I want the cavalry to take off those bemedaled blue uniforms
the color of Zeus and those shiny boots clanking with spurs.
I want the horses to win this time and eat grass together.
In this movie the Army always comes bugling over the hill,
burns some squaws and pens up the rest on a reservation,
paves over the sacred dancing ground for a Stop and Shop,
and a ten-lane turnpike to the snowmobile factory.
Then they ask the doctor why nothing is fun.
Their eyes are the color of television screens.
They come by pretending, they die with their minds turned off.
Do you think on the tenting ground of General Bluster
young renegades may begin to steal away?
Or will they always go back for their paychecks?
I think it is time for the extras to burn down the movie.
Yes, I am sick of treaties with the enemy who brings to bed
his boots and his law, who is
still and after my enemy.
I have been trained to love him, and he to use me.
Yes, I am weary of war where I want exchange,
sick of harvesting disgust from the shoots of joy.
Fight with my tribe or die in your blue uniform
but don’t think you can take it off in bed.
It dyes your words, your brain runs cobalt
and your tear ducts atrophy to pebbles.
I love easily: never mind that.
Love is the paper script of this loose army.
Let us sleep on honesty at night like a board.
Talk with your body, talk with your life.
Grow me good will
rough and thick as meadow grass
but tend it like an invalid house plant,
a tender African violet in the best window.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
TO BE OF USE
LIVING IN THE OPEN
From THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
The twelve-spoked wheel flashing
A turn of the wheel, I thrust
up with effort pushing, braced and sweating,
then easy over down into sleep, body idle,
and the sweet loamy smell of the earth,
a turn of the twelve-spoked wheel flashing.
I have tried to forge my life whole,
round, integral as the earth spinning.
I have tried to bet my values,
poker played with a tarot deck,
all we hope and fear and struggle for,
where the white chips are the eyes of anguish,
the red the coins of blood paid on the streets
and the blues are all piled by the dealer.
We sit round the table gambling against the house:
the power hidden under the green felt,
the television camera that reads your hand,
the magnetic dice, the transistorized
computer controlled deck that riffles
with the sound of ice
blowing on the wind against glass.
A turn of the wheel: nothing
stays. The redwinged blackbirds implode
into a tree above the salt marsh one
March day piping and chittering
every year, but the banded pet
does not return. The cherry tree begins
to bear this June, a cluster
of sweet black fruit warm on the palm.
The rue died of the winter heaves.
We’ll plant a new one. It does not
taste the same, bitter always, but
even in bitterness there are shades,
flavors, subtle essences, discretions
in what sets the teeth on edge.
Down into the mud of pain,
buried, choking, shivering with despair,
the fire gone out in the belly’s hearth
and frogs hopping on the floor,
ears sealed with icy muck,
and the busy shrill cricket of the mad
ego twitching its legs in dry
compulsion all night. Up into the sun
that ripens you like a pear
bronze and golden, the hope that twines
its strands clambering up to the light
and bears fragrant wide blossoms opening
like singing faces.
Turn and turn again and turn,
always rolling on with massive thumps
and sudden lurching dives, I am pinned
to the wheel of the seasons,
hot and cold, sober and glad and menacing,
bearing and losing. I turn head high,
head low, my feet brushing the pine boughs,
moss in my ears, my nose gathering
snow, my feet soaked like a tree’s
roots. I go rolling on, heads and tails,
turn and turn again and turn,
pinned to the wheel of my choice and choosing still,
stretched on the wheel of the seasons,
learning and forgetting and moving
some part of the way toward
a new and better place, some part
of the way toward dying.
What the owl sees
Mirror from the twenties
in a gilded frame muting
pleasantly dull, you hung
over the secondhand buffet
in the diningroom
that proved we were practically
middleclass: table with claw
legs, cave of genteel lace.
Underneath I crawled
running my toy car.
In that asbestos box
no room was big enough
to pace more than one stride.
