1983
WHAT WAS, IS;
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, MIGHT BE
What’s kept.What’s lost.A snap decision.
Burn the archives.Let them rot.
Begin by going ten years back.
A woman walks downstairs in a brownstone
in Brooklyn.Late that night, some other night
snow crystals swarm in her hair
at the place we say, So long.
I’ve lost something.I’m not sure what it is.
I’m going through my files.
Jewel-weed flashing
blue fire against an iron fence
Her head bent to a mailbox
long fingers ringed in goldin red-eyed
golden serpents
the autumn sun
burns like a beak off the cars
parked along Riversidewe so deep in talk
in burnt September grass
I’m trying for exactitude
in the files I handle worn and faded labels
And how she drove, and danced, and fought, and worked
and loved, and sang, and hated
dashed into the record storethen out
with the Stevie Wonderback in the car
flew on
Worn and faded label … This was
our glamour for each other
underlined in bravado
Could it have been another way:
could we have been respectful comrades
parallel warriorsnone of that
fast-falling
could we have kept a clean
and decent slate
1984
FOR AN OCCUPANT
Did the fox speak to you?
Did the small brush-fires on the hillside
smoke her out?
Were you standing on the porch
not the kitchen porchthe front
one of poured concretefull in the rising moon
and did she appearwholly on her own
asking no quarterwandering by
on impulseup the driveand on
into the pine-woods
but were you standing there
at the moment of moon and burnished light
leading your own lifetill she caught your eye
asking no charity
but did she speak to you?
1983
EMILY CARR
I try to conjure the kind of joy
you tracked through the wildwoods where the tribes
had set up their poleswhat brought you
how by boat, water, wind, you found
yourself facing the one great art
of your native land, your life
All I know is, it is here
even postcard-size can’t diminish
the great eye, nostril, tongue
the wave of the green hills
the darkblue crest of skythe white
and yellow fog bundled behind the green
You were alone in this
Nobody knew or cared
how to paint the way you saw
or what you sawAlone
you walked up to the sacred and disregarded
with your canvas, your box of colors
saying Wait for me and the crumbling
totem poles held still
while you sat down on your stool, your knees
spread wide, and let the mist
roll in past your shoulders
bead your rough shawl, your lashes
Wait for me, I have waited so long for you
But you never said thatI
am ashamed to have thought it
You had no personal leanings
You brushed in the final storm-blue stroke
and gave its name:Skidegate Pole
1984
POETRY: I
Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp
is studying the history of poetry.
Someone in the library at closing-time
has learned to say modernism,
trope, vatic, text.
She is listening for shreds of music.
He is searching for his name
back in the old country.
They cannot learn without teachers.
They are like uswhat we were
if you remember.
In a corner of night a voice
Is crying in a kind of whisper:
More!
Can you remember?when we thought
the poets taughthow to live?
That is not the voice of a critic
nor a common reader
it is someone youngin anger
hardly knowing what to ask
who finds our linesour glosses
wantingin this world.
1985
POETRY: II, CHICAGO
Whatever a poet is
at the point of conceptionis
conceived in these projects
of beige and grey bricksYes, poets are born
in wasted tracts like thesewhatever color, sex
comes to term in this winter’s driving nights
And the child pushes like a spear
a crythrough cracked cementthrough zero air
a spear, a cry of greenYes, poets endure
these schools of fearbalked yet unbroken
where so much gets broken:trust
windowspridethe mothertongue
Wherever a poet is bornenduring
depends on the frailest of chances:
Who listened to your murmuring
over your little rubbishwho let you be
who gave you the books
who let you know you were not
aloneshowed you the twist
of old strandsraffia, hemp or silk
the beaded threadsthe fiery lines
saying:This belongs to youyou have the right
you belong to the song
of your mothers and fathersYou have a people
1984
POETRY: III
Even if we knew the children were all asleep
and healthythe ledgers balancedthe water running
clear in the pipes
and all the prisoners free
Even if every word we wrote by then
were honestthe sheer heft
of our living behind it
not these sometimes
lax, indolent lines
these litanies
Even if we were toldnot just by friends
that this was honest work
Even if each of us didn’t wear
a brass locket with a picture
of a strangled womana girlchild sewn through the crotch
Even if someone had told us, young:This is not a key
nor a peacock feather
not a kite nor a telephone
This is the kitchen sinkthe grinding-stone
would we give ourselves
more calmly overfeel less criminal joy
when the thing comesas it does come
clarifying grammar
and the fixed and mutable stars—?
1984
BALTIMORE:A FRAGMENT FROM THE THIRTIES
Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window.
Outside, it’s summer. Heat
swamping stretched awnings, battering dark-green shades.
The Depression, Monument Street,
ice-wagons trailing melt, the Hospital
with its segregated morgues …
I’m five years old and trying to be perfect
walking hand-in-hand with my father.
A Black man halts beside us
croaks in a terrible voice, I’m hungry …
I’m a lucky child but I’ve read about beggars—
how the good give, the evil turn away.
But I want to turn away.My father gives.
We walk in silence.Why did he sound like that?
