These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit
here are the forests primeval the copper the silver lodes
These are the suburbs of acquiescence silence rising fumelike
from the streets
This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires
flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling
whose children are drifting blind alleys pent
between coiled rolls of razor wire
I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural
then yes let it be these are small distinctions
where do we see it from is the question
III
Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, bought at the
Ben Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one
chipped
—now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between
a spider is working, the third point of her filamental passage
a wicker basket-handle. All afternoon I’ve sat
at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in
slivers
and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows
at the long scribble of lake due south
where the wind and weather come from. There are bottles set in
the windows
that children dug up in summer woods or bought for nickels and
dimes
in dark shops that are no more, gold-brown, foam-green or
cobalt glass, blue that gave way to the cobalt
bomb. The woods
are still on the hill behind the difficult unknowable
incommensurable barn. The wind’s been working itself up
in low gusts gnashing the leaves left chattering on branches
or drifting over still-green grass; but it’s been a warm wind.
An autumn without a killing frost so far, still warm
feels like a time of self-deception, a memory of pushing
limits in youth, that intricate losing game of innocence long
overdue.
Frost is expected tonight, gardens are gleaned, potplants taken in,
there is talk of withering, of wintering-over.
• • •
North of Willoughby the back road to Barton
turns a right-hand corner on a high plateau
bitten by wind now and rimed grey-white
—farms of rust and stripping paint, the shortest growing season
south of Quebec, a place of sheer unpretentious hardship, dark
pines stretching away
toward Canada. There was a one-room schoolhouse
by a brook where we used to picnic, summers, a little world
of clear bubbling water, cowturds, moss, wild mint, wild mush
rooms under the pines.
One hot afternoon I sat there reading Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte
Brontë—the remote
upland village where snow lay long and late, the deep-rutted
roads, the dun and grey moorland
—trying to enfigure such a life, how genius
unfurled in the shortlit days, the meagre means of that house. I
never thought
of lives at that moment around me, what girl dreamed
and was extinguished in the remote back-country I had come to
love,
reader reading under a summer tree in the landscape
of the rural working poor.
Now the panes are black and from the south the wind still staggers,
creaking the house:
brown milkweeds toss in darkness below but I cannot see them
the room has lost the window and turned into itself: two corner
shelves of things
both useful and unused, things arrived here by chance or choice,
two teapots, one broken-spouted, red and blue
came to me with some books from my mother’s mother, my
grandmother Mary
who travelled little, loved the far and strange, bits of India, Asia
and this teapot of hers was Chinese or she thought it was
—the other given by a German Jew, a refugee who killed herself
Midlands flowered ware, and this too cannot be used because
coated inside—why?—with flaking paint:
“You will always use it for flowers,” she instructed when she
gave it.
In a small frame, under glass, my father’s bookplate, engraved in
his ardent youth, the cleft tree-trunk and the wintering ants:
Without labor, no sweetness—motto I breathed in from him and
learned in grief and rebellion to take and use
—and later learned that not all labor ends in sweetness.
A little handwrought iron candlestick, given by another German
woman
who hidden survived the Russian soldiers beating the walls in
1945,
They are now long apart.
Some odd glasses for wine or brandy, from an ignorant, passionate
time—we were in our twenties—
with the father of the children who dug for old medicine bottles
in the woods
—afternoons listening to records, reading Karl Shapiro’s Poems
of a Jew and Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health”
aloud, using the poems to talk to each other
—now it’s twenty years since last I heard that intake
of living breath, as if language were too much to bear,
that voice overcast like klezmer with echoes, uneven, edged,
torn, Brooklyn street crowding Harvard Yard
—I’d have known any syllable anywhere.
Stepped out onto the night-porch. That wind has changed,
though still from the south
it’s blowing up hard now, no longer close to earth but driving
high
into the crowns of the maples, into my face
almost slamming the stormdoor into me. But it’s warm, warm,
pneumonia wind, death of innocence wind, unwinding wind,
time-hurtling wind. And it has a voice in the house. I hear
conversations that can’t be happening, overhead in the bedrooms
and I’m not talking of ghosts. The ghosts are here of course but
they speak plainly
—haven’t I offered food and wine, listened well for them all
these years,
not only those known in life but those before our time
of self-deception, our intricate losing game of innocence long
overdue?
• • •
The spider’s decision is made, her path cast, candle-wick to
wicker handle to candle,
in the air, under the lamp, she comes swimming toward me
(have I been sitting here so long?) she will use everything,
nothing comes without labor, she is working so
hard and I know
nothing all winter can enter this house or this web, not all labor
ends in sweetness.
But how do I know what she needs? Maybe simply
to spin herself a house within a house, on her own terms
in cold, in silence.
IV
Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds
the map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-
petalled
with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to
California
runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences
milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations
truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards
of veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the
jerusalem artichoke
that has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.
Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for
a plant so generous? Spendtbrift we say, as if
accounting nature’s waste. Ours darkens
the states to their strict borders, flushes
down borderless streams, leaches from lakes to the curdled foam
down by the riverside.
Waste. Waste. The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the
builder severed, brain of the maker starved
those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish
now at risk in this segregate republic
locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside
those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments
those urgently needed for the work of perception
work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of
new streets
work of the speaker who also listens
meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate
woman, the desperate man
—never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair—it cannot
be done without them
and where are they now?