When we shut up we could hear
neighbors in multifamily cages
six feet each side, yelling.
We could smell the liver
and onions frying, we could
hear the tubercular cough
racking an old man’s lungs.
When the sun hit your
beveled edge, rainbows would
quiver out to stripe the walls
clear as sugar candy, pure as
the cry of my hunger.
Now you hang in this rented
space, my only heirloom, over
a radiator, and as I rise
I see my naked body
poised in you like a diver
about to leap.
Your carved frame in childhood
I feared as an owl’s head,
eyes of a predator.
You carry in your depths
like mouse bones the starving
blue face of that
unwanted brat. Survival
knocks and hisses. I still
see the wooden owl staring
but beneath I recognize
your sides are gently
curved in and out
female as my own facing
me inside you. I smile
at you, at me, at
that battered surviving heiress
of mousebone soup.
The Greater Grand Rapids lover
In all of Greater Grand Rapids you
are the only one who knows me
the shape of my thighs and my fears
working like yeast
the taste of my laughter
how my teeth chatter
in a cold wind of despairing.
Slowly I evaporate here
drying into a paper scarecrow,
simplified into a scaffolding
of pipes in which a neon
womanfist blinks. I am all
facade and fixed grimaces
like a pinochle deck.
My blood is slowing with
the wide cold brown river.
My frog heart burrows
deep in the mud of the bank.
M
y hands fold up
and harden on sticks to wait for spring.
My voice flies out over
the stiff grasses of the field
searching and comes back hungry.
Here you have fourteen lovers
and I only one. At home
I have fourteen lovers but here only you
precious as drops of winter sun.
Have you had your vitamin C,
I ask you, take another piece of
chicken, let me massage you,
solicitous as an heir
fingering a parchment will.
Curious as snails meeting on a gate
we exchange with soft horns
and wet organs, words and signals,
information, tricks, the history of the soft
flowing foot and the intricate
masonry bower of shell. How the strange
minds twine and glitter and swing
looped in words like a hammock.
How the strange minds joining stand,
charmed snakes glittering
to dance their knowledge.
Round and round I turn
in you, a cat making a bed,
kneading you with my velvet and claws,
butting and nudging and licking,
round and round, and my hair
grows another foot and my eyes
shine gold and red like a carnival.
Then I walk outside and the cold
wind plucks the fur and the shine
from all the branches of my bones.
The Lansing bad penny come again blues
So you turn up like an old
arrest record, so you turn
up like a single boot
after I finally threw the other
away, so you turn up
like a drunken wobbly angel
making your own fierce annunciation
to this wilting female
trouble, garlands of trouble.
Tomorrow you go to jail
and tonight you sit before me
brushing me with the gaze
of your eyes burning
and smoky: your eyes that
change, grey into blue,
and that look that never changes.
Lately I haven’t thought
of you every day, lately it hasn’t
been as bad, you say, and
when I laugh, your mouth
calls me cruel.
Ah, you chew your heart
like a steak rare and salty.
When you are cozy in my bed
you twitch with restlessness,
you want to be mirroring your
face in shopwindows in Port
au Prince. When you are gone
a thousand miles you wake up
with the veins of your arm
boring like sirens, and you
want me night and morning
till your belly wrings dry.
I am simple and dogged
as a turtle crossing a road
while you dance jagged epicycles
around me. Now you are
laughing because you know
how to unzip shells. For a few
hours we will both get
just what we want: this is Act
Forty Four in a play
that would be tedious to observers
but for us strict
and necessary as a bullfight,
a duel, the dance of double
suns, twinned stars
whose attraction and repulsion
balance as they inscribe
erratic orbits whose center
is where the other was
or will be.
The poet dreams of a nice warm motel
Of course the plane is late
two hours twisting bumpily
over Chicago in a droning grey funk
with the seatbelt sign on.
Either you are met by seven
young Marxists who want to know
at once What Is To Be Done
or one professor who says, What?
You have luggage? But I
parked in the no
parking zone.
