Later Poems Selected and New
Page 17
Her punk hair/ her religious hair.
Passing the blue rectangles of the stranger’s doors.
Not one opens to her.
Threading herself into declining alleys/ black on white plaster olive on violet.
To walk to walk to walk.
To lie on a warm stone listening to familiar insects.
(Exile, exile.)
This woman/ the heart of the matter.
Circling back to the city where her name crackles behind creviced stones.
This woman who left alone and returns alone.
Whose hair again is covered/ whose arms and neck are covered/ according to the law.
Underneath her skin has darkened/ her footsoles roughened.
Sand from the stranger’s doorway sifting from her plastic
carry-all/ drifting into the sand
whirling around in her old quarter.
1993
Then or Now
Is it necessary for me to write obliquely
about the situation? Is that what
you would have me do?
Food Packages: 1947
Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea,
salamis, aspirin:
Four packages a month to her old professor in Heidelberg
and his Jewish wife:
Europe is trying to revive an intellectual life
and the widow of the great sociologist needs flour.
Europe is trying/to revive/
with the Jews somewhere else.
The young ex-philosopher tries to feed her teachers
all the way from New York, with orders for butter from Denmark,
sending dispatches into the fog
of the European spirit:
I am no longer German. I am a Jew and the German language
was once my home.
1993
Innocence: 1945
“The beauty of it was the guilt.
It entered us, quick schnapps,
forked tongue of ice. The guilt
made us feel innocent again.
We had done nothing while some
extreme measures were taken. We drifted. In the
Snow Queen’s huge ballroom had dreamed
of the whole world and a new pair of skates.
But we had suffered too.
The miracle was: felt
nothing. Felt we had done
nothing. Nothing to do. Felt free.
And we had suffered, too.
It was that freedom we craved,
cold needle in the bloodstream.
Guilt after all was a feeling.”
1993
Sunset, December, 1993
Dangerous of course to draw
parallels Yet more dangerous to write
as if there were a steady course, we and our poems
protected: the individual life, protected
poems, ideas, gliding
in mid-air, innocent
I walked out on the deck and every board
was luminous with cold dew It could freeze tonight
Each board is different of course but each does gleam
wet, under a complicated sky: mounds of swollen ink
heavy gray unloading up the coast
a rainbow suddenly and casually
unfolding its span
Dangerous not to think
how the earth still was in places
while the chimneys shuddered with the first dischargements
1993
Deportations
It’s happened already while we were still
searching for patterns A turn of the head
toward a long horizontal window overlooking the city
to see people being taken
neighbors, vendors, paramedicals
hurried from their porches, their tomato stalls
their auto-mechanic arguments
and children from schoolyards
There are far more of the takers-away than the taken
at this point anyway
Then: dream-cut: our house:
four men walk through the unlatched door
One in light summer wool and silken tie
One in work clothes browned with blood
One with open shirt, a thin
thong necklace hasped with silver around his neck
One in shorts naked up from the navel
And they have come for us, two of us and four of them
and I think, perhaps they are still human
and I ask them When do you think this all began?
as if trying to distract them from their purpose
as if trying to appeal to a common bond
as if one of them might be you
as if I were practicing for something
yet to come
1994
And Now
And now as you read these poems
—you whose eyes and hands I love
—you whose mouth and eyes I love
—you whose words and minds I love—
don’t think I was trying to state a case
or construct a scenery:
I tried to listen to
the public voice of our time
tried to survey our public space
as best I could
—tried to remember and stay
faithful to details, note
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock’s hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
was declared obsolete.
1994
Six Narratives
1
You drew up the story of your life I was in that story
Nights on the coast I’d meet you flashlight in hand
curving my soles over musseled rocks cracked and raw we’d lick
inside the shells for danger
You’d drop into the bar I’d sit upstairs at my desk writing
the pages
you hoped would make us famous then in the face of my
turned back
you went to teach at the freedom school as if
you were teaching someone else to get free from me this was
your story
Like a fogsmeared planet over the coast
I’d walked into, served, your purposeful longings I knew, I did
not stop till I turned my back
2
You drew up a story about me I fled that story
Aching in mind I noticed names on the helms of busses:
COP CITY SHEEPSHEAD BAY
I thought I saw the city where the cops came home
to lay kitchen linoleum barbecue on balconies
I saw the bloodied head of the great sheep dragged through
the underpasses
trucked to the bay where the waters would not touch it
left on the beach in its shroud of flies
On the bus to La Guardia my arms ached with all my findings
anchored under my breasts with all my will
I cried sick day, O sick day, this is my day and I, for this I will
not pay
as the green rushed bleeding out through the snarled cracks of
the expressway
3
You were telling a story about women to young men It was
not my story
it was not a story about women it was a story about men
Your hunger a spear gripped in hand a tale unspun in your
rented campground
clothed in captured whale-songs tracked with synthesized
Andes flutes
it was all about you beaded and bearded misfeathered and
miscloaked
where the TV cameras found you in your sadness
4
Y
ou were telling a story about love it was your story
I came and stood outside
listening : : death was in the doorway
death was in the air but the story
had its own life no pretenses
about women in that lovesong for a man
Listening I went inside the bow scraping the bass-string
inside the horn’s heartbroken cry
I was the breath’s intake the bow’s rough mutter:
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain . . .
