by Buffalo Gals
The alien took me up at once and returned to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it. But how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its amusement…Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then I have known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel.
When it put me into the baby maze yesterday, I could not move. The power of speech was all but gone (I am dancing this, of course, in my mind; “the best maze is the mind,” the old proverb goes) and I simply crouched there, silent. After a while it took me out again, gently enough. There is the ultimate perversity of its behavior: it has never once touched me cruelly.
It set me down in the prison, locked the gate, and filled up the trough with inedible food. Then it stood two-legged, looking at me for a while.
Its face is very mobile, but if it speaks with its face I cannot understand it, that is too foreign a language. And its body is always covered with bulky, binding mats, like an old widower who has taken the Vow of Silence. But I had become accustomed to its great size, and to the angular character of its limb-positions, which at first had seemed to be saying a steady stream of incoherent and mispronounced phrases, a horrible nonsense-dance like the motions of an imbecile, until I realized that they were strictly purposive movements. Now I saw something a little beyond that, in its position. There were no words, yet there was communication. I saw, as it stood watching me, a clear signification of angry sadness—as clear as the Sembrian Stance. There was the same lax immobility, the bentness, the assertion of defeat. Never a word came clear, and yet it told me that it was filled with resentment, pity, impatience, and frustration. It told me it was sick of torturing me, and wanted me to help it. I am sure I understood it. I tried to answer. I tried to say, “What is it you want of me? Only tell me what it is you want.” But I was too weak to speak clearly, and it did not understand. It has never understood.
And now I have to die. No doubt it will come in to watch me die; but it will not understand the dance I dance in dying.
(1971)
The Wife’s Story
HE WAS A GOOD HUSBAND, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle. If you’d have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn’t any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother over near Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn’t got any game at all, not so much as a field mouse, but he wasn’t cast down about it. He was just larking along enjoying the morning air. That’s one of the things I first loved about him. He didn’t take things hard, he didn’t grouch and whine when things didn’t go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things moved right along after that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister said—see, my parents had moved out the year before and gone South, leaving us the place—my sister said, kind of teasing but serious, “Well! If he’s going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn’t room for me!” And she moved out—just down the way. We’ve always been real close, her and me. That’s the sort of thing doesn’t ever change. I couldn’t ever have got through this bad time without my sis.
Well, so he came to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happy year of my life. He was just purely good to me. A hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine-looking. Everybody looked up to him, you know, young as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and more often they had him to lead the singing. He had such a beautiful voice, and he’d lead off strong, and the others following and joining in, high voices and low. It brings the shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I’d stayed home from meeting when the children was babies—the singing coming up through the trees there, and the moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. I’ll never hear anything so beautiful. I’ll never know a joy like that again.
It was the moon, that’s what they say. It’s the moon’s fault, and the blood. It was in his father’s blood. I never knew his father, and now I wonder what become of him. He was from up Whitewater way, and had no kin around here. I always thought he went back there, but now I don’t know. There was some talk about him, tales, that come out after what happened to my husband. It’s something runs in the blood, they say, and it may never come out, but if it does, it’s the change of the moon that does it. Always it happens in the dark of the moon. When everybody’s home asleep. Something comes over the one that’s got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can’t sleep, and goes out into the glaring sun, and goes off all alone—drawn to find those like him. And it may be so, because my husband would do that. I’d half rouse and say, “Where you going to?” and he’d say, “Oh, hunting, be back this evening,” and it wasn’t like him, even his voice was different. But I’d be so sleepy, and not wanting to wake the kids, and he was so good and responsible, it was no call of mine to go asking “Why?” and “Where?” and all like that.
So it happened that way maybe three times or four. He’d come back late, and worn out, and pretty near cross for one so sweet-tempered—not wanting to talk about it. I figured everybody got to bust out now and then, and nagging never helped anything. But it did begin to worry me. No so much that he went, but that he come back so tired and strange. Even, he smelled strange. It made my hair stand up on end. I could not endure it and I said, “What is that—those smells on you? All over you!” And he said, “I don’t know,” real short, and made like he was sleeping. But he went down when he thought I wasn’t noticing, and washed and washed himself. But those smells stayed in his hair, and in our bed, for days.
