams with fear that all is done,

That there’s no more reprieve, no leaf to tear

And find another January there.

So we are safe again. Goodnight, brave friends.

So may beginnings always follow ends.

Though time is treasonable, may we stand

Gathered each year, a stubborn-hearted band

Whose gaiety rises like a litany

Under the dying ornamental tree.

IN TIME OF CARNIVAL

Those lights, that plaza—I should know them all:

The impotent blind beggar shouting his songs

Of lovers, while the headlong populace

Drinks, tramples, immolates itself in action;

The bloody light of braziers on the faces

Of women who are action’s means and end,

Each a laughing Fury; the towering glass

Of those cathedral saints, whose stiffened forms,

Ruby in passing torchlight, stoop to dark

And flare again as puppets of disorder,

Lifeless without its light, but in that rout

Illumined and empowered. There’s no crowd

In nave or playhouse any more; for all

Are actors where mere pasteboard roars to heaven

Under the dropped match, and the streets alone,

The amphitheatre of great night itself,

Suffice to contain their scene. Nothing will do

But action of the senses, total seizure

Of what’s to hand. And through the swaying streets

That beggar, impotent since youth, sings on,

Ignorant of the scene, blind to his power,

The songs that send those lovers wild to bed.

THE MIDDLE-AGED

Their faces, safe as an interior

Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,

Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light

Of placid afternoon—their voices’ measure,

Their figures moving in the Sunday garden

To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,

Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young

Was always to live in other people’s houses

Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,

Was ours at second-hand and not for long.

The custom of the house, not ours, the sun

Fading the silver-blue Fortuny curtains,

The reminiscence of a Christmas party

Of fourteen years ago—all memory,

Signs of possession and of being possessed,

We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,

Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit

Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs

We must call ours: but twenty years of living

They could not give. Nor did they ever speak

Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,

The crack in the study window, or the letters

Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.

All to be understood by us, returning

Late, in our own time—how that peace was made,

Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.

THE MARRIAGE PORTION

From commissars of daylight

Love cannot make us free.

Nights of ungracious darkness

Hang over you and me.

We lie awake together

And hear the clocks strike three.

Our loving cannot exile

The felons but and if;

Yet being undivided

Some ways we can contrive

To hold off those besiegers

Who batter round our life:

The thieves of our completeness

Who steal us stone by stone,

The patronage that scowls upon

Our need to be alone,

And all the clever people

Who want us for their own.

The telephone is ringing,

And planes and trains depart.

The cocktail party’s forming,

The cruise about to start.

To stay behind is fatal—

Act now, the time is short.

If we refuse the summons

And stand at last alone,

We walk intact and certain,

As man and woman grown

In the deserted playground

When all the rest have gone.

THE TREE

Long ago I found a seed,

And kept it in a glass of water,

And half forgot my dim intent

Until I saw it start to reach

For life with one blind, fragile root.

And then I pressed it into earth

And saw its tendrils seek the air,

So slowly that I hardly knew

Of any change till it had grown

A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be

No more a thing in need of me,

But living by some sapience

I had not given, could not withdraw.

So it grew on, and days went by,

And seasons with their common gifts,

Till at the leafage of the year

I felt the sun cut off from me

By something thick outside my room—

Not yet a tree grown to the full,

Yet so endowed with need and will

It took the warmth and left me cold.

And first I climbed with hook and shears

To prune the boughs that darkened me,

But the tree was stubborner than I,

And where I clipped it grew again,

Brutal in purpose as a weed.

Nor did it give of fruit or flower,

Though seasons brought their common gifts,

And years went by. It only grew

Darker and denser to my view,

Taking whatever I would yield—

The homage of a troubled mind—

Requiring nothing, yet accepting

My willingness to guard its life

By the endurance of my own.

It gives me nothing; yet I see

Sometimes in dreams my enemy

Hanged by the hair upon that tree.

LOVERS ARE LIKE CHILDREN

Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue

Remind me that discovery by two

Of any world the mind can wander through

Is like the time when young and left alone,

We touched the secret fringe of being one,

Back of the playground full of Everyone.

Love is like childhood, caught in trust and fear.

The statues point to omens in the air,

And yet the fountains bubble bright and clear.

Lost in the garden rank with contradiction,

We see the fences sprout for our affliction,

And the red-rose-tree curtly labelled Fiction.

Nothing to tell us whether what they mean

Is true of this or any other scene.

We only know the summer leaves are green,

Alive and dense for two to penetrate—

An exploration difficult and great

As when one day beside the schoolyard gate,

Straggling behind to glean a sunlit stone,

One first perceived and knew itself as one.

Now add this pebble to that early one.

WHEN THIS CLANGOR IN THE BRAIN

Say a master of the track

Lightly leaped and lightly ran,

Knew his powers of chest and thigh

Clean outstripped the thought of man—

Would it not be pill and patch

And worse than queasy cripples know,

If on a day the rheum should catch

And lay that master leaper low?

Say that into certain minds

A Merlin dances, in and out,

And what he chooses, must obey

And sway the thought it thinks about—

Would it not be old folks’ home

And the dry end of the year

For the mind he left again

Unmastered, lock and stock and gear?

When this clangor in the brain

Grows perfunctory, or worse,

Put me down a sick old woman

Propped for sleep, hire me a nurse;

Till then, all things I look upon

Beat on my brain to hail and bless,

And every last and wayward power

I claim till then, and nothing less.

A VIEW OF MERTON COLLEGE

An interval: the view across the fields

Perfect and insusceptible as seen

In printshops of the High Street—sun on stone

Worn like old needlework, the sheen of grass,

Minute and ageless figures moving down

The Broad Walk under tinted trees. Awhile

Mind’s local jangling lightens, ear is eased,

Eye’s flaw is mended in such gazing, healed

By separation as through glass. Until

Sun shifts, air turns harsher, paler, rooks

Flap in the rising wind. The wind has found you,

The mortal light of day, whose envy, waste,

Irresolution tread you as you go

Guilty and human. Here as anywhere,

Peace of the mind lies through an arch of stone,

The limitations posted strict and clear:

Not to be littered or presumed upon.

HOLIDAY

Summer was another country, where the birds

Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves

And lent to all our fêtes their sweet approval.

The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,

The senses flourished like a laden tree

Whose every gesture finishes in a flower.

In those unwardened provinces we dined

From wicker baskets by a green canal,

Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,

Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,

Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded

Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled

The long walk back to winter, leagues away.

THE CAPITAL

Under that summer asphalt, under vistas

Aspiring to a neo-classic calm,

The steaming burgeon of Potomac’s swamp

Has never quite been laid to rest. The eye

Winces in sunlight off a marble dome.

But cannot fix the face of Jefferson

Through haze of an outrageous atmosphere

By diplomats called tropic; nor can the ear

Hold to the lifeline of a single voice

Through jettisoned rumors jamming all the air.

The dollar in that city of inscriptions

Is minted among pediments and columns

Purer than newmade coin. The afternoon

Steams with the drip of departmental fountains

And humid branches breathing overhead

Down avenues where the siren’s nervous shriek

Pursues the murderer or the foreign guest

Through those indifferent noonday crowds who never

Ask, till history tells them, what they do

In that metropolis anything but Greek.

THE PLATFORM

The railway stations of our daily plight

See every hour love’s threatened overthrow.

Each afternoon at five the buses go

Laden with those who shall be false by night.

We say goodbye in rooms too bright with noise

To catch the shades of a receding voice;

We turn at the revolving door and see

Love’s face already changed, indelibly.

Not to admit we may not meet again—

This was the parting treason of our thought.

Battering down our cowardly “till then,”

Time’s traffic hems the seeker from the sought.

We take too sudden leave; the platform reels

With thunder of a thousand pounding heels,

And at the gate where one remains behind,

Though most we strain to see, we most are blind.

Dear loves, dear friends, I take my leave all day

In practice for a time that need not come.

I turn and move from you a little way,

As men walk out beyond the fields of home

In troubled days, to view what they love well—

Distance confirming for a moment’s spell,

Meeting or going, that when we embrace

We know the heart beyond the transient face.

LAST SONG

All in the day that I was born,

I walked across the shouting corn;

I saw the sunlight flash and hail

From every spire and every sail,

But most I leaned against the sky

To hear the eagles racing by,

And all the safety of the womb

Could not betray me, lure me home.

All in the day that I was wed

I saw them strew my bridal bed.

I smelled the wind across the sheets

Breathing of lavender and sweets

That neither sea nor meadow knew;

And when my bride was brought to view

I kept a hundred candles lit

All for light and the joy of it.

All in the day that I was old

I felt the wind blow salt and cold

Like seaspray on my shaking thighs

Or sand flung up to blind my eyes.

I cried for sun and the eagles flying,

But felt those fingers spying, prying,

The same that wrenched me into life

And cut my safety with a knife.

Soon they will bind me dark and warm

And impotent to suffer harm.

I shall be exiled to the womb

Where once I lay and thought it home.

The sun that flashed my first delight

Shall never learn to cleave that night;

And all the swords of danger fly

Far from the caul in which I lie.

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

However legendary,

The stone is still a stone,

Though it had once resisted

The weight of Africa,

The hammer-blows of time

That wear to bits of rubble

The mountain and the pebble—

But not this coldest one.

Now, you intelligence

So late dredged up from dark

Upon whose smoky walls

Bison took fumbling form

Or flint was edged on flint—

Now, careful arriviste,

Delineate at will

Incisions in the ice.

Be serious, because

The stone may have contempt

For too-familiar hands,

And because all you do

Loses or gains by this:

Respect the adversary,

Meet it with tools refined,

And thereby set your price.

Be hard of heart, because

The stone must leave your hand.

Although you liberate

Pure and expensive fires

Fit to enamor Shebas,

Keep your desire apart.

Love only what you do,

And not what you have done.

Be proud, when you have set

The final spoke of flame

In that prismatic wheel,

And nothing’s left this day

Except to see the sun

Shine on the false and the true,

And know that Africa

Will yield you more to do.

SNAPSHOTS

OF A

DAUGHTER-

IN-LAW

(1963)

AT MAJORITY

For C.

When you are old and beautiful,

And things most difficult are done,

There will be few who can recall

Your face that I see ravaged now

By youth and its oppressive work.

Your look will hold their wondering looks

Grave as Cordelia’s at the last,

Neither with rancor at the past

Nor to upbraid the coming time.

For you will be at peace with time.

But now, a daily warfare takes

Its toll of tenderness in you,

And you must live like captains who

Wait out the hour before the charge—

Fearful, and yet impatient too.

Yet someday this will have an end,

All choices made or choice resigned,

And in your face the literal eye

Trace little of your history,

Nor ever piece the tale entire

Of villages that had to burn

And playgrounds of the will destroyed

Before you could be safe from time

And gather in your brow and air

The stillness of antiquity.

1954

FROM MORNING-GLORY TO

PETERSBURG

(The World Book, 1928)

“Organized knowledge in story and picture”

confronts through dusty glass

an eye grown dubious.

I can recall when knowledge still was pure,

not contradictory, pleasurable

as cutting out a paper doll.

You opened up a book and there it was:

everything just as promised, from

Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum

Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.

Facts could be kept separate

by a convention; that was what

made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;

in all its risible untidiness

it traces me to each address,

dragging in things I never thought about.

I don’t invite what facts can be

held at arm’s length; a family

of jeering irresponsibles always

comes along gypsy-style

and there you have them all

forever on your hands. It never pays.

If I could still extrapolate

the morning-glory on the gate

from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.

1954

RURAL REFLECTIONS

This is the grass your feet are planted on.

You paint it orange or you sing it green,

But you have never found

A way to make the grass mean what you mean.

A cloud can be whatever you intend:

Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.

But you have never found

A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

Get out there with your splendid expertise;

Raymond who cuts the meadow does no less.

Inhuman nature says:

Inhuman patience is the true success.

Human impatience trips you as you run;

Stand still and you must lie.

It is the grass that cuts the mower down;

It is the cloud that swallows up the sky.

1956

THE KNIGHT

A knight rides into the noon,

and his helmet points to the sun,

and a thousand splintered suns

are the gaiety of his mail.

The soles of his feet glitter

and his palms flash in reply,

and under his crackling banner

he rides like a ship in sail.

A knight rides into the noon,

and only his eye is living,

a lump of bitter jelly

set in a metal mask,

betraying rags and tatters

that cling to the flesh beneath

and wear his nerves to ribbons

under the radiant casque.

Who will unhorse this rider

and free him from between

the walls of iron, the emblems

crushing his chest with their weight?

Will they defeat him gently,

or leave him hurled on the green,

his rags and wounds still hidden

under the great breastplate?

1957

THE LOSER

A man thinks of the woman he once loved:

first, after her wedding, and then nearly a decade later.

I.

I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

home from that bourgeois sacrament,

your cheek still tasting cold upon

my lips that gave you benison

with all the swagger that they knew—

as losers somehow learn to do.

Your wedding made my eyes ache; soon

the world would be worse off for one

more golden apple dropped to ground

without the least protesting sound,

and you would windfall lie, and we

forget your shimmer on the tree.

Beauty is always wasted: if

not Mignon’s song sung to the deaf,

at all events to the unmoved.

A face like yours cannot be loved

long or seriously enough.

Almost, we seem to hold it off.

II.

Well, you are tougher than I thought.

Now when the wash with ice hangs taut

this morning of St. Valentine,

I see you strip the squeaking line,

your body weighed against the load,

and all my groans can do no good.

Because you still are beautiful,

though squared and stiffened by the pull

of what nine windy years have done.

You have three daughters, lost a son.

I see all your intelligence

flung into that unwearied stance.

My envy is of no avail.

I turn my head and wish him well

who chafed your beauty into use

and lives forever in a house

lit by the friction of your mind.

You stagger in against the wind.

1958

THE ABSENT-MINDED

ARE ALWAYS TO BLAME

What do you look for down there

in the cracks of the pavement? Or up there

between the pineapple and the acanthus leaf

in that uninspired ornament? Odysseus

wading half-naked out of the shrubbery

like a god, dead serious among those at play,

could hardly be more out of it. In school

we striped your back with chalk, you all oblivious,

your eyes harnessed by a transparent strand

reaching the other side of things, or down

like a wellchain to the center of earth.

Now with those same eyes you pull the

pavements up like old linoleum,

arches of triumph start to liquefy

minutes after you slowly turn away.

1958

EURYCLEA’S TALE

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting

for a father dawdling among the isles,

and the seascape hollowed out by that boy’s edged gaze

to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.

And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home

till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood

and the tears of an old woman must run down

to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what

can they do together, father and son?

the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy

whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea.

But all the time and everywhere

lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball

light: light on the ship racked up in port,

the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke,

than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride.

1958

SEPTEMBER 21

Wear the weight of equinoctial evening,

light like melons bruised on all the porches.

Feel the houses tenderly appraise you,

hold you in the watchfulness of mothers.

Once the nighttime was a milky river

washing past the swimmers in the sunset,

rinsing over sleepers of the morning.

Soon the night will be an eyeless quarry

where the shrunken daylight and its rebels,

loosened,     dive like stones in perfect silence,

names and voices drown without reflection.

Then the houses draw you. Then they have you.

1958

AFTER A SENTENCE

IN “MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE”

The month’s eye blurs.

The winter’s lungs are cracked.

Along bloated gutters race,

shredded, your injured legions,

the waste of our remorseless search.

Your old, unuttered names are holes

worn in our skins

through which we feel from time to time

abrasive wind.

Those who are loved live poorly and in danger.

We who were loved will never

unlive that crippling fever.

A day returns, a certain weather

splatters the panes, and we

once more stare in the eye of our first failure.

1958

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,

still have your dresses copied from that time,

and play a Chopin prelude

called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections

float like perfume through the memory.”

Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,

crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.

Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm,

a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her any more, except

each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,

that sprung-lidded, still commodious

steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

gets stuffed with it all:      the mildewed orange-flowers,

the female pills, the terrible breasts

of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream

across the cut glass and majolica

like Furies cornered from their prey:

The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,

ma semblable, ma soeur!

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,

the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn …

Reading while waiting

for the iron to heat,

writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

or, more often,

iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

she shaves her legs until they gleam

like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings

neither words nor music are her own;

only the long hair dipping

over her cheek, only the song

of silk against her knees

and these

adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,

tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—

is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down

by love, for you the only natural action,

are you edged more keen

to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown

her household books to you, daughter-in-law,

that her sons never saw?

7.

“To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is

of the utmost consequence.”

Thus wrote

a woman, partly brave and partly good,

who fought with what she partly understood.

Few men about her would or could do more,

hence she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

and turn part legend, part convention.

Still, eyes inaccurately dream

behind closed windows blankening with steam.

Deliciously, all that we might have been,

all that we were—fire, tears,

wit, taste, martyred ambition—

stirs like the memory of refused adultery

the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but

that it is done at all? Yes, think

of the odds! or shrug them off forever.

This luxury of the precocious child,

Time’s precious chronic invalid,—

would we, darlings, resign it if we could?

Our blight has been our sinecure:

mere talent was enough for us—

glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male

and in his cups drinks to the fair.

Bemused by gallantry, we hear

our mediocrities over-praised,

indolence read as abnegation,

slattern thought styled intuition,

every lapse forgiven, our crime

only to cast too bold a shadow

or smash the mould straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

tear gas, attrition shelling.

Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.

1958–1960

PASSING ON

The landlord’s hammer in the yard

patches a porch where your shirts swing

brashly against May’s creamy blue.

This year the forsythia ran wild,

chrome splashed on the spring evenings,

every bush a pile of sulphur.

Now, ragged, they bend

under the late wind’s onslaught, tousled

as my head beneath the clotheslines.

Soon we’ll be off. I’ll pack us into parcels,

stuff us in barrels, shroud us in newspapers,

pausing to marvel at old bargain sales:

Oh, all the chances we never seized!

Emptiness round the stoop of the house

minces, catwise, waiting for an in.

1959

THE RAVEN

If, antique hateful bird,

flapping through dawngagged streets

of metal shopfronts grated down

on pedestrian nerve-ends,

if, as on old film,

my features blurred and grained like cereal,

you find me walking up and down

waiting for my first dream,

don’t try to sully my head

with vengeful squirtings. Fly on,

ratfooted cautionary of my dark,

till we meet further along.

You are no dream, old genius.

I smell you, get my teeth on edge,

stand in my sweat—in mercury—

even as you prime your feathers and set sail.

1959

MERELY TO KNOW

I.

Wedged in by earthworks

thrown up by snouters before me,

I kick and snuffle, breathing in

cobwebs of beetle-cuirass:

vainglory of polished green,

infallible pincer, resonant nerve,

a thickening on the air now,

confusion to my lungs, no more.

My predecessors blind me—

their zeal exhausted among roots and tunnels,

they gasped and looked up once or twice

into the beechtree’s nightblack glitter.

II.

Let me take you by the hair

and drag you backward to the light,

there spongelike press my gaze

patiently upon your eyes,

hold like a photographic plate

against you my enormous question.

What if you cringe, what if you weep?

Suffer this and you need suffer

nothing more. I’ll give you back

yourself at last to the last part.

I take nothing, only look.

Change nothing. Have no need to change.

Merely to know and let you go.

1959

III.

Spirit like water

molded by unseen stone

and sandbar, pleats and funnels

according to its own

submerged necessity—

to the indolent eye

pure willfulness, to the stray

pine-needle boiling

in that cascade-bent pool

a random fury: Law,

if that’s what’s wanted, lies

asking to be read

in the dried brook-bed.

1961

ANTINOÜS: THE DIARIES

Autumn torture. The old signs

smeared on the pavement, sopping leaves

rubbed into the landscape as unguent on a bruise,

brought indoors, even, as they bring flowers, enormous,

with the colors of the body’s secret parts.

All this. And then, evenings, needing to be out,

walking fast, fighting the fire

that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy,

till on the black embankment

I’m a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

Then at some house the rumor of truth and beauty

saturates a room like lilac-water

in the stream of a bath, fires snap, heads are high,

gold hair at napes of necks, gold in glasses,

gold in the throat, poetry of furs and manners.

Why do I shiver then? Haven’t I seen,

over and over, before the end of an evening,

the three opened coffins carried in and left in a corner?

Haven’t I watched as somebody cracked his shin

on one of them, winced and hopped and limped

laughing to lay his hand on a beautiful arm

striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?

The old, needless story. For if I’m here

it is by choice and when at last

I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air

tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,

I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?

If what I spew on the tiles at last,

helpless, disgraced, alone,

is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,

motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,

Isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,

abortive, murdered, or never willed?

1959

JUVENILIA

Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined,

each flaking its gold arabesque!

Again I sit, under duress, hands washed,

at your inkstained oaken desk,

by the goose-neck lamp in the tropic of your books,

stabbing the blotting-pad, doodling loop upon loop,

peering one-eyed in the dusty reflecting mirror

of your student microscope,

craning my neck to spell above me

A DOLLS HOUSE      LITTLE EYOLF

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

Unspeakable fairy tales ebb like blood through my head

as I dip the pen and for aunts, for admiring friends,

for you above all to read,

copy my praised and sedulous lines.

Behind the two of us, thirsty spines

quiver in semi-shadow, huge leaves uncurl and thicken.

1960

DOUBLE MONOLOGUE

To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-

shaft of doubt, and still

mime illusions for others? A puzzle

for the maker who has thought

once too often too coldly.

Since I was more than a child

trying on a thousand faces

I have wanted one thing: to know

simply as I know my name

at any given moment, where I stand.

How much expense of time and skill

which might have set itself

to angelic fabrications! All merely

to chart one needle in the haymow?

Find yourself and you find the world?

Solemn presumption! Mighty Object

no one but itself has missed,

what’s lost, if you stay lost? Someone

ignorantly loves you—will that serve?

Shrug that off, and presto!—

the needle drowns in the haydust.

Think of the whole haystack—

a composition so fortuitous

it only looks monumental.

There’s always a straw twitching somewhere.

Wait out the long chance, and

your needle too could get nudged up

to the apex of that bristling calm.

Rusted, possibly. You might not want

to swear it was the Object, after all.

Time wears us old utopians.

I now no longer think

“truth” is the most beautiful of words.

Today, when I see “truthful”

written somewhere, it flares

like a white orchid in wet woods,

rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.

Sometimes, unwittingly even,

we have been truthful.

In a random universe, what more

exact and starry consolation?

Don’t think I think

facts serve better than ignorant love.

Both serve, and still

our need mocks our gear.

1960

A WOMAN MOURNED BY DAUGHTERS

Now, not a tear begun,

we sit here in your kitchen,

spent, you see, already.

You are swollen till you strain

this house and the whole sky.

You, whom we so often

succeeded in ignoring!

You, are puffed up in death

like a corpse pulled from the sea;

we groan beneath your weight.

And yet you were a leaf,

a straw blown on the bed,

you had long since become

crisp as a dead insect.

What is it, if not you,

that settles on us now

like satin you pulled down

over our bridal heads?

What rises in our throats

like food you prodded in?

Nothing could be enough.

You breathe upon us now

through solid assertions

of yourself: teaspoons, goblets,

seas of carpet, a forest

of old plants to be watered,

an old man in an adjoining

room to be touched and fed.

And all this universe

dares us to lay a finger

anywhere, save exactly

as you would wish it done.

1960

READINGS OF HISTORY

He delighted in relating the fact that he had been born

near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging

cholera epidemic.

—Domenico Vittorini, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello

I. The Evil Eye

Last night we sat with the stereopticon,

laughing at genre views of 1906,

till suddenly, gazing straight into

that fringed and tasseled parlor, where the vestal

spurns an unlikely suitor

with hairy-crested plants to right and left,

my heart sank. It was terrible.

I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush,

dust on the eyepiece bloomed to freaks of mold.

I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was.

Today, a fresh clean morning.

Your camera stabs me unawares,

right in my mortal part.

A womb of celluloid already

contains my dotage and my total absence.

II. The Confrontation

Luigi Pirandello

looked like an old historian

(oval head, tufted white beard,

not least the hunger

for reconciliation in his eye).

For fourteen years, facing

his criminal reflection

in his wife’s Grand Guignol mind,

he built over and over

that hall of mirrors

in which to be appears

to be perceived.

The present holds you like a raving wife,

clever as the mad are clever,

digging up your secret truths

from her disabled genius.

She knows what you hope

and dare not hope:

remembers

what you’re sick

of forgetting.

What are you now

but what you know together, you and she?

She will not let you think.

It is important

to make connections. Everything

happens very fast in the minds

of the insane. Even you

aren’t up to that, yet.

Go out, walk,

think of selves long past.

III. Memorabilia

I recall

Civil War letters of a great-grand-uncle,

fifteen at Chancellorsville,

no raconteur,

no speller, either; nor to put it squarely,

much of a mind;

the most we gather

is that he did write home:

I am well,

how are my sisters, hope you are the same.

Did Spartan battle-echoes rack his head?

Dying, he turned into his father’s memory.

History’s queerly strong perfumes

rise from the crook of this day’s elbow:

Seduction fantasies of the public mind,

or Dilthey’s dream from which he roused to see

the cosmos glaring through his windowpane?

Prisoners of what we think occurred,

or dreamers dreaming toward a final word?

What, in fact, happened in these woods

on some obliterated afternoon?

IV. Consanguinity

Can history show us nothing

but pieces of ourselves, detached,

set to a kind of poetry,

a kind of music, even?

Seated today on Grandmamma’s

plush sofa with the grapes

bursting so ripely from the curved mahogany,

we read the great Victorians

weeping, almost, as if

some family breach were healed.

Those angry giantesses and giants,

lately our kith and kin!

We stare into their faces, hear

at last what they were saying

(or some version not bruited

by filial irritation).

The cat-tails wither in the reading-room.

Tobacco-colored dust

drifts on the newest magazines.

I loaf here leafing ancient copies

of LIFE from World War II.

We look so poor and honest there:

girls with long hair badly combed

and unbecoming dresses—

where are you now?

You sail

to shop in Europe, ignorantly freed

for you, an age ago.

Your nylon luggage matches

eyelids

expertly azured.

I, too, have lived in history.

V. The Mirror

Is it in hopes

to find or lose myself

that I

fill up my table now

with Michelet and Motley?

To “know how it was”

or to forget how it is—

what else?

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

Yankee nor Rebel, born

in the face of two ancient cults,

I’m a good reader of histories.

And you,

Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,

when you sit at night

tracing your way through your volumes

of Josephus, or any

of the old Judaic chronicles,

do you find yourself there, a simpler,

more eloquent Jew?

or do you read

to shut out the tick-tock of self,

the questions and their routine answers?

VI. The Covenant

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,

our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.

Nothing will thaw these bones except

memory like an ancient blanket wrapped

about us when we sleep at home again,

smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,

old nightmare,

and insomnia’s spreading stain.

Or say I sit with what I halfway know

as with a dying man who heaves the true

version at last, now that it hardly matters,

or gropes a hand to where the letters

sewn in the mattress can be plucked and read.

Here’s water.      Sleep.      No more is asked of you.

I take your life into my living head.

1960

TO THE AIRPORT

Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks

of diamond battlements flush high and cold.

Alarm clocks strike a million sparks of will.

Weeping:      all night we’ve wept and watched the hours

that never will be ours again: Now

weeping, we roll through unforgettable

Zion, that rears its golden head from sleep

to act, and does not need us as we weep.

You dreamed us, City, and you let us be.

Grandiloquence, improvidence, ordure, light,

hours that seemed years, and ours—and over all

the endless wing of possibility,

that mackerel heaven of yours, fretted with all

our wits could leap for, envy batten on.

Our flights take off from you into the sea;

nothing you need wastes, though we think we do.

You are Canaan now and we are lifted high

to see all we were promised, never knew.

1960

THE AFTERWAKE

Nursing your nerves

to rest, I’ve roused my own; well,

now for a few bad hours!

Sleep sees you behind closed doors.

Alone, I slump in his front parlor.

You’re safe inside. Good. But I’m

like a midwife who at dawn

has all in order: bloodstains

washed up, teapot on the stove,

and starts her five miles home

walking, the birthyell still

exploding in her head.

Yes, I’m with her now: here’s

the streaked, livid road

edged with shut houses

breathing night out and in.

Legs tight with fatigue,

we move under morning’s coal-blue star,

colossal as this load

of unexpired purpose, which drains

slowly, till scissors of cockcrow snip the air.

1961

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

To GPS

Over the chessboard now,

Your Artificiality concludes

a final check; rests; broods—

no—sorts and stacks a file of memories,

while I

concede the victory, bow,

and slouch among my free associations.

You never had a mother,

let’s say? no digital Gertrude

whom you’d as lief have seen

Kingless? So your White Queen

was just an “operator.”

(My Red had incandescence,

ire, aura, flare,

and trapped me several moments in her stare.)

I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition

of human waste. Why not

dump the whole reeking snarl

and let you solve me once for all?

(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite

itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

Still, when

they make you write your poems, later on,

who’d envy you, force-fed

on all those variorum

editions of our primitive endeavors,

those frozen pemmican language-rations

they’ll cram you with? denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams.

1961

A MARRIAGE IN THE ’SIXTIES

As solid-seeming as antiquity,

you frown above

the New York Sunday Times

where Castro, like a walk-on out of Carmen,

mutters into a bearded henchman’s ear.

They say the second’s getting shorter—

I knew it in my bones—

and pieces of the universe are missing.

I feel the gears of this late afternoon

slip, cog by cog, even as I read.

“I’m old,” we both complain,

half-laughing, oftener now.

Time serves you well. That face—

part Roman emperor, part Raimu—

nothing this side of Absence can undo.

Bliss, revulsion, your rare angers can

only carry through what’s well begun.

When

I read your letters long ago

in that half-defunct

hotel in Magdalen Street

every word primed my nerves.

A geographical misery

composed of oceans, fogbound planes

and misdelivered cablegrams

lay round me, a Nova Zembla

only your live breath could unfreeze.

Today we stalk

in the raging desert of our thought

whose single drop of mercy is

each knows the other there.

Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,

may have at last the perfect hour of talk

that language aches for; still—

two minds, two messages.

Your brows knit into flourishes. Some piece

of mere time has you tangled there.

Some mote of history has flown into your eye.

Will nothing ever be the same,

even our quarrels take a different key,

our dreams exhume new metaphors?

The world breathes underneath our bed.

Don’t look. We’re at each other’s mercy too.

Dear fellow-particle, electric dust

I’m blown with—ancestor

to what euphoric cluster—

see how particularity dissolves

in all that hints of chaos. Let one finger

hover toward you from There

and see this furious grain

suspend its dance to hang

beside you like your twin.

1961

FIRST THINGS

I can’t name love now

without naming its object—

this the final measure

of those flintspark years

when one believed

one’s flash innate.

Today I swear

Only in the sun’s eye

Do I take fire.

1961

ATTENTION

The ice age is here.

I sit burning cigarettes,

burning my brain.

A micro-Tibet,

deadly, frivolous, complete,

blinds the four panes.

Veils of dumb air

unwind like bandages

from my lips

half-parted, steady as the mouths

of antique statues.

1961

END OF AN ERA

This morning, flakes of sun

peel down to the last snowholds,

the barbed-wire leavings of a war

lost, won, in these dead-end alleys.

Stale as a written-out journalist,

I sort my gear.—Nothing is happening.—City,

dumb as a pack of thumbed cards, you

once had snap and glare

and secret life; now, trembling

under my five grey senses’ weight,

you flatten

onto the table.

Baudelaire, I think of you … Nothing changes,

rude and self-absorbed the current

dashes past, reflecting nothing, poetry

extends its unsought amnesty,

the roots of the great grove

atrophy underground.

Some voices, though, shake in the air like heat.

The neighborhood is changing,

even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar.

I walk into my house and see

tourists fingering this and that.

My mirrors, my bric-à-brac

don’t suit their style.

Those old friends, though,

alive and dead,

for whom things don’t come easy—

Certain forests are sawdust,

from now on have to be described?

Nothing changes. The bones of the mammoths

are still in the earth.

1961

RUSTICATION

In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled

with roses, purchased dearly at auction,

goldenrod and asters spill

toward the inevitable sunset.

The houseguests trail from swimming

under huge towels.

Marianne dangles barefoot in the hammock

reading about Martin Luther King.

Vivaldi rattles on the phonograph,

flutes ricocheting off the birchtrees.

Flies buzz and are gaily murdered.

Still out of it, and guilty,

I glue the distance-glasses to my eyes

ostrich-like, hoping

you’ll think me in that clearing half a mile away.

Offstage I hear

the old time-killers dressing, banging doors,

your voice, a timbre or two too rich for love,

cheering them on.

A kestrel sails into my field of vision,

clear as a rising star.

Why should I need to quarrel

with another’s consolations?

Why, in your mortal skin,

vigorously smashing ice and smoking,

a graying pigtail down your back,

should you seem infamous to me?

1961

APOLOGY

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever

keep a cat, a dog,

a bird—

chiefly because

I’d rather love my equals.

Today, turning

in the fog of my mind,

I knew, the thing I really

couldn’t stand in the house

is a woman

with a mindful of fog

and bloodletting claws

and the nerves of a bird

and the nightmares of a dog.

1961

SISTERS

Can I easily say,

I know you of course now,

no longer the fellow-victim,

reader of my diaries, heir

to my outgrown dresses,

ear for my poems and invectives?

Do I know you better

than that blue-eyed stranger

self-absorbed as myself

raptly knitting or sleeping

through a thirdclass winter journey?

Face to face all night

her dreams and whimpers

tangled with mine,

sleeping but not asleep

behind the engine drilling

into dark Germany,

her eyes, mouth, head

reconstructed by dawn

as we nodded farewell.

Her I should recognize

years later, anywhere.

1961

IN THE NORTH

Mulish, unregenerate,

not “as all men are”

but more than most

you sit up there in the sunset;

there are only three

hours of dark

in your night. You are

alone as an old king

with his white-gold beard

when in summer the ships

sail out, the heroes

singing, push off

for other lands. Only

in winter when

trapped in the ice

your kingdom flashes

under the northern lights

and the bees dream

in their hives, the young

men like the bees

hang near you

for lack of another,

remembering too, with some

remorseful tenderness

you are their king.

1962

THE CLASSMATE

One year, you gave us

all names, hudibrastic

titles, skywrote

our gaudy histories.

We were all sparks

struck in your head,

we mocked but listened.

You filled a whole

zoological notebook

with sly generations

of should-have-beens,

were disgraced, not distressed.

Our howls died away.

Your poetry was in

paper-dart ballads

sailing beyond our noses,

in blackboard lyrics

scrawled in our own patois,

spirals of chalkdust,

inkblot manifestos

who could read today?

You less than any.

Because later you turned

to admiration of the classics

and a sedulous ear.

Still if I hear

the slash of feet

through gutters full of oakleaves

and see the boys

still unprized, unprizing,

dancing along, tossing

books and dusty leaves

into the sun,

they chant, it would seem,

your momentary quatrains,

nose-thumbing, free-lancing

poet of the schoolyard—

prize-giver and taker

now, a pillar

swaddled in laurels—

lost classmate, look!

your glory was here.

1962

PEELING ONIONS

Only to have a grief

equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.

Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,

merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once

when I’d good cause.

Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds

raw in my head,

so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.

A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—

yet all that stayed

stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

1961

GHOST OF A CHANCE

You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch,

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle,

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing

air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant

sea.

1962

THE WELL

Down this old well

what leaves have fallen,

what cores of eaten apples,

what scraps of paper!

An old trash barrel.

November, no one comes.

But I come, trying

to breathe that word

into the well’s ear

which could make the leaves fly up

like a green jet

to clothe the naked tree,

the whole fruit leap to the bough,

the scraps like fleets of letters

sail up into my hands.

Leiden, 1961

NOVELLA

Two people in a room, speaking harshly.

One gets up, goes out to walk.

(That is the man.)

The other goes into the next room

and washes the dishes, cracking one.

(That is the woman.)

It gets dark outside.

The children quarrel in the attic.

She has no blood left in her heart.

The man comes back to a dark house.

The only light is in the attic.

He has forgotten his key.

He rings at his own door

and hears sobbing on the stairs.

The lights go on in the house.

The door closes behind him.

Outside, separate as minds,

the stars too come alight.

1962

FACE

I could look at you a long time,

man of red and blue;

your eye glows mockingly

from the rainbow-colored flesh

Karel Appel clothed you in.

You are a fish,

drawn up dripping hugely

from the sea of paint,

laid on the canvas

to glower and flash

out of the blackness

that is your true element

1962

PROSPECTIVE

IMMIGRANTS

PLEASE NOTE

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

1962

LIKENESS

A good man

is an odd thing:

hard to find

as the song says,

he is anarchic

as a mountain freshet

and unprotected

by the protectors.

1962

THE LAG

With you it is still the middle of the night.

Nothing I know will make you know

what birds cried me awake

or how the wet light leaked

into my sky.

Day came as no clear victory,

it’s raining still, but light

washes the menace from obscure forms

and in the shaving mirror there’s

a face I recognize.

With you it is still the middle of the night.

You hug yourself, tightened as in a berth

suspended over the Grand Banks

where time is already American

and hanging fire.

I’m older now than you.

I feel your black dreams struggling at a porthole

stuffed full of night. I feel you choking

in that thick place. My words

reach you as through a telephone

where some submarine echo of my voice

blurts knowledge you can’t use.

1962

ALWAYS THE SAME

Slowly, Prometheus

bleeds to life

in his huge loneliness.

You, for whom

his bowels are exposed,

go about your affairs

dying a little every day

from the inside out

almost imperceptibly

till the late decades when

women go hysterical

and men are dumbly frightened

and far away, like the sea

Prometheus sings on

“like a battle-song after a battle.”

1962

PEACE

Lashes of white light

binding another hailcloud—

the whole onset all over

bursting against our faces,

sputtering like dead holly

fired in a grate:

And the birds go mad

potted by grapeshot

while the sun shines

in one quarter of heaven

and the rainbow

breaks out its enormous flag—

oily, unnegotiable—

over the sack-draped backs

of the cattle in their kingdom.

1961

THE ROOFWALKER

For Denise Levertov

Over the half-finished houses

night comes. The builders

stand on the roof. It is

quiet after the hammers,

the pulleys hang slack.

Giants, the roofwalkers,

on a listing deck, the wave

of darkness about to break

on their heads. The sky

is a torn sail where figures

pass magnified, shadows

on a burning deck.

I feel like them up there:

exposed, larger than life,

and due to break my neck.

Was it worth while to lay—

with infinite exertion—

a roof I can’t live under?

—All those blueprints,

closings of gaps,

measurings, calculations?

A life I didn’t choose

chose me: even

my tools are the wrong ones

for what I have to do.

I’m naked, ignorant,

a naked man fleeing

across the roofs

who could with a shade of difference

be sitting in the lamplight

against the cream wallpaper

reading—not with indifference—

about a naked man

fleeing across the roofs.

1961

POEMS

(1955–1957)

AT THE JEWISH NEW YEAR

For more than five thousand years

This calm September day

With yellow in the leaf

Has lain in the kernel of Time

While the world outside the walls

Has had its turbulent say

And history like a long

Snake has crawled on its way

And is crawling onward still.

And we have little to tell

On this or any feast

Except of the terrible past.

Five thousand years are cast

Down before the wondering child

Who must expiate them all.

Some of us have replied

In the bitterness of youth

Or the qualms of middle-age:

“If Time is unsatisfied,

And all our fathers have suffered

Can never be enough,

Why, then, we choose to forget.

Let our forgetting begin

With those age-old arguments

In which their minds were wound

Like musty phylacteries;

And we choose to forget as well

Those cherished histories

That made our old men fond,

And already are strange to us.

“Or let us, being today

Too rational to cry out,

Or trample underfoot

What after all preserves

A certain savor yet—

Though torn up by the roots—

Let us make our compromise

With the terror and the guilt

And view as curious relics

Once found in daily use

The mythology, the names

That, however Time has corrupted

Their ancient purity

Still burn like yellow flames,

But their fire is not for us.”

And yet, however we choose

To deny or to remember,

Though on the calendars

We wake and suffer by,

This day is merely one

Of thirty in September—

In the kernel of the mind

The new year must renew

This day, as for our kind

Over five thousand years,

The task of being ourselves.

Whatever we strain to forget,

Our memory must be long.

May the taste of honey linger

Under the bitterest tongue.

1955

MOVING IN WINTER

Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,

is carried piecemeal through the snow:

Headboard and footboard now, the bed

where she has lain desiring him

where overhead his sleep will build

its canopy to smother her once more;

their table, by four elbows worn

evening after evening while the wax runs down;

mirrors grey with reflecting them,

bureaus coffining from the cold

things that can shuffle in a drawer,

carpets rolled up around those echoes

which, shaken out, take wing and breed

new altercations, the old silences.

1957

NECESSITIES

OF LIFE

(1966)

I

Poems

1962–1965

Changeray-je pas pour vous cette belle

contexture des choses? C’est la condition

de vostre creation, c’est une partie de

vous que la mort: vous vous fuyez vous-mesmes.

—Montaigne

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

Piece by piece I seem

to re-enter the world: I first began

a small, fixed dot, still see

that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack

pushed into the scene,

a hard little head protruding

from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.

After a time the dot

begins to ooze. Certain heats

melt it.

Now I was hurriedly

blurring into ranges

of burnt red, burning green,

whole biographies swam up and

swallowed me like Jonah.

Jonah! I was Wittgenstein,

Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul

of Louis Jouvet, dead

in a blown-up photograph.

Till, wolfed almost to shreds,

I learned to make myself

unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb

thrown into a cellar

I used myself, let nothing use me.

Like being on a private dole,

sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt.

What life was there, was mine,

now and again to lay

one hand on a warm brick

and touch the sun’s ghost

with economical joy,

now and again to name

over the bare necessities.

So much for those days. Soon

practice may make me middling-perfect, I’ll

dare inhabit the world

trenchant in motion as an eel, solid

as a cabbage-head. I have invitations:

a curl of mist steams upward

from a field, visible as my breath,

houses along a road stand waiting

like old women knitting, breathless

to tell their tales.

1962

IN THE WOODS

“Difficult ordinary happiness,”

no one nowadays believes in you.

I shift, full-length on the blanket,

to fix the sun precisely

behind the pine-tree’s crest

so light spreads through the needles

alive as water just

where a snake has surfaced,

unreal as water in green crystal.

Bad news is always arriving.

“We’re hiders, hiding from something bad,”

sings the little boy.

Writing these words in the woods,

I feel like a traitor to my friends,

even to my enemies.

The common lot’s to die

a stranger’s death and lie

rouged in the coffin, in a dress

chosen by the funeral director.

Perhaps that’s why we never

see clocks on public buildings any more.

A fact no architect will mention.

We’re hiders, hiding from something bad

most of the time.

Yet, and outrageously, something good

finds us, found me this morning

lying on a dusty blanket

among the burnt-out Indian pipes

and bursting-open lady’s-slippers.

My soul, my helicopter, whirred

distantly, by habit, over

the old pond with the half-drowned boat

toward which it always veers

for consolation: ego’s Arcady:

leaving the body stuck

like a leaf against a screen.—

Happiness! how many times

I’ve stranded on that word,

at the edge of that pond; seen

as if through tears, the dragon-fly—

only to find it all

going differently for once

this time: my soul wheeled back

and burst into my body.

Found! ready or not.

If I move now, the sun

naked between the trees

will melt me as I lie.

1963

THE CORPSE-PLANT

How dare a sick man, or an obedient man, write poems?

—Whitman

A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains

from the discolored ceiling

is beautiful tonight. On the floor, leaves, crayons,

innocent dust foregather.

Neither obedient nor sick, I turn my head,

feeling the weight of a thick gold ring

in either lobe. I see the corpse-plants

clustered in a hobnailed tumbler

at my elbow, white as death, I’d say,

if I’d ever seen death;

whiter than life

next to my summer-stained hand.

Is it in the sun that truth begins?

Lying under that battering light

the first few hours of summer

I felt scraped clean, washed down

to ignorance. The gold in my ears,

souvenir of a shrewd old city,

might have been wearing thin as wires

found in the bones of a woman’s head

miraculously kept in its essentials

in some hot cradle-tomb of time.

I felt my body slipping through

the fingers of its mind.

Later, I slid on wet rocks,

threw my shoes across a brook,

waded on algae-furred stones

to join them. That day I found

the corpse-plants, growing like

shadows on a negative

in the chill of fern and lichen-rust.

That day for the first time

I gave them their deathly names—

or did they name themselves?—

not “Indian pipes” as once

we children knew them.

Tonight, I think of winter,

winters of mind, of flesh,

sickness of the rot-smell of leaves

turned silt-black, heavy as tarpaulin,

obedience of the elevator cage

lowering itself, crank by crank

into the mine-pit,

forced labor forcibly renewed—

but the horror is dimmed:

like the negative of one

intolerable photograph

it barely sorts itself out

under the radiance of the milk-glass shade.

Only death’s insect whiteness

crooks its neck in a tumbler

where I placed its sign by choice.

1963

THE TREES

The trees inside are moving out into the forest,

the forest that was empty all these days

where no bird could sit

no insect hide

no sun bury its feet in shadow

the forest that was empty all these nights

will be full of trees by morning.

All night the roots work

to disengage themselves from the cracks

in the veranda floor.

The leaves strain toward the glass

small twigs stiff with exertion

long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof

like newly discharged patients

half-dazed, moving

to the clinic doors.

I sit inside, doors open to the veranda

writing long letters

in which I scarcely mention the departure

of the forest from the house.

The night is fresh, the whole moon shines

in a sky still open

the smell of leaves and lichen

still reaches like a voice into the rooms.

My head is full of whispers

which tomorrow will be silent.

Listen. The glass is breaking.

The trees are stumbling forward

into the night. Winds rush to meet them.

The moon is broken like a mirror,

its pieces flash now in the crown

of the tallest oak.

1963

LIKE THIS TOGETHER

For A.H.C.

1.

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

Birds scatter across islands

of broken ice. Another time

I’d have said “Canada geese,”

knowing you love them.

A year, ten years from now

I’ll remember this—

this sitting like drugged birds

in a glass case—

not why, only that we

were here like this together.

2.

They’re tearing down, tearing up

this city, block by block.

Rooms cut in half

hang like flayed carcasses,

their old roses in rags,

famous streets have forgotten

where they were going. Only

a fact could be so dreamlike.

They’re tearing down the houses

we met and lived in,

soon our two bodies will be all

left standing from that era.

3.

We have, as they say,

certain things in common.

I mean: a view

from a bathroom window

over slate to stiff pigeons

huddled every morning; the way

water tastes from our tap,

which you marvel at, letting

it splash into the glass.

Because of you I notice

the taste of water,

a luxury I might

otherwise have missed.

4.

Our words misunderstand us.

Sometimes at night

you are my mother:

old detailed griefs

twitch at my dreams, and I

crawl against you, fighting

for shelter, making you

my cave. Sometimes

you’re the wave of birth

that drowns me in my first

nightmare. I suck the air.

