folded inside dreaming of wings.
You are those wings, Martha,
and in you your mother
and your mother’s mother climb
to the synagogue roof, standing there
black against the sun flapping,
flapping, and take off heavily
as albatrosses, running
to lurch, lumber into the dirty air
and hang unlikely as a boot.
Then off, the big wings
hinging gracefully, higher.
For months at a time, Martha,
for years the albatross
sails the ocean winds and never
bothers to touch land
except to mate.
The love of lettuce
With a pale green curly
lust I gloat over it nestled
there on the wet earth
(oakleaf, buttercrunch, ruby, cos)
like so many nests
waiting for birds
who lay hard boiled eggs.
The first green eyes
of the mustard, the frail
wands of carrots, the fat
thrust of the peas: all
are precious as I kneel
in the mud weeding
and the thinnings go into the salad.
The garden with crooked
wandering rows dug
by the three of us
drunk with sunshine has
an intricate pattern emerging
like the back of a rug.
The tender seedlings
raise their pinheads
with the cap of seed stuck on.
Cruel and smiling with sharp
teeth is the love of lettuce.
You grow out of last year’s
composted dinner and you
will end in my hot mouth.
Snow in May
It isn’t supposed to happen:
snow on the apple boughs
beside the blossoms, the hills
green and white at once.
Backs steaming, horses
stand in the crusted pasture
switching their tails
in the snow, their broad
flanks like doors of leather
ovens. We lie on a mattress
in the high room with no
heat. Your body chills.
I keep taking parts of you
into my mouth, finny nose,
ears like question marks,
fatfaced toes, raspberry
cock, currant nipples, plum
balls. The snow hangs
sheets over the windows.
My grandmother used to drink
tea holding a sugar cube
between her teeth: hot boiling
strong black tea
from a glass. A gleaming
silver spoon stood up.
Before we make a fire of
our bodies I braid my black
hair and I am Grandmother braiding
her greystreaked chestnut hair
rippling to her waist before
she got into bed with me
to sleep, dead now
half my life. Ice on the palm
of my hand melting,
so cold it burns me.
The window of the woman burning
Woman dancing with hair
on fire, woman writhing in the
cone of orange snakes, flowering
into crackling lithe vines:
Woman
you are not the bound witch
at the stake, whose broiled alive
agonized screams
thrust from charred flesh
darkened Europe in the nine millions.
Woman
you are not the madonna impaled
whose sacrifice of self leaves her
empty and mad as wind,
or whore crucified
studded with nails.
Woman
you are the demon of a fountain of energy
rushing up from the coal hard
memories in the ancient spine,
plexus, lush scents from the reptilian brain,
river that winds up the hypothalamus
with its fibroids of pleasure and pain
twisted and braided like rope,
firing the lanterns of the forebrain
till they glow blood red.
You are the fire sprite
that charges leaping thighs,
that whips the supple back on its arc
as deer leap through the ankles:
dance of a woman strong
in beauty that crouches
inside like a cougar in the belly
not in the eyes of others measuring.
You are the icon of woman sexual
in herself like a great forest tree
in flower, liriodendron bearing sweet tulips,
cups of joy and drunkenness.
You drink strength from your dark fierce roots
and you hang at the sun’s own fiery breast
and with the green cities of your boughs
you shelter and celebrate
woman, with the cauldrons of your energies
burning red, burning green.
Going in
Every day alone whittles me.
I go to bed unmated and wake
with a vulture perched on my chest.
I suck my solitude
like a marrowbone, nothing
left but a memory of feasts.
Wait in the silence, wait
empty as a cracked eggshell
for the beating of heavy fast wings,
the soft pad of the big cat,
the dry grate of scales sliding over rock,
the boiling of the waves as It breaches.
I wait for the repressed, the unnamed,
the familiar twisted masks of early
terrors, or what I have always really known
lurks behind the door at night groping
from the corner of my eye, what breaks
through the paper hoop of sleep.