Is it evil to be frightened?I want to ask.
He has no roof in h
is mouth,
my father says at last.
1985
NEW YORK
For B. and C.
at your table
telephone rings
every four minutes
talk
of terrible things
the papers bringing
no good news
and burying the worst
Cut-up fruit in cutglass bowls
good for you
French Market coffee
cut with hot milk
crying together
wanting to save this
how we are when we meet
all our banners out
do we deceive each other
do we speak of the dead we sit with
do we mourn in secret
do we taste the sweetness
of life in the center of pain
I wanted to say to you
until the revolution this is happiness
yet was afraid to praise
even with such skeptic turn
of phraseso shrugged a smile
1985
HOMAGE TO WINTER
You:a woman too old
for passive contemplation
caught staring out a window
at bird-of-paradise spikes
jewelled with rain, across an alley
It’s winter in this land
of roses, rosessometimes
the fog lies thicker around you than your past
sometimes the Pacific radiance
scours the air to lapis
In this new world you feel
backward along the hem of your whole life
questioning every breadth
Nights you can watch the moon shed skin after skin
over and over, always a shape
of imbalance except
at birth and in the full
You, still trying to learn
how to live, what must be done
though in death you will be complete
whatever you do
But death is not the answer.
On these flat green leaves
light skates like a golden blade
high in the dull-green pine
sit two mushroom-colored doves
afterglow overflows
across the bungalow roof
between the signs for the three-way stop
over everything that is:
the cotton pants stirring on the line, the
empty Coke can by the fence
onto the still unflowering
mysterious acacia
and a sudden chill takes the air
Backward you dream to a porch
you stood on a year ago
snow flying quick as thought
sticking to your shouldergone
Blue shadows, ridged and fading
on a snow-swept road
the shortest day of the year
Backward you dream to glare ice
and ice-wet pussywillows
to Riverside Drive, the wind
cut loose from Hudson’s Bay
driving tatters into your face
And back you come at last to that room
without a view, where webs of frost
blinded the panes at noon
where already you had begun
to make the visible world your conscience
asking things:What can you tell me?
what am I doing?what must I do?
1985
BLUE ROCK
For Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz
Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain
blue into the wineglass on the table
the full moon moving up the sky is plain
as the dead rose and the live buds on one stem
No, this isn’t Persian poetry I’m quoting:
all this is here in North America
where I sit trying to kindle fire
from what’s already on fire:
the light of a blue rock from Chile swimming
in the apricot liquid called “eye of the swan”.
This is a chunk of your world, a piece of its heart:
split from the rest, does it suffer?
You needn’t tell me.Sometimes I hear it singing
by the waters of Babylon, in a strange land
sometimes it just lies heavy in my hand
with the heaviness of silent seismic knowledge
a blue rock in a foreign land, an exile
excised but never separated
from the gashed heart, its mountains,
winter rains, language, native sorrow.
At the end of the twentieth century
cardiac graphs of torture reply to poetry
line by line:in North America
the strokes of the stylus continue
the figures of terror are reinvented
all night, after I turn the lamp off, blotting
wineglass, rock and roses, leaving pages
like this scrawled with mistakes and love,
falling asleep; but the stylus does not sleep,
cruelly the drum revolves, cruelty writes its name.
Once when I wrote poems they did not change
left overnight on the page
they stayed as they were and daylight broke
on the lines, as on the clotheslines in the yard
heavy with clothes forgotten or left out
for a better sun next day
But now I know what happens while I sleep
and when I wake the poem has changed:
the facts have dilated it, or cancelled it;
and in every morning’s light, your rock is there.
1985
YOM KIPPUR 1984
I drew solitude over me, on the lone shore.
—Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”
For whoever does not afflict his soul throughout this day, shall be cut off from his people.
—Leviticus 23:29
What is a Jew in solitude?
What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude:a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?
The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs
with its electric gate, its perfected privacy
is not what I mean
the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan
Heights
is not what I mean
the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to
the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her
attack dog suddenly risen
is not what I mean
Three thousand miles from what I once called home
I open a book searching for some lines I remember
about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the
dooryard once
bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,
something that bloomed and faded and was written down
in the poet’s book, forever:
Opening the poet’s book
I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: … the hateful-eyed
and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have
them
Robinson Jeffers, multitude
is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys
and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines
are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling
its scrolls of surf,
and the separate persons, stooped
over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering
skies of harvest
who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams
Hands
that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape,
scour, belong to a brain like no other
Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend
a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final
solution, have I a choice?
To wander far from your own or those you have called your own
to hear strangeness calling you from far away
and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk
to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection
nowhere on your mind
(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another
Jew
the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make
those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a
woman’s god)
Find someone like yourself.Find others.
Agree you will never desert each other.
Understand that any rift among you
means power to those who want to do you in.
Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.
But I have a nightmare to tell:I am trying to say
that to be with my people is my dearest wish
but that I also love strangers
that I crave separateness
I hear myself stuttering these words
to my worst friends and my best enemies
who watch for my mistakes in grammar
my mistakes in love.
This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?
If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.
To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about
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