Miscarried knowledge twists us

like hot sheets thrown askew.

5.

Dead winter doesn’t die,

it wears away, a piece of carrion

picked clean at last,

rained away or burnt dry.

Our desiring does this,

make no mistake, I’m speaking

of fact: through mere indifference

we could prevent it.

Only our fierce attention

gets hyacinths out of those

hard cerebral lumps,

unwraps the wet buds down

the whole length of a stem.

1963

BREAKFAST IN A

BOWLING ALLEY IN

UTICA, NEW YORK

Smudged eyeballs,

mouth stale as air,

I’m newly dead, a corpse

so fresh the grave unnerves me.

Nobody here but me

and Hermes behind the counter

defrosting sandwich steaks.

Paeans of vox humana

sob from the walls. THIS LAND

IS MY LAND.… It sounds

mummified. Has no sex,

no liquor license.

I chew meat and bread

thinking of wheatfields—

a gold-beige ceinture—

and cattle like ghosts

of the buffalo, running

across plains, nearing

the abbatoir. Houses

dream old-fashionedly

in backwoods townships

while the land glitters

with temporary life

stuck fast by choice:

trailers put out taproots

of sewage pipe, suckers

of TV aerial—

but in one of them,

perhaps, a man

alone with his girl

for the first time.

1963

OPEN-AIR MUSEUM

Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?

What burns in the dump today?

Thick flames in a grey field, tended

by two men: one derelict ghost,

one clearly apter at nursing destruction,

two priests in a grey field, tending the flames

of stripped-off rockwool, split

mattresses, a caved-in chickenhouse,

mad Lou’s last stack of paintings, each a perfect black lozenge

seen from a train, stopped

as by design, to bring us

face to face with the flag of our true country:

violet-yellow, black-violet,

its heart sucked by slow fire

O my America

this then was your desire?

but you cannot burn fast enough:

in the photograph the white

skirts of the Harlem bride

are lashed by blown scraps, tabloid sheets,

and her beauty a scrap of flickering light

licked by a greater darkness

This then was your desire!

those trucked-off bad dreams

outside the city limits

crawl back in search of you, eyes

missing, skins missing, intenser in decay

the carriage that wheeled the defective baby

rolls up on three wheels

and the baby is still inside,

you cannot burn fast enough

Blue sparks of the chicory flower

flash from embers of the dump

inside the rose-rust carcass of a slaughtered Chevrolet

crouches the young ailanthus

and the two guardians go raking the sacred field, raking

slowly, to what endless end

Cry of truth among so many lies

at your heart burns on

a languid fire

1964

TWO SONGS

1.

Sex, as they harshly call it,

I fell into this morning

at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour

of traffic and wet newspapers.

I thought of him who yesterday

clearly didn’t

turn me to a hot field

ready for plowing,

and longing for that young man

piercéd me to the roots

bathing every vein, etc.

All day he appears to me

touchingly desirable,

a prize one could wreck one’s peace for.

I’d call it love if love

didn’t take so many years

but lust too is a jewel

a sweet flower and what

pure happiness to know

all our high-toned questions

breed in a lively animal.

2.

That “old last act”!

And yet sometimes

all seems post coitum triste

and I a mere bystander.

Somebody else is going off,

getting shot to the moon.

Or, a moon-race!

Split seconds after my opposite number

lands

I make it—

we lie fainting together

at a crater-edge

heavy as mercury in our moonsuits

till he speaks—

in a different language

yet one I’ve picked up

through cultural exchanges …

we murmur the first moonwords:

Spasibo. Thanks. O.K.

1964

THE PARTING

The ocean twanging away there

and the islands like scattered laundry—

You can feel so free, so free,

standing on the headland

where the wild rose never stands still,

the petals blown off

before they fall

and the chicory nodding

blue, blue, in the all-day wind.

Barbed wire, dead at your feet,

is a kind of dune-vine,

the only one without movement.

Every knot is a knife

where two strands tangle to rust.

1963

NIGHT-PIECES: FOR A CHILD

THE CRIB

You sleeping I bend to cover.

Your eyelids work. I see

your dream, cloudy as a negative,

swimming underneath.

You blurt a cry. Your eyes

spring open, still filmed in dream.

Wider, they fix me—

—death’s head, sphinx, medusa?

You scream.

Tears lick my cheeks, my knees

droop at your fear.

Mother I no more am,

but woman, and nightmare.

HER WAKING

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark

hourless as Hiroshima,

almost hearing you breathe

in a cot three doors away.

You still breathe, yes—

and my dream with its gift of knives,

its murderous hider and seeker,

ebbs away, recoils

back into the egg of dreams,

the vanishing point of mind.

All gone.

But you and I—

swaddled in a dumb dark

old as sickheartedness,

modern as pure annihilation—

we drift in ignorance.

If I could hear you now

mutter some gentle animal sound!

If milk flowed from my breast again….

1964

THE STRANGER

Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!

We arrange a prison-temple

for the weak-legged little god

who might stamp the world to bits

or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.

We hang his shrine with bells,

aeolian harps, paper windmills,

line it with biscuits and swansdown.

His lack of culture we expected,

scarcely his disdain however—

that wild hauteur, as if

it were we who blundered.

Wildness we fret to avenge!

Eye that hasn’t yet blinked

on the unblinking gold archways

of its trance—that we know

must be trained away:

that aloof, selective stare.

Otherness that affronts us

as cats and dogs do not—

once this was original sin

beaten away with staves of holy writ.

Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault

of the little god still baffles.

All other strangers are forgiven

Their strangeness, but he—

how save the eggshell world from his

reaching hands, how shield

ourselves from the disintegrating

blaze of his wide pure eye?

1964

AFTER DARK

I.

You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

old tree of life

old man whose death I wanted

I can’t stir you up now.

Faintly a phonograph needle

Whirs round in the last groove

eating my heart to dust.

That terrible record! how it played

down years, wherever I was

in foreign languages even

over and over, I know you better

than you know yourself   I know

you better than you know

yourself   I know

you   until, self-maimed,

I limped off, torn at the roots,

stopped singing a whole year,

got a new body, new breath,

got children, croaked for words,

forgot to listen

or read your mene tekel fading on the wall,

woke up one morning

and knew myself your daughter.

Blood is a sacred poison.

Now, unasked, you give ground.

We only want to stifle

what’s stifling us already.

Alive now, root to crown, I’d give

—oh,—something—not to know

our struggles now are ended.

I seem to hold you, cupped

in my hands, and disappearing.

When your memory fails—

no more to scourge my inconsistencies—

the sashcords of the world fly loose.

A window crashes

suddenly down. I go to the woodbox

and take a stick of kindling

to prop the sash again.

I grow protective toward the world.

II.

Now let’s away from prison—

Underground seizures!

I used to huddle in the grave

I’d dug for you and bite

my tongue for fear it would babble

—Darling—

I thought they’d find me there

someday, sitting upright, shrunken,

my hair like roots and in my lap

a mess of broken pottery—

wasted libation—

and you embalmed beside me.

No, let’s away. Even now

there’s a walk between doomed elms

(whose like we shall not see much longer)

and something—grass and water—

an old dream-photograph.

I’ll sit with you there and tease you

for wisdom, if you like,

waiting till the blunt barge

bumps along the shore.

Poppies burn in the twilight

like smudge pots.

I think you hardly see me

but—this is the dream now—

your fears blow out,

off, over the water.

At the last, your hand feels steady.

1964

MOURNING PICTURE

The picture is by Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850–1923.

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker

out under the lilac bush,

and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.

Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,

my doll lies in her wicker pram

gazing at western Massachusetts.

This was our world.

I could remake each shaft of grass

feeling its rasp on my fingers,

draw out the map of every lilac leaf

or the net of veins on my father’s

grief-tranced hand.

Out of my head, half-bursting,

still filling, the dream condenses—

shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.

Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light

carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,

under high early-summer clouds,

I am Effie, visible and invisible,

remembering and remembered.

They will move from the house,

give the toys and the pets away.

Mute and rigid with loss my mother

will ride the train to Baptist Corner,

the silk-spool will run bare.

I tell you, the thread that bound us lies

faint as a web in the dew.

Should I make you, world, again,

could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air

its early-summer cloud, the house

its noonday presence, shadowless,

and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.

1965

“I AM IN DANGER—SIR—”

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,

afterward famous in garbled versions,

your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,

now your old snood

mothballed at Harvard

and you in your variorum monument

equivocal to the end—

who are you?

Gardening the day-lily,

wiping the wine-glass stems,

your thought pulsed on behind

a forehead battered paper-thin,

you, woman, masculine

in single-mindedness,

for whom the word was more

than a symptom—

a condition of being.

Till the air buzzing with spoiled language

sang in your ears

of Perjury

and in your half-cracked way you chose

silence for entertainment,

chose to have it out at last

on your own premises.

1964

HALFWAY

In Memory: M.G.J.

In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket.

Masses of birds revolve, blades

of a harvester.

The sky is getting milkily white,

a sac of light is ready to burst open.

Time of hailstones and rainbow.

My life flows North. At last I understand.

A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead.

A tray of expensive waxen fruit,

she lies arranged on the spare-room coverlid.

To sit by the fire is to become another woman,

red hair charring to grey,

green eyes grappling with the printed page,

voice flailing, flailing, the uncomprehending.

My days lie open, listening, grandmother.

1965

AUTUMN SEQUENCE

1.

An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

and dreams of the subtly tyrannical.

Thirst in the morning; waking into the blue

drought of another October

to read the familiar message nailed

to some burning bush or maple.

Breakfast under the pines, late yellow-

jackets fumbling for manna on the rim

of the stone crock of marmalade,

and shed pine-needles drifting

in the half-empty cup.

Generosity is drying out,

it’s an act of will to remember

May’s sticky-mouthed buds

on the provoked magnolias.

2.

Still, a sweetness hardly earned

by virtue or craft, belonging

by no desperate right to me

(as the marmalade to the wasp

who risked all in a last euphoria

of hunger)

washes the horizon. A quiet

after weeping, salt still on the tongue

is like this, when the autumn planet

looks me straight in the eye

and straight into the mind

plunges its impersonal spear:

Fill and flow over, think

till you weep, then sleep

to drink again.

3.

Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

flayed stiff in the wind,

half-mast on the day of victory,

anarchist prince of evening marshes!

Your eye blurs in a wet smoke,

the stubble freezes under your heel,

the cornsilk Mädchen all hags now,

their gold teeth drawn,

the milkweeds gutted and rifled,

but not by you, foundering hero!

The future reconnoiters in dirty boots

along the cranberry-dark horizon.

Stars swim like grease-flecks

in that sky, night pulls a long knife.

Your empire drops to its knees in the dark.

4.

Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Charcoal slabs pitted with gold.

The reason for cities comes clear.

There must be a place, there has come a time—

where so many nerves are fusing—

for a purely moral loneliness.

Behind bloodsoaked lights of the avenues,

in the crystal grit of flying snow,

in this water-drop bulging at the taphead,

forced by dynamos three hundred miles

from the wild duck’s landing and the otter’s dive,

for three seconds of quivering identity.

There must be a place. But the eyeball stiffens

as night tightens and my hero passes out

with a film of stale gossip coating his tongue.

1964

NOON

Light pulses through underground chambers.

I have to tell myself: my eyes are not blue.

Two dark holes

Feed at the sky.

It swirls through them, raging

in azure spirals.

Nothing changes them:

two black tubes, draining off

a lake of iris.

Cleave open my skull:

The gouts of blue

Leap from the black grotto.

1965

NOT LIKE THAT

It’s so pure in the cemetery.

The children love to play up here.

It’s a little town, a game of blocks,

a village packed in a box,

a pre-war German toy.

The turf is a bedroom carpet:

heal-all, strawberry flower

and hillocks of moss.

To come and sit here forever,

a cup of tea on one’s lap

and one’s eyes closed lightly, lightly,

perfectly still

in a nineteenth-century sleep!

it seems so normal to die.

Nobody sleeps here, children.

The little beds of white wrought iron

and the tall, kind, faceless nurse

are somewhere else, in a hospital

or the dreams of prisoners of war.

The drawers of this trunk are empty,

not even a snapshot

curls in a corner.

In Pullmans of childhood we lay

enthralled behind dark-green curtains,

and a little lamp burned blue

all night, for us. The day

was a dream too, even the oatmeal

under its silver lid, dream-cereal

spooned out in forests of spruce

skirting the green-black gorges,

thick woods of sleep, half prickle,

half lakes of fern.

To stay here forever

is not like that, nor even

simply to lie quite still,

the warm trickle of dream

staining the thick quiet.

The drawers of this trunk are empty.

They are all out of sleep up here.

1965

THE KNOT

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.

For years I never saw it,

years of metallic vision,

spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

suns off a Swiss lake.

A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider

sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint

into the white apparencies.

Little wonder the eye, healing, sees

for a long time through a mist of blood.

1965

ANY HUSBAND TO ANY WIFE

“Might I die last and show thee!”

I know: you are glycerine,

old quills, rose velvet,

tearstains in Middlemarch,

a style of getting into cabs, of eating fruit,

a drawer of stones, chains, seeds, shells, little mirrors:

Darling, you will outlive yourself, and me.

Sometimes the sea backs up against a lashed pier,

grinding and twisting,

a turmoil of wrecked stuff

alive and dead. And the pier stands groaning

as if the land depended on it.

We say it is the moon that draws these tides,

then glazes in aftercalm

the black, blurred face to something we can love.

1965

SIDE BY SIDE

Ho! in the dawn

how light we lie

stirring faintly as laundry

left all night on the lines.

You, a lemon-gold pyjama,

I, a trousseau-sheet, fine

linen worn paper-thin in places,

worked with the maiden monogram.

Lassitude drapes our folds.

We’re slowly bleaching

with the days, the hours, and the years.

We are getting finer than ever,

time is wearing us to silk,

to sheer spiderweb.

The eye of the sun, rising, looks in

to ascertain how we are coming on.

1965

SPRING THUNDER

1.

Thunder is all it is, and yet

my street becomes a crack in the western hemisphere,

my house a fragile nest of grasses.

The radiotelescope flings its nets

at random; a child is crying,

not from hunger, not from pain,

more likely impotence. The generals are sweltering

in the room with a thousand eyes.

Red-hot lights flash off and on

inside air-conditioned skulls.

Underfoot, a land-mass

puffed-up with bad faith and fatigue

goes lumbering onward,

old raft in the swollen waters,

unreformed Huck and Jim

watching the tangled yellow shores

rush by.

2.

Whatever you are that weeps

over the blistered riverbeds

and the cracked skin of cities,

you are not on our side,

eye never seeking our eyes,

shedding its griefs like stars

over our hectic indifference,

whispered monologue

subverting space with its tears,

mourning the mournable,

nailing the pale-grey woolly flower

back to its ledge.

3.

The power of the dinosaur

is ours, to die

inflicting death,

trampling the nested grasses:

power of dead grass

to catch fire

power of ash

to whirl off the burnt heap

in the wind’s own time.

4.

A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

generalized as a basalt mask.

Breathes like a rabbit, an Eskimo,

strips to an older and simpler thing.

No criminal, no hero; merely a shadow

cast by the conflagration

that here burns down or there leaps higher

but always in the shape of fire,

always the method of fire, casting

automatically, these shadows.

5.

Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

a great wall: no temporary shelter.

Did you tell yourself these beams would melt,

these fiery blocs dissolve?

Did you choose to build this thing?

Have you stepped back to see what it is?

It is immense; it has porches, catacombs.

It is provisioned like the Pyramids, for eternity.

Its buttresses beat back the air with iron tendons.

It is the first flying cathedral,

eating its parishes by the light of the moon.

It is the refinery of pure abstraction,

a total logic, rising

obscurely between one man

and the old, affective clouds.

1965

MOTH HOUR

Space mildews at our touch.

The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—

aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?

A million insects die every twilight,

no one even finds their corpses.

Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,

knows us better than we know ourselves.

I am gliding backward away from those who knew me

as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.

I can be replaced a thousand times,

a box containing death.

When you put out your hand to touch me

you are already reaching toward an empty space.

1965

FOCUS

For Bert Dreyfus

Obscurity has its tale to tell.

Like the figure on the studio-bed in the corner,

out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.

Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable

making of a jar of pencils, a typewriter keyboard

more than they were. Veridical light …

Earth budges. Now an empty coffee-cup,

a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on

their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand

of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.

O secret in the core of the whetstone, in the five

pencils splayed out like fingers of a hand!

The mind’s passion is all for singling out.

Obscurity has another tale to tell.

1965

FACE TO FACE

Never to be lonely like that—

the Early American figure on the beach

in black coat and knee-breeches

scanning the didactic storm in privacy,

never to hear the prairie wolves

in their lunar hilarity

circling one’s little all, one’s claim

to be Law and Prophets

for all that lawlessness,

never to whet the appetite

weeks early, for a face, a hand

longed-for and dreaded—

How people used to meet!

starved, intense, the old

Christmas gifts saved up till spring,

and the old plain words,

and each with his God-given secret,

spelled out through months of snow and silence,

burning under the bleached scalp; behind dry lips

a loaded gun.

1965

II

Translations from

the Dutch

MARTINUS NIJHOFF

THE SONG OF THE FOOLISH BEES

A smell of further honey

embittered nearer flowers,

a smell of further honey

sirened us from our meadow.

That smell and a soft humming

crystallized in the azure,

that smell and a soft humming,

a wordless repetition,

called upon us, the reckless,

to leave our usual gardens,

called upon us, the reckless,

to seek mysterious roses.

Far from our folk and kindred

joyous we went careering,

far from our folk and kindred

exhuberantly driven.

No one can by nature

break off the course of passion,

no one can by nature

endure death in his body.

Always more fiercely yielding,

more lucently transfigured,

always more fiercely yielding

to that elusive token,

we rose and staggered upward,

kidnapped, disembodied,

we rose and vanished upward,

dissolving into glitter.

It’s snowing; we are dying,

homeward, downward whirled.

It’s snowing; we are dying;

it snows among the hives.

HENDRIK DE VRIES

MY BROTHER

My brother, nobody knows

the end you suffered.

Often you lie beside me, dim, and I

grow confused, grope, and startle.

You walked along that path through the elms.

Birds cried late. Something wrong

was following us both. But you

wanted to go alone through the waste.

Last night we slept again together.

Your heart jerked next to me. I spoke your name

and asked where you were going.

Your answer came:

“The horror! … there’s no telling …

See: the grass

lies dense again, the elms

press round.”

HENDRIK DE VRIES

FEVER

Listen! It’s never sung like that! Listen!

The wallpaper stirred,

and the hairs of the heavy-fringed eye.

What flew

Through the rooms?

Tomorrow it will be

as if all night the whips hadn’t lashed so.—

See, through the blinds,

The spirits in their cold ships!

Boughs graze the frame

of the window. Far off, a whistle

sounds, always clearly, along the fields.

The beasts on the walls

fade away. The light goes out.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

EBEN HAËZER

(Hebrew for “Stone of Help”; a common old name for farmhouses in Holland.)

Sabbath evening privacy at home.

Mist-footsteps, prowling past the shed.

At that hour, not another soul abroad;

the blue farmhouse a closed hermitage.

There we lived together, man and mouse.

Through cowstall windows an eternal fire

fell ridged from gold lamps on the threshing-floor,

stillness of linseed cakes and hay in house.

There my father celebrated mass:

serving the cows, priestlike at their heads.

Their tongues curled along his hands like fish.

A shadow, diagonal to the rafters.

Worship hung heavy from the loftbeams.

His arteries begin to calcify.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

ACCOUNTABILITY

Old oblivion-book, that I lay open.

White eye-corner rounding the page.

Gold lace slips out under the evening,

Green animals creep backwards.

Lifelessness of the experimental station.

Added-up, subtracted sum.

Black night. Over the starlight skims

God’s index finger, turning the page.

Death comes walking on all fours

past the room, a crystal egg,

with the lamp, the books, the bread,

where you are living and life-size.

GERRIT ACHTERBERG

STATUE

A body, blind with sleep,

stands up in my arms.

Its heaviness weighs on me.

Death-doll.

I’m an eternity too late.

And where’s your heartbeat?

The thick night glues us together,

makes us compact with each other.

“For God’s sake go on holding me—

my knees are broken,”

you mumble against my heart.

It’s as if I held up the earth.

And slowly, moss is creeping

all over our two figures.

LEO VROMAN

OUR FAMILY

My father, who since his death

no longer speaks audibly

lies sometimes, a great walrus

from nightfall to daybreak

his muzzle in my lap

in the street from his chin down.

The light of morning feeds

through his hide, thinned to parchment,

and his slackened features dwindle

to a line creeping off among the chairs;

if I rise to peer at him

he winces away to a dot

In the daytime there’s nothing to see

but an emphatically vanished

absence where moments ago

the sun too was just shining.

Where my father has stood

it now just quivers,

rippling by handfuls through

my little daughter’s light hair

while on the sunny grass

she slowly scampers forward.

Her little snoot is so open

you could easily spread it out

with a teaspoon or your finger

on a slice of fresh white bread

or, if need be,

you could mold it into a pudding.

Her little voice itches like a fleece;

it wriggles gaily into my ear

and can’t get out when it laughs;

with plopping fishfins

it folds itself struggling up

into my head. Where it spends the night.

And here, this taller child

is Tineke, my wife.

She hums a nursery rhyme

to the hair on her third breast,

which whimpers, being a baby,

and a thirsty baby at that.

I have such a gentle family,

it kisses, goes on eight legs,

but it has no moustache:

my father has vanished,

and they too are all going to die:

too soft, if they turn into air,

to swing a weathercock;

if turned into water, too slight

to fill a gutter; if into light

to make one live cock crow.

CHR. J. VAN GEEL

HOMECOMING

The sea, a body of mysterious calls

is almost motionless.

I know a beach, a tree stands there

in which women are singing,

voluptuous, languid.

In harbors ships are steaming

full of honey from the sea. Drizzle hangs

like eyelashes over the landscape.

Behind the seadike, breathing invisibly

in the mist, sleep the cows.

The hobble of a horse drags along the fence,

holding still where I stand with sweet words.

Listen, the sea calls,

claps her hands.

The ships running out in the wet

come like children—one drags

a sled into the garden.

CHR. J. VAN GEEL

SLEEPWALKING

(next to death.)

Sleep, horns of a snail

Out of the black and white bed, floors of red glaze,

mornings in the careful garden

on paths suitable rubbish slowly buried

and without urgency overgrown with grass

with ivy and sometimes a flower

just as we dream

to see unseen, to listen unattended.

The twigs of the moon

in indifferent white,

horns upright, wood with-

out leaf and seeking bees

sadness down to the ground.

Like silence always and from afar

lisps the water

never, by no one possessed.

Dead trees in green leaf.

What to do but among bushes,

what to see but underbrush.

On this sun time sharpens itself

to brilliance.

A stone of untouchable fire

on which time breaks its tooth.

Time caught no hour: loafing next to

a blaze.

In the darkened town the old groped

with their sticks.

The rays of the sun are tired,

the beetles rot in the wood,

only the sea….

In the earth of the dead

earth covers leaf, leaf covers leaf.

Heartbeat of the wild creeper,

hammer between wing-lashes,

butterflies hammer at the sun.

Now you must get to the institution

with a mask on, your little feet

tarred, an iron crown on your head.

You awake there a python,

a boa constrictor,

after seven-and-twenty years,

after six-and-twenty years,

fair sleep, fair sleepers.

You strike the prince twice

a youth wasted with waiting

for your serpent eyes and

you unfold your scaly tail.

Now you must get to the institution

with a mask on, your little feet

tarred, an iron crown on your head.

Night blows away from the sun,

sky in fresh wind,

the sea kicks off its surf.

The moon scorches, a cloud of steam.

Driving water torn to shreds,

sunny twilight, fruitless field.

Tamed sea, muscular

to the temples, stoop where no coast

is, under the familiar blows,

stand where you cannot stand,

night is embraced on the sun.

A scared hind in a wood of one tree.

Whether the dead live, how they rest or

decay, leaves me cold, for cold for good and all

is death.

Poor is the frontier of life, to die blossoms

away over the graves.

Every existence competes in every

lost chance of life for death.

Of always fewer chances, one moved

and drove over her, naked standing by her child

death.

Residing in a thunderstorm,

sky hoists sun, night cuts light.

The wind’s wings are at home.

Whistle now out of the nights

sparks of burnt paper.

Whisper fire in the days

dried by the sun, your desires

are lightened, curled to ash.

Flowers for hunger,

the darkest, the blue,

of ash, of grey granite,

black ice,

room without window,

abacus without beads,

room without a person,

the eaten past

gnaws,

the teeth out of the comb,

the funeral wreath emptily devoured,

a stone.

Whatever I may contrive—

and I contrive it—death’s

private roads are the coldest night.

That I shall not be with her—

not with her—

that nothing shall glimmer

except danger.

Trees of ash, trees of ice,

the light frozen.

Summer and winter are

constructed of one emptiness.

The boughs of the wind are dead.

Must I dejected and contemplating death

now that above the sea a cloudless night

empties the sky, let treason and false laughter

prudently ring out until the morning?

the threshold of the horizon shifts—

and think with the thinkers of this earth:

“Life is thus”—then am I crazed

because my heart encloses what it held?

Morning has broken and the sea

is wide, I go back home to sleep.

Path, dune, trees and sheep

are rosy from the east, a rosy gull

flies up under the rash sky.

What’s silent speaks aloud buried in sleep.

POEMS

(1962–1965)

TO JUDITH, TAKING LEAVE

For J.H.

Dull-headed, with dull fingers

I patch once more

the pale brown envelope

still showing under ink scratches

the letterhead of Mind.

A chorus of old postmarks

echoes across its face.

It looks so frail

to send so far

and I should tear it across

mindlessly

and find another.

But I’m tired, can’t endure

a single new motion

or room or object,

so I cling to this too

as if your tallness moving

against the rainlight

in an Amsterdam flat

might be held awhile

by a handwritten label

or a battered envelope

from your desk.

Once somewhere else

I shan’t talk of you

as a singular event

or a beautiful thing I saw

though both are true.

I shan’t falsify you

through praising and describing

as I shall other

things I have loved

almost as much.

There in Amsterdam

you’ll be living as I

have seen you live

and as I’ve never seen you.

And I can trust

no plane to bring you

my life out there

in turbid America—

my own life, lived against

facts I keep there.

It wasn’t literacy—

the right to read Mind—

or suffrage—to vote

for the lesser of two

evils—that were

the great gains, I see now,

when I think of all those women

who suffered ridicule

for us.

But this little piece of ground,

Judith! that two women

in love to the nerves’ limit

with two men—

shared out in pieces

to men, children, memories

so different and so draining—

should think it possible

now for the first time

perhaps, to love each other

neither as fellow-victims

nor as a temporary

shadow of something better.

Still shared-out as we are,

lovers, poets, warmers

of men and children

against our flesh, not knowing

from day to day

what we’ll fling out on the water

or what pick up

there at the tide’s lip,

often tired, as I’m tired now

from sheer distances of soul

we have in one day to cover—

still to get here

to this little spur or headland

and feel now free enough

to leave our weapons somewhere

else—such are the secret

outcomes of revolution!

that two women can meet

no longer as cramped sharers

of a bitter mutual secret

but as two eyes in one brow

receiving at one moment

the rainbow of the world.

1962

ROOTS

For M.L.

Evenings seem endless, now

dark tugs at our sky

harder and earlier

and milkweeds swell to bursting …

now in my transatlantic eye

you stand on your terrace

a scarf on your head and in your hands

dead stalks of golden-glow

and now it’s for you,

not myself, I shiver

hearing glass doors rattle

at your back, the rustling cough

of a dry clematis vine

your love and toil trained up the walls

of a rented house.

All those roots, Margo!

Didn’t you start each slip between your breasts,

each dry seed, carrying some

across frontiers, knotted

into your handkerchief,

haven’t you seen your tears

glisten in narrow trenches

where rooted cuttings grope for life?

You, frailer than you look,

long back, long stride, blond hair

coiled up over straight shoulders—

I hear in your ear the wind

lashing in wet from the North Sea

slamming the dahlias flat.

All your work violated

every autumn, every turn of the wrist

guiding the trowel: mocked.

Sleet on brown fibers,

black wilt eating your harvest,

a clean sweep, and you the loser …

or is this after all

the liberation your hands fend off

and your eyes implore

when you dream of sudden death

or of beginning anew,

a girl of seventeen, the war just over,

and all the gardens

to dig again?

1963

THE PARTING: II

White morning flows into the mirror.

Her eye, still old with sleep,

meets itself like a sister.

How they slept last night,

the dream that caged them back to back,

was nothing new.

Last words, tears, most often

come wrapped as the everyday

familiar failure.

Now, pulling the comb slowly

through her loosened hair

she tries to find the parting;

it must come out after all:

hidden in all that tangle

there is a way.

1963

WINTER

Dead, dead, dead, dead.

A beast of the Middle Ages

stupefied in its den.

The hairs on its body—a woman’s—

cold as hairs on a bulb or tuber.

Nothing so bleakly leaden, you tell me,

as the hyacinth’s dull cone

before it bulks into blueness.

Ah, but I’d chosen to be

a woman, not a beast or a tuber!

No one knows where the storks went,

everyone knows they have disappeared.

Something—that woman—seems to have

migrated also; if she lives, she lives

sea-zones away, and the meaning grows colder.

1965

LEAFLETS

(1969)

For Rose Marie and Hayden Carruth

I

Night Watch

ORION

Far back when I went zig-zagging

through tamarack pastures

you were my genius, you

my cast-iron Viking, my helmed

lion-heart king in prison.

Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring

down from that simplified west

your breast open, your belt dragged down

by an oldfashioned thing, a sword

the last bravado you won’t give over

though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim

and maybe have stopped burning.

But you burn, and I know it;

as I throw back my head to take you in

an old transfusion happens again:

divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder,

break faith, leave ill enough

alone, a dead child born in the dark.

Night cracks up over the chimney,

pieces of time, frozen geodes

come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes

and finds them empty

a woman’s head turns away

from my head in the mirror

children are dying my death

and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.

Calmly you ache up there

pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,

my speechless pirate!

You take it all for granted

and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye

shooting its cold and egotistical spear

where it can do least damage.

Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon

out here in the cold with you

you with your back to the wall.

1965

HOLDING OUT

The hunters’ shack will do,

abandoned, untended, unmended

in its cul-de-sac of alders.

Inside, who knows what

hovel-keeping essentials—

a grey saucepan, a broom, a clock

stopped at last autumn’s last hour—

all or any, what matter.

The point is, it’s a shelter,

a place more in- than outside.

From that we could begin.

And the wind is surely rising,

snow is in the alders.

Maybe the stovepipe is sound,

maybe the smoke will do us in

at first—no matter.

Late afternoons the ice

squeaks underfoot like mica,

and when the sun drops red and moon-

faced back of the gun-colored firs,

the best intentions are none too good.

Then we have to make a go of it

in the smoke with the dark outside

and our love in our boots at first—

no matter.

1965

FLESH AND BLOOD

For C.

A cracked walk in the garden,

white violets choking in the ivy,

then O then …

Everyone else I’ve had to tell how it was,

only not you.

Nerve-white, the cloud came walking

over the crests of tallest trees.

Doors slammed. We

fell asleep, hot Sundays, in our slips,

two mad little goldfish

fluttering in a drying pond.

Nobody’s seen the trouble I’ve seen

but you.

Our jokes are funnier for that

you’d say

and, Lord, it’s true.

1965

IN THE EVENING

Three hours chain-smoking words

and you move on. We stand in the porch,

two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

The old masters, the old sources,

haven’t a clue what we’re about,

shivering here in the half-dark ’sixties.

Our minds hover in a famous impasse

and cling together. Your hand

grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

The wall of the house is bleeding. Firethorn!

The moon, cracked every which-way,

pushes steadily on.

1966

MISSING THE POINT

There it was, all along,

twisted up in that green vine-thread,

in the skeins of marble,

on the table behind them—those two!

white-faced and undeterred—

everything doubled: forks,

brown glass tumblers, echoing plates,

two crumbled portions of bread.

That was the point that was missed

when they left the room with its wavy light

and pale curtains blowing

and guessed the banquet was over, the picnic

under the leaves was over,

when haggling faces pushed in for a look

and the gingerbread village shrieked outside:

Who’s in the wrong? Who’s in the wrong?

1966

CITY

From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

Maybe you spoke to someone

and on that hour your face

printed itself for good.

Where is that man? I need

to find him before he dies

and see you drift across his retina.

You have played with children.

They will run up to me

whenever you

come home free in their dreams.

Houses, realized by you,

slumber in that web.

Streets suppose you

in other streets, and call:

Evening papers …

Strawberries …

The city has changed hands;

the plan you gave it, fallen through.

1962

DWINGELO

From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

In the never, still arriving, I find you

again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive,

makes of October an adjusted lens.

The days have almost no clouds left.

Cassiopeia, the Great Bear

let their signals burst by night

to rip into impossibility.

The Pleiades rage silently about.

To wait is the password; and to listen.

In Dwingelo you can hear it whisper,

the void in the radiotelescope.

There too the singing of your nerves is gathered,

becoming graphic on a sheet of paper

not unlike this one here.

1962

THE DEMON LOVER

Fatigue, regrets. The lights

go out in the parking lot

two by two. Snow blindness

settles over the suburb.

Desire. Desire. The nebula

opens in space, unseen,

your heart utters its great beats

in solitude. A new

era is coming in.

Gauche as we are, it seems

we have to play our part.

A plaid dress, silk scarf,

and eyes that go on stinging.

Woman, stand off. The air

glistens like silk.

She’s gone. In her place stands

a schoolgirl, morning light,

the half-grown bones

of innocence. Is she

your daughter or your muse,

this tree of blondness

grown up in a field of thorns?

Something piercing and marred.

Take note. Look back. When quick

the whole northeast went black

and prisoners howled and children

ran through the night with candles,

who stood off motionless

side by side while the moon swam up

over the drowned houses?

Who neither touched nor spoke?

whose nape, whose finger-ends

nervelessly lied the hours away?

A voice presses at me.

If I give in it won’t

be like the girl the bull rode,

all Rubens flesh and happy moans.

But to be wrestled like a boy

with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain …

with language?

He doesn’t know. He’s watching

breasts under a striped blouse,

his bull’s head down.

The old wine pours again through my veins.

Goodnight, then. ’Night. Again

we turn our backs and weary

weary we let down.

Things take us hard, no question.

How do you make it, all the way

from here to morning? I touch

you, made of such nerve

and flare and pride and swallowed tears.

Go home. Come to bed. The skies

look in at us, stern.

And this is an old story.

I dreamed about the war.

We were all sitting at table

in a kitchen in Chicago.

The radio had just screamed

that Illinois was the target.

No one felt like leaving,

we sat by the open window

and talked in the sunset.

I’ll tell you that joke tomorrow,

you said with your saddest smile,

if I can remember.

The end is just a straw,

a feather furling slowly down,

floating to light by chance, a breath

on the long-loaded scales.

Posterity trembles like a leaf

and we go on making heirs and heirlooms.

The world, we have to make it,

my coexistent friend said, leaning

back in his cell.

Siberia vastly hulks

behind him, which he did not make.

Oh futile tenderness

of touch in a world like this!

how much longer, dear child,

do you think sex will matter?

There might have been a wedding

that never was:

two creatures sprung free

from castiron covenants.

Instead our hands and minds

erotically waver …

Lightness is unavailing.

Catalpas wave and spill

their dull strings across this murk of spring.

I ache, brilliantly.

Only where there is language is there world.

In the harp of my hair, compose me

a song. Death’s in the air,

we all know that. Still, for an hour,

I’d like to be gay. How could a gay song go?

Why that’s your secret, and it shall be mine.

We are our words, and black and bruised and blue.

Under our skins, we’re laughing.

In triste veritas?

Take hold, sweet hands, come on …

Broken!

When you falter, all eludes.

This is a seasick way,

this almost/never touching, this

drawing-off, this to-and-fro.

Subtlety stalks in your eyes,

your tongue knows what it knows.

I want your secrets—I will have them out.

Seasick, I drop into the sea.

1966

JERUSALEM

In my dream, children

are stoning other children

with blackened carob-pods

I dream my son is riding

on an old grey mare

to a half-dead war

on a dead-grey road

through the cactus and thistles

and dried brook-beds.

In my dream, children

are swaddled in smoke

and their uncut hair smolders

even here, here

where trees have no shade

and rocks have no shadow

trees have no memories

only the stones and

the hairs of the head.

I dream his hair is growing

and has never been shorn

from slender temples hanging

like curls of barbed wire

and his first beard is growing

smoldering like fire

his beard is smoke and fire

and I dream him riding

patiently to the war.

What I dream of the city

is how hard it is to leave

and how useless to walk

outside the blasted walls

picking up the shells

from a half-dead war

and I wake up in tears

and hear the sirens screaming

and the carob-tree is bare.

Balfour Street, July 1966

CHARLESTON IN THE 1860’s

Derived from the diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut.

He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat …

Your eyes, dear, are they grey or blue,

eyes of an angel?

The carts have passed already with their heaped

night-soil, we breathe again …

Is this what war is? Nitrate …

But smell the pear,

the jasmine, the violets.

Why does this landscape always sadden you?

Now the freshet is up on every side,

the river comes to our doors,

limbs of primeval trees dip in the swamp.

So we fool on into the black

cloud ahead of us.

Everything human glitters fever-bright—

the thrill of waking up

out of a stagnant life?

There seems a spell upon

your lovers, —all dead of wounds

or blown to pieces … Nitrate!

I’m writing, blind with tears of rage.

In vain. Years, death, depopulation, fears,

bondage—these shall all be borne.

No imagination to forestall woe.

1966

NIGHT WATCH

And now, outside, the walls

of black flint, eyeless.

How pale in sleep you lie.

Love: my love is just a breath

blown on the pane and dissolved.

Everything, even you,

cries silently for help, the web

of the spider is ripped with rain,

the geese fly on into the black cloud.

What can I do for you?

what can I do for you?

Can the touch of a finger mend

what a finger’s touch has broken?

Blue-eyed now, yellow-haired,

I stand in my old nightmare

beside the track, while you,

and over and over and always you

plod into the deathcars.

Sometimes you smile at me

and I—I smile back at you.

How sweet the odor of the station-master’s roses!

How pure, how poster-like the colors of this dream.

1967

THERE ARE SUCH SPrINGLIKE NIGHTS

From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.

There are such springlike nights here,

when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil

and the fresh dawn is a green pillow

under the skeleton of a dead horse.

And all the limbs of a woman plead for the ache of birth.

And women come to lie down like sick sheep

by the wells—to heal their bodies,

their faces blackened with yearlong thirst for a child’s cry.

There are such springlike nights here

when lightning pierces the black soil with silver knives

and pregnant women approach the white tables of the hospital

with quiet steps

and smile at the unborn child

and perhaps at death.

There are such springlike nights here

when a blade of grass pushes up through the soil.

1968

FOR A RUSSIAN POET

1. The Winter Dream

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot

drags across huge cobblestones, bells

hammer in distant squares.

Everything we stood against has conquered

and now we’re part

of it all. Life’s the main thing, I hear you say,

but a fog is spreading between this landmass

and the one your voice

mapped so long for me. All that’s visible

is walls, endlessly yellow-grey, where

so many risks were taken, the shredded skies

slowly littering both our continents with

the only justice left, burying

footprints, bells and voices with all deliberate speed.

1967

2. Summer in the Country

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk,

late August, forebodings

under the birches, along the water’s edge

and between the typed lines

and evenings, tracing a pattern of absurd hopes

in broken nutshells

but this year we both

sit after dark with the radio

unable to read, unable to write

trying the blurred edges of broadcasts

for a little truth, taking a walk before bed

wondering what a man can do, asking that

at the verge of tears in a lightning-flash of loneliness.

3. The Demonstration

Natalya Gorbanevskaya

13/3 Novopeschanaya Street

Apartment 34

At noon we sit down quietly on the parapet

and unfurl our banners

almost immediately

the sound of police whistles

from all corners of Red Square

we sit

quietly and offer no resistance

Is this your little boy

we will relive this over and over

the banners torn from our hands

blood flowing

a great jagged torn place

in the silence of complicity

that much at least

we did here

In your flat, drinking tea

waiting for the police

your children asleep while you write

quickly, the letters you want to get off

before tomorrow

I’m a ghost at your table

touching poems in a script I can’t read

we’ll meet each other later

August 1968

NIGHT IN THE KITCHEN

The refrigerator falls silent.

Then other things are audible:

this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.

The thickness budging forward in these veins

is surely something other

than blood:

say, molten lava.

You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;

nerves, friable as lightning

ending in burnt pine forests.

You are begun, beginning, your black heart drumming

slowly, triumphantly

inside its pacific cave.

1967

5:30 A.M.

Birds and periodic blood.

Old recapitulations.

The fox, panting, fire-eyed,

gone to earth in my chest.

How beautiful we are,

he and I, with our auburn

pelts, our trails of blood,

our miracle escapes,

our whiplash panic flogging us on

to new miracles!

They’ve supplied us with pills

for bleeding, pills for panic.

Wash them down the sink.

This is truth, then:

dull needle groping in the spinal fluid,

weak acid in the bottom of the cup,

foreboding, foreboding.

No one tells the truth about truth,

that it’s what the fox

sees from his scuffled burrow:

dull-jawed, onrushing

killer, being that

inanely single-minded

will have our skins at last.

1967

THE BREAK

All month eating the heart out,

smothering in a fierce insomnia …

First the long, spongy summer, drying

out by fits and starts, till a morning

torn off another calendar

when the wind stiffens, chairs

and tables rouse themselves

in a new, unplanned light

and a word flies like a dry leaf down the hall

at the bang of a door.

Then break, October, speak,

non-existent and damning clarity.

Stare me down, thrust

your tongue against mine, break

day, let me stand up

like a table or a chair

in a cold room with the sun beating in

full on the dusty panes.

1967

TWO POEMS

Adapted from Anna Akhmatova.

1.

There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

neither the lover nor the expert sensualist

passes it, though mouths press silently together

and the heart is bursting.

And friends—they too are helpless there,

and so with years of fire and joy,

whole histories of freedom

unburdened by sensual languor.

The crazy ones push on to that frontier

while those who have found it are sick with grief …

And now you know

why my heart doesn’t beat beneath your hand.

2.

On the terrace, violins played

the most heartbreaking songs.

A sharp, fresh smell of the sea

came from oysters on a dish of ice

He said, I’m a faithful friend,

touching my dress.

How far from a caress,

the touch of that hand!

The way you stroke a cat, a bird,

the look you give a shapely bareback rider.

In his calm eyes, only laughter

under the light-gold lashes.

And the violins mourn on

behind drifting smoke:

Thank your stars, you’re at last alone

with the man you love.

1966

THE KEY

Through a drain grating, something

glitters and falters,

glitters again. A scrap of foil,

a coin, a signal, a message

from the indistinct

piercing my indistinctness?

How long I have gone round

and round, spiritless with foreknown defeat,

in search of that glitter?

Hours, years maybe. The cry of metal

on asphalt, on iron, the sudden

ching of a precious loss,

the clear statement

of something missing. Over and over

it stops me in my tracks

like a falling star, only

this is not the universe’s loss

it is mine. If I were only colder,

nearer death, nearer birth, I might let go

whatever’s so bent on staying lost.

Why not leave the house

locked, to collapse inward among its weeds,

the letters to darken and flake

in the drawer, the car

to grow skeletal, aflame with rust

in the moonlit lot, and walk

ever after?

O God I am not spiritless,

but a spirit can be stunned,

a battery felt going dead

before the light flickers,

and I’ve covered this ground too often

with this yellow disc

within whose beam all’s commonplace

and whose limits are described

by the whole night.

1967

PICNIC

Sunday in Inwood Park

the picnic eaten

the chicken bones scattered

for the fox we’ll never see

the children playing in the caves

My death is folded in my pocket

like a nylon raincoat

What kind of sunlight is it

that leaves the rocks so cold?

1967

THE BOOK

For Richard Howard

You, hiding there in your words

like a disgrace

the cast-off son of a family

whose face is written in theirs

who must not be mentioned

who calls collect three times a year

from obscure towns out-of-state

and whose calls are never accepted

You who had to leave alone

and forgot your shadow hanging under the stairs

let me tell you: I have been in the house

I have spoken to all of them

they will not pronounce your name

they only allude to you

rising and sitting, going or coming,

falling asleep and waking,

giving away in marriage or calling for water

on their deathbeds

their faces look into each other and see

you

when they write at night in their diaries they are writing

to you

1968

ABNEGATION

The red fox, the vixen

dancing in the half-light among the junipers,

wise-looking in a sexy way,

Egyptian-supple in her sharpness—

what does she want

with the dreams of dead vixens,

the apotheosis of Reynard,

the literature of fox-hunting?

Only in her nerves the past

sings, a thrill of self-preservation.

I go along down the road

to a house nailed together by Scottish

Covenanters, instinct mortified

in a virgin forest,

and she springs toward her den

every hair on her pelt alive

with tidings of the immaculate present.

They left me a westernness,

a birthright, a redstained, ravelled

afghan of sky.

She has no archives,

no heirlooms, no future

except death

and I could be more

her sister than theirs

who chopped their way across these hills

—a chosen people.

1968

II

Leaflets

WOMEN

For C.R.G.

My three sisters are sitting

on rocks of black obsidian.

For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.

My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.

She is going as the Transparent Lady

and all her nerves will be visible.

My second sister is also sewing,

at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely.

At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.

My third sister is gazing

at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.

Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.

1968

IMPLOSIONS

The world’s

not wanton

only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you

would have to be changed by

Take the word

of my pulse, loving and ordinary

Send out your signals, hoist

your dark scribbled flags

but take

my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope

and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch

and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it’s finished and we’re lying

in a stubble of blistered flowers

eyes gaping, mouths staring

dusted with crushed arterial blues

I’ll have done nothing

even for you?

1968

TO FRANTZ FANON

Born Martinique, 1925; dead Washington D.C., 1961.

I don’t see your head

sunk, listening   to the throats

of the torturers and the tortured

I don’t see your eyes

deep in the blackness   of your skull

they look off from me   into the eyes

of rats and haunted policemen.

What I see best is the length

of your fingers

pressing the pencil

into the barred page

of the French child’s copybook

with its Cartesian squares   its grilled

trap of holy geometry

where your night-sweats streamed out

in language

and your death

a black streak on a white bed

in L’Enfant’s city where

the fever-bush sweats off

its thick

petals   year after year

on the mass grave

of revolt

1968

CONTINUUM

Waking thickheaded by crow’s light

I see the suitcase packed

for your early plane; nothing to do

but follow the wristwatch hands

round to the hour. Life is like money

—you said, finishing the brandy from the cracked

plastic bathroom cup last night—

no use except for what you can get with it.

