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The Tether
What I did, mama, was to reach
for that time on the beach at night
and be you: draining
the sand through clean, pink fingers
taking my chances which were none:
which were to drop in the greedy
drawer of the waves, and let them
close on me, or
go back to the man who hit,
who put all our money in the bank
under his name alone. Dumped, huddling,
a cold flesh sat there,
considering the signs bearing
queer names in the wrong
language - a lamp on the boardwalk
must have glistened
like a light under the door, or was it
spots of grease, or was it
moonlight, trembling at the waves' tiptop? They
crashed and called.
I had to jump down to them, had
to get to the money:
open the fan of my body
over the braided waters, and how
the sand was to grind my cheek,
but the flesh of my arms, in spite of me,
my feet and my speechless
legs pushed back, no choice, we
were such light orange peels, floating,
at the top of the cash-holding waves.
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Evening Poems
I
It blackens
around him,
crouching in the yard, evening
swabs the ground, always
coming closer, while his hands
scrabble in the dirt
to cover the brown-skinned bulbs
tipped carefully in their places
to hide now, spring later-
Vanderhouw Orange, Professor Blauvelt,
and Red and Scarlet Emperor,
the barrow trundling
from place
to place its dark, indeterminate load, the clods
still dropping and spilling.
He prefers to work alone.
Above his stoop, his lips
compress, and then
the prodding fingers, ten
soldiers drilling hope,
poke at the guarded body,
the blinded soil.
II
In the subject, which
is domestic ritual,
a man, lifting his eyes from his work,
looks at a woman sewing:
head bent, the vivid scraps of cotton
littering her lap, she
makes a movement forward,
fists brought to her mouth,
and with her sharp, white teeth
bites the thread:
enclosed by lamplight.
Like a small and perfect animal, he thinks,
gathering and grooming.
What can I ask of her that she would give?
In the lacquer of her lamp,
how hard her speechless softness.
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Real Estate
Forward,
in disguised laterals, in a broken
plummet
across what still remains
the hilled horizon - your foot
urges the falling car
on the downslope, prods it again
to labor on the rise:
we are driving home.
Pepper and bone, the
barns slip past;
to our right and to our left
the same old cows that the strong sun
presses into olive meadows, at rest
with their flanks on these flanks. .
At every dip in the journey
what greets me is me:
my old and mottled self
come as a ghost that must be welcomed.
Over the crossing that
marks old argument-
getting out of the car
I threw myself onto the bank, crying very hard,
snow burning my face and hands -
where you gave me such
deep hurt.
That my arm was powerless to rise against you:
as it wanted to, as it wished to return
a blow for a blow.
Last spring I hardly
noticed
when we drove past the same spot,
it was all so long ago;
glad and forgetful, your strongly-worded face
joined me behind the moving glass:
while outside, freshly
ploughed,
the damp soft April ground
sat there like cooked meat;
in that blank and humid air
both of us hearing the wet, tunnelling
whistle of the meadlowlark. . . .
Old time like a load
of gravel
spilling over back roads,
and memory by intrusive memory, washed away.
Nothing keeps, not even pain;
as the hills continue
to signal
their partial ascent,
and in the large blue lung overhead,
damning and treacherous, white spots
re-seed the dissolute core -
the road below.
And the car still fleeing over it.
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Farm Woman
The geese
they don't seem to know
how their feet move on beneath them
and the bent queer road
with its narrow pad
its eyes of ice
receives them
the clouds
shaken loose
roll above the orange feet
and the white goose bodies
and the clouds are white also
and I was there
when those other blue rags
flew by
at night
when you and the other
hands would come to me
asking for hot things
for dishes with milk
not even my body
but the milk
and show me the shelves
in the barn
where you hid the bottles
the many bottles which
you touch
devoutly
while your eyes
sidle over me
hot and sour
I smell the stink of your breath
only human
I am ashamed at how my body stirs
before I move it away from you
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The Sisters
She was
so firm, so quickly
mindful of her: and when from the pink
bathrobe around the wasting body
the feces dropped unnoticed, she
wiped her dry and clean:
not taking up the fear
that greased the air for both of them,
as she brushed the gray curls
clotting the pillow. Day by day,
she bent over the bed,
carrying forward the guarded talk,
smoothing and cooling; her slippered
feet trotting back and forth, as she
shaped her sister for death.
And after that death,
we saw her, too,
put like an object between the same
white sheets, even her eyes
and pressed lips effaced,
under the cloth without power to warm
that strangers lay on her, as we, her children,
stood away. In June
dirt fell on the box moving in
beside the grassed-in other, blue
heat, bright
dress of the mourners fluttering, dirt
sweeping them in,
the yew trees planted, and two new
stones eying them both.
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The Mourners
Look
at the moon.
Ghost ball on the black pane,
cupped between leaves and cloud.
What is it now? downstairs
on the dark couch your body bends
in its black sleep,
your back eased, the downward
capes of your eyelids enclosing
no picture.
You said you were mourning:
nailing the boards of a new house,
the wood shrinks
far from the box-filled
lawn where we put her down.
From your body in sleep, a body
rises, spins
in that vaudeville of grief
both prescribed and involuntary
the knots and throbs-
as feelings thicken, and shroud
not the corpse but you.
