—in its odd spaces, free,
many have sung and battled—
But I’m already living the rest of my life
not under conditions of my choosing
wired into pain
rider on the slow train
Yours, Adrienne
8.
I’m afraid of prison. Have been all these years.
Afraid they’ll take my aspirin away
and of other things as well:
beatings damp and cold I have my fears.
Unable one day to get up and walk
to do what must be done
Prison as idea it fills me
with fear this exposure to my own weakness
at someone else’s whim
I watched that woman go over the barbed-wire fence
at the peace encampment
the wheelchair rider
I didn’t want to do what she did
I thought, They’ll get her for this
I thought, We are not such victims.
9.
Tearing but not yet torn: this page
The long late-winter rage
wild rain on the windshield
clenched stems unyielding sticks
of maple, birch bleached grass the range
of things resisting change
And this is how I am
and this is how you are
when we resist the charmer’s open sesame
the thief’s light-fingered touch
staying closed because we will
not give ourselves away
until the agent the manipulator the false toucher
has left and it is May
10.
Night over the great and the little worlds
of Brooklyn the shredded communities
in Chicago Argentina Poland
in Holyoke Massachusetts Amsterdam Manchester England
Night falls the day of atonement begins
in how many divided hearts how many defiant lives
Toronto Managua St. Johnsbury
and the great and little worlds of the women
Something ancient passes across the earth
lifting the dust of the blasted ghettos
You ask if I will eat and I say, Yes,
I have never fasted
but something crosses my life
not a shadow the reflection of a fire
11.
I came out of the hospital like a woman
who’d watched a massacre
not knowing how to tell
my adhesions the lingering infections
from the pain on the streets
In my room on Yom Kippur they took me off morphine
I saw shadows on the wall the dying and the dead
They said Christian Phalangists did it
then Kol Nidre on the radio and my own
unhoused spirit trying to find a home
Was it then or another day
in what order did it happen
I thought They call this elective surgery
but we all have died of this.
12.
Violence as purification: the one idea.
One massacre great enough to undo another
one last-ditch operation to solve the problem
of the old operation that was bungled
Look: I have lain on their tables under their tools
under their drugs from the center of my body
a voice bursts against these methods
(wherever you made a mistake
batter with radiation defoliate cut away)
and yes, there are merciful debridements
but burns turn into rotting flesh
for reasons of vengeance and neglect.
I have been too close to septic too many times
to play with either violence or non-violence.
13.
Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,
feelings are always about more than one thing.
You drag yourself back home and it is autumn
you can’t concentrate, you can’t lie on the couch
so you drive yourself for hours on the quiet roads
crying at the wheel watching the colors
deepening, fading and winter is coming
and you long for one idea
one simple, huge idea to take this weight
and you know you will never find it, never
because you don’t want to find it
You will drive and cry and come home and eat
and listen to the news
and slowly even at winter’s edge
the feelings come back in their shapes
they are changed
14.
Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences
meaningless in ordinary American
like, Your mother, too, was a missionary of poets
and in another dream one of my old teachers
shows me a letter of reference
he has written for me, in a language
I know to be English but cannot understand,
telling me it’s in “transformational grammar”
and that the student who typed the letter
does not understand this grammar either.
Lately I dreamed about my father,
how I found him, alive, seated on an old chair.
I think what he said to me was,
You don’t know how lonely I am.
15.
You who think I find words for everything,
and you for whom I write this,
how can I show you what I’m barely
coming into possession of, invisible luggage
of more than fifty years, looking at first
glance like everyone else’s, turning up
at the airport carousel
and the waiting for it, knowing what nobody
would steal must eventually come round—
feeling obsessed, peculiar, longing?
16.
It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived
watching myself in the act of loss—the art of losing,
Elizabeth Bishop called it, but for me no art
only badly-done exercises
acts of the heart forced to question
its presumptions in this world its mere excitements
acts of the body forced to measure
all instincts against pain
acts of parting trying to let go
without giving up yes Elizabeth a city here
a village there a sister, comrade, cat
and more no art to this but anger
17.
I have backroads I take to places
like the hospital where night pain
is never tended enough but I can drive
under the overlacing boughs
of wineglass elm, oak, maple
from Mosquitoville to Wells River
along the double track with the greened hump
the slope with the great sugar-grove
New Age talk calls it “visualizing” but I know
under torture I would travel
from the West Barnet burying-ground
to Joe’s Brook by heart I know
all of those roads by heart
by heart I know what, and all, I have left behind
18.
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured un-grieved-over The problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world
For it is the body’s world
they are trying to destroy forever
The best world is the body’s world
filled with creatures filled with dread
misshapen so yet the best
we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I longed to live on this earth
walking her boundaries never counting the cost
19.
If to feel is to be unreliable
don’t listen to us
if to be in pain is to be predictable
embittered bullying
then don’t listen to us
If we’re in danger of mistaking
our personal trouble for the pain on the streets
don’t listen to us
if my fury at being grounded frightens you
take off on your racing skis
in your beautiful tinted masks
Trapped in one idea, you can’t have feelings
Without feelings perhaps you can feel like a god
20.
The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers
no longer visible
where undocumented intelligences travailed
on earth they had no stake in
though the dark leaves growing beneath white veils
were beautiful and the barns opened out like fans
All this of course could have been done differently
This valley itself: one more contradiction
the paradise fields the brute skyscrapers
the pesticidal wells
I have been wanting for years
to write a poem equal to these
material forces
and I have always failed
I wasn’t looking for a muse
only a reader by whom I could not be mistaken
21.