V
Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin
where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox
Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon
the ex-Army nurse hitch-hiking from the debriefing center; medal
of spit on the veteran’s shoulder
—catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause
earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks
these pilgrim ants pouring out from the bronze eyes, ears,
nostrils,
the mouth of Liberty
over the chained bay waters
San Quentin:
once we lost our way and drove in under the searchlights to the
gates
end of visiting hours, women piling into cars
the bleak glare aching over all
Where are we moored? What
are the bindings? What be-
hooves us?
Driving the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
no monument’s in sight but fog
prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz
poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog
no icon lifts a lamp here
history’s breath blotting the air
over Gold Mountain a transfer
of patterns like the transfer of African appliqué
to rural Alabama voices alive in legends, curses
tongue-lashings
poems on a weary wall
And when light swivels off Angel Island and Alcatraz
when the bays leap into life
views of the Palace of Fine Arts,
TransAmerica
when sunset bathes the three bridges
still
old ghosts crouch hoarsely whispering
under Gold Mountain
• • •
North and east of the romantic headlands there are roads into tule
fog
places where life is cheap poor quick unmonumented
Rukeyser would have guessed it coming West for the opening
of the great red bridge There are roads to take she wrote
when you think of your country driving south
to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it
heaped like snow, death-angel white
—poet journalist pioneer mother
uncovering her country: there are roads to take
• • •
I don’t want to know how he tracked them
along the Appalachian Trail, hid close
by their tent, pitched as they thought in seclusion
killing one woman, the other
dragging herself into town his defense they had teased his
loathing
of what they were I don’t want to know
but this is not a bad dream of mine these are the materials
and so are the smell of wild mint and coursing water remembered
and the sweet salt darkred tissue I lay my face
upon, my tongue within.
A crosshair against the pupil of an eye
could blow my life from hers
a cell dividing without maps, sliver of ice beneath a wheel
could do the job. Faithfulness isn’t the problem.
VI
A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine:
the poets who never starved, whose names we know
the famished nameless taking ship with their hoard of poetry
Annie Sullivan half-blind in the workhouse enthralling her child-
mates
with lore her father had borne in his head from Limerick along
with the dream of work
and hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire. But a poetry older
than hatred. Poetry
in the workhouse, laying of the rails, a potato splattering oven
walls
poetry of cursing and silence, bitter and deep, shallow and
drunken
poetry of priest-talk, of I.R.A.-talk, kitchen-talk, dream-talk,
tongues despised
in cities where in a mere fifty years language has rotted to jargon,
lingua franca of inclusion
from turns of speech ancient as the potato, muttered at the coals
by women and men
rack-rented, harshened, numbed by labor ending
in root-harvest rotted in field. 1847. No relief. No succour.
America. Meat three times a day, they said. Slaves—You would
not be that.
VII (The Dream-Site)
Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled
and others known and unknown there, long sweet summer evening
on the tarred roof:
leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars
the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands
every known constellation flinging out fiery threads
and you could distinguish all
—cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars
coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between
—you knew your way among them, knew you were part of them
until, neck aching, you sat straight up and saw:
It was New York, the dream-site
the lost city the city of dreadful light
where once as the sacks of garbage rose
like barricades around us we
stood listening to riffs from Pharaoh Sanders’ window
on the brownstone steps
went striding the avenues in our fiery hair
in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading
or pressed against other bodies
feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan
The Bronx unscrolling in the long breakneck
express plunges
as darkly we felt our own blood
streaming a living city overhead
coherently webbed and knotted bristling
we and all the others
known and unknown
living its life
VIII
He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him.
He depended on that:
the cuts would be made by someone else, the direction
come from somewhere else, arrows flashing on the freeway.
That he’d end somewhere gazing
straight into It was what he imagined and nothing beyond.
That he’d end facing as limit a thing without limits and so he
flung
and burned and hacked and bled himse
lf toward that (if I
understand
this story at all). What he found: FOR SALE: DO NOT
DISTURB
OCCUPANT on some cliffs; some ill-marked, ill-kept roads
ending in warnings about shellfish in Vietnamese, Spanish and
English.
But the spray was any color he could have dreamed
—gold, ash, azure, smoke, moonstone—
and from time to time the ocean swirled up through the eye of a
rock and taught him
limits. Throwing itself backward, singing and sucking, no
teacher, only its violent
self, the Pacific, dialectical waters rearing
their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient.
• • •
If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?
What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother
on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight
out
into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of
the father
facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide,
what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?
• • •
If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the
rocks
what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a
bottled message
from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly de-
faulting into the clouds
what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the
moon, the basket
with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal
packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling
ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood
all picnics are eaten on the grave?
IX
On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely.
Lonely in the bar, on the shore of the coastal river
with your best friend, his wife, and your wife, fishing
lonely in the prairie classroom with all the students who love
you. You know some ghosts
come everywhere with you yet leave them unaddressed
for years. You spend weeks in a house
with a drunk, you sober, whom you love, feeling lonely.
You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in
loneliness.
I wonder if this is a white man’s madness.
I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that.
What have I learned from stories of the hunt, of lonely men in
gangs?
But there were other stories:
one man riding the Mohave Desert
another man walking the Grand Canyon.