es peligrosa
many sleep
the whole way
others sit
staring holes of fire into the air
others plan rebellion:
night after night
awake in prison, my mind
licked at the mattress like a flame
till the cellblock went up roaring
Thoreau setting fire to the woods
Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act
1972
III
I saw a beggar leaning on his crutch,
He said to me: Why do you ask for so much?
I saw a woman leaning on a door,
She said, Why not, why not, why not ask for more?
—Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” (as sung by Judy Collins)
MERCED
Fantasies of old age:
they have rounded us up
in a rest-camp for the outworn.
Somewhere in some dustbowl
a barbed-wire cantonment
of low-cost dustcolored prefab
buildings, smelling of shame
and hopeless incontinence
identical clothes of disposable
paper, identical rations
of chemically flavored food
Death in order, by gas,
hypodermics daily
to neutralize despair
So I imagine my world
in my seventieth year alive
and outside the barbed wire
a purposeless exchange
of consciousness for the absence
of pain. We will call this life.
Yet only last summer I
burned my feet in the sand
of that valley traced by the thread
of the cold quick river Merced
watered by plummets of white
When I swam, my body ached
from the righteous cold
when I lay back floating the jays
flittered from pine to pine
and the shade moved hour by hour
across El Capitan
Our wine cooled in the water
and I watched my sons, half-men
half-children, testing their part
in a world almost archaic
so precious by this time
that merely to step in pure water
or stare into clear air
is to feel a spasm of pain.
For weeks now a rage
has possessed my body, driving
now out upon men and women
now inward upon myself
Walking Amsterdam Avenue
I find myself in tears
without knowing which thought
forced water to my eyes
To speak to another human
becomes a risk
I think of Norman Morrison
the Buddhists of Saigon
the black teacher last week
who put himself to death
to waken guilt in hearts
too numb to get the message
in a world masculinity made
unfit for women or men
Taking off in a plane
I look down at the city
which meant life to me, not death
and think that somewhere there
a cold center, composed
of pieces of human beings
metabolized, restructured
by a process they do not feel
is spreading in our midst
and taking over our minds
a thing that feels neither guilt
nor rage: that is unable
to hate, therefore to love.
1972
A PRIMARY GROUND
But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his sense restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life …
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
And this is how you live: a woman, children
protect you from the abyss
you move near, turning on the news
eating Thanksgiving with its pumpkin teeth
drinking the last wine
from the cellar of your wedding
It all seems innocent enough, this sin
of wedlock: you, your wife, your children
leaning across the unfilled plates
passing the salt
down a cloth ironed by a woman
with aching legs
Now they go out to play
in the coarse, rough November air
that smells of soft-coal smoke, the river,
burnt sweet-potato pie.
Sensuality dessicates in words—
risks of the portage, risks of the glacier
never taken
Protection is the genius of your house
the pressure of the steam iron
flattens the linen cloth again
chestnuts puréed with care are dutifully eaten
in every room the furniture reflects you
larger than life, or dwindling
Emptiness
thrust like a batch of letters to the furthest
dark of a drawer
But there is something else:
your wife’s twin sister, speechless
is dying in the house
You and your wife take turns
carrying up the trays,
understanding her case, trying to make her understand.
1972
TRANSLATIONS
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth
The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political
1972
LIVING IN THE CAVE
Reading the Parable of the Cave
While living in the cave,
black moss
deadening my footsteps
candles stuck on rock-ledges
weakening my eyes
These things around me, with their
daily requirements:
fill me, empty me
talk to me, warm me, let me
suck on you
Every one of them has a plan that depends on me
stalactites want to become
stalagmites
veins of ore
imagine their preciousness
candles see themselves disembodied
into gas
and taking flight
the bat hangs dreaming
of an airy world
None of them, not one
sees me
as I see them
&nbs
p; 1972
THE NINTH SYMPHONY
OF BEETHOVEN UNDERSTOOD AT LAST
AS A SEXUAL MESSAGE
A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table
1972
RAPE
There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.
You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,
on horseback, one hand touching his gun.
You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:
he has access to machinery that could kill you.
He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,
his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud
from between his unsmiling lips.
And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,
the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,
your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess
to him, you are guilty of the crime
of having been forced.
And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family
whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,
his hand types out the details
and he wants them all
but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.
You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:
he has taken down your worst moment
on a machine and filed it in a file.
He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;
he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.
He has access to machinery that could get you put away:
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,
will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?
1972
BURNING ONESELF IN
In a bookstore on the East Side
I read a veteran’s testimony:
the running down, for no reason
of an old woman in South Vietnam
by a U.S. Army truck
The heat-wave is over
Lifeless, sunny, the East Side
rests under its awnings
Another summer
The flames go on feeding
and a dull heat permeates the ground
of the mind, the burn has settled in
as if it had no more question
of its right to go on devouring
the rest of a lifetime,
the rest of history
Pieces of information, like this one
blow onto the heap
they keep it fed, whether we will it or not,
another summer, and another
of suffering quietly
in bookstores, in the parks
however we may scream we are
suffering quietly
1972
BURNING ONESELF OUT
For E.K.
We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,
the serrated log, the yellow-blue
gaseous core
the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes,
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin
Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain
You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,
that print, that rock,
that sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this
or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down
feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire
1972
FOR A SISTER
Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others
I trust none of them. Only my existence
thrown out in the world like a towchain
battered and twisted in many chance connections,
being pulled this way, pulling in that.
I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,
milk souring in your pantry
after they came and took you.
I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.
A few paragraphs in the papers,
allowing for printers’ errors, wilful omissions,
the trained violence of doctors.
I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.
Little by little out of the blurred conjectures
your face clears, a sunken marble
slowly cranked up from underwater.
I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.
They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.
A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.
Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,
try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.
My images. This metaphor for what happens.
A geranium in flames on a green cloth
becomes yours. You, coming home after years
to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again. Your story.
1972
FOR THE DEAD
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight
1972
FROM A SURVIVOR
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days
I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special
Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more
since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could do and could not do
it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life
Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making
which I live now
not as a leap
but
a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next
1972
AUGUST
Two horses in yellow light
eating windfall apples under a tree
as summer tears apartmilkweeds stagger
and grasses grow more ragged
They say there are ions in the sun
neutralizing magnetic fields on earth
Some way to explain
what this week has been, and the one before it!
If I am flesh sunning on rock
if I am brain burning in fluorescent light
if I am dream like a wire with fire
throbbing along it
if I am death to man
I have to know it
His mind is too simple, I cannot go on
sharing his nightmares
My own are becoming clearer, they open
into prehistory
which looks like a village lit with blood
where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!
1972
IV
Meditations for
a Savage Child
MEDITATIONS FOR A SAVAGE CHILD
The prose passages are from J.-M. Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey.
I
There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still … so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields … that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken …
Collected Poems Page 27