5
I was telling you a story about love
how even in war it goes on speaking its own language
Yes you said but the larynx is bloodied
the knife was well-aimed into the throat
Well I said love is hated it has no price
No you said you are talking about feelings
Have you ever felt nothing? that is what war is now
Then a shadow skimmed your face
Go on talking in a normal voice you murmured
Nothing is listening
6
You were telling a story about war it is our story
an old story and still it must be told
the story of the new that fled the old
how the big dream strained and shifted
the ship of hope shuddered on the iceberg’s breast
the private affections swayed and staggered
So we are thrown together so we are racked apart
in a republic shivering on its glassy lips
parted as if the fundamental rift
had not been calculated from the first into the mighty scaffold.
1994
Inscriptions
One: comrade
Little as I knew you I know you: little as you knew me you
know me
—that’s the light we stand under when we meet.
I’ve looked into flecked jaws
walked injured beaches footslick in oil
watching licked birds stumble in flight
while you drawn through the pupil of your eye
across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief
headlong and by choice took on the work of charting
your city’s wounds ancient and fertile
listening for voices within and against.
My testimony: yours: Trying to keep faith
not with each other exactly yet it’s the one known and unknown
who stands for, imagines the other with whom faith could
be kept.
In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope
(no stranger to bleakness you: worms have toothed at
your truths
but you were honest regarding that).
You conspired to compile the illegal discography
of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.
If there were ethical flowers one would surely be yours
and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines
across city’s whyless sleeplight I’d hand it
purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty afloat
on the bacterial waters.
When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous
when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.
The self unlocked to many selves.
A mirror handed to one who just released
from the locked ward from solitary from preventive detention
sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows
whole populations.
One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of home
at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult of his
own eye
how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote it.
Two: movement
Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light
Talking of angles of vision movements a black or a red tulip
opening
Times of walking across a street thinking
not I have joined a movement but I am stepping in this deep current
Part of my life washing behind me terror I couldn’t swim with
part of my life waiting for me a part I had no words for
I need to live each day through have them and know them all
though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.
• • •
When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?
How do you know you’re not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,
stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado
requiring all your strength wherever found
your patience and your labor
desire pitted against desire’s inversion
all your mind’s fortitude?
Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers
with poetry
who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES
OUR DREAMS.
Maybe a student: one mind unfurling like a redblack peony
quenched into percentile, dropout, stubbed-out bud
—Your journals Patricia: Douglas your poems: but the repetitive blows
on spines whose hope you were, on yours:
to see that quenching and decide.
—And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in
the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class . . . all that . . . but isn’t all that just history?
Aren’t people bored with it all?
She could be
myself at nineteen but free of reverence for past ideas
ignorant of hopes piled on her She’s a mermaid
momentarily precipitated from a solution
which could stop her heart She could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal.
Three: origins
Turning points. We all like to hear about those. Points
on a graph.
Sudden conversions. Historical swings. Some kind of
dramatic structure.
But a life doesn’t unfold that way it moves
in loops by switchbacks loosely strung
around the swelling of one hillside toward another
one island toward another
A child’s knowing a child’s forgetting remain childish
till you meet them mirrored and echoing somewhere else
Don’t ask me when I learned love
Don’t ask me when I learned fear
Ask about the size of rooms how many lived in them
what else the rooms contained
what whispers of the histories of skin
Should I simplify my life for you?
The Confederate Women of Maryland
on their dried-blood granite pedestal incised
IN DIFFICULTY AND IN DANGER . . .
“BRAVE AT HOME”
—words a child could spell out
standing in wetgreen grass stuck full of yellow leaves
monumental women bandaging wounded men
Joan of Arc in a book a peasant in armor
Mussolini Amelia Earhart the President on the radio
—what’s taught, what’s overheard
Four: history
Should I simplify my life for you?
Don’t ask how I began to love men.
Don’t ask how I began to love women.
Remember the forties songs, the slowdance numbers
the small sex-filled gas-rationed Chevrolet?
Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?
Cigarette smoke of the movies, silver-and-gray
profiles, dreaming the dreams of he-and-she
breathing the dissolution of the wisping silver plume?
; Dreaming that dream we leaned applying lipstick
by the gravestone’s mirror when we found ourselves
playing in the cemetery. In Current Events she said
the war in Europe is over, the Allies
and she wore no lipstick have won the war
and we raced screaming out of Sixth Period.
Dreaming that dream
we had to maze our ways through a wood
where lips were knives breasts razors and I hid
in the cage of my mind scribbling
this map stops where it all begins
into a red-and-black notebook.
Remember after the war when peace came down
as plenty for some and they said we were saved
in an eternal present and we knew the world could end?
—remember after the war when peace rained down
on the winds from Hiroshima Nagasaki Utah Nevada?
and the socialist queer Christian teacher jumps from the
hotel window?
and L.G. saying I want to sleep with you but not for sex
and the red-and-black enamelled coffee-pot dripped slow through
the dark grounds
—appetite terror power tenderness
the long kiss in the stairwell the switch thrown
on two Jewish Communists married to each other
the definitive crunch of glass at the end of the wedding?
(When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?)
Five: voices
“That year I began to understand the words burden of proof
—how the free market of ideas depended
on certain lives laboring under that burden.
I started feeling in my body
how that burden was bound to our backs
keeping us cramped in old repetitive motions
crouched in the same mineshaft year on year
or like children in school striving to prove
proofs already proven over and over
to get into the next grade
but there is no next grade no movement onward only this
and the talk goes on, the laws, the jokes, the deaths, the way of
life goes on
as if you had proven nothing as if this burden were what
you are.”