herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal
outing, vol de nuit.
Alone in a row on the half empty late
plane I sit by the window holding myself.
As the engines roar and the plane quivers
and then bursts forward I am tensed
and tuned for the high arc of flight
between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold
distant fires of the clustered stars. Below
the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,
ordered, radial, pulsing.
Sometimes hurtling down a highway through
the narrow cone of headlights I feel
moments of exaltation, but my night
vision is poor. I pretend at control
as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge
I am not really managing. I am in the hands
of strangers and of luck. By flight he meant
flying and I mean being flown, totally
beyond volition, willfully.
We fall in love with strangers whose faces
radiate a familiar power that reminds us
of something lost before we had it.
The braille of the studious fingers instructs
exactly what we have succumbed to, far too late
to close, to retract the self that has extruded
from us naked, vulnerable and sticky,
the foot, the tentative eyestalked head
of the mating snail.
To fall in love so late is dangerous. Below,
lights are winking out. Cars crawl into driveways
and fade into the snow. Planes make me think
of dying suddenly, and loving of dying
slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed
trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing
my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide
as I land. Love is plunging into darkness toward
a place that may exist.
Excursions, incursions
1.
“Learning to manage the process
of technological innovation
more productively” is the theme
of the speech the man beside me
on the plane to Washington
will be saying to a Congressional
subcommittee. He works at M.I.T.
He drinks a martini, glancing sideways.
His watch flashes numbers; it houses
a tiny computer. He observes
me in snatches, data to analyze:
the two-piece V-neck dress
from New York, the manuscript
I am cutting, the wild black
hair, the dirt under my stubby nails.
It doesn’t scan. I pretend
I do not see him looking
while I try to read his speech,
pretending not to: a neutron
bomb of deadly language that kills
all warm-blooded creatures
but leaves the system standing.
He rates my face and body at-
tractive but the presence
disturbing. Chop, chop, I want
to say, sure, we are enemies.
Watch out. I try to decide
if I can learn anything useful
to my side if I let him
engage me in a game of
conversation.
2.
At the big round table in the university
club, the faculty are chatting
about wives, marriages, divorces, visiting
arrangements. They all belong
to the same kinship system. They have
one partner at a time, then terminate.
Monogamy means that the husband has
sex only a couple of times with each
other female, I figure out, and
the wife, only with him. Afterwards
the children spend summers/weekends/
Sundays with the father.
Listening becomes eavesdropping and they
begin to feel my silence like a horse
in the diningroom. Gradually as I sit
my hair mats. Feathers stick up from
it, crow and eagle. My cheeks break
out into painted zigzag designs. My spear
leans against the back of my chair.
They begin to question me, oh, um,
do you live communally? What do
you mean, “open”? Hair breaks through
the back of my hands. My fangs
drum on the table top. In another moment
I will swing by my long prehensile
tail from the crystal chandelier,
3.
The men are laughing as I approach
and then they price me: that calculating
scan. Everything turns into hornets
buzzing, swarming. One will
tell me about his wife
weeping tears of pure beersuds;
one is even now swaggering down
the Tombstone set of his mind, the fastest
gun; one will let me know in the next
half hour he thinks political writers
are opportunistic simpletons, and women
have minds of goat fudge; one will
only try unceasingly to bed me as if
I were the week’s prize, and he wears
a chain of fellowships and grants
like sharpshooters’ medals. Mostly they
will chase the students and drink, mostly
they will gossip and put each other
down, mostly they will complain. I
am here for the women, a political
task. They think they have a label
for that. I am on vacation from sex
and love, from the fatty broth
of my life. I am seeking to be useful,
the good godmother. We are acting
in different fables. I know the plots
of theirs, but none of them recognize
mine, except the students, who understand
at once they will be allowed
to chew me to the bones.
4.
I am sitting on a kitchen chair.
My feet do not reach the floor.
If I sit forward, they’ll rest on
a rung, but if I do that, the women
will stop talking and look at me
and I’ll be made to go outside
and “play” in this taffeta dress.
What they say is not what they
are talking about, which lumps
just underneath. If I listen, if I
screw up my face and hold my breath
and listen, I’ll see it, the moving
bump under the rug, that snake in the
tablecloth jungle, the bulge
in women’s dresses you aren’t supposed
to notice. I listen and listen
but it doesn’t go anyplace,
nobody comes out all
right in the end. I get bored
and kick the table leg and am sent
outside to sulk, still not knowing.
I never got there, into the hot
wet heart of the kitchen gossip,
to sit twisting the ring on my finger
worn smooth, saying my hubby, my old
man, him. I never grew up, Mama,
I grew off, I grew outside. I grew
like crazy. I am the calico
mouse gnawing at the foundations.
The sweet snake is my friend who chews
on the roots of the hangman’s tree
to bring it down. I am the lump
under the tablecloth that moves
stealthily toward the cream pitcher.
After years under the rug like a tumor
they invite me into the parlor, Mama,
they pay me by check and it doesn’t bounce.
I’m giving a speech tonight. Do they
think I’m kidding? The walls I write
on are for sale now, but the message
is the same as I wrote in
blood on the jail house wall.