Yet something wants us delivered up

alive, whatever it is,

that causes me to edge the slatted blind

soundlessly up, leaving you

ten minutes’ more sleep, while I look

shivering, lucidifying, down

at that street where the poor are already getting started

and that poster streaking the opposite wall

with the blurred face of a singer whose songs

money can’t buy nor air contain

someone yet unloved, whose voice

I may never hear, but go on hoping

to hear, tonight, tomorrow, someday,

as I go on hoping to feel

tears of mercy in the of course impersonal rain.

1968

ON EDGES

When the ice starts to shiver

all across the reflecting basin

or water-lily leaves

dissect a simple surface

the word ‘drowning’ flows through me.

You built a glassy floor

that held me

as I leaned to fish for old

hooks and toothed tin cans,

stems lashing out like ties of

silk dressing-gowns

archangels of lake-light

gripped in mud.

Now you hand me a torn letter.

On my knees, in the ashes, I could never

fit these ripped-up flakes together.

In the taxi I am still piecing

what syllables I can

translating at top speed like a thinking machine

that types out ‘useless’ as ‘monster’

and ‘history’ as ‘lampshade’.

Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve

to trust to the man-made cables.

The blades on that machine

could cut you to ribbons

but its function is humane.

Is this all I can say of these

delicate hooks, scythe-curved intentions

you and I handle? I’d rather

taste blood, yours or mine, flowing

from a sudden slash, than cut all day

with blunt scissors on dotted lines

like the teacher told.

1968

VIOLENCE

No one knows yet

what he is capable of. Thus: if you

(still drawing me, mouth to mouth

toward the door) had pushed

a gun into my hand

would my fingers have burned, or not,

to dry ice on that metal?

if you’d said, leaving

in a pre-dawn thunderstorm

use this when the time comes

would I have blurted my first no that night

or, back without you, bundled

the cold bulk into a drawer

in a cocoon of nightgowns

printed with knots of honeysuckle …

Still following you as if your body

were a lantern, an angel of radar,

along the untrustworthy park

or down that block where the cops shoot to kill—

could I have dreamed a violence

like that of finding

your burnt-out cigarettes

planted at random, charred

fuses in a blown-up field?

1968

THE OBSERVER

Completely protected on all sides

by volcanoes

a woman, darkhaired, in stained jeans

sleeps in central Africa.

In her dreams, her notebooks, still

private as maiden diaries,

the mountain gorillas move through their life term;

their gentleness survives

observation. Six bands of them

inhabit, with her, the wooded highland.

When I lay me down to sleep

unsheltered by any natural guardians

from the panicky life-cycle of my tribe

I wake in the old cellblock

observing the daily executions,

rehearsing the laws

I cannot subscribe to,

envying the pale gorilla-scented dawn

she wakes into, the stream where she washes her hair,

the camera-flash of her quiet

eye.

1968

NIGHTBREAK

Something broken     Something

I need     By someone

I love     Next year

will I remember what

This anger     unreal

yet

has to be gone through

The sun to set

on this anger

I go on

head down     into it

The mountain pulsing

Into the oildrum     drops

the ball of fire.

Time is quiet     doesn’t break things

or even wound     Things are in danger

from people     The frail clay lamps

of Mesopotamia

row on row under glass

in the ethnological section

little hollows for dried-

up oil     The refugees

with their identical

tales of escape     I don’t

collect what I can’t use     I need

what can be broken.

In the bed the pieces fly together

and the rifts fill     or else

my body is a list     of wounds

symmetrically placed

a village

blown open     by planes

that did not     finish the job

The enemy has     withdrawn

between raids     become invisible

there are

no agencies

of relief

the darkness becomes utter

Sleep     cracked and flaking

sifts over the shaken   target.

What breaks     is night

not day     The white

scar     splitting

over the east

The crack weeping

Time for the pieces

to move

dumbly back

toward each other.

1968

GABRIEL

There are no angels     yet

here comes an angel     one

with a man’s face     young

shut-off     the dark

side of the moon     turning to me

and saying:     I am the plumed

serpent     the beast

with fangs of fire   and a gentle

heart

But he doesn’t say that     His message

drenches his body

he’d want to kill me

for using words to name him

I sit in the bare apartment

reading

words stream past me     poetry

twentieth-century rivers

disturbed surfaces     reflecting clouds

reflecting wrinkled neon

but clogged     and mostly

nothing alive left

in their depths

The angel is barely

Speaking     to me

Once in a horn of light

he stood     or someone like him

salutations in gold-leaf

ribboning from his lips

Today again     the hair streams

to his shoulders

the eyes reflect     something

like a lost country     or so I think

but the ribbon has reeled itself

up

he isn’t giving

or taking any shit

We glance miserably

across the room     at each other

It’s true     there are moments

closer and closer together

when words stick   in my throat

‘the art of love’

‘the art of words’

I get your message Gabriel

just     will you stay looking

straight at me

awhile longer

1968

LEAFLETS

1.

The big star, and that other

lonely on black glass

overgrown with frozen

lesions, endless night

the Coal Sack gaping

black veins of ice on the pane

spelling a word:

Insomnia

not manic but ordinary

to start out of sleep

turning off and on

this seasick neon

vision, this

division

the head clears of sweet smoke

and poison gas

life without caution

the only worth living

love for a man

love for a woman

love for the facts

protectless

that self-defense be not

the arm’s first motion

memory not only

cards of identity

that I can live half a year

as I have never lived up to this time—

Chekhov coughing up blood almost daily

the steamer edging in toward the penal colony

chained men dozing on deck

five forest fires lighting the island

lifelong that glare, waiting.

2.

Your face

stretched like a mask

begins to tear

as you speak of Che Guevara

Bolivia, Nanterre

I’m too young to be your mother

you’re too young to be my brother

your tears are not political

they are real water, burning

as the tears of Telemachus

burned

Over Spanish Harlem the moon

swells up, a fire balloon

fire gnawing the edge

of this crushed-up newspaper

now

the bodies come whirling

coal-black, ash-white

out of torn windows

and the death columns blacken

whispering

Who’d choose this life?

We’re fighting for a slash of recognition,

a piercing to the pierced heart.

Tell me what you are going through—

but the attention flickers

and will flicker

a matchflame in poison air

a thread, a hair of light

sum of all answer

to the Know that I exist! of all existing things.

3.

If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

someone has courage to enter the fire

the young man will be restored to life.

If, the girl whispers,

I do not go into the fire

I will not be able to live with my soul.

(Her face calm and dark as amber

under the dyed butterfly turban

her back scarified in ostrich-skin patterns.)

4.

Crusaders’ wind glinting

off linked scales of sea

ripping the ghostflags

galloping at the fortress

Acre, bloodcaked, lionhearted

raw vomit curdling in the sun

gray walkers walking

straying with a curbed intentness

in and out the inclosures

the gallows, the photographs

of dead Jewish terrorists, aged 15

their fading faces wide-eyed

and out in the crusading sunlight

gray strayers still straying

dusty paths

the mad who live in the dried-up moat

of the War Museum

what are we coming to

what wants these things of us

who wants them

5.

The strain of being born

over and over has torn your smile into pieces

often I have seen it broken

and then re-membered

and wondered how a beauty

so anarch, so ungelded

will be cared for in this world.

I want to hand you this

leaflet streaming with rain or tears

but the words coming clear

something you might find crushed into your hand

after passing a barricade

and stuff in your raincoat pocket.

I want this to reach you

who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred

no more sacred that is

than other things in your life—

to answer yes, if life is uncorrupted

no better poetry is wanted.

I want this to be yours

in the sense that if you find and read it

it will be there in you already

and the leaflet then merely something

to leave behind, a little leaf

in the drawer of a sublet room.

What else does it come down to

but handing on scraps of paper

little figurines or phials

no stronger than the dry clay they are baked in

yet more than dry clay or paper

because the imagination crouches in them.

If we needed fire to remind us

that all true images

were scooped out of the mud

where our bodies curse and flounder

then perhaps that fire is coming

to sponge away the scribes and time-servers

and much that you would have loved will be lost as well

before you could handle it and know it

just as we almost miss each other

in the ill cloud of mistrust, who might have touched

hands quickly, shared food or given blood

for each other. I am thinking how we can use what we have

to invent what we need.

Winter–Spring 1968

THE RAFTS

For David, Michael and David

Down the river, on rafts you came

floating. The three of you

and others I can’t remember.

Stuck to your sleeves, twists of

blurred red rag, old bandages, ribbons

of honor.      Your hands dragged me

aboard.

Then I sprawled

full length on the lashed poles

laughing, drenched, in rags.

The river’s rising!

they yelled on shore

thru megaphones.

Can’t you see

that water’s mad, those rafts

are children’s toys, that crowd

is heading nowhere?

My lips

tasted your lips and foreheads

salty with sweat,

then we were laughing, holding off

the scourge of dead branches

overhanging from shore as your

homemade inventions

danced

along

1968

III

Ghazals (Homage

To Ghalib)

7/12/68

For Sheila Rotner

The clouds are electric in this university.

The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you

and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:

the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point is the point where he appears.

Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable

is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me

and of what I have not written here.

7/13/68

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

saw differently from us, who breathed thin air and kept walking.

Sleeping back-to-back, man and woman, we were more conscious

than either of us awake and alone in the world.

These words are vapor-trails of a plane that has vanished;

by the time I write them out, they are whispering something else.

Do we still have to feel jealous of our creations?

Once they might have outlived us; in this world, we’ll die together.

Don’t look for me in the room I have left;

the photograph shows just a white rocking-chair, still rocking.

7/14/68: I

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

How many times a day, in this city, are those words spoken?

The tears of the universe aren’t all stars, Danton;

some are satellites of brushed aluminum and stainless steel.

He, who was temporary, has joined eternity;

he has deserted us, gone over to the other side.

In the Theatre of the Dust no actor becomes famous.

In the last scene they all are blown away like dust.

“It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.”

You were American, Whitman, and those words are yours.

7/14/68: II

Did you think I was talking about my life?

I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall.

The field they burned over is greener than all the rest.

You have to watch it, he said, the sparks can travel the roots.

Shot back into this earth’s atmosphere

our children’s children may photograph these stones.

In the red wash of the darkroom, I see myself clearly;

when the print is developed and handed about, the face is

nothing to me.

For us the work undoes itself over and over:

the grass grows back, the dust collects, the scar breaks open.

7/16/68: I

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

five green hours and forty violet minutes.

A cold spring slowed our lilacs, till a surf broke

violet/white, tender and sensual, misread it if you dare.

I tell you, truth is, at the moment, here

burning outward through our skins.

Eternity streams through my body:

touch it with your hand and see.

Till the walls of the tunnel cave in

and the black river walks on our faces.

7/16/68: II

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

as if by snow, or fire, or physical desire.

First snow. Death of the city. Ghosts in the air.

Your shade among the shadows, interviewing the mist.

The mail came every day, but letters were missing;

by this I knew things were not what they ought to be.

The trees in the long park blurring back

into Olmsted’s original dream-work.

The impartial scholar writes me from under house arrest.

I hope you are rotting in hell, Montaigne you bastard.

7/17/68

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

Flower cast in metal, Picasso-woman, sister.

Two hesitant Luna moths regard each other

with the spots on their wings: fascinated.

To resign yourself—what an act of betrayal!

—to throw a runaway spirit back to the dogs.

When the ebb-tide pulls hard enough, we are all starfish.

The moon has her way with us, my companion in crime.

At the Aquarium that day, between the white whale’s loneliness

and the groupers’ mass promiscuities, only ourselves.

7/23/68

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

when my thought absorbs yours, a world begins.

If the mind of the teacher is not in love with the mind of the student,

he is simply practicing rape, and deserves at best our pity.

To live outside the law! Or, barely within it,

a twig on boiling waters, enclosed inside a bubble

Our words are jammed in an electronic jungle;

sometimes, though, they rise and wheel croaking above the treetops.

An open window; thick summer night; electric fences trilling.

What are you doing here at the edge of the death-camps, Vivaldi?

7/24/68: I

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

In the woods I have a vision of asphalt, blindly lingering.

I hardly know the names of the weeds I love.

I have forgotten the names of so many flowers.

I can’t live at the hems of that tradition—

will I last to try the beginning of the next?

Killing is different now: no fingers round the throat.

No one feels the wetness of the blood on his hands.

When we fuck, there too are we remoter

than the fucking bodies of lovers used to be?

How many men have touched me with their eyes

more hotly than they later touched me with their lips.

7/24/68: II

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

At the drive-in movie, above the PanaVision,

beyond the projector beams, you project yourself, great Star.

The eye that used to watch us is dead, but open.

Sometimes I still have a sense of being followed.

How long will we be waiting for the police?

How long must I wonder which of my friends would hide me?

Driving at night I feel the Milky Way

streaming above me like the graph of a cry.

7/26/68: I

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

Today you needn’t write; the wall has tumbled down.

We were taught to respect the appearance behind the reality.

Our senses were out on parole, under surveillance.

A pair of eyes imprisoned for years inside my skull

is burning its way outward, the headaches are terrible.

I’m walking through a rubble of broken sculpture, stumbling

here on the spine of a friend, there on the hand of a brother.

All those joinings! and yet we fought so hard to be unique.

Neither alone, nor in anyone’s arms, will we end up sleeping.

7/26/68: II

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

his image could survive our comings and our goings.

LeRoi! Eldridge! listen to us, we are ghosts

condemned to haunt the cities where you want to be at home.

The white children turn black on the negative.

The summer clouds blacken inside the camera-skull.

Every mistake that can be made, we are prepared to make;

anything less would fall short of the reality we’re dreaming.

Someone has always been desperate, now it’s our turn—

we who were free to weep for Othello and laugh at Caliban.

I have learned to smell a conservateur a mile away:

they carry illustrated catalogues of all that there is to lose.

7/26/68: III

So many minds in search of bodies

groping their way among artificial limbs.

Of late they write me how they are getting on:

desertion, desertion, is the story of those pages.

A chewed-up nail, the past, splitting yet growing,

the same and not the same; a nervous habit never shaken.

Those stays of tooled whalebone in the Salem museum—

erotic scrimshaw, practical even in lust.

Whoever thought of inserting a ship in a bottle?

Long weeks without women do this to a man.

8/1/68

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

forever at war with the order of the dark and starlit soul.

Were you free then all along, Jim, free at last,

of everything but the white boy’s fantasies?

We pleaded guilty till we saw what rectitude was like:

its washed hands, and dead nerve, and sclerotic eye.

I long ago stopped dreaming of pure justice, your honor—

my crime was to believe we could make cruelty obsolete.

The body has been exhumed from the burnt-out bunker;

the teeth counted, the contents of the stomach told over.

And you, Custer the Squaw-killer, hero of primitive schoolrooms—

where are you buried, what is the condition of your bones?

8/4/68

For Aijaz Ahmad

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

If scribblings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others.

Fuck reds      Black Power      Angel loves Rosita

—and a transistor radio answers in Spanish: Night must fall.

Prisoners, soldiers, crouching as always, writing,

explaining the unforgivable to a wife, a mother, a lover.

Those faces are blurred and some have turned away

to which I used to address myself so hotly.

How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces,

has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi?

When they read this poem of mine, they are translators.

Every existence speaks a language of its own.

8/8/68: I

From here on, all of us will be living

like Galileo turning his first tube at the stars.

Obey the little laws and break the great ones

is the preamble to their constitution.

Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,

under the mocking eyes of the way things are.

There’s a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,

between the existing and the non-existing.

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.

8/8/68: II

For A.H.C.

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

some weaving figured as magic against oppression.

I’m speaking to you as a woman to a man:

when your blood flows I want to hold you in my arms.

How did we get caught up fighting this forest fire,

we, who were only looking for a still place in the woods?

How frail we are, and yet, dispersed, always returning,

the barnacles they keep scraping from the warship’s hull.

The hairs on your breast curl so lightly as you lie there,

while the strong heart goes on pounding in its sleep.

POEMS

(1967–1969)

POSTCARD

Rodin’s Orpheus, floodlit, hacked,

clawing I don’t know what

with the huge toes of an animal,

gripping the air

above the mitered floors

of the Musée …

This comes in the mail and I wonder

what it is to be cast in bronze

like the sender;

who wouldn’t live, thirsty, drifting,

obscure, freaked-out

but with a future

still lapping at the door

and a dream of language

unlived behind the clouds?

Orpheus hurts all over

but his throat hurts worst of all.

You can see it: the two knobs

of bronze pain in his neck,

the paralysis of his floodlit lips.

1967

WHITE NIGHT

From the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky.

White night, my painful joy,

your light is brighter than the dawn.

A white ship is sailing from East Broadway

where I see no sail by day.

A quiet star hands me a ticket

open for all the seas.

I put on my time-worn jacket

and entrust myself to the night.

Where are you taking me, ship?

Who charted us on this course?

The hieroglyphs of the map escape me,

and the arrows of your compass.

I am the one who sees and does not see.

I go along on your deck of secrets,

squeeze shut my baggage on the wreath of sorrows

from all my plucked-out homes.

—Pack in all my blackened pots,

their split lids, the chipped crockeries,

pack in my chaos with its gold-encrusted buttons

since chaos will always be in fashion.

—Pack the letters stamped Unknown at This Address—

vanished addresses that sear my eyes,

postmarked with more than years and days;

sucked into my bones and marrow.

—Pack up my shadow that weighs more than my body,

that comes along with its endless exhortations.

Weekdays or holidays, time of flowers or withering,

my shadow is with me, muttering its troubles.

Find me a place of honey cakes and sweetness

where angels and children picnic together

(this is the dream I love best of all),

where the sacred wine fizzes in bottles.

Let me have one sip, here on East Broadway,

for the sake of those old Jews crying in the dark.

I cry my heretic’s tears with them,

their sobbing is my sobbing.

I’m a difficult passenger, my ship

is packed with the heavy horns, the shofars of grief.

Tighten the sails of night as far as you can,

for the daylight cannot carry me.

Take me somewhere to a place of rest,

of goats in belled hats playing on trombones—

to the Almighty’s fresh white sheets

where the hunter’s shadow cannot fall.

Take me … Yes, take me … But you know best

where the sea calmly opens its blue road.

I’m wearier than your oldest tower;

somewhere I’ve left my heart aside.

1968

THE DAYS: SPRING

He writes: Let us bear

our illusions together …

I persist in thinking:

every fantasy I have

comes true; who am I

to bear illusions?

He writes: But who can be

a saint?—The woman in #9

is locked in the bathroom.

She screams for five hours,

pounds the walls, hears voices

retreating in the hall.

The lock is broken.

The lovers pass and go out to lunch,

boredom sets in by 2 o’clock.

Emptiness of the mirror, and

the failure of the classics.

A look at the ceiling

in pauses of lovemaking:

that immense, scarred domain.

He writes: The depth of pain

grows all the time.

We marched and sat down in the street,

she offered her torn newspaper.

Who will survive Amerika?

they sang on Lenox Avenue.

This early summer weekend.

The chance of beginning again.

From always fewer chances

the future plots itself.

I walk Third Avenue,

bare-armed with flowing hair.

Later the stars come out like facts,

my constellation streams at my head,

a woman’s body nailed with stars.

1969

TEAR GAS

October 12, 1969: reports of the tear-gassing of demonstrators protesting the treatment of G.I. prisoners in the stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of.

That they are afraid of.

(Would it have been different at Fort Dix, beginning

to feel the full volume of tears in you, the measure

of all you have in you to shed, all you have held

back from false pride, false indifference, false

courage

beginning to weep as you weep peeling onions, but

endlessly, for the rest of time, tears of chemistry,

tears of catalyst, tears of rage, tears for yourself,

tears for the tortured men in the stockade and for

their torturers

tears of fear, of the child stepping into the adult

field of force, the woman stepping into the male field

of violence, tears of relief, that your body was here,

you had done it, every last refusal was over)

Here in this house my tears are running wild

in this Vermont of India-madras-colored leaves, of cesspool-

stricken brooks, of violence licking at old people and

children

and I am afraid

of the language in my head

I am alone, alone with language

and without meaning

coming back to something written years ago:

our words misunderstand us

wanting a word that will shed itself like a tear

onto the page

leaving its stain

Trying every key in the bunch to get the door even ajar

not knowing whether it’s locked or simply jammed from long disuse

trying the keys over and over then throwing the bunch away

staring around for an axe

wondering if the world can be changed like this

if a life can be changed like this

It wasn’t completeness I wanted

(the old ideas of a revolution that could be foretold, and once

arrived at would give us ourselves and each other)

I stopped listening long ago to their descriptions

of the good society

The will to change begins in the body not in the mind

My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every

act of resistance and each of my failures

Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body

that act is in me still

No, not completeness:

but I needed a way of saying

(this is what they are afraid of)

that could deal with these fragments

I needed to touch you

with a hand, a body

but also with words

I need a language to hear myself with

to see myself in

a language like pigment released on the board

blood-black, sexual green, reds

veined with contradictions

bursting under pressure from the tube

staining the old grain of the wood

like sperm or tears

but this is not what I mean

these images are not what I mean

(I am afraid.)

I mean that I want you to answer me

when I speak badly

that I love you, that we are in danger

that she wants to have your child, that I want us to have mercy

on each other

that I want to take her hand

that I see you changing

that it was change I loved in you

when I thought I loved completeness

that things I have said which in a few years will be forgotten

matter more to me than this or any poem

and I want you to listen

when I speak badly

not in poems but in tears

not my best but my worst

that these repetitions are beating their way

toward a place where we can no longer be together

where my body no longer will demonstrate outside your stockade

and wheeling through its blind tears will make for the open air

of another kind of action

(I am afraid.)

It’s not the worst way to live.

1969

The Will

To Change

(1971)

For David, Pablo and Jacob

What does not change / is the will to change

—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

NOVEMBER 1968

Stripped

you’re beginning to float free

up through the smoke of brushfires

and incinerators

the unleafed branches won’t hold you

nor the radar aerials

You’re what the autumn knew would happen

after the last collapse

of primary color

once the last absolutes were torn to pieces

you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you

until this moment

I know nothing about it

my ignorance of you amazes me

now that I watch you

starting to give yourself away

to the wind

1968

STUDY OF HISTORY

Out there.   The mind of the river

as it might be you.

Lights     blotted by unseen hulls

repetitive shapes passing

dull foam crusting the margin

barges sunk below the water-line with silence.

The scow, drudging on.

Lying in the dark, to think of you

and your harsh traffic

gulls pecking your rubbish   natural historians

mourning your lost purity

pleasure cruisers

witlessly careening you

but this

after all

is the narrows and after

all we have never entirely

known what was done to you upstream

what powers trepanned

which of your channels diverted

what rockface leaned to stare

in your upturned

defenseless

face.

1968

PLANETARIUM

Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750–1848, astronomer,

sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman   ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces   of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet     I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslateable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep   so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me   And has

taken   I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images   for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

1968

THE BURNING OF PAPER INSTEAD OF CHILDREN

I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.

—Fr. Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

1.

My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state

of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven

and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics

text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his

house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house

during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible

sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset

me so much as the idea of burning a book.”

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Dürer’s Complete Works

for MELENCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2.

To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue     the slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast     wildgreen     clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

3.

“People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence

to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not

had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money

to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food

for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears

in your eyes.”

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4.

We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts   said Artaud

5.

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.

1968

I DREAM I’M THE

DEATH OF ORPHEUS

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers

and those powers severely limited

by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I am a woman in the prime of life

driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

A woman with a certain mission

which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

A woman with the nerves of a panther

a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels

a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

at the precise moment when she must not use them

a woman sworn to lucidity

who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

of these underground streets

her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

on the wrong side of the mirror

1968

THE BLUE GHAZALS

9/21/68

Violently asleep in the old house.

A clock stays awake all night ticking.

Turning, turning their bruised leaves

the trees stay awake all night in the wood.

Talk to me with your body through my dreams.

Tell me what we are going through.

The walls of the room are muttering,

old trees, old utopians, arguing with the wind.

To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams

and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.

Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,

wading against the tide, and with the tide.

9/23/68

One day of equinoctial light after another,

moving ourselves through gauzes and fissures of that light.

Early and late I come and set myself against you,

your phallic fist knocking blindly at my door.

The dew is beaded like mercury on the coarsened grass,

the web of the spider is heavy as if with sweat.

Everything is yielding toward a foregone conclusion,

only we are rash enough to go on changing our lives.

An Ashanti woman tilts the flattened basin on her head

to let the water slide downward:   I am that woman and that water.

9/26/68: I

A man, a woman, a city.

The city as object of love.

Anger and filth in the basement.

The furnace stoked and blazing.

A sexual heat on the pavements.

Trees erected like statues.

Eyes at the ends of avenues.

Yellow for hesitation.

I’m tired of walking your streets

he says, unable to leave her.

Air of dust and rising sparks,

the city burning her letters.

9/28/68: II

For Wallace Stevens

Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,

you were our poet of revolution all along.

A man isn’t what he seems but what he desires:

gaieties of anarchy drumming at the base of the skull.

Would this have left you cold, our scene, its wild parades,

the costumes, banners, incense, flowers, the immense marches?

Disorder is natural, these leaves absently blowing

in the drinking-fountain, filling the statue’s crevice.

The use of force in public architecture:

nothing, not even the honeycomb, manifests such control.

9/29/68

For Leroi Jones

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

half-sleepy, half-alert in that thicket of bitter roots.

Who doesn’t speak to me, who speaks to me more and more,

but from a face turned off, turned away, a light shut out.

Most of the old lecturers are inaudible or dead.

Prince of the night there are explosions in the hall.

The blackboard scribbled over with dead languages

is falling and killing our children.

Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light:

it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.

12/13/68

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

the edge of dark from the edge of dawn, your love is a lie.

If I thought of my words as changing minds,

hadn’t my mind also to suffer changes?

They measure fever, swab the blisters of the throat,

but the cells of thought go rioting on ignored.

It’s the inner ghost that suffers, little spirit

looking out wildly from the clouded pupils.

When will we lie clearheaded in our flesh again

with the cold edge of the night driving us close together?

12/20/68: I

There are days when I seem to have nothing

but these frayed packets, done up with rotting thread.

The shortest day of the year, let it be ours.

Let me give you something: a token for the subway.

(Refuse even

the most beloved old solutions.

That dead man wrote, grief ought to reach the lips.

You must believe I know before you can tell me.

A black run through the tunnelled winter, he and she,

together, touching, yet not side by side.

12/20/68: II

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

We gather like viruses.

The doctors are all on their yachts

watching the beautiful skin-divers.

The peasant mind of the Christian

transfixed on food at the year’s turning.

Thinking of marzipan

forget that revolutionary child.

Thought grown senile with sweetness.

You too may visit the Virgins.

In the clear air, hijacked planes

touch down at the forbidden island.

5/4/69

Pain made her conservative.

Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.

The police arrive at dawn

like death and childbirth.

City of accidents, your true map

is the tangling of all our lifelines.

The moment when a feeling enters the body

is political. This touch is political.

Sometimes I dream we are floating on water

hand-in-hand; and sinking without terror.

PIERROT LE FOU

1.

Suppose you stood facing

a wall

of photographs

from your unlived life

as you stand looking at these

stills from the unseen film?

Yourself against a wall

curiously stuccoed

Yourself in the doorway

of a kind of watchman’s hut

Yourself at a window

signaling to people

you haven’t met yet

Yourself in unfamiliar clothes

with the same eyes

2.

On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ’forties.

Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle.

We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind.

He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me.

France of the superhighways, I never knew you.

How much the body took in those days, and could take!

A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs.

In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.

3.

Suppose we had time

and no money

living by our wits

telling stories

which stories would you tell?

I would tell the story

of Pierrot Le Fou

who trusted

not a woman

but love itself

till his head blew off

not quite intentionally

I would tell all the stories I knew

in which people went wrong

but the nervous system

was right all along

4.

The island blistered our feet.

At first we mispronounced each others’ names.

All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words.

There was a language there but no-one to speak it.

Sometimes each of us was alone.

At noon on the beach our shadows left us.

The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking.

The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal.

You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.

5.

When I close my eyes

other films

have been there all along

a market shot:

bins of turnips, feet

of dead chickens

close-up: a black old woman

buying voodoo medicines

a figure of terrible faith

and I know her needs

Another film:

an empty room stacked with old films

I am kneeling on the floor

it is getting dark

they want to close the building

and I still haven’t found you

Scanning reel after reel

tundras in negative,

the Bowery

all those scenes

but the light is failing

and you are missing

from the footage of the march

the railway disaster

the snowbound village

even the shots of the island

miss you

yet you were there

6.

To record

in order to see

if you know how the story ends

why tell it

To record

in order to forget

the surface is always lucid

my shadows are under the skin

To record

in order to control

the eye of the camera

doesn’t weep tears of blood

To record

for that is what one does

climbing your stairs, over and over

I memorized the bare walls

This is my way of coming back

1969

LETTERS: MARCH 1969

1.

Foreknown. The victor

sees the disaster through and through.

His soles grind rocksalt

from roads of the resistance.

He shoulders through rows

of armored faces

he might have loved and lived among.

The victory carried like a corpse

from town to town

begins to crawl in the casket.

The summer swindled on

from town to town, our train

stopping and broiling on the rails

long enough to let on who we were.

The disaster sat up with us all night

drinking bottled water, eating fruit,

talking of the conditions that prevailed.

Outside along the railroad cut

they were singing for our death.

2.

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

How little it takes

to restore composure.

White napkins, a tray

of napoleons and cherry tarts

compliments of the airline

which has flown us out of danger.

They are torturing the journalist we drank with

last night in the lounge

but we can’t be sure of that

here overlooking the runway

three hours and twenty minutes into another life.

If this is done for us

(and this is done for us)

if we are well men wearing bandages

for disguise

if we can choose our scene

stay out of earshot

break the roll and pour

from the clean carafe

if we can desert like soldiers

abjure like thieves

we may well purchase new virtues at the gate

of the other world.

3.

“I am up at sunrise

collecting data.

The reservoir burns green.

Darling, the knives they have on this block alone

would amaze you.

When they ask my profession I say

I’m a student of weapons systems.

The notes I’m putting together are purely

of sentimental value

my briefcase is I swear useless

to foreign powers, to the police

I am not given I say

to revealing my sources

to handling round copies

of my dossier for perusal.

The vulnerable go unarmed.

I myself walk the floor

a ruinously expensive Swiss hunter’s knife

exposed in my brain

eight blades, each one for a distinct purpose,

laid open as on the desk

of an importer or a fence.”

4.

Six months back

send carbons you said

but this winter’s dashed off in pencil

torn off the pad too fast

for those skills. In the dawn taxi

in the kitchen

burning the succotash

the more I love my life the more

I love you. In a time

of fear. In a city

of fear. in a life

without vacations the paisley fades

winter and summer in the sun

but the best time is now.

My sick friend writes: what’s love?

This life is nothing, Adrienne!

Her hands bled onto the sill.

She had that trick of reaching outward,

the pane was smashed but only

the Calvinist northwind

spat in from the sea.

She’s a shot hero. A dying poet.

Even now, if we went for her—

but they’ve gone with rags and putty to fix the pane.

She stays in with her mirrors and anger.

I tear up answers

I once gave, postcards

from riot and famine go up on the walls

valentines stuck in the mirror

flame and curl, loyalties dwindle

the bleak light dries our tears

without relief. I keep coming back to you

in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and

I have no carbons. Prince of pity,

what eats out of your hand?

the rodent pain, electric

with exhaustion, mazed and shaken?

I’d have sucked the wound in your hand to sleep

but my lips were trembling.

Tell me how to bear myself,

how it’s done, the light kiss falling

accurately

on the cracked palm.

1969

PIECES

1. Breakpoint

The music of words

received as fact

The steps that wouldn’t hold us both

splintering in air

The self withheld in an urn

like ashes

To have loved you better than you loved yourself

—whoever you were, to have loved you—

And still to love but simply

as one of those faces on the street

2. Relevance

That erudition

how to confront it

The critics wrote answers

the questions were ours

A breast, a shoulder

chilled at waking

The cup of yoghurt

eaten at noon

and no explanations

The books we borrowed

trying to read each other’s minds

Paperbacks piling

on both sides of the fireplace

and piled beside the bed

What difference could it make

that those books came

out of unintelligible pain

as daylight out of the hours

when that light burned

atop the insurance tower

all night like the moon

3. Memory

Plugged-in to her body

he came the whole way

but it makes no difference

If not this then what

would fuse a connection

(All that burning intelligence about love

what can it matter

Falling in love on words

and ending in silence

with its double-meanings

Always falling and ending

because this world gives no room

to be what we dreamt of being

Are we, as he said

of the generation that forgets

the lightning-flash, the air-raid

and each other

4. Time and Place

Liquid mist burning off

along the highway

Slap of water

Light on shack boards

Hauling of garbage

early in the wet street

Always the same, wherever waking,

the old positions

assumed by the mind

and the new day forms

like a china cup

hard, cream-colored, unbreakable

even in our travels

5. Revelation

This morning: read Simone Weil

on the loss of grace

drank a glass of water

remembered the dream that woke me:

some one, some more than one

battering into my room

intent to kill me

I crying your name

its two syllables

ringing through sleep

knowing it vain

knowing

you slept unhearing

crying your name

like a spell

like signs executed

by the superstitious

who are the faithful of this world

1969

OUR WHOLE LIFE

Our whole life a translation

the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies

eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint

under the blowtorch

All those dead letters

rendered into the oppressor’s language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian

who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain

and there are no words for this

except himself

1969

YOUR LETTER

blinds me

like the light of that surf

you thrust your body in

for punishment

or the river of fiery fenders

and windshields

you pour yourself into

driving north to S.F.

on that coast of chrome and oil

I watch for any signal

the tremor of courage

in the seismograph

a flash

where I thought the glare

was steady, smogged & tame

1969

STAND UP

Stand up in my nightgown at the window

almost naked behind black glass

Off from the line of trees the road

beaten, bare, we walked

in the light of the bare, beaten moon.

Almost, you spoke to me. The road

swings past swampground

the soft spots of the earth

you might sink through into location

where their cameras are set up

the underground film-makers waiting to make their film

waiting for you

their cameras pivot toward your head and the film burns

but you’re not talking

If I am there you have forgotten my name

you think perhaps ‘a woman’

and you drift on, drifter, through the frames

of the movie they are making of this time.

A whole soundtrack of your silence

a whole film

of dark nights and darker rooms

and blank sheets of paper, bare …

1969

THE STELAE

For Arnold Rich

Last night I met you in my sister’s house

risen from the dead

showing me your collection

You are almost at the point of giving things away

It’s the stelae on the walls I want

that I never saw before

You offer other objects

I have seen time and time again

I think you think you are giving me

something precious

The stelae are so unlike you

swart, indifferent, incised with signs

you have never deciphered

I never knew you had them

I wonder if you are giving them away

1969

SNOW

when it comes down turning

itself in clusters before the flat

light of the shortest day

you see how all turns away

from us how we turn

into our shadows you can see

how we are tested

the individual crystal on the

black skirt of the maxi-coat

under the lens

was it a whole day or just a lifetime

spent studying crystals

on the fire escape while the ’Sixties

were running out

could you see

how the black ladder spun away from us

into whiteness

how over and over

a star became a tear

if no two are alike

then what are we doing

with these diagrams of loss

1969

THE WILL TO CHANGE

1.

For L D., Dead 11/69

That Chinese restaurant was a joke

with its repeating fountains

& chopsticks in tissue paper

The vodka was too sweet

the beancurd too hot

You came with your Egyptian hieroglyph

your angel’s smile

Almost the next day

as surely as if shot

you were thin air

At the risk of appearing ridiculous—

we take back this halfworld for you

and all whose murders accrue

past your death

2.

For Sandra Levinson

Knocked down in the canefield

by a clumsily swung machete

she is helped to her feet

by Fidel

and snapped by photographers

the blonde Yanqui in jeans

We’re living through a time

that needs to be lived through us

(and in the morning papers

Bobby Seale, chalked

by the courtroom artist

defaced by the gag)

3.

For D.J.L.

Beardless again, phoning

from a storefront in Yorkville

… we need a typewriter, a crib

& Michael’s number …

I swim to you thru dead

latitudes of fever

… accepting the discipline …

You mean your old freedom

to disappear—you miss that?

… but I can dig having lost it …

David, I could dig losing everything.

Knowing what you mean, to make that leap

bite into the fear, over & over

& survive. Hoarding my ‘liberty’

like a compulsive—more

than I can use up in a lifetime—

two dozen oranges in the refrigerator

for one American weekend

4.

For A.H.C.

At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

from the Feast of San Gennaro

gaze thru the dark

All night the A-train forages

under our bedroom

All night I dream of a man

black, gagged, shackled, coffined

in a courtroom where I am

passive, white & silent

though my mouth is free

All night I see his eyes

iridescent under torture

and hear the shuddering of the earth

as the trains tear us apart

5.

The cabdriver from the Bronx

screaming: ‘This city’s GOTTA die!’

dynamiting it hourly from his soul

as surely as any terrorist

Burning the bodies of the scum on welfare

ejaculating into the flames

(and, said Freud,

who welcomed it when it was done?)

the professors of the fact

that someone has suffered

seeking truth in a mist of librium

the artists talking of freedom

in their chains

1969–1970

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE

UNMADE BED

Cruelty is rarely conscious

One slip of the tongue

one exposure

among so many

a thrust in the dark

to see if there’s pain there

I never asked you to explain

that act of violence

what dazed me was our ignorance

of our will to hurt each other

•

In a flash I understand

how poems are unlike photographs

(the one saying   This could be

the other   This was

The image

isn’t responsible

for our uses of it

It is intentionless

A long strand of dark hair

in the washbasin

is innocent and yet

such things have done harm

•

These snapshots taken by ghetto children

given for Christmas

Objects blurring into perceptions

No ‘art,’ only the faults

of the film, the faults of the time

Did mere indifference blister

these panes, eat these walls,

shrivel and scrub these trees—

mere indifference? I tell you

cruelty is rarely conscious

the done and the undone blur

into one photograph of failure

•

This crust of bread we try to share

this name traced on a window

this word I paste together

like a child fumbling

with paste and scissors

this writing in the sky with smoke

this silence

this lettering chalked on the ruins

this alphabet of the dumb

this feather held to lips

that still breathe and are warm

1969

IMAGES FOR GODARD

1.

Language as city: : Wittgenstein

Driving to the limits

of the city of words

the superhighway streams

like a comic strip

to newer suburbs

casements of shockproof glass

where no one yet looks out

or toward the coast where even now

the squatters in their shacks

await eviction

When all conversation

becomes an interview

under duress

when we come to the limits

of the city

my face must have a meaning

2.

To know the extremes of light

I sit in this darkness

To see the present flashing

in a rearview mirror

blued in a plateglass pane

reddened in the reflection

of the red Triomphe

parked at the edge of the sea

the sea glittering in the sun

the swirls of nebula

in the espresso cup

raindrops, neon spectra

on a vinyl raincoat

3.

To love, to move perpetually

as the body changes

a dozen times a day

the temperature of the skin

the feeling of rise & fall

deadweight & buoyancy

the eye sunk inward

the eye bleeding with speech

(‘for that moment at least

I wás you—’)

To be stopped, to shoot the same scene

over & over

4.

At the end of Alphaville

she says I love you

and the film begins

that you’ve said you’d never make

because it’s impossible

‘things as difficult to show

as horror & war & sickness are’

meaning:    love,

to speak in the mouth

to touch the breast

for a woman

to know the sex of a man

That film begins here

yet you don’t show it

we leave the theatre

suffering from that

5.

Interior monologue of the poet:

the notes for the poem are the only poem

the mind collecting, devouring

all these destructibles

the unmade studio couch the air

shifting the abalone shells

the mind of the poet is the only poem

the poet is at the movies

dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently

free in the dark as if asleep

free in the dusty beam of the projector

the mind of the poet is changing

the moment of change is the only poem

1970

A VALEDICTION

FORBIDDING MOURNING

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.

The grammar turned and attacked me.

Themes, written under duress.

Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:

the experience of repetition as death

the failure of criticism to locate the pain

the poster in the bus that said:

my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.

These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I could say: those mountains have a meaning

but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

1970

SHOOTING SCRIPT

PART I: 11/69–2/70

1.

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.

A monologue waiting for you to interrupt it.

A man wading into the surf. The dialogue of the rock with the breaker.

The wave changed instantly by the rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over.

The dialogue that lasts all night or a whole lifetime.

A conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms.

A shell waiting for you to listen.

A tide that ebbs and flows against a deserted continent.

A cycle whose rhythm begins to change the meanings of words.

A wheel of blinding waves of light, the spokes pulsing out from where we hang together in the turning of an endless conversation.

The meaning that searches for its word like a hermit crab.

A monologue that waits for one listener.

An ear filled with one sound only.

A shell penetrated by meaning.

2. Ghazal V

Adapted from Mirza Ghalib.

Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I found the door shut, I simply walked away.

We all accept Your claim to be unique; the stone lips, the carved limbs, were never your true portrait.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Now tell me your story till the blood drips from your lashes. Any other version belongs to your folklore, or ours.

To see the Tigris in a water-drop … Either you were playing games with me, or you never cared to learn the structure of my language.

3.

The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

Where we lay and breakfasted. The stains of tea. The squares of winter light projected on the wool.

You, sleeping with closed windows. I, sleeping in the silver nitrate burn of zero air.

Where it can snow, I’m at home; the crystals accumulating spell out my story.

The cold encrustation thickening on the ledge.

The arrow-headed facts, accumulating, till a whole city is taken over.

Midwinter and the loss of love, going comes before gone, over and over the point is missed and still the blind will turns for its target.

4.

In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

In rafts they came over the sea; on the island they put up those stones by methods we can only guess at.

If the vegetation grows as thick as this, how can we see what they were seeing?

It is all being made clear, with bulldozers, at Angkor Wat.

The verdure was a false mystery; the baring of the stones is no solution for us now.

Defoliation progresses; concrete is poured, sheets of glass hauled overland in huge trucks and at great cost.

Here we never travailed, never took off our shoes to walk the final mile.

Come and look into this cellar-hole; this is the foundling of the woods.

Humans lived here once; it became sacred only when they went away.

5.

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with them like red clay roads they have been walking.

The sole of the foot is a map, the palm of the hand a letter, learned by heart and worn close to the body.

They seemed strange to me, till I began to recall their dialect.

Poking the spade into the dry loam, listening for the tick of broken pottery, hoarding the brown and black bits in a dented can.

Evenings, at the table, turning the findings out, pushing them around with a finger, beginning to dream of fitting them together.

Hiding all this work from them, although they might have helped me.

Going up at night, hiding the tin can in a closet, where the linoleum lies in shatters on a back shelf.

Sleeping to dream of the unformed, the veil of water pouring over the wet clay, the rhythms of choice, the lost methods.

6.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and keep moving through the bad light.

At this time of year when faces turn aside, it is amazing that your eyes are to be met.

A bad light is one like this, that flickers and diffuses itself along the edge of a frontier.

No, I don’t invest you with anything; I am counting on your weakness as much as on your strength.

This light eats away at the clarities I had fixed on; it moves up like a rodent at the edge of the raked paths.

Your clarities may not reach me; but your attention will.

It is to know that I too have no mythic powers; it is to see the liability of all my treasures.

You will have to see all this for a long time alone.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and keep trying to move through the bad light.

7.

Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum.

Fingering down the thread of the maze where the green strand cuts across the violent strand.

Picking apart the strands of pain; a warp of wool dipped in burning wax.

When the flame shrinks to a blue bead, there is danger; the change of light in a flickering situation.

Stretched on the loom the light expands; the smell of a smell of burning.

When the change leaves you dark, when the wax cools in the socket, when I thought I prayed, when I was talking to myself under the cover of my darkness.

Someone who never said, “What do you feel?” someone who sat across from me, taking the crumbs of wax as I picked them apart and handed them over.

PART II: 3–7/70

8.

For Hugh Seidman

A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard she never looks into.

Thinking of the force of a waterfall, the slash of cold air from the thickest water of the falls, slicing the green and ochre afternoon inwhich he turns his head and walks away.

Thinking of that place as an existence.

A woman reaching for the glass of water left all night on the bureau, the half-done poem, the immediate relief.

Entering the poem as a method of leaving the room.

Entering the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart.

The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot, an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the mind, the subversion of choice by language.

Instead of the alternative: to pull the sooty strings to set the window bare to purge the room with light to feel the sun breaking in on the courtyard and the steamheat smothering in the shut-off pipes.

To feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved corners of the courtyard.

9. (Newsreel)

This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier, there were no hills of that size there.

But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.

The scenery angers me, I know there is something wrong, the sun is too high, the grass too trampled, the peasants’ faces too broad, and the main square of the capital had no arcades like those.

Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed fuselage burning among the ferns.

But this is not the war I came to see, buying my ticket, stumbling through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and masturbators in the dark.

I thought of seeing the General who cursed us, whose name they gave to an expressway; I wanted to see the faces of the dead when they were living.

Once I know they filmed us, back at the camp behind the lines, taking showers under the trees and showing pictures of our girls.

Somewhere there is a film of the war we fought in, and it must contain the flares, the souvenirs, the shadows of the netted brush, the standing in line of the innocent, the hills that were not of this size.

Somewhere my body goes taut under the deluge, somewhere I am naked behind the lines, washing my body in the water of that war.

Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but this would not be the war I fought in.

10.

For Valerie Glauber

They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

They come and drop their mementoes at the foot of your bed; their feathers, ferns, fans, grasses from the western mountains.

They wait for you to unfold for them like a paper flower, a secret springing open in a glass of water.

They believe your future has a history and that it is themselves.

They have family trees to plant for you, photographs of dead children, old bracelets and rings they want to fasten onto you.

And, in spite of this, you live alone.

Your secret hangs in the open like Poe’s purloined letter; their longing and their methods will never let them find it.

Your secret cries out in the dark and hushes; when they start out of sleep they think you are innocent.

You hang among them like the icon in a Russian play; living your own intenser life behind the lamp they light in front of you.

You are spilt here like mercury on a marble counter, liquefying into many globes, each silvered like a planet caught in a lens.

You are a mirror lost in a brook, an eye reflecting a torrent of reflections.

You are a letter written, folded, burnt to ash, and mailed in an envelope to another continent.

11.

The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

When you pull the embedded bones up from the soil, the flies collect again.

The pelvis, the open archway, staring at me like an eye.

In the desert these bones would be burnt white; a green bloom grows on them in the woods.

Did she break her leg or die of poison?

What was it like when the scavengers came?

So many questions unanswered, yet the statement is here and clear.

With what joy you handled the skull, set back the teeth spilt in the grass, hinged back the jaw on the jaw.