Oh, we wouldn’t want to put you
up at a motel, we here at
Southwestern Orthodontic Methodist,
we want you to feel homey:
drafty rooms where icicles
drip on your forehead, dorm cubicles
under the belltower where
the bells boom all night on each
quarter hour, rooms in faculty attics
two miles from a bathroom.
The bed
is a quarter inch mattress
flung upon springs of upended
razor blades: the mattress
is stuffed with fingernail
clippings and the feathers of buzzards.
If you roll over or cough it
sounds like a five car collision.
The mattress is shaped that way
because our pet hippo Sweetie
likes to nap there. It’s homey,
isn’t it, meaning we’re going to keep
you up with instant coffee
until two A.M. discussing why
we at Middle Fork State Teachers College
don’t think you are truly great.
You’ll love our dog Ogre,
she adores sleeping with guests
especially when she’s in heat.
Don’t worry, the children
will wake you. (They do.)
In the morning while all
fourteen children (the ones
with the flu and whooping cough
and oh, you haven’t had
the mumps—I mean, yet?) assault
you with tomahawks and strawberry
jam, you are asked, oh
would you like breakfast?
Naturally we never eat
breakfast ourselves, we believe
fasting purifies the system.
don’t mind the mold.
No, we didn’t order
your books, that’s rampant
commercialism. We will call you
Miz Percy and make a joke about
women’s libbers. The mike was run
over by a snowplow.
If we were too busy to put
up posters, we’ve obtained the
outdoor Greek Amphitheater
where you’ll read to me and my wife.
If we blanketed five states
with announcements, we will be astounded
when five hundred cram into
the women’s restroom we reserved.
Oh yes, the check will be four
months late. The next hungry poet
will be told, you’ll be real comfortable
here, What’s-her-name, she wrote that book
The Flying Dyke, she was through last year
and she found it real homey
in the Athens of the West.
Skimpy day at the solstice
The whiskey-colored sun
cruises low as a marshhawk
over the dun grass.
Long intricate shadows bar the path.
Then empty intense winter sky.
Dark crouches against the walls of buildings.
The ground sinks under it.
Pale flat lemon sky,
the trees all hooks scratching.
If I could soar I could
prolong daylight on my face.
I could float on the stark
wooden light, levitating
like dried milkweed silk.
Only December and already
my bones beg for sun.
Storms have gnawed the beach
to the cliffs’ base. Oaks
in the salty blast clutch ragged
brown leaves, a derelict’s
paperbag of sad possessions
.
Like the gulls that cross from sea to bay
at sunset screaming, I am hungry.
Among sodden leaves and hay-colored needles
I scavenge for the eye’s least
nibble of green.
The market economy
Suppose some peddler offered
you can have a color TV
but your baby will be
born with a crooked spine;
you can have polyvinyl cups
and wash and wear
suits but it will cost
you your left lung
rotted with cancer; suppose
somebody offered you
a frozen precooked dinner
every night for ten years
but at the end
your colon dies
and then you do,
slowly and with much pain.
You get a house in the suburbs
but you work in a new plastics
factory and die at fifty-one
when your kidneys turn off.
But where else will you
work? where else can
you rent but Smog City?
The only houses for sale
are under the yellow sky.
You’ve been out of work for
a year and they’re hiring
at the plastics factory.
Don’t read the fine
print, there isn’t any.
Martha as the angel Gabriel
for Martha Shelley
Good Martha
you back into town like a tug
small yet massive, hooting, thumping
butting and steering through
the shoals, the temptations, the rocks.
Your politics like a good engine
rattles the decks and churns the wake lively.
Sweet Martha
bulldog butterfly, koala
bear among the eucalyptus
of the Oakland hills,
your heart is shy and your
eyes dart like swallows.
Bereft Martha,
bleeding losses, you are all
you have ever loved in woman after
woman, you yourself, and in your belly
you carry your dead mother,
a pearl of an egg
with a small wet embryo bird