And then the awful thing. I don’t find it easy to tell about this. I want to cry when I have to bring it to my mind. Our youngest, the little one, my baby, she turned from her father. Just overnight. He come in and she got scared-looking, stiff, with her eyes wide, and then she begun to cry and try to hide behind me. She didn’t yet talk plain but she was saying over and over, “Make it go away! Make it go away!”
The look in his eyes, just for one moment, when he heard that. That’s what I don’t want ever to remember. That’s what I can’t forget. The look in his eyes looking at his own child.
I said to the child, “Shame on you, what’s got into you?”—scolding, but keeping her right up close to me at the same time, because I was frightened too. Frightened to shaking.
He looked away then and said something like, “Guess she just waked up dreaming,” and passed it off that way. Or tried to. And so did I. And I got real mad with my baby when she kept on acting crazy scared of her own dad. But she couldn’t help it and I couldn’t change it.
He kept away that whole day. Because he knew, I guess. It was just beginning dark of the moon.
It was hot and close inside, and dark, and we’d all been asleep some while, when something woke me up. He wasn’t there beside me. I heard a little stir in the passage, when I listened. So I got up, because I could bear it no longer. I went out into the passage, and it was light there, hard sunlight coming in from the door. And I saw him standing just outside, in the tall grass by the entrance. His head was hanging. Presently he sat down, like he felt weary, and looked down at his feet. I held still, inside, and watched—I didn’t know what for.
And I saw what he saw. I saw the changing. In his feet, it was, first. They got long, each foot got longer, stretching out, the toes stretching out and the foot getting long, and fleshy, and whit
e. And no hair on them.
The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over, then, like a worm’s skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I looked. It got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue—blue, with white rims around the blue—staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face.
He stood up then on two legs.
I saw him, I had to see him, my own dear love, turned into the hateful one.
I couldn’t move, but as I crouched there in the passage staring out into the day I was trembling and shaking with a growl that burst out into a crazy, awful howling, A grief howl and a terror howl and a calling howl. And the others heard it, even sleeping, and woke up.
It stared and peered, that thing my husband had turned into, and shoved its face up to the entrance of our house. I was still bound by mortal fear, but behind me the children had waked up, and the baby was whimpering. The mother anger come into me then, and I snarled and crept forward.
The man thing looked around. It had no gun, like the ones from the man places do. But it picked up a heavy fallen tree-branch in its long white foot, and shoved the end of that down into our house, at me. I snapped the end of it in my teeth and started to force my way out, because I knew the man would kill our children if it could. But my sister was already coming. I saw her running at the man with her head low and her mane high and her eyes yellow as the winter sun. It turned on her and raised up that branch to hit her. But I come out of the doorway, mad with the mother anger, and the others all were coming answering my call, the whole pack gathering, there in that blind glare and heat of the sun at noon.
The man looked round at us and yelled out loud, and brandished the branch it held. Then it broke and ran, heading for the cleared fields and plowlands, down the mountainside. It ran, on two legs, leaping and weaving, and we followed it.
I was last, because love still bound the anger and the fear in me. I was running when I saw them pull it down. My sister’s teeth were in its throat. I got there and it was dead. The others were drawing back from the kill, because of the taste of the blood, and the smell. The younger ones were cowering and some crying, and my sister rubbed her mouth against her forelegs over and over to get rid of the taste. I went up close because I thought if the thing was dead the spell, the curse must be done, and my husband could come back—alive, or even dead, if I could only see him, my true love, in his true form, beautiful. But only the dead man lay there white and bloody. We drew back and back from it, and turned and ran, back up into the hills, back to the woods of the shadows and the twilight and the blessed dark.
(1979)
Five Vegetable Poems
The first four of these poems have to do with threat and survival, fragility and toughness, what lasts and what can’t last. I think Westerners may sometimes perceive plants a bit differently from those who grew up where water can be taken for granted. In the West, one is often forced to see the plants as quite contingent. By now, however, anybody anywhere who can take trees for granted probably also believes that the so-called shortage of bison on the Great Plains is a liberal conspiracy,
The fifth poem, “The Crown of Laurel,” is what Adrienne Rich has called a re-visioning. Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living, ways of telling the world, narrating reality, but in order to be useful they must (however archetypal and collectively human their structure) be retold; and the teller makes them over—and over. Many women and some men are now engaged in what almost seems a shared undertaking of re-telling, re-thinking the myths and tales we learned as children—fables, folktales, legends, hero-stories, god-stories. So John Gardner in his brilliant novel Grendel (Beowulf as seen by the monster), and Anne Sexton’s equally brilliant Transformations of folktales; and the work goes on, and this poem is part of it. Very often the re-visioning consists in a ‘simple’ change of point of view. It is possible that the very concept of Point-of-view may be changing, may have to change, or to be changed, so that our reality can be narrated.