With what joy we left the woods, swinging our sticks, miming the speech of noble savages, of the fathers of our country, bursting into the full sun of the uncut field.

12.

I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

We walked in the wholesale district: closed warehouses, windows, steeped in sun.

I said: those cloths are very old. You said: they have lain in that window a long time.

When the skeletons of the projects shut off the sunset, when the sense of the Hudson leaves us, when only by loss of light in the east do I know that I am living in the west.

When I give up being paraphrased, when I let go, when the beautiful solutions in their crystal flasks have dried up in the sun, when the lightbulb bursts on lighting, when the dead bulb rattles like a seed-pod.

Those cloths are very old, they are mummies’ cloths, they have lain in graves, they were not intended to be sold, the tragedy of this mistake will soon be clear.

Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.

13.

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.

Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction of incompetence.

A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.

I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.

In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.

I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.

14.

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats; ashes spilled on white formica.

The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice melting on stainless steel.

Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.

Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.

To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.

To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood.

DIVING INTO THE

WRECK

(1971–1972)

I

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

—André Breton, Nadja

There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.

—George Eliot

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

WAKING IN THE DARK

1.

The thing that arrests me is

how we are composed of molecules

(he showed me the figure in the paving stones)

arranged without our knowledge and consent

like the wirephoto composed

of millions of dots

in which the man from Bangladesh

walks starving

on the front page

knowing nothing about it

which is his presence for the world

2.

We were standing in line outside of something

two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone,

looking into windows full of scissors,

windows full of shoes. The street was closing,

the city was closing, would we be the lucky ones

to make it? They were showing

in a glass case, the Man Without A Country.

We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.

They are dumping animal blood into the sea

to bring up the sharks. Sometimes every

aperture of my body

leaks blood. I don’t know whether

to pretend that this is natural.

Is there a law about this, a law of nature?

You worship the blood

you call it hysterical bleeding

you want to drink it like milk

you dip your finger into it and write

you faint at the smell of it

you dream of dumping me into the sea.

3.

The tragedy of sex

lies around us, a woodlot

the axes are sharpened for.

The old shelters and huts

stare through the clearing with a certain resolution

—the hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack—

scenes of masturbation

and dirty jokes.

A man’s world. But finished.

They themselves have sold it to the machines.

I walk the unconscious forest,

a woman dressed in old army fatigues

that have shrunk to fit her, I am lost

at moments, I feel dazed

by the sun pawing between the trees,

cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket.

Nothing will save this. I am alone,

kicking the last rotting logs

with their strange smell of life, not death,

wondering what on earth it all might have become.

4.

Clarity,

spray

blinding and purging

spears of sun striking the water

the bodies riding the air

like gliders

the bodies in slow motion

falling

into the pool

at the Berlin Olympics

control; loss of control

the bodies rising

arching back to the tower

time reeling backward

clarity of open air

before the dark chambers

with the shower-heads

the bodies falling again

freely

faster than light

the water opening

like air

like realization

A woman made this film

against

the law

of gravity

5.

All night dreaming of a body

space weighs on differently from mine

We are making love in the street

the traffic flows off from us

pouring back like a sheet

the asphalt stirs with tenderness

there is no dismay

we move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake

I dive back to discover you

still whispering, touch me, we go on

streaming through the slow

citylight forest ocean

stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream

on waking

I wish there were somewhere

actual we could stand

handing the power-glasses back and forth

looking at the earth, the wildwood

where the split began

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

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

For A.P.C.

Two women sit at a table by a window. Light breaks

unevenly on both of them.

Their talk is a striking of sparks

which passers-by in the street observe

as a glitter in the glass of that window.

Two women in the prime of life.

Their babies are old enough to have babies.

Loneliness has been part of their story for twenty years,

the dark edge of the clever tongue,

the obscure underside of the imagination.

It is snow and thunder in the street.

While they speak the lightning flashes purple.

it is strange to be so many women,

eating and drinking at the same table,

those who bathed their children in the same basin

who kept their secrets from each other

walked the floors of their lives in separate rooms

and flow into history now as the woman of their time

living in the prime of life

as in a city where nothing is forbidden

and nothing permanent.

1971

THE MIRROR IN WHICH TWO ARE SEEN AS ONE

1.

She is the one you call sister.

Her simplest act has glamour,

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

THE STRANGER

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart

of the street to the river

walking the rivers of the avenues

feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

watching the lights turn on in the towers

walking as I’ve walked before

like a man, like a woman, in the city

my visionary anger cleansing my sight

and the detailed perceptions of mercy

flowering from that anger

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language

if they ask me my identity

what can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

in your dead language

the lost noun, the verb surviving

only in the infinitive

the letters of my name are written under the lids

of the newborn child

1972

SONG

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:

OK then, yes, I’m lonely

as a plane rides lonely and level

on its radio beam, aiming

across the Rockies

for the blue-strung aisles

of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely

it must be the loneliness

of waking first, of breathing

dawn’s first cold breath on the city

of being the one awake

in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely

it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore

in the last red light of the year

that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither

ice nor mud nor winter light

but wood, with a gift for burning

1971

DIALOGUE

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the

other turning an old ring to the light

for hours our talk has beaten

like rain against the screens

a sense of August and heat-lightning

I get up, go to make tea, come back

we look at each other

then she says (and this is what I live through

over and over)—she says: I do not know

if sex is an illusion

I do not know

who I was when I did those things

or who I said I was

or whether I willed to feel

what I had read about

or who in fact was there with me

or whether I knew, even then

that there was doubt about these things

1972

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

II

The Phenomenology

of Anger

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

III

I saw a beggar leaning on his crutch,

He said to me: Why do you ask for so much?

I saw a woman leaning on a door,

She said, Why not, why not, why not ask for more?

—Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” (as sung by Judy Collins)

MERCED

Fantasies of old age:

they have rounded us up

in a rest-camp for the outworn.

Somewhere in some dustbowl

a barbed-wire cantonment

of low-cost dustcolored prefab

buildings, smelling of shame

and hopeless incontinence

identical clothes of disposable

paper, identical rations

of chemically flavored food

Death in order, by gas,

hypodermics daily

to neutralize despair

So I imagine my world

in my seventieth year alive

and outside the barbed wire

a purposeless exchange

of consciousness for the absence

of pain. We will call this life.

Yet only last summer I

burned my feet in the sand

of that valley traced by the thread

of the cold quick river Merced

watered by plummets of white

When I swam, my body ached

from the righteous cold

when I lay back floating the jays

flittered from pine to pine

and the shade moved hour by hour

across El Capitan

Our wine cooled in the water

and I watched my sons, half-men

half-children, testing their part

in a world almost archaic

so precious by this time

that merely to step in pure water

or stare into clear air

is to feel a spasm of pain.

For weeks now a rage

has possessed my body, driving

now out upon men and women

now inward upon myself

Walking Amsterdam Avenue

I find myself in tears

without knowing which thought

forced water to my eyes

To speak to another human

becomes a risk

I think of Norman Morrison

the Buddhists of Saigon

the black teacher last week

who put himself to death

to waken guilt in hearts

too numb to get the message

in a world masculinity made

unfit for women or men

Taking off in a plane

I look down at the city

which meant life to me, not death

and think that somewhere there

a cold center, composed

of pieces of human beings

metabolized, restructured

by a process they do not feel

is spreading in our midst

and taking over our minds

a thing that feels neither guilt

nor rage: that is unable

to hate, therefore to love.

1972

A PRIMARY GROUND

But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his sense restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life …

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

And this is how you live: a woman, children

protect you from the abyss

you move near, turning on the news

eating Thanksgiving with its pumpkin teeth

drinking the last wine

from the cellar of your wedding

It all seems innocent enough, this sin

of wedlock: you, your wife, your children

leaning across the unfilled plates

passing the salt

down a cloth ironed by a woman

with aching legs

Now they go out to play

in the coarse, rough November air

that smells of soft-coal smoke, the river,

burnt sweet-potato pie.

Sensuality dessicates in words—

risks of the portage, risks of the glacier

never taken

Protection is the genius of your house

the pressure of the steam iron

flattens the linen cloth again

chestnuts puréed with care are dutifully eaten

in every room the furniture reflects you

larger than life, or dwindling

Emptiness

thrust like a batch of letters to the furthest

dark of a drawer

But there is something else:

your wife’s twin sister, speechless

is dying in the house

You and your wife take turns

carrying up the trays,

understanding her case, trying to make her understand.

1972

TRANSLATIONS

You show me the poems of some woman

my age, or younger

translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow

enough to let me know

she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:

we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls

baked it like bread in our ovens

worn it like lead on our ankles

watched it through binoculars as if

it were a helicopter

bringing food to our famine

or the satellite

of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman

doing things: stirring rice

ironing a skirt

typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call

from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered

in a man’s bedroom

she hears him telling someone else

Never mind. She’ll get tired.

hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own time

light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary

and political

1972

LIVING IN THE CAVE

Reading the Parable of the Cave

While living in the cave,

black moss

deadening my footsteps

candles stuck on rock-ledges

weakening my eyes

These things around me, with their

daily requirements:

fill me, empty me

talk to me, warm me, let me

suck on you

Every one of them has a plan that depends on me

stalactites want to become

stalagmites

veins of ore

imagine their preciousness

candles see themselves disembodied

into gas

and taking flight

the bat hangs dreaming

of an airy world

None of them, not one

sees me

as I see them

1972

THE NINTH SYMPHONY

OF BEETHOVEN UNDERSTOOD AT LAST

AS A SEXUAL MESSAGE

A man in terror of impotence

or infertility, not knowing the difference

a man trying to tell something

howling from the climacteric

music of the entirely

isolated soul

yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego

music without the ghost

of another person in it, music

trying to tell something the man

does not want out, would keep if he could

gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy

where everything is silence and the

beating of a bloody fist upon

a splintered table

1972

RAPE

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,

had certain ideals.

You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,

on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:

he has access to machinery that could kill you.

He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,

his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud

from between his unsmiling lips.

And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,

the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,

your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess

to him, you are guilty of the crime

of having been forced.

And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family

whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,

his hand types out the details

and he wants them all

but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:

he has taken down your worst moment

on a machine and filed it in a file.

He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;

he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away:

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,

will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

1972

BURNING ONESELF IN

In a bookstore on the East Side

I read a veteran’s testimony:

the running down, for no reason

of an old woman in South Vietnam

by a U.S. Army truck

The heat-wave is over

Lifeless, sunny, the East Side

rests under its awnings

Another summer

The flames go on feeding

and a dull heat permeates the ground

of the mind, the burn has settled in

as if it had no more question

of its right to go on devouring

the rest of a lifetime,

the rest of history

Pieces of information, like this one

blow onto the heap

they keep it fed, whether we will it or not,

another summer, and another

of suffering quietly

in bookstores, in the parks

however we may scream we are

suffering quietly

1972

BURNING ONESELF OUT

For E.K.

We can look into the stove tonight

as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue

gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes,

I know inside my eyelids

and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft

upward, drawing at the heats

in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand

into the print of a long-dead Indian

and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that rock,

that sun producing powerful dreams

A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire

of my mind, burning as if it could go on

burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything

till there is nothing in life

that has not fed that fire

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

FROM A SURVIVOR

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact

of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were

that our personalities

could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know

the race had failures of that order

and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me

as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:

I know what it could do and could not do

it is no longer

the body of a god

or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years

and you are wastefully dead

who might have made the leap

we talked, too late, of making

which I live now

not as a leap

but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

1972

AUGUST

Two horses in yellow light

eating windfall apples under a tree

as summer tears apart   milkweeds stagger

and grasses grow more ragged

They say there are ions in the sun

neutralizing magnetic fields on earth

Some way to explain

what this week has been, and the one before it!

If I am flesh sunning on rock

if I am brain burning in fluorescent light

if I am dream like a wire with fire

throbbing along it

if I am death to man

I have to know it

His mind is too simple, I cannot go on

sharing his nightmares

My own are becoming clearer, they open

into prehistory

which looks like a village lit with blood

where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!

1972

IV

Meditations for

a Savage Child

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

1972

POEMS

(1973–1974)

DIEN BIEN PHU

A nurse on the battlefield

wounded herself, but working

dreams

that each man she touches

is a human grenade

an anti-personnel weapon

that can explode in her arms

How long

can she go on like this

putting mercy

ahead of survival

She is walking

in a white dress stained

with earth and blood

down a road lined

with fields long

given up          blasted

cemeteries of one name

or two

A hand

juts out like barbed wire

it is terribly alone

if she takes it

will it slash her wrists again

if she passes it by

will she turn into a case

of shell-shock, eyes

glazed forever on the

blank chart of

amnesia

1973

ESSENTIAL RESOURCES

I don’t know

how late it is. I’m writing

with a chewed blunted lead

under a bridge while snow blankets the city

or with a greasy ballpoint

the nurse left

in a ward of amnesiacs who can be trusted

not to take notes

You talk of a film we could make

with women’s faces naked

of make-up, the mist of sweat

on a forehead, lips dry

the little bloodspot from a coldsore

I know the inmates are encouraged

to express themselves

I’m wondering how

I long to create something

that can’t be used to keep us passive:

I want to write

a script about plumbing, how every pipe

is joined

to every other

the wash of pure water and sewage

side by side

or about the electrical system

a study of the sources of energy

till in the final shot

the whole screen goes dark

and the keepers of order are screaming

I forget

what year it is. I am thinking

of films we have made but cannot show

yet, films of the mind unfolding

and our faces, still young

sweated with desire and

premature clarity

1973

BLOOD-SISTER

For Cynthia

Shoring up the ocean. A railroad track

ran close to the coast for miles

through the potato-fields, bringing us

to summer. Weeds blur the ties,

sludge clots the beaches.

During the war, the shells we found—

salmon-and-silver coins

sand dollars dripping sand

like dust. We were dressed

in navy dotted-swiss dresses in the train

not to show the soot. Like dolls

we sat with our dolls in the station.

When did we begin to dress ourselves?

Now I’m wearing jeans spider-webbed

with creases, a black sweater bought years ago

worn almost daily since

the ocean has undergone a tracheotomy

and lost its resonance

you wear a jersey the color of

Navaho turquoise and sand

you are holding a naked baby girl

she laughs into your eyes

we sit at your table drinking coffee

light flashes off unwashed sheetglass

you are more beautiful than you have ever been

we talk of destruction and creation

ice fits itself around each twig of the lilac

like a fist of law and order

your imagination burns like a bulb in the frozen soil

the fierce shoots knock

at the roof of waiting

when summer comes the ocean may be closed for good

we will turn

to the desert

where survival

takes naked and fiery forms

1973

THE WAVE

For J.B.

To give you back this wave

I would have to give back

the black

spaces

fretted with film of spray,

darker and deeper than the mind

they are emblems of

Not only the creator fury

of the whitest churn

the caldron of all life

but the blankness underlying

Thinking of the sea I think of light

lacing, lancing the water

the blue knife of a radiant consciousness

bent by the waves of vision as it pierces

to the deepest grotto

And I think of those lives we tried to live

in our globed helmets, self-enclosed

bodies self-illumined gliding

safe from the turbulence

and how, miraculously, we failed

1973

RE-FORMING THE CRYSTAL

I am trying to imagine

how it feels to you

to want a woman

trying to hallucinate

desire

centered in a cock

focused like a burning-glass

desire without discrimination:

to want a woman like a fix

Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of ’flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.

Tonight is a different kind of night.

I sit in the car, racing the engine,

calculating the thinness of the ice.

In my head I am already threading the beltways

that rim this city,

all the old roads that used to wander the country

having been lost.

Tonight I understand

my photo on the license is not me,

my

name on the marriage-contract was not mine.

If I remind you of my father’s favorite daughter,

look again. The woman

I needed to call my mother

was silenced before I was born.

Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice; I want to understand my fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name of the one she has chosen.

1973

THE FOURTH MONTH OF THE

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

It is asleep in my body.

For now, I am myself,

like anyone, like a man

whose body contains simply: itself.

I draw a too-big sweater

over my breasts, walk into the drafting-room

and stand there, balancing.

The sun sprays acid points of light

on the tools of my trade, the metal,

the edged instruments. My work has always been

with edges. For a while I listen:

will there be a knock, is the neighbor

so near me stirring behind his walls?

The neighbor is quiet. I am not

a body, I am no body, I am I,

a pair of hands ending in fingers

that think like a brain.

I draw a sheet of paper toward me

on the slanted drafting-table.

I start to imagine

plans for a house, a park

stretching in every direction to the horizon

which is no horizon

which is merely a circle of volcanoes.

I touch stylus, T-square, pens

of immeasurable fineness,

the hard-edge. I am I,

this India ink my rain

which can irrigate gardens, terraces

dissolve or project horizons

flowing like lava from the volcano of the inkpot

at the stirring of my mind.

A city waits at the back of my skull

eating its heart out to be born:

how design the first

city of the moon? how shall I see it

for all of us who are done

with enclosed spaces, purdah, the salon, the sweatshop loft,

the ingenuity of the cloister?

My mind flies at the moon

beating, a pale-green kite.

Something else is beating.

In my body.

Spaces fold in. I’m caught

in the enclosure of the crib my body

where every thought I think

simply loosens to life another life.

1973

THE ALLEGED MURDERESS

WALKING IN HER CELL

Nine months we conspired:

first in panic, then in a quieter dread,

finally an unfamiliar kind of peace.

In the new year voices began,

they said I’d helped beat a man to death,

even my lover said so.

You were no bigger than a cyst

then, a bead of life

lit from within.

I took that life in my hands

with mine; a key turned

and the voices shrank away.

Then began that whispered conversation

telling each other we were alive,

twins in the prison womb,

exchanging vows against the future.

Justice, they say, and clemency

installed our nursery in the house

of detention. I don’t know what

it means, that we have each other.

Do they mean to—can they use you

against me? I walk up and down

more at peace than in any prison night

here or outside—

your warmth washing into my ribcage

your frail silken skull asleep against my throat

your anxious pleading stilled—

unable to remember

whether or not I ever killed

whether I ever lived

without this—the blue pulse of your life

with its blind stroke: Not-Guilty

fledging my twenty-one-year life

of unmeaning, my worthless life

they framed in their contempt.

1973

WHITE NIGHT

Light at a window. Someone up

at this snail-still hour.

We who work this way have often worked

in solitude. I’ve had to guess at her

sewing her skin together as I sew mine

though

with a different

stitch.

Dawn after dawn, this neighbor

burns like a candle

dragging her bedspread through the dark house

to her dark bed

her head

full of runes, syllables, refrains,

this accurate dreamer

sleepwalks the kitchen

like a white moth,

an elephant, a guilt.

Somebody tried to put her

to rest under an afghan

knitted with wools the color of grass and blood

but she has risen. Her lamplight

licks at the icy panes

and melts into the dawn.

They will never prevent her

who sleep the stone sleep of the past,

the sleep of the drugged.

One crystal second, I flash

an eye across the cold

unwrapping of light between us

into her darkness-lancing eye

—that’s all. Dawn is the test, the agony

but we were meant to see it:

After this, we may sleep, my sister,

while the flames rise higher and higher, we can sleep.

1974

AMNESIA

I almost trust myself to know

when we’re getting to that scene—

call it the snow-scene in Citizen Kane:

the mother handing over her son

the earliest American dream

shot in a black-and-white

where every flake of snow

is incandescent

with its own burden, adding-

up, always adding-up to the

cold blur of the past

But first there is the picture of the past

simple and pitiless as the deed

truly was

the putting-away of a childish thing

Becoming a man means leaving

someone, or something—

still, why

must the snow-scene blot itself out

the flakes come down so fast

so heavy, so unrevealing

over the something that gets left behind?

1974

FOR L.G.: UNSEEN FOR TWENTY YEARS

A blue-grained line circles a fragment of the mind

drawn in ancient crayon:

out of the blue, your tightstrung smile—

often in the first snow

that even here smells only of itself

even on this Broadway limped by cripples

and the self-despising

Still, in that smell, another snow,

another world: we’re walking

grey boulevards traced with white

in Paris, the early ’fifties

of invincible ignorance:

or, a cold spring:

I clasp your hips on the bike

shearing the empty plain in March

teeth gritted in the wind

searching for Chartres:

we doze

in the boat-train

we who were friends and thought

women and men should be lovers

Your face: taut as a mask of wires, a fencer’s mask

half-turned away, the one night, walking

the City of Love, so cold

we warmed our nerves with wine

at every all-night café

to keep on walking, talking

Your words have drifted back for twenty years:

I have to tell you—maybe I’m not a man—

I can’t do it with women—but I’d like

to hold you, to know what it’s like

to sleep and wake together—

the one night in all our weeks of talk

you talked of fear

I wonder

what words of mine drift back to you?

Something like:

But you’re a man, I know it—

the swiftness of your mind is masculine—?

—some set-piece I’d learned to embroider

in my woman’s education

while the needle scarred my hand?

Of course, you’re a man. I like you. What else could you be?

what else, what else,

what bloody else …

Given the cruelty of our times and customs,

maybe you hate these memories,

the ignorance, the innocence we shared:

maybe you cruise the SoHo cocktail parties

the Vancouver bar-scene

stalking yourself as I can see you still:

young, tense, amorphous, longing—

maybe you live out your double life

in the Berkeley hills, with a wife

who stuns her mind into indifference

with Scotch and saunas

while you arrange your own humiliations

downtown

(and, yes, I’ve played my scenes

of favorite daughter, child-bride, token woman, muse

listening now and then

as a drunken poet muttered into my hair:

I can’t make it with women I admire—)

maybe you’ve found or fought

through to a kind of faithfulness

in the strange coexistence

of two of any gender

But we were talking in 1952

of the fear of being cripples in a world

of perfect women and men:

we were the givens and the stake

and we did badly

and, dear heart, I know, had a lover gestured

you’d have left me

for a man, as I left you,

as we left each other, seeking the love of men.

1974

FAMILY ROMANCE

(the brothers speak)

Our mother went away and our father was the king

always absent at the wars

We had to make it together or not at all

in the black forest

cutting paths, stumbling on the witch’s house

long empty

gathering wood and mushrooms, gathering everything

we needed in a wordless collusion

Sometimes we pretended the witch had been our mother

and would come back

we loved each other with a passion understood

like the great roots of the wood

In another country we might have fought each other

and died of fraternal wounds

conspiring each alone for the father’s blessing,

the birthright, the mother

Since we had no father to bless us, we were free

and our birthright was each other

our life was harsh and simple; we slept deeply

and we thought our mother came and watched us sleeping

1974

FROM AN OLD HOUSE IN AMERICA

1.

Deliberately, long ago

the carcasses

of old bugs crumbled

into the rut of the window

and we started sleeping here

Fresh June bugs batter this June’s

screens, June-lightning batters

the spiderweb

I sweep the wood-dust

from the wood-box

the snout of the vacuum cleaner

sucks the past away

2.

Other lives were lived here:

mostly un-articulate

yet someone left her creamy signature

in the trail of rusticated

narcissus straggling up

through meadowgrass and vetch

Families breathed close

boxed-in from the cold

hard times, short growing season

the old rainwater cistern

hulks in the cellar

3.

Like turning through the contents of a drawer:

these rusted screws, this empty vial

useless, this box of watercolor paints

dried to insolubility—

but this—

this pack of cards with no card missing

still playable

and three good fuses

and this toy: a little truck

scarred red, yet all its wheels still turn

The humble tenacity of things

waiting for people, waiting for months, for years

4.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

I place my hand on the hand

of the dead, invisible palm-print

on the doorframe

spiked with daylilies, green leaves

catching in the screen door

or I read the backs of old postcards

curling from thumbtacks, winter and summer

fading through cobweb-tinted panes—

white church in Norway

Dutch hyacinths bleeding azure

red beach on Corsica

set-pieces of the world

stuck to this house of plank

I flash on wife and husband

embattled, in the years

that dried, dim ink was wet

those signatures

5.

If they call me man-hater, you

would have known it for a lie

but the you I want to speak to

has become your death

If I dream of you these days

I know my dreams are mine and not of you

yet something hangs between us

older and stranger than ourselves

like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water

a dusty window

the irreducible, incomplete connection

between the dead and living

or between man and woman in this

savagely fathered and unmothered world

6.

The other side of a translucent

curtain, a sheet of water

a dusty window, Non-being

utters its flat tones

the speech of an actor learning his lines

phonetically

the final autistic statement

of the self-destroyer

All my energy reaches out tonight

to comprehend a miracle beyond

raising the dead: the undead to watch

back on the road of birth

7.

I am an American woman:

I turn that over

like a leaf pressed in a book

I stop and look up from

into the coals of the stove

or the black square of the window

Foot-slogging through the Bering Strait

jumping from the Arbella to my death

chained to the corpse beside me

I feel my pains begin

I am washed up on this continent

shipped here to be fruitful

my body a hollow ship

bearing sons to the wilderness

sons who ride away

on horseback, daughters

whose juices drain like mine

into the arroyo of stillbirths, massacres

Hanged as witches, sold as breeding-wenches

my sisters leave me

I am not the wheatfield

nor the virgin forest

I never chose this place

yet I am of it now

In my decent collar, in the daguerreotype

I pierce its legend with my look

my hands wring the necks of prairie chickens

I am used to blood

When the men hit the hobo track

I stay on with the children

my power is brief and local

but I know my power

I have lived in isolation

from other women, so much

in the mining camps, the first cities

the Great Plains winters

Most of the time, in my sex, I was alone

8.

Tonight in this northeast kingdom

striated iris stand in a jar with daisies

the porcupine gnaws in the shed

fireflies beat and simmer

caterpillars begin again

their long, innocent climb

the length of leaves of burdock

or webbing of a garden chair

plain and ordinary things

speak softly

the light square on old wallpaper

where a poster has fallen down

Robert Indiana’s LOVE

leftover of a decade

9.

I do not want to simplify

Or: I would simplify

by naming the complexity

It was made over-simple all along

the separation of powers

the allotment of sufferings

her spine cracking in labor

his plow driving across the Indian graves

her hand unconscious on the cradle, her mind

with the wild geese

his mother-hatred driving him

into exile from the earth

the refugee couple with their cardboard luggage

standing on the ramshackle landing-stage

he with fingers frozen around his Law

she with her down quilt sewn through iron nights

—the weight of the old world, plucked

drags after them, a random feather-bed

10.

Her children dead of diphtheria, she

set herself on fire with kerosene

(O Lord I was unworthy

Thou didst find me out)

she left the kitchen scrubbed

down to the marrow of its boards

“The penalty for barrenness

is emptiness

my punishment is my crime

what I have failed to do, is me …”

—Another month without a show

and this the seventh year

O Father let this thing pass out of me

I swear to You

I will live for the others, asking nothing

I will ask nothing, ever, for myself

11.

Out back of this old house

datura tangles with a gentler weed

its spiked pods smelling

of bad dreams and death

I reach through the dark, groping

past spines of nightmare

to brush the leaves of sensuality

A dream of tenderness

wrestles with all I know of history

I cannot now lie down

with a man who fears my power

or reaches for me as for death

or with a lover who imagines

we are not in danger

12.

If it was lust that had defined us—

their lust and fear of our deep places

we have done our time

as faceless torsos licked by fire

we are in the open, on our way—

our counterparts

the pinyon jay, the small

gilt-winged insect

the Cessna throbbing level

the raven floating in the gorge

the rose and violet vulva of the earth

filling with darkness

yet deep within a single sparkle

of red, a human fire

and near and yet above the western planet

calmly biding her time

13.

They were the distractions, lust and fear

but are

themselves a key

Everything that can be used, will be:

the fathers in their ceremonies

the genital contests

the cleansing of blood from pubic hair

the placenta buried and guarded

their terror of blinding

by the look of her who bore them

If you do not believe

that fear and hatred

read the lesson again

in the old dialect

14.

But can’t you see me as a human being

he said

What is a human being

she said

I try to understand

he said

what will you undertake

she said

will you punish me for history

he said

what will you undertake

she said

do you believe in collective guilt

he said

let me look in your eyes

she said

15.

Who is here. The Erinyes.

One to sit in judgment.

One to speak tenderness.

One to inscribe the verdict on the canyon wall.

If you have not confessed

the damage

if you have not recognized

the Mother of reparations

if you have not come to terms

with the women in the mirror

if you have not come to terms

with the inscription

the terms of the ordeal

the discipline   the verdict

if still you are on your way

still She awaits your coming

16.

“Such women are dangerous

to the order of things”

and yes, we will be dangerous

to ourselves

groping through spines of nightmare

(datura tangling with a simpler herb)

because the line dividing

lucidity from darkness

is yet to be marked out

Isolation, the dream

of the frontier woman

leveling her rifle along

the homestead fence

still snares our pride

—a suicidal leaf

laid under the burning-glass

in the sun’s eye

Any woman’s death diminishes me

1974

THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME

means there is something to hold

onto with both hands

while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood

and taking it away

one of the oldest motions of suffering

as Makeba sings

a courage-song for warriors

music is suffering made powerful

I think of the story

of the goose-girl who passed through the high gate

where the head of her favorite mare

was nailed to the arch

and in a human voice

If she could see thee now, thy mother’s heart would break

said the head

of Falada

Now, again, poetry,

violent, arcane, common,

hewn of the commonest living substance

into archway, portal, frame

I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your

ancient and stubborn poise

—as the earth trembles—

burning out from the grain

1974

THE DREAM OF A

COMMON LANGUAGE

(1974–1977)

I go where I love and where I am loved,

into the snow;

I go to the things I love

with no thought of duty or pity

—H. D., The Flowering of the Rod

I

Power

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

PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV

(Leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.)

The cold felt cold until our blood

grew colder   then the wind

died down and we slept

If in this sleep I speak

It’s with a voice no longer personal

(I want to say   with voices)

When the wind tore      our breath from us at last

we had no need of words

For months      for years      each one of us

had felt her own yes      growing in her

slowly forming   as she stood at windows   waited

for trains   mended her rucksack   combed her hair

What we were to learn   was simply   what we had

up here   as out of all words   that yes   gathered

its forces   fused itself   and only just in time

to meet a No of no degrees

the black hole   sucking the world in

I feel you climbing toward me

your cleated bootsoles leaving   their geometric bite

colossally embossed   on microscopic crystals

as when I trailed you in the Caucasus

Now I am further

ahead   than either of us dreamed   anyone would be

I have become

the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind

the women I love   lightly flung   against the mountain

that blue sky

our frozen eyes unribboned   through the storm

we could have stitched that blueness   together   like a quilt

You come (I know this)   with your love   your loss

strapped to your body   with your tape-recorder   camera

ice-pick   against advisement

to give us burial in the snow   and in your mind

While my body lies out here

flashing like a prism   into your eyes

how could you sleep   You climbed here for yourself

we climbed for ourselves

When you have buried us   told your story

ours does not end   we stream

into the unfinished   the unbegun

the possible

Every cell’s core of heat   pulsed out of us

into the thin air   of the universe

the armature of rock beneath these snows

this mountain   which has taken   the imprint of our minds

through changes elemental and minute

as those we underwent

to bring each other here

choosing ourselves   each other   and this life

whose every breath   and grasp   and further foothold

is somewhere   still enacted   and continuing

In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready

and each of us knows it   I have never loved

like this   I have never seen

my own forces so taken up and shared

and given back

After the long training      the early sieges

we are moving almost effortlessly in our love

In the diary as the wind   began to tear

at the tents over us   I wrote:

We know now we have always been in danger

down in our separateness

and now up here together   but till now

we had not touched our strength

In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:

What does love mean

What does it mean   “to survive”

A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies

burning together in the snow   We will not live

to settle for less   We have dreamed of this

all of our lives

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

SPLITTINGS

1.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day-

light raining down      each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her      I have been waking off and on

all night to that pain      not simply absence but

the presence of the past      destructive

to living here and now   Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn from pain

even as it grasps us      if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse      to let itself be crushed

in that grasp   it would loosen   Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen   its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak to pain

and pain would have to answer:

We are older now

we have met before      these are my hands before your eyes

my figure blotting out      all that is not mine

I am the pain of division      creator of divisions

it is I who blot your lover from you

and not the time-zones nor the miles

It is not separation calls me forth      but I

who am separation      And remember

I have no existence      apart from you

2.

I believe I am choosing something new

not to suffer uselessly      yet still to feel

Does the infant memorize the body of the mother

and create her in absence?      or simply cry

primordial loneliness?      does the bed of the stream

once diverted      mourning      remember wetness?

But we, we live so much in these

configurations of the past      I choose

to separate her   from my past we have not shared

I choose not to suffer uselessly

to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me

flashing its bleak torch in my eyes   blotting out

her particular being      the details of her love

I will not be divided      from her or from myself

by myths of separation

while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me

than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning   on these hills

3.

The world tells me I am its creature

I am raked by eyes   brushed by hands

I want to crawl into her for refuge   lay my head

in the space   between her breast and shoulder

abnegating power for love

as women have done   or hiding

from power in her love   like a man

I refuse these givens   the splitting

between love and action   I am choosing

not to suffer uselessly   and not to use her

I choose to love   this time   for once

with all my intelligence

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

TO A POET

Ice splits   under the metal

shovel   another day

hazed light off fogged panes

cruelty of winter   landlocked   your life

wrapped round you   in your twenties

an old bathrobe      dragged down

with milkstains      tearstains      dust

Scraping eggcrust from the child’s

dried dish   skimming the skin

from cooled milk   wringing diapers

Language floats at the vanishing-point

incarnate   breathes the fluorescent bulb

primary   states the scarred grain of the floor

and on the ceiling in torn plaster laughs   imago

and I have fears that you will cease to be

before your pen has glean’d your teeming brain

for you are not a suicide

but no-one calls this murder

Small mouths, needy, suck you: This is love

I write this   not for you

who fight to write your own

words   fighting up the falls

but for another woman   dumb

with loneliness   dust   seeping plastic bags

with children in a house

where language floats and spins

abortion   in

the bowl

1974

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 dó 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

THE LIONESS

The scent of her beauty draws me to her place.

The desert stretches, edge from edge.

Rock. Silver grasses. Drinking-hole.

The starry sky.

The lioness pauses

in her back-and-forth pacing of three yards square

and looks at me. Her eyes

are truthful. They mirror rivers,

seacoasts, volcanoes, the warmth

of moon-bathed promontories.

Under her haunches’ golden hide

flows an innate, half-abnegated power.

Her walk

is bounded. Three square yards

encompass where she goes.

In country like this. I say, the problem is always

one of straying too far, not of staying

within bounds. There are caves,

high rocks, you don’t explore. Yet you know

they exist. Her proud, vulnerable head

sniffs toward them. It is her country, she

knows they exist.

I come towards her in the starlight.

I look into her eyes

as one who loves can look.

entering the space behind her eyeballs,

leaving myself outside.

So, at last, through her pupils,

I see what she is seeing:

between her and the river’s flood,

the volcano veiled in rainbow,

a pen that measures three yards square.

Lashed bars.

The cage.

The penance.

1975

II

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

III

Not Somewhere Else,

But Here

NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE, BUT HERE

Courage   Her face in the leaves   the polygons

of the paving   Her   out of touch

Courage to breathe   The death of October

Spilt wine   The unbuilt house   The unmade life

Graffiti   without memory   grown conventional

scrawling the least wall   god loves you   voice of the ghetto

Death of the city   Her face

sleeping   Her quick stride   Her

running   Search for a private space   The city

caving in from within   The lessons badly

learned      Or not at all   The unbuilt world

This one love flowing   Touching other

lives   Spilt love   The least wall caving

To have enough courage   The life that must be lived

in terrible October

Sudden immersion in yellows   streaked blood   The fast rain

Faces   Inscriptions   Trying to teach

unlearnable lessons   October   This one love

Repetitions   from other lives   The deaths

that must be lived   Denials   Blank walls

Our quick stride side by side   Her fugue

Bad air in the tunnels   voice of the ghetto   god loves you

My face   pale in the window   anger is pale

the blood shrinks to the heart

the head severed   it does not pay to feel

Her face   The fast rain tearing   Courage

to feel this   To tell of this   to be alive

Trying to learn   unteachable lessons

The fugue   Blood in my eyes   The careful sutures

ripped open   The hands that touch me   Shall it be said

I am not alone

Spilt love   seeking its level   flooding other

lives   that must be lived   not somewhere else

but here   seeing through blood   nothing is lost

1974

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

NIGHTS AND DAYS

The stars will come out over and over

the hyacinths rise like flames

from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway

where the desolate take the sun

the days will run together and stream into years

as the rivers freeze and burn

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us

which will we claim

how will we go on living

how will we touch, what will we know

what will we say to each other.

Pictures form and dissolve in my head:

we are walking in a city

you fled, came back to and come back to still

which I saw once through winter frost

years back, before I knew you,

before I knew myself.

We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood

streets you have graven and erased in dreams:

scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth-century statues.

We are holding hands so I can see

everything as you see it

I follow you into your dreams

your past, the places

none of us can explain to anyone.

We are standing in the wind

on an empty beach, the onslaught of the surf

tells me Point Reyes, or maybe some northern

Pacific shoreline neither of us has seen.

In its fine spectral mist our hair

is grey as the sea

someone who saw us far-off would say we were two old women

Norns, perhaps, or sisters of the spray

but our breasts are beginning to sing together

your eyes are on my mouth

I wake early in the morning

in a bed we have shared for years

lie watching your innocent, sacred sleep

as if for the first time.

We have been together so many nights and days

this day is not unusual.

I walk to an eastern window, pull up the blinds:

the city around us is still

on a clear October morning

wrapped in her indestructible light.

The stars will come out over and over

the hyacinths rise like flames

from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway

where the desolate take the sun

the days will run together and stream into years

as the rivers freeze and burn

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us

which will we claim

how will we go on living

how will we touch, what will we know

what will we say to each other.

1976

SIBLING MYSTERIES

For C.R.

1.

Remind me how we walked

trying the planetary rock

for foothold

testing the rims of canyons

fields of sheer

ice in the midnight sun

smelling the rains before they came

feeling the fullness of the moon

before moonrise

unbalanced by the life

moving in us, then lightened

yet weighted still

by children on our backs

at our hips, as we made fire

scooped clay   lifted water

Remind me how the stream

wetted the clay     between our palms

and how the flame

licked it to mineral colors

how we traced our signs by torchlight

in the deep chambers of the caves

and how we drew the quills

of porcupines between our teeth

to a keen thinness

and brushed the twisted raffia into velvet

and bled our lunar knowledge thirteen times

upon the furrows

I know by heart, and still

I need to have you tell me,

hold me, remind me

2.

Remind me how we loved our mother’s body

our mouths drawing the first

thin sweetness from her nipples

our faces dreaming hour on hour

in the salt smell of her lap   Remind me

how her touch melted childgrief

how she floated great and tender in our dark

or stood guard over us

against our willing

and how we thought she loved

the strange male body first

that took, that took, whose taking seemed a law

and how she sent us weeping

into that law

how we remet her in our childbirth visions

erect, enthroned, above

a spiral stair

and crawled and panted toward her

I know, I remember, but

hold me, remind me

of how her woman’s flesh was made taboo to us

3.

And how beneath the veil

black gauze or white, the dragging

bangles, the amulets, we dreamed   And how beneath

the strange male bodies

we sank in terror or in resignation

and how we taught them tenderness—

the holding-back, the play,

the floating of a finger

the secrets of the nipple

And how we ate and drank

their leavings, how we served them

in silence, how we told

among ourselves our secrets, wept and laughed

passed bark and root and berry

from hand to hand, whispering each one’s power

washing the bodies of the dead

making celebrations of doing laundry

piecing our lore in quilted galaxies

how we dwelt in two worlds

the daughters and the mothers

in the kingdom of the sons

4.

Tell me again because I need to hear

how we bore our mother-secrets

straight to the end

tied in unlawful rags

between our breasts

muttered in blood

in looks exchanged at the feast

where the fathers sucked the bones

and struck their bargains

in the open square when noon

battered our shaven heads

and the flames curled transparent in the sun

in boats of skin on the ice-floe

—the pregnant set to drift,

too many mouths for feeding—

how sister gazed at sister

reaching through mirrored pupils

back to the mother

5.

C. had a son on June 18th … I feel acutely that we are strangers, my sister and I; we don’t get through to each other, or say what we really feel. This depressed me violently on that occasion, when I wanted to have only generous and simple feelings towards her, of pleasure in her joy, affection for all that was hers. But we are not really friends, and act the part of sisters. I don’t know what really gives her pain or joy, nor does she know how I am happy or how I suffer.

(1963)

There were years you and I

hardly spoke to each other

then one whole night

our father dying upstairs

we burned our childhood, reams of paper,

talking till the birds sang

Your face across a table now: dark

with illumination

This face I have watched changing

for forty years

has watched me changing

this mind has wrenched my thought

I feel the separateness

of cells in us, split-second choice

of one ovum for one sperm?

We have seized different weapons

our hair has fallen long

or short at different times

words flash from you I never thought of

we are translations into different dialects

of a text still being written

in the original

yet our eyes drink from each other

our lives were driven down the same dark canal

6.

We have returned so far

that house of childhood seems absurd

its secrets a fallen hair, a grain of dust

on the photographic plate

we are eternally exposing to the universe

I call you from another planet

to tell a dream

Light-years away, you weep with me

The daughters never were

true brides of the father

the daughters were to begin with

brides of the mother

then brides of each other

under a different law

Let me hold and tell you

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

MOTHER-RIGHT

For M.H.

Woman and child   running

in a field   A man planted

on the horizon

Two hands   one long, slim   one

small, starlike   clasped

in the razor wind

Her hair cut short for faster travel

the child’s curls grazing his shoulders

the hawk-winged cloud   over their heads

The man is walking boundaries

measuring   He believes in what is his

the grass   the waters underneath   the air

the air   through which child and mother

are running   the boy singing

the woman   eyes sharpened in the light

heart stumbling   making for the open

1977

NATURAL RESOURCES

1.

The core of the strong hill: not understood:

the mulch-heat of the underwood

where unforeseen the forest fire unfurls;

the heat, the privacy of the mines;

the rainbow laboring to extend herself

where neither men nor cattle understand,

arching her lusters over rut and stubble

purely to reach where she must go;

the emerald lying against the silver vein

waiting for light to reach it, breathing in pain;

the miner laboring beneath

the ray of the headlamp: a weight like death.

2.

The miner is no metaphor. She goes

into the cage like the rest, is flung

downward by gravity like them, must change

her body like the rest to fit a crevice

to work a lode

on her the pick hangs heavy, the bad air

lies thick, the mountain presses in on her

with boulder, timber, fog

slowly the mountain’s dust descends

into the fibers of her lungs.

3.

The cage drops into the dark,

the routine of life goes on:

a woman turns a doorknob, but so slowly

so quietly, that no one wakes

and it is she alone who gazes

into the dark of bedrooms, ascertains

how they sleep, who needs her touch

what window blows the ice of February

into the room and who must be protected:

It is only she who sees; who was trained to see.

4.

Could you imagine a world of women only,

the interviewer asked. Can you imagine

a world where women are absent. (He believed

he was joking.) Yet I have to imagine

at one and the same moment, both. Because

I live in both. Can you imagine,

the interviewer asked, a world of men?

(He thought he was joking.) If so, then,

a world where men are absent?

Absently, wearily, I answered: Yes.

5.

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,

the lost brother, the twin—

for him did we leave our mothers,

deny our sisters, over and over?

did we invent him, conjure him

over the charring log,

nights, late, in the snowbound cabin

did we dream or scry his face

in the liquid embers,

the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?

6.

It was never the rapist:

it was the brother, lost,

the comrade/twin whose palm

would bear a lifeline like our own:

decisive, arrowy,

forked-lightning of insatiate desire

It was never the crude pestle, the blind

ramrod we were after:

merely a fellow-creature

with natural resources equal to our own

7.

Meanwhile, another kind of being

was constructing itself, blindly

—a mutant, some have said:

the blood-compelled exemplar

of a “botched civilization”

as one of them called it

children picking up guns

for that is what it means to be a man

We have lived with violence for seven years

It was not worth one single life—

but the patriot’s fist is at her throat,

her voice is in mortal danger

and that kind of being has lain in our beds

declaring itself our desire

requiring women’s blood for life

a woman’s breast to lay its nightmare on

8.

And that kind of being has other forms:

a passivity we mistake

—in the desperation of our search—

for gentleness

But gentleness is active

gentleness swabs the crusted stump

invents more merciful instruments

to touch the wound beyond the wound

does not faint with disgust

will not be driven off

keeps bearing witness calmly

against the predator, the parasite

9.

I am tired of faintheartedness,

their having to be exceptional

to do what an ordinary woman

does in the course of things

I am tired of women stooping to half our height

to bring the essential vein to light

tired of the waste of what we bear

with such cost, such elation, into sight

(—for what becomes of what the miner probes

and carves from the mountain’s body in her pain?)

10.

This is what I am: watching the spider

rebuild—“patiently”, they say,

but I recognize in her

impatience—my own—

the passion to make and make again

where such unmaking reigns

the refusal to be a victim

we have lived with violence so long

Am I to go on saying

for myself, for her

This is my body,

take and destroy it?

11.

The enormity of the simplest things:

in this cold barn tables are spread

with china saucers, shoehorns

of german silver, a gilt-edged book

that opens into a picture-frame—

a biscuit-tin of the thirties.

Outside, the north lies vast

with unshed snow, everything is

at once remote and familiar

each house contains what it must

women simmer carcasses

of clean-picked turkeys, store away

the cleaned cutglass and soak the linen cloths

Dark rushes early at the panes

12.

These things by women saved

are all we have of them

or of those dear to them

these ribboned letters, snapshots

faithfully glued for years

onto the scrapbook page

these scraps, turned into patchwork,

doll-gowns, clean white rags

for stanching blood

the bride’s tea-yellow handkerchief

the child’s height penciled on the cellar door

In this cold barn we dream

a universe of humble things—

and without these, no memory

no faithfulness, no purpose for the future

no honor to the past

13.

There are words I cannot choose again:

humanism   androgyny

Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence

before the raging stoic grandmothers:

their glint is too shallow, like a dye

that does not permeate

the fibers of actual life

as we live it, now:

this fraying blanket with its ancient stains

we pull across the sick child’s shoulder

or wrap around the senseless legs

of the hero trained to kill

this weaving, ragged because incomplete

we turn our hands to, interrupted

over and over, handed down

unfinished, found in the drawer

of an old dresser in the barn,

her vanished pride and care

still urging us, urging on

our works, to close the gap

in the Great Nebula

to help the earth deliver.

14.

The women who first knew themselves

miners, are dead. The rainbow flies

like a flying buttress from the walls

of cloud, the silver-and-green vein

awaits the battering of the pick

the dark lode weeps for light

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

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

TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE

For Michelle Cliff

This August evening I’ve been driving

over backroads fringed with queen anne’s lace

my car startling young deer in meadows—one

gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all

four fawns sprang after her

into the dark maples.

