detail not on TV
the fingers of the policewoman
searching the cunt of the young prostitute
it sees
the roaches dropping into the pan
where they cook the pork
in the House of D
it sees
the violence
embedded in silence
This eye
is not for weeping
its vision
must be unblurred
though tears are on my face
its intent is clarity
it must forget
nothing
September 1971
Diving into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it’s a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
1972
The Phenomenology of Anger
1. The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room
which is not, of course, the freedom
you have, walking on Broadway
to stop & turn back or go on
10 blocks; 20 blocks
but feels enviable maybe
to the compromised
curled in the placenta of the real
which was to feed & which is strangling her.
2. Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp
as long as this house has stood:
even with dry sticks I can’t get started
even with thorns.
I twist last year into a knot of old headlines
—this rose won’t bloom.
How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on
feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?
Each day during the heat-wave
they took the temperature of the haymow.
I huddled fugitive
in the warm sweet simmer of the hay
muttering: Come.
3. Flat heartland of winter.
The moonmen come back from the moon
the firemen come out of the fire.
Time without a taste: time without decisions.
Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind.
The shallowness of a life lived in exile
even in the hot countries.
Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives.
4. White light splits the room.
Table. Window. Lampshade. You.
My hands, sticky in a new way.
Menstrual blood
seeming to leak from your side.
Will the judges try to tell me
which was the blood of whom?
5. Madness. Suicide. Murder.
Is there no way out but these?
The enemy, always just out of sight
snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded
in a snowy blur, abominable snowman
—at once the most destructive
and the most elusive being
gunning down the babies at My Lai
vanishing in the face of confrontation.
The prince of air and darkness
computing body counts, masturbating
in the factory
of facts.
6. Fantasies of murder: not enough:
to kill is to cut off from pain
but the killer goes on hurting
Not enough. When I dream of meeting
the enemy, this is my dream:
white acetylene
ripples from my body
effortlessly released
perfectly trained
on the true enemy
raking his body down to the thread
of existence
burning away his lie
leaving him in a new
world; a changed
man
7. I suddenly see the world
as no longer viable:
you are out there burning the crops
with some new sublimate
This morning you left the bed
we still share
and went out to spread impotence
upon the world
I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the l
andscape of bone
I hate your words
they make me think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields.
Last night, in this room, weeping
I asked you: what are you feeling?
do you feel anything?
Now in the torsion of your body
as you defoliate the fields we lived from
I have your answer.
8. Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon.
A pale cross-hatching of silver
lies like a wire screen on the black
water. All these phenomena
are temporary.
I would have loved to live in a world
of women and men gaily
in collusion with green leaves, stalks,
building mineral cities, transparent domes,
little huts of woven grass
each with its own pattern—
a conspiracy to coexist
with the Crab Nebula, the exploding
universe, the Mind—
9. “The only real love I have ever felt
was for children and other women.
Everything else was lust, pity,
self-hatred, pity, lust.”
This is a woman’s confession.
Now, look again at the face
of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,
the Judith of Chartres
with her so-called smile.
10. how we are burning up our lives
testimony:
the subway
hurtling to Brooklyn
her head on her knees
asleep or drugged
la vía del tren subterráneo
es peligrosa
many sleep
the whole way
others sit
staring holes of fire into the air
others plan rebellion:
night after night
awake in prison, my mind
licked at the mattress like a flame
till the cellblock went up roaring
Thoreau setting fire to the woods
Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act
1972
For a Sister
(Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others
I trust none of them. Only my existence
thrown out in the world like a towchain
battered and twisted in many chance connections,
being pulled this way, pulling in that.
I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,
milk souring in your pantry
after they came and took you.
I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.
A few paragraphs in the papers,
allowing for printers’ errors, wilful omissions,
the trained violence of doctors.
I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.
Little by little out of the blurred conjectures
your face clears, a sunken marble
slowly cranked up from underwater.
I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.
They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.
A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.
Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,
try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.
