“Swing Low,” and most of all
“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”
How we sang out the chorus how I loved
the watchfires of the hundred circling camps
and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free
4.
Piano lessons The mother and the daughter
Their doomed exhaustion their common mystery
worked out in finger-exercises Czerny, Hanon
The yellow Schirmer albums quarter-rests double-holds
glyphs of an astronomy the mother cannot teach
the daughter because this is not the story
of a mother teaching magic to her daughter
Side by side I see us locked
My wrists your voice are tightened
Passion lives in old songs in the kitchen
where another woman cooks teaches and sings
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd
and in the booklined room
where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches
Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs
The daughter struggles with the strange notations
—dark chart of music’s ocean flowers and flags
but would rather learn by ear and heart The mother
says she must learn to read by sight not ear and heart
5.
Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—
even today a scrip of music balks me—
I feel illiterate in this
your mother-tongue Had it been Greek or Slovak
no more could your native alphabet have baffled
your daughter whom you taught for years
held by a tether over the ivory
and ebony teeth of the Steinway
It is
the three hundredth anniversary of Johann
Sebastian Bach My earliest life
woke to his English Suites under your fingers
I understand a language I can’t read
Music you played streams on the car radio
in the freeway night
You kept your passions deep You have them still
I ask you, both of us
—Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?
Did I see power in yours?
What was worth fighting for? What did you want?
What did I want from you?
1985–1988
This
Face flashing free child-arms
lifting the collie pup
torn paper on the path
Central Park April ’72
behind you minimal
those benches and that shade
that brilliant light in which
you laughed longhaired
and I’m the keeper of
this little piece of paper
this little piece of truth
I wanted this from you—
laughter a child turning
into a boy at ease
in the spring light with friends
I wanted this for you
I could mutter Give back
that day give me again
that child with the chance
of making it all right
I could yell Give back that light
on the dog’s teeth the child’s hair
but no rough drafts are granted
—Do you think I don’t remember?
did you think I was all-powerful
unimpaired unappalled?
yes you needed that from me
I wanted this from you
1985
Negotiations
Someday if someday comes we will agree
that trust is not about safety
that keeping faith is not about deciding
to clip our fingernails exactly
to the same length or wearing
a uniform that boasts our unanimity
Someday if someday comes we’ll know
the difference between liberal laissez-faire
pluralism and the way you cut your hair
and the way I clench my hand
against my cheekbone
both being possible gestures of defiance
Someday if there’s a someday we will
bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought
I’ll say Have some in the name of our
trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?
We’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit
we’ve tasted stranger
Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go
back and reread those poems and manifestos
that so enraged us in each other’s hand
I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I
couldn’t write it off You’ll say
I read you always, even when I hated you
1986
In a Classroom
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking
What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.
1986
The Novel
All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and
Peace
Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield
were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound
like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers
You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary
as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand
on the slight strand that held your tattered mind
blown like an old stocking from a wire
on the wind between two rivers.
All winter you asked nothing
of that book though it lay heavy on your knees
you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk
you were old woman, child, commander
you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing
you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages
you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-
hand growing few, you knew the end was coming
you knew beyond the ending lay
your own, unwritten life
1986
In Memoriam: D.K.
A man walking on the street
feels unwell has felt unwell
all week, a little Yet the flowers crammed
in pots on the corner: furled anemones:
he knows they open
burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo
all the way to their velvet cores
The flowers hanging over the fence: fuchsias:
each tongued, staring, all of a fire:
the flowers He who has
been happy oftener than sad
carelessly happy well oftener than sick
one of the lucky is thinking about death
and its music about poetry
its translations of his life
And what good will it do you
to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?
Read Keats? How will culture cure you?
Poor, unhappy
unwell culture what can it sing or say
six weeks from now, to you?
Give me your living hand If I could take the hour
death moved into you undeclared, unnamed
—even if sweet, if I could take that hour
between my forceps tear at it like a monster
wrench it out of your flesh dissolve its shape in quicklime
and make you well again
no, not again
but still. . . .