The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers
shed their pale fiery dust on the dark stove-lid
others stand guard heads bowed over the garden
the fierce and flaring garden you have made
out of your woes and expectations
tilled into the earth I circle close to your mind
crash into it sometimes as you crash into mine
Given this strip of earth given mere love
should we not be happy?
but happiness comes and goes as it comes and goes
the safe-house is temporary the garden
lies open to vandals
this whole valley is one more contradiction
and more will be asked of us we will ask more
22.
In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet
of third-degree burns
her quizzical melancholy grace
her irreplaceable self in utter peril
In the radioactive desert walks a woman
in a black dress white-haired steady
as the luminous hand of a clock
in circles she walks knitting
and unknitting her scabbed fingers
Her face is expressionless shall we pray to her
shall we speak of the loose pine-needles how they shook
like the pith of country summers
from the sacks of pitchblende ore in the tin-roofed shack
where it all began
Shall we accuse her of denial
first of the self then of the mixed virtue
of the purest science shall we be wise for her
in hindsight shall we scream It has come to this
Shall we praise her shall we let her wander
the atomic desert in peace?
23.
You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,
the chemical industries and pay
that hush-money to the men
who landed out there at twenty not for belief
but because of who they were and were called psychos
when they said their bodies contained dioxin
like memories they didn’t want to keep
whose kids came out deformed
You know nothing has changed no respect or grief
for the losers of a lost war everyone hated
nobody sent them to school like heroes
if they started sueing for everything that was done
there would be no end there would be a beginning
My country wedged fast in history
stuck in the ice
24.
Someone said to me: It’s just that we don’t
know how to cope with the loss of memory.
When your own grandfather doesn’t know you
when your mother thinks you’re somebody else
it’s a terrible thing.
Now just like that is this idea
that the universe will forget us, everything we’ve done
will go nowhere
no one will know who we were.
No one will know who we were!
Not the young who will never Nor even the old folk
who knew us when we were young insatiable
for recognition from them
trying so fiercely not to be them
counting on them to know us anywhere
25.
Did anyone ever know who we were
if we means more than a handful?
flower of a generation young white men
cut off in the named, commemorated wars
I stare Jewish into that loss
for which all names become unspeakable
not ever just the best and brightest
but the most wretched and bedevilled
the obscure the strange the driven
the twins the dwarfs the geniuses the gay
But ours was not the only loss
(to whom does annihilation speak
as if for the first time?)
26.
You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil
that was your portion from the torched-out village
the Marxist study-group the Zionist cell
café or cheder Zaddik or Freudian straight or gay
woman or man O you
stripped bared appalled
stretched to mere spirit yet still physical
your irreplaceable knowledge lost
at the mud-slick bottom of the world
how you held fast with your bone-meal fingers
to yourselves each other and strangers
how you touched held-up from falling
what was already half-cadaver
how your life-cry taunted extinction
with its wild, crude so what?
Grief for you has rebellion at its heart
it cannot simply mourn
You: air-driven: reft: are yet our teachers
trying to speak to us in sleep
trying to help us wake
27.
The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves
knew this: you could be killed
for teaching people to read and write
I used to think the worst affliction
was to be forbidden pencil and paper
well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls
for years of the Cultural Revolution
and truly, the magic of written characters
looms and dwindles shrinks small grows swollen
depending on where you stand
and what is in your hand
and who can read and why
I think now the worst affliction
is not to know who you are or have been
I have learned this in part
from writers Reading and writing
aren’t sacred yet people have been killed
as if they were
28.
This high summer we love will pour its light
the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment
then before we’re ready will crash into autumn
with a violence we can’t accept
a bounty we can’t forgive
Night frost will strike when the noons are warm
the pumpkins wildly glowing the green tomatoes
straining huge on the vines
queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty
as the milkweed stakes her claim
she who will stand at last dark sticks barely rising
up through the snow her testament of continuation
We’ll dream of a longer summer
but this is the one we have:
I lay my sunburnt hand
on your table: this is the time we have
29.
You who think I find words for everything
this is enough for now
cut it short cut loose from my words
You for whom I write this
in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage
sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones
when the insect of detritus crawls
from shoulder to elbow to wristbone
remember: the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
1983–1985
Time’s Power
* * *
Solfeggietto
1.
Your windfall at fifteen your Steinway grand
paid for by fire insurance
came to me as birthright a black cave
with teeth of ebony and ivory
twanging and thundering over the head
of the crawling child until
that child was set on the big book on the chair
to face the keyboard world of black and white
—already knowing the world was black and white
The child’s hands smaller than a sand-dollar
set on the keys wired to their mysteries
the child’s wits facing the ruled and ruling staves
2.
For years we battled over music lessons
mine, taught by you Nor did I wonder
what that keyboard meant to you
the hours of solitude the practising
your life of prize-recitals lifted hopes
Piatti’s nephew praising you at sixteen
scholarships to the North
Or what it was to teach
boarding-school girls what won’t be used
shelving ambition beating time
to “On the Ice at Sweet Briar” or
“The Sunken Cathedral” for a child
counting the minutes and the scales to freedom
3.
Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me?
—Summers of ’36, ’37, Europe untuned
what I remember isn’t lessons
not Bach or Brahms or Mozart
but the rented upright in the summer rental
One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack
And so you played, evenings and so we sang
“Steal Away” and “Swanee River,”