lies with her throbbing leg on the vined verandah where the woman
of the house
wanted her out of there, that was clear
yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned above her
with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring, mint from the same
source
later with rags wrung from a boiling kettle
and studying, staring eyes. Eyes ringed with watching. A peachtree
shedding yellowy leaves
and a houseful of men who keep off. So great a family of men, and
then this woman
who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.
But this girl is expert in overhearing
and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,
the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl
with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?
Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg
without which she won’t get past Virginia, though she’s running
north.
Whatever gave the girl the idea you could run away
from a family quarrel? Displace yourself, when nothing else
would change? It wasn’t books:
it was half-overheard, a wisp of talk:
escape flight free soil
softing past her shoulder
She has never dreamed of arsenals, though
she’s a good rifle-shot, taken at ten
by her brothers, hunting
and though they’ve climbed her over and over
leaving their wet clots in her sheets
on her new-started maidenhair
she has never reached for a gun to hold them off
for guns are the language of the strong to the weak
—How many squirrels have crashed between her sights
what vertebrae cracked at her finger’s signal
what wings staggered through the boughs
whose eyes, ringed and treed, has she eyed as prey?
There is a strategy of mass flight
a strategy of arming
questions of how, of when, of where:
the arguments soak through the walls
of the houseful of men where running from home
the white girl lies in her trouble.
There are things overheard and things unworded, never sung
or pictured, things that happen silently
as the peachtree’s galactic blossoms open in mist, the frost-star
hangs in the stubble, the decanter of moonlight pours its mournless
liquid down
steadily on the solstice fields
the cotton swells in its boll and you feel yourself engorged,
unnameable
you yourself feel encased and picked-open, you feel yourself
unenvisaged
There is no quarrel possible in this silence
You stop yourself listening for a word that will not be spoken:
listening instead to the overheard
fragments, phrases melting on air: No more Many thousand go
And you know they are leaving as fast as they can, you whose child’s
eye followed each face wondering
not how could they leave but when: you knew they would leave
and so could you but not with them, you were not their child, they
had their own children
you could leave the house where you were daughter, sister, prey
picked open and left to silence, you could leave alone
This would be my scenario of course: that the white girl understands
what I understand and more, that the leg torn in flight
had not betrayed her, had brought her to another point of struggle
that when she takes her place she is clear in mind and her anger
true with the training of her hand and eye, her leg cured on the
porch of history
ready for more than solitary defiance. That when the General passes
through
in her blazing headrag, this girl knows her for Moses, pleads to
stand with the others in the shortened light
accepts the scrutiny, the steel-black gaze; but Moses passes and is
gone to her business elsewhere
leaving the men to theirs, the girl to her own.
But who would she take as leader?
would she fade into the woods
will she die in an indefensible position, a miscarried raid
does she lose the family face at last
pressed into a gully above two rivers, does Shenandoah or Potomac
carry her
north or south, will she wake in the mining camps to stoke the
stoves
and sleep at night with her rifle blue and loyal under her hand
does she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?
Living Memory
Open the book of tales you knew by heart,
begin driving the old roads again,
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wordings you remembered.
A full moon on the first of May
drags silver film on the Winooski River.
The villages are shut
for the night, the woods are open
and soon you arrive at a crossroads
where late, late in time you recognize
part of yourself is buried. Call it Danville,
village of water-witches.
From here on instinct is uncompromised and clear:
the tales come crowding like the Kalevala
longing to burst from the tongue. Under the trees
of the backroad you rumor the dark
with houses, sheds, the long barn
moored like a barge on the hillside.
Chapter and verse. A mailbox. A dooryard.
A drink of springwater from the kitchen tap.
An old bed, old wallpaper. Falling asleep like a child
in the heart of the story.
Reopen the book. A light mist soaks the page,
blunt naked buds tip the wild lilac scribbled
at the margin of the road, no one knows when.
Broken stones of drywall mark the onset
of familiar paragraphs slanting up and away
each with its own version, nothing ever
has looked the same from anywhere.
We came like others to a country of farmers—
Puritans, Catholics, Scotch Irish, Québecois:
bought a failed Yankee’s empty house and barn
from a prospering Yankee,
Jews following Yankee footprints,
prey to many myths but most of all
that Nature makes us free. That the land can save us.
Pioneer, indigenous; we were neither.
You whose stories these farms secrete,
you whose absence these fields publish,
all you whose lifelong travail
took as given this place and weather
who did what you could with the means you had—
it was pick and shovel work
done with a pair of horses, a stone boat
a strong back, and an iron bar: clearing pasture—
Your memories crouched, foreshortened in our text.
Pages torn. New words crowding the old.
I knew a woman whose clavicle was smashed
inside a white clapboard house with an apple tree
and a row of tulips by the door. I had a friend
with six children and a tumor like a seventh
who drove me to my driver’s test and in exchange
wanted to see Goddard College, in Plainfield. She’d heard
women without diplomas could study there.
I knew a woman who walked
straight across cut stubbl
e in her bare feet away,
women who said, He’s a good man, never
laid a hand to me as living proof.
A man they said fought death
to keep fire for his wife for one more winter, leave
a woodpile to outlast him.
I was left the legacy of a pile of stovewood
split by a man in the mute chains of rage.