1986
Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest
Two green-webbed chairs
a three-legged stool between
Your tripod
Spears of grass
longer than your bare legs
cast shadows on your legs
drawn up
from the red-and-black
cardboard squares
the board of play
the board of rules
But you’re not playing, you’re talking
It’s midsummer
and greater rules are breaking
It’s the last
innocent summer you will know
and I
will go on awhile pretending that’s not true
When I have done pretending
I can see this:
the depth of the background
shadows
not of one moment only
erased and charcoaled in again
year after year
how the tree looms back behind you
the first tree of the forest
the last tree
from which the deer step out
from protection
the first tree
into dreadfulness
The last and the first tree
1987
Sleepwalking Next to Death
Sleep horns of a snail
protruding, retracting
What we choose to know
or not know
all these years
sleepwalking
next to death
I
This snail could have been eaten
This snail could have been crushed
This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet
This snail could have driven fast at night
putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:
This snail could have ridden
in the back of the pick-up, handing guns
II
Knows, chooses not to know
It has always
been about death and chances
The Dutch artist wrote and painted
one or more strange and usable things
For I mean to meet you
in any land in any language
This is my promise:
I will be there
if you are there
III
In between this and that there are different places
of waiting, airports mostly where the air
is hungover, visibility low boarding passes not guaranteed
If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi
I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth
I would begin reading you like a dream
That’s how extreme it feels
that’s what I have to do
IV
Every stone around your neck you know the reason for
at this time in your life Relentlessly
you tell me their names and furiously I
forget their names Forgetting the names of the stones
you love, you lover of stones
what is it I do?
V
What is it I do? I refuse to take your place
in the world I refuse to make myself
your courier I refuse so much
I might ask, what is it I do?
I will not be the dreamer for whom
you are the only dream
I will not be your channel
I will wrestle you to the end
for our difference (as you have wrestled me)
I will change your name and confuse
the Angel
VI
I am stupid with you and practical with you
I remind you to take a poultice forget a quarrel
I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you
vitamins you hate to take
VII
Calmly you look over my shoulder at this page and say
It’s all about you None of this
tells my story
VIII
Yesterday noon I stood by a river
and many waited to cross over
from the Juarez barrio
to El Paso del Norte
First day of spring a stand of trees
in Mexico were in palegreen leaf
a man casting a net
into the Rio Grande
and women, in pairs, strolling
across the border
as if taking a simple walk
Many thousands go
I stood by the river and thought of you
young in Mexico in a time of hope
IX
The practical nurse is the only nurse
with her plastic valise of poultices and salves
her hands of glove leather and ebony
her ledgers of pain
The practical nurse goes down to the river
in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace
eating a burrito in hand
it will be a long day
a long labor
the midwife will be glad to see her
it will be a long night someone bleeding
from a botched abortion a beating Will you let her touch you
now?
Will you tell her you’re fine?
X
I’m afraid of the border patrol
Not those men
of La Migra who could have run us
into the irrigation canal with their van
I’m afraid
of the patrollers
the sleepwalker in me
the loner in you
I want five hours with you
in a train running south
maybe ten hours
in a Greyhound bound for the border
the two seats side-by-side that become a home
an island of light in the continental dark
the time that takes the place of a lifetime
I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down
I will not be lulled
Promise you won’t jump the train
vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.
that you won’t defect
that we’ll travel
like two snails
our four horns erect
1987
Delta
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking through it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread
1987
6/21
It’s June and summer’s height
the longest bridge of light
leaps from all the rivets
of the sky
Yet it’s of earth
and nowhere else I have to speak
Only on earth has this light taken on
these swivelled meanings, only on this earth
where we are dying befouled, gritting our teeth
losing our guiding stars
has this light
found an alphabet a mouth
1987
Dreamwood
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,
here and there a sign o
f aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, massproduced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
massproduced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
1987
Harpers Ferry
Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads
glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading
across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,
rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills
and a white girl running away from home
who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how
do I know how the light quails from the trembling
waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge
how behind the gunmetal pines the guns
are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?
I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky
crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck
on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale
like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now
are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership
in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from
the ones who can get it to the ones
who have been refused. It’s a simple act,
to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought
it.
Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought
and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper
snows
than she has ever pictured
but this is one exact and definite place,
a wooden village at the junction of two rivers
two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,
low houses crawling up the mountains.
Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pine’s tooth, ties the leg
in a kerchief
knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town
has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will
know her family face