This silence frightens me:
like a wave of grass eating the world, first
death of a parent
is all the deaths. All
the bodies that will not stay down.
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The
Trees, And What They Raise
Is the mind the
glass of the body?
a clear nothing
through which the flesh is permitted to peer?
When the body dies, the mind -
When the body dies the mind could be still awake;
reading in bed with the night-light on,
under the snow-cover.
All the leaves go someplace.
In Amherst the empty branches of the trees
are still flung upward:
as if they wanted something.
As if they misunderstood.
And the sunlight itself is full of questions,
as if the blue sky were a surface of cloth,
soft, and full of entities,
and spanning the trees, the empty branches, one
holding a nugget of leaf -
Where do things go when
they die,
you ask.
These words that turn into themselves.
Then no one.
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Cello
Why does
one say that the heart sings?
when it is not the heart, but the voice that does:
if the leg could sing, it might;
if the pump lodged in the chest
could sing, it would make such clear
deep sounds, as only that cellist makes,
playing Bach, the man of the brook,
whose dark wood shivers with pleasure -
or it would make the
hoarse, hurt sounds
of the deer bitten in the woods, the morning
that our dog got to him;
over the frozen river,
dark wood, dark waters
under the leaping cross of the animal
as he seizes his pleasure with teeth,
with tongue, and the sail of his skin spread -
Should all abandon have
such danger in it.
The air, given the faith of the cello,
sings with the innocence and stolidity of trees,
which bend, and also the human will
bends, the blades of its joy
folded like grass-tips, sunk
in the ice by the river, so many times,
they stiffen and thaw, the lip-like blades,
they open and sing.
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Elegy For
Ann Green
The tips
of the larch trees smoke in the moonlight
and the mountains lie down,
the hips, belly and breasts of the earth lying down -
put them at your eyes,
Margaret Green,
and come back to Vermont,
forgiving Vermont the death of your child:
come back to Vermont,
the familiar shapes in the dark rising
beside the ragged trees with hairlike ends,
as we drive to leave a message, pin it
above the locked pantry,
moonlight striping the grass with cream,
the bent grounds of your abandoned lawn
so wild and homely -
and I can hear the girls
still screaming in the damaged car,
even here, in this quiet, you gone away,
the trees putting it to themselves
with so little concern, and the air
filled with the noise of harmless animals -
Dark and beautiful.
Tomorrow, the sun, that scarred flower
lifting on its stem, and all of us led from our beds
by something; until that something
hears in its hands the unvoiced signal,
and lays us back in our foretasting sleep.
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A Child Of
The Kingdom
"The
light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light."
-Matthew
6:22
V
Pleasures Of Travel
firstborn
driving away from me
the car radio
making your favorite
thumping sound
as you hum along
foot steady on the gas
lightly and expectantly
the beautiful crisp hands
lie on the ebony wheel
in the rear window
the breakers of the shore line
roll for you
coming in trim succession
they pull
on the shortening sands
no one that I know is
there
like the bodies of women
the beach bushes
breasted with yellow leaves
tremble in the dunes
for you
mile after mile in light
winds
they stand
and signal only for you
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The
Guardians
In June,
grinding our way over back roads
like black tunnels, rusty, and half-asleep
from Jim's good wine and food, we can
hardly talk to each other, hardly
keep moving the heavy body of the car - it is
so late for the long drive home, and late
for the half-dressed
boy at the road side,
surging toward us at a dead run
as beyond the wild semaphore of his arms
that flag us down, we slow, and then make out
a car wallowing oddly in the river:
the yellow lumps of its
headlights
a giant cat's eyes reflecting over water;
and then the loud country 'n western
still drifting over that.
I ask myself what a car
can be doing in the river.
Whether it might not be all right.
As the radio dies, and
that active boy
leaves us on the bank,
and scrambles down before he scrambles back,
gasping and wet,
to tell us no pulse,
and vomit in the throat - we
stall in our central
selves.
A police siren whines briefly in our ears
as the trooper gets out and makes his way
past knots of excited people
gathering now on the bank of the still-dark stream:
it seems to be time to go.
And yet: what reaches
us in the morning news?
as the coroner makes clear
that last night's drowning stranger
was a sailor on leave?
so drunk and fast at a curve
that swerving, and catching
a young birch by its
topmost boughs,
he burned past the brush
and flew to the river,
where held in the heavy bunting of his car
he died of drowning. No bones broken.
Five hundred yards from his parents' house.
And no bones broken in
those seconds
while we stood by;
and watched one boy
flounder up and down a bank
to go to the aid of another
as we did not
rush at the river, only
momentarily halted at the icy shock -
as we did not
claw at the metal that pinned him down,
rasping and bloodying my limbs,
as I would have done,
had I thought this sailor to be my son.
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Ambulance
Call
In the
morning I went out with my bow:
slippery, after a little rain, but pretty:
the sky like a peeled bone,
and the trees so fresh, restful and straight;
I climbed the big apple by Bartlett's,
and sat up there a long time,
growing into it;
as if there were no spaces
between my flesh and the flesh of the tree,
the ground rising gladly with me,
and bringing in that sweet, slight sting
of apples rotting below;
and the wet black noses of the animals,
dogs, deer, coons - all feeling for life
with their heads cocked, and listening: I listened:
and there came such a black rose spreading,
and such a wave of sleep, a whole sea of sleep
that I could trust, could
lean down into:
I don't remember falling.