Torrey Pines Reserve
(For Bob and Mary Elliott)
Ground dry as yellow bones.
A dust of sand, gold-mica-glittering.
Oh, dry! Grey ceanothus stems
twisted and tough; small flowers. A lizard place.
Rain rare and hard as an old woman’s tears
runnelled these faces of the cliffs.
Sandstone is softer than the salty wind;
it crumbles, wrinkles, very old,
vulnerable. Circles in the rock
in hollows worn by ocean long ago.
These are eyes that were his pearls.
One must walk
lightly; this is fragile.
Hold to the thread of way.
There’s narrow place for us
in this high place between the still
desert and the stillness of the sea.
This gentle wilderness.
The Torrey pines
grow nowhere else on earth.
Listen:
you can hear the lizards
listening.
(1973)
Lewis and Clark and After
Always in the solemn company
(save on the Desert Plains)
of those great beings (we did not
think much about it, trees
by our tribe being
seen with the one eye) we
walked across a forest continent.
Ohone! ohone! the deep groves,
the high woods of Ohio!
the fir-dark mountains, the silent lives,
the forests, the forests of Oregon!
(1985)
West Texas
Honor the lives of the terrible places:
greasewood, rabbitbrush, prickly pear,
yucca, swordfern, sagebrush,
the dingy wild-eyed sheep alert
and deer like shadows starting from the rock.
In gait and grace and stubborn strength
with delicate hoof or filament root,
stonebreakers, lifebringers.
Let there be rain for them.
(1980)
Xmas Over
The young fir in the back of the car
was silent, didn’t admire the scenery,
took up residence without comment
in the high field near the old apple,
trading a two-foot pot for the Columbia Gorge.
When the wind came up, the branches
said Ssshhh to it, but the trunk and roots
were taciturn, and will be
a hundred years from now, perhaps.
Where the glass bubbles and colored lights
were, will be rain, and owls.
It won’t hear carols sung again.
But then, it never listened.
(1982)
The Crown of Laurel
He liked to feel my fingers in his hair.
So he pulled them off me, wove a wreath of them,
and wears it at parades and contests,
my dying fingers with their kitchen smell
interlocked around his sunny curls.
Sometimes he rests on me a while.
Aside from that, he seems to have lost interest.
It wasn’t to preserve my ‘virtue’ that I ran!
What’s a nymph like me
to do with something that belongs to men?
It’s just I wasn’t in the mood.
And he didn’t care. It scared me.
The little goatleg boys can’t even talk,
but still they wait till they can smell you feel
like humping with a goatleg in the woods,
rolling and scratching and laughing—they can laugh!—
poor little hairycocks, I miss them.
When we were tired of that kind of thing
and talk, and tease, and stroke, and chase, and stretch
out panting for another talk, and sleep
in the warm shadows side by side
under the leaves, and all was as we pleased.
And then the mortal hunters of the deer,
the poachers, the deciduous shepherd-boys:
they’d stop and gape and stare with owly eyes,
not even hoping, even when I smiled…
New every spring, like daffodils, those boys.
But once for forty years I met one man
up on the sheep-cropped hills of Arcady.
I kissed his wrinkles, the ravines of time
I cannot enter, gazing in his eyes, whose dark
dimmed and deepened, seeing less always,
till he died.
I came to his burial. Among the villagers
I walked behind his grey-haired wife.
She could have been Time’s wife, my grandmother.
And then there were my brothers of the streams,
O my river-lovers, with their silver tongues
so sweet to thirst! the cool, prolonged delight
of a river moving in me, of his flow and flow and flow!
They send to my roots their kindness, even now,
and slowly I drink it from my mother’s hands.
So that was all I knew, until he came,