Three months from today they’ll be fair game

for the hit-and-run hunters, glorying

in a weekend’s destructive power.

triggers fingered by drunken gunmen, sometimes

so inept as to leave the shattered animal

stunned in her blood. But this evening deep in summer

the deer are still alive and free,

nibbling apples from early-laden boughs

so weighted, so englobed

with already yellowing fruit

they seem eternal, Hesperidean

in the clear-tuned, cricket-throbbing air.

Later I stood in the dooryard,

my nerves singing the immense

fragility of all this sweetness,

this green world already sentimentalized, photographed,

advertised to death. Yet, it persists

stubbornly beyond the fake Vermont

of antique barnboards glazed into discothèques,

artificial snow, the sick Vermont of children

conceived in apathy, grown to winters

of rotgut violence,

poverty gnashing its teeth like a blind cat at their lives.

Still, it persists. Turning off onto a dirt road

from the raw cuts bulldozed through a quiet village

for the tourist run to Canada,

I’ve sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field

of musing heifers, a farmstead

slanting its planes calmly in the calm light,

a dead elm raising bleached arms

above a green so dense with life,

minute, momentary life—slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats,

spiders, moths, hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies—

a lifetime is too narrow

to understand it all, beginning with the huge

rockshelves that underlie all that life.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,

make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history

or music, that we should begin

with the simple exercises first

and slowly go on trying

the hard ones, practicing till strength

and accuracy became one with the daring

to leap into transcendence, take the chance

of breaking down in the wild arpeggio

or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on

everything at once before we’ve even begun

to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin

in the midst of the hardest movement,

the one already sounding as we are born.

At most we’re allowed a few months

of simply listening to the simple line

of a woman’s voice singing a child

against her heart. Everything else is too soon,

too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat

heard ever after from a distance,

the loss of that ground-note echoing

whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,

we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said

is true for us, caught naked in the argument,

the counterpoint, trying to sightread

what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart

what we can’t even read. And yet

it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi

or child prodigies, there are no prodigies

in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn

cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are

—even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing

against the world for speed and brilliance

(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her

What makes a virtuoso?—Competitiveness.)

The longer I live the more I mistrust

theatricality, the false glamour cast

by performance, the more I know its poverty beside

the truths we are salvaging from

the splitting-open of our lives.

The woman who sits watching, listening,

eyes moving in the darkness

is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood

a score touched off in her perhaps

by some words, a few chords, from the stage:

a tale only she can tell.

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them—

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

when we have to pull back from the incantations,

rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,

and disenthrall ourselves, bestow

ourselves to silence, or a deeper listening, cleansed

of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static

crowding the wires. We cut the wires,

find ourselves in free-fall, as if

our true home were the undimensional

solitudes, the rift

in the Great Nebula.

No one who survives to speak

new language, has avoided this:

the cutting-away of an old force that held her

rooted to an old ground

the pitch of utter loneliness

where she herself and all creation

seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry

to which no echo comes or can ever come.

But in fact we were always like this,

rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.

Birth stripped our birthright from us,

tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves

so early on

and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears

like midges, told us nothing, nothing

of origins, nothing we needed

to know, nothing that could re-member us.

Only: that it is unnatural,

the homesickness for a woman, for ourselves,

for that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms

cast on a wall, her heavy or slender

thighs on which we lay, flesh against flesh,

eyes steady on the face of love; smell of her milk, her sweat,

terror of her disappearance, all fused in this hunger

for the element they have called most dangerous, to be

lifted breathtaken on her breast, to rock within her

—even if beaten back, stranded again, to apprehend

in a sudden brine-clear thought

trembling like the tiny, orbed, endangered

egg-sac of a new world:

This is what she was to me, and this

is how I can love myself—

as only a woman can love me.

Homesick for myself, for her—as, after the heatwave

breaks, the clear tones of the world

manifest: cloud, bough, wall, insect, the very soul of light:

homesick as the fluted vault of desire

articulates itself: I am the lover and the loved,

home and wanderer, she who splits

firewood and she who knocks, a stranger

in the storm, two women, eye to eye

measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s

limitless desire,

a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life

as if a woman quietly walked away

from the argument and jargon in a room

and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap

bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,

laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards

in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells

sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,

and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow—

original domestic silk, the finest findings—

and the darkblue petal of the petunia,

and the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;

not forgotten either, the shed silver

whisker of the cat,

the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling

beside the finch’s yellow feather.

Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,

the striving for greatness, brilliance—

only with the musing of a mind

one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing

dark against bright, silk against roughness,

pulling the tenets of a life together

with no mere will to mastery,

only care for the many-lived, unending

forms in which she finds herself,

becoming now the sherd of broken glass

slicing light in a corner, dangerous

to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf

that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;

and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further

forming underneath everything that grows.

1977

A WILD PATIENCE

HAS TAKEN ME

THIS FAR

(1978–1981)

THE IMAGES

Close to your body, in the

pain of the city

I turn. My hand half-sleeping reaches, finds

some part of you, touch knows you before language

names in the brain. Out in the dark

a howl, police sirens, emergency

our 3 a.m. familiar, ripping the sheath of sleep

registering pure force as if all transpired—

the swell of cruelty and helplessness—

in one block between West End

and Riverside. In my dreams the Hudson

rules the night like a right-hand margin

drawn against the updraft

of burning life, the tongueless cries

of the city. I turn again, slip my arm

under the pillow turned for relief,

your breathing traces my shoulder. Two women sleeping

together have more than their sleep to defend.

And what can reconcile me

that you, the woman whose hand

sensual and protective, brushes me in sleep,

go down each morning into such a city?

I will not, cannot withhold

your body or my own from its chosen danger

but when did we ever choose

to see our bodies strung

in bondage and crucifixion across the exhausted air

when did we choose

to be lynched on the queasy electric signs

of midtown when did we choose

to become the masturbator’s fix

emblem of rape in Riverside Park   the campground

at Bandol the beach at Sydney?

We are trying to live

in a clearheaded tenderness—

I speak not merely of us, our lives

are “moral and ordinary”

as the lives of numberless women—

I pretend the Hudson is a right-hand margin

drawn against fear and woman-loathing

(water as purification, river as boundary)

but I know my imagination lies:

in the name of freedom of speech

they are lynching us no law is on our side

there are no boundaries

no-man’s-land does not exist.

I can never romanticize language again

never deny its power for disguise for mystification

but the same could be said for music

or any form created

painted ceilings beaten gold worm-worn Pietàs

reorganizing victimization   frescoes translating

violence into patterns so powerful and pure

we continually fail to ask are they true for us.

When I walked among time-battered stones

thinking already of you

when I sat near the sea

among parched yet flowering weeds

when I drew in my notebook

the thorned purple-tongued flower, each petal

protected by its thorn-leaf

I was mute

innocent of grammar as the waves

irrhythmically washing   I felt washed clean

of the guilt of words   there was no word to read

in the book of that earth   no perjury

the tower of Babel fallen once and for all

light drank at my body

thinking of you I felt free

in the cicadas’ pulse, their encircling praise.

When I saw hér face, she of the several faces

staring   indrawn   in judgment   laughing for joy

her serpents twisting   her arms raised

her breasts   gazing

when I looked into hér world

I wished to cry loose my soul

into her, to become

free of speech   at last.

And so I came home   a woman starving

for images

to say my hunger is so old

so fundamental, that all the lost

crumbled   burnt   smashed   shattered   defaced

overpainted   concealed and falsely named

faces of every past we have searched together

in all the ages

could rise   reassemble   re-collect   re-member

themselves as I recollected myself in that presence

as every night close to your body

in the pain of the city, turning

I am remembered by you, remember you

even as we are dismembered

on the cinema screens, the white expensive walls

of collectors, the newsrags blowing the streets

—and it would not be enough.

This is the war of the images.

We are the thorn-leaf guarding the purple-tongued flower

each to each.

1976–1978

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: entirety

—Webster’s

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

Culture and Anarchy

Leafshade stirring on lichened bark

Daylilies

run wild, “escaped” the botanists call it

from dooryard to meadow to roadside

Life-tingle of angled light

late summer

sharpening toward fall, each year more sharply

This headlong, loved, escaping life

Rainy days at the kitchen table typing,

heaped up letters, a dry moth’s

perfectly mosaiced wings, pamphlets on rape,

forced sterilization, snapshots in color

of an Alabama woman still quilting in her nineties,

The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony….

I stained and varnished

the library bookcase today and superintended

the plowing of the orchard….

Fitted out a fugitive slave for Canada

with the help of Harriet Tubman….

The women’s committee failed

to report. I am mortified to death for them….

Washed every window in the house today.

Put a quilted petticoat in the frame.

Commenced Mrs. Browning’s Portuguese

Sonnets. Have just finished

Casa Guidi Windows, a grand poem

and so fitting to our struggle….

To forever blot out slavery is the only

possible compensation for this

merciless war….

The all-alone feeling will creep over me. …

Upstairs, long silence, then

again, the sudden torrent of your typing

Rough drafts we share, each reading

her own page over the other’s shoulder

trying to see afresh

An energy I cannot even yet

take for granted: picking up a book

of the nineteenth century, reading there the name

of the woman whose book you found

in the old town Athenaeum

beginning to stitch together

Elizabeth Ellet

Elizabeth Barrett

Elizabeth Blackwell

Frances Kemble

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Susan B. Anthony

On Saturday Mrs. Ford took us to Haworth,

the home of the Brontë sisters….

A most sad day it was to me

as I looked into the little parlor where

the sisters walked up and down

with their arms around each other

and planned their novels….

How much the world of literature has lost

because of their short and ill-environed lives

we can only guess.…

Anarchy of August: as if already

autumnal gases glowed in darkness underground

the meadows roughen, grow guttural

with goldenrod, milkweed’s late-summer lilac,

cat-tails, the wild lily brazening,

dooryards overflowing in late, rough-headed

bloom: bushes of orange daisies, purple mallow,

the thistle blazing in her clump of knives,

and the great SUNFLOWER turns

Haze wiping out the hills. Mornings like milk,

the mind wading, treading water, the line of vision blind

the pages of the book cling to the hand

words hang in a suspension

the prism hanging in the windowframe

is blank

A stillness building all day long to thunder

as the weedpod swells and thickens

No one can call this calm

Jane Addams, marking time

in Europe: During most

of that time I was absolutely at sea

so far as any moral purpose was concerned

clinging only to the desire to live

in a really living world

refusing to be content

with a shadowy intellectual

or aesthetic reflection

finally the bursting of the sky

power, release

by sheets by ropes of water, wind

driving before or after

the book laid face-down on the table

spirit travelling the lines of storm

leaping the torrent   all that water

already smelling of earth

Elizabeth Barrett to Anna Jameson:

… and is it possible you think

a woman has no business with questions

like the question of slavery?

Then she had better use a pen no more.

She had better subside into slavery

and concubinage herself, I think, …

and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.

Early dark; still raining; the electricity

out. On the littered table

a transparent globe half-filled

with liquid light, the soaked wick quietly

drinking, turning to flame

that faintly stains the slim glass chimney:

ancient, fragile contrivance

light welling, searching the shadows

Matilda Joslyn Gage; Harriet Tubman;

Ida B. Wells-Barnett; Maria Mitchell;

Anna Howard Shaw; Sojourner Truth;

Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Harriet Hosmer;

Clara Barton; Harriet Beecher Stowe;

Ida Husted Harper; Ernestine Rose

and all those without names

because of their short and ill-environed lives

False dawn. Gossamer tents in wet grass: leaflets

dissolving within hours,

spun of necessity and

leaving no trace

The heavy volumes, calf, with titles in smooth

leather, red and black, gilt letters spelling:

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING

I brush my hand across my eyes

—this is a dream, I think—and read:

THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE

of a movement

for many years unnoticed

or greatly misrepresented in the public press

its records usually not considered

of sufficient value to be

officially preserved

and conjure up again

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING

like bound back issues of a periodical

stretching for miles

OF HUMAN SUFFERING: borne,

tended, soothed, cauterized,

stanched, cleansed, absorbed, endured

by women

our records usually not considered

of sufficient value to be

officially preserved

The strongest reason

for giving woman all the opportunities

for higher education, for the full

development of her forces of mind and body …

the most enlarged freedom of thought and action

a complete emancipation

from all the crippling influences of fear—

is the solitude and personal

responsibility

of her own individual life.

Late afternoon: long silence.

Your notes on yellow foolscap drift on the table

you go down to the garden to pick chard

while the strength is in the leaves

crimson stems veining upward into green

How you have given back to me

my dream of a common language

my solitude of self.

I slice the beetroots to the core,

each one contains a different landscape

of bloodlight filaments, distinct rose-purple

striations like the oldest

strata of a Southwestern canyon

an undiscovered planet laid open in the lens

I should miss you more than any other

living being from this earth…

Yes, our work is one,

we are one in aim and sympathy

and we should be together….

1978

FOR JULIA IN NEBRASKA

Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpreter of man’s growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance of work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky….

In the Midwest of Willa Cather

the railroad looks like a braid of hair

a grandmother’s strong hands plaited

straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

Out there last autumn the streets

dreamed copper-lustre, the fields

of winter wheat whispered long snows yet to fall

we were talking of matrices

and now it’s spring again already.

This stormy Sunday lashed with rain

I call you in Nebraska

hear you’re planting your garden

sanding and oiling a burl of wood

hear in your voice the intention to

survive the long war between mind and body

and we make a promise to talk

this year, about growing older

and I think: we’re making a pledge.

Though not much in books of ritual

is useful between women

we still can make vows together

long distance, in electrical code:

Today you were promising me

to live, and I took your word,

Julia, as if it were my own:

we’ll live to grow old and talk about it too.

I’ve listened to your words

seen you stand by the caldron’s glare

rendering grammar by the heat

of your womanly wrath.

Brave linguist, bearing your double axe and shield

painfully honed and polished,

no word lies cool on your tongue

bent on restoring meaning to

our lesbian names, in quiet fury

weaving the chronicle so violently torn.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land

—the historical marker says—

man fought to establish a home

(fought whom? the marker is mute.)

They named this Catherland, for Willa Cather,

lesbian—the marker is mute,

the marker white men set on a soil

of broken treaties, Indian blood,

women wiped out in childbirths, massacres—

for Willa Cather, lesbian,

whose letters were burnt in shame.

Dear Julia, Willa knew at her death

that the very air was changing

that her Archbishop’s skies

would hardly survive his life

she knew as well that history

is neither your script nor mine

it is the pictograph

from which the young must learn

like Tom Outland, from people

discredited or dead

that it needs a telling as plain

as the prairie, as the tale

of a young girl or an old woman

told by tongues that loved them

And Willa who could not tell

her own story as it was

left us her stern and delicate

respect for the lives she loved—

How are we going to do better?

for that’s the question that lies

beyond our excavations,

the question I ask of you

and myself, when our maps diverge,

when we miss signals, fail—

And if I’ve written in passion,

Live, Julia! what was I writing

but my own pledge to myself

where the love of women is rooted?

And what was I invoking

but the matrices we weave

web upon web, delicate rafters

flung in audacity to the prairie skies

nets of telepathy contrived

to outlast the iron road

laid out in blood across the land they called virgin—

nets, strands, a braid of hair

a grandmother’s strong hands plaited

straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

1978, 1981

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

MOTHER-IN-LAW

Tell me something

you say

Not: What are you working on now, is there anyone special,

how is the job

do you mind coming back to an empty house

what do you do on Sundays

Tell me something …

Some secret

we both know and have never spoken?

Some sentence that could flood with light

your life, mine?

Tell me what daughters tell their mothers

everywhere in the world, and I and only I

even have to ask….

Tell me something.

Lately, I hear it: Tell me something true,

daughter-in-law, before we part,

tell me something true before I die

And time was when I tried.

You married my son, and so

strange as you are, you’re my daughter

Tell me….

I’ve been trying to tell you, mother-in-law

that I think I’m breaking in two

and half of me doesn’t even want to love

I can polish this table to satin because I don’t care

I am trying to tell you, I envy

the people in mental hospitals their freedom

and I can’t live on placebos

or Valium, like you

A cut lemon scours the smell of fish away

You’ll feel better when the children are in school

I would try to tell you, mother-in-law

but my anger takes fire from yours and in the oven

the meal bursts into flames

Daughter-in-law, before we part

tell me something true

I polished the table, mother-in-law

and scrubbed the knives with half a lemon

the way you showed me to do

I wish I could tell you—

Tell me!

They think I’m weak and hold

things back from me. I agreed to this years ago.

Daughter-in-law, strange as you are,

tell me something true

tell me something

Your son is dead

ten years, I am a lesbian,

my children are themselves.

Mother-in-law, before we part

shall we try again? Strange as I am,

strange as you are? What do mothers

ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world?

Is there a question?

Ask me something.

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 shine

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

RIFT

I have in my head some images of you:

your face turned awkwardly from the kiss of greeting

the sparkle of your eyes in the dark car, driving

your beautiful fingers reaching for

a glass of water.

Also your lip curling

at what displeases you, the sign of closure,

the fending-off, the clouding-over.

Politics,

you’d say, is an unworthy name

for what we’re after.

What we’re after

is not that clear to me, if politics

is an unworthy name.

When language fails us, when we fail each other

there is no exorcism. The hurt continues. Yes, your scorn

turns up the jet of my anger. Yes, I find you

overweening, obsessed, and even in your genius

narrow-minded—I could list much more—

and absolute loyalty was never in my line

once having left it in my father’s house—

but as I go on sorting images of you

my hand trembles, and I try

to train it not to tremble.

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

TURNING THE WHEEL

1. Location

No room for nostalgia here. What would it look like?

The imitation of a ghost mining town,

the movie-set façade of a false Spanish

arcade, the faceless pueblo

with the usual faceless old woman grinding corn?

It’s all been done. Acre on acre

of film locations disguised as Sears,

Safeway, the Desert National Bank,

Fashion Mall, Sun Valley Waterbeds.

Old people, rich, pass on in cloistered stucco

tiled and with fountains; poor, at Golden Acres

Trailer Ranch for Adult Seniors, at the edge of town,

close by the Reassembled Church of Latter-Day

Saints and a dozen motels called Mountain View.

The mountains are on view from everywhere

in this desert: this poor, conquered, bulldozed desert

overridden like a hold-out

enemy village. Nostalgia for the desert

will soon draw you to the Desert Museum

or off on an unpaved track to stare at one saguaro

—velvety, pleated, from a distance graceful—

closer-on, shot through with bullet holes

and seeming to give the finger to it all.

2. Burden Baskets

False history gets made all day, any day,

the truth of the new is never on the news

False history gets written every day

and by some who should know better:

the lesbian archaeologist watches herself

sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,

asking the clay all questions but her own.

Yet suddenly for once the standard version

splits open to something shocking, unintentional.

In the elegant Southwest Museum, no trace of bloodshed

or broken treaty. But, behind glass, these baskets

woven for the young women’s puberty dances

still performed among the still surviving

Apache people;   filled with offerings:

cans of diet Pepsi, peanut brittle,

Cracker Jack, Hershey bars

piled there, behind glass, without notation

in the anthropologist’s typewritten text

which like a patient voice tired of explaining

goes on to explain a different method of weaving.

3. Hohokam

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around.

I try to pierce through to a prehistoric culture

the museum says were known as those who have ceased.

I try to imagine them, before the Hopi

or Navaho, those who have ceased

but they draw back, an archetypal blur.

Did they leave behind for Pima or Navaho

something most precious, now archaic,

more than a faceless woman grinding corn?

Those who have ceased is amnesia-language:

no more to be said of them. Nobody wants

to see their faces or hear what they were about.

I try to imagine a desert-shamaness

bringing water to fields of squash, maize and cotton

but where the desert herself is half-eroded

half-flooded by a million jets of spray

to conjure a rich white man’s paradise

the shamaness could well have withdrawn her ghost.

4. Self-hatred

In Colcha embroidery, I learn,

women use raveled yarn from old wool blankets

to trace out scenes on homespun woollen sacks—

our ancient art of making out of nothing—

or is it making the old life serve the new?

The impact of Christian culture, it is written,

and other influences, have changed the patterns.

(Once they were birds perhaps, I think; or serpents.)

Example: here we have a scene of flagellants,

each whip is accurately self-directed.

To understand colonization is taking me

years. I stuck my loaded needle

into the coarse squares of the sack, I smoothed

the stylized pattern on my knee with pride.

I also heard them say my own designs

were childlike, primitive, obscene.

What rivets me to history is seeing

arts of survival turned

to rituals of self-hatred. This

is colonization. Unborn sisters,

look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves,

see us not one-dimensional but with

the past as your steadying and corrective lens.

5. Particularity

In search of the desert witch, the shamaness

forget the archetypes, forget the dark

and lithic profile, do not scan the clouds

massed on the horizon, violet and green,

for her icon, do not pursue

the ready-made abstraction, do not peer for symbols.

So long as you want her faceless, without smell

or voice, so long as she does not squat

to urinate, or scratch herself, so long

as she does not snore beneath her blanket

or grimace as she grasps the stone-cold

grinding stone at dawn

so long as she does not have her own peculiar

face, slightly wall-eyed or with a streak

of topaz lightning in the blackness

of one eye, so long as she does not limp

so long as you try to simplify her meaning

so long as she merely symbolizes power

she is kept helpless and conventional

her true power routed backward

into the past, we cannot touch or name her

and, barred from participation by those who need her

she stifles in unspeakable loneliness.

6. Apparition

If she appears, hands ringed with rings

you have dreamed about, if on her large fingers

jasper and sardonyx and agate smolder

if she is wearing shawls woven in fire

and blood, if she is wearing shawls

of undyed fiber, yellowish

if on her neck are hung

obsidian and silver, silver and turquoise

if she comes skirted like a Christian

her hair combed back by missionary fingers

if she sits offering her treasure by the road

to spare a brother’s or an uncle’s dignity

or if she sits pretending

to weave or grind or do some other thing

for the appeasement of the ignorant

if she is the famous potter

whose name confers honor on certain vessels

if she is wrist-deep in mud and shawled in dust

and wholly anonymous

look at her closely if you dare

do not assume you know those cheekbones

or those eye-sockets; or that still-bristling hair.

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

My dear Mother and Sister:

I have been asked

to design a building in the Hopi style

at the Grand Canyon. As you know

in all my travels for Mr. Harvey

and the Santa Fe Railroad, I have thought this the greatest

sight in the Southwest—in our land entire.

I am here already, trying to make a start.

I cannot tell you with what elation

this commission has filled me. I regret to say

it will mean I cannot come home to St. Paul

as I hoped, this spring. I am hoping this may lead

to other projects here, of equal grandeur.

(Do you understand? I want this glory,

I want to place my own conception

and that of the Indians whose land this was

at the edge of this incommensurable thing.)

I know my life seems shaky, unreliable

to you. When this is finished I promise you

to come home to St. Paul and teach. You will never lack

for what I can give you. Your affectionate

daughter and sister,

Mary.

8. Turning the Wheel

The road to the great canyon always feels

like that road and no other

the highway to a fissure      to the female core

of a continent

Below Flagstaff even   the rock erosions wear

a famous handwriting

the river’s still prevailing signature

Seeing those rocks   that road   in dreams   I know

it is happening again   as twice while waking

I am traveling to the edge   to meet the face

of annihilating and impersonal time

stained in the colors of a woman’s genitals

outlasting every transient violation

a face that is strangely intimate to me

Today I turned the wheel   refused that journey

I was feeling too alone on the open plateau

of piñon juniper   world beyond time

of rockflank spread around me   too alone

and too filled with you   with whom I talked for hours

driving up from the desert   though you were far away

as I talk to you all day   whatever day

1981

YOUR NATIVE LAND,

YOUR LIFE

(1981–1985)

I

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 constellation 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 trying-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

II

North American Time

… traigo este calendario.

Sí; aquí se marca el tiempo.

Es almanaque por lo tanto, solo

que es tiempo injusto el que aparece …

—Georgina Herrera

(… I offer this calendar.

Yes; here time is marked.

It’s an almanac therefore, but

only unjust time appears.)

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-stand 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

EDUCATION OF A NOVELIST

(Italicized lines quoted from Ellen Glasgow’s autobiography, The Woman Within.)

I

Looking back      trying to decipher

yourself and Lizzie Jones:

We were strange companions, but

that everyone knew us:      a dark

lean, eager colored woman

and a small, pale, eager little girl

roaming together, hand-in-hand

Waking early, Mammy and I

would be dressed before the family had risen

spurred on by an inborn love

of adventure

a vital curiosity

… visiting

the neighbors and the neighbors’ cooks and with the neighbors’ maids

sweeping the brick pavement

and the apothecary

and the friendly light-colored letter-carrier

But when you made one visit to the almshouse

“Mammy” was reprimanded

II

I revolted from sentimentality

less because it was false then because

it was cruel …

In the country, later

the Black artist spent her genius on the white children

Mammy was with us; we were all happy together

(I revolted from sentimentality      when it suited me)

She would dress us as gypsies, darken

our faces with burnt cork

We would start

on a long journey, telling fortunes

wherever we came to a farm or a Negro cabin

I was always the one who would

think up the most exciting fortunes

(I, too, was always the one)

III

Where or how I learned to read

(you boast so proudly)      I could never

remember      After supper

in front of the fire, undressing by candlelight

Mammy and I would take up and spin out

the story left from the evening before

Nobody ever taught me to read

(Nobody had to,

it was your birthright, Ellen.)

“As soon as I learn my letters,

Mammy, I’m going to teach you yours”

IV

Givens, Ellen. That we’d pick out our way

through the Waverly novels

that our childish, superior fire

was destined for fortune

even though female      deaf      or lame

dewomanized      The growing suspicion

haunting the growing life

the sense of exile in a hostile world

how do we use that?

and for what?

with whom?

Givens.      The pale skin, the eager look, the fact

of having been known

by everyone

our childish, superior fire, and all

I was always the one …

Deafness finally drives you

here, there, to specialists in Europe

for hardening of the Eustachian tube

Finding no cure you build

a wall of deceptive gaiety      to shield your pain:

That I, who was winged for flying, should be

wounded and caged!

V

Lizzie Jones vanishes.      Her trace is lost.

She, who was winged for flying

Where at the end

of the nineteenth century      you ask

could one find the Revolution?

In what mean streets and alleys of the South

was it then lying in ambush?      Though I suffered

with the world’s suffering. …

“As soon

as I learn my letters, Mammy,

I’m going to teach you yours”

but by your own admission

you never did

Where at the end of the twentieth century

does the Revolution find us

in what streets and alleys, north or south

is it now lying in ambush?

It’s not enough

using your words to damn you, Ellen:

they could have been my own:

this criss-cross

map of kept and broken promises

I was always the one

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

WHEN/THEN

Tell us

how we’ll be together

in that time

patch of sun on a gritty floor; an old newspaper, torn

for toilet paper and coughed-up scum      Don’t talk, she said

when we still love but are no longer young

they bring you a raw purple stick and say

it is one of her fingers;      it could be

Tell us

about aging, what it costs, how women

have loved forty, fifty years

enamel basin, scraped

down to the bare iron      some ashen hairs      red fluid

they say is her blood      how can you

Tell us about the gardens we will keep, the milk

we’ll drink from our own goats

she needs

anti-biotics they say which will be given

when you name names      they show you her fever chart

Tell us about community      the joy

of coming to rest

among women

who will love us

you choose between your community

and her      later others

will come through the cell      not all of them will love you

whichever way you choose

Don’t talk, she said      (you will learn to hear

only her voice when they close in on you)      Don’t talk

Why are you telling us this?

patch of sun on a gritty

floor, bad dreams, a torn newspaper, someone’s blood

in a scraped basin. …

1983

UPCOUNTRY

The silver shadow      where the line falls grey

and pearly      the unborn villages quivering

under the rock      the snail      traveling the crevice

the furred, flying white insect like a tiny

intelligence lacing the air

this woman whose lips lie parted

after long speech

her white hair unrestrained

All that you never paid

or have with difficulty paid

attention to

Change and be forgiven!      the roots of the forest

muttered      but you tramped through      guilty

unable to take forgiveness      neither do you

give mercy

She is asleep now      dangerous      her mind

slits the air like silk      travels faster than sound

like scissors flung into the next century

Even as you watch for the trout’s hooked stagger

across the lake      the crack of light and the crumpling bear

her mind was on them first

when forgiveness ends

her love means danger

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

IN THE WAKE OF HOME

1.

You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains

posters      a pile of animals on the bed

A woman and a man who love you

and each other      slip the door ajar

you are almost asleep      they crouch in turn

to stroke your hair      you never wake

This happens every night for years.

This never happened.

2.

Your lips      steady      never say

It should have been this way

That’s not what you say

You      so carefully not asking, Why?

Your eyes      looking straight in mine

remind me of a woman’s

auburn hair      my mother’s hair

but you never saw that hair

The family coil      so twisted, tight and loose

anyone trying to leave

has to strafe the field

burn the premises down

3.

The home houses

mirages      memory fogs the kitchen panes

the rush-hour traffic outside

has the same old ebb and flow

Out on the darkening block

somebody calls you home

night after night      then never again

Useless for you to know

they tried to do what they could

before they left for good

4.

The voice that used to call you home

has gone off on the wind

beaten into thinnest air

whirling down other streets

or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash

maybe the tongue was torn out

brownlung has stolen the breath

or fear has stolen the breath

maybe under another name

it sings on AM radio:

And if you knew, what would you know?

5.

But you will be drawn to places

where generations lie

side by side with each other:

fathers, mothers and children

in the family prayerbook

or the country burying-ground

You will hack your way through the bush

to the Jodensavanne

where the gravestones are black with mould

You will stare at old family albums

with their smiles      their resemblances

You will want to believe that nobody

wandered off      became strange

no woman dropped her baby and ran

no father took off for the hills

no axe splintered the door

—that once at least it was all in order

and nobody came to grief

6.

Anytime you go back

where absence began

the kitchen faucet sticks in a way you know

you have to pull the basement door

in before drawing the bolt

the last porch-step is still loose

the water from the tap

is the old drink of water

Any time you go back

the familiar underpulse

will start its throbbing:      Home, home!

and the hole torn and patched over

will gape unseen again

7.

Even where love has run thin

the child’s soul musters strength

calling on dust-motes      song on the radio

closet-floor of galoshes

stray cat      piles of autumn leaves

whatever comes along

—the rush of purpose to make a life

worth living past abandonment

building the layers up again

over the torn hole      filling in

8.

And what of the stern and faithful aunt

the fierce grandmother      the anxious sister

the good teacher      the one

who stood at the crossing when you had to cross

the woman hired to love you

the skeleton who held out a crust

the breaker of rules      the one

who is neither a man nor a woman      the one

who warmed the liquid vein of life

and day after day whatever the need

handed it on to you?

You who did and had to do

so much for yourself      this was done for you

by someone who did what they could

when others left for good

9.

You imagine an alley      a little kingdom

where the mother-tongue is spoken

a village of shelters      woven

or sewn of hides      in a long-ago way

a shanty standing up

at the edge of sharecropped fields

a tenement where life is seized by the teeth

a farm battened down on snowswept plains

a porch with rubber-plant and glider

on a steep city street

You imagine the people would all be there

fathers mothers and children

the ones you were promised would all be there

eating      arguing      working

trying to get on with life

you imagine this used to be

for everyone      everywhere

10.

What if I told you your home

is this continent of the homeless

of children sold      taken by force

driven from their mothers’ land

killed by their mothers to save from capture

—this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

of languages tabooed

diasporas unrecorded

undocumented refugees

underground railroads      trails of tears

What if I tell you your home

is this planet of warworn children

women and children standing in line or milling

endlessly calling each others’ names

What if I tell you, you are not different

it’s the family albums that lie

—will any of this comfort you

and how should this comfort you

11.

The child’s soul carries on

in the wake of home

building a complicated house

a tree-house without a tree

finding places for everything

the song      the stray cat      the skeleton

The child’s soul musters strength

where the holes were torn

but there are no miracles:

even children become exhausted

And how shall they comfort each other

who have come young to grief?

Who will number the grains of loss

and what would comfort be?

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 label … This was

our glamour 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

FOR AN OCCUPANT

Did the fox speak to you?

Did the small brush-fires on the hillside

smoke her out?

Were you standing on the porch

not the kitchen porch      the front

one of poured concrete      full in the rising moon

and did she appear      wholly on her own

asking no quarter      wandering by

on impulse      up the drive      and on

into the pine-woods

but were you standing there

at the moment of moon and burnished light

leading your own life      till she caught your eye

asking no charity

but did she speak to you?

1983

EMILY CARR

I try to conjure the kind of joy

you tracked through the wildwoods where the tribes

had set up their poles      what brought you

how by boat, water, wind, you found

yourself facing the one great art

of your native land, your life

All I know is, it is here

even postcard-size can’t diminish

the great eye, nostril, tongue

the wave of the green hills

the darkblue crest of sky      the white

and yellow fog bundled behind the green

You were alone in this

Nobody knew or cared

how to paint the way you saw

or what you saw      Alone

you walked up to the sacred and disregarded

with your canvas, your box of colors

saying Wait for me and the crumbling

totem poles held still

while you sat down on your stool, your knees

spread wide, and let the mist

roll in past your shoulders

bead your rough shawl, your lashes

Wait for me, I have waited so long for you

But you never said that      I

am ashamed to have thought it

You had no personal leanings

You brushed in the final storm-blue stroke

and gave its name:      Skidegate Pole

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

NEW YORK

For B. and C.

at your table

telephone rings

every four minutes

talk

of terrible things

the papers bringing

no good news

and burying the worst

Cut-up fruit in cutglass bowls

good for you

French Market coffee

cut with hot milk

crying together

wanting to save this

how we are when we meet

all our banners out

do we deceive each other

do we speak of the dead we sit with

do we mourn in secret

do we taste the sweetness

of life in the center of pain

I wanted to say to you

until the revolution this is happiness

yet was afraid to praise

even with such skeptic turn

of phrase      so shrugged a smile

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

III

Contradictions:

Tracking Poems

1.

Look:this is Januarythe 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 faceand 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 madnessand 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.

Nightover 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 taketo 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 fallowthe 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 cornersunflowers

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 friendin 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 suing 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 bedeviled

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-drivenreftfrom 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 Tolstoyansthe 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

(1985–1988)

For Michelle

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

LOVE POEM

Tell me, bristler, where

do you get such hair

so quick a flare      so strong a tongue

Green eyes      fierce curls

there and here a mole

a girl’s

dimples      a warrior’s mind

dark blood under gold skin

testing, testing the world

the word

and so to write for you

a pretty sonnet

would be untrue

to your mud-river flashing

over rocks      your delicate

coffee-bushes

and more I cannot know

and some I labor with

and I mean to stay true

even in poems, to you

But there’s something more

Beauty, when you were young

we both thought we were young

now that’s all done

we’re serious now

about death      we talk to her

daily, as to a neighbor

we’re learning to be true

with her      she has the keys

to this house      if she must

she can sleep over

1986

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

A STORY

Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home.

but Absence left without a glance at Home.

Home tried to hold in Absence’s despite,

Home caved, shuddered, yet held

without Absence’s consent. Home took a walk

in several parks, Home shivered

in outlying boroughs, slept on strange floors,

cried many riffs of music, many words.

Home went out to teach school, Home studied pain control

Home learned to dive and came up blind with blood

Home learned to live on each location

but whenever Absence called, called, Home had to answer

in the grammar of Absence.

Home would hitch-hike

through flying snow, Home would roast meat,

light candles, to withstand the cold. Home washed the dishes

faithfully. But Absence

always knew when to call.

What if Absence calls

and a voice answers

in the accent of Home?

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

SLEEPWALKINGNEXT 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

LETTERS IN THE FAMILY

I: Catalonia 1936

Dear Parents:

I’m the daughter

you didn’t bless when she left,

an unmarried woman wearing a khaki knapsack

with a poor mark in Spanish.

I’m writing now

from a plaster-dusted desk in a town

pocked street by street with hand grenades,

some of them, dear ones, thrown by me.

This is a school: the children are at war.

You don’t need honors in schoolroom Spanish here

to be of use and my right arm

’s as strong as anyone’s. I sometimes think

all languages are spoken here,

even mine, which you got zero in.

Don’t worry. Don’t try to write. I’m happy,

if you could know it.

Rochelle.

II: Yugoslavia, 1944

Dear Chana,

where are you now?

Am sending this pocket-to-pocket

(though we both know pockets we’d hate to lie in).

They showed me that poem you gave Reuven,

about the match:

Chana, you know, I never was

for martyrdom. I thought we’d try our best,

ragtag mission that we were,

then clear out if the signals looked too bad.

Something in you drives things ahead for me

but if I can I mean to stay alive.

We’re none of us giants, you know,

just small, frail, inexperienced romantic people.

But there are things we learn.

You know the sudden suck of empty space

between the jump and the ripcord pull?

I hate it. I hate it so,

I’ve hated you for your dropping

ecstatically in free-fall, in the training,

your look, dragged on the ground, of knowing

precisely why you were there.

My mother’s

still in Palestine. And yours

still there in Hungary. Well, there we are.

When this is over—

I’m

your earthbound friend to the end, still yours—

Esther.

III: Southern Africa, 1986

Dear children:

We’ve been walking nights

a long time over rough terrain,

sometimes through marshes. Days we hide

under what bushes we can find.

Our stars steer us. I write

on my knee by a river with a weary hand,

and the weariness will come through

this letter that should tell you

nothing but love. I can’t say where we are,

what weeds are in bloom, what birds cry at dawn.

The less you know the safer.

But not to know how you are going on—

Matile’s earache, Emma’s lessons, those tell-tale

eyes and tongues, so quick—are you remembering

to be brave and wise and strong?

At the end of this hard road

we’ll sit all together at one meal

and I’ll tell you everything: the names

of our comrades, how the letters

were routed to you, why I left.

And I’ll stop and say, “Now you,

grown so big, how was it for you, those times?

Look, I know you in detail, every inch of each

sweet body, haven’t I washed and dried you

a thousand times?”

And we’ll eat and tell our stories

together. That is my reason.

Ma.

1987

THE DESERT AS GARDEN OF PARADISE

1.

Guard the knowledge

from the knowledgeable,

those who gobble:

make it unpalatable.

Stars in this place

might look

distant to me as you,

to you as me.

Monotheism. Where it began.

But all the spirits, too.

Desert says: What you believe

I can prove. I: amaranth flower,

I: metamorphic rock, I: burrow,

I: water-drop in tilted catchment,

I: vulture, I: driest thorn.

Rocks in a trance. Escaped

from the arms of other rocks.

Roads leading to gold and to false gold.

2.

I ask you to sing, Chavela, in the desert

on tapes pirated from smuggled LP’s

I bring you here with me: I ask you to sing

It’s not for me, your snarling contralto

caught on a backdrop of bitter guitar

not for me      yet I pray let me listen

I don’t pray often      Never to male or female

sometimes to music or the flask of sunset

quick winter evenings      draining into the ground

our blood is mixed in, borderland magenta

and vermilion, never to become one

yet what we’re singing, dying in, that color

two-worlded, never one      Where from bars

lit by candle and earthquake your music finds me

whom it didn’t look for      This is why I ask you,

when the singing escapes the listener and goes

from the throat to where the mountains hang in chains

as if they never listened      why the song

wants so much to go where no song has ever gone.

3.

In this pale clear light where all mistakes are bathed

this afterglow of westernness

I write to you, head wrapped in your darkred scarf

framed by the sharp spines of the cholla

you love, the cruel blonde

spirit of the Mohave blossoming

in the spring twilights

of much earlier ages

Off at this distance I’m safe

to conjure the danger

you undergo daily, chin outthrust

eyelid lowered against the storm

that takes in an inkling whole ranches down

with the women the men and the children

the horses and cattle

—that much, flash-flood, lightning

all that had been done right, gone to hell

all crimes washed down the gulch

of independence, lost horse trail

Well, this was your country, Malinche,

and is, where you choose to speak

4.

Every drought-resistant plant has its own story

each had to learn to live

with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip

after the thunderstorm

each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some

who persist, not by species-betrayal

but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study

of the price of continuity

a steady bargain with the way things are

5.

Then there were those, white-skinned

riding on camels

fast under scorching skies

their lives a tome of meaning

holding all this in fief:

star-dragged heavens, embroidered saddle-bags

coffee boiled up in slim urns

the salt, the oil, the roads

linking Europe with Asia

Crusaders, Legionnaires

desert-rats of empire

sucking the kid’s bones, drunk with meaning

fucking the Arab, killing the Jew

6.

Deutsches Blut, Ahmad the Arab

tells Arnold the Jew

tapping the blue

veins of his own brown wrist

in his own walled garden

spread with figured carpets

summer, starlight, 1925

Was it the Crusader line?

Did they think it made them brothers?

Arnold the Jew my father

told me the story, showed me

his photograph of Ahmad: Deutsches Blut

7.

Then there were those, black-robed

on horseback, tracing the great plateaus

cut by arroyos, cleft by ravines

facing Sierra San Pedro San Mártir

a fixed bar welding Baja California

to the mainland north:

a land the most unfortunate

ungrateful and miserable of this world

Padre Miguel Venegas wrote

yet they ordered the missions raised

from fragile ramadas

the thin stream drawn from the watering-hole

into gardens of fig, palm, sugarcane

tried to will what cannot be willed

killed many in the trying:

unpacked smallpox, measles, typhus

from the chests with the linens and chalices

packed the sufferers in plague-ridden rooms

baptized in one village walk

all the children, who then died.

(San Ignacio!      Soledad!)

There were those: convinced the material

was base, the humanity less

—Out of what can I bring forth a Christian soul?

For these, naked and dark

I come to do the work of Cross and Crown?

winning hearts and minds

peeling the prickly pear

and dousing it in wine

8.

What would it mean to think

you are part of a generation

that simply must pass on?

What would it mean to live

in the desert, try to live

a human life, something

to hand on to the children

to take up to the Land?

What would it mean to think

you were born in chains and only time,

nothing you can do

could redeem the slavery

you were born into?

9.

Out of a knot of deadwood

on ghostly grey-green stems

the nightblooming cereus opens

On a still night, under Ursa Major

the tallest saguaro cracks with cold

The eaters of herbs are eaten

the carnivores’ bones fall down

and scavengers pick them clean

This is not for us, or if it is

with whom, and where, is the covenant?

10.

When it all stands clear you come to love

the place you are:

the bundle of bare sticks soaked

with resin

always, and never, a bush on fire

the blue sky without tale or text

and without meaning

the great swing of the horizontal circle

Miriam, Aaron, Moses

are somewhere else, marching

You learn to live without prophets

without legends

to live just where you are

your burning bush, your seven-branched candlestick

the ocotillo in bloom

11.

What’s sacred is nameless

moves in the eyeflash

holds still in the circle

of the great arid basin

once watered and fertile

probes outward through twigbark

a green ghost inhabiting

dormant stick, abstract thorn

What’s sacred is singular:

out of this dry fork, this

wreck of perspective

what’s sacred tries itself

one more time

1987–1988

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 swiveled 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

FOR AN ALBUM

Our story isn’t a file of photographs

faces laughing under green leaves

or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving

away, our story is not about women

victoriously perched on the one

sunny day of the conference,

nor lovers displaying love:

Our story is of moments

when even slow motion moved too fast

for the shutter of the camera:

words that blew our lives apart, like so,

eyes that cut and caught each other,

mime of the operating room

where gas and knives quote each other

moments before the telephone

starts ringing: our story is

how still we stood,

how fast.

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

WALKING DOWN THE ROAD

On a clear night in Live Oak you can see

the stars glittering low as from the deck

of a frigate.

In Live Oak without pavements you can walk

the fronts of old homesteads, past tattered palms,

original rosebushes, thick walnut trees

ghosts of the liveoak groves

the whitemen cleared.      On a night like this

the old California thickens and bends

the Baja streams out like lava-melt

we are no longer the United States

we’re a lost piece of Mexico

maybe dreaming the destruction

of the Indians, reading the headlines,

how the gringos marched into Mexico City

forcing California into the hand

of Manifest Destiny, law following greed.

And the pale lies trapped in the flickering boxes

here in Live Oak tonight, they too follow.

One thing follows on another, that is time:

Carmel in its death-infested prettiness,

thousands of skeletons stacked in the campo santo:

the spring fouled by the pickaxe:

the flag dragged on to the moon:

the crystal goblet smashed: grains of the universe

flashing their angry tears, here in Live Oak.

1988

THE SLIDES

Three dozen squares of light-inflicted glass

lie in a quarter-century’s dust

under the skylight. I can show you this:

also a sprung couch spewing

dessicated mouse-havens, a revolving bookstand

rusted on its pivot, leaning

with books of an era: Roosevelt vs Recovery

The Mystery & Lure of Perfume      My Brother Was Mozart

I’ve had this attic in mind for years

Now you

who keep a lookout for

places like this, make your living

off things like this:      You see, the books are rotting,

sunbleached, unfashionable

the furniture neglected past waste

but the lantern-slides—their story

could be sold, they could be a prize

I want to see

your face when you start to sort them. You want

cloched hats of the Thirties, engagement portraits

with marcelled hair, maillots daring the waves,

my family album:

This is the razing of the spinal cord

by the polio virus

this, the lung-tissue kissed by the tubercle bacillus

this with the hooked shape is

the cell that leaks anemia to the next generation

Enlarged on a screen

they won’t be quaint; they go on working; they still kill.

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

ONE LIFE

A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs

recalls great bodily joys, much pain.

Nothing in her is apt to say

My heart aches, though she read those words

in a battered college text, this morning

as the sun rose. It is all too

mixed, the heart too mixed with laughter

raucousing the grief, her life

too mixed, she shakes her heavy

silvered hair at all the fixed

declarations of baggage. I should be dead and I’m alive

don’t ask me how; I don’t eat like I should

and still I like how the drop of vodka

hits the tongue. I was a worker and a mother,

that means a worker and a worker

but for one you don’t pay union dues

or get a pension; for the other

the men ran the union, we ran the home.

It was terrible and good, we had more than half a life,

I had four lives at least, one out of marriage

when I kicked up all the dust I could

before I knew what I was doing.

One life with the girls on the line during the war,

yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together

one life with a husband, not the worst,

one with your children, none of it just what you’d thought.

None of it what it could have been, if we’d known.

We took what we could.

But even this is a life, I’m reading a lot of books

I never read, my daughter brought home from school,

plays where you can almost hear them talking,

Romantic poets, Isaac Babel. A lot of lives

worse and better than what I knew. I’m walking again.

My heart doesn’t ache; sometimes though it rages.