But there was a moment of no holding back,
Of a rushing so big and dark
before I slammed my body back into life:
my spine into its permanent sleep. It's
real bad, isn't it? Tell
me.
I know it's bad.
What do I do without my legs.
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A
Woman On A Bed
Legs pushed up, your knees
the peaks of a Greek m, the crotch
of your trousers its low center, I
cannot believe that the tall
meagerness, and the softness, coexist:
in the brief pit of your
lap, a child,
a little girl, crawls playfully about, also
full of bent limbs scattering like fragile pins-
out of that slight body to rise
such restlessness of desire: you
tell us about your new
man -
from the dark respite of your mouth,
the thick, soft lips
move slowly on the subject, as the white skin
stretches over your narrow
cheeks, circles
the black doe eyes of your face,
gathering tautly
over a skull of classical beauty:
now by the window
you kneel and yawn, like one
warding off an argument of love - arms
wide, your white throat arching,
as in a field of light like grain,
the red sun himself goes down on you.
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The Survivor
It isn't my mother dazing
here at the sink,
and staring beyond the white pitcher
my hands are soaping, it's me,
scaring myself with what it feels like
to be the only one left. All the ones
that cause a cramp in the heart,
as if the blood fell down momentarily,
and then recovered, gone -
you no longer in the bed beside me,
making those small strangling noises
which are for you the deep sounds of release, as you
trust yourself utterly to the bed,
arms and legs around your own one wife,
none like her, although you often
wish that this were not the case,
as daily we stiffen ourselves
around the burials and excisions of the will
that long love exacts from each of us
in its different ways.
As if I could scour death
like a bad smell
out of the pot - as if the subject of the poem
were never elegy, only the blurred, expectant
fuzz around the mid-March dogwood limbs,
the timid violets hanging onto the sky's underbelly,
as sky lifts my head from the kitchen sink.
As if these days were not some
night-time hunter's dressing of the cut tree-limbs
above the dank trap dug in the ground:
as if our substance were timeless,
came not into its end, as properly speaking,
yearning and longing, to keep their form, should not.
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II
Genesis
Birth
was only a light tap,
a further pressure
on the already spilling presence.
In the first of things,
the white trunk of my
body
leaned down into its beating light,
the glazed wings
shook in their full, sweet dampness,
and the blood,
tumbling and choking between my legs,
rose upright into he and she.
See how they stir, blink-
and with their split limbs
force me backwards
into my smashed space,
my burst time.
I watch the woman
crouch as I did,
taking from her thighs
another such as she,
another such as he,
who stands so gracefully, quietly,
while she holds the brood in her arms.
It is not clear what
comes next:
the day that a little one
closes its fingers around the rock
and spoils another nestling;
or the day an adult,
stooping swiftly,
scoops out a pair of eyes
with its hard thumb.
Murder or nurture,
why should I continue to care?
A droplet of milk on
a red lip,
a thick flower like a fist
briefly squeezing away
behind its bonewalled chest,
as it stands on its divided ground,
each creature looks at
me,
each thrusts at me my name.
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"Preparation For
The Wedding"
In an unfinished painting
by Gustave Courbet,
where the art dealers have mistaken the dead girl
for a bride, it is true
that she sits limply in the central chair,
as one stunned to receive the white array.
Beside her, the leaden
damask of the table
whitens and stretches, and the dresses of her women
billow like stonedust, gleam
like alabaster seen through a cold dawn:
the loose sheets tumbling from their arms,
they are unfolding the future.
One holds a mirror at
her lips.
Beneath her head, bent in its
stiff astonishment, the dark daubs of her eyes
contain so little joy - as her awkward feet,
still bound, sprawl on a wet rag
dripping from a dark washtub, its contents
invisible to us behind
its level lip.
The skirts of her kneeling attendant
tucked back, all colors
grind into the white wall, mass
at the window painted shut.
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The
Lunch
First,
the lettuce washed, the bread and meat
cut and brought to the table
and lifted to all of the mouths -
the oil of anchovy, of olive,
blinking on the china plates
the talk unstopping
and the gestures wide - how we needed
to sit on and on in the
awkward chairs
the lip movements so many,
words with difficulty
shoved into the cracks available to them,
smoke flowering heavily above the narrow
face of an elder with deft
pinches of wisdom as her gift,
the blond hair springing back
from the broad cheeks of another, pain
a baton lifting up her face
another crumpled and
then smoothed
her paper napkin, and listening,
tore it into such tiny even strips
and the dishes were taken
away
the cloth unlaid
the papers brought out and the sun
set without our noticing it
while in the circuit of the lamp
some faces studied faces
and others were averted
hands did not leave their
threshing of points
and I was amazed that the hours
did not break, or the women shatter,
their chairs still linked
at the wooden table, its four legs
planted on the floor,
or the stiff walls of my house
lie down and stream as water
before the force of these human words
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The
Tea Room
ah...