The land he loved as landscape
could not unchain him. There are many,
Gentile and Jew, it has not saved. Many hearts have burst
over these rocks, in the shacks
on the failure sides of these hills. Many guns
turned on brains already splitting
in silence. Where are those versions?
Written-across like nineteenth-century letters
or secrets penned in vinegar, invisible
till the page is held over flame.
I was left the legacy of three sons
—as if in an old legend of three brothers
where one changes into a rufous hawk
one into a snowy owl
one into a whistling swan
and each flies to the mother’s side
as she travels, bringing something she has lost,
and she sees their eyes are the eyes of her children
and speaks their names and they become her sons.
But there is no one legend and one legend only.
This month the land still leafless, out from snow
opens in all directions, the transparent woods
with sugar-house, pond, cellar-hole unscreened.
Winter and summer cover the closed roads
but for a few weeks they lie exposed,
the old nervous-system of the land. It’s the time
when history speaks in a row of crazy fence-poles
a blackened chimney, houseless, a spring
soon to be choked in second growth
a stack of rusting buckets, a rotting sledge.
It’s the time when your own living
laid open between seasons
ponders clues like the One Way sign defaced
to Bone Way, the stones
of a graveyard in Vermont, a Jewish cemetery
in Birmingham, Alabama.
How you have needed these places,
as a tall gaunt woman used to need to sit
at the knees of bronze-hooded Grief
by Clover Adams’ grave.
But you will end somewhere else, a sift of ashes
awkwardly flung by hands you have held and loved
or, nothing so individual, bones reduced
with, among, other bones, anonymous,
or wherever the Jewish dead
have to be sought in the wild grass overwhelming
the cracked stones. Hebrew spelled in wilderness.
All we can read is life. Death is invisible.
A yahrzeit candle belongs
to life. The sugar skulls
eaten on graves for the Day of the Dead
belong to life. To the living. The Kaddish is to the living,
the Day of the Dead, for the living. Only the living
invent these plumes, tombs, mounds, funeral ships,
living hands turn the mirrors to the walls,
tear the boughs of yew to lay on the casket,
rip the clothes of mourning. Only the living
decide death’s color: is it white or black?
The granite bulkhead
incised with names, the quilt of names, were made
by the living, for the living.
I have watched
films from a Pathé camera, a picnic
in sepia, I have seen my mother
tossing an acorn into the air;
my grandfather, alone in the heart of his family;
my father, young, dark, theatrical;
myself, a six-month child.
Watching the dead we see them living
their moments, they were at play, nobody thought
they would be watched so.
When Selma threw
her husband’s ashes into the Hudson
and they blew back on her and on us, her friends,
it was life. Our blood raced in that gritty wind.
Such details get bunched, packed, stored
in these cellar-holes of memory
so little is needed
to call on the power, though you can’t name its name:
It has its ways of coming back:
a truck going into gear on the crown of the road
the white-throat sparrow’s notes
the moon in her fullness standing
right over the concrete steps the way
she stood the night they landed there.
From here
nothing has changed, and everything.
The scratched and treasured photograph Richard showed me
taken in ’29, the year I was born:
it’s the same road I saw
strewn with the Perseids one August night,
looking older, steeper than now
and rougher, yet I knew it. Time’s
power, the only just power—would you
give it away?
1988
An Atlas of the
Difficult World
* * *
An Atlas of the Difficult World
I
A dark woman, head bent, listening for something
—a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or
voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast
past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires
THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes
dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand
in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,
Malathion in the throat, communion,
the hospital at the edge of the fields,
prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,
the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching
planes dusting rows of pickers.
Elsewhere declarations are made: at the sink
rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market
one says: “On the pond this evening is a light
finer than my mother’s handkerchief
received from her mother, hemmed and initialled
by the nuns in Belgium.”
One says: “I can lie for hours
reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.
I’d rather lie awake and read.” One writes:
“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks
in this cabin’s walls, the road
in winter is often impassable,
I live here so I don’t have to go out and act,
I’m trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing.”
One says: “I never knew from one day to the next
where it was coming from: I had to make my life happen
from day to day. Every day an emergency.
Now I have a house, a job from year to year.
What does that make me?”
In the writing workshop a young man’s tears
wet the frugal beard he’s grown to go with his poems
hoping they have redemption stored
in their lines, maybe will get him home free. In the classroom
eight-year-old faces are grey. The teacher knows which children
have not broken fast that day,
remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal.
• • •
I don’t want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,
tore up her writing, threw the kerosene
lantern into her face waiting
like an unbearable mirror of his own. I don’t
want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer
how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck
and backed it into her. I don’t want to think
how her guesses betrayed her—that he meant well, that she
was really the stronger and ought not to leave him
to his own apparent devastation. I don’t want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
• • •
Within two miles of the Pacific rounding
this long bay, sheening the light for miles
inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over
strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind
returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with
ever-changing words, always the same language
—this is where I live now. If you had known me
once, you’d still know me now though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.
But it would not surprise you
to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean
eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always
I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth. What I love here
is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks
small canyons running through pitched hillsides
liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading
to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle
on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads
closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons
roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light
where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled
to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not the roads
you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching
for life and death, is the same.
II
Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
This is the cemetery of the poor
who died for democracy This is a battlefield
from a nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous
This is the sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets
went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier
processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares