be well, whatever that means, to be well.
Outrage: who dare claim protection for their own
amid such unprotection? What kind of prayer
is that? To what kind of god? What kind of wish?
V
She who died on that bed sees it her way:
She who went under peers through the translucent shell
cupping her death and sees her other well,
through a long lens, in silvered outline, well
she sees her other and she cannot tell
why when the boom of surf struck at them both
she felt the undertow and heard the bell,
thought death would be their twinning, till the swell
smashed her against the reef, her other still
fighting the pull, struggling somewhere away
further and further, calling her all the while:
she who went under summons her other still.
1989–1990
Darklight
I
Early day. Grey the air.
Grey the boards of the house, the bench,
red the dilated potflower’s petals
blue the sky that will rend through
this fog.
Dark summer’s outer reaches:
thrown husk of a moon
sharpening
in the last dark blue.
I think of your eye
(dark the light
that washes into a deeper dark).
An eye, coming in closer.
Under the lens
lashes and veins grow huge
and huge the tear that washes out the eye,
the tear that clears the eye.
II
When heat leaves the walls at last
and the breeze comes
or seems to come, off water
or off the half-finished moon
her silver roughened by a darkblue rag
this is the ancient hour
between light and dark, work and rest
earthly tracks and star-trails
the last willed act of the day
and the night’s first dream
If you could have this hour
for the last hour of your life.
1988–1990
For a Friend in Travail
Waking from violence: the surgeon’s probe left in the foot
paralyzing the body from the waist down.
Dark before dawn: wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house
the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,
half-slice of moon to the south
through dark panes. A time to speak to you.
What are you going through? she said, is the great question.
Philosopher of oppression, theorist
of the victories of force.
We write from the marrow of our bones. What she did not
ask, or tell: how victims save their own lives.
That crawl along the ledge, then the ravelling span of fibre strung
from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.
Waking, not sure we made it. Relief, appallment, of waking.
Consciousness. O, no. To sleep again.
O to sleep without dreaming.
How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon
melting into moon-colored air
moist and sweet, here on the western edge.
Love for the world, and we are part of it.
How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes
she did not tell.
What are you going through, there on the other edge?
1990
Final Notations
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will
1991
Dark Fields of the Republic
* * *
What Kind of Times Are These
What Kind of Times Are These
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but
don’t be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
1991
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
1991
To the Days
From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,
all of it—the newscasts’ terrible stories
of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,
much worse—the knowing what it means to be lied to.
Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.
A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.
Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.
Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.
Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.
To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.
To know the bodies drifting underwater.
To be human, said Rosa—I can’t teach you that.
A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds—his moment.
Surely the love of life is never-ending,
the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?
I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.
Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn
in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.
Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment
with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.
1991
Miracle Ice Cream
MIRACLE’S truck comes do
wn the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.
Take what’s still given: in a room’s rich shadow
a woman’s breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.
1992
Rachel
There’s a girl born in abrupt August light
far north, a light soon to be peeled
like an onion, down to nothing. Around her ions are falling
in torrents, glacial eyes are staring, the monster’s body
trapped in the bay goes through its spasms.
What she opens her gray eyes on
is drastic. Even the man and woman gazing
into her unfocused gaze, searching for focus,
are drastic.
It’s the end of a century.
If she gets to grow old, if there’s anything
: anyone to speak, will they say of her,
She grew up to see it, she was our mother, but
she was born one of them?
1992
Amends
Nights like this: on the cold apple-bough
a white star, then another
exploding out of the bark:
on the ground, moonlight picking at small stones
as it picks at greater stones, as it rises with the surf
laying its cheek for moments on the sand
as it licks the broken ledge, as it flows up the cliffs,
as it flicks across the tracks
as it unavailing pours into the gash
of the sand-and-gravel quarry
as it leans across the hangared fuselage
of the crop-dusting plane
as it soaks through cracks into the trailers
tremulous with sleep
as it dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers
as if to make amends
1992
Calle Visión
1
Not what you thought: just a turn-off
leading downhill not up
narrow, doesn’t waste itself
has a house at the far end
scrub oak and cactus in the yard
some cats some snakes
in the house there is a room
in the room there is a bed
on the bed there is a blanket
that tells the coming of the railroad
under the blanket there are sheets
scrubbed transparent here and there
under the sheets there’s a mattress
the old rough kind, with buttons and ticking
under the mattress is a frame
of rusting iron still strong
the whole bed smells of soap and rust
the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain
this is your room
in Calle Visión
if you took the turn-off
it was for you
2
Calle Visión sand in your teeth
granules of cartilage in your wrists
Calle Visión firestorm behind
shuttered eyelids fire in your foot
Calle Visión rocking the gates
of your locked bones
Calle Visión dreamnet dropped
over your porous sleep
3
Lodged in the difficult hotel
all help withheld
a place not to live but to die in
not an inn but a hospital
a friend’s love came to me
touched and took me away
in a car love
of a curmudgeon, a short-fuse
and as he drove eyes on the road
I felt his love
and that was simply the case the way things were
unstated and apparent
and like the rest of it
clear as a dream
4
Calle Visión your heart beats on unbroken
how is this possible
Calle Visión wounded knee
wounded spine wounded eye
Have you ever worked around metal?
Are there particles under your skin?
Calle Visión but your heart is still whole
how is this possible
since what can be will be taken
when not offered in trust and faith
by the collectors of collectibles
the professors of what-has-been-suffered
The world is falling down hold my hand
It’s a lonely sound hold my hand
Calle Visión never forget
the body’s pain
never divide it
5
Ammonia
carbon dioxide
carbon monoxide
methane
hydrogen sulfide
: the gasses that rise from urine and feces
in the pig confinement units known as nurseries
can eat a metal doorknob off in half a year
pig-dander
dust from dry manure
—lung-scar: breath-shortedness an early symptom
And the fire shall try
every man’s work :Calle Visión:
and every woman’s
if you took the turn-off
this is your revelation this the source
6
The repetitive motions of slaughtering
—fire in wrists in elbows—
the dead birds coming at you along the line
—how you smell them in your sleep—
fire in your wrist blood packed
under your fingernails heavy air
doors padlocked on the outside
—you might steal a chicken—
fire in the chicken factory fire
in the carpal tunnel leaping the frying vats
yellow smoke from soybean oil
and wasted parts and insulating wire
—some fleeing to the freezer some
found “stuck in poses of escape”—
7
You can call on beauty still and it will leap
from all directions
you can write beauty into the cruel file
of things done things left undone but
once we were dissimilar
yet unseparate that’s beauty that’s what you catch
in the newborn’s midnight gaze
the fog that melts the falling stars
the virus from the smashed lianas driven
searching now for us
8
In the room in the house
in Calle Visión
all you want is to lie down
alone on your back let your hands
slide lightly over your hipbones
But she’s there with her remnants her cross-sections
trying to distract you
with her childhood her recipes her
cargo of charred pages her
carved and freckled neck-stones
her crying-out-for-witness her
backward-forward timescapes
her suitcase in Berlin
and the one lost and found
in her island go-and-come
—is she terrified you will forget her?
9
In the black net
of her orange wing
the angry nightblown butterfly
hangs on a piece of lilac in the sun
carried overland like her
from a long way off
She has travelled hard and far
and her interrogation goes:
—Hands dripping with wet earth
head full of shocking dreams
O what have you buried all these years
what have you dug up?
• • •
This place is alive with the dead and with the living
I have never been alone here
I wear my triple eye as I walk along the road
past, present, future all are at my side
Storm-beaten, tough-winged passenger
there is nothing I have buried that can die
10
On the road there is a house
scrub oak and cactus in the yard
lilac carried overland
from a long way off
in the house there is a bed
on the bed there is a blanket
telling the coming of the railroad
under the mattress there’s a frame
of rusting iron still strong
the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain
the window smells of old
tobacco-dust and rain
1992–1993
Reversion
This woman/ the heart of the matter.
This woman flung into solitary by the prayers of her tribe.
This woman waking/ reaching for scissors/ starting to cut her hair
Hair long shaven/ growing out.
To snip to snip to snip/ creak of sharpness meeting itself against the roughness of her hair.
This woman whose voices drive her into exile.
(Exile, exile.)
Drive her toward the other side.
By train and foot and ship, to the other side.
Other side. Of a narrow sea.
This woman/ the heart of the matter.
Heart of the law/ heart of the prophets.
Their voices buzzing like raspsaws in her brain.
Taking ship without a passport.
How does she do it. Even the ships have eyes.
Are painted like birds.
This woman has no address book.
This woman perhaps has a toothbrush.
Somewhere dealing for red/blue dyes to crest her rough-clipped hair.
On the other side: stranger to women and to children.
Setting her bare footsole in the print of the stranger’s bare foot in the sand.
Feeding the stranger’s dog from the sack of her exhaustion.
Hearing the male prayers of the stranger’s tribe/ rustle of the stranger’s river.
Lying down asleep and dreamless in one of their doorways.
She has long shed the coverings.
On the other side she walks bare-armed, bare-legged, clothed in voices.
Here or there picks up a scarf/ a remnant.
Day breaks cold on her legs and in her sexual hair.
Later Poems Selected and New Page 16