When all of my loves fall from me
like clothing, like the sweet flesh, what
stands but the bones of my childhood
ringed like a treetrunk with hunger
and glut, the tortured gaping
grin of my adolescence homely
as death. Then my bones drop away
like petals, my bones wither
and scatter and still I am waiting
empty as a grey arching sky, waiting
till I fall headlong into my center
the great roaring fiery heart
the crackling golden furnace of the sun.
Athena in the front lines
Only accidents preserve.
Athena Promachos, warrior goddess thirty feet tall,
no longer exists. Phidias
made her between wars in ruins
of a fort that had not kept the enemy out.
Making is an attack too, on bronze, on air, on time.
Sailors out on the Argo-Saronic
of gull and dolphin and bone-dry island
could see the sunlight creaking on her helmet.
A thousand years she stood over fire and mud,
then hauled as booty to Constantinople,
where the Crusaders, bouncy legionnaires
on the town, melted her down for coins.
These words are pebbles
sucked from mouth to mouth since Chaucer.
I don’t believe the Etruscans or the Mayans
lacked poets, only victories.
Manuscripts under glass, women’s quilts packed away
lie in the attics of museums sealed from the streets
where the tactical police are clubbing the welfare mothers.
There are no cameras, so it is not real.
Wring the stone
s of the hillside
for the lost plays of Sophocles they heard.
Art is nonaccident. Like love, it is
a willed tension up through the mind
balancing thrust and inertia, energy
stored in a bulb. Then the golden
trumpet of the narcissus pokes up
willfully into the sun, focusing the world.
The epigraphs stabbed the Song of Songs
through the smoking heart (The Church
Prepares for Her Bridegroom). The seven hundred thousand
four hundred fifty second tourist stared
the Venus de Milo into a brassiere ad.
Generations of women wrote poems and hid
them in drawers, because an able
woman is a bad woman. They expired
leaking radioactivity among pastel underwear.
A woman scribbling for no one doodles,
dabbles in madness, dribbles shame.
Art requires a plaza in the mind, a space
lit by the sun of regard. That tension
between maker and audience, that feedback,
that force field of interest, sustains
an I less guilty than Ego, who can utter
the truths of vision and nightmare,
the truths that spill like raw egg from the
cracking of body on body, the thousand
soft and slimy names of death, the songs
of the blind fish that swim
the caverns of bone, the songs
of the hawks who soar and stoop grappling
and screaming through the crystalline
skies of the forehead.
Though the cod stifle in the seas, though
the rivers thicken to shit, still
writing implies faith in someone listening,
different in content but not in need
from the child who cries in the night.
Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,
on blind inertia, on the second law
of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,
on contempt, on the silence
that does not follow the chord resolved,
the sentence spoken, but the something
that cannot be said. Perhaps there are no
words yet, perhaps the words bend the thought
back on itself, perhaps the words can be said
but cannot yet be heard, and so
the saying arches through the air and crumbles.
Making is an act, but survival
is luck, caught in history
like a moth trapped in the subway.
There is nothing to do but make well,
finish, and let go. Words
live, words die
in the mouths of everybody.
The root canal
You see before you an icing of skin,
a scum of flesh
narrowly wrapped around a tooth.
This tooth is red as a lion’s
heart and it throbs.
This tooth is hollowed out to a cave
big enough for tourists
to go through in parties with guides
in flat-bottomed boats.
This tooth sings opera all night
like a Russian basso prof undo.
This tooth plays itself like an organ
in an old movie palace; it is
the chief villain, Sydney Greenstreet,
and its laughter tickles with menace.
This tooth is dying, dying
like a cruel pharaoh, like a
fat gouty old tyrant assembling
his wives and his cabinet, his horse
and his generals, his dancing girls
and his hunting cheetah, all
to be burned on his tomb
in homage. I am nothing,
nothing at all, but a reluctant
pyramid standing here, a grandiose
talking headstone for my tooth.