we were truly in a foreign country
in this tea room
eating our soft, pale biscuits with pink jam
and the butter was very white
with soft pink sausages and two blue eggs
in an alcove at the front
of the room
three tea musicians played their melting music
at us and the visitors to the abbey
who sat at our table
elderly, with some of their teeth intact
also eating the pale jam and the pale biscuits
the pale soft butter and the unresisting eggs
the limp food
like an animal on the wet leash of our throats
falling to its final place
we were taking an English tea
and the damp music of
several violins
nuzzled our cheeks and the cheeks
of the elderly people, delivering to us
their sentences cut like sandwiches, thin hair
taping the edges of their foreheads shut
their little mouths nibbling the little words
thin lips keeping the breath in place
and the anxious smiles
offered us friendship
as leaving
we coated our place at the table
with our new, thick English money
heavy coins, the pale and dowdy bills
and the music which had stopped
began again
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Habits
of Ivory
"...the
little bit (Two Inches wide) of ivory
on
which I work with so fine a Brush ...."
I am putting away my
love for you, Jane Austen,
love of the defunct girlish.
Stopping my ears to Anne Elliott's charm-
shoulders bent
around the tight plum of her heart,
will trussed, mute fingers
stuck to the pianoforte -
dismissing again your
famous argument
about the two-inch bit of ivory!
The inaudible leaves, and the sea waves
that tinkled like music boxes,
death, in your novels a pinch of snuff -
the practical art of inducing plot changes.
Lovers, clamped to their bedside chairs,
bombarding the patient flesh
with words only ....
But in your letters a
less doctored scene.
Listen to you! "Mrs. Hall, brought to bed....
of a dead child... owing to a fright. I suppose
she happened unawares to look at her husband."
You were no kinder to your favorite niece,
pregnant - "poor animal"-
as stiff-lipped, you prescribed
for that helpless human replication,
"The simple regimen of a separate room."
Stout Englishwoman, who
after Albuera cried,
"How horrible to have so many people killed -
and what a blessing that one cares for none of them!"
Generous to six people in your books.
And they were all you or your family.
Nobody ever really touched
you,
pulling, like rabbit from a hat,
your heart, from out of that muslin bodice
but family: and they drew around, always,
they must have sheltered you, even against
the health of your own vulgarities - there,
on the cool ivory of your specifications,
as the keen knife picked, in that
prisoner's way, at the records of its fire.
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Clytie
Sunflower
Clytie at the feminist party,
head swivelling after the two
male heads in the room, still
in the full flow of your harangue
affirming sisterhood,
the active jet of your black eyes
restlessly seeking their confirmation:
It's not that you want
their sex.
Thighs pulled into order by the cloth-covered,
unmistakeably convex bump of the crotch:
it's just a signet. They have the power and you
still turn to it, turn with it, Clytie,
calling them by the harsh, didactic
wind in which your body vibrates:
I was always
a plain and earnest bulk in the kitchen,
turned to the kettle by the sink;
for supper, papa had to be ambushed,
blown out from behind the newspaper,
my little brother always usurping my place
in the order of the ages, while mama,
standing, administered the soup -
and I was never beautiful.
Only with the tumbling, boiling words could I
bring them around, four
chairs around the table,
two of them empty, could I
swing their faces in the circle of my mouth.
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Bus
Ride
Careless, he cools a
sweaty palm
wide out the half-open window -
and then the window frame falls out.
Behind him, in the rush of air, we all feel it.
It has distinctly fallen out.
With a nervous cackle,
he signals to the driver:
"You just lost a window, by the way."
A giggle escapes him
as he thinks of all the other windows
against which he has carelessly leaned,
which might have betrayed him
to a less fortunate end.
Now he is tasting his
luck,
that bitter blade against the tongue,
on one side delicious knowing,
and on the other, delicious fear, as he sits there
both arms now folded tightly on his chest.
But the girl across the
aisle ignores him:
eyes closed to all lessons on the use of faith,
the lovely column of her throat turned up, she
bus above the sticky plastic of the seat,
warmth and dampness
stirring the amber bands
of hair
that frame her cheeks,
her wet mouth fallen open;
milk and indigo, the flowers
crowding the sleeping calmness of her lap: oh, my
longing: what can I
bargain away for that.
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Trees
When a child, I tried
so often
to tell the truth about trees,
concealing from them my jealousy,
my desire to be as slow and hugely fond.
As if with tenderness
and safety
someone had taken a foot,
eased away the heel,
and thrust it deep down underground:
and that were the story of the lower part.
As if in a moment of
unguarded play, an uncle
had pulled the tips of my fingers above my head
and twirled me so fast I seemed to stand stockstill-
the hairs of my head spinning upwards
and fusing, fusing, with my thousand thinning arms....
And that were the story
of the upper part.
The lucky puzzle of the
tree trunk, let freely down
like a thick rope from an unseen balcony.
When in winter the tree
is cleaned of its leaves,
branch, twig and limb all point
to the great heart of sky caught up amongst them,
the low, wooden sounds rocking it;
and then, like a drawerful of things
pulled out and dropped, the heart
cracked, and come to its rest,
its pieces found in a white scattered heap -
all the playthings rolled
away in dustballs,
covering an old floor - could it be
yours, or my old house? the roof now fallen in,
black pellets of rabbit and squirrel
raked into piles in every room,
and face down in a closet,
a dog-eared photo of a child in braces
smoothing her shadowstained skirt.
