An Origin Like Water
Page 5
Nor even summer’s ample things,
But decay’s simple trust.
And since we had been like them cut
But from the flowering not the root
Then we had thanks to give—
That they and we had opened once,
Had found the light, had lost its glance
And still had lives to live.
Song
Where in blind files
Bats outsleep the frost
Too fast, too fast
For ice, afraid he’d slip
By me I asked him first.
Round as a bracelet
Clasping the wet grass,
An adder drowsed by berries
Which change blood to cess.
Dreading delay’s venom
I risked the first kiss.
My skirt in my hand.
Lifting my hem high
I forded the river there.
Drops splashed my thigh.
Ahead of me at last
He turned at my cry:
“Look how the water comes
Boldly to my side.
See the waves attempt
What you have never tried.”
And he late that night
Followed the leaping tide.
The Botanic Gardens
(FOR KEVIN)
Guided by love, leaving aside dispute—
Guns on the pages of newspapers, the sound
Urgent of peace—we drive in real pursuit
Of another season, spring, where each has found
Something before, new, and then sense
In the Botanic Gardens, terms of reference.
You take my hand. Three years ago, your bride,
I felt your heart in darkness, a full moon
Hauling mine to it like a tide.
Still at night our selves reach to join.
To twine like these trees in peace and stress
Before the peril of unconsciousness.
Corsican pine, guerrilla poison plants,
The first gardener here by foreign carriage
And careful seeding in this circumference
Imitated the hours of our marriage:
The flowers of forced proximity, swollen, fed,
Flourishing here, usually sheltered,
Exposed this once.
Now you have overstepped
My reach, searching for something this February
Like a scholar in poor light over a script,
Able at last to decipher its coded story.
And so preoccupied you do not see
My absence in the conservatory
Where you, while African grotesqueries
Sweat in sandy heat, at last stand
Wondering at cacti, deformed trees
Most ridicule. Each pumpkin history
Turns coach at a touch of your hand.
I watch and love you in your mystery.
Prisoners
I saw him first lost in the lion cages
of the zoo. Before he could tear it out,
I screamed my heart out. But his rages
had been left behind. All he had left was his lope,
his mane as—bored as a socialite
with her morning post—I saw him slit
A rabbit open like an envelope.
Everything after that was parody:
I glimpsed him at the hearth in a jet
cat, in a school annual tamed in type,
in a screen safari. The irony
of finding him here in the one habitat
I never expected—alive and well in our suburban
world, present as I garden, sweep,
wring the teacloth dry, domesticate
acanthus in a bowl, orbit each chair
exactly round our table. Your pullover
lies on the bed upstairs, spread out where
you can no more free yourself from the bars
of your arms round me than can over us
the lion flee, silently, his stars.
Ready for Flight
From this I will not swerve nor fall nor falter:
If around your heart the crowds disperse,
And I who at their whim now freeze or swelter
Am allowed to come to a more temperate place.
And if a runner starts to run to me
Dispatched by you, crying that all is trampled
Underfoot, terraces smashed, the entry
Into holy places rudely sampled,
Then I would come at once my love with love
Bringing to wasted areas the sight
Of butterfly and swan and turtle dove
Their wings ruffled like sails ready for flight.
In such surroundings, after the decease
Of devils, you and I would live in peace.
Anon
I sympathize but wonder what he fled
From: the press, an unimpressed boss,
His wife smirking as he came to bed,
Aunts whispering that he’d turned to verse
As though to vice?
Maybe they weren’t far wrong.
Some guilty midnight, the idea spawned, shawled
In words, he abandoned it, a foundling
To be forever afterwards the love child
Of anthologies. Then back to work,
His moment’s indiscretion a secret
Until one day rifling through a book
To find it, accusing, illegitimate.
Suburban Woman
I
Town and country at each other’s throat—
between a space of truce until one night
walls began to multiply, to spawn
like lewd whispers of the goings-on,
the romperings, the rape on either side.
The smiling killing. That you were better dead
than let them get you. But they came, armed
with blades and ladders, with slimed
knives, day after day, week by week—
a proxy violation. She woke
one morning to the usual story. Withdrawing
neither side had gained, but there, dying,
caught in cross fire, her past lay. Like a pride
of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died
and her world with them. She saw their power to sever
with a scar. She is the sole survivor.
II
Morning, mistress of talcums, spun
and second cottons, run tights
she is, courtesan to the lethal
rapine of routine. The room invites.
She reaches to fluoresce the dawn.
The kitchen lights like a brothel.
III
The chairs dusted and the morning
coffee break behind, she starts pawning
her day again to the curtains, the red
carpets, the stair rods, at last to the bed
the unmade bed where once in an underworld
of limbs, his eyes freckling the night like jeweled
lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled
bargained out of nothingness her child,
bartered from the dark her only daughter.
Waking, her cheeks dried, to a brighter
dawn she sensed in her as in April earth
a seed, a life ransoming her death.
IV
Late, quiet across her garden
sunlight shifts like a cat
burglar, thieving perspectives,
leaving her in the last light
alone, where, as shadows harden,
lengthen, silent she perceives
veteran dead-nettles, knapweed
crutched on walls, a summer’s seed
of roses trenched in peat moss, and stares
at her life falling with her flowers,
like military tribute, or the tears
of shell-shocked men, into arrears.
