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.
Dirty poem
Snow lies on my fields
though the air is so warm I want
to roll on my back and wriggle.
Sure, the dark downhill weep shows
who’s winning, and the thatch of tall
grass is sticking out of the banks,
but I want to start digging and planting.
My swelling hills, my leaf brown loamy
soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,
my garden,
why don’t you hurry up
and take your clothes off?
Leonard Avenue
Two floors down I loll
in warm cinnamon-scented water.
Box piled on box on box,
up under the eaves you float
in turgid bloodwarm sleep.
Bundled in my robe I climb
bearing coffee steaming incense
on the chill stairway air.
We’ll drink it dabbling in bed
on the shore between waking and sleep
where you enter my wetness and I
take in your warmth.
Limited but fertile possibilities
are offered by this brochure
We cannot have monogrammed towels
or matches with our names on. We cannot
have children. We cannot share joint
tax returns. We don’t have a past.
Our future is a striped unicorn, fragile,
shy, the first of a new
species born without kind
to hostile kin. We can work together
snarling and giggling and grunting.
Every few years we can have a play
as offspring. We can travel. We can
go away and come back. We can shake
each other rattling honest. We can have long
twining soft voiced phonecalls that leave me
molten and fevered. We can make each other
laugh, cry, groan till our flesh shines
phosphorescent, till heat shimmers in the room,
till we steam with joy and streamers of light
run down the insides of our eyes.
We can love. We can love. We can
love.
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
mark but in meaning an exclamation
point.
You are too near my nest so I will
let you believe you can catch and
eat me, says the whip-poor-will
leading me through the thorniest thickets
uphill and down ravines of briar
as it drags its apparently broken wing.
This is my lair, my home, my master,
my piss-post, my good brown blanket,
my feeding dish, my bone farm, all
mine and my teeth are long and sharp
as icicles and my tongue is red as your
blood I will spill if you do not
run, the German shepherd says loudly
and for half a block.
In the center of her web the spider
crouches to charge me. In the woods
the blue jay shrieks and the squirrels
perch over my head chittering while all
the small birds bide silent in the leaves.
Wherever I march on two legs
I am walking on somebody’s roof.
But when I sit still and alone
trees hatch warblers rapid as sparks.
The price of seeing is silence.
A voracious furnace of shrew darts
in the grass like a truncated snake.
On my arm a woodnymph lights probing
me curiously, faintly, as she opens
and closes the tapestried doors of flight.
The damn cast
It’s a barracuda, you say,
that attacked, swallowed your leg
and choked to death, still
attached. It’s moby prick,
the plaster caster’s bone-dry dream.
It’s a Beef Wellington with your thigh
as tenderloin; or a two foot
long red-hot getting stale in the bun.
You can no longer sneak from behind
to tickle or seize. For ten minutes
I hear you thumping up the staircase,
a dinosaur in lead boots,
before you collapse carefully in the chair
face red as borscht and puffing steam.
We find a freemasonry of the temporarily
halt: people with arms in slings,
men limping on canes, women
swinging on crutches, cross the street
to ask your story, tell theirs. But
the permanently disabled whiz by
in their wheelchairs indifferent.
They know you only visit
at difficulty. By spring you’ll
be running up my stairs two
at a time, and you won’t remember
the mountain that loomed in each building,
the heavy doors fortressed against you.
All of you I can still touch,
I cherish: how easily torn, how
quickly smashed we are. Each street
bristles with impaling machines.
I say, Take Care; yet we can’t
love in armor, can’t dance inside tanks,
can’t wave at the world from a barnacle
shell. The same nerves that melt
us to butterscotch brandy sundaes
scream pain hot as laser drills.
Inside that long egg, you atrophy.
The wrong anger
Infighting, gut battles we all
wage so well. Carnage in the fish tank.
Alligators wrestling in bed.
Nuclear attack
across the breakfast table.
Duels in the women’s center.
The fractioning faction fight.
Where does the bank president
drink his martinis? Where
do those who squeeze the juice
from the land till it blows
red dust in your eye
hang out on Saturday night?
It’s easy to kick my dog,
my child, my lover, the woman
across the desk. People
burning their lives away
for pennies pile up in neighborhoods
like rusting car bodies.
Why not stroll down to the corner
yacht club and invite the chairman
of the board of I.T. & T.
to settle it with his fists?
How hard to war against those
too powerful to show us faces
of billboard lions smiling
from bloodflecked jaws. Their eyes
flick over us like letters
written too small to read,
streets seen from seven miles
up as they spread the peacock
tail of executive jets
across skies yellow with greed.
Their ashes rain down
on our scarred arms, the fall
out from explosions
they order by memo.
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
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.
Waiting outside
All day you have been on my mind,
a seagull perched on an old wharf
piling by the steely grip of its claws,
shrieking when any other comes too near,
waiting for fish or what the tide brings,
shaking out its long white wings like laundry.
