Mistaken identity, recanted testimony, intimidation,
Witness tampering, racial profiling, prejudiced judges,
Corrupt district attorneys, heartless bounds of pardon and parole,
And above all Georgia, the sovereign of the Confederacy,
The megastate of retrovision and racial aberation,
Kowtow by the President of all Americans in the name of
Political correctness and fear of the racist right when
Fearlessness could have been justified in the name of
A Presidential Pardon despite the polls, “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
III
The short, Tragic life of Troy Davis ends,
With this final lethal injection on top of all the other
Lethal injections: invisibility, injustice, solitude
Born in poverty’s prison before he could walk
Handcuffed in the same chains of yesteryear
The same dried blood on the same bent heads,
The same wild stones on the same cracked spines,
The same mothers carrying the same water;
The policeman’s whose son remains unrevenged
The condemned’s who watches the extermination
Of one more black boy in Georgia,
Lying helpless on this table as silent as the strobe lights above,
Who was twenty once, twenty years ago
Who had ambitions and a girlfriend and was full of sap
Who thought he belonged to the greatest nation in the best
Of all possible worlds and who knew the clean, cool, touch of
Law and Order, freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial
Who spent that magical year of Twenty-one and adulthood
That magic threshold of life, of wholeness, and objectivity behind bars
Not only son, but man, not only brother, but husband,
Not only identity but pride are all denied him,
Standing in the dark mildewed corridor of Death’s Row
Surrounded by cut-throat good ol’ Georgia’s boys,
Howling in a wind tunnel of an indifferent world, “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
IV
Female justices of the Supreme Court,
Change the world. Only as judges and mothers
Can you obliterate the pain of a child’s death,
Only those who possess wombs can change the irrevocable wrong
By the State in the case of revocable error.
Come lie down beside an innocent man
And taste the bitter tears of remorse now that
It is too late and you will know as the executed know
What forever really means
Peering from the safety of the grandstand protected
By a glass wall, take care to wash your hands
Throughly after use, wash and wear again and again
Until they sting and seethe with recrimination and remorse
Not because I die, but because you live
It is not for me to tell you who to kill and who not to
But to ask yourself if God’s will is man-made
Just as man’s soul is mortal
The only immortal soul is the universal one
From which each soul arises and
Into which each soul returns to repeat history,
You, you, and you have murdered without cause
An innocent who has not killed,
And your souls will collide with mine in the Universe
And I will recognize you, saying “Look
I have engraved you on the palms of my hand”
Mao’s Organ
I said I’d never do this,
Write a poem about a sculpture
But when the red-silk bloomed un-uttered
To the surface of steel and bronze
It became the writing on the wall
It filled the hollow of my bones
My chest emptied with strange soliloquies
And even hallucinations, about what?
And it did look like the Devil’s laughter
Polished to the gilded gleam of a burning candle
I fondle every fold like a blind woman pursuing
Each machine-made chrysanthemum
My fingers burn on the still warm metal
And the cool silk of his homeland.
II.
PORTRAIT OF A NUDE WOMAN AS CLEOPATRA
1984-1987
Preface
From my early years I have been wounded by woman’s lot,
and the trace of a poet is no more than the trace of her movements.
And when the woman is a poet—her task is doubly difficult.
Life’s abominations keep attacking her both as a woman and a
poet, and for this reason her spiritual defense has to be doubly
strengthened compared with that of a poet alone.
—Boris Pasternak
Several years ago, in London, I saw a Rembrandt drawing called Study of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra and the title of this book is taken from its title. I had seen the Rembrandt at auction, along with a great many spectacular paintings, yet it was this sketch I remembered. At the time I had not collected the sonnets which now appear as A Nude Woman as a verse novel about Cleopatra. I considered Cleopatra the exemplar or dramatic action, a narrative pyramid, a poetic Himalayas. Yet later when I recalled that small black and white sketch, nothing indicated either the theatricality, or the heroic, or the historical obligations of her theme. This gave me courage. There was no asp, no Antony, no Roman soldiers, or warring fleets; no eunuchs, or slaves, or ladies-in-waiting, or imperial architecture. The pen-and-ink drawing showed an ordinary woman of a certain age, half turned from the spectator, sitting on the side of an unmade bed, nude. Not one of the famous romantic elements of the historical Cleopatra was evident, but she was more real to me than any Cleopatra I had ever seen. The unerring rendering of a beautifully banal woman had seduced me into believing she was indeed the Cleopatra. Why? It could have been simply the genius of a masterful sketch. Or had Rembrandt had in mind a full-fledged painting of Cleopatra of which he had put down only a memento? Perhaps the novel of the painting had existed in his head all the time. Or had the title of Cleopatra been only an excuse to draw a nude woman? If so, then why did he call her Cleopatra? And why did I believe him? The more I looked at the drawing, the more the woman became Cleopatra. A nude woman had taken on a complex and continuous narrative in which the adventures of the two protagonists (one invisible) put into motion and existence a whole world of feelings. The nude woman’s destiny had been sealed centuries ago. Culturally she had become an object of memory. Yet the woman I saw was a new woman because the artist who had sketched her, however casually, knew her as a writer knows his characters: from the inside out, through his own inclinations. Somewhere the man who had drawn her had met up with Cleopatra, knew her very well, through love, pity, or fury.