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Beauty
And The Beast
Suddenly, the magical
horse
looks ordinary, the black bale of his chest
diminished - and the puffy cat
stops, mid-prowl, where each bare twig of the poplar
stands forth from the main stem
like frightened hair:
the voice
is breaking its year-long spell.
And in the garden pool,
upside-down,
a young man's lips
are glittering; he
holds out his arms to me:
tears falling in straight
strings of light
down his undented face ....
Who is he?
an utter stranger,
masking in satin gloves
his still lengthened nails - where
is the other?
As soon as I learned to love him,
they took my Beast away.
In the black bed of the
house
at my back, a wave of blanket
cools, where the flesh abandoned it;
abandons the dead garden,
where standing,
I finger the exposed, punk head
of a rose in winter, its bald nub
with the petals dropped away
consoling me; nothing
to move me from its
perfect vegetable grief ....
The goaded clock
now presses past its stations;
and in the long oval of the parlor table,
brown, dim,
like the mirror of a country pond,
I peer at the face
whose blind loving
blindly and beautifully
has reversed the Beast, and yet,
unlike the Beast, knows
what it cannot risk -
- rose threshed on its
stem
who bears in place
time's female body,
and forfeits the ransom of change.
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Joan
Such a little thing,
my voices told me,
not mentioning the fire
to bite the heart,
or the prying, fingering
hot sleep to bring me there:
out of my body at last,
poor little coat, poor little coal.
They told me to join them
and then they disappeared.
How long I waited!
the rest of my life
in those bushes of flame,
straws sticking me,
and I said Jesus, my head wobbling,
falling into the sun's suddenly
lowered face, and blistering - soon
there was no way to come to them:
whose hands were not where I thought them,
held up,
blessed and bodiless to catch at,
bright tips leaking all of that
roar of light.
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Joseph
Among the women by the
road
one stepped aside and joined me at the stuck cart,
the dog-soft silk of her breath at my ear
as she stood behind me with her arms raised,
and we all put our backs to it -
then stopped awhile, taking our bread and cheese.
I rinsed my mouth with
the sour wine from home,
watching the small stones that clung to her dress
fall back when she sat up, smelling of grass and hot sun-
a fly, briefly intent, touching the liquid corner of her eye, and then the
pleasure of her arm.
Always to be held by
the blades of the star!
To ask for more than I was given:
as God knew, too, that among them I alone was fully human,
excluded from the whiteness of those other faces,
skin like wax furling a lit wick, and clearing
into flame I cannot touch
- always
the very air around them full of cut light flashing!
Once when the child fell, the straw on his hair
glinting like broken glass, for abominable seconds,
I could not take them back, I
watched as my thrust hand, dreaming,
pressed the sharp straw down on that brow-
and the boy said, "Mary ..."
Her rare tears: strict
rose of her inner lip stalled at his hair;
and also like mine, unwithered, unused,
the perfect male fruits of his body.
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Saint
Julian The Hospitaler
I
What should I do with
my life?
Still feeling desires, and hungry, oh, I eat;
itching, I scratch - feeling
quite self-conscious about it.
Something terrible happened, I did it
and then I was saved,
but sorry - a little
yawn pleating my back and breastbone,
a tic trembling my eyelids open,
I feel the impulse to masturbate.
Or to find a wife.
Possibly my old wife.
What should I do?
An unsuspecting legatee, willed
an impossible fortune, my days
come spending all at once, each one
the same relentless denomination -
I wish my body knew better.
The thing seems stuck...
everything stubbing back to the same wrong,
but I can't keep my mind on it,
death death death.
Or away from it... only
one night the old dream came back?
This time a film with white
holes eaten in it - all the important
parts missing -
of all the worst miseries,
unable even to cling to my sin,
my special category.
Like a hair
stuck on the end of a bloody stick,
I seem to stay and stay here ....
II
God cranked up the world
for me.
An enormous piece of machinery -
that grayish-yellow, gritty bit of desert
lying like a prostrate sail,
he blew up - and took to the sun:
whose fire tested me,
ate what it needed to
of the fouled heart God offered
and the heart came down, perfected.
First it was sin-eaten,
and empty:
second it was washed of sin, and empty:
and in the end
the saint laundered in the sun.
Some people always do
well for themselves.
The record crumpled and stiffened
like a knuckle of coal.
III
My parents had been told:
Much
Blood! Much Glory!
Always Happy! an emperor's
family.
The tame sea, a salt
cup of wine for them.
At high noon the little bowman went
in the dark stone tower
and slept like a monk, it was said.
All peace was ours: all simplicities:
and the portcullis never lowered;
bees lingered
in the pots of basil and heliotrope
spotting the walls
with their green intermission.
In all the golden legends
I was given no lines to speak.
I found a massive silence
best and simplest; what I saw
and heard was to govern me -
only the black mountainous
stag
whom I killed,
cried out: broke
our animal silence, speaking the truth
and cursed me.
Best?
So many bodies broken
into,
rifled by my spears. I had been
such victory.
