The Witch of the Inner Wood
Page 17
And in the general bluey sky
you merge
until the clouds confuse
the warm blue with the chilly all,
but you were there —
I heard you chirr,
a tiny voice.
And if the wind
takes you
and all. . . .
In the parrot’s den
deep in the hollow, beaconed tree
the ivy-covered hole obscures
your frosted, dazzled skeleton.
Winter returned.
It is always here.
xxxvi
In these dim hours I, sulking by my stove,
construct no thing,
no object,
no ideas
(and despair …)
but in the cooky fleshings
of the mud.
What is in me
is soot,
is smoke,
is stale debris
that clings within the chimney.
Should a flame
spout up surprising from below
a hundred half-awakened birds
would startle from the blackened shaft —
swifts leaving home —
a quick whirl over the sticky woods —
Where will my lone birds nestle in?
I fold my wings,
my feathered hands,
I lean against my sooty selves
in this cold narrow chimney.
Night
darkens,
and I doze.
xxxvii
Cleaning my barn at year’s end
I threw shit —
(and re-creation.)
my wrists up warm
in hay, manure, and hammers,
shredded tires,
and old rum bottles — glorious!
Hot to my gloves in the icy air
and steaming like a geyser,
it fell upon my yard like rain.
The hammer broke the rose bush,
but
the snow will break
it also.
Under the ice
earth ferments, rots.
I am your spouter!
Mechanic, I
am bearing your dead oil light.
xxxviii
I made two dough-faced puddings, loaves
left to soak like washtubs,
sullen, cold,
(And God created
man in Her own
image; in the
image of God
created She him;
male and female
created She him.)
fermenting —
and they swelled
slowly all winter,
two puffball eggs.
One egg broke.
It shattered humpty dumpty;
its red yolk
pulsed to a scarlet rooster which flew up
and perched among the rafters
where he burst
into a thousand sparks:
brave beaus, brass boys,
red leprechauns
that dashed the hearth with cinders.
Then they rolled,
lead pellets,
out of doors
and stained the snow like measles.
They
corroded winter,
split
spring’s yellow runnels with their knives.
xxxix
In the thawing marsh
I hear the rattle of my sons
with their dragon-toothed bulldozers
digging out
what I had not intended yet;
they break
the shells too soon,
destructive,
passionate
embrace
of mud and iron.
My cooky men
plough my small order
down.
xl
But order is never a static thing.
For order is:
the pattern that I make,
so that
the needle of my cat is order,
his;
the birds
weave the bright carpets of their sun;
so that
my fragrant garden rings
with order;
is the stove
of amorous delight;
and winter,
my retreats indoors
to roll my icy doughs,
cut out
the shapes to startle spring again
are order.
xli
Cold as the earth the last loaf sagged,
reluctant daughter, and I held
her to my bosom where she warmed
as some small pendant does
worn from a gold chain on the neck —
she yawned,
she stretched,
she broke the chain.
She broke the ivory pendant
and emerged.
xlii
Like a long silk evolving from a tree
she filled the garden,
and she was
the music of a flute whose song
like silver seeds
swelled into flowers,
glowed,
like summer. Yes,
the gold chain broke,
I said, but it
fell in a thousand different ways,
each link
let go as if a vine
unwound itself.
Each glittering wire
fattened and swelled to chrysalis
and opened:
moths,
my daughters spoke
like the flute’s music in black notes.
xliii
I saw them fall upon the earth
like dead confetti.
Where they fell
they shredded finer into soil
and stained the gaping,
sharded earth
like some dark blush upon it,
sank —
the garden sealed
above them like a yeast.
It was the summer came
all in a single music:
a jade leaf,
an ivory pendant
on one chain
became a continent of leaves,
of green and glowing grasses,
and of grain.
xliv
I saw two bats
that circled in the moonlight like
a river of fluidity.
Beyond them, making their own light,
the moon,
the world’s poor mirror, hangs,
dead world,
which is the image of
(She sees the
world in Her
poem’s light …)
the witch, her garden,
the despoiled
and ransacked wilderness,
stone mirror,
marred
beyond the telling of the truth
so what I see
in her bedraggled backside
is
death —
light —
reflected light.
xlv
What is the world
but the reflections of a thought,
a witch’s thought?