1988

DIVISIONS OF LABOR

The revolutions wheel, compromise, utter their statements:

a new magazine appears, mastheaded with old names,

an old magazine polishes up its act

with deconstructions of the prose of Malcolm X

The women in the back rows of politics

are still licking thread to slip into the needle’s

eye, trading bones for plastic, splitting pods

for necklaces to sell to the cruise-ships

producing immaculate First Communion dresses

with flatiron and irresolute hot water

still fitting the microscopic golden wires

into the silicon chips

still teaching, watching the children

quenched in the crossfire alleys, the flashflood gullies

the kerosene flashfires

—the women whose labor remakes the world

each and every morning

I have seen a woman sitting

between the stove and the stars

her fingers singed from snuffing out the candles

of pure theory      Finger and thumb: both scorched:

I have felt that sacred wax blister my hand

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

TURNING

1.

Deadstillness over droughtlands.

Parched, the heart of the matter.

Panic among smaller animals

used to licking water from cool stones.

Over the great farms, a burning-glass

one-eyed and wild as a jack,

the corn snatched in a single afternoon

of the one-eyed jack’s impassive stare.

And in that other country

of choices made by others

that country I never chose

that country of terrible leavings and returnings

in that country whose map I carry on my palm

the forests are on fire: history is on fire.

My foot drags in the foothills of two lands;

At the turn the spirit pauses

and faces the high passes:

bloodred granite, sandstone steeped in blood.

At the turn the spirit turns,

looks back—if any follow—

squints ahead—if any lead—

What would you bring along on a trek like this?

What is bringing you along?

2.

In a time of broken hands

in a broken-promised land

something happens to the right hand

Remembering a city, it forgets

flexion, gestures that danced like flames

the lifeline buried in the fist

forgets the pedlar’s trinket, fine to finger and lay forth,

the scalpel’s path, the tracing of the pulse

the sprinkle of salt and rip of chicken feathers

forgets the wrist’s light swivel breaking bread

the matzoh crumb

fingered to secret lips in stinking fog

forgets its own ache, lying

work-stiffened, mute

on the day most like Paradise

Becomes the handle of a club

an enemy of hands

emptied of all memories but one

When the right hand forgets its cunning, what of the other?

Shall we invent its story?

Has it simply lain in trance

disowned, written-off, unemployed?

Does it twitch now, finger and thumb,

does the prickle of memory race through?

When the right hand becomes the enemy of hands

what does the left hand make of their old collaboration?

Pick up the book, the pinch of salt, the matzoh crumb,

hand, and begin to teach.

3.

Finally, we will make change. This eyeflash,

this touch, handling the drenched flyers,

these glances back at history—

riverside where harps hang from the trees,

cracked riverbed with grounded hulks,

unhealed water to cross—

leaving superstition behind—

first our own, then other’s—

that barrier, that stream

where swimming against the current will become

no metaphor: this is how you land, unpurified,

winded, shivering, on the further shore

where there are only new kinds of tasks, and old:

writing with others that open letter or brief

that might—if only—we know it happens:

no sudden revelation but the slow

turn of consciousness, while every day

climbs on the back of the days before:

no new day, only a list of days,

no task you expect to see finished, but

you can’t hold back from the task.

4.

A public meeting.      I glance at a woman’s face:

strong lines and soft, listening, a little on guard:

we have come separately, are sitting apart,

know each other in the room, have slept twelve years

in the same bed, attend now to the speaker.

Her subject is occupation, a promised land,

displacement, deracination, two peoples called Semites,

humiliation, force, women trying to speak with women,

the subject is how to break a mold of discourse,

how little by little minds change

but that they do change.      We two have fought

our own battles side by side, at dawn, over supper,

our changes of mind have come

with the stir of hairs, the sound of a cracked phrase:

we have depended on something.

What then?      Sex isn’t enough, merely to trust

each other’s inarticulate sounds,

—what then?      call it mutual recognition.

5.

Whatever you are that has tracked us this far,

I never thought you were on our side,

I only thought you did not judge us.

Yet as a cell might hallucinate

the eye—intent, impassioned—

behind the lens of the microscope

so I have thought of you,

whatever you are—a mindfulness—

whatever you are: the place beyond all places,

beyond boundaries, green lines,

wire-netted walls

the place beyond documents.

Unnameable by choice.

So why am I out here, trying

to read your name in the illegible air?

—vowel washed from a stone,

solitude of no absence,

forbidden face-to-face

—trying to hang these wraiths

of syllables, breath

without echo, why?

1988

AN ATLAS OF THE

DIFFICULT WORLD

(1988–1991)

—For John Benedict, in memory—

I

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 initialed

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 stag-

gers, 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 win-

tering 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, passion-

ate 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 traveled 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, out-

buildings spaced in winter sun

and the concrete mass beyond:      who now writes letters deep in-

side 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 caliper-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

II

SHE

goes through what must be gone through:

that catalogue she is pitching out

mildew spores      velvet between the tiles

soft hairs, nests, webs

in corners, edges of basins, in the teeth

of her very comb.      All that rots or rusts

in a night, a century.

Balances memory, training, sits in her chair

hairbrush in hand, breathing the scent of her own hair

and thinks:      I have been the weir

where disintegration stopped.

Lifts her brush once like a thrown thing

lays it down at her side like a stockpiled weapon

crushes out the light.      Elsewhere

dust chokes the filters, dead leaves rasp in the grate.

Clogged, the fine nets bulge

and she is not there.

1988

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

OLIVIA

Among fundamentalist Christians, she was one of them;

in our anti-apartheid groups, she was the

most militant. … She was a chameleon.

—White South African student activist interviewed on National Public Radio, 10/11/88

Yes, I saw you, see you, come

into the meetings, out of the rain

with your wan cheek and your thin waist—

did anyone see you eat?

Did anyone see you eat, did you wear

a woman’s body, were you air

to their purpose, liquid at their call

when you stood, spine against the wall?

And I know your stance, back to the wall,

overlooking the others, your bent head

your sense of timing, your outraged tongue

the notes you take when you get home.

I see the white joints of your wrist

moving across the yellow pad

the exhausted theatre of your sleep:

I know the power you thought you had—

to know them all, better than they

knew you, than they knew you knew,

to know better than those who paid

you—paid by them, to move

at some pure point of mastery

as if, in your slight outline, moon

you could dwell above them, light and shade,

travel forever to and fro

above both sides, all sides, none,

gliding the edges, knapsack crammed

—was that it? to lift above

loyalty, love and all that trash

higher than power and its fields of force?

—never so much as a woman friend?

You were a woman walked on a leash.

And they dropped you in the end.

1988

EASTERN WAR TIME

1

Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,

single isinglass window      kerosene

stove in the streetcar barn      halfset moon

8:15 a.m. Eastern War Time dark

Number 29 clanging in and turning

looseleaf notebook      Latin for Americans

Breasted’s History of the Ancient World

on the girl’s lap

money for lunch and war-stamps in her pocket

darkblue wool wet acrid on her hands

three pools of light      weak ceiling bulbs

a schoolgirl’s hope-spilt terrified

sensations wired to smells

of kerosene wool and snow

and the sound of the dead language

praised as key      torchlight of the great dead

Grey spreading      behind still-flying snow

the lean and sway of the streetcar she must ride

to become one      of a hundred girls

rising white-cuffed and collared in a study hall

to sing For those in peril on the sea

under plaster casts of the classic frescoes

chariots horses draperies certitudes.

2

Girl between home and schoolwhat is that girl

Swinging her plaid linen bookbag      what’s an American girl

in wartime      her permed friz of hair

her glasses for school and movies

between school and home      ignorantly Jewish

trying to grasp the world

through books:      Jude the Obscure      The Ballad

of Reading Gaol Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Story

NV15      CABLE-LIVERPOOL       122      1/63NFD

HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER

CONSIDERATION

ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED

GERMANY

NUMBER 3 1/2 – TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER

DEPORTATION

AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST

AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE

ONCE AND FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE

3

How telegrams used to come:ring

of the doorbell      serious messenger

bicycling with his sheaf      enveloped pasted strips

yellow on yellow      the stripped messages

DELAYED STOP MEET 2:27 THURSDAY

DAUGHTER BORN LAST NIGHT STOP BOTH DOING

WELL

THE WAR DEPARTMENT REGRETS TO INFORM YOU

also: PARENTS DEPORTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION

EAST

SITUATION DIFFICULT      ether of messages

in capital letters      silence

4

What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push

onto children?      and the deadweight of Leo Frank

thirty years lynched      hangs heavy

:      “this is what our parents were trying to spare us”      :

here in America      but in terrible Europe

anything was possible      surely?

:      “But this is the twentieth century”      :

what the grown-ups can’t teach      children must learn

how do you teach a child what you won’t believe?

how do you say      unfold, my flower, shine, my star

and we are hated, being what we are?

5

A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

taken on the closed journey

her pockets drained of meaning

her ankles greased in vomit and diarrhea

driven naked across the yard

a young girl remembers her youth:

anything      textbooks      forbidden novels

school songs      petnames

the single time she bled and never since

having her hair done      its pale friz

clipped and shaped      still friz      pale Jewish hair

over her green Jewish eyes

thinking she was pretty and that others would see it

and not to bleed again and not to die

in the gas      but on the operating table

of the famous doctor

who plays string quartets with his staff in the laboratory

6

A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

a romantic walk      a couple in a poem

hand-in-hand      but you’re not watching each other

for signs of desire      you’re watching the woods

for signs of the secret bases      lines

converging toward the resistance      where the guns

are cached      the precious tools

the strategies argued      you’re fourteen, fifteen

classmates from Vilna      walking away from Vilna

your best marks were in history and geometry      his

in chemistry      you don’t intend to die

too much you think is waiting in you      for you

you never knew the forest outside Vilna

could hide so many      would have to

you’d dreamed of living in the forest

as in a folksong      lying on loose pine-needles

light ribboning from sky cross-hatched with needles

you and one dearest friend      now you will meet the others

7

A woman of sixtydriving

the great grades      sea-level to high desert

a century slipping from her shoulders

a blink in geological time

though heavy to those who had to wear it

Knowledge has entered her connective tissue and

into sand dissolved her cartilage

If her skeleton is found this will be clear

or was it knowledge      maybe a dangerous questioning

At night she lies      eyes open      seeing

the young who do not wander in the moonlight

as in a poem      faces seen

for thirty years      under the fire-hoses

walking through mobs to school

dragged singing from the buses

following the coffins

and here      brows knotted under knotted scarfs

dark eyes      searching armed streets

for the end of degradation

8

A woman wired in memories

stands by a house      collapsed in dust

her son beaten in prison      grandson

shot in the stomach      daughter

organizing the camps      an aunt’s unpublished poems

grandparents’ photographs      a bridal veil

phased into smoke      up the obliterate air

With whom shall she let down and tell her story

Who shall hear her to the end

standing if need be for hours      in wind

that swirls the leveled dust

in sun that beats through their scarfed hair

at the lost gate by the shattered prickly pear

Who must hear her to the end

but the woman      forbidden to forget

the blunt groats freezing in the wooden ladle

old winds      dusting the ovens with light snow?

9

Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners

with open mouths and eyes      Memory speaks:

You cannot live on me alone

you cannot live without me

I’m nothing if I’m just a roll of film

stills from a vanished world

fixed lightstreaked mute

left for another generation’s

restoration and framing      I can’t be restored or framed

I can’t be still      I’m here

in your mirror      pressed leg to leg beside you

intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing

with what makes me unkillable though killed

10

Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating

I’m a mass grave      I’m the life that returns

I’m a table set with room for the Stranger

I’m a field with corners left for the landless

I’m accused of child-death      of drinking blood

I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man

I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken

I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket

I’m a family dispersed between night and fog

I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat

is not a piece of cloth only   I sway

in the learnings of the master-mystics

I have dreamed of Zion      I’ve dreamed of world revolution

I have dreamed my children could live at last like others

I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred

I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin

a river in Mississippi      I’m a woman standing

with other women dressed in black

on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem

there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night

I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks

I stand on a road in Ramallah      with naked face      listening

I am standing here in your poem      unsatisfied

lifting my smoky mirror

1989–1990

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 is 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

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 raveling 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

1948: JEWS

A mother’s letter, torn open

in a college mailroom:

… Some of them will be

the most brilliant, fascinating

you’ll ever meet

but don’t get taken up by any clique

trying to claim you

—Marry out, like your father

she didn’t write      She wrote for      wrote

against      him

It was a burden for anyone

to be fascinating, brilliant

after the six million

Never mind just coming home

and trying to get some sleep

like an ordinary person

1990

TWO ARTS

1

I’ve redone you by daylight.

Squatted before your gauntness

chipping away.      Slivers of rock

piling up like petals.

All night I’d worked to illuminate the skull.

By dawn you were pure electric.      You pulsed like a star.

You awoke in the last darkness

before the light poured in.

I’ve redone you by daylight.

Now I can submit you to the arts administrator

and the council of patrons

who could never take your measure.

This time they will love you,

standing on the glass table, fluent and robed at last,

and all your origins countered.

I wrap you in pure white sheets to mail you,

I brush you off my apron,

the charged filings crunch like cinders on the floor.

2

Raise it up there and it will

loom, the gaunt original thing

gristle and membrane of your life

mortared with shells of trilobites

it will hold between the cracks

of lightning, in the deadpan face of before and after

it will stick on up there as you left it

pieced together by starlight

it will hang by the flying buttresses you gave it

—hulk of mist, rafter of air, suspension bridge of mica

helm of sweat and dew—

but you have to raise it up there, you

have a brutal thing to do.

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

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

(1991–1995)

He had come a long way to this blue lawn,

and his dream must have seemed so close that

he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not

know that it was already behind him, some-

where back in that vast obscurity beyond the

city, where the dark fields of the republic

rolled on under the night.

—The Great Gatsby

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 Visiónsand 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 Visiónyour 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 roomin 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

REVOLUTION IN PERMANENCE (1953, 1993)

Through a barn window, three-quartered

the profile of Ethel Rosenberg

stares down past a shattered apple-orchard

into speechless firs.

Speechless this evening.      Last night

the whole countryside thrashed in lowgrade fever

under low swollen clouds

the mist advanced and the wind

tore into one thing then another

—you could think random but you know

the patterns are there—

a sick time, and the human body

feeling it, a loss of pressure,

an agitation without purpose …

Purpose?      Do you believe

all agitation has an outcome

like revolt, like Bread and Freedom?

—or do you hang on to the picture

of the State as a human body

—some people being heads or hearts

and others only hands or guts or legs?

But she—how did she end up here

in this of all places?

What she is seeing I cannot see,

what I see has her shape.

There’s an old scythe propped

in an upper window of the barn—

—does it call up marches of peasants?

what is it with you and this barn?

And, no, it’s not an old scythe,

it’s an old rag, you see how it twitches.

And Ethel Rosenberg? I’ve worried about her

through the liquid window in that damp place.

I’ve thought she was coughing, like me,

but her profile stayed still watching

what held her in that position.

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

SENDING LOVE

Voice

from the grain

of the forest bought

and condemned

sketched bond

in the rockmass

the earthquake sought

and threw

•

Sending love:Molly sends it

Ivan sends it, Kaori

sends it to Brian, Irina sends it

on pale green aerograms Abena sends it

to Charlie and to Joséphine

Arturo sends it, Naomi sends it

Lourdes sends it to Naoual

Walter sends it to Arlene

Habib sends it, Vashti

floats it to Eqbal in a paper plane

Bored in the meeting, on a postcard

Yoel scribbles it to Gerhard

Reza on his e-mail

finds it waiting from Patricia

Mario and Elsie

send it to Francísco

Karolina sends it monthly

home with a money order

June seals it with a kiss to Dahlia

Mai sends it, Montserrat

scrawls it to Faíz on a memo

Lenny wires it with roses

to Lew who takes it on his

whispery breath, Julia sends it

loud and clear, Dagmar brailles it

to Maureen, María Christina

sends it, Meena and Moshe send it

Patrick and Max are always

sending it back and forth

and even Shirley, even George

are found late after closing

sending it, sending it

•

Sending love is harmless

doesn’t bind you      can’t make you sick

sending love’s expected

precipitous      and wary

sending love can be carefree

Joaquín knew it, Eira knows it

sending love without heart

—well, people do that daily

•

Terrence years ago

closed the window, wordless

Grace who always laughed is leaning

her cheek against bullet-proof glass

her tears enlarged

like scars on a planet

Vivian hangs her raincoat

on a hook, turns to the classroom

her love entirely

there, supreme

Victor fixes his lens

on disappearing faces

—caught now or who will ever

see them again?

1992–1994

TAKE

At the head of this poem I have laid out

a boning knife a paring knife a wooden spoon a pair of tongs.

Oaken grain beneath them olive and rusty light

around them.

And you looming:      This is not your scene

this is the first frame of a film

I have in mind to make:      move on, get out.

And you here telling me:      What will be done

with these four objects will be done

through my lens not your words.

The poet shrugs:      I was only in the kitchen

looking at the chopping board.      (Not the whole story.)

And you telling me:      Awful is the scope

of what I have in mind, awful the music I shall deploy, most

awful the witness of the camera moving

out from the chopping board to the grains of snow

whirling against the windowglass to the rotating

searchlights of the tower.      The humped snow-shrouded tanks

laboring toward the border.      This is not your bookish art.

But say the poet picks up the boning knife and thinks my bones

if she touching the paring knife thinks carrot, onion, celery

if staring at the wooden spoon I see the wood is split

as if from five winters of war

when neither celery, onion, carrot could be found

or picking up the tongs I whisper What this was for

And did you say get on, get out or just look out?

Were you speaking from exhaustion from disaster from your last

assignment were you afraid.

for the vision in the kitchen, that it could not be saved

—no time to unload the heavy

cases to adjust

the sensitive equipment

to seize the olive rusty light to scan the hand that reaches

hovering

over a boning knife a paring knife a wooden spoon a pair

of tongs

to cull the snow before it blows away across the border’s blacked-

out sheds

and the moon swims in a bluish bubble dimmed

by the rotating searchlights of the tower?      Here

it is in my shorthand, do what you have in mind.

1994

LATE GHAZAL

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.

First rains of the winter      morning’s smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then      what will you do there?

Life always pulsed harder than the lines.

Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?

The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?

Everything there was cast in an image of desire.

The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.

I took my body anyplace with me.

In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.

Life was always stronger … the critics couldn’t get it.

Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.

1994

SIX NARRATIVES

1

You drew up the story of your lifeI 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 meI 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 menIt 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 loveit 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 warit 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

FROM PIERCÉD DARKNESS

New York/December

Taking the least griefcrusted avenue the last worst bridge away

somewhere beyond her Lost & Found we stopped in our flight to

check backward

in the rearview mirror into her piercéd darkness.      A mirror is

either flat or deep

and ours was deep to the vanishing point:      we saw showroom

mannequins draped and trundled

—black lace across blackening ice—

false pearls knotted by nervous fingers, backribs lacquered in

sauce.

Narrow waters rocking in spasms.      The torch hand-held and the

poem of entrance.

Topless towers turned red and green.

Dripping faucet icicled radiator.

Eyes turned inward.      Births arced into dumpsters.

Eyes blazing under knitted caps,

hands gripped on taxi-wheels, steering.

Fir bough propped in a cardboard doorway, bitter tinsel.

The House of the Jewish Book, the Chinese Dumpling House.

Swaddled limbs dreaming on stacked shelves of sleep      opening

like knives.

•

Her piercéd darkness.      Dragqueen dressed to kill in beauty

drawing her bridgelit shawls

over her shoulders.      Her caves ghosted by foxes.      Her tracked

arms.

Who climbs the subway stairs at the end of night

lugging a throwaway banquet.      Her

Man Who Lived Underground and all his children.

Nightcrews uncapping her streets wildlamps strung up on high.

•

Fairy lights charming stunted trees.

Hurt eyes awake to the glamor.

I’ve walked this zone

gripping my nightstick, worked these rooms

in silver silk charmeuse and laid my offerings

next to the sexless swathed form lying in the doorway.

I’ve preached for justice rubbing crumbs

from sticky fingers for the birds.

Picked up a pretty chain of baubles

in the drugstore, bitten them to see if they were real.

I’ve boiled a stocking and called it Christmas pudding.

Bought freeborn eggs to cook

with sugar, milk and pears.

•

Altogether the angels arrive for the chorus

in rapidly grabbed robes they snatch scores of hallelujahs

complicit with television cameras they bend down their eyes.

However they sing their voices will glisten

in the soundmix.      All of it good enough for us.

Altogether children will wake before the end of night

(“not good dawn” my Jewish grandmother called it) will stand

as we did

handheld in cold dark before the parents’ door

singing for glimpsed gilt and green

packages, the drama, the power of the hour.

•

Black lace, blackening ice.      To give on one designated day—

a window bangs shut on an entire

forcefield of chances, connections.      A window flies open

on the churning of birds in flight going surely somewhere else.

A snowflake like no other flies past, we will not hear of it

again, we will surely

hear of it

again.

1994–1995

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 of 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 razor 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

night 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

(1995–1998)

I don’t know how to measure happiness. The issue is happiness, there is no other issue, or no other issue one has a right to think about for other people, to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness.

—GEORGE OPPEN, LETTER TO JUNE OPPEN DEGNAN, AUGUST 5, 1970

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

FOR AN ANNIVERSARY

The wing of the osprey lifted

over the nest on Tomales Bay

into fog and difficult gust

raking treetops from Inverness Ridge on over

The left wing shouldered into protective

gesture the left wing we thought broken

and the young beneath in the windy nest

creaking there in their hunger

and the tides beseeching, besieging

the bay in its ruined languor

1996

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 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?

1996–97

1941

In the heart of pain where mind is broken

and consumed by body, I sit like you

on the rocky shore      (like you, not with you)

A windmill shudders, great blades cleave the air and corn is ground

for a peasant century’s bread and fear of hunger

(like that, but not like that)

Pewter sails drive down green water

barges shoulder fallowing fields

(Like then, not then)

If upstairs in the mill sunrise fell low and thin

on the pierced sleep of children hidden in straw

where the mauled hen had thrashed itself away

if some lost their heads and ran

if some were dragged

if some lived and grew old remembering

how the place by itself was not evil

had water, spiders, a cat

if anyone asked me—

How did you get here anyway?

Are you the amateur of drought? the collector

of rains? are you poetry’s inadmissible

untimely messenger?

By what right?

In whose name?

Do you

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

PLAZA STREET AND FLATBUSH

1

On a notepad on a table

tagged for the Goodwill

the word      Brooklyn

on the frayed luggage label

the matchbox cover

the name      Brooklyn

in steel-cut script on a watermarked form

on a postcard postmarked 1961

the word      Brooklyn

on the medal for elocution

on the ashtray with the bridge

the inscription      Brooklyn

in the beige notebook

of the dead student’s pride

in her new language

on the union card      the love letter

the mortgaged insurance policy

somewhere it would say,      Brooklyn

on the shear of the gull

on the ramp that sweeps

to the great cable-work

on the map of the five boroughs

the death certificate

the last phone bill

in the painter’s sighting

of light unseen

till now, in Brooklyn

2

If you had been required

to make inventory

of everything in the apartment

if you had had to list

the acquisitions of a modest life

punctuated with fevers of shopping

—a kind of excitement for her

but also a bandage

over bewilderment

and for him, the provider

the bandage of providing

for everyone

if you had had to cram the bags

with unworn clothing unused linens

bought by a woman

who but just remembered

being handed through the window

of a train in Russia

if you had had to haul

the bags to the freight elevator

if you had been forced to sign

a declaration of all

possessions kept or given away

in all the old apartments

in one building say

at Plaza and Flatbush

or on Eastern Parkway?

Art doesn’t keep accounts

though artists

do as they must

to stay alive

and tend their work

art is a register of light

3

The painter taking her moment

—a rift in the clouds—

and pulling it out

—mucous strand, hairy rootlet

sticky clew to the labyrinth

pulling and pulling

forever or as long

as this grain of this universe

will be tested

the painter seizing the light

of creation

giving it back to its creatures

headed under the earth

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

“THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES”

1

The taxi meter clicking up

loose change who can afford to pay

basalt blurring spectral headlights

darkblue stabbed with platinum

raincoats glassy with evening wet

the city gathering

itself for darkness

into a bitter-chocolate vein

the east side with its trinkets

the west side with its memories

2

Wherever you had to connect:

question of passport, glances, bag

dumped late on the emptied carousel

departure zones

where all could become mislaid, disinvented

undocumented, unverified

all but the footprint of your soul

in the cool neutral air

till the jumbo jet groaned and gathered

itself over Long Island

gathered you into your earth-craving

belly-self, that desire

3

Gaze through the sliced-glass window

nothing is foreign here

nothing you haven’t thought or taught

nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know

your old poets and painters knew it

knocking back their wine

you’re just in a cab driven wild

on the FDR by a Russian Jew

who can’t afford to care if he lives or dies

you rode with him long ago

4

Between two silvered glass urns an expensive

textile is shouldered

it’s after dark now, floodlight

pours into the wired boutique

there are live roses in the urns

there are security codes

in the wall      there are children, dead, near death

whose fingers worked this

intricate

desirable thing

—nothing you haven’t seen on your palm

nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know

5

After one stroke she looks at the river

remembers her name—Muriel

writes it in her breath

on the big windowpane

never again perhaps

to walk in the city freely

but here is her landscape this old

industrial building converted

for artists

her river      the Lordly Hudson

Paul named it      which has no peer

in Europe or the East

her mind on that water      widening

6

Among five men walks a woman

tall as the tallest man, taller than several

a mixed creature

from country poverty      good schooling

and from that position seeing

further than many

beauty, fame, notwithstanding      standing

for something else

—Where do you come from?—

—Como tú, like you, from nothing—

Julia de Burgos, of herself, fallen

in Puerto Rican Harlem

7

Sometime tonight you’ll fall down

on a bed far from your heart’s desire

in the city as it is

for you now:      her face or his

private across an aisle

throttling uptown

bent over clasped hands or

staring off then suddenly glaring:

Back off! Don’t ask!      you will meet those eyes

(none of them meeting)

8

The wrapped candies from Cleveland

The acclaim of East St. Louis

deadweight trophies borne

through interboro fissures of the mind

in search of Charlie Parker

—Where are you sleeping tonight? with whom?

in crippled Roebling’s harbor room

where he watched his bridge transpire?—

Hart      Miles      Muriel      Julia      Paul

you will meet the eyes you were searching for

and the day will break

as we say, it breaks

as we don’t say, of the night

as we don’t say of the night

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 question 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 gull’s 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 traditions 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?

1997–98

FOX

(1998–2000)

For Michelle, again, after twenty-five years

Y in alto cielo, su fondo estrellado

Y en las multitudes, la mujer que amo

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

VETERANS DAY

1

No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face

this body swung home from home      sewn into its skin

Let you      entrusted to close the box

for final draping      take care

what might be due

to the citizen wounded

by no foreign blast nor shell      (is this

body a child’s?      if?      why?)

eyes hooded in refusal—

over these to lower the nation’s pall, thick flutter

this body shriveled into itself

—a normal process they have said

The face?      another story, a flag

hung upside down against glory’s orders

2

Trying to think about

something else—what?—when?

the story broke

the scissor-fingered prestidigitators

snipped the links of concentration

State vs memory

State vs unarmed citizen

wounded by no foreign blast nor shell

forced into the sick-field

brains-out coughing downwind

backing into the alley      hands shielding eyes

under glare-lit choppers coming through      low

3

In the dream you—is it?—set down

two packages in brown paper

saying, Without such means

there can be no end

to the wrenching of mind

from body, the degradation

no end to everything you hate

and have exposed, lie upon lie

I think: We’ve been dying slowly

now we’ll be blown to bits

I think you’re testing me

“how vitally we desired disaster”

You say, there can be no poetry

without the demolition

of language, no end to everything you hate

lies upon lies

I think: you’re testing me

testing us both

but isn’t this what it means to live—

pushing further the conditions in which we breathe?

4

In the college parlor by the fireplace

ankled and waisted with bells

he, inclined by nature toward tragic themes

chants of the eradication of tribal life

in a blue-eyed trance

shaking his neckbent silvering hair

Afterward, wine and cake at the Provost’s house

and this is surely no dream, how the beneficiary

of atrocities yearns toward innocence

and this is surely a theme, the vengeful rupture

of prized familiar ways

and calculated methods

for those who were there      But for those elsewhere

it’s something else, not herds hunted down cliffs

maybe a buffalo burger in the

tribal college cafeteria

and computer skills after lunch      Who wants to be tragic?

The college coheres out of old quonset huts

demolition-scavenged doors, donated labor

used textbooks, no waste, passion

5

Horned blazing fronds of Sierra ice

grow hidden rivulets, last evening’s raindrop pulses

in the echeveria’s cup next morning, fogdrip darkens the

road

under fire-naked bishop pines

thick sweats form on skins

of pitched-out nectarines, dumpster shrine

of miracles of truths of mold

Rain streaming, stroking

a broken windowpane

When the story broke I thought

I was thinking about water

how it is most of what we are

and became bottled chic

such thoughts are soon interrupted

6

When the story broke we were trying to think

about history      went on stubbornly thinking

though history plunged

with muddy spurs      screamed at us for trying

to plunder its nest      seize its nestlings

capture tame and sell them or something

after the manner of our kind

Well, was it our secret hope?

—a history you could seize

(as in old folios of “natural history”

each type and order pictured in its place?)

—Back to the shambles, comrades.

where the story is always breaking

down      having to be repaired

7

Under the small plane’s fast shadow an autumn

afternoon bends sharply

—swathes of golden membrane, occult blood

seeping up through the great groves

where the intestinal the intestate

blood-cords of the stags are strung from tree to tree

I know already where we’re landing

what cargo we’ll take on

boxed for the final draping

coming home from home      sewn into its skin

eyes hooded in refusal

—what might be due—

1998–1999

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

SIGNATURES

It would have made no difference who commanded us in

those first hours. …

—veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944

That was no country for old women … Someone from D-Day

at the redgold turn of the party

recites his line of Yeats with a sex-change

someone already stricken

in his urethra      rising four times nightly

Went through that and still despises …

Here an old woman’s best country is her art

or it’s not her country

Here the old don’t pity the old

As when young we scale our rock face

relentless, avid

looking sometimes back at the whole terrain:

—those scrapings on the rocks

are they a poet’s signature?

a mother’s who tried for all her worth to cling

to the steep      with the small soft claws gripping her back?

1998

NORA’S GAZE

Clayton, we can’t

have it both ways:

Nora’s art

was erotic

not sensual

yet how can that be?

Mostly, she handled

the body in a bleak light

—surely that was her right

to make such paintings, drawings more

than paintings anyway—

grey-brown, black, white-grey

—not the usual hues encoding

sensual encounter

but how she figured it

and stained it

And had she painted

the deep-dyed swollen shaft

the balls’ magenta shadow

in dark dominion

that

might have “done well”

But to paint and paint again

the penis as a workaday

routine

wintry morning thing

under a gaze

expert and merciful as hers

that was heinous

and her genius

still lies chained

till that is told

You a man

I a woman tell it

none of it lessens her

For Clayton Eshleman

1998

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

TWILIGHT

Mudseason dusk schoolmaster:      pressed out of rain my spine

on your grey dormitory

chiseled from Barre

caught now in your blurred story

hauling my jacket overshoulder

against your rectilinear stones

Out of the rain I waited

in a damp parlor ghosted

with little gifts and candy toys

pitting my brain against your will

Could rays from my pupils dissect

mortar      pry boards from floor

probe the magnetic field of your

granitic clarity

Schoolmaster: could swear I’ve caught your upper-window profile

bent down on this little kingdom      dreamed your advice:

Always read with the dark falling over your left shoulder

—seen you

calculate volume of blocks required

inspect the glazing

pay the week’s wages

blueprints scrolled under arm

treading home over snow

driven virgin then cow-pied

five o’clock’s blue eyeballs

strung open day after day

a few seconds longer

an ascendant planet

following in your footprints possibly

1999

OCTOBRISH

—it is to have these dreams

still married/where

you tell me In those days

instead of working

I was playing on the shore with a wolf

coming to a changed

house/you

glad of the changes

but still almost

transparent

and bound to disappear

A life thrashes/half unlived/its passions

don’t desist/displaced from their own habitat

like other life-forms take up other dwellings

so in my body’s head

so in the stormy spaces

that life

leads itself which could not be led

1999

SECOND SIGHT

1

Tonight I could write many verses

beginning      Let this not happen

for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing

in hot July      worn webbed-plastic

chairs aglare on the nickel-colored balcony

foreseeing in tracked patterns

of a project landscape

the hammer brought

down by one child upon another’s skull

Not moved yet      she      and hers

her child inside      gazing

at a screen

and she a reader once      now a woman foreseeing

elbows sore with the weight

she has placed on them

a woman on a balcony with a child inside

gazing at a screen

2

A woman      neither architect nor engineer      construes the dustmotes

of a space primed for neglect

Indoor, outdoor exhausted air

Paths that have failed as paths      trees

that have failed as trees

Practiced in urban literacy she

traverses and assesses streets and bridges

tilting the cumbrous ornamental sewer lids ajar

in search of reasons underground

which there why this must be

1999–2000

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

1999

Before the acute

point of the severing

I wanted to see into my century’s

hinged and beveled mirror

clear of smoke

eyes of coal and ruby

stunned neck the carrier of bricks and diamonds

brow of moonlit oyster shells

barbed wire lacework disgracing

the famous monument

Behind it spread the old

indigenous map      landscape

before conquerors      horizon ownless

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

(2000–2004)

For Jean Valentine

I

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

FOR JUNE, IN THE YEAR 2001

The world’s quiver and shine

I’d clasp for you forever

jetty vanishing into pearlwhite mist

western sunstruck water-light

Touch food to the lips

let taste never betray you

cinnamon vanilla melting

on apple tart

but what you really craved:

a potency of words

Driving back from Berkeley

880’s brute dystopia

I was at war with words

Later on C-SPAN:      Tallahassee:

words straight to the point:

One person, one vote

No justice, no peace

it could lift you by the hair

it could move you like a wind

it could take you by surprise

as sudden Canada geese

took us by the marina

poised necks and alert

attitudes of pause

Almost home I wanted

you to smell the budding acacias

tangled with eucalyptus

on the road to Santa Cruz

2002

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

VARIATIONS ON LINES FROM A CANADIAN POET

I needed a genre for the times I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed a genre to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity. . . .

—Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (1993)

I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy

for phantom Liberty standing bridal at my harbor

I need a gauze to slow the hemorrhaging of my history

I need an ancestor complicit in my undercover prying

I need soil that whirls and spirals upward somewhere else

I need dustbowl, sand dune, dustdevils for roots

I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado

I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada

to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing

to keep on fleeing or invent a genre

to distemper ideology

2002

DELIVERED CLEAN

You’ve got to separate what they signify from what

they are      distinguish

their claimed intentions from the stuff coming

out from their hands and heads      The professor of cultural dynamics

taught us this      They’re disasters      in absentia

really      when supposedly working

Look at the record:

lost their minds wrote bad checks and smoked in bed

and if they were men were bad with women and if they were women

picked men like that or would go with women

and talked too much and burnt the toast and abused all

known substances      Anyone who says

they were generous to a fault putting change

in whoever’s cup if they had it on them      always room for the friend

with no place to sleep      refused to make what they made

in the image of the going thing

cooked up stews that could keep you alive with

gizzards and onions and splashes of raw

red wine      were

loyal where they loved and wouldn’t name names

should remember      said the professor of cultural

dynamics      what

messes they made

The building will be delivered vacant

of street actors      so-called artists in residence

fast-order cooks on minimum wage

who dreamed up a life where space was cheap

muralists doubling as rabble-rousers

cross-dressing pavement poets

delivered clean

of those who harbor feral cats illegals illicit ideas

selling their blood to buy old vinyls

living at night and sleeping by day

with huge green plants in their windows

and huge eyes painted on their doors.

For Jack Foley

2002

THE EYE

A balcony, violet shade on stucco      fruit in a plastic bowl on the iron

raggedy legged table, grapes and sliced melon, saucers, a knife, wine

in a couple of thick short tumblers cream cheese once came in: our snack

in the eye of the war      There are places where fruit is implausible, even

rest is implausible, places where wine if any should be poured into wounds

but we’re not yet there or it’s not here yet      it’s the war

not us, that moves, pauses and hurtles forward into the neck

and groin of the city, the soft indefensible places but not here yet

Behind the balcony an apartment, papers, pillows, green vines still watered

there are waterless places but not here yet, there’s a bureau topped

with marble

and combs and brushes on it, little tubes for lips and eyebrows, a dish

of coins and keys

there’s a bed a desk a stove a cane rocker a bookcase civilization

cage with a skittery bird, there are birdless places but not

here yet, this bird must creak and flutter in the name of all

uprooted orchards, limbless groves

this bird standing for wings and song that here can’t fly

Our bed quilted      wine poured      future uncertain      you’d think

people like us would have it scanned and planned      tickets to somewhere

would be in the drawer      with all our education you’d think we’d

have taken measures

soon as ash started turning up on the edges of everything ash

in the leaves of books ash on the leaves of trees and in the veins of

the passive

innocent life we were leading calling it hope

you’d think that and we thought this      it’s the war not us that’s moving

like shade on a balcony

2002

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

II

USonian Journals 2000

[Usionian: 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, it’s 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

III

Territory Shared

ADDRESS

Orientation of the word toward its addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. … Each and every word expresses the “one” in relation to the “other.” … A word is territory shared by both addressor and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.

—V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

If all we would speak is ideology

believable walking past pent-up Christmas trees

in a California parking lot      day before Thanksgiving      hot sun

on faint

scent of spruce      in the supermarket

mixed metaphors of food

faces expectant, baffled, bitter, distracted

wandering aisles or like me and the man ahead of me buying

only milk

my car door grabbed open by a woman

thinking it her husband’s car honking for her somewhere else

—and I think it true indeed I know

I who came only for milk am speaking it      :      though

would stand somewhere beyond

this civic nausea

: desiring not to stand apart

like Jeffers giving up on his kind      loving only unhuman creatures

because they transcend ideology      in eternity as he thought

but he wasn’t writing to them

nor today’s gull perched on the traffic light

Nor can this be about remorse

staring over its shopping cart

feeling its vague ideological thoughts

nor about lines of credit

blanketing shame and fear

nor being conscripted for violence

from without      beckoning at rage within

I know what it cannot be

But who      at the checkout this one day

do I address      who is addressing me

what’s the approach whose the manners

whose dignity whose truth

when the change purse is tipped into the palm

for an exact amount without which

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

LIVRESQUE

There hangs a space between the man

and his words

like the space around a few snowflakes

just languidly beginning

space

where an oil rig has dissolved in fog

man in self-arrest

between word and act

writing agape, agape

with a silver fountain pen

2002

COLLABORATIONS

I

Thought of this “our” nation : : thought of war

ghosts of war fugitive

in labyrinths of amnesia

veterans      out-of-date textbooks in a library basement

evidence trundled off      plutonium      under tarps after dark

didn’t realize it until I wrote it

August now      apples have started

severing from the tree

over the deck      by night their dim impact

thuds into dreams

by daylight bruised      starting to stew in sun

saying “apple” to nose and tongue

to memory

Word following sense, the way it should be

and if you don’t speak the word

do you lose your senses

And isn’t this just one speck, one atom

on the glazed surface we call

America

from which I write

the war ghosts treading in their shredded

disguises above the clouds

and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog

these mornings

we always say will break open?

II

Try this on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”

If you read it will you succumb

Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window

and circle your room

Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house

he has had to rebuild in words

Would it weaken your will to hear

riffs of the instruments he loves

rustling of rivers remembered

where faucets are dry

“The enemy’s water”      is there a phrase

for that in your language?

And you      what do you write

now in your borrowed house      tuned in

to the broadcasts of horror

under a sagging arbor, dimdumim

do you grope for poetry

to embrace all this

—not describe, embrace      staggering

in its arms, Jacob-and-angel-wise?

III

Do you understand why I want your voice?

At the seder table it’s said

you reclined and said nothing

now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry

your dreams so stony

you wake with their grit in your mouth?

There was a beautiful life here once

Our enemies poisoned it?

Make a list of what’s lost but don’t

call it a poem

that’s for the scriptors of nostalgia

bent to their copying-desks

Make a list of what you love well

twist it      insert it

into a bottle of old Roman glass

go to the edge of the sea

at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in

and the ships of deportation wrenched away

IV

For Giora Leshem

Drove upcoast      first day of another year      no rain

oxalis gold lakes floating

on January green

Can winter tides off the Levant

churn up wilder spume?

Think Crusades, remember Acre

wind driving at fortress walls

everything returns in time except the

utterly disappeared

What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee

What does not change / is the will

to vanquish

the fascination with what’s easiest

see it in any video arcade

is this what the wind is driving at?

Where are you Giora?      whose hands

lay across mine a moment

Can you still believe that afternoon

talking      you smoking      light and shade

on the deck, here in California

our laughter, your questions of translation

your daughter’s flute?

2002–2003

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

POINT IN TIME

If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica

to be left on the shelf of the cave

with the century’s other letters each

stained with its own DNA expressed

in love’s naked dark or the dawn

of a day of stone:

it’s a fact like a town crosshaired on a map

But we are not keeping archives here

where all can be blown away

nor raking the graves in Père-Lachaise

nor is she beholden or dutiful

as her pen pushes its final stroke

into the mineral page

molecule speaking to molecule

for just this moment

This is the point in time when

she must re-condense her purpose

like ink, like rain, like winter light

like foolishness and hatred

like the blood her hand first knew

as a wet patch on the staircase wall

she was feeling her way down in the dark.

2003

IV

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 laughterin 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

V

If some long unborn friend

looks at photos in pity,

we say, sure we were happy,

but it was not in the wind.

MEMORIZE THIS

i

Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop

A withered petunia’s crisp      the bud sticky      both are dark

The flower engulfed in its own purple      So common, nothing

like it

The old woodstove gone to the dump

Sun plunges through the new skylight

This morning’s clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts

This afternoon’s far-flung like the Mojave

Night melts one body into another

One drives fast the other maps a route

Thought new it becomes familiar

From thirteen years back maybe

One oils the hinges one edges the knives

One loses an earring the other finds it

One says I’d rather make love

Than go to the Greek Festival

The other, I agree.

ii

Take a strand of your hair

on my fingers let it fall

across the pillow      lift to my nostrils

inhale your body entire

Sleeping with you after

weeks apart      how normal

yet      after midnight

to turn and slide my arm

along your thigh

drawn up in sleep

what delicate amaze

2002–2003

THE PAINTER’S HOUSE

Nineteen-thirties Midwestern

—the painter long gone to the sea—

plutonic sycamore by the shed

a mailbox open mouthed

in garden loam a chip

of veiny china      turned

up there where he might have stood

eyeing the dim lip of grass

beyond, the spring stars sharpening

above

Well since there’s still light      walk around

stand on the porch

cup hands around eyes peering in

Is this the kitchen where she worked and thought

Is that the loft where their bodies fell

into each other      The nail where the mirror

hung      the shelf where her college books

eyed her aslant

Those stairs would her bare feet have felt?

In the mute shed no trace

of masterworks      occult

fury of pigment      no

downslash of provocation

no whirled hands at the doorjamb

no lightning streak      no stab in the dark

no      sex      no      face

2003

AFTER APOLLINAIRE & BRASSENS

When the bridge of lovers bends

over the oilblack river

and we see our own endings

through eyes aching and blearing

when the assault begins

and we’re thrown apart still longing

when the Bridge of Arts trembles

under the streaked sky

when words of the poets tumble

into the shuddering stream

where who knew what joy

would leap after what pain

what flows under the Seine

Mississippi Jordan Tigris

Elbe Amazon Indus Nile

and all the tributaries

who knows where song goes

now and from whom

toward what longings

2003

SLASHES

Years pass      and two      who once

don’t know each other at all

dark strokes gouge a white wall      as lives

and customs slashed by dates :      October ’17/May ’68

/September ’73

Slash across lives      memory pursues its errands

a lent linen shirt pulled unabashedly over her naked shoulders

cardamom seed bitten in her teeth

watching him chop onions

words in the air      segregation/partition/apartheid

vodka/cigarette smoke      a time

vertigo on subway stairs

Years pass      she pressing the time into a box

not to be opened      a box

quelling pleasure and pain

You could describe something like this

in gossip      write a novel      get it wrong

In wolf-tree, see the former field

The river’s muscle :      greater than its length

the lake’s light-blistered blue :      scorning

circumference

A map inscribes relation

only when

underground aquifers are fathomed in

water table rising or falling

beneath apparently

imperturbable earth

music from a basement session overheard

2002

TRACE ELEMENTS

Back to the shallow pond      sharp rotting scatter

leaf-skinned edge there      where the ring

couldn’t be sunk far out enough

(far enough from shore)

back out the rock-toothed logging road

to the dark brook where it’s dropped      mudsucked gold

(sucked under stones)

that’s another marriage      lucid and decisive

to say at last:      I did, I do, I will

(I did not, I will not)

Snow-whirled streetlamps under a window

(a bedroom and a window)

icy inch of the raised sash      blizzard clearing to calm

outlined furniture:      figured mirror:      bedded bodies:

warm blood:      eyes in the dark:

no contradiction:

She was there

and they were there:      her only      now      seeing it      (only now)

Bow season:      then gun season

Apricot leaves bloodsprinkled:      soaked:       case closed

Memory:      echo in time

All’s widescreen now      lurid inchoate century

Vast disappearing acts      the greatest show on earth

but here are small clear refractions

from an unclear season

blood on a leaf

gold trace element in water

light from the eye behind the eye

2003

BRACT

Stories of three islands

you’ve told me, over years

over meals, after quarrels,

light changing the spectrum of your hair

your green eyes, lying on our backs

naked or clothed, driving

through wind, eighteen-wheeler trucks

of produce crates ahead and behind

you saying, I couldn’t live long

far from the ocean

Spring of new and continuing

war, harpsichord crashing

under Verlet’s fingers

I tell you I could not live long

far from your anger

lunar reefed and tidal

bloodred bract from spiked stem

tossing on the ocean

2003

VI

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

VII

FIVE O’CLOCK, JANUARY 2003

Tonight as cargoes of my young

fellow countrymen and women are being hauled

into positions aimed at death, positions

they who did not will it suddenly

have to assume

I am thinking of Ed Azevedo

half-awake in recovery

if he has his arm whole

and how much pain he must bear

under the drugs

On cliffs above a beach

luxuriant in low tide after storms

littered with driftwood hurled and piled and

humanly arranged in fantastic

installations and beyond

silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned

Jeffers’ “most glorious creature on earth”

we passed, greeting, I saw his arm

bandaged to the elbow

asked and he told me: It was just

a small cut, nothing, on the hand he’d

washed in peroxide thinking

that was it until the pain began

traveling up his arm

and then the antibiotics the splint the

numbing drugs the sick sensation

and this evening at five o’clock the emergency

surgery and last summer

the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain

with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese

room with a balcony, ocean like this

nobody asking for pay in advance

kindness of foreigners

in that country, sick sensation now

needing to sit in his brother’s truck again

even the accident on the motorcycle

was nothing like this

I’ll be thinking of you at five

this evening I said

afterward you’ll feel better, your body

will be clean of this poison

I didn’t say Your war is here

but could you have believed

that from a small thing infection

would crawl through the blood

and the enormous ruffled shine

of an ocean wouldn’t tell you.