Energy flowing through me gets turned
into money and they take that back,
but the work remains, Mama, under
the carpet, in the walls, out
in the open. It goes on talking
after they’ve shut me up.
Apologies
Moments
when I care about nothing
except an apple:
red as a maple tree
satin and speckled
tart and winy.
Moments
when body is all:
fast as an elevator
pulsing out waves of darkness
hot as the inner earth
molten and greedy.
Moments
when sky fills my head:
bluer than thought
cleaner than number
with a wind
fresh and sour
cold from the mouth of the sea.
Moments
of sinking my teeth
into now like a hungry fox:
never otherwise
am I so cruel;
never otherwise
so happy.
The long death
for Wendy Teresa Simon (September 25, 1954–August 7, 1979)
Radiation is like oppression,
the average daily kind of subliminal toothache
you get almost used to, the stench
of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.
We comprehend the disasters of the moment,
the nursing home fire, the river in flood
pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane
crash with fragments of burnt bodies
scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,
the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.
But how to grasp a thing that does not
kill you today or tomorrow
but slowly from the inside in twenty years.
How to feel that a corporate choice
means we bear twisted genes and our
grandchildren will be stillborn if our
children are very lucky.
Slow death can not be photographed for the six
o’clock news. It’s all statistical,
the gross national product or the prime
lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw
in the right spectrum, how it would shine,
lurid as magenta neon.
If we could smell radiation like seeping
gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we
could hear it as a low ominous roar
of the earth shifting, then we would not sit
and be poisoned while industry spokesmen
talk of acceptable millirems and .02
cancer per population thousand.
We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,
murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,
from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,
and fourteen years later statistics are printed
on the rise in leukemia among children.
We never see their faces. They never stand,
those poisoned children together in a courtyard,
and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.
The shipyard workers who built nuclear
submarines, the soldiers who were marched
into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-
bomb, the people who work in power plants,
they die quietly years after in hospital
wards and not on the evening news.
The soft spring rain floats down and the air
is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings
drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,
you run in it and feel clean and strong,
the spring rain blowing from the irradiated
cloud over the power plant.
Radiation is oppression, the daily average
kind, the kind you’re almost used to
and live with as the years abrade you,
high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,
a hacking cough: you take it inside
and it becomes pain and you say, not
They are killing me, but I am sick now.
The cast off
This is a day to celebrate can-
openers, those lantern-jawed long-tailed
humping tools that cut through what keeps
us from what we need: a can of beans
trapped in its armor taunts the nails
and teeth of a hungry woman.
Today let us hear hurrahs for zippers,
those small shark teeth that part
politely to let us at what we want;
the tape on packages that unlock
us birthday presents; envelopes
we slit to thaw the frozen
words on the tundra of paper.
Today let us praise the small
rebirths, the emerging groundhog
from the sodden burrow; the nut
picked from the broken fortress of walnut
shell, itself pried from the oily fruit
shaken from the high turreted
city of the tree.
Today let us honor the safe whose door
hangs ajar; the champagne bottle
with its cork bounced off the ceiling
and into the soup tureen; the Victorian lady
in love who has removed her hood, her cloak,
her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress,
her underdress, her wool petticoat, her linen
petticoats, her silk petticoats, her whalebone
corset, her bustle, her chemise, her drawers, and
who still wants to! Today let us praise the cast
that finally opens, slit neatly in two
like a dinosaur egg, and out at last
comes somewhat hairier, powdered in dead skin
but still beautiful, the lost for months
body of my love.
Rainy 4th
I am someone who boots myself from bed
when the alarm cracks my sleep. Spineless
as raw egg on the tilted slab of day
I ooze toward breakfast to be born.
I stagger to my desk on crutches of strong coffee.
How sensuous then are the mornings we do
not rise. This morning we curl embracing
while rain crawls over the roof like a thousand
scuttling fiddler crabs. Set off a
twenty-one tea kettle salute
for a rainy 4th with the parade and races
cancelled, our picnic chilling disconsolate
in five refrigerators. A sneaky hooray
for the uneven gallop of the drops,
for the steady splash of the drainpipe,
for the rushing of the leaves in green
whooshing wet bellows, for the teeming wind
that blows the house before it in full sail.
We are at sea together in the woods.
The air chill enough for the quilt, warm
and sweet as cocoa and coconut we make
love in the morning when there’s never time.
Now time rains over us liquid and vast.
We talk facing, elastic parentheses.
We dawdle in green mazes of conversing
seeking no way out but only farther into
the undulating hedges, grey statues of nymphs,
satyrs and learned old women, broken busts,
past a fountain and tombstone
in the boxwood of our curious minds
that like the pole beans on the fence
expand perceptibly in the long rain.
Attack of the squash
people
And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.
They’re coming, they’re on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!
Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped with cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.
Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.
Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people’s gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.
With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.
Intruding
What are you doing up, my cat
complains as I come into the living
room at two in the morning: she
is making eyes through the glass
at a squat ruffed grey tom. He fades
back, only the gold eyes shining
like headlights under the bird feeder.
Retreat with all deliberate speed
says the skunk in the path
at the marsh’s edge, tail upraised
quivering in shape like a question