Thus, as a contemporary poet, I was confronted with a “historical theme,” which I had to make at once classical and modern. The woman sitting on the side of a bed with the loose change of History strung out all over my bed is also the woman sitting on the side of a bed with the loose change of the subway strung all over her bed.
Coleridge is quoted as saying that a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry. That is perhaps why Edgar Allan Poe considered a long poem “simply a contradiction in terms.” But the contemporary poem is bound to be all poetry. One would like to know at what number of lines a poem begins to be long nevertheless, the developed narrative, the description of characters, the exposition of a system are from this point of view of “incurable length.” I had poems of feeling. For me, there was little choice between the “incurable” length of Rembrandt’s novel in his head and the sparse, anonymous study he made, to which the spectator brought his own narrative. In Nude Woman, I have provi
ded the narrative by quoting the original teller, Plutarch. It is the historian Plutarch (in North’s 1579 translation) who footnotes Cleopatra’s novel or, if you like, the painting in my head. I have veered slightly from Plutarch’s tale to include an early English tradition of “storical sooth” concerning the way in which Cleopatra died. According to John Lygate, the English poet and monk of St. Edmunds—
And with tat worde, naked, with ful good herte,
Amonge the serpents in the pit she sterte;And ther
she chees to han hir buryinge.
Anon the neddres gone hir for to stynge,
And she hir deeth receveth with good chere,
For love of Antony that was hir so dere.
And this is storialsooth, it is no fable.
Nevertheless, this is not an “epic” or “storical” poem, but rather a meditation on History as poetry in the form of a melologue, that is a recitation, written to be acted by one actor playing all characters, by imitating both the masculine and feminine voice, accompanied by music. The reader may protest that his imagination must not only supply the sets and the extras, but the music as well. In Portrait of a Nude Woman, the poetical space is filled in with This Actor, who is, of course, Everywoman and not only Plutarch. Not Cleopatra but a nude woman; not the seclusion of myself in a poem but someone we all know. Someone we know as well as Rembrandt knew the nude woman whom he called Cleopatra for reasons that we can believe when we encounter her but can’t explain.
Plutarch
The manner how he fel in love with her was this. Antonius, going to make warre with the Parthians sent commaunde Cleopatra to appeare personally before him, when he came into Cilicia, to aunswere unto suche accusacians as were layed against her, being this: that she had aided Cassius and Brutus in their warre against him.
The year 41 bc
I
Cleopatra
Winged by my multifeathered flexed knees,
Soft down’d in peacock colors,
My triangle pressed against your chest,
Connecting the three points
Of your flesh’s compass,
A nude woman flies South towards Summer—
As the swallow flies,
By degree and nature
Crowned and earring’d by love,
My hair a ragged river flowing
Towards your sea—black tributaries
Raking your beaches, where in the
Turquoise-veined granite of Hammamet
I build my monument.
III
Cleopatra
I shall be Venus Genetrix and greet
With chaste lips this Dionysus I first saw at fourteen.
I shall trap his quintessent heart and waltz it round
My own Gods quivering in unmarked graves.
For so long as one dank breath escapes from Karnak,
So long as one brace of bones, churns like rolling dice,
Away from Delphi’s oracle, so long as one
Handful of red earth crumbles under the
Saturnine & Equatorial sun of Ethiopia’s Pharaohs,
I refuse to be eclipsed by Caesar’s shadow & Caesar’s sex.
For, so long as Egypt rests its shaven head
On my Cleopatran breasts,
Caesar’s manhood curled loosely in my hand,
Rome, don’t cross me.
IV
Cleopatra
How many pebbles on how many beaches have got
Wind of us & how many alabaster whistles and brass
Trumpets have made their announcements?
I suffocate under the airless dome of so much knowledge.
