full of runes, syllables, refrains,
this accurate dreamer
sleepwalks the kitchen
like a white moth,
an elephant, a guilt.
Somebody tried to put her
to rest under an afghan
knitted with wools the color of grass and blood
but she has risen. Her lamplight
licks at the icy panes
and melts into the dawn.
They will never prevent her
who sleep the stone sleep of the past,
the sleep of the drugged.
One crystal second, I flash
an eye across the cold
unwrapping of light between us
into her darkness-lancing eye
—that’s all. Dawn is the test, the agony
but we were meant to see it:
After this, we may sleep, my sister,
while the flames rise higher and higher, we can sleep.
1974
AMNESIA
I almost trust myself to know
when we’re getting to that scene—
call it the snow-scene in Citizen Kane:
the mother handing over her son
the earliest American dream
shot in a black-and-white
where every flake of snow
is incandescent
with its own burden, adding-
up, always adding-up to the
cold blur of the past
But first there is the picture of the past
simple and pitiless as the deed
truly was
the putting-away of a childish thing
Becoming a man means leaving
someone, or something—
still, why
must the snow-scene blot itself out
the flakes come down so fast
so heavy, so unrevealing
over the something that gets left behind?
1974
FOR L.G.: UNSEEN FOR TWENTY YEARS
A blue-grained line circles a fragment of the mind
drawn in ancient crayon:
out of the blue, your tightstrung smile—
often in the first snow
that even here smells only of itself
even on this Broadway limped by cripples
and the self-despising
Still, in that smell, another snow,
another world: we’re walking
grey boulevards traced with white
in Paris, the early ’fifties
of invincible ignorance:
or, a cold spring:
I clasp your hips on the bike
shearing the empty plain in March
teeth gritted in the wind
searching for Chartres:
we doze
in the boat-train
we who were friends and thought
women and men should be lovers
Your face: taut as a mask of wires, a fencer’s mask
half-turned away, the one night, walking
the City of Love, so cold
we warmed our nerves with wine
at every all-night café
to keep on walking, talking
Your words have drifted back for twenty years:
I have to tell you—maybe I’m not a man—
I can’t do it with women—but I’d like
to hold you, to know what it’s like
to sleep and wake together—
the one night in all our weeks of talk
you talked of fear
I wonder
what words of mine drift back to you?
Something like:
But you’re a man, I know it—
the swiftness of your mind is masculine—?
—some set-piece I’d learned to embroider
in my woman’s education
while the needle scarred my hand?
Of course, you’re a man. I like you. What else could you be?
what else, what else,
what bloody else …
Given the cruelty of our times and customs,
maybe you hate these memories,
the ignorance, the innocence we shared:
maybe you cruise the SoHo cocktail parties
the Vancouver bar-scene
stalking yourself as I can see you still:
young, tense, amorphous, longing—
maybe you live out your double life
in the Berkeley hills, with a wife
who stuns her mind into indifference
with Scotch and saunas
while you arrange your own humiliations
downtown
(and, yes, I’ve played my scenes
of favorite daughter, child-bride, token woman, muse
listening now and then
as a drunken poet muttered into my hair:
I can’t make it with women I admire—)
maybe you’ve found or fought
through to a kind of faithfulness
in the strange coexistence
of two of any gender
But we were talking in 1952
of the fear of being cripples in a world
of perfect women and men:
we were the givens and the stake
and we did badly
and, dear heart, I know, had a lover gestured
you’d have left me
for a man, as I left you,
as we left each other, seeking the love of men.
1974
FAMILY ROMANCE
(the brothers speak)
Our mother went away and our father was the king
always absent at the wars
We had to make it together or not at all
in the black forest
cutting paths, stumbling on the witch’s house
long empty
gathering wood and mushrooms, gathering everything
we needed in a wordless collusion
Sometimes we pretended the witch had been our mother
and would come back
we loved each other with a passion understood
like the great roots of the wood
In another country we might have fought each other
and died of fraternal wounds
conspiring each alone for the father’s blessing,
the birthright, the mother
Since we had no father to bless us, we were free
and our birthright was each other
our life was harsh and simple; we slept deeply
and we thought our mother came and watched us sleeping
1974
FROM AN OLD HOUSE IN AMERICA
1.
Deliberately, long ago
the carcasses
of old bugs crumbled
into the rut of the window
and we started sleeping here
Fresh June bugs batter this June’s
screens, June-lightning batters
the spiderweb
I sweep the wood-dust
from the wood-box
the snout of the vacuum cleaner
sucks the past away
2.
Other lives were lived here:
mostly un-articulate
yet someone left her creamy signature
in the trail of rusticated
narcissus straggling up
through meadowgrass and vetch
Families breathed close
boxed-in from the cold
hard times, short growing season
the old rainwater cistern
hulks in the cellar
3.
Like turning through the contents of a drawer:
these rusted screws, this empty vial
useless, this box of watercolor paints
dried to insolubility—
but this—
this pack of cards with no card missing
still playable
and three good fuses
> and this toy: a little truck
scarred red, yet all its wheels still turn
The humble tenacity of things
waiting for people, waiting for months, for years
4.