And in the end I could
not be kept
from killing what made me:
the little bearded one,
he died,
and the sweet one with the bonnet flaps.
She, too.
IV
In the boat, as the ferryman,
I was given the order
I could not disobey:
first time,
wandering in the penitential desert,
sighting the waters of oasis,
I was about to step in the well,
go on down and try it feet first,
when, in all of the stories,
they said it was papa's face
called to me Stop!
Now, how can I believe that?
Down there in the water, a floating
shape like a dried strawberry
with a few tufts of discoloured flax
strung at each side, was me:
the thing was so old. . .
Mouth open, whose was the call?
What kind of mirror in
that well?
What prompter? Papa.
Still leaning over me.
Second time, I pulled
and pulled in the boat
when the message, save, and the leper
came in the dark:
I toiled with him over the river,
fed him in my hut with my bad food
and never taking my eyes off him
pulled him into bed, and rowed his flesh too.
I sucked and swallowed
at his yellow kiss;
with a trembling but interested hand,
slid my fingers around the fallen nose,
touched the lips; did
what the voice like a bee-sting
pricked me into, and as I see it,
I turned around. God
flowed me over the water
and in the leper's embrace
I bent the equivocal mirror,
spit on the polished,
punished armor of my soul:
reversed, God's justice let me go.
V
Upwards, as the sparks
fly always upwards,
stained glass was my reward.
In the cathedral at Rouen
you can always see me: the self-made
son of my own change.
I tell you what I can
never dodge:
the dirtiness of that surrender.
In the desert I sweated like a lit fuse;
mea culpa,
that dribble of mouthwater to liquid gold -
I licked my lips, helpless,
I moved to that embrace -
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Mary
Up there, God waited,
while the moon like an onion
cooking in fat
spattered the desert with its glistening film,
and what the angel offered I kept in mind:
down here, the elderly
Joseph
my gelded companion for life;
I to be taken
and made over into the lap of God.
He said, chosen among women.
I did not know that meant, betray them;
my lovely son blown out
of reach.
Not just a question of bearing, it was
put to me that I might bear once; put to me
only that I could not age:
watching him always in
the company
of his young men, watching
as the nailed man transfixed the sober babe,
whose soft skin sucking at my soft skin
was never to belong to me ....
I was pressed to cede
mortality,
gain heaven as beloved of all,
but never of one.
In the perpetual sundering
the son of woman slumps on his sterile tree,
death passing over
in grand dark animal clothes,
radical of the flesh denied.
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The
Plains Of Heaven
I am in Heaven.
Look how the sun stays risen - a barn
raised by a team of horses and then forgotten,
abandoned in its blue field.
Below it, an odorless grass
grows thickly, white and cool,
mobs of flowers, pale too, and without texture-
and inwoven among them, clumps of people
stand newly in albino dress,
old tears on their cheeks,
and mouthing a soft, dubbed speech,
eyelids like envelopes steamed open
in that huge, unmerciful light.
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III
Aubade:
Sierra Madre, 1972
We lie, beneath a fur
of dust
on the ragged string cots,
aware that dawn is coming
like something draining, and the scrawny cocks
begin a loud gargle, an ugly
ratchet in the throat. So tired,
last night's muscles still in their
blood-strangled knots, I wash into you
and refuse.
What are we doing here?
sleeping out in the courtyard,
caught between the pigs and the pigfouled brush
and the mud houses without windows,
where in the warm and greasy corners
people stow dead babies for luck:
I feel those sad and brittle bodies
rise, and crumble in the soft grit
filling our mouths and noses ....
Last night, we walked
on mountains, leaned
over what steep drops on muleback
to get here?
Jose's radio leaks its fuzzy music
over the tea with laurel leaves - his wife
slaps up the everlasting tortillas,
and we are finally leaving; mules
yanked from potreros, hats, water,
us - strung into place, and now the sun is up:
painfully slitting our
eyes.
My hands steam on the pommel,
hot tea lurching in my stomach, as some
inches away, a mule's ear flicks, re-loading
his velvet indelible flies. Yesterday
he passed me, a loosening burden, upwards -
his feet playing the
boulders
like a child with jacks
and a bobbing ball.
To go back -
we have only to fall on our former steps.
To come down all the way -
as already our soft bodies
sag in the grave strictures
of our other lives:
a branch of the strangler
fig
snaps,
no need for radical exchange.
Shrinking,
I shove it all away -
while the internal pitchman explains to me
that all our lives
turned over like a rock,
and stared at
in the trick of travel,
are never this simple and poor.
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The
Disappearance: Argentina, 1979
-
for Dr. Laura Bonaparte
When I went to the district
and found my daughter missing,
asking the other teachers about her,
the frightened residents at the apartments, too,
the dirt I stood on was still innocent;
each shuttered house inconsequential. . .
They remembered her because
she looked so much like me;
as I hurried from building to building,
holding the witness of her face
above the flesh that bore her ....
I hardly guessed then
at the terms:
department to department, office to office,
where either they looked too fixedly at me
or not at all, while I sat there
with my spine ramrod straight,
my purse in my lap, and only once,
as I gagged at what they told me,
gripping the desk with my her-shaped hands.
Hands that I finally
lay down.
