on the forehead of someone lying
awake remembering, remembering
another year and another face.
Sometimes time stalls in a door
opening, a moment balanced
on a blade of choice when the hand
falters, the face freezes,
and then finally the doors of the will
open or shut
on a yes or a no.
Beyond official history of texts,
of bronze generals,
a history flows of rivers and amoebas,
of the first creeping thing
that shuddered onto the land,
a history of the woman who
tamed corn, a history
of learning and losing, a history
of making good and being had,
of some great green organism
gasping to be free.
Sometimes time funnels down
to a woman who stands in a door
saying no to those who come
with guns and warrants.
Sometimes silence
is a song that carries on the soiled wind
like a flight of geese winging north
to clear cold waters. Sometimes
history that matters is seizing your own,
the old blood clots, the too short dresses,
the anguished masks of failures half
remembered like childhood fevers,
matchboxes from motels off freeways,
snapshots with faces torn out, letters
that said too much or too little,
and saying yes. Yes, I am the person
who acted, who spoke. I grow
from what I was
like a pitch pine after a fire
that pokes up green and bushy shoots
from the charred ground
where its roots spread deep and wide.
I grow from what I was,
more, not less, yes,
in me both egg and stone.
No, I am not a soldier in your
history, I live in my own tale
with others I choose to wake me in the morning,
to sit across the table in the evening,
to wipe my forehead, to touch
my hand, to carry in my throat
like a lullaby that murmurs
no, I do not fear you
and yes, I am not for sale.
In the wet
How you shine from the inside
orange as a pumpkin’s belly,
your face beautiful as children’s
faces when they want
at white heat, when fear pinches
them, when they have not learned
how to lie well
yet.
Your pain flows into me through
my ears and fingers. Your pain
presses in, I cannot keep it away.
Like a baby in my body
you kick me as you stretch
and knock the breath out.
Yet when I shook with pain’s
fever, when fear chewed me
raw all night, you held me, you
held on. Then I was the baby
past words and blubbering.
The words, the comfort were yours
and you nurtured me shriveled
like a seed that would
never uncurl.
How strangely we mother each
other, sister and brother, lovers,
twins. For you to love me means
you must love yourself.
That is what loving is, I say,
it is not pain, it is not
pleasure, it is not compulsion
or fantasy. It is only a way
of living, wide open.
Crows
They give me a bad
reputation, those swart rowers
through the air, heavy winged
and heavy voiced, brass tipped.
Before us they lived here
in the tallest pine. Shortly
after coming I walked in
on a ceremony, the crows
were singing secretly
and beautifully a ritual.
They divebombed me. To make
peace I brought a sacrifice,
the remains of a leg
of lamb. Since then
we have had truce.
sighted, they use our land
as sanctuary for raiding
where men shoot at them.
They come down, settling like
unwieldy cargo jets, to the bird
food, scattering the
cardinals, the juncos. God
they’re big, I’ve never seen
them so near a house,
the guest says. We look
at each other, the crows
and me. Outside
they allow my slow approach.
They do not touch our crops
even in the far garden
in the bottomland. I’m aware
women have been burned
for less. I stand
under the oldest white oak
whose arms coil fat as pythons
and scream at the hunters
driving them back
with black hair coarse and streaming:
Caw! Caw!
If they come in the night
Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, Why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together
on a hard cold floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to
angry.
I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me only
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.
Sun and moonshine, starshine,
the muted grey light off the waters
of the bay at night, the white
light of the fog stealing in,
the first spears of the morning
touching a face
I love. We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.
Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculps from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.
At the core
Quiet setting the rough hairy roots
into the hole, tamping the compost;
quiet cutting the chicken between
the bones, so the knife
rarely needs sharpening as it
senses the way through;
quiet in the hollow setting
the feet down carefully so the quail
bow their heads and go on pecking;
silence as my cats walk round
and round me in bed butting
and kneading my chest with their
sharp morning feet;
silence of body on body until
the knot of the self loosens gushing;
my living is words placed end to end,
oddly assorted cuneiform bricks
half broken, crumbling, sharp,
just baked with shiny sides
and raw edges. Even in sleep
words clatter through my head
roughly, like a wheelbarrow of
bricks dumped out. Words are my work,
my tools, my weapons, my follies,
my posterity, my faith.
Yet when I grasp myself I find
the coarse black hair
and warm slowly heaving flank
of silence digging with strong
nailed feet its burrow
in the tongueless earth.
Beauty I would suffer for
Last week a doctor told me
anemic after an operation
to eat: ordered to indulgence,
given a papal dispensation to run
amok in Zabar’s.
Yet I know that in
two weeks, a month I
not the savor of roasting goose,
not the burnt sugar of caramel topping
the Saint-Honoré cake, not the pumpernickel
bearing up the sweet butter, the sturgeon
but again the scorched wire,
burnt rubber smell
of willpower, living
with the brakes on.
I want to pass into the boudoirs
of Rubens’ women. I want to dance
graceful in my tonnage like Poussin nymphs.
Those melon bellies, those vast ripening thighs,
those featherbeds of forearms, those buttocks
placid and gross as hippopotami:
how I would bend myself
to that standard of beauty, how faithfully
I would consume waffles and sausage for breakfast
with croissants on the side, how dutifully
I would eat for supper the blackbean soup
with Madeira, followed by the fish course,
the meat course, and the Bavarian cream.
Even at intervals during the day I would
suffer an occasional éclair
for the sake of appearance.
