in different centuries, under altered suns.
I see your blood soaking into the linoleum,
I see you twisted, a mop some giant hand
is wringing out. Pain in the careless joke
and shouted insult and knotted fist. Pain like knives
and forks set out on the domestic table.
You look to men for salvation and every year
finds you more helpless. Do I battle
for other women, myself included,
because I cannot give you anything
you want? I cannot midwife you free.
In my childhood bed we float, your sweet
husky voice singing about the crescent
moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would
climb into like a boat and row away
and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.
In the land where the moon hides, mothers
and daughters hold each other tenderly.
There is no male law at five o’clock.
Our sameness and our difference do not clash
metal on metal but we celebrate and learn.
My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.
The life you gave me burns its acetylene
of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,
the compost of discontent, flaring into words
strong for other women under your waning moon.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
TO BE OF USE
LIVING IN THE OPEN
THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE
SEVEN NEW POEMS
It breaks
You hand me a cup of water;
I drink it and thank you pretending
what I take into me so calmly
could not kill me. We take food
from strangers, from restaurants
behind whose swinging doors flies
swarm and settle, from estranged
lovers who dream over the salad plates
of breaking the bones of our backs
with a sledgehammer.
Trust flits through the apple
blossoms, a tiny spring warbler
in bright mating plumage. Trust
relies on learned pattern
and signal to let us walk down
stairs without thinking each
step, without stumbling.
I breathe smog and pollen
and perfume. I take parts
of your body inside me. I give you
the flimsy black lace and sweat
stained sleaze of my secrets.
I lay my sleeping body naked
at your side. Jump, you shout.
I do and you catch me.
In love we open wide as a house
to a summer afternoon, every shade up
and window cranked open and doors
flung back to the probing breeze.
If we love for long, we stand like row
houses with no outer walls
on the companionable side.
Suddenly we are naked,
abandoned. The plaster of bedrooms
hangs exposed to the street, wall
paper, pink and beige skins of broken
intimacy torn and flapping.
To fear you is fearing my left
hand cut off, a monstrous crab
scaling the slippery steps of night.
The body, the lineaments of old
desire remain, but the gestures
are new and harsh. Words unheard
before are spat out grating
with the rush of loosed anger.
Friends bear back to me banner
headlines of your rewriting of our
common past. You explain me away,
a dentist drilling a tooth.
I wonder at my own trust, how absolute
it was, mortal but part of me
like the bones of my pelvis.
You were the true center of my
cycles, the magnetic north
I used to plot my wanderings.
It is not that I will not love
again or give myself into partnership
or lie naked sweating secrets
like nectar, but I will never
share a joint checking account
and when some lover tells me, Always,
baby, I’ll be thinking, sure,
until this one too meets an heiress
and ships out. After a bone breaks
the healing and the damage.
What’s that smell in the kitchen?
All over America women are burning dinners.
It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock
in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they’re supposed to bring with calico
smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it’s
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
Wind is the wall of the year
Much of what I had thought mine
essentially has fallen from me
of death, desertion, of ideas changed
conveniently as the temperature
drops and glaciers begin to creep.
The strong broad wind of autumn brushes
before it torn bags, seared apple skins,
moth wings, scraps of party velvet.
The hickory is a hard yellow scream
among maples’ open raging mouths.
Lye in the wind eats the flesh from the land
till black skeletons arch against the sky,
till earth’s great backbone rears, granite
picked clean of all abundance, consolation.
The road is strewn with broken ribs of branches.
Sparks spring up against the morning
devouring the last green, frying the sap.
A sheet of flame covers the day,
a cushion of haze in the bleeding afternoon,
a violent sunset over before supper.
I reach up into the sky and find
in ash of leaves, days and works, a love
I had expected to die still weaving,
dropping away to expose I must hope
some core to wait out this winter,
uncertain now if this is the winter
of my life or only a season like all
others to be entertained like a tyran-
nical guest or even enjoyed for the anatomy
it teaches as it rapidly dissects me.
Laocoön is the name of the figure
That sweet sinewy green nymph
eddying in curves through the grasses:
she must stop and stare at him.
Of all the savage secret creatures
he imagines stealthy in the quivering
night, she must be made to approach,
she must be tamed to love him.
The power of his wanting will turn
her from hostile dark wandering
other beyond the circle of his
campfire into his own, his flesh,
his other wanting half. To keep her
she must be filled with his baby,
weighted down.
Then suddenly
the horror of it: he awakens,
wrapped in the coils of the mother,
the great old serpent hag,
the hungry ravening witch who gives
birth and demands, and the lesser
mouths of the grinning children
gobbling his substance. He
must cut free.
An epic battle
in courts and beds and offices,
in barrooms and before the bar
and then free at last, he wanders.
There on the grassy hill, how the body
moves,
her, the real one,
green
as a mayfly she hovers and he pounces.
Snow, snow
Like the sun on February ice dazzling;
like the sun licking the snow back
roughly so objects begin to poke through,
logs and steps, withered clumps of herb;
like the torch of the male cardinal
borne across the clearing from pine
to pine and then lighting among the bird
seed and bread scattered; like the sharp
shinned hawk gliding over the rabbit
colored marsh grass, exulting
in talon-hooked cries to his larger mate;
like the little pale green seedlings sticking
up their fragile heavy heads on white stalks
into the wide yellow lap of the pregnant sun;
like the sky of stained glass the eye seeks
for respite of the glitter that makes the lips
part; similar to all of these pleasures
of the failing winter and the as yet unbroken
blue egg of spring is our joy as we twist
and twine about each other in the bed
facing the window where the sun plays
the tabla of the thin cold air
and the snow sings soprano
and the emerging earth drones bass.