Doors in the wind and the water
Doors open in the mind
and close again like wounds
healing. Doors open in the
mind and close again like
dying fish whose gills fall
finally still. Doors in the mind
open and close like mountains
you see spired white past other
mountains but never reach.
Doors open flashing in the sundarkened wave,
doors in the brown carp pool,
doors in the beard of the waterfall,
doors in the green caverns
of the tree, doors in the eye
of the goat, of the alley cat,
doors in a hand held up,
doors in the astonished skin.
The self is last summer’s
clothes unpacked from suitcases.
The self is your old physics
notebook filled with experiments
you had to fake. A well thumbed
deck where the joker fills in
for the King of Diamonds
and the dog has eaten the Ace
of Spades, but there are
five battered sevens.
Always too at the root tips growing
or dying, dark osmotic exchange
of particles, of energy, of dreams
goes wetly on. The larger mysteries
come to us at morning and evening
crowned with bladderwrack and gull feathers,
wearing the heads of cows, of horned owls,
of our children who are not ours,
of strangers whose faces open
like doors where we enter
or flee.
You ask why sometimes I say stop
You ask why sometimes I say stop
why sometimes I cry no
while I shake with pleasure.
What do I fear, you ask,
why don’t I always want to come
and come again to that molten
deep sea center where the nerves
fuse open and the brain
and body shine with a black wordless light
fluorescent and heaving like plankton.
If you turn over the old refuse
of sexual slang, the worn buttons
of language, you find men
talk of spending and women
of dying.
You come in a torrent and ease
into limpness. Pleasure takes me
farther and farther from shore
in a series of breakers, each
towering higher before it
crashes and spills flat.
I am open then as a palm held out,
open as a sunflower, without
crust, without shelter, without
skin, hideless and unhidden.
How can I let you ride
so far into me and not fear?
Helpless as a burning city,
how can I ignore that the extremes
of pleasure are fire storms
that leave a vacuum into which
dangerous feelings (tenderness,
affection, l o v e) may rush
like gale force winds.
Smalley Bar
Anchored a ways off Buoy Rocks the sailboat
bobs jaunty, light, little. We slide
over the side after scraping bottom.
The water up to our waists looks brown
ahead. We wade onto Smalley Bar.
I leave the men clamming and walk
the bar toward shore.
By the time I walk back straight out
from the coast of the wild island the tide
is rushing in. My shoes already float.
I walk the bar, invisible now,
water to my thighs. The day’s
turned smoky. A storm is blowing
thick from the east. I stand
a quarter mile out in the bay with
the tide rising and only this
strange buried bridge of sandbar under me,
calling across the breaking grey waves,
unsure whether I can still wade
or must swim against the tide to the boat
dragging its anchor loose.
Unknown territory. Strange bottom.
I live on bridges that may or may
not be there under the breaking
water deepening. I never know
what I’ll step on. I never know
whether I’ll make it before dark,
before the storm catches me,
before the tide sweeps me out.
The neat white houses across the bay
are fading as the air thickens.
People in couples, in boxes, in clear
expectations of class and role
and income, I deserve no pity
shivering here as the water rushes past.
I find more than clams out on
the bar. It’s not my sailboat
ever, but it’s my choice.
For Shoshana Rihn — Pat Swinton
History falls like rain
on the fields, like hailstones
that break the graceful
fleur de lis spears
of young corn. History falls
like freezing rain
on the small hopes, the
small pleasures of the morning,
the small struggles of a life.
History falls like bombs
scorching the birds on their nests,
burning the big-eyed voles in their tunnels,
the rabbits giving suck
curled in the green grass of June.
Craters pit the smoking fields.
A right hand, a left foot
scattered on the broken road.
History is manufactured like
plastic buckets. History is traded
on the stock exchange and the big
holding corporations
rake off a profit.
History is written to order
like the Sunday funnies. History
is floated like a bond issue
on the fat of banks.
Sometimes time funnels down
to the dripping of water
one drop at a time slow
as the slowest tears right