My images. This metaphor for what happens.
A geranium in flames on a green cloth
becomes yours. You, coming home after years
to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again. Your story.
1972
For the Dead
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight
1972
Meditations for a Savage Child
(The prose passages are from J-M Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey)
I
There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still . . . so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields . . . that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken . . .
In their own way, by their own lights
they tried to care for you
tried to teach you to care
for objects of their caring:
glossed oak planks, glass
whirled in a fire
to impossible thinness
to teach you names
for things
you did not need
muslin shirred against the sun
linen on a sack of feathers
locks, keys
boxes with coins inside
they tried to make you feel
the importance of
a piece of cowhide
sewn around a bundle
of leaves impressed with signs
to teach you language:
were strung on
II
When considered from a more general and philosophic point of view, these scars bear witness . . . against the feebleness and insufficiency of man when left entirely to himself, and in favor of the resources of nature which . . . work openly to repair and conserve that which she tends secretly to impair and destroy.
I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear
which stands for music, which stands for balance—
or the cat’s ear which I can study better
the whorls and ridges exposed
It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull
which I cannot see
lobe, zone, that part of the brain
which is pure survival
The most primitive part
I go back into at night
pushing the leathern curtain
with naked fingers
then
with naked body
There where every wound is registered
as scar tissue
A cave of scars!
ancient, archaic wallpaper
built up, layer on layer
from the earliest, dream-white
to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl
a red mouth slowly closing
Go back so far there is another language
go back far enough the language
is no longer personal
these scars bear witness
but whether to repair
or to destruction
I no longer know
III
It is true that there is visible on the throat a very extended scar which might throw some doubt upon the soundness of the underlying parts if one were not reassured by the appearance of the scar . . .
When I try to speak
my throat is cut
and, it seems, by his hand
The sounds I make are prehuman, radical
the telephone is always
ripped-out
and he sleeps on
Yet always the tissue
grows over, white as silk
hardly a blemish
maybe a hieroglyph for
scream
Child, no wonder you never wholly
trusted your keepers
IV
A hand with the will rather than the habit of crime had wished to make an attempt on the life of this child . . . left for dead in the woods, he will have owed the prompt recovery of his wound to the help of nature alone.
In the 18th century infanticide
reaches epidemic proportions:
old prints attest to it: starving mothers
smothering babies in sleep
abandoning newborns in sleet
on the poorhouse steps
gin-blurred, setting fire to the room
I keep thinking of the flights we used to take
on the grapevine across the gully
littered with beer-bottles where dragonflies flashed
we were 10, 11 years old
wild little girls with boyish bodies
flying over the moist
shadow-mottled earth
till they warned us to stay away from there
Later they pointed out
the venetian blinds
of the abortionist’s house
we shivered
Men can do things to you
was all they said
V
And finally, my Lord, looking at this long experiment . . . whether it be considered as the methodical education of a savage or as no more than the physical and moral treatment of one of those creatures ill-favored by nature, rejected by society and abandoned by medicine, the care that has been taken and ought still to be taken of him, the changes that have taken place, and those that can be hoped for, the voice of humanity, the interest inspired by such a desertion and a destiny so strange—all these things recommend this extraordinary young man to the attention of scientists, to the solicitude of administrators, and to the protection of the government.
1. The doctor in “Uncle Vanya”:
They will call us fools,
blind, ignorant, they will
despise us
devourers of the forest
leaving teeth of metal in every tree
so the tree can neither grow
nor be cut for lumber
Does the primeval forest
weep
for its devourers
does nature mourn
our existence
is the child with arms
burnt to the flesh of its sides
weeping eyelessly for man
2. At the end of the distinguished doctor’s
lecture
a young woman raises her hand:
You have the power
in your hands, you control our lives—
why do you want our pity too?
Why are men afraid
why do you pity yourselves
why do the administrators
lack solicitude, the government
refuse protection,
why should the wild child
weep for the scientists
why
The Dream of a
Common Language