Upon the cauldrons of her mind
she broke the egg;
its phoenix sparks
expanded to this universe
and yet
(and re-affirms
the Word.)
the music came along with them,
in coiling, miming loveliness,
and all indifferent maths resigned
into the beauty of the frame
their first design,
that what should be dispersed and lost
should be
upgathered now,
in love’s
retarding
skein.
from
SOLID THINGS
Po
ems New and Selected
LIFE INSURANCE
(The dreamer, a young woman, has been hospitalized after the crash of a small, private airplane on its way to a sales workshop.)
*
That sky was blue, was baby blue and solid.
Nothing stirred,
except the crackling of the plane,
the sough of trees —
a sort of smoke
that vanished from the singed grey earth
around me like a steam from stones.
Bob tucked the orange space blanket down,
weighting the light foil.
A branch
leans on my chest like a fallen tree.
Its needles and the bright foil twitch
in the tiny wind.
He said, he said:
Don’t blow away.
The wind turned white, turned darker, turned
to coarse white curtains like a tent.
It fell against me, closed my eyes. A strap
around me weighed me down. . . .
He coughed.
He didn’t. Ivan’s dead.
An icy thorn digs in my hand. The sun
sags in scrawny leafless trees
like a small red dial.
A thumb
counts numbers on my wrist.
Clouds
rattle like metal. Their blanketing
stifles, weights me,
holds me down.
*
I wanted to fly the plane myself.
He could teach me how.
To take the surging engine in my hands.
To pull her over the scratchy trees
into the soaring ecstasies. . . .
The shadows dart across the fields, the clouds
dotting the winter-scalded earth
sun-spangled under their crescent tips.
The cockpit clamorous with light,
and Ivan laughing when she bucks
and shivers in the rattling wind.
Hang on! he says. She’s a rocking horse!
Rockabye baby!
She drops.
He did that on purpose.
He pulls her up.
Drilling into the brilliancies
higher and higher.
*
Just Bob from the office, you and me,
and Sandy, if he makes it out.
A weekend learning to suck eggs.
Nothing we don’t know already, kid.
And maybe, later?
He wasn’t sure
I’d answer.
That was my big mistake,
letting these other guys come along,
but they knew I was flying up, you see.
He waffles, worries what anyone thinks.
Big Ivan, uncertain of everything.
I’m your man, he says,
he hopes.
He wants to boast to the other guys:
Best little salesman that we got!
SalesPERSON, he says.
These little redheads!
Don’t get a divorce for me, I said.
I should have said no.
It didn’t mean that much to me.
He knew I’d just been trying on.
They make so much of it. Too much.
He made too much.
Not me, I said, Don’t count on me.
I couldn’t tell him my freedom is
no strings. No strings.
My mother was
all strings.
*
Insurance, my trade. But to be alive,
to fly —
free of the tugging, aching earth,
its sores, to be free of my mother’s hands,
of the room where my mother waits for me
all night, awake, in her rocking chair,
like a clock, like a nurse,
like an open wound. . . .
Later on, he said. I want to fly. Now.
Says, Later on.
The white light bubbles around us, higher,
higher — He swoops:
Whoopee! he cries. Hang on!
We dive.
We drop like a hawk’s collapse
when it strikes for fish.
The show-off, Ivan, showing off.
She snapped. She snapped. Some muscle broke.
She buckled like a plastic toy. Fell,
as if shot.
I heard the trees
breaking —
and
Bob. Can you get the door?
He hauled me out.
Gee Christ, he said. Old Ivan.
Ivan’s bought it.
Christ.
*
But this is a dream. I see my life:
a passive seed in the fairy books,
never myself but the “good girl”
all wrapped up in a neat cocoon.
Papoose — a woman in a bag
carried about
by a woman in —
another bag.
I want to fly but the clouds close in,
their heavy winter closing in,
glazing the windows. I want to fly
before the winds and the waters close.
I flew. Or in my mind I flew.