For after the moon has raced through here,
After the asteroids and comets have ricocheted
Back and forth across the arc of the century,
Who am I but a Nude Woman?
Caesar knew me when I was but a young thing.
You discover me filtered through finesse, men, and years,
Sailing into your butterfly-shaped harbor,
Leaving wet tracks on your purple carpet
To lie between lighted lamps, for like all Africans,
I am afraid of the dark.
V
Antony
You are a dangerous woman,
Honed to that one millimicron of difference
Between Life and Death.
Eyes horizontally stripped with arrogance,
Menace in that Greek drawl,
Sweet-voiced’d, thousand-stringed instrument
Tuned to any language you please.
You answer men yourself,
Pale and slender Pharaohan, tender as the summer,
Delta-dyed into raw linen—a royal will
Running out along parallel lines.
A premonition of ill is extinguished underfoot,
Like a spark, the Remembrancer,
Collecting debts from your enemies.
Plutarch
Nowe, Antonius was so ravished with love of Cleopatra, that though his wife Fulvia had great warres, and much a doe with Caesar for his affaires and that the armie of the Parthians… was now assembled in Mesopotamia readie to invade Syria:yet, as though all this had nothing touched him, he yielded himself to goe with Cleopatra into Alexandria.
The year 41 bc
VI
Antony
My blood sings through your tuned flesh.
That mute song of deaf desire
Pierces as the scent of wild fern,
Lingers like the taste of brass that
Flares against the stone sanctuary,
Like the breath of Delphi’s oracle
Spiraling toward the high-arched vaults
Strung with gold and the promissory notes of Gods,
Splintering the high-pitched trumpeting of Caesar
With Arabian flutes, and Dravidian cymbals,
A maelstrom of ringlets on that seismic circle
Which marks the Beginning and the End,
And in a lover’s whistle
The Song is Sung.
VII
Cleopatra
Your mouth tastes of sweet steel.
Your body, frank and fresh,
Has the feel of pure mineral.
Male, mysterious
Beyond your sex,
I rest in the hollow of bronze bells vibrating
Under the weight
Of smooth copper arms
That bind the length of mine
And hands that gather,
Like African figs, my fists
As you bear down
That long, wide avenue,
Autocrator, in your own city.
VIII
Antony
Death is not deaf,
Neither to song nor that soft flesh
Bending and surfacing under my touch.
Death is in every Love Song,
The absolute rector of all composition,
The warden of pitch and timbre,
The metronome of gathering pleasure.
Music, the gleam of a sigh’s longest pause,
Sweeps against the silk edges of solid sound,
Stark and white as desert salt quarries
Onto which we press like fossils,
One fevered instrument, playing by
Memory the Song that silences pain
And causes loneliness to mark time.
IX
Cleopatra
Tend my body.
Carve the thin incisions that once healed.
Make flower patterns on my shadowed skin,
A sheath of black brocade invented for
The giddy running of a palm along ridged tattoos
Marked since girlhood for your touch,
Clear in the chiaroscuro of a thousand strokes,
The sharp siren smell of readiness,
Rough under your fingers
That clutch the Darkness and the Void
As if to stay
The Darkness and
the Void;
Which I cannot stay
But for a Comfort’s Cry.
X
Antony
My darkness covers all your light.
A navy shadow, I fall across your midday sun.
With my shade I cool your burning stone,
And my scorpion tongue drops
Palm tree milk tasting fresh and bittersweet
Against your teeth, which chatter in the heat.
I shape your shaven head in my palms and press
Radiance which silhouettes my charred penumbra
Slipping through my fingers’ separations,
Gliding softly over wrists
And naked arms to knot in my hair.
The white hot phallus of a roving star
I send back on its millennium-year journey
To pierce your heart.
XI
Cleopatra
Resting on your right flank,
You rise, the mountain of my valley,
Wild and barren and naked as the
Treeless steppes of Arabia.
I am homesick for your face.
This broad back seems a foreign country,
Stern and impassive and exotic,
Where I am not sure of myself or men’s ways.
Muscles tensed in sleep, smooth, daring as a racer’s
I trace a curve of rib,
A path in the wilderness,
And press my woman’s throat
Against the nape of your neck,
Hoping to hear echoes of your barbarian heart.
XII
Antony
Female, come comfort me.
Eyes banked like Plato’s Rebel Horse of the Soul,
Silk-fringed under a stern and lightly marked brow,
Unwigged, and nude of tress, let my tongue
Touch smooth skull, move your knee to make
Room for my sleek glide onto sparkling tiles
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 4