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
I place my hand on the hand
of the dead, invisible palm-print
on the doorframe
spiked with daylilies, green leaves
catching in the screen door
or I read the backs of old postcards
curling from thumbtacks, winter and summer
fading through cobweb-tinted panes—
white church in Norway
Dutch hyacinths bleeding azure
red beach on Corsica
set-pieces of the world
stuck to this house of plank
I flash on wife and husband
embattled, in the years
that dried, dim ink was wet
those signatures
5.
If they call me man-hater, you
would have known it for a lie
but the you I want to speak to
has become your death
If I dream of you these days
I know my dreams are mine and not of you
yet something hangs between us
older and stranger than ourselves
like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water
a dusty window
the irreducible, incomplete connection
between the dead and living
or between man and woman in this
savagely fathered and unmothered world
6.
The other side of a translucent
curtain, a sheet of water
a dusty window, Non-being
utters its flat tones
the speech of an actor learning his lines
phonetically
the final autistic statement
of the self-destroyer
All my energy reaches out tonight
to comprehend a miracle beyond
raising the dead: the undead to watch
back on the road of birth
7.
I am an American woman:
I turn that over
like a leaf pressed in a book
I stop and look up from
into the coals of the stove
or the black square of the window
Foot-slogging through the Bering Strait
jumping from the Arbella to my death
chained to the corpse beside me
I feel my pains begin
I am washed up on this continent
shipped here to be fruitful
my body a hollow ship
bearing sons to the wilderness
sons who ride away
on horseback, daughters
whose juices drain like mine
into the arroyo of stillbirths, massacres
Hanged as witches, sold as breeding-wenches
my sisters leave me
I am not the wheatfield
nor the virgin forest
I never chose this place
yet I am of it now
In my decent collar, in the daguerreotype
I pierce its legend with my look
my hands wring the necks of prairie chickens
I am used to blood
When the men hit the hobo track
I stay on with the children
my power is brief and local
but I know my power
I have lived in isolation
from other women, so much
in the mining camps, the first cities
the Great Plains winters
Most of the time, in my sex, I was alone
8.
Tonight in this northeast kingdom
striated iris stand in a jar with daisies
the porcupine gnaws in the shed
fireflies beat and simmer
caterpillars begin again
their long, innocent climb
the length of leaves of burdock
or webbing of a garden chair
plain and ordinary things
speak softly
the light square on old wallpaper
where a poster has fallen down
Robert Indiana’s LOVE
leftover of a decade
9.
I do not want to simplify
Or: I would simplify
by naming the complexity
It was made over-simple all along
the separation of powers
the allotment of sufferings
her spine cracking in labor
his plow driving across the Indian graves
her hand unconscious on the cradle, her mind
with the wild geese
his mother-hatred driving him
into exile from the earth
the refugee couple with their cardboard luggage
standing on the ramshackle landing-stage
he with fingers frozen around his Law
she with her down quilt sewn through iron nights
—the weight of the old world, plucked
drags after them, a random feather-bed
10.
Her children dead of diphtheria, she
set herself on fire with kerosene
(O Lord I was unworthy
Thou didst find me out)
she left the kitchen scrubbed
down to the marrow of its boards
“The penalty for barrenness
is emptiness
my punishment is my crime
what I have failed to do, is me …”
—Another month without a show
and this the seventh year
O Father let this thing pass out of me
I swear to You
I will live for the others, asking nothing
I will ask nothing, ever, for myself
11.
Out back of this old house
datura tangles with a gentler weed
its spiked pods smelling
of bad dreams and death
I reach through the dark, groping
past spines of nightmare
to brush the leaves of sensuality
A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history
I cannot now lie down
with a man who fears my power
or reaches for me as for death
or with a lover who imagines
we are not in danger
12.
If it was lust that had defined us—
their lust and fear of our deep places
we have done our time
as faceless torsos licked by fire
we are in the open, on our way—
our counterparts
the pinyon jay, the small
gilt-winged insect
the Cessna throbbing level
the raven floating in the gorge
the rose and violet vulva of the earth
filling with darkness
yet deep within a single sparkle
of red, a human fire
and near and yet above the western planet
calmly biding her time
13.
They were the distractions, lust and fear
but are
themselves a key
Everything that can be used, will be:
the fathers in their ceremonies
the genital contests
the cleansing of blood from pubic hair
the placenta buried and guarded
their terror of blinding
by the look of her who bore them
If you do not believe
that fear and hatred
read the lesson again
in the old dialect
14.
But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
&nbs
p; she said
I try to understand
he said
what will you undertake
she said
will you punish me for history
he said
what will you undertake
she said
do you believe in collective guilt
he said
let me look in your eyes
she said
15.
Who is here. The Erinyes.
One to sit in judgment.
One to speak tenderness.
One to inscribe the verdict on the canyon wall.
If you have not confessed
the damage
if you have not recognized
the Mother of reparations
if you have not come to terms
Collected Poems Page 29
