fading, out with me
along the tiled corridors
into the rest of the world,
which thinks it is opaque and hard.
I am being very careful.
O heart, now that I know your nature,
who can I tell?
A Boat
Evening comes on and the hills thicken;
red and yellow bleaching out of the leaves.
The chill pines grow their shadows.
Below them the water stills itself,
a sunset shivering in it.
One more going down to join the others.
Now the lake expands
and closes in, both.
The blackness that keeps itself
under the surface in daytime
emerges from it like mist
or as mist.
Distance vanishes, the absence
of distance pushes against the eyes.
There is no seeing the lake,
only the outlines of the hills
which are almost identical,
familiar to me as sleep,
shores unfolding upon shores
in their contours of slowed breathing.
It is touch I go by,
the boat like a hand feeling
through shoals and among
dead trees, over the boulders
lifting unseen, layer
on layer of drowned time falling away.
This is how I learned to steer
through darkness by no stars.
To be lost is only a failure of memory.
Interlunar
Darkness waits apart from any occasion for it;
like sorrow it is always available.
This is only one kind,
the kind in which there are stars
above the leaves, brilliant as steel nails
and countless and without regard.
We are walking together
on dead wet leaves in the intermoon
among the looming nocturnal rocks
which would be pinkish gray
in daylight, gnawed and softened
by moss and ferns, which would be green,
in the musty fresh yeast smell
of trees rotting, earth returning
itself to itself
and I take your hand, which is the shape a hand
would be if you existed truly.
I wish to show you the darkness
you are so afraid of.
Trust me. This darkness
is a place you can enter and be
as safe in as you are anywhere;
you can put one foot in front of the other
and believe the sides of your eyes.
Memorize it. You will know it
again in your own time.
When the appearances of things have left you,
you will still have this darkness.
Something of your own you can carry with you.
We have come to the edge:
the lake gives off its hush;
in the outer night there is a barred owl
calling, like a moth
against the ear, from the far shore
which is invisible.
The lake, vast and dimensionless,
doubles everything, the stars,
the boulders, itself, even the darkness
that you can walk so long in
it becomes light.
***
NEW POEMS (1985–1986)
Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony
The front lawn is littered with young men
who want me to pay attention to them
not to their bodies and their freshly-
washed cotton skins, not to their enticing
motifs of bulb and root, but
to their poems. In the back yard
on the other hand are the older men
who want me to pay attention to their
bodies. Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need. I gather
dust, for practice, my attention
wanders like a household pet
once leashed, now
out on the prowl, an animal
neither dog nor cat, unique
and hairy, snuffling
among the damp leaves at the foot
of the hedge, among the afterbloom
of irises which melt like blue and purple
ice back into air; hunting for something
lost, something to eat or love, among
the twists of earth,
among the glorious bearclaw sun-
sets, evidence
of the red life that is leaking
out of me into time, which become
each night more final.
Porcupine Tree
A porcupine tree is always
dead or half dead with chewed core
and mangy bark. Droppings drool down it.
In winter you can see it clear:
shreds of wood, porcupine piss
as yellow ice, toothwork, trails to and from
waddling in the snow. In summer you smell it.
This tree
is bigger than the other trees,
frowsy as my
room or my vocabulary.
It does not make
leaves much any more,
only porcupines and porcupines,
fat, slow and lazy,
each one a low note, the longest string
on a cello,
or like turning over in bed
under the eiderdown in spring,
early before the leaves are out;
sunlight too hot on you through the window,
your head sodden with marshy dreams
or like a lungfish burrowed
into mud. Oh pigsheart. Oh luxury.
I'll come around at night
and gnaw the salt off your hands,
eat toilet seats and axe handles.
That is my job in life: to sniff
your worn skin music,
to witness the border
between flesh and the inert,
lick up dried blood
soaked into the grain,
the taste of mortality in the wood.
Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Amazingly young beautiful woman poets
with a lot of hair falling down around
their faces like a bad ballet,
their eyes oblique over their cheekbones;
they write poems like blood in a dead person
that comes out black, or at least deep
purple, like smashed grapes.
Perhaps I was one of them once.
Too late to remember
the details, the veils.
If I were a man I would want to console them,
and would not succeed.
Porcupine Meditation
I used to have tricks, dodges, a whole sackful.
I could outfox anyone,
double back, cover my tracks,
walk backwards, the works.
I left it somewhere, that knack
of running, that good luck.
Now I have only
one trick left: head down, spikes out,
brain tucked in.
I can roll up:
thistle as animal, a flower of quills,
that's about it.
I lie in the grass and watch the sunlight pleating
the skin on the backs of my hands
as if I were a toad, squashed and drying.
I don't even wade through spring water
to cover my scent.
I can't be bothered.
I squat and stin
k, thinking:
peace and quiet are worth something.
Here I am, dogs,
nose me over,
go away sneezing, snouts full of barbs
hooking their way to your brain.
Now you've got some
of my pain. Much good may it do you.
Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day
I prop up my face and go out, avoiding the sunlight,
keeping away from the curve where the burnt road
touches the sky.
Whatever exists at the earth's center will get me
sooner or later. Sooner. Than I think.
That core of light squeezed tight
and shut, dense as a star, as molten
mirrors. Dark red and heavy. Slab at the butcher's.
Already it's dragging me down, already
I become shorter, infinitesimally.
The bones of my legs thicken—that's first—
contract, like muscles.
After that comes the frailty, a dry wind blowing
inside my body,
scouring me from within, as if I were
a fossil, the soft parts eaten away.