Hoping at the unknown last
that there had been for her one pair of eyes
neither ill-wishing nor indifferent
to ease the body tumbling in this ground,
to which they bring me:
body fallen somewhere
beneath these wooden markers
now rising out of lime - oh God,
under which of these scrabbled numbers
are her hands, beloved
flesh that the cattle prod burned, bruised
lips I wish to remember
speaking to me.
As I am shown the mass grave
puddling in its slime, where the guard
who keeps the grave is pacing,
he does not stop: leading me forward, he
steps across my buried body,
where underneath his stepping hurts me so ....
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Suite
After the rain, the bulging
sky
lays indigo above the black pines, receives
in its peach and silver underbelly
the thrust of the mountains;
and at the crossing, the ship-like geese
advance with their stomachs
across the fields, indifferent
to the clouds passing faster than they,
although they whiten in the same fat, gleaming curves;
and the glassy, irregular rain in the road
records it; records, at sundown,
a girl falling in the mud,
the heavy arm of the man behind her
crushing her mouth, his piston hand
working her dress; and then he stands
beside the stilled scissors of her legs,
his eyes roving over a farmhouse, miles away:
behind one tiny orange pane,
the paradox of the children
playing in their white bathtub,
clean and steamy, so easily clambering out,
as they slip into pajamas smelling of talcum,
and hear the soft, welcoming slash
of the sound of their sheets drawn back.
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No
Passage; Identities
Maddening, that the mountains would not move
toward me, nor in me.
I was not able to touch them,
or eat them. They stood out whole in the sunlight,
the brush of their unshaven sides
beyond my windows, four cones,
and light fell on them, violet,
beyond my power to turn them, hold them,
or feel the late fruity light
drenching their sides.
Did the glass keep me from it?
Was it that I sat on my too-soft chair
listening, from far away, upstairs, above where
the cars hammered the dirt road into its
holding shape? No passage: in the black
branches of the trees, the quick
fall of a light, weightless substance
proves to be bird: not leaf:
like a large piece of snow, a bird
separates
from the bark of a tree,
before becoming
a part of the ground.
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Field
Poem
Chestnut brown, the leather
straps of the camera bag
hang down, striping the counter. Mites
tenant in the eucalyptus in the bowl, the blue gray
leaves a pleasant color, when crushed, still having
their familiar pungent smell.
This, and the sun shining through other leaves,
other greens and browns, I am annotating -
are they the footnotes of a cell?
Today is dangerously fast, although the motion
of these things seems slow,
and what is now toppling is not everything
nailed by the eyes, or pushed back
by the blades of tears crowding and rolling in my head.
The familiar is too slow - the lovely idea
too fast - like a stream a brown leather strap
falls endlessly over the counter, as
turning idea, the camera hangs, and is not in my eye.
Leaves and the tiles, ghost photograph of the sun
backing over my shoulder, I run my eyes, two
desperate animals over the bodies of what I own:
everything tears and melts. That
was it: falling
apart, my hands, twin peasants of the will,
pluck at the blank sheets, my
white fields turning.
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Still
Lives Of The People
After the long abrasions
of the road,
car wheels grinding, and our cut minds
paying out the endless center line,
we flickered in,
the movies of reunion.
Placed on the white screen
of those studio walls, we
laughed and swayed against the potted
leaves; all
smelling so strongly of excitement,
exhaustion and the popping, late-night talk;
our food
dead quiet on the table,
like the twin food
in that painting of yours behind us:
like a mirror over our
shoulders
it sat;
with its own people
also over wine bottles,
touching the same glazed fruit,
your little cream jug, and a man
half-turning in his seat, head
tilted, his gray
lips shaping a question - you
were asking us to join
hands:
arms spread
in the Quaker circle - and next day,
again we met, bowed heads, fed,
and left after breakfast like a shot.
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Letter
For A Daughter
Put it this way, lovey,
some people
stab themselves with their own strength:
stubbornly clinging, when all the best
of collective wisdom, not just your parents,
but your friends, too calls up the feral
outline of a lover that love for yourself
should let you let go.
Thinking about it, I
had it all
so clear in my mind, as placed above you
on this northern map, I wrote you good advice -
but the lines have wavered, and fallen short;
failing to touch that adolescent pride,
still hammer-firm in a southern city.
What lover could clear,
or should, the blackness
from those eyes. . .
Wednesday, the pig came; we stacked it in boxes
by the door; the weather turned cold enough
to keep anything we wanted stiff. As in mute
promise, the pieces of the pig lay wrapped,
lay waiting for the festival of the returning child.
You didn't come.
By Thursday, hinting
at spoils,
the massed disordered meat still lay
in its blood-stained papers, two greasy boxes
to be rendered into lard. At nightfall,
all of the burners covered with the big black
kettles and pots, we did it; swept up the floors
and put the cans away, warm oil
oozing in every crack
of the littered stove,
as the large cans held their snowfall of fat
like deferred pleasure. His hair,
strained of color, holds you: the round, full
throbbing of that muscular neck, as it turns
in its senseless activity, the large hands
with the light blond fur, the blunt
nails knotting in the
thickness of your hair,
quick and light in their ambiguous caresses,
hold you; tease and deploy us with the hopeful
possibility of our mistake - as nothing can be done
our stomachs full of the veteran pig, the six months
since we saw you. The river in back of the house
clarifies. Slowly and carefully, the snow
thins from the winter-scabbed
path. All things
drive to their opposite number. My life
hunkering down in your youth, as absently,
you blur towards a stale body - fresh error - snow
gives way to the black slick mud, and the sky
lightens. Sunday, that bald signal, augmenting,
reaches round for its repeating self again.