All day you have been on my mind,
a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit
with a perky veil scratching my cheek,
with a feather hanging down like a broken
tail tickling my neck, settling its
big dome over my ears muffling sounds.
All day you have been on my mind,
a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,
wind off the Sahara bearing bad
news and sand that stifles, roaring
through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,
a helmet that clamps me here to bake.
All day you have been on my mind,
a steam iron pressing the convolutions
from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying
cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable
with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow
furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.
Will we work together?
You wake in the early grey
morning in bed alone and curse
me, that I am only
sometimes there. But when
I am with you, I light
up the corners, I am bright
as a fireplace roaring
with love, every bone in my back
and my fingers is singing
like a tea kettle on the boil.
My heart wags me, a big dog
with a bigger tail. I am
a new coin printed with
your face. My body wears
sore before I can express
on yours the smallest part
of what moves me. Words
shred and splinter.
I want to make with you
some bold new thing
to stand in the marketplace,
the statue of a goddess
laughing, armed and wearing
flowers and feathers. Like sheep
of whose hair is made
blankets and coats, I want
to force from this fierce sturdy
rampant love some useful thing.
In memoriam
Walter and Lillian Lowenfels
Born into history:
going headfirst through a trapdoor
from heaven into a river
of boiling sewage: what we do
rushes on with cans and bottles.
The good die still ringing
to the nails with hope like a fever.
A friend said of another old man, his war
is over. She could not understand
why he is toted about like a talking
head to demonstrations, press
conferences, unpacked, propped up.
I said, his war is mine.
He wants to be useful as long as he
can want. He needs freedom to blow
through him seeking its hard way.
Struggle wears the bones thin
as it sings in them, but there is no pension,
no retirement fund for the guerrilla.
Alice Paul, old suffragette ailing
I can’t deliver my aunt. The French
feminists who use de Beauvoir’s apartment
for abortions, are her children. Her best love
runs flickering in their veins
altering the faces carved on their genes.
Walter, Lillian, you were my parents too.
Poet, communist, anthologist, writer of letters
of protest to The New York Times, jailbird
in the ice age fifties for your politics,
you crowed with life, Walter, in a rustle
of misfiled Thermofaxed work of poets
fifty years younger, Black, Native American,
Quebecois, voices that swarmed in your windows,
a flight of varicolored warblers escaped singing
from the prisons of the world. You grew old
in your craft but never respectable.
A fresh anger for a new outrage quickened you.
You did not think Jara in the stadium in Chile
as they crushed the fingers then the hands
before they killed him to silence, hurt less
than your friends shot in Spain in ’38.
You poured out neat history for aperitifs
to whet the hunger for dinner to come.
You heard new voices each morning and fell
in love catching enthusiasm like a viral fever.
You roared your old loves, preening, showing
off for Lillian and sister Nan, hacking up
a roasted chicken with a cleaver so the drumsticks
flew while the women pretended terror.
I miss you, old man. You never gave up.
Your death caught you still soldiering
in the war I too will never see finished.
Goodbye, Walter and Lillian, becoming history.
Under red Aries
I am impossible, I know it,
a fan with a clattering blade loose,
a car with no second gear.
I want you to love freely, I want
you to love richly and many
but I want your mouth to taste of me
and I want to walk in your dreams naked.
You are impossible, you know it,
holy March hairiness, my green
ey
ed monster, my lunatic.
On the turning spit of the full moon
my period starts flooding down and you
toss awake. Sleeping with you then
is spending a night on an airport
runway. Something groaning
from the ends of the earth is always
coming down and something overloaded
is taking off in a wake of ashes.
We are impossible, everybody says it.
I could have babysat in bobbysox
and changed you. Platoons of men
have camped on my life bivouacking
in their war. Now, presumably both adults,
I am still trying to change you.
We are cut from the same cloth, you say,
and what material is that? A crazy quilt
of satin and sackcloth, of sandpaper
and chiffon, of velvet and chickenwire.
I love you from my bones out, impulses
rising far down in the molten core
deep as orgasm in the moist and fiery pit
beyond ego. I love you from the center
of my life pulsating like a storm on the sun
shooting out arms of fire with power
enough to run a world or scorch it.
We are partially meshed in each other
and partially we turn free. We are
hooked into others like a machine
that could actually move forward,
a vehicle of flesh that could bring us
and other loving travelers to a new land.
The ordinary gauntlet
In May when the first warm days
open like peonies, the coat,
the jacket stay home.
Then making my necessary
way through streets I am impaled
on shish-kabob stares,
slobbering invitations,
smutfires of violence.
The man who blocks my path,
the man who asks my price,
the man who grabs with fat
hands like sweating crabs.
I grimace, I trot.
Put on my ugliest clothes,
layer over sweltering layer.
Sprint scowling and still
they prance in ugly numbers.
I, red meat, cunt
on the hoof, trade
insult for insult,