Soon I will turn to calcium. It starts with the heart.
I do a lot of washing. I wash everything.
If I could only get this clean once, before I die.
To see God, they told me, you do not go
into the forest or city; not the meadow,
the seashore even unless it is cold.
You go to the desert.
You think of sand.
Nightshade on the Way to School
Nightshade grows more densely than most weeds:
in the country of burdock and random stones,
rooted in undersides of damp logs,
leaf mold, worm castings.
Dark foliage, strong tendrils, the flowers purple
for mourning but with a center
so yellow I thought buttercup or adder,
the berries red, translucent,
like the eggs of an unknown moth,
feather-soft, nocturnal.
Belladonna was its name, beautiful lady.
Its other name was deadly.
If you ate it it would stop your heart,
you would sleep forever. I was told that.
Sometimes it was used for healing,
or in the eyes. I learned that later.
I had to go down the mud path to the ravine,
the wooden bridge across it rotting,
walk across it, from good
board to good board,
level with the tips of the trees.
Birds I don't remember.
On the other side the thicket of nightshade
where cats hunted, leaving their piss:
a smell of ammonia and rust, some dead thing.
All this in sunshine.
At that time I did well, my fingers
were eaten down to the blood.
They never healed.
The word Nightshade a shadow,
the color of a recurring dream
in which you cannot see color.
Porridge, worn underwear, wool
stockings, my fault. Not purple: some
other color. Sick
outside in a snowbank.
I dreamed of falling from the bridge,
one hand holding on, unable to call.
In other dreams, I could step into the air.
It was not flying. I never flew.
Now some years I cross the new bridge,
concrete, the path white gravel.
The old bridge is gone,
the nightshade has been cut down.
The nightshade spreads and thickens
where it always was,
at this season the red berries.
You would be tempted to eat them
if you did not know better.
Also the purple flowers.
Mothers
How much havoc this woman spills
out of herself into us
merely by being
unhappy with such finality:
The mothers rise up in us,
rustling, uttering cooing
sounds, their hands moving
into our hands, patting anything
smooth again. Her deprived eyes and deathcamp
shoulders. There there
we say, bringing
bright things in desperation:
a flower? We make
dolls of other people and offer
them to her. Have him, we say,
what about her? Eat their heads off
for all we care, but stop crying.
She half sits in the bed, shaking
her head under the cowl of hair.
Nothing will do, ever.
She discards us, crumples down
into the sheets, twisting around
that space we can never
hope to fill,
hugging her true mother,
not among us:
hugging her darkness.
She
The snake hunts and sinews
his way along and is not his own
idea of viciousness. All he wants is
a fast grab, with fur and a rapid
pulse, so he can take that fluttering
and make it him, do a transfusion.
They say whip or rope about him, but this
does not give the idea; nor
phallus, which has no bones,
kills nothing and cannot see.
The snake sees red, like a hand held
above sunburn. Zeroes in,
which means, aims for the round egg
with nothing in it but blood.
If lucky, misses the blade
slicing light just behind him.
He's our idea of a bad time, we are his.
I say he out of habit. It could be she.
Werewolf Movies
Men who imagine themselves covered with fur and sprouting
fangs, why do they do that? Padding among wet
moonstruck treetrunks crouched on all fours, sniffing
the mulch of sodden leaves, or knuckling
their brambly way, arms dangling like outsized
pajamas, hair all over them, noses and lips
sucked back into their faces, nothing left of their kindly
smiles but yellow eyes and a muzzle. This gives them
pleasure, they think they'd be
more animal. Could then freely growl, and tackle
women carrying groceries, opening
their doors with keys. Freedom would be
bared ankles, the din of tearing: rubber, cloth,
whatever. Getting down to basics. Peel, they say
to strippers, meaning: take off the skin.
A guzzle of flesh
dogfood, ears in the bowl. But
no animal does that: couple and kill,
or kill first: rip up its egg, its future.
No animal eats its mate's throat, except
spiders and certain insects, when it's the protein
male who's gobbled. Why do they have this dream then?
Dress-ups for boys, some last escape
from having to be lawyers? Or a
rebellion against the mute
resistance of objects: reproach of the
pillowcase big with pillow, the tea-
cosy swollen with its warm
pot, not soft as it looks but hard
as it feels, round tummies of saved string in the top
drawer tethering them down. What joy, to smash the
tyranny of the doorknob, sink your teeth
into the inert defiant eiderdown with matching
spring-print queensized sheets and listen to her
scream. Surrender.
How to Tell One Country From Another
Whether it is possible to becom
e lost.
Whether one tree looks like another.
Whether there is water all around
the edges or not. Whether
there are edges or whether
there are just insects.
Whether the insects bite,
whether you would die
from the bites of the insects.
Whether you would die.
Whether you would die for your country.
Whether anyone in the country would die for your country.
Let's be honest here.
A layer of snow, a layer of granite, a layer of snow.
What you think lies under the snow.
What you think lies.
Whether you think white on white is a state of mind
or blue on blue or green on green.
Whether you think there is a state,
of mind.
How many clothes you have to take off
before you can make love.
This I think is important:
the undoing of buttons, the gradual shedding.
of one color after another. It leads
to the belief that what you see is not
what you get.
Whether there are preliminaries,
hallways, vestibules,
basements, furnaces,
chesterfields, silences
between sentences, between pieces
of furniture, parasites in your eyes,
drinkable water.
Whether there has ever been
an invading army.
Whether, if there were an invading army,