V
Her kitc
hen blind down—a white flag—
the day’s assault over, now she will shrug
a hundred small surrenders off as images
stillborn, unwritten metaphors, blank pages.
And on this territory, blindfold, we meet
at last, veterans of a defeat
no truce will heal, no formula prevent
breaking out fresh again. Again the print
of twigs stalking her pillow will begin
a new day and all her victims then—
hopes unreprieved, hours taken hostage—
will newly wake, while I, on a new page
will watch, like town and country, word, thought
look for ascendancy, poise, retreat
leaving each line maimed, my forces used.
Defeated we survive, we two, housed
together in my compromise, my craft—
who are of one another the first draft.
from
In Her Own Image
1980
Tirade for the Mimic Muse
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout
So here you are fumed in candle-stink.
Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass.
How you arch and pout in it!
How you poach your face in it!
Anyone would think you were a whore—
An aging out-of-work kind-hearted tart.
I know you for the ruthless bitch you are:
Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse—
Our Muse of Mimic Art.
Eye shadow, swivel brushes, blushers,
Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks,
Ice for the pores, a mud mask—
All the latest tricks.
Not one of them disguise
That there’s a dead millennium in your eyes.
You try to lamp the sockets of your loss:
The lives that famished for your look of love.
Your time is up. There’s not a stroke, a flick
Can make your crime cosmetic.
With what drums and dances, what deceits
Rituals and flatteries of war,
Chants and pipes and witless empty rites
And war-like men
And wet-eyed patient women
You did protect yourself from horrors,
From the lizarding of eyelids
From the whiskering of nipples,
From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors—
How you fled
The kitchen screw and the rack of labor,
The wash thumbed and the dish cracked,
The scream of beaten women,
The crime of babies battered,
The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief
That seeks asylum behind suburb walls—
A world you could have sheltered in your skirts—
And well I know and how I see it now,
The way you latched your belt and twitched your hem
And shook it off like dirt.
And I who mazed my way to womanhood
Through all your halls of mirrors, making faces,
To think I waited on your trashy whim!
Hoping your lamp and flash,
Your glass, might show
This world I needed nothing else to know
But love and again love and again love.
In a nappy stink, by a soaking wash
Among stacked dishes
Your glass cracked,
Your luck ran out. Look. My words leap
Among your pinks, your stench pots and sticks.
They scatter shadow, swivel brushes, blushers.
Make your face naked,
Strip your mind naked,
Drench your skin in a woman’s tears.
I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.
I will show you true reflections, terrors.
You are the Muse of all our mirrors.
Look in them and weep.
In Her Own Image
It is her eyes:
the irises are gold
and round they go
like the ring on my wedding finger,
round and round
and I can’t touch
their histories or tears.
To think they were once my satellites!
They shut me out now.
Such light-years!
She is not myself
anymore she is not
even in my sky
anymore and I
am not myself.
I will not disfigure
her pretty face.
Let her wear amethyst thumbprints,
a family heirloom,
a sort of burial necklace
and I know just the place:
Where the wall glooms,
where the lettuce seeds,
where the jasmine springs
no surprises
I will bed her.
She will bloom there,
second nature to me,
the one perfection
among compromises.
In His Own Image
I was not myself, myself.
The celery feathers,
the bacon flitch,
the cups deep on the shelf
and my cheek
coppered and shone
in the kettle’s paunch,
my mouth
blubbed in the tin of the pan—
they were all I had to go on.
How could I go on
With such meager proofs of myself?
I woke day after day.
Day after day I was gone.
From the self I was last night.
And then he came home tight.
Such a simple definition!
How did I miss it?
Now I see
that all I needed
was a hand
to mold my mouth
to scald my cheek,
was this concussion
by whose lights I find
my self-possession,
where I grow complete.
He splits my lip with his fist,
shadows my eye with a blow,
knuckles my neck to its proper angle.
What a perfectionist!
His are a sculptor’s hands:
they summon
form from the void,
they bring
me to myself again.
I am a new woman.
Anorexic
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self-denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless.
I will slip
back into him again
as if I have never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and brea
sts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
Mastectomy
My ears heard
their words.
I didn’t believe them.
No, even through my tears
they couldn’t deceive me.
Even so
I could see
through them
to the years
opening
their arteries,
fields gulching
into trenches
cuirasses stenching,
a mulch of heads
and towns
as prone
to bladed men
as women.
How well
I recognized
the specialist
freshing death
across his desk,
the surgeon,
blade-handed,
standing there
urging patience.
How well
they have succeeded!
I have stopped bleeding
I look down.
It has gone.
So they have taken off
what slaked them first,
what they have hated since:
blue-veined
white-domed
home
of wonder
and the wetness
of their dreams.
I flatten
to their looting,
to the sleight
of their plunder.
I am a brute site.
Theirs is the true booty.
Solitary
Night:
An oratory of dark,
a chapel of unreason.
Here in the shrubbery
the shrine.
I am its votary,
its season.
Flames
single
to my fingers
expert
to pick out
their heart,
the sacred heat
none may violate.
You could die for this.
The gods could make you blind.
I defy them.
I know,
only I know
these incendiary
and frenzied ways:
I am alone.
No one’s here,
no one sees
my hands
fan and cup,
my thumbs tinder.
How it leaps
from spark to blaze!
I flush
I darken.
How my flesh summers,
how my mind shadows
meshed in this brightness.
How my cry
blasphemes
light and dark,
screams
land from sea,
makes word flesh