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Photographs
Still a child's hands, they bullet through the box,
and the photographs,
like a mismatched
deck of cards, spatter her wrists and arms,
and her breath comes short, her sharp gaze raking up
these cracked and blurred, these
spotted things.
She is sorting the past.
And comes to my house again and again
on just such errands, and no other: her lips
as she meets me at the door, grazing,
as her eyes already pass me, looking for some unnameable
thing to hold her here: to keep and sort the deepening litter.
Which will not hold her.
Which will not explain
why she should stay or what she should do in the other place
that ties her with no message but the present
urgencies of flesh: blindly, her hands, two disparate persons,
dig and score at the mess, scrabble like a young dog's
pulling at the bone put down there yesterday -
uncovered: groups of
girls, a file of young men
grin at the camera, ask the beholder what it is that they
should do. The stillness is so absolute.
Their beauty no use to them at all.
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Gemini
Why? instead of that
pleasant
simultaneous doing of things that
separately engage us, just
the cool push away:
your body, my old
shop of delights, closed-
the loose words locked up tight,
as you turn at the sink,
speechless, but rattling things,
rattling me.
Yesterday I had your head in my hands, shaping,
maybe thinking I had something - as softly
the black hair dreams and plots, falls
on the kitchen floor, suddenly
looking dirty.
Like the cut hair that it was.
Do I talk too much?
Thrusting, always
thrusting, like a hand in the pocket.
Our too-much struggle:
from the tap
the water pulses, braids,
marries itself with innocence-
a clear stream going somewhere -
down a stainless steel drain.
Living like twins, in
the same
expensive sack of air -
when did you stop thinking
that I was there to hear?
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Changing
The Tire
That you came back, that
your plans
were altered by the car -
the spare tire propped against the frame,
the tool kit lying on the damp ground
where we both bent down, and I pretended to help
by handing you things, your hands
moving with their slow security,
tightening the lugnuts -
and we could talk a little longer,
each tasting the other's surprising presence:
between the raising and the lowering
of that familiar metal body, the jack put away,
the wrench, and you came back to the house,
and washed your hands,
more words; another kiss, and then
there was nothing more to do:
but watch as you drove away.
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Sunset
I have
been with you half my life,
and cannot exhaust the warmth
rising from twin sources,
the close-fitting bell you make
when you lift the covers and crawl in to me:
convulsively, sometimes, you reach across in sleep -
I am happy to be grabbed.
This telephone voice which is yours
does not alter because I am on the line.
You speak to you; no special discretions.
How it all must be understood: a river,
in that late light,
eases the gulf between two separating lands,
and glittering,
looks like the spread of joy -
the split sun shapes
and re-shapes on the river's trembling skin -
moments before the body, braking,
lowers for each
each night.
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Weingarten's
Ketubah
Begin with Dma's purple
dress,
her woolen shawl, and the dribble
of red thread down her front -
you, in the foolish oat smile
of your best suit, beside her,
body stalled in its message,
telling the temple that I come:
that my knees knock against it
for permanence: for permanence:
onward
he moves his body's
festive tent - and the union closes:
on these papers of the house,
marriage,
with clauses,
and the cry of the soul for fruit.
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When
You Fled
while it snows
the ground has risen a foot around me,
the trees are thickening, too
everything
is taking on.
Last night I had a great fright,
I dreamed you were dead:
there was
no visible hurt, and
nothing strewn about -
only your face so still
it frightened me
a white blind pulled -
should you die before
me I won't
be your widow knocking
and crying at the absent skin:
seeing you dead, last
night,
I was undone
your body the last place
I couldn't expect to find you in
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My
Mother's Safety
She is quite patient,
my whitehaired mother with her hands
in her lap, sitting and greeting,
greet arid sit: she
has not been observed moving, no,
not for an hour or more - the sun
pours strictly on her,
and over the rhododendron, its buds
undressing upward, the downward
petals of the dogwood by the pool
so many scraps of tissue
crisping the water, which
continues its movable shine
beside my mother
who sits in her pale summer clothes
as if the flesh inside could last
as if her limbs could never lie by water,
never lie beneath water or earth;
eighty years, the rose of her mouth
holding its small, insistent smile.
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Then
In The Dark
then in the dark
the luminous dial of Anita's white dress
moving ahead of us, in
moonlight full of a thousand
small things, hanging and spinning
flowers popping
with their tiny tut tut
in the beds of high grass I
sat down by the butternut
avoiding the damp
raspberry canes, and their daylight
smell: enjoying
the sight of a man, pissing,
soaking the grass; how
we did make
a mark in a field,
and the stars qualified everything.
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Copyright © 1983, by Lorrie Goldensohn
All rights reserved
Published by L'EPERVIER PRESS,
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 81-21685
ISBNN 0-934332-39-8