A gift of light
Grape conserve from the red Caco vine
planted five years ago:
rooted deep in the good dark loam
of the bottomland, where centuries
have washed the topsoil from the sandy
hill of pine and oak, whose bark
shows the scabs of fire.
Once this was an orchard on a farm.
When lilacs bloom in May I cap find
the cellar hole of the old house.
Once this was a village of Pamet Indians.
From shell middens I can find their campground.
From the locust outside my window the fierce
hasty October winds have stripped the delicate
grassgreen fingernails. Winter is coming early.
The birds that go are gone, the plants retreating
underground, their hope in tubers, bulb and seed.
The peaches, the tomatoes, the pears
glow like muted lanterns on their shelves. All
is put down for the winter except the root crops
still tunneling under the salt hay mulch
we gathered at the mouth of the Herring River
as the sun kippered our salty brown backs.
Even the fog that day was hot as soup.
At evening when we made love
our skin tasted of tears and leather.
This year the autumn colors are muted. Too
much rain, the winds tore the leaves loose
before they cured. I braid my life in its
strong and muted colors and I taste my love
in me this morning like something harsh
and sweet, like raw sugarcane I chewed in Cuba,
fresh cut, oozing sap.
On those Washington avenues that resemble
emperor-sized cemeteries, vast Roman mausoleum
after mausoleum where Justice and Health
are budgeted out of existence for the many,
men who smell of good cologne are pushing pins
across maps. It is time to attack the left
again, it is time for a mopping up
operation against those of us who opposed
their wars too soon, too seriously, too long.
It is time to silence the shrill voices
of women whose demands incommode men
with harems of illpaid secretaries, men
for whom industries purr, men who buy death wholesale.
Today some are released from prison and others
are sucked in. Those who would not talk
to grand juries are boxed from the light
to grow fungus on their brains and those
who talked receive a message it is time
to talk again.
I try hard to be simple, to remember always
to ask for whom what is done is done.
Who gets and who loses? Who pays
and who rakes off the profit? Whose
life is shortened? Whose heat
is shut off? Whose children end
shooting up or shot in the streets?
I try to remember to ask simple questions,
I try to remember to love my friends and fight
my enemies. But their faces are hidden
in the vaults of banks, their names are inscribed
on the great plains by strip mining and you can
only read the script from Mars. Their secret
wills are encoded in the computers that mind
nuclear submarines armed with the godheads
of death. They enter me in the drugs I buy
that erode my genes. They enter my blood invisible
as the Sevin in the water that flows
from the tap, as strontium 90 in milk.
You are part comrade and part enemy; you
are part guerrilla and part prison guard. Sometimes
you care more to control me than for winning
this lifelong war. If I am your colony
you differ only in scale from Rockefeller.
I want to trust you the way I want
to drink water when my tongue is parched
and blistered, the way I want to crouch
by a fire when I have hiked miles
through the snowy woods and my toes are numb.
Let no one doubt, no onlookers, no heirs
of our agonies, how much I have loved
what I have loved. Flying back
from Washington, I saw the air steely
bright out to the huge bell of horizon.
I leaned against the plane window, cheek
to the plastic, crooning to see the curve
of the Cape hooking out in the embrace
of the water, to see the bays, the tidal
rivers, the intricate web of marshes,
the whole body of this land like beautiful
lace, like a fraying bronze net laid
on the glittering fish belly of the sea.
I sink my hands into this hillside wrist
deep. My nails are stubby and under them
always is my own land’s dirt. I bring you
this gift of grape conserve from shelves
of summer sun bottled like glowing lights
I hope we will survive free and contentious to taste,
as I bring myself, my mouth opening
to taste you, my hands that know how
to touch you, belly and back and cunt,
history and politics. I bring you trouble
like a hornet’s nest in a hat
to roost on your head. I bring you
struggle and trouble and love
and a gift of grape conserve to melt
on your tongue, red and winy,
the summer sun within like soft jewels
passing and strong and sweet.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
TO BE OF USE
LIVING IN THE OPEN
THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
From THE MOON I
S ALWAYS FEMALE
The inside chance
Dance like a jackrabbit
in the dunegrass, dance
not for release, no
the ice holds hard but
for the promise. Yesterday
the chickadees sang fever,
fever, the mating song.
You can still cross ponds
leaving tracks in the snow
over the sleeping fish
but in the marsh the red
maples look red
again, their buds swelling.
Just one week ago a blizzard
roared for two days.
Ice weeps in the road.
Yet spring hides
in the snow. On the south
wall of the house
the first sharp crown
of crocus sticks out.
Spring lurks inside the hard
casing, and the bud
begins to crack. What seems
dead pares its hunger
sharp and stirs groaning.
If we have not stopped
wanting in the long dark,
we will grasp our desires
soon by the nape.
Inside the fallen brown
apple the seed is alive.
Freeze and thaw, freeze
and thaw, the sap leaps
in the maple under the bark
and although they have
pronounced us dead, we
rise again invisibly,
we rise and the sun sings
in us sweet and smoky
as the blood of the maple
that will open its leaves
like thousands of waving hands.
Night flight
Vol de nuit: It’s that French
phrase comes to me out of a dead
era, a closet where the bones of pets
and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams
of a twenty-year-old are salty water
and the residual stickiness of berry jam
but they have the power to paralyze
a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength.
Memory’s a minefield.
Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French
former husband. Every love has its
season, its cultural artifacts, shreds
of popular song like a billboard
peeling in strips to the faces behind,
endearments and scents, patchouli,
musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked