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 his mouth,
my father says at last.
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, roses sometimes
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 shoulder gone
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,
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 sol
itude 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
about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,
a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,
who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy
river, woman dragged from her stalled car
into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death
young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening
walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing
availing his Blackness
Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion,
the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has
turned her back
on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her
breasts) hiking alone
found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs
(did she die as queer or as Jew?)
Solitude, O taboo, endangered species
on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend
you
In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:
your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread
her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true
And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?
have I traded off something I don’t name?
To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?
What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for
her spirit-vision
far from the protection of those she has called her own?
Will I find O solitude
your plumes, your breasts, your hair
against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s
singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?
in the old places, anywhere?
What is a Jew in solitude?
What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?
When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock,
crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide
into the sea
when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger
when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities
crushed together on which the world was founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our
loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and
forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are
chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in
multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will
solitude mean?
1984–1985
Edges
In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream
the kingfisher cuts through flashing
spirit-fire from his wings bluer than violet’s edge
the slice of those wings
5 a.m., first light, hoboes of the past
are leaning through the window, what freightcars
did they hop here I thought I’d left behind?
Their hands are stretched out but not for bread
they are past charity, they want me to hear their names
Outside in the world where so much is possible
sunrise rekindles and the kingfisher—
the living kingfisher, not that flash of vision—
darts where the creek drags her wetness over stump and stone
where poison oak reddens acacia pods collect
curled and secretive against the bulkhead
and the firstlight ghosts go transparent
while the homeless line for bread
1985
Contradictions: Tracking Poems
1.
Look: this is January the worst onslaught
is ahead of us Don’t be lured
by these soft grey afternoons these sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paper by the thought
the days are lengthening
Don’t let the solstice fool you:
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moment of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life
2.
Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold.
the grey the black the blond the red
hairs on a skull of cold. Within that skull
the thought of war the sovereign thought
the coldest of all thought. Dreaming shut down
everything kneeling down to cold intelligence
smirking with cold memory
squashed and frozen cold breath
half held-in for cold. The freezing people
of a freezing nation eating
luxury food or garbage
frozen tongues licking the luxury meat
or the pizza-crust the frozen eyes
welded to other eyes also frozen
the cold hands trying to stroke the coldest sex.
Heart of cold Sex of cold Intelligence of cold
My country wedged fast in history
stuck in the ice
3.
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
and tough so hot with joy we amaze ourselves
tough and delicate we play rings
around each other our daytime candle burns
with its peculiar light and if the snow
begins to fall outside filling the branches
and if the night falls without announcement
these are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicate your fingers
exact my tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter
4.
He slammed his hand across my face and I
let him do that until I stopped letting him do it
so I’
m in for life.
. . . . he kept saying I was crazy, he’d lock me up
until I went to Women’s Lib and they
told me he’d been abusing me as much
as if he’d hit me: emotional abuse.
They told me how to answer back. That I could
answer back. But my brother-in-law’s a shrink
with the State. I have to watch my step.
If I stay just within bounds they can’t come and get me.
Women’s Lib taught me the words to say
to remind myself and him I’m a person with rights
like anyone. But answering back’s no answer.
5.
She is carrying my madness and I dread her
avoid her when I can
She walks along I.S. 93 howling
in her bare feet
She is number 6375411
in a cellblock in Arkansas
and I dread what she is paying for that is mine
She has fallen asleep at last in the battered
women’s safe-house and I dread
her dreams that I also dream
If never I become exposed or confined like this
what am I hiding
O sister of nausea of broken ribs of isolation
what is this freedom I protect how is it mine
6.
Dear Adrienne:
I’m calling you up tonight
as I might call up a friend as I might call up a ghost
to ask what you intend to do
with the rest of your life. Sometimes you act
as if you have all the time there is.
I worry about you when I see this.
The prime of life, old age
aren’t what they used to be;
making a good death isn’t either,
now you can walk around the corner of a wall
and see a light
that already has blown your past away.
Somewhere in Boston beautiful literature
is being read around the clock
by writers to signify
their dislike of this.
I hope you’ve got something in mind.
I hope you have some idea
about the rest of your life.
In sisterhood,
Adrienne
7.
Dear Adrienne,
I feel signified by pain
from my breastbone through my left shoulder down
through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain
I am typing this instead of writing by hand
because my wrist on the right side
blooms and rushes with pain
like a neon bulb
You ask me how I’m going to live
the rest of my life
Well, nothing is predictable with pain
Did the old poets write of this?