I fell.
*
My spirit like a dew drop lay
like Thumbelina on her leaf
that tugged against the current, chrysalis
upon the fluent waters, to escape —
until my muddy mother drew me in.
Her mouse hands cribbed me, tied me up.
She rocked me in a walnut shell
under the ground, the stones, the roots,
said Sleep, said Sleep, all winter long.
*
Oh to be running the woods again
skiing alone, or in my car,
the white ice skidding against my tires
as I take the corner:
Red! You little redheads sure are tough!
I’ll race you if you want.
I’ll win.
Thinking he’s something.
On my own.
I want to take the plane myself, control
the hawk’s bright soaring, take
the downhill skier’s rush, the twist,
the turn —
but the t-bar crowd
makes grabs at me. It holds me down,
that long rope straining up the hill —
Be a good girl, someone, worrying
says. Shh. Says, Go to sleep.
*
You can’t catch me. I’m the Candy Queen.
I’m fine. I’m fine.
Just hold that thought.
When they rev their motors after you,
their bright lights hurtling after you —
white lightning on the slick —
Steering into the icy hill,
the swooping hilltops of the night,
the white rock pylon ledges. . . .
Like a hawk
threads through the bristle boughs,
flicker of wing dust, lights:
on the snow where the trail breaks red —
the frantic mouse hands scrabbling —
then white.
*
She worries a lot. As if her pain
were something that could hold me down.
She’s sick. My mother’s sick.
She’s dead.
*
A red light flickers through the twigs,
a fire crackles, somewhere, beyond my feet,
stinking of metal.
The wind that bellies the glittering foil
can’t lift me up. I hang
under it strapped in a lead cocoon.
Weighed down. Weighed down.
The branches broke.
Great tree boughs hold me down.
*
Log walls, the antlered curtain rods,
the wolfskin with its musty smell,
and my arms tied down — it felt lik
e that,
zipped up in the stinking sleeping bag,
its singed grey serge,
the grey bark flaking from the walls—
I must have been only six years old.
My sharp nosed father grins at me
stark midnight, with his glassy eyes . . .
a dead dog at the highway’s edge
raising its head.
The wolfskin flattened against the wall,
the glittering marbles of its eyes
scratched, the pink mouth gaping —
dead.
Only the red dial of the fire
rustling, my mother in her chair,
her bruised eyes like an owl’s.
Tick tock.
You never knew him, Mother said.
You couldn’t adjust to it, she said.
You were much too young.
*
Mary had a baby. What did Mary do?
Put it down the elevator. Shame on you!
First you call the doctor.
Then you call the nurse.
Cry Baby. Cry Baby. Tell me where it hurts.
*
He was warm, poor shabby, velvet thing,
poor mole.
And cosy, at first, like an old nest.
But his breath was stale,
panting above me. . . .
gasoline
charring the peat where the snubbed
plane —
the dark sludge trickling from the wings’
crushed tinfoil —
shredded,
still shuddering. . . .
*
I’m lying in a hospital.
Far down the darkened corridor
the huge floor waxer drones,
drones like a pilot overhead,
speck on the sky-ball —
Does he see the tinfoil spattered on the trees?
Ice leaking, freezing, leaking —
ash? My flaming plastic flaring?
Don’t
rockabye baby,
rock the bed —
but Ivan,
stone weight
leans on me.
Hey Red, he says.
He holds me down.
The bedsprings creak and rattle with his weight.
*
The hot cocoon grows soggy, cools,
and Mother, dark earth, gathers me.
I lie in mud, in stony mud,
tangled by grasping, corded roots.
I lie where I fell, a tiny girl
the fairies dropped, forgetful.
Mole, the tender visitor, Ivan,
who thinks I’ll marry him,
gropes for me underground.
His humid smell spreads over me —
a whole life —
underground. . . .
*
I dream, I dream of the upper air,
of the forest of unborn animals
disembodied, nameless,
free. . . .
The fur thing strolling at my side
along the charcoal fringes of the wood:
You’re a human child!
It winces. Flees.
To take a name, a body.
No.
*
She’s out there in the snowy night