2003

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

DON’T TAKE ME

too seriously      please

take the December goodness

of my neighbors’ light-strung eaves

take the struggle helping with the tree

for the children’s sake

don’t take me seriously

on questionnaires about faith and fault

and country      Don’t

take me for a loner don’t take me for a foreigner don’t

take me in the public

library checking definitions

of freedom in the dictionary or

tracing satellites after curfew

or in my Goodwill truck delivering a repaired TV

to the house of the foil’d revolutionary

2002

TO HAVE WRITTEN THE TRUTH

To have spent hours stalking the whine of an insect

have smashed its body in blood on a door

then lain sleepless with rage

to have played in the ship’s orchestra crossing

the triangle route

dissonant arpeggios under cocktail clatter

to have written the truth in a lightning flash

then crushed those words in your hand

balled-up and smoking

when self-absolution

easygoing pal of youth

leans in the doorframe

Kid, you always

took yourself so hard!

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

VIII

Tendril

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

(2004–2006)

For Aijaz Ahmad

and

in memory of

F. O. Matthiessen

1902–1950

Poetry isn’t easy to come by.

You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world.

In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.

—Alan Davies

Poetry is not self-expression, the I is a dramatic I.

—Michael S. Harper,

quoting Sterling A. Brown

To which I would add: and so, unless

otherwise indicated, is the You.

—A.R.

I

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

SKELETON KEY

In the marina an allegro creaking

boats on the tide

each with its own sway

rise and fall

acceptance and refusal

La Barqueta, My Pelican

barometer in the body

rising and falling

•

A small wound, swallow-shaped, on my wrist

ripped by a thorn

exacerbated by ash and salt

And this is how I came to be

protector of the private

and enemy of the personal

•

Then I slept, and had a dream

No more

No màs

From now on, only

reason’s drugged and dreamless sleep

•

Creeps down the rockface      shadow cast

from an opposite crag exactly at that moment

you needed light on the trail      These are the shortening days

you forgot about      bent on your own design

•

Cut me a skeleton key

to that other time, that city

talk starting up, deals and poetry

Tense with elation, exiles

walking old neighborhoods

calm journeys of streetcars

revived boldness of cats

locked eyes of couples

music playing full blast again

Exhuming the dead      Their questions

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

PIANO MÉLANCOLIQUE (extraits)

par Élise Turcotte

N’emporte rien avec toi.

Essayons de croire

qu’il n’y a rien dans mes poumons.

Qu’aucune maladie ne noircit

tes yeux.

Que je t’écris de la mangrove

pour te parler des palétuviers

qui sont les personnages

les plus mystérieux que j’aie vu.

Fantomatique, comme les

arbres, je reviens aux paysages.

Vapeurs et reflets.

Et petites racines aériennes

fixées au bas de ma robe.

MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)

from the French of Élise Turcotte

Take nothing with you

Let’s try believing

there’s nothing in my lungs.

That no sickness clouds

your eyes.

That I write you from the swamp

to tell you about the mangroves

the most mysterious

presences I’ve seen.

Spectral as the

trees, I return to landscape.

Fumes and reflections.

And little airy roots

stuck to the hem of my skirt.

Je me décris comme un animal

à plumes.

Je décris. Tu regardes.

Tandis que poussent mes plumes.

La nuit, tu cherches un motif fragile,

un relief aussi précis qu’un visage

aimé.

Des insectes occupent la chapelle cachée

sous le sable.

Beaucoup d’années ont passé

jusqu’ici.

I describe myself as a feathered

animal.

I describe.      You watch.

While my plumes grow.

Nights, you search for a fragile cause

set in relief, precise as a loved

face.

Insects dwell in the chapel hidden

in sand.

Many years have gone by

until this moment.

C’est la nuit qui parle,

dis-tu.

Mon poème sans mot.

Ma fuite en terre sauvage.

Le corps est léger quand

il est pris pour ce qu’il est.

Composé de murs et de

fenêtres.

Prêt à brûler.

Avec des petits drapeaux

flottant au centre.

Je te caresse avec le secours

du vide.

Une ode à la survie.

Un dictionnaire d’herbes folles.

Pour guérir, nous sommes prêts

à tout.

Night is speaking

you say.

My poem without words.

My flight into wild country.

The body is light when

taken for what it is.

Formed of walls and

windows.

Ready to burn.

With little flags

fluttering      in the center.

I touch you with the help

of the void.

An ode to survival.

A dictionary of wild grasses.

We’ll do anything

for a cure.

2004

II

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 plate 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

IMPROVISATION ON LINES FROM EDWIN MUIR’S “VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME”

Packed in my skin from head to toe

Is one I know and do not know

He never speaks to me yet is at home

More snug than embryo in the womb …

His name’s Indifference

Nothing offending he is all offence …

Can note with a lack-lustre eye

Victim and murderer go by …

If I could drive this demon out

I’d put all Time’s display to rout …

Or so I dream when at my door

I hear my Soul, my Visitor.

He comes but seldom, and I cannot tell

If he’s myself or one who loves me well

And comes in pity, for he pities all …

Victim and murderer … Vision’s

bloodshot wandering eye engages and

the whetted tool moves toward the hand

scrapes down an impassive sky      debrides

the panicked face      erases or redresses

with understrokes and slashes

in smeared roughed-over surfaces

false moves bad guesses

pausing to gauge its own

guilty innocence, desire

to make it clear yet leave the field

still dark and dialectical

This is unpitying yet not cold

—And Muir I wonder, standing under

the bruised eye-socket of late-winter sun

about your circling double-bind

between indifference and pity

your dream of history as Eden’s

loss, all else as repetition

—Wonder at your old opposite

number, Hugh MacDiarmid

his populated outraged joy

his ear for Lenin and for Rilke

for the particular and vast

the thistle’s bony elegance

the just, the wild, the urge, the cry for

what must change what be demolished

what secreted for the future

bardic or technological

together dialectical

2005–2006

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

HOTEL

I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time

It was in New York had been there a long time

Finnish sea-captains had stayed there in their time

It had fallen on one then another bad time

Now restored it wished to be or seem of the olden time

The Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time

There was a perpendicular lighted sign along its spine:

THE FINNISH HOTEL and on the desk aligned

two lamps like white globes and a blond

wood lounge with curved chairs and a bar beyond

serving a clear icy liquor of which the captains had been fond

reputedly in the olden time

In the Finnish Hotel I slept on a mattress stuffed with straw

after drinking with a Finnish captain who regarded me with awe

saying, Woman who could put away that much I never saw

but I did not lie with him on the mattress, his major flaw

being he was a phantom of the olden time

and I a woman still almost in my prime

dreaming the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in the olden time

2005

THREE ELEGIES

i. LATE STYLE

Propped on elbow in stony light

Green lawns of entitlement

out the window you can neither

open nor close

man crouched in den flung trembling

back on failed gifts

lapsed desire      A falling

star      Dim, trapped

in the narrow place of fame

And beneath the skin of boredom

indecipherable fear

ii. AS EVER

As ever, death.      Whenever, where.      But it’s

the drawn-together life we’re finally

muted by.      Must stand, regard as whole

what was still partial      still

under revision.      So it felt, so we thought.

Then to hear sweep

the scythe on grass

still witherless and sweet

iii. FALLEN FIGURE

The stone walls will recede and the needs that laid them

scar of winter sun stretch low

behind the advancing junipers

darkness rise up from the whitening pond

Crusted silver your breath in this ditch

the pitchfork in your hand

still stuck to your hand

The northern lights

will float, probe, vacillate

the yellow eye

of the snowplow you used to drive

will seek and find you

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

MIDNIGHT, THE SAME DAY

i

When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

of failure will still be standing

motionless at this intersection

between family restaurant

and medical clinic

wearing his cardboard necklace lettered

H ARD LU CK

until his sister

the Fury of reparations

descends

curdling the air in whirlwind

tears it from his neck

picks him up and hurls on

ii

Try to rest now, says a voice.

Another:      Give yourself time.

But rest is no act of will

and gifts to the self come back unopened

Milk will boil down in the iron pot

blistering into black sugar,

scalded vinegar lift

crispened layers

pages of a codex

in a library blown away

2005

EVEN THEN MAYBE

Not spent      those bloodshot friendships      those

soul-marriages sealed and torn

those smiles of pain

I told her a mouthful

I shut my mouth against him

Throat thick with tears

how words sound when you swallow

—and under the roof

of the mouth      long stroke

reaching from the tongue’s root

No, I was not living with her at the time

At the time I was not living

with him, at the time we were living together

I was living with neither of them

—was dwelling you could say

But as for living at that time

we were all living together with many others

for whom living was precisely the question

Haven’t seen evenings like that since

vesuvian emerald to brass dissolving

—a sentence you’d waited for

taken back half-spoken—

Luxury even then maybe

evenings like those

2005

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

III

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:

•

—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

IV

IF/AS THOUGH

you’d spin out on your pirate platter

chords I’d receive on my crystal set

blues purpling burgundy goblets

Lorca’s piano spuming up champagne flutes

could drop over any night at will

with that bottle of Oregon Pinot to watch Alexander Nevsky

If no curfews no blackouts no

no-fly lists no profiling racial genital mental

If all necessary illicits blew in

like time-release capsules or spores in the mulch

up-rising as morels, creviced and wild-delicious      If

Gerard Manley Hopkins were here to make welsh rarebit

reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland to Hart Crane in his high tenor

guessing him captive audience to sprung rhythm      as we in lóst lóve

sequences      hearing it

skim uncurfewed, uncowled

pelicans over spindrift beating agnostic wings

For Ed Pavlić

2006

TIME EXPOSURES

i

Glance into glittering moisture

webbed in lashes      unshed tears

I’d guess as yours

Known odor inhaled years later

in a brief social kiss      sudden conjuncture

soap, sweat, breath, hair      other embraces

diffused      once, again, time’s exhilarations

ii

Is there a doctor in the house

who in his plain mindful way

cared for his patients through

pain rain and snow

who at each and every grave

side knew

what could be done

he’d done

And where have all the patients gone

who wanted (more than one)

a tending hand

across the forehead      at the end

And what’s the house?

iii

They’d say she was humorless

didn’t go to the parties

giggle      show white teeth

So would suspend her in

their drained

definitions

Her body had nipples, eyes

a tongue and other parts

mirthful

obscene

which rose from love      quite often

hilarious into daylight

even forgetting why

iv

When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

into the long history they were made for running

caught the train you missed sought you eye-level

at the next station      You having run the whole way

to seize my face between your hands      your kind

of victory or benediction      then

we swerved down-tunnel

in separate cars      What is it to

catch yourself mirror-twinned

in an underwater window      what

about speed      matching

technology and desire      getting off

at the last stop:      dispersed

v

You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

ocean in its shaking

looks back at you with a blurred eye

Who’s that reflected

naked and sundered

reaching a hand

Go

down to the beach, walk in the wind

Pick up the washed-in shell

at your foot

Shell castle built on sand

your body and what’s your soul?

Is there a ghost-in-waiting?

time to bring that one in

2006

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

VIA INSOMNIA

Called up in sleep: your      voice:

I don’t know where I am …

A hand, mine, stroking a white fur surface

you as a white fur hat unstitched, outspread

white as your cold brancusian marble head

what animal’s pelt resembles you?

but these are my navigations:      you don’t know where you are

Is this how it is to be newly dead?      unbelieving

the personal soul, electricity unsheathing

from the cortex, light-waves fleeing

into the black universe

to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering

Where, when will I sleep

For Tory Dent

2006

A BURNING KANGAROO

leaping forward      escaping

out of rock reamed

on sky

in violet shadow

leaping      scorched to the skin

toward water

(none for miles)

Who did

(and can you see

this thing

not as a dream

a kangaroo

and not in profile either

Frontal

in flame      no halo

no aura      burning meat in movement

Can

you see with me

(unverified

otherwise

(whoever      did this thing

2006

EVER, AGAIN

Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!

and would I could      I’d

fly, drive back to that house

up the long hill between queen

anne’s lace and common daisyface

shoulder open stuck door

run springwater from kitchen

tap      drench tongue

palate and throat

throw window sashes up screens down

breathe in      mown grass

pine-needle heat

manure, lilac      unpack

brown sacks from the store:

ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one

big onion, milk and orange juice

iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing

potato chips, dill pickles

the Caledonian-Record

Portuguese rosé in round-hipped flask

open the box of newspapers by the stove

reread:      (Vietnam Vietnam)

Set again on the table

the Olivetti, the stack

of rough yellow typing paper

mark the crashed instant

of one summer’s mosquito

on a bedroom door

voices of boys outside

proclaiming twilight and hunger

Pour iced vodka into a shotglass

get food on the table

sitting with those wild heads

over hamburgers, fireflies, music

staying up late with the typewriter

falling asleep with the dead

2006

V

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 tasseled 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

VI

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

(2007–2010)

SERVE (v.t.):

to work for, be a servant to;

to give obedience and reverent honor to;

to fight for; do military or naval service for;

to go through or spend (a term of imprisionment);

to meet the needs of or satisfy the requirements of, be used by;

to deliver (a legal document) as a summons

—Webster’s New World Dictionary

of the American Language (1964)

I

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

BENJAMIN REVISITED

The angel

of history is

flown

now meet the janitor

down

in the basement      who

shirtless      smoking

has the job of stoking

the so-called past

into the so-called present

2007

INNOCENCE

… thought, think, I did

some terrible

thing back then

—thing that left traces

all over you

your work / how your figure

pressed into the world      ?

Had you murdered

—or not—something if not

someone      Had blindly—or not—

followed custom needing to be

broken      Broken

—or not—with custom

needing to be kept      ?

Something—a body—still

spins in air      a weaving weight

a scorching

However it was done

And the folks disassembling

from under the tree

after you snapped the picture

saliva thick in your mouth

•

Disfigured sequel:

confederations of the progeny

cottaged along these roads

front-center colonials

shrubbery lights in blue

and silver

crèche on the judge’s lawn      O the dear baby

People craving      in their mouths

warm milk over soft white bread

2007

DOMAIN

i

A girl looks through a microscope      her father’s

showing her life

in a drop of water or

finger blood smeared onto a glass wafer

Later leaning head on hand

while the sound of scales being practiced

clambers bleakly, adamantly up the stairs

she reads her own handwriting

Neighbors don’t meet on the corner here

the child whose parents aren’t home is not offered a meal

the congressman’s wife who wears nothing but green

tramples through unraked oak leaves yelling

to her strayed dogs Hey Rex! Hey Roy!

Husband in Washington:      1944

The girl finding her method:      you want friends

you’re going to have to write

letters to strangers

ii

A coffee stain splashed on a desk:      her accident her

mistake her true

country:      wavy brown coastline      upland

silken reeds swayed by long lectures of the wind

From the shore small boats reach, depart, return

the never-leavers tie nets of dried seaweed weighted

with tumbled-down stones

instructing young fingers through difficult knots

guiding, scraping some young fingers

No sound carries far from here

Rebuked, utopian projection

she visits rarely trying to keep

interior root systems, milky

nipples of stars, airborne wings rushing over

refuge of missing parts

intact

2008

FRACTURE

When on that transatlantic call into the unseen

ear of a hack through whiskey film you blabbed

your misanthrope’s

misremembered remnant of a story

given years back in trust

a rearview mirror

cracked /

shock of an ice-cube biting liquid

Heard the sound / didn’t know yet

where it was coming from

That mirror / gave up our ghosts

This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:

it would be strange not to forgive

(I in body now alive)

All are human / give / forgive

drop the charges / let go / put away

Rage for the trusting

it would be strange not to say

Love? yes

in this lifted hand / behind

these eyes

upon you / now

2007

TURBULENCE

There’ll be turbulence.      You’ll drop

your book to hold your

water bottle steady.      Your

mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall

may who ne’er hung there let him

watch the movie.      The plane’s

supposed to shudder, shoulder on

like this.      It’s built to do that.      You’re

designed to tremble too.      Else break

Higher you climb, trouble in mind

lungs labor, heights hurl vistas

Oxygen hangs ready

overhead.      In the event put on

the child’s mask first.      Breathe normally

2007

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

II

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 light 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

III

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

IV

Axel Avákar

[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

V

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

DON’T FLINCH

Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver

when you lift your eyes.      It’s the glare.      Don’t flinch

The news you were reading

(who tramples whom) is antique and on the death pages you’ve seen

already

worms doing their normal work

on the life that was:      the chewers chewing

at a sensuality that wrestled doom

an anger steeped in love they can’t

even taste.      How could this still

shock or sicken you?      Friends go missing, mute

nameless.      Toss

the paper.      Reach again

for the. Iliad.      The lines

pulse into sense.      Turn up the music

Now do you hear it?      can you smell smoke

under the near shingles?

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

VI

YOU, AGAIN

Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn’t ask

to parse again your idioms of littered

parking lots your chain-linked crane-hung sites

limp once more your crime-scene-festooned streets

to buildings I used to live in.      Lose my nerve

at a wrong door on the wrong floor

in search of a time.      The precision of dream is not

such a privilege. I know those hallways tiled in patterns

of oriental rugs those accordion-pleated

elevator gates. Know by heart the chipped

edges on some of those tiles. You who require this

heart-squandering want me wandering you, craving

to press a doorbell hear a lock turn, a bolt slide back

—always too much, over and over back

to the old apartment, wrong again, the key maybe

left with a super in charge of the dream who will not be found

2010

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

LATER POEMS

(2010–2012)

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

The following section compiles all of the notes appearing in Adrienne Rich’s published books, beginning with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in 1963. Her first two books (A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters) appeared without explanatory notes—as did The Will to Change in 1971 and Diving into the Wreck in 1973. A year later, when putting together the 1974 volume Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974, she provided notes for three poems selected from The Diamond Cutters. After that, with the exception of The Dream of a Common Language in 1978, all of her other volumes included some explanatory notes on sources for passages or on works that informed her writing and thinking.

In preparing the contents of The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984, Rich added two new notes that appear here with the date in parentheses. In The Fact of a Doorframe and in Collected Early Poems (1993), she also revised, expanded, or updated some notes, and cut others (she made no changes or provisions for notes for her last book, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012).

For the present volume I have brought together everything from the original books, using the updated versions where possible and restoring some notes she cut from the volumes of selected poems. Typography and format of the notes is made uniform without omitting any of the information they provided at the ends of the volumes where they first appeared. Where the note on one poem makes reference to another poem in the volume, the updated page reference is given.

The notes created especially for this volume are few, and where they occur, they are given in parentheses. For example, where information on a quoted passage was provided on the copyright page in one of the books, it appears here as a note. In rare instances I added an editor’s note to give publishing information about a particular poem. Finally, rather than reprinting the full text of Adrienne Rich’s original forewords for Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974, The Fact of a Doorframe, or Collected Early Poems, relevant information is briefly quoted in note form.

A CHANGE OF WORLD

Storm Warnings

(In Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, this poem is dated 1949.)

POEMS 1950–1951

(In The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984, Rich noted: [“The Prisoners” and “At the Jewish New Year”] “were ‘lost’ for a long time; I had even forgotten their existence.”)

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

The Tourist and the Town The pronouns in the third section were originally masculine. But the tourist was a woman—myself—and I never saw her as anything else. In 1953, when the poem was written, a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect or merely “personal.” In this poem, as in “Afterward” (page 16), I later altered the pronouns because they alter, for me, the dimensions of the poem. (1984)

Villa Adriana The summer palace built by the Emperor Hadrian for his favorite boy lover, Antinoüs. In “Antinoüs: The Diaries” (page 125) I let the young man speak for me. (1974)

The Snow Queen Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was the point of departure.

The Diamond Cutters Thirty years later I have trouble with the informing metaphor of this poem. I was trying, in my twenties, to write about the craft of poetry. But I was drawing, quite ignorantly, on the long tradition of domination, according to which the precious resource is yielded up into the hands of the dominator as if by a natural event. The enforced and exploited labor of actual Africans in actual diamond mines was invisible to me and, therefore, invisible in the poem, which does not take responsibility for its own metaphor. I note this here because this kind of metaphor is still widely accepted, and I still have to struggle against it in my work. (1984)

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

Euryclea’s Tale Euryclea was the old nurse of Odysseus and the first person to recognize him when he returned home from his wanderings. (1974)

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law Part 4: “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson, 1960, p. 369.

Part 7: The lines in Part 7 beginning “To have in this uncertain world some stay” were written by Mary Wollstonecraft in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787).

Part 8: “Vous mourez toutes à quinze ans,” from Diderot’s Lettres à Sophie Volland, quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, pp. 123–24.

Part 10: Cf. Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, p. 574: “… elle arrive du fond des ages, de Thèbes, de Minos, de Chichen Itza; et elle est aussi le totem planté au coeur de la brousse africaine; c’est un helicoptère et c’est un oiseau; et voilà la plus grande merveille: sous ses cheveux peints le bruissement des feuillages devient une pensée et des paroles s’échappent de ses seins.”

(“She comes from the remotest ages, from Thebes, Minos, Chichén Itzá; and she is also a totem planted in the heart of the African jungle; she is a helicopter and she is a bird; and here is the greatest wonder: beneath her painted hair, the rustling of leaves becomes a thought and words escape from her breasts.” The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Feminism Short Edition.)

Artificial Intelligence See Herbert Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 26. “A General Problem-Solving Program: Computer programs have been written that enable computers to discover proofs for theorems in logic or geometry, to play chess, to design motors … to compose music. … From almost all of them, whether intended as simulations [of human processes] or not, we learn something about human problem solving, thinking, and learning.

“The first thing we learn … is that we can explain these human processes without postulating mechanisms at subconscious levels that are different from those that are partly conscious and partly verbalized. … The secret of problem solving is that there is no secret.”

Always the Same The last line is quoted from D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 258.

POEMS 1962–1965

(The epigraph from Montaigne on page 165 is from the Essays, Book 1, Chapter 20: “Shall I change, just for you, this beautiful interwoven structure! Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is a part of you; you are running away from yourself.” Translation by M.A. Screech [Penguin/Allen Lane].)

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

In the Woods The first line is borrowed and translated from the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem.

Mourning Picture Effie is the painter’s daughter, who died young, and the speaker of the poem.

“I Am in Danger—Sir—” See Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 409. (The poem was first published as an epigraph to Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965] under the title “E.”)

Any Husband to Any Wife The title is, of course, a reversal of Browning’s, and the epigraph comes from his poem.

Translations from the Dutch (In Necessities of Life Rich provided two notes for these poems: “These translations are from a group commissioned by the Bollingen Foundation. For criticism and linguistic advice my thanks go to Judith Herzberg, Marjan DeWolff, and Leo Vroman; the final responsibility is of course my own.”

“Anyone who will compare the Dutch poems with my translations will see that I have, deliberately, refrained from imitating rhyme patterns and have in some instances altered metres. I have tried to be faithful first of all to the images and the emotional tone of the poems, and have been unwilling to introduce distortions in order to reproduce formal structure. Much of the onomatopoeic music of the Nijhoff poem is thus necessarily lost. Possibly I have made Hendrik de Vries sound more modern than he actually sounds in Dutch: in ‘Brother’ for instance he uses an old form of the second person singular which corresponds to the English ‘thou.’ But I believe that the inner structure of these poems remains in the translations, and as a poet-translator I have tried to do as I would be done by.”)

LEAFLETS

Orion One or two phrases suggested by Gottfried Benn’s essay “Artists and Old Age,” in Primal Vision: Selected Writings, ed. E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1960).

Dwingelo The site of an astronomical observatory in Holland.

Charleston in the 1860’s See Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary from Dixie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

For a Russian Poet Part 3: This poem is based on an account by the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya of a protest action against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Gorbanevskaya was later held, and bore a child, in a “penal mental institution” for her political activities.

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova) Based on literal prose versions in Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (London: Penguin, 1962).

Implosions The first three lines are stolen, by permission, from Abbott Small.

To Frantz Fanon Revolutionary philosopher; studied medicine at the Sorbonne; worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Franco-Algerian war; died of cancer at thirty-six. Author of The Wretched of the Earth; Toward the African Revolution; Black Skin, White Masks; A Dying Colonialism.

The Observer Suggested by a brief newspaper account of the fieldwork of Dian Fossey. She more recently wrote of her observations in Gorillas in the Mist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).

Leaflets Part 2: “The love of a fellow-creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ ” (Simone Weil, Waiting for God).

Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib) This poem began to be written after I read Aijaz Ahmad’s literal English versions of the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). While the structure and metrics of the classical ghazal form used by Ghalib are much stricter than mine, I adhered to his use of a minimum five couplets to a ghazal, each couplet being autonomous and independent of the others. The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal. The poems are dated as I wrote them, during a month in the summer of 1968. Although I was a contributor to Ahmad’s The Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), the ghazals here are not translations, but original poems.

My ghazals are personal and public, American and twentieth-century; but they owe much to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet self-educated and profoundly learned, who owned no property and borrowed his books, writing in an age of political and cultural break-up (1993).

Translations from the Dutch, Russian, and Yiddish (Rich wrote in Leaflets that “The Dutch poems in this book [‘City’ and ‘Dwingelo’] are translations, in the sense that they were derived by me directly from their originals. The Russian poems [‘Two Poems, adapted from Anna Akhmatova’] are adaptations of literal prose versions in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse, and will appear in Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Russian poetry edited by Olga Carlisle, to be published by Random House in 1969. The Yiddish poem [‘There Are Such Springlike Nights’] is, similarly, an adaptation from a literal version furnished by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, and will be included in their forthcoming anthology of Yiddish poetry in translation. It appears here with their permission and that of Kadia Maldovsky [sic].”)

POEMS 1967–1969

(The poem “Postcard” on page 289 was first published by W. W. Norton in Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974 in a section titled “Uncollected Poems 1957–1969.” In the Collected Early Poems it was grouped with the poems of Leaflets.)

White Night This poem and “There Are Such Springlike Nights” (page 244) were adapted from the Yiddish with the aid of transliterated versions and prose translations provided by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, in whose anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), these first appeared.

POEMS 1973–1974

From an Old House in America Part 4: The first line is borrowed from Emily Brontë’s poem “Stanzas.”

Part 7: Many African women went into labor and gave birth on the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, chained for the duration of the voyage to the dying or the dead.

Part 11: Datura is a poisonous hallucinogenic weed with a spiky green pod and a white flower; also known as jimson-weed, or deadly nightshade.

THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

(Twenty-One Love Poems was first published in 1976 in a limited edition, designed and hand-printed by Bonnie Carpenter at Effie’s Press, Emeryville, California.)

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff Some phrases in this poem are quoted from actual diaries and letters of Paula Modersohn Becker, which were shown to me in unpublished translations by Liselotte Glozer. Since then, an annotated translation of the manuscripts has been published by Diane Radycki: The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980). (1984)

A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR

The Images The phrase “moral and ordinary” is echoed from Blanche Wiesen Cook’s essay “Female Support Networks and Political Activism” in her pamphlet Women and Support Networks (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Out & Out Books, 1979).

Integrity To my knowledge, this word was first introduced in a feminist context by Janice Raymond in her essay “The Illusion of Androgyny,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 2, no. I (Summer 1975).

Culture and Anarchy The title is stolen from Matthew Arnold’s collection of essays by the same name, first published in London, 1869. The sources for the voices of nineteenth-century women heard in this poem are as follows: diaries of Susan B. Anthony, 1861, and letter from Anthony to her sister, 1883, both from Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis and Kansas City: Bowen-Merrill, 1899); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Anna Brownell Jameson, 1852, in Frederick Kenyon, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Ida Husted Harper, introduction to Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech “On Solitude of Self,” in Anthony and Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to Susan B. Anthony, in Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1.

For Julia in Nebraska Epigraph quoted from the Willa Cather Educational Foundation, Historical Landmark Council, marker at the intersection of Highways 281 and 4, fourteen miles north of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

For Ethel Rosenberg Phrases italicized in Part 3, line 6, are from Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977).

Mother-in-Law      It has been suggested to me that the lines “I am trying to tell you, I envy / the people in mental hospitals their freedom” add to a stockpile of false images of mental patients’ incarceration—images that help perpetuate their pain and the system which routinely drugs, curbs, “constrains,” electroshocks, and surgically experiments on them. The woman speaking in the poem speaks, of course, out of her own frustration and despair, the lines are bitterly ironic; but I agree with my critics that in a world eager both to romanticize and to torture mental patients, such cliches must be used, if at all, with utmost concern for the realities underlying them. (1984)

Heroines See Gerda Lerner: “The history of notable women is the history of exceptional, even deviant women, and does not describe the experience and history of the mass of women.” (“Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979].)

Grandmothers Part 3: Italicized lines are quoted from Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 39.

The Spirit of Place Part III: Italicized passages are from Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), specifically, from Letter 154 to Susan Gilbert (June 1854) and Letter 203 to Catherine Scott Anthon Turner (March 1859).

Turning the Wheel Part 3: The Hohokam were a prehistoric farming culture who developed irrigation canals in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico between about 300 B.C. and A.D. 1400. The word Hohokam is Pima and is translated variously as “those who have ceased” or “those who were used up.” See Emil W. Haury, The Hohokam, Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (sic) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).

Part 7: The letter is a poetic fiction, based on a reading of Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter, Builder upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980). Mary E. J. Colter (1869–1958) studied design and architecture in order to support her mother and younger sister upon her father’s death. She taught art in a St. Paul, Minnesota, high school for fifteen years before starting to work as a decorator for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad. Soon she was completely in charge of both exterior and interior design of hotels and restaurants from Chicago westward. Her work advanced the movement away from Victorian style toward a more indigenous southwestern and western architecture. At the height of her career she designed eight major buildings at the Grand Canyon, all of which are still standing. She never married. She drew consistently on Native American arts and design in her work, and her collection of Hopi and Navaho art can be seen at Mesa Verde Museum. Colter’s lifework—a remarkable accomplishment for a woman architect—was thus inextricable from the violation and expropriation of Native culture by white entrepreneurs. Yet her love for that culture was lifelong.

YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE

(The poem “Sources” was first published in 1983 as a chapbook by the Heyeck Press, Woodside, California.)

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 Section 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: 20th Century Poetry by Cuban Women (1982). Pulp Press, 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3.

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem Section 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.

In the Wake of Home Section 6: The Jodensavanne is an abandoned Jewish settlement in Surinam whose ruins exist in a jungle on the Cassipoera River.

Emily Carr Canadian painter (1871–1945). At the height of her powers she painted, with deep respect, the disappearing totem poles of the Northwest Coast Indians. See Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).

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 Section 16: See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 173.

Section 26: See Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 255: “the glorious So What: the life-cry.”

Section 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 counter-revolutionary in 1970; cleared of all charges in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

TIME’S POWER

Sleepwalking       Title and opening words (“next to death”) from “Slaapwandelen (naast de dood)” by Chr. J. van Geel, Dutch poet and painter. For the original and my translation, see page 214.

Letters in the Family Section 11, Yugoslavia, 1944: See Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (New York: Schocken, 1973). Born in Budapest, 1921, Hannah Senesh became a Zionist and immigrated to Palestine at the age of eighteen; her mother and brother remained in Europe. In 1943, she joined an expedition of Jews who trained under the British to parachute behind Nazi lines in Europe and connect with the partisan underground, to rescue Jews in Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. She was arrested by the Nazis, imprisoned, tortured, and executed in November 1944. Like the other letter-writers, “Esther” is an imagined person. See also Ruth Whitman’s long poem The Testing of Hannah Senesh (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1986).

The Desert as Garden of Paradise Section 2: Chavela Vargas, a Mexican popular and traditional singer.

Section 3: Malintzin/La Malinche/Marina are names for an Aztec woman given as a slave to Hernán Cortés on his arrival in Mexico in 1519. Her historical reality has undergone many layerings of legend and symbolism; more recently she has become a frequent presence in Chicana feminist literature. See, for example, Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Revision through Malintzin,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981; distributed by Kitchen Table / Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 908, Latham, NY 12110). See also Lucha Corpi’s “Marina” poems, and the author’s note, in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets, trans. Catherine Rodriguez-Nieto (Oakland, Calif.: Oyez Books, 1975); and Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

Section 7: See Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., Black Robes in Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Antonine Tibeson, O.F.M., ed., The Writings of Junipero Serra, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955); Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1974); Van H. Garner, The Broken Ring: The Destruction of the California Indians (Tucson, Ariz.: Westernlore Press, 1982).

Sections 10, 11: Italicized phrases from John C. van Dyke, The Desert (1901) (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980).

The Slides Thanks to Janis Kelly for her keen eye on the medical details.

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 Part 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. 1 (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).

Part 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.

Part 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.

Eastern War Time Part 2: Text of a telegram sent through the American legation in Bern, Switzerland, August 11, 1942, to the U.S. State Department in Washington, and transmitted after several weeks’ delay to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. See David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 42–45.

Part 4: Charged with the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl employed in his uncle’s pencil factory in Atlanta, Leo Max Frank (1884–1915), a mechanical engineer, was tried and found guilty, and the decision appealed, in a climate of intense anti-Semitism. When his sentence was commuted from death to life by the governor of Georgia, he was dragged by a mob from prison and lynched.

Part 10: “A coat is not a piece of cloth only”: See Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 44. Myerhoff quotes Shmuel Goldman, immigrant Socialist garment-worker: “It is not the way of a Jew to make his work like there was no human being to suffer when it’s done badly. A coat is not a piece of cloth only. The tailor is connected to the one who wears it and he should not forget it.”

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 III, 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. 318–20.)

“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 Luxemberg (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 introduction 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.

Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993) The phrase “revolution in permanence” is Marx’s, referring to his concept that the creation of a just society does not end with the uprooting of the old order, “but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present.” (Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], p. 12.)

In the poem, Ethel Rosenberg is a secular vision. But she was, of course, a real woman, electrocuted in 1953 with her husband, Julius, on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. The original charges were rapidly translated by the presiding judge and the media into “selling the secret of the atomic bomb” to agents of the Soviet Union. After the Rosenbergs’ conviction, “twenty-three motions and appeals for new trial, reduction of sentence, stay of execution, and presidential clemency were made on the basis of perjury; unfair trial; cruel, excessive, inapplicable, and unprecedented sentencing; newly discovered evidence; subornation of perjury by the prosecution; application of incorrect law; and justice, mercy, or both. All appeals were denied. … [The day after the electrocution] Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion was published, noting that the Supreme Court ‘had never reviewed the record of this trial and therefore never affirmed the fairness of this trial.’ ” (Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], pp. 63–64. See also Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest [New York: Pantheon, 1983]; Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and ]ulius Rosenberg [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986]; and Michael Meeropol, ed., The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of ]ulius and Ethel Rosenberg [New York: Garland, 1994].

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.

Late Ghazal See “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)” on pages 275–85 and “The Blue Ghazals” on pages 307–12. See also Aijaz Ahmad, ed., Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

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. 123–24.

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 III: “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 Mathew’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.

“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” The title of the poem is that of a composition played by John Coltrane on the album Coltrane’s Sound, Atlantic Jazz, 1964.

Section 5, lines 10–12: “… the Lordly Hudson / … which has no peer / in Europe or the East”: From Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson,” in The Lordly Hudson (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 7.

Section 6, lines 9–10: “—Where do you come from?— / —Como tú, like you, from nothing—”: See Jack Aguëros, Introduction, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, comp. and trans. Jack Aguëros (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1997), p. xxv.

Section 8, line 4: “through interboro fissures of the mind”: From Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” Part VII: “The Tunnel,” line 71.

Section 8, line 9. In “The Bridge,” Crane hallucinated Edgar Allan Poe in the New York subway; I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos, and Paul Goodman, or their descendants.

A Long Conversation “energy: Eternal Delight”: See William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 4: “The Voice of the Devil.”

“Maybe this is the beginning of madness …”: See Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 95.

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist … its own image”: See Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 207–8. “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital. …” Ibid., p. 211. See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, intro. Eric Hobsbawm (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

“—It isn’t nations anymore …”: Suggested by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia (New York: New Press, 1993).

“What is the use of studying philosophy …”: See Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 39.

“small tradespeople … of the population”: See Marx, p. 212.

“At the risk of appearing ridiculous”: See Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 1997), p. 211: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love” (“Socialism and Man in Cuba,” 1965).

“the memory of traditions of mercy …”: See interview with Aijaz Ahmad, in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), p. 111: “… we certainly need the most rigorous of theories but we also need to have memories of the traditions of mercy and the struggles for justice. It is only there that any true reconciliation of the universal and the particular is really possible.”

“the eye has become a human eye …”: Marx, p. 151.

“the Arts, you know …”: Richard M. Nixon, taped in 1972, quoted in Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 36.

“ ‘This is for you …’ ”: After Georges Brassens’s “Chanson pour l’Auvergnat,” recorded by Juliette Greco on her album 10 Ans de Chansons, Phillips, 1962.

FOX

The lines in Spanish in the dedication are from Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida”.

Nora’s Gaze Alludes to works by the painter Nora Jaffe (1928–1994). See Clayton Eshleman, “Nora’s Roar,” in his From Scratch (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), pp. 31–49.

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.

Manzanar Site of the first War Relocation Center activated in World War II for the internment of Japanese Americans, Manzanar is located east of the Sierra Nevada range and northeast of Death Valley.

Twilight Brownington, Vermont, is the site of the “Old Stone House” completed in 1836 as a dormitory for the Orleans County Grammar School. Its architect and builder, African American Alexander Lucius Twilight, served as principal of the school for most of its existence (“The Old Stone House Museum” [Orleans, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1996]). A working granite quarry still operates in Barre, Vermont.

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, September 4, 1999, sec. A.

“Usonian:” The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.

Terza Rima Section 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.

Delivered Clean “Delivered vacant” is a developer’s phrase for a building for sale whose tenants have already been evicted. See Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 158.

Transparencies “we are truely sorry …”: Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.

Collaborations dimdumim: Hebrew for “dawn,” “dusk,” “twilight.”

“what thou lovest well …”: See Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 112: “what thou lovest well remains … cannot be reft from thee.”

“what does not change …”: See Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in his Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5: “What does not change / is the will to change.”

“the fascination with what’s easiest …”: See W. B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” in his Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 104.

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.

V “If some long unborn friend …”: Muriel Rukeyser, “Tree of Days,” in Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 69.

After Apollinaire & Brassens Derived from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” and Georges Brassens’s song “Le Pont des Arts.”

Slashes “October ’17 / May ’68 / September ’73”: October 1917 marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a determinative event in twentieth-century history. May 1968 saw massive popular U.S. opposition to the war in Vietnam, linked with the movement for Black civil rights and with anticolonial struggles abroad; in France there were uprisings of workers and students. On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet backed by the CIA violently seized power from the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.

“In wolf-tree, see the former field”: See Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19: “A ‘wolf’ tree is a tree within a woods, its size and form, large trunk and horizontal branches, anomalous to the environs of slim-trunked trees with upright branches … a clue to the open field in which it once grew alone, branches reaching laterally to the light and up.”

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios Section 5: “You thought you were innocent …”: See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.

Five O’Clock, January 2003 “most glorious creature on earth”: See Robinson Jeffers, “Ninth Anniversary,” in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52: “there the most glorious / Creature on earth shines in the nights or glitters in the suns, / Or feels of its stone in the blind fog.”

TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH

Epigraphs on page 972 from Alan Davies, review of Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea (Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 2004), in St. Mark’s in the Bowery Poetry Newsletter (April/May 2004), used by permission of Alan Davies; and from Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

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.

Melancholy Piano (extracts) This translation was published as part of an international poetry project by the Quebec literary magazine Estuaire and the New Review of Literature (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles) with Quebecois and Anglophone-American poets translating poems by their counterparts.

Élise Turcotte’s works include Sombre Ménagerie (Montreal: Éditions du Noroît, 2002) and Diligence (Longueuil: Les Petits Villages, 2004). Her novel The Alien House (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004), translated into English by Sheila Fischman, received the Canadian Governor General’s Prize.

Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme” See Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 1921–1951 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), and John C. Weston, ed., Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

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 from 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, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 213.

Draft #2006 Part vi: “Out of sight, out of mind”: See Carolyn Jones, “Battle of the Beds,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-I.

TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE

Waiting for Rain, for Music “Send my roots rain”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 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, UK: 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. 394–95, bk. 19, lines 91–130.

“Horses turn away their heads / weeping”: Homer, pp. 365–66, bk. 17, lines 426–40.

Fracture “it would be strange not to forgive”: “Essentially all this is crude and meaningless … as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive … and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive”: Anton Chekhov, Notebook of Anton Chekhov, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921).

Turbulence “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer … Hold them cheap / May he who ne’er hung there”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 167.

I was there, Axel “The Blue Ghazals.” See “The Blue Ghazals,” pages 307–12.

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).

INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

A balcony, violet shade on stucco    fruit in a plastic bowl on the iron, 908

A blue-grained line circles a fragment of the mind, 421

Abnegation, 254

A body, blind with sleep, 211

Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home, 666

Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame, The, 114

Accountability, 210

A child’s hand smears a wall    the reproof is bitter, 975

A clear night    if the mind were clear, 537

A conversation begins, 455

A cracked walk in the garden, 233

A crime of nostalgia, 1084

Across a city from you, I’m with you, 473

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something, 709

Address, 923

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door, 282

A deluxe blending machine, 938

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, 451

After Apollinaire & Brassens, 945

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge,” 116

After Dark, 185

After the sunlight and the fiery vision, 19

After Twenty Years, 363

Afterwake, The, 135

Afterward, 16

A girl looks through a microscope    her father’s, 1051

A girl wanders with a boy into the woods, 739

A good man, 151

Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?, 178

Air without Incense, 11

A knight rides into the noon, 111

A life hauls itself uphill, 816

All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled, 44

Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell, The, 417

All in the day that I was born, 103

All month eating the heart out, 249

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken, 889

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and, 665

A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains, 994

Along the coastal waters, signals run, 14

Alternating Current, 935

Always the Same, 152

A man, a woman, a city, 308

A man in terror of impotence, 391

A man lies under a car half bare, 983

A man walking on the street, 667

Amends, 758

A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains, 171

Ammonia, 762

Amnesia, 420

A mother’s letter, torn open, 746

And could it be I saw you, 1074

And Now, 776

And now, outside, the walls, 243

And now as you read these poems, 776

And this is how you live: a woman, children, 387

And when was dust a thing so rash?, 34

An idea declared itself between us, 860

An interval: the view across the fields, 100

Ankles shackled, 1109

Annotation for an Epitaph, 51

An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city, 35

An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, 191

Antinoüs: The Diaries, 125

A nurse on the battlefield, 409

Any Husband to Any Wife, 196

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design, 285

Apology (I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever), 142

Apology (You, invincibly yourself), 70

A potato explodes in the oven.    Poetry and famine, 718

Archaic, 993

Architect, 864

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon, 280

A room papered with clippings, 979

Artificial Intelligence, 136

Art of Translation, The, 805

As Ever, 1000

As ever, death.    Whenever, where.    But it’s, 1000

As finally by wind or grass, 939

As for me, I distrust the commonplace, 4

A smell of further honey, 207

A soldier is here, an ancient figure, 200

As solid-seeming as antiquity, 137

At a Bach Concert, 21

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand, 15

At Hertford House, 58

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters, 118

Atlas of the Difficult World, An, 707

At Majority, 109

Attention, 140

At the end of Alphaville, 336

At the head of this poem I have laid out, 780

At the Jewish New Year, 159

at the oak table under the ceiling fan, 732

At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes, 331

at your table, 628

August, 398

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, 4

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, 4

Autumn Equinox, 72

Autumn Sequence, 191

Autumn torture. The old signs, 125

A Walk by the Charles, 92

A white woman dreaming of innocence, 602

A wild patience has taken me this far, 523

A woman in the shape of a monster, 300

A woman of sixty    driving, 739

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—, 1095

A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard, 344

A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs, 692

A woman wired in memories, 740

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house, 1074

Axel, in thunder, 1072

Axel, the air’s beaten, 1072

Axel Avákar, 1071

Axel: backstory, 1071

A young girl knows she is young and meant to live, 738

Back to the shallow pond   sharp rotting scatter, 947

Ballade of the Poverties, 1081

Baltimore:    a fragment from the Thirties, 627

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink, 117

Beardless again, phoning, 330

Bears, 55

Beast and bird must bow aside, 61

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano, 886

Before the acute, 876

Behind the Motel, 983

Benjamin Revisited, 1049

Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea, 63

Beside this door a January tree, 8

Birds and periodic blood, 248

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—, 279

Black Locket, 1091

blinds me, 325

Blood-Sister, 412

Blue Ghazals, The, 307

Blue Rock, 631

Book, The, 253

Boundary, 18

Bract, 948

Break, The, 249

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York, 177

Breakpoint, 320

Burning Kangaroo, A, 1024

Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The, 303

Burning Oneself In, 393

Burning Oneself Out, 394

Burn me some music    Send my roots rain    I’m swept, 1047

Burnt by lightning    nevertheless, 1103

By No Means Native, 9

Calibrations, 976

Called up in sleep: your    voice, 1024

Calle Visión, 759

Calle Visión    sand in your teeth, 760

Calle Visión    your heart beats on unbroken, 761

Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over, 1088

Camino Real, 822

Can history show us nothing, 132

Can I easily say, 143

Can it be growing colder when I begin, 475

Capital, The, 101

Cartographies of Silence, 455

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin, 716

Caustic implacable, 1082

Celebration in the Plaza, The, 52

Centaur’s Requiem, 895

Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue, 98

Change of World, A, 28

Char, 812

Charleston in the 1860’s, 242

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest, 668

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye, 87

Circum/Stances, 1084

City, 235

City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker, 952

Classmate, The, 145

Clayton, we can’t, 863

Clock in the Square, A, 12

Close to your body, in the, 519

Coast to Coast, 522

Cold wit leaves me cold, 993

Collaborations, 926

Colophon, 91

Coming by evening through the wintry city, 21

Completely protected on all sides, 264

Concord River, 67

Confrontation, The, 130

Confrontations, 1083

Consanguinity, 132

Continuum, 261

Contradictions: Tracking Poems, 639

Corpse-Plant, The, 171

—Could you see me laboring over this, 1011

Courage    Her face in the leaves    the polygons, 479

Covenant, The, 134

Cruelty is rarely conscious, 332

Crusaders’ wind glinting, 271

Culture and Anarchy, 525

Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry, 18

Dangerous of course to draw, 774

Darklight, 748

Days: Spring, The, 291

Dead, dead, dead, dead, 226

Deadstillness over droughtlands, 699

Dead winter doesn’t die, 176

Dear Adrienne,    I feel signified by pain, 644

Dear Adrienne:    I’m calling you up tonight, 643

Dear Parents: I’m the daughter, 674

Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get, 1092

Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks, 135

Deliberately, long-ago, 425

Delivered Clean, 907

Delta, 683

Demon Lover, The, 237

Demonstration, The, 246

Deportations, 775

Desert as Garden of Paradise, The, 677

Design in Living Colors, 29

Despair falls, 605

Dialogue, 370

Diamond Cutters, The, 104

Did anyone ever know who we were, 653

Did the fox speak to you?, 623

Did you think I was talking about my life?, 278

Dien Bien Phu, 409

“Difficult ordinary happiness,” 169

Director’s Notes, 1007

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios, 949

Diving into the Wreck, 370

Divisions of Labor, 693

Domain, 1051

Don’t Flinch, 1090

Don’t Take Me, 959

Double Monologue, 126

Doves bleat, crows repeat, 1109

Down the river, on rafts you came, 274

Down this old well, 148

Draft #2006, 1031

Dreams Before Waking, 605

Dreamwood, 685

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens, 119

Dull-headed, with dull fingers, 221

Dwingelo, 236

Early day.    Grey the air, 748

Easier to encapsulate your lives, 551

Eastern War Time, 736

Eastport to Block Island, 14

Eben Haëzer, 209

Edges, 637

Education of a Novelist, 599

Either you will, 150

Embroidered in a tapestry of green, 29

Emergency Clinic, 1082

Emily Carr, 623

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood, 43

End of an Era, 140

Endpapers, 1118

Ends of the Earth, 889

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell, 61

Equinox, 895

Essential Resources, 410

Europe 1953, 539

Euryclea’s Tale, 115

Even if we knew the children were all asleep, 626

Evenings seem endless, now, 223

Even Then Maybe, 1006

Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I, 340

Ever, Again, 1025

Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, 470

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot, 245

Evil Eye, The, 130

Exceptional, 546

Explorers, The, 63

Eye, The, 908

Face, 149

Face flashing free    child-arms, 662

Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain, 953

Face to Face, 202

Fact of a Doorframe, The, 438

Fallen Figure, 1000

False history gets made all day, any day, 564

Family Romance, 424

Fantasies of old age, 385

Far back when I went zig-zagging, 231

Fashions are changing in the sphere, 28

Fatigue, regrets. The lights, 237

Fever, 209

Finality broods upon the things that pass, 92

Final Notations, 749

Fire, 867

First having read the book of myths, 371

First Things, 139

Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill, 18

Five O’Clock, January 2003, 957

5:30 a.m., 248

Five:    voices, 795

Flesh and Blood, 233

Focus, 202

Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!, 184

Food Packages:   1947, 773

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror, 781

For a Friend in Travail, 745

For an Album, 684

For an Anniversary, 807

For an Occupant, 623

For a Russian Poet, 245

For a Sister, 395

Foreknown. The victor, 317

For Ethel Rosenberg, 539

For Julia in Nebraska, 531

For June, in the Year 2001, 898

For L.G.: Unseen for Twenty Years, 421

For Memory, 535

For more than five thousand years, 159

For recalcitrancy of attitude, 952

For the Conjunction of Two Planets, 39

For the Dead, 396

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard, 11

For the Record, 593

For the Young Anarchists, 1105

For This, 859

Four:    history, 794

Four Short Poems, 885

Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect, The, 416

Fox, 865

Fracture, 1053

Fragments of an Opera, 1106

Frame, 558

From 1964: a color snapshot:    you, 610

From a Chapter on Literature, 19

From an Old House in America, 425

From a Survivor, 396

From commissars of daylight, 95

from crush and splinter, 1003

From here on, all of us will be living, 284

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg, 110

From Piercéd Darkness, 785

From shores of sickness:    skin of the globe stretches and snakes, 1065

From Sickbed Shores, 1065

From Strata, 1114

From the archaic ships the green and red, 20

From the new crudities, from the old, 886

From the Prison House, 367

From you I want more than I’ve ever asked, 756

Frost, burning. The city’s ill, 311

Gabriel, 267

Generosity, 1092

Ghost of a Chance, 147

Girl between home and school    what is that girl, 736

Glance into glittering moisture, 1020

goes through what must be gone through, 731

Going home by lamplight across Boston Common, 26

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, 23

Grandmothers, 550

Grating, 872

Guard the knowledge, 677

Hail-spurting sky    sun, 877

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living, 189

Halfway, 190

Harpers Ferry, 688

Heart of cold.    Bones of cold.    Scalp of cold, 641

He had come nearly half a thousand miles, 77

Here among tables lit with bottled tapers, 6

Here from the corridor of an English train, 59

Here is a map of our country, 711

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust,” 34

Heroines, 546

He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat … , 242

He slammed his hand across my face    and I, 642

He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him, 720

He writes: Let us bear, 291

Ho! in the dawn, 197

Holding Out, 232

Holiday, 100

Homage to Winter, 629

Homecoming, 213

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe, 317

Hotel, 998

Hot stink of skunk, 822

House at the Cascades, The, 44

How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes, 887

However legendary, 104

How telegrams used to come:    ring, 737

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho, 1001

Hunger, 451

I almost trust myself to know, 420

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today, 306

“I Am in Danger—Sir—,” 189

I am trying to imagine, 414

“I am up at sunrise, 318

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown, 307

I bid you cast out pity, 15

I came out of the hospital like a woman, 646

I can see myself years back at Sunion, 469

I can’t name love now, 139

Ice splits    under the metal, 454

I come home from you through the early light of spring, 466

I could look at you a long time, 149

Ideal Landscape, 51

Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys, 309

I don’t know, 410

I don’t see your head, 260

I dreamed I called you on the telephone, 396

I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time, 998

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 307

If, antique hateful bird, 122

If, says the Dahomeyan devil, 271

If all we would speak is ideology, 923

If/As Though, 1019

If I lay on that beach with you, 473

If I’ve reached for your lines    (I have), 859

If she appears, hands ringed with rings, 566

If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica, 933

If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes, 1118

If these are letters, they will have to be misread, 284

If to feel is to be unreliable, 650

If you have taken this rubble for my past, 683

If you know who died in that bed, do you know, 744

If Your Name Is on the List, 875

If your name is on the list of judges, 875

I have backroads I take    to places, 649

I have in my head some images of you, 561

I have seen the mob of late, 17

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting, 115

I Heard a Hermit Speak, 90

I kissed you, bride and lost, and went, 112

I know: you are glycerine, 196

I know you are reading this poem, 727

I love the infinity of these silent spaces, 866

I’m afraid of prison.    Have been all these years, 645

Images, The, 519

Images for Godard, 334

Imagine a city where nothing’s, 836

Implosions, 259

Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme,” 995

In a bald skull sits our friend    in a helmet, 652

In a bookstore on the East Side, 393

In a Classroom, 665

In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled, 141

In a vast dystopic space the small things, 951

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice, 278

Incipience, 362

In Colcha embroidery, I learn, 565

I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy, 906

I needed fox    Badly I needed, 865

In Memoriam: D.K., 667

In my dream, children, 241

In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning, 341

Innocence, 1050

Innocence:    1945, 773

Innocents, The, 33

In paradise every, 958

In Plain Sight, 981

Inscriptions, 789

In search of the desert witch, the shamaness, 566

Insomniacs, The, 85

Insusceptibles, The, 55

Integrity, 523

Interior monologue of the poet, 337

In the black net, 764

In the dark year an angry rain came down, 22

In the Evening, 234

In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket, 190

In the heart of pain where mind is broken, 818

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood, 196

In their own way, by their own lights, 401

In the marina an allegro creaking, 977

In the Midwest of Willa Cather, 531

In the never, still arriving, I find you, 236

In the North, 144

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand, 685

in the old city    incendiaries abound, 867

In the room    in the house, 764

In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream, 637

In the Wake of Home, 615

In the Woods, 169

In this long room, upon each western pane, 91

In Those Years, 755

In those years, people will say, we lost track, 755

In Time of Carnival, 94

I recall, 131

I sat down facing the steep place where, 888

Is it in hopes, 133

Is there a doctor in the house, 1020

Itinerary (The guidebooks play deception; oceans are), 25

Itinerary (Burnt by lightning      nevertheless), 1103

It is asleep in my body, 416

—it is to have these dreams, 869

I trust none of them. Only my existence, 395

I try to conjure the kind of joy, 623

It’s happened already while we were still, 775

It should be the most desired sight of all, 1001

It’s June and summer’s height, 684

It’s not new, this condition, just for a while, 1083

It’s so pure in the cemetery, 194

It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived, 649

It was amusing on that antique grass, 57

It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—, 1110

It was your vision of the pilot, 472

it will not be simple, it will not be long, 749

I’ve redone you by daylight, 747

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever, 142

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming, 465

I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations, 348

I was telling you a story about love, 784

I was there, Axel, 1073

I write you this out of another province, 66

Jerusalem, 241

Juvenilia, 126

Key, The, 251

Knight, The, 111

Knocked down in the canefield, 329

Knot, The, 196

Knowing themselves too well in one another, 118

Kursaal at Interlaken, The, 6

Lag, The, 151

Landscape of the Star, 64

Language as city: : Wittgenstein, 334

Lashes of white light, 153

Last night I met you in my sister’s house, 327

Last night we sat with the stereopticon, 130

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry, 282

Last Song, 103

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood, 310

Late Ghazal, 781

Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences, 648

Late night on the underside    a spectral glare, 874

Late Style, 999

Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds, 715

Leaflets, 269

Leafshade stirring on lichened bark, 525

leaping forward    escaping, 1024

Let me take you by the hair, 124

Letter from the Land of Sinners, 66

Letters Censored Shredded Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send, 1011

Letters in the Family, 674

Letters: March 1969, 317

Letters to a Young Poet, 819

Liberté, 1109

Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver, 1090

Life and Letters, 35

Light at a window. Someone up, 419

Light pulses through underground chambers, 194

Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump, 28

Likeness, 151

Like This Together, 174

Lioness, The, 460

Liquid mist burning off, 322

Listen! It’s never sung like that! Listen!, 209

Little as I knew you I know you:    little as you knew me you, 791

Living in Sin, 71

Living in the Cave, 390

Living    in the earth-deposits    of our history, 443

Living Memory, 694

Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love, 799

Livresque, 926

Lodged in the difficult hotel, 760

Long After Stevens, 994

Long ago I found a seed, 96

Long Conversation, A, 837

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart, 368

Looking back    trying to decipher, 599

Look:    this is January    the worst onslaught, 641

Loser, The, 112

Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop, 943

Love in the Museum, 89

Love Poem, 663

Lovers Are Like Children, 98

Lucifer in the Train, 56

Luigi Pirandello, 130

Lurid, garish, gash, 1048

Marghanita, 732

Mariner unpracticed, 29

Marriage in the ’Sixties, A, 137

Marriage Portion, The, 95

Mathilde in Normandy, 20

Maybe you spoke to someone, 235

means there is something to hold, 438

Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window, 627

Meditations for a Savage Child, 401

Melancholy Piano (extracts), 985

Memorabilia, 131

Memorize This, 943

Memory, 320

Memory lifts her smoky mirror:    1943, 736

Memory says:    Want to do right? Don’t count on me, 741

Merced, 385

Merely the landscape of a vanished whim, 50

Merely to Know, 123

Messages, 866

Metallic slam on a moonless night, 960

Middle-Aged, The, 94

Midnight, the Same Day, 1005

Midnight Salvage, 807

Miracle Ice Cream, 757

Miracle’s truck comes down the little avenue, 757

Mirror, The, 133

Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One, The, 364

Missing the Point, 235

Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!, 1025

Modotti, 815

Mother-in-Law, 544

Mother-Right, 497

Moth Hour, 201

Mourning Picture, 188

Moving in Winter, 161

Mudseason dusk schoolmaster:    pressed out of rain my    spine, 868

Mulish, unregenerate, 144

Mute it utters ravage    guernican, 1086

My body opens over San Francisco like the day-, 449

My Brother, 208

My brother, nobody knows, 208

My dear Mother and Sister, 567

My father, who since his death, 211

My mouth hovers across your breasts, 642

My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state, 303

My neighbor moving, 981

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips, 338

My three sisters are sitting, 259

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, 246

Natural Resources, 498

Necessities of Life, 167

Negotiations, 664

Never to be lonely like that—, 202

New Year Morning, 93

New York, 628

Night, 43

Nightbreak, 265

Night in the Kitchen, 247

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon, 446

Night    over the great and the little worlds, 646

Night-Pieces: For a Child, 182

Nights and Days, 484

Nights like this: on the cold apple-bough, 758

Night Watch, 243

Nine months we conspired, 417

1948: Jews, 746

1941, 818

1999, 876

Nineteen-thirties Midwestern, 944

Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message, The, 391

No bad dreams.    Night, the bed, the faint clockface, 937

Noctilucent Clouds, 874

No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face, 854

Noon, 194

No one knows yet, 263

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone, 474

Nora’s Gaze, 863

No room for nostalgia here. What would it look like?, 563

North American Time, 594

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around, 564

Not having worn, 872

Nothing he had done before, 864

No: this, my love, is neither you nor I, 13

Not Like That, 194

Not Somewhere Else, But Here, 479

Not spent    those bloodshot friendships    those, 1006

not talk, 903

Not that it is done well, but, 120

Not to get up and go back to the drafting table, 953

Not what you thought:    just a turn-off, 759

Novel, The, 665

Novella, 149

November 1968, 299

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk, 245

Now, not a tear begun, 128

Now let’s away from prison—, 187

Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand, 16

Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree, 48

Now will you stand for me, in this cool light, 89

Nursing your nerves, 135

Obscurity has its tale to tell, 202

Observer, The, 264

Octobrish, 869

of polished tables lit with medalled, 1002

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with, 341

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light, 792

Old oblivion-book, that I lay open, 210

Old words:    trust    fidelity, 535

Olivia, 34

On a clear night in Live Oak you can see, 686

On a notepad on a table, 825

On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles, 313

One:    comrade, 791

One day of equinoctial light after another, 308

On Edges, 262

One Life, 692

One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century, 724

One year, you gave us, 145

Only to have a grief, 147

On the road there is a house, 765

On the terrace, violins played, 250

On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely, 722

Open-Air Museum, 178

Open the book of tales you knew by heart, 694

“Organized knowledge in story and picture,” 110

Orient Wheat, 49

Origins and History of Consciousness, 446

Orion, 231

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter, 557

Our Family, 211

Our fathers in their books and speech, 49

Our Kind of Terror: A Love Poem, 610

Our mother went away and our father was the king, 424

Our story isn’t a file of photographs, 684

Our Whole Life, 324

Our whole life a translation, 324

Our words misunderstand us, 176

Out in this desert we are testing bombs, 355

Out there.    The mind of the river, 300

Over him, over you, a great roof is rising, 200

Over the chessboard now, 136

Over the half-finished houses, 154

Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett, 552

Overthrow.    And make new, 1008

Packed in my skin from head to toe, 995

Pain made her conservative, 312

Pain taught her the language, 1073

Painter’s House, The, 944

Parting, The, 181

Parting: II, The, 225

Passing On, 122

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff, 481

Peace, 153

Peeling Onions, 147

“People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence, 304

Perennial Answer, The, 79

Perfection now is tended and observed, 58

Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev, 443

Phenomenology of Anger, The, 377

Photograph of the Unmade Bed, The, 332

Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum, 343

Picnic, 253

Pictures by Vuillard, 48

Piece by piece I seem, 167

Pieces, 320

Pierrot Le Fou, 312

Planetarium, 301

Platform, The, 102

Plaza Street and Flatbush, 825

Plugged-in to her body, 322

Poetry: I, 624

Poetry: II, Chicago, 625

Poetry: III, 626

Point in Time, 933

Postcard, 289

Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea, 773

Power, 443

Powers of Recuperation, 1095

Primary Ground, A, 387

Prisoners, The, 43

Propped on elbow in stony light, 999

Prospect, The, 60

Prospective Immigrants Please Note, 150

Purely Local, 8

Quarto, 1088

Rachel, 758

Rafts, The, 274

Rain of Blood, The, 22

Rain on the West Side Highway, 474

Raise it up there and it will, 747

Rape, 391

Rauschenberg’s Bed, 887

Raven, The, 122

Readings of History, 130

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time, 1048

Reading the Parable of the Cave, 390

Recorders in Italy, 57

Re-forming the Crystal, 414

Regardless, 860

Relevance, 321

Reliquary, 8

Remind me how we walked, 486

Rereading The Dead Lecturer, 1008

Return of the Evening Grosbeaks, The, 27

Revelation, 323

Reversion, 766

Revivalist in Boston, A, 26

Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993), 768

Rhyme, 997

Riding the black express from heaven to hell, 56

Rift, 561

Ritual Acts, 930

Roadway, The, 47

Rodin’s Orpheus, floodlit, hacked, 289

Roofwalker, The, 154

Roots, 223

Rural Reflections, 111

Rusted Legacy, 836

Rustication, 141

Sabbath evening privacy at home, 209

Saw you walking barefoot, 1054

Say a master of the track, 99

Scene One: Ales, Sardinia, 19—, 1106

Scenes of Negotiation, 1059

School Among the Ruins, The, 900

Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe, 1112

Screen Door, 960

Second Sight, 870

Sending Love, 777

Sending love is harmless, 778

Sending love:    Molly sends it, 777

September 21, 115

Seven Skins, 828

Sex, as they harshly call it, 180

Shattered Head, 816

She, 731

She had thought the studio would keep itself, 71

She is carrying my madness    and I dread her, 643

She is the one you call sister, 364

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the, 370

She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl, 976

She who died on that bed sees it her way, 744

She who has power to call her man, 20

Shooting Script, 339

Shoring up the ocean. A railroad track, 412

Should blue air in its purity let you disdain, 1022

Should I simplify my life for you?, 794

Showering after ’flu;    stripping the bed, 743

Sibling Mysteries, 486

Side by Side, 197

Signatures, 862

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time, 466

Sisters, 143

Six:    edgelit, 799

Six months back, 319

Six Narratives, 782

Sixteen years.    The narrow, rough-gullied backroads, 573

6/21, 684

Skeleton Key, 977

Skin of wet leaves on asphalt, 193

Slashes, 946

Sleep, horns of a snail, 214

Sleep    horns of a snail, 669

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets, 471

Sleepwalking, 214

Sleepwalking    Next to Death, 669

Slides, The, 687

Slowly, Prometheus, 152

Smudged eyeballs, 177

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 117

Snow, 327

Snow Queen, The, 87

Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat, 722

Solfeggietto, 659

So many minds in search of bodies, 283

Someday if someday comes we will agree, 664

Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn’t ask, 1095

Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp, 624

Someone said to me:    It’s just that we don’t, 653

Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled, 719

Something broken    Something, 265

Something spreading underground won’t speak to us, 851

Sometimes I’m back in that city, 937

Song, 369

Song of the Foolish Bees, The, 207

Sources, 571

Space mildews at our touch, 201

Spirit like water, 124

Splittings, 449

Springboard, The, 28

Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack, 1003

Spring Thunder, 198

Stand Up, 326

Stand up in my nightgown at the window, 326

Statue, 211

Steam from a melting glacier, 1071

Stelae, The, 327

Stepping Backward, 23

Still, a sweetness hardly earned, 192

Still learning the word, 951

Stories of three islands, 948

Storm Warnings, 3

Story, A, 666

Stranger, The (Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!), 184

Stranger, The (Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart), 368

Strangers are an endangered species, 554

Strayed Village, The, 77

Streets closed, emptied by force    Guns at corners, 740

Stripped, 299

Study of History, 300

Summer in the Country, 245

Summer was another country, where the birds, 100

Sunday Evening, 32

Sunday in Inwood Park, 253

Sunset, December, 1993, 774

Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions, 1031

Suppose we had time, 313

Suppose you stood facing, 312

Suspended Lines, 1112

Tactile Value, 1003

Take, 780

Take nothing with you, 985

Take one, take two, 937

Taking the least griefcrusted avenue the last worst bridge away, 785

Talking of poetry, hauling the books, 665

Tattered Kaddish, 742

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field, 742

Teaching the first lesson and the last, 900

Tear Gas, 293

Tearing but not yet torn:    this page, 645

Teethsucking Bird, 1109

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, 1039

Tell Me, 897

Tell me, bristler, where, 663

Tell me, why way toward dawn the body, 897

Tell me something, 544

Tell us, 608

Tendril, 965

Terrence years ago, 779

Terza Rima, 877

That Chinese restaurant was a joke, 329

That conversation we were always on the edge, 475

That erudition, 320

That light of outrage is the light of history, 744

That Mouth, 731

That “old last act”!, 180

That the meek word like the righteous word can bully, 924

That was no country for old women … Someone from D-Day, 862

“That year I began to understand the words burden of proof, 795

The angel, 1049

The autumn feels slowed down, 481

“The beauty of it was the guilt, 773

The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath, 93

The big star, and that other, 269

The birds about the house pretend to be, 27

The bones of saints are praised above their flesh, 8

The cabdriver from the Bronx, 331

The cat-tails blaze in the corner    sunflowers, 651

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war, 593

The clouds are electric in this university, 277

The cold felt cold until our blood, 443

The core of the strong hill: not understood, 498

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones, 476

The engineer’s story of hauling coal, 909

The freedom of the wholly mad, 377

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death, 281

The glass has been falling all the afternoon, 3

The guidebooks play deception; oceans are, 25

The hunters’ shack will do, 232

The ice age is here, 140

Their faces, safe as an interior, 94

Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, 161

The island blistered our feet, 314

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar, 1071

The landlord’s hammer in the yard, 122

The leafbud straggles forth, 480

The leaves that shifted overhead all summer, 72

The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life, 347

The month’s eye blurs, 116

The moon, 885

The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm, 43

The mountain laurel in bloom, 553

The music of words, 320

The mystic finishes in time, 85

“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” 831

Then or Now, 771

Then the long sunlight lying on the sea, 55

The ocean twanging away there, 181

The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up, 340

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit, 277

The order of the small town on the riverbank, 283

The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket, 1091

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact, 396

The power of the dinosaur, 199

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze, 134

The problem, unstated till now, is how, 650

The railway stations of our daily plight, 102

There are days when housework seems the only, 522

There are days when I seem to have nothing, 311

There are no angels    yet, 267

There Are Such Springlike Nights, 244

There are such springlike nights here, 244

The red fox, the vixen, 254

The refrigerator falls silent, 247

There hangs a space between the man, 926

There is a cop who is both prowler and father, 391

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry, 812

There Is No One Story and One Story Only, 909

There it was, all along, 235

There’ll be turbulence.    You’ll drop, 1054

The repetitive motions of slaughtering, 763

There’s a girl born in abrupt August light, 758

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows, 755

There’s a poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted, 1081

There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses, 250

The revolutions wheel, compromise, utter their statements, 693

The river-fog will do for privacy, 556

The road to the great canyon always feels, 568

The rules break like a thermometer, 471

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature, 281

The scent of her beauty draws me to her place, 460

The sea, a body of mysterious calls, 213

These are the sins for which they cast out angels, 51

The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon, 52

The silence of the year. This hour the streets, 64

The silver shadow    where the line falls grey, 609

The Spirit of Place, 552

The stars will come out over and over, 484

The stone walls will recede and the needs that laid them, 1000

The strain of being born, 272

The taxi meter clicking up, 831

The thing that arrests me is, 358

The thirtieth of November, 507

The tobacco fields lie fallow    the migrant pickers, 651

The Tolstoyans    the Afro-American slaves, 655

The trees inside are moving out into the forest, 173

The turtles on the ledges of July, 67

The way the world came swinging round my ears, 79

The wing of the osprey lifted, 807

The world’s, 259

The world’s quiver and shine, 898

They come to you with their descriptions of your soul, 346

They’d say she was humorless, 1021

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker, 188

They’re tearing down, tearing up, 175

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed, 33

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket, 310

They say the ground precisely swept, 11

This, 662

This apartment full of books could crack open, 467

This August evening I’ve been driving, 510

This Beast, This Angel, 13

This chair delivered yesterday, 1112

This evening let’s, 903

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower, 12

This high summer we love will pour its light, 655

This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of, 293

This Is Not the Room, 1002

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste, 731

This is the grass your feet are planted on, 111

This morning, flakes of sun, 140

This morning: read Simone Weil, 324

This woman/    the heart of the matter, 766

This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is, 345

Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord, 30

Those clarities detached us, gave us form, 53

Those lights, that plaza—I should know them all, 94

… thought, think, I did, 1050

Thought of this “our” nation : : thought of war, 926

Three dozen squares of light-inflicted glass, 687

Three Elegies, 999

Three hours chain-smoking words, 234

Three:    origins, 793

Through a barn window, three-quartered, 768

Through a drain grating, something, 251

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud, 743

Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud, 743

Thunder is all it is, and yet, 198

Time and Place, 322

Time Exposures, 1020

Time split like a fruit between dark and light, 895

To a Poet, 454

To Frantz Fanon, 260

To give you back this wave, 413

“To have in this uncertain world some stay, 120

To have seen you exactly, once, 805

To have spent hours stalking the whine of an insect, 959

To Have Written the Truth, 959

To imagine a time of silence, 304

To Judith, Taking Leave, 221

To know the extremes of light, 335

To live, to lie awake, 362

To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-, 127

To love, to move perpetually, 336

Tonight as cargoes of my young, 957

Tonight I could write many verses, 870

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark, 183

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, 1054

Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment, 954

too seriously    please, 959

To record, 316

To the Airport, 135

To the Days, 756

Tourist and the Town, The, 53

Toward the Solstice, 507

Trace Elements, 947

Tracings, 1112

Transcendental Etude, 510

Transit, 534

Translations, 388

Transparencies, 924

Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings, 647

Tree, The, 96

Trees, The, 173

Trying to Talk with a Man, 355

Trying to tell you how, 356

Try to rest now, says a voice, 1005

Turbulence, 1054

Turning, 699

Turning points.    We all like to hear about those.    Points, 793

Turning the Wheel, 563

Twilight, 868

Two Arts, 747

Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, bought at the, 712

Two green-webbed chairs, 668

Two horses in yellow light, 398

Two:    movement, 792

Two people in a room, speaking harshly, 149

Two Poems, 250

Two Songs, 180

Two women sit at a table by a window. Light breaks, 363

Ultimate Act, The, 5

Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room, The, 17

Underneath my lids another eye has opened, 367

Under that summer asphalt, under vistas, 101

Under the green umbrellas, 8

Under this blue, 1114

Undesigned, 1110

University Reopens as the Floods Recede, The, 1022

Unknown Quantity, 1003

Unsaid Word, An, 20

Unsounded, 29

Upcountry, 609

Upon the mountain of the young, 90

Upper Broadway, 480

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I, 807

USonian Journals 2000, 911

Valediction Forbidding Mourning, A, 338

Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet, 906

Versailles, 50

Vertigo, 4

Veterans Day, 854

Via Insomnia, 1024

Victory, 851

View of Merton College, A, 100

View of the Terrace, A, 8

Villa Adriana, 62

Violence, 263

Violence as purification:    the one idea, 647

Violently asleep in the old house, 307

Virginia 1906, 602

Vision, A, 562

Voice, 777

Voyage to the Denouement, 975

Wait, 958

Waiting for Rain, for Music, 1047

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot, 888

Waking from violence:    the surgeon’s probe left in the foot, 745

Waking in the Dark, 358

Waking thickheaded by crow’s light, 261

Walden 1950, 30

Walk along back of the library, 828

Walking by the fence but the house, 997

Walking Down the Road, 686

Wallpaper, 979

—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree, 837

Wave, The, 413

We are asking for books, 930

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to, 348

We are two acquaintances on a train, 32

Wear the weight of equinoctial evening, 115

We can look into the stove tonight, 394

Wedged in by earthworks, 123

We eat this body and remain ourselves, 11

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you, 550

We had to take the world as it was given, 51

We have, as they say, 175

We lie under the sheet, 305

Well, 121

Well, The, 148

Well, you are tougher than I thought, 113

We’re not yet out of the everglades, 885

We smile at astrological hopes, 39

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation, 339

What do you look for down there, 114

Whatever a poet is, 625

Whatever happens with us, your body, 472

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats, 349

Whatever we hunger for, 1105

Whatever you are that weeps, 199

What Ghosts Can Say, 5

What has happened here will do, 18

What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last, 726

What if the world’s corruption nears, 5

What is a Jew in solitude? 633

What Is Possible, 537

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?, 468

What Kind of Times Are These, 755

What’s kept.    What’s lost.    A snap decision, 621

What’s suffered in laughter    in aroused afternoons, 938

What the grown-ups can’t speak of    would you push, 738

What Was, Is: What Might Have Been, Might Be, 621

When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost, 5

When heat leaves the walls at last, 749

When I close my eyes, 314

When I meet the skier she is always, 534

When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking, 1021

when it comes down turning, 327

When my dreams showed signs, 594

When on that transatlantic call into the unseen, 1053

When the bridge of lovers bends, 945

When the colossus of the will’s dominion, 62

When the footbridge washes away, 47

When the ice starts to shiver, 262

When/Then, 607

When the sun seals my eyes the emblem, 1005

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed, 279

When This Clangor in the Brain, 99

When to her lute Corinna sings, 119

When we are shaken out, 939

When We Dead Awaken, 356

When you are old and beautiful, 109

When your sperm enters me, it is altered, 280

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads, 688

Wherever in this city, screens flicker, 465

White morning flows into the mirror, 225

White Night (Light at a window. Someone up), 419

White Night (White night, my painful joy), 289

White night, my painful joy, 289

Why does the outstretched finger of home, 965

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour, 13

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed, 13

Wild Sky, The, 59

Will to Change, The, 329

Wind rocks the car, 174

Winter, 226

Winter Dream, The, 245

Winterface, 1086

Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-, 558

With you it is still the middle of the night, 151

Woman and child    running, 497

Woman Dead in Her Forties, A, 492

Woman Mourned by Daughters, A, 128

Women, 259

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night, 55

Years pass    and two    who once, 946

Yes, I saw you, see you, come, 734

Yom Kippur 1984, 633

“Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same,” 9

You, Again, 1095

You:    air-driven    reft    from the tuber-bitten soil, 654

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot, 120

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and, 342

You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you, 185

You:    a woman too old, 629

You can call on beauty still and it will leap, 763

You don’t want a harsh outcry here, 1007

You drew up a story about me    I fled that story, 782

You drew up the story of your life    I was in that story, 782

you’d spin out on your pirate platter, 1019

You, hiding there in your words, 253

You, invincibly yourself, 70

You know the Government must have pushed them to settle, 652

You, once a belle in Shreveport, 117

You promise me when certain things are done, 60

Your breasts/    sliced-off    The scars, 492

Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain, 631

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through, 470

You’re wondering if I’m lonely, 369

Your face, 270

Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb, 192

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper, 815

Your hooves drawn together underbelly, 895

Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined, 126

Your Letter, 325

Your photograph won’t do you justice, 819

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live, 469

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—, 467

Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me, 550

Your windfall at fifteen    your Steinway grand, 659

You see a man, 147

You show me the poems of some woman, 388

You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains, 615

You sleeping I bend to cover, 182

You. There, with your gazing eyes, 562

You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog, 1022

You’ve got to separate what they signify from what, 907

You were telling a story about love    it was your story, 783

You were telling a story about war    it is our story, 784

You were telling a story about women to young men    It was, 783

You who can be silent in twelve languages, 1039

You who think I find words for everything (15), 648

You who think I find words for everything (29), 656

Z: I hated that job but    You’d have taken it too if you’d had a family, 1059

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012

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 1950–2001

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

Copyright © 2016, 2013 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.

Copyright © 2011, 2007, 2004, 2001, 1999, 1995, 1991, 1989, 1986,

1984, 1981, 1967, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956,

1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951 by Adrienne Rich.

Copyright © 1984, 1978, 1975, 1973, 1971, 1969, 1966

by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Introduction © 2016 by Claudia Rankine

All rights reserved

First Edition

Lines from “The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright 1938 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed © 1966 by M. D. Herter Norton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Lines from “Bird on the Wire” excerpted from Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Lines from “The Flowering of the Rod” by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), from Trilogy, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson. Copyright © 1997 by Carcanet Press. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press. Lines from “The Flowering of the Rod” by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), from Collected Poems, 1912–1944, copyright © 1944, 1945, 1946 by Oxford University Press, renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Lines from “Como Presentaciön, Como Disculpa” by Georgina Herrera (and English translation) by permission of Margaret Randall. Lines from “Elogio de la Dialectica” by Nancy Morejón reprinted with permission from the author. Lines from “U.S. 1” by Muriel Rukeyser from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005, used by permission of William L. Rukeyser.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

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Table of Contents

Title

Contents

Introduction by Claudia Rankine

Editor’s Note

A Change of World (1951)

Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Vertigo

The Ultimate Act

What Ghosts Can Say

The Kursaal at Interlaken

Reliquary

Purely Local

A View of the Terrace

By No Means Native

Air without Incense

For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

A Clock in the Square

Why Else But to Forestall This Hour

This Beast, This Angel

Eastport to Block Island

At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

Afterward

The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

Boundary

Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill

From a Chapter on Literature

An Unsaid Word

Mathilde in Normandy

At a Bach Concert

The Rain of Blood

Stepping Backward

Itinerary

A Revivalist in Boston

The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

The Springboard

A Change of World

Unsounded

Design in Living Colors

Walden 1950

Sunday Evening

The Innocents

“He Remembereth That We Are Dust”

Life and Letters

For the Conjunction of Two Planets

Poems (1950–1951)

The Prisoners

Night

The House at the Cascades

The Diamond Cutters (1955)

The Roadway

Pictures by Vuillard

Orient Wheat

Versailles

Annotation for an Epitaph

Ideal Landscape

The Celebration in the Plaza

The Tourist and the Town

Bears

The Insusceptibles

Lucifer in the Train

Recorders in Italy

At Hertford House

The Wild Sky

The Prospect

Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell

Villa Adriana

The Explorers

Landscape of the Star

Letter from the Land of Sinners

Concord River

Apology

Living in Sin

Autumn Equinox

The Strayed Village

The Perennial Answer

The Insomniacs

The Snow Queen

Love in the Museum

I Heard a Hermit Speak

Colophon

A Walk by the Charles

New Year Morning

In Time of Carnival

The Middle-Aged

The Marriage Portion

The Tree

Lovers Are Like Children

When This Clangor in the Brain

A View of Merton College

Holiday

The Capital

The Platform

Last Song

The Diamond Cutters

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1. You, once a belle in Shreveport,

2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

4. Knowing themselves too well in one another:

5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

6. When to her lute Corinna sings

7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay

8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

9. Not that it is done well, but

10. Well,

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

I. Wedged in by earthworks

II. Let me take you by the hair

III. Spirit like water

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

I. The Evil Eye

II. The Confrontation

III. Memorabilia

IV. Consanguinity

V. The Mirror

VI. The Covenant

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’Sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

The Classmate

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

The Lag

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

Poems (1955–1957)

At the Jewish New Year

Moving in Winter

Necessities of Life (1966)

Part One: Poems 1962–1965

Necessities of Life

In the Woods

The Corpse-Plant

The Trees

Like This Together

1. Wind rocks the car.

2. They’re tearing down, tearing up

3. We have, as they say,

4. Our words misunderstand us.

5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

Open-Air Museum

Two Songs

1. Sex, as they harshly call it,

2. That “old last act”!

The Parting

Night-Pieces: For a Child

The Crib

Her Waking

The Stranger

After Dark

I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

II. Now let’s away from prison—

Mourning Picture

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

Halfway

Autumn Sequence

1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned

3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Noon

Not Like That

The Knot

Any Husband to Any Wife

Side by Side

Spring Thunder

1. Thunder is all it is, and yet

2. Whatever you are that weeps

3. The power of the dinosaur

4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

Moth Hour

Focus

Face to Face

Part Two: Translations from the Dutch

Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees

Hendrik de Vries, My Brother

Hendrik de Vries, Fever

Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer

Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability

Gerrit Achterberg, Statue

Leo Vroman, Our Family

Chr. J. van Geel, Homecoming

Chr. J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

Poems (1962–1965)

To Judith, Taking Leave

Roots

The Parting: II

Winter

Leaflets (1969)

Part One: Night Watch

Orion

Holding Out

Flesh and Blood

In the Evening

Missing the Point

City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

The Demon Lover

Jerusalem

Charleston in the 1860’s

Night Watch

There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

For a Russian Poet

1. The Winter Dream

2. Summer in the Country

3. The Demonstration

Night in the Kitchen

5:30 A.M.

The Break

Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

2. On the terrace, violins played

The Key

Picnic

The Book

Abnegation

Part Two: Leaflets

Women

Implosions

To Frantz Fanon

Continuum

On Edges

Violence

The Observer

Nightbreak

Gabriel

Leaflets

1. The big star, and that other

2. Your face

3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

4. Crusaders’ wind glinting

5. The strain of being born

The Rafts

Part Three: Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)

The clouds are electric in this university.

The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

Did you think I was talking about my life?

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

So many minds in search of bodies

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

From here on, all of us will be living

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

Poems (1967–1969)

Postcard

White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

The Days: Spring

Tear Gas

The Will to Change (1971)

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, …

2. To imagine a time of silence

3. “People suffer highly in poverty …

4. We lie under the sheet

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, …

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Violently asleep in the old house.

One day of equinoctial light after another,

A man, a woman, a city.

Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

There are days when I seem to have nothing

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

Pain made her conservative.

Pierrot Le Fou

1. Suppose you stood facing

2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

3. Suppose we had time

4. The island blistered our feet.

5. When I close my eyes

6. To record

Letters: March 1969

1. Foreknown. The victor

2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

3. “I am up at sunrise

4. Six months back

Pieces

1. Breakpoint

2. Relevance

3. Memory

4. Time and Place

5. Revelation

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

Stand Up

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke

2. Knocked down in the canefield

3. Beardless again, phoning

4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

1. Language as city: : Wittgenstein

2. To know the extremes of light

3. To love, to move perpetually

4. At the end of Alphaville

5. Interior monologue of the poet:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

Part I: 11/69–2/70

1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib)

3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; …

6. You are beside me like a wall; …

7. Picking the wax to crumbs …

Part II: 3–7/70

8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds …

9. (Newsreel)

10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

13. We are driven to odd attempts; …

14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier …

Diving into the Wreck (1971–1972)

I.

Trying to Talk with a Man

When We Dead Awaken

Waking in the Dark

Incipience

After Twenty Years

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

From the Prison House

The Stranger

Song

Dialogue

Diving into the Wreck

II. The Phenomenology of Anger

The Phenomenology of Anger

III.

Merced

A Primary Ground

Translations

Living in a Cave

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

Rape

Burning Oneself In

Burning Oneself Out

For a Sister

For the Dead

From a Survivor

August

IV. Meditations for a Savage Child

Meditations for a Savage Child

Poems (1973–1974)

Dien Bien Phu

Essential Resources

Blood-Sister

The Wave

Re-forming the Crystal

The Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect

The Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell

White Night

Amnesia

For L.G.: Unseen for Twenty Years

Family Romance

From an Old House in America

The Fact of a Doorframe

The Dream of a Common Language (1974–1977)

I. POWER

Power

Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev

Origins and History of Consciousness

Splittings

Hunger

To a Poet

Cartographies of Silence

The Lioness

II. Twenty-One Love Poems

I. Wherever in this city, screens flicker

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

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

IV. I come home from you through the early light of spring

V. This apartment full of books could crack open

VI. Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

VII. What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

VIII. I can see myself years back at Sunion,

IX. Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

X. Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

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

XII. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

XIII. The rules break like a thermometer,

XIV. It was your vision of the pilot

(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

XV. If I lay on that beach with you

XVI. Across a city from you, I’m with you,

XVII. No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

XVIII. Rain on the West Side Highway,

XIX. Can it be growing colder when I begin

XX. That conversation we were always on the edge

XXI. The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

III. Not Somewhere Else, but Here

Not Somewhere Else, But Here

Upper Broadway

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

Nights and Days

Sibling Mysteries

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Mother-Right

Natural Resources

Toward the Solstice

Transcendental Etude

A Wild Patience has Taken me this Far (1978–1981)

The Images

Coast to Coast

Integrity

Culture and Anarchy

For Julia in Nebraska

Transit

For Memory

What Is Possible

For Ethel Rosenberg

Mother-in-Law

Heroines

Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones

2. Hattie Rice Rich

3. Granddaughter

The Spirit of Place

I. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

II. The mountain laurel in bloom

III. Strangers are an endangered species

IV. The river-fog will do for privacy

V. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

Frame

Rift

A Vision

Turning the Wheel

1. Location

2. Burden Baskets

3. Hohokam

4. Self-hatred

5. Particularity

6. Apparition

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

8. Turning the Wheel

Your Native Land, Your Life (1981–1985)

I. Sources

Sources

II. North American Time

For the Record

North American Time

Education of a Novelist

Virginia 1906

Dreams Before Waking

When/Then

Upcountry

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

In the Wake of Home

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

For an Occupant

Emily Carr

Poetry: I

Poetry: II, Chicago

Poetry: III

Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties

New York

Homage to Winter

Blue Rock

Yom Kippur 1984

Edges

III. Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1. Look: this is January the worst onslaught

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

3. My mouth hovers across your breasts

4. He slammed his hand across my face and I

5. She is carrying my madness and I dread her

6. Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight

7. Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain

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

9. Tearing but not yet torn: this page

10. Night over the great and the little worlds

11. I came out of the hospital like a woman

12. Violence as purification: the one idea.

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

14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

15. You who think I find words for everything,

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

17. I have backroads I take to places

18. The problem, unstated till now, is how

19. If to feel is to be unreliable

20. The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers

21. The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers

22. In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet

23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

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

25. Did anyone ever know who we were

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

27. The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves

28. This high summer we love will pour its light

29. You who think I find words for everything

Time’s Power (1985–1988)

Solfeggietto

This

Love Poem

Negotiations

In a Classroom

The Novel

A Story

In Memoriam: D.K.

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

Sleepwalking Next to Death

Letters in the Family

The Desert as Garden of Paradise

Delta

6/21

For an Album

Dreamwood

Walking Down the Road

The Slides

Harpers Ferry

One Life

Divisions of Labor

Living Memory

Turning

An Atlas of the Difficult World (1988–1991)

I. An Atlas of the Difficult World

I. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

II. Here is a map of our country:

III. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, …

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

V. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

VI. A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine:

VII. (The Dream-Site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

VIII. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:

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

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

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

XII. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

XIII. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem

II.

She

That Mouth

Marghanita

Olivia

Eastern War Time

1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror: 1943,

2. Girl between home and school, what is that girl

3. How telegrams used to come: ring

4. What the grown-ups can’t speak of would you push

5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

7. A woman of sixty driving

8. A woman wired in memories

9. Streets closed, emptied by force Guns at corners

10. Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

Tattered Kaddish

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

II. Showering after ’flu; stripping the bed;

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

IV. That light of outrage is the light of history

V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:

For a Friend in Travail

1948: Jews

Two Arts

1. I’ve redone you by daylight.

2. Raise it up there and it will

Darklight

I. Early day. Grey the air.

II. When heat leaves the walls at last

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

1. Not what you thought: just a turn-off

2. Calle Visión sand in your teeth

3. Lodged in the difficult hotel

4. Calle Visión your heart beats on unbroken

5. Ammonia

6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering

7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap

8. In the room in the house

9. In the black net

10. On the road there is a house

Reversion

Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993)

Then or Now

Food Packages: 1947

Innocence: 1945

Sunset, December, 1993

Deportations

And Now

Sending Love

Voice

Sending love: Molly sends it

Sending love is harmless

Terrence years ago

Take

Late Ghazal

Six Narratives

1. You drew up the story of your life

2. You drew up a story about me

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

From Piercéd Darkness

Inscriptions

One: comrade

Two: movement

Three: origins

Four: history

Five: voices

Six: edgelit

Midnight Salvage (1995–1998)

The Art of Translation

For an Anniversary

Midnight Salvage

Char

Modotti

Shattered Head

1941

Letters to a Young Poet

Camino Real

Plaza Street and Flatbush

Seven Skins

“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”

Rusted Legacy

A Long Conversation

Fox (1998–2000)

Victory

Veterans Day

For This

Regardless

Signatures

Nora’s Gaze

Architect

Fox

Messages

Fire

Twilight

Octobrish

Second Sight

Grating

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

1999

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)

I.

Centaur’s Requiem

Equinox

Tell Me

For June, in the Year 2001

The School Among the Ruins

This evening let’s

Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet

Delivered Clean

The Eye

There Is No One Story and One Story Only

II.

USonian Journals 2000

III. Territory Shared

Address

Transparencies

Livresque

Collaborations

Ritual Acts

Point in Time

IV. Alternating Current

Sometimes I’m back in that city

No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface.

Take one, take two

What’s suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons

A deluxe blending machine

As finally by wind or grass

When we are shaken out

V.

Memorize This

The Painter’s House

After Apollinaire & Brassens

Slashes

Trace Elements

Bract

VI. Dislocations: Seven Scenarios

1 Still learning the word

2 In a vast dystopic space the small things

3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

4 For recalcitrancy of attitude

5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain

6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table

7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

VII.

Five O’Clock, January 2003

Wait

Don’t Take Me

To Have Written the Truth

Screen Door

VIII. Tendril

Tendril

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2004–2006)

I.

Voyage to the Denouement

Calibrations

Skeleton Key

Wallpaper

In Plain Sight

Behind the Motel

Melancholy Piano (extracts)

II.

Archaic

Long After Stevens

Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme”

Rhyme

Hotel

Three Elegies

I. Late Style

II. As Ever

III. Fallen Figure

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

This Is Not the Room

Unknown Quantity

Tactile Value

Midnight, the Same Day

I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

II. Try to rest now, says a voice

Even Then Maybe

Director’s Notes

Rereading The Dead Lecturer

III.

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

IV.

If/As Though

Time Exposures

I. Glance into glittering moisture

II. Is there a doctor in the house

III. They’d say she was humorless

IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

V. You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede

Via Insomnia

A Burning Kangaroo

Ever, Again

V.

Draft #2006

VI.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

Tonight no Poetry Will Serve (2007–2010)

I.

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

Benjamin Revisited

Innocence

Domain

Fracture

Turbulence

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

II.

Scenes of Negotiation

III.

From Sickbed Shores

IV. Axel Avákar

Axel Avákar

Axel: backstory

Axel, in thunder

I was there, Axel

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

V.

Ballade of the Poverties

Emergency Clinic

Confrontations

Circum/Stances

Winterface

Quarto

Don’t Flinch

Black Locket

Generosity

VI.

You, Again

Powers of Recuperation

Later 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

Index of Titles and First Lines

Also by Adrienne Rich

Copyright