Digging in
This fall you will taste carrots
you planted, you thinned, you mulched,
you weeded and watered. You don’t
know yet they will taste like yours,
not others, not mine.
This earth is yours as you love it.
We drink the water of this hill
and give our garbage to its soil.
We haul thatch for it and seaweed.
Out of it rise supper and roses
for the bedroom and herbs
for your next cold.
Your flesh grows out of this hill
like the maple trees. Its sweetness
is baked by this sun. Your eyes
have taken in sea and the light leaves
of the locust and the dark bristles
of the pine.
When we work in the garden you say
that now it feels sexual, the plants
pushing through us, the shivering
of the leaves. As we make love
later the oaks bend over us,
the hill listens.
The cats come and sit on the foot
of the bed to watch us.
Afterwards they purr.
The tomatoes grow faster and the beans.
You are learning to live in circles
as well as straight lines.
Let us gather at the river
I am the woman who sits by the river
river of tears
river of sewage
river of rainbows.
I sit by the river and count the corpses
floating by from the war upstream.
I sit by the river and watch the water
dwindle and the banks poke out like sore gums.
I watch the water change from green to shit brown.
I sit by the river and fish for your soul.
I want to lick it clean.
I want to turn it into a butterfly
that will weave drunkenly from orchid to rose.
I want to turn it into a pumpkin.
I want it to turn itself into a human being.
Oh, close your eyes tight and push hard
and evolve, altogether now. We can
do it if we try. Concentrate
and hold hands and push.
You can take your world back
if you want to. It’s an araucana
egg, all blue and green
swaddled in filmy clouds.
Don’t let them cook and gobble it,
azure and jungle green egg laid
by the extinct phoenix of the universe.
Send me your worn hacks of tired themes, your dying horses of liberation,
your poor bony mules of freedom now.
I am the woman sitting by the river.
I mend old rebellions and patch them new.
Now the river turns from shit brown to bubbling blood
as an arm dressed in a uniform
floats by like an idling log.
Up too high to see, bombers big as bowling alleys
streak over and the automated battlefield
lights up like a Star Wars pinball machine.
I am the old woman sitting by the river scolding corpses.
I want to stare into the river and see the bottom
glinting like clean hair.
I want to outlive my usefulness
and sing water songs, songs
in praise of the green brown river
flowing clean through the blue green world.
The following is a list of the poems in this book and the dates they were written, which, as you can see, often is different from the date of the book publication.
From BREAKING CAMP
Kneeling at the pipes 1965
Visiting a dead man on a summer day 1966
Girl in white 1963
Noon of the sunbather 1961
A valley where I don’t belong 1961
S. dead 1965
Hallow eve with spaces for ghosts 1965
Landed fish 1966
A few ashes for Sunday morning 1961
Concerning the mathematician 1966
Postcard from the garden 1964
The cats of Greece 1964
Sign 1967
A married walk in a hot place 1964
The Peaceable Kingdom 1966
Gasman invites the skyscrapers to dance 1967
The skyscrapers of the financial district dance with Gasman 1967
Breaking camp 1966, revised 1981
From HARD LOVING
Walking into love 1968
Community 1967
The neighbor 1966
The friend 1967
The morning half-life blues began 1952, finished 1967
Erasure 1967
The cyclist 1966
Juan’s twilight dance 1967
Learning experience 1966
Half past home began 1960, finished 1968
Simple-song 1967
For Jeriann’s hands 1967
I am a light you could read by 1967
Crabs 1968
Trajectory of the traveling Susan 1968
The butt of winter 1968
Bronchitis on the 14th floor 1968
The death of the small commune 1969
The track of the master builder (published in Hard Loving as “Homo faber” 1967, rewritten 1981 for this vol.)
Why the soup tastes like the Daily News 1967
Curse of the earth magician on a metal land 1967
From 4-TELLING
Letter to be disguised as a gas bill 1965
Sojourners 1966
Under the grind 1967
Somehow 1968
Never-never 1969
Ache’s end 1969
From TO BE OF USE
A work of artiface 1970
What you
waited for 1971
The secretary chant 1968
Night letter 1968
In the men’s room(s) 1972
The nuisance 1968
I will not be your sickness 1968
The thrifty lover 1971
A shadow play for guilt 1969
Song of the fucked duck 1969
A just anger 1971
The crippling 1969
Right thinking man 1971
Barbie doll 1970
Hello up there 1972
High frequency 1973
The woman in the ordinary 1970
Unlearning to not speak 1971
Women’s laughter 1972
Burying blues for Janis 1970
The best defense is offensive began 1960, finished 1971
Icon began 1960, finished 1972
Some collisions bring luck 1967
We become new 1971
Meetings like hungry beaks 1972
To be of use 1973
Bridging 1971
Doing it differently 1972
The spring offensive of the snail 1972
Councils 1971
Laying Down the Tower 1971–72
From LIVING IN THE OPEN
Living in the open 1974
I awoke with the room cold 1970
Gracious goodness 1971
Homesick 1973
Seedlings in the mail 1972
The daily life of the worker bee 1974
Cod summer 1972
A proposal for recycling wastes 1974
The bumpity road to mutual devotion 1974
On Castle Hill 1973
From Sand Roads 1975
Rough times 1972
Phyllis wounded 1975
Rape poem 1974
The consumer 1969
The provocation of the dream 1975
Looking at quilts 1974
To the pay toilet 1973
All clear 1972
Unclench yourself 1968
The homely war 1975
From THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
The twelve-spoked wheel flashing 1976
What the owl sees 1975