back from false pride, false indifference, false
courage
beginning to weep as you weep peeling onions, but
endlessly, for the rest of time, tears of chemistry,
tears of catalyst, tears of rage, tears for yourself,
tears for the tortured men in the stockade and for
their torturers
tears of fear, of the child stepping into the adult
field of force, the woman stepping into the male field
of violence, tears of relief, that your body was here,
you had done it, every last refusal was over)
Here in this house my tears are running wild
in this Vermont of India-madras-colored leaves, of cesspool-
stricken brooks, of violence licking at old people and
children
and I am afraid
of the language in my head
I am alone, alone with language
and without meaning
coming back to something written years ago:
our words misunderstand us
wanting a word that will shed itself like a tear
onto the page
leaving its stain
Trying every key in the bunch to get the door even ajar
not knowing whether it’s locked or simply jammed from long disuse
trying the keys over and over then throwing the bunch away
staring around for an axe
wondering if the world can be changed like this
if a life can be changed like this
It wasn’t completeness I wanted
(the old ideas of a revolution that could be foretold, and once
arrived at would give us ourselves and each other)
I stopped listening long ago to their descriptions
of the good society
The will to change begins in the body not in the mind
My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every
act of resistance and each of my failures
Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body
that act is in me still
No, not completeness:
but I needed a way of saying
(this is what they are afraid of)
that could deal with these fragments
I needed to touch you
with a hand, a body
but also with words
I need a language to hear myself with
to see myself in
a language like pigment released on the board
blood-black, sexual green, reds
veined with contradictions
bursting under pressure from the tube
staining the old grain of the wood
like sperm or tears
but this is not what I mean
these images are not what I mean
(I am afraid.)
I mean that I want you to answer me
when I speak badly
that I love you, that we are in danger
that she wants to have your child, that I want us to have mercy
on each other
that I want to take her hand
that I see you changing
that it was change I loved in you
when I thought I loved completeness
that things I have said which in a few years will be forgotten
matter more to me than this or any poem
and I want you to listen
when I speak badly
not in poems but in tears
not my best but my worst
that these repetitions are beating their way
toward a place where we can no longer be together
where my body no longer will demonstrate outside your stockade
and wheeling through its blind tears will make for the open air
of another kind of action
(I am afraid.)
It’s not the worst way to live.
1969
The Will
To Change
(1971)
For David, Pablo and Jacob
What does not change / is the will to change
—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”
NOVEMBER 1968
Stripped
you’re beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won’t hold you
nor the radar aerials
You’re what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin
How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment
I know nothing about it
my ignorance of you amazes me
now that I watch you
starting to give yourself away
to the wind
1968
STUDY OF HISTORY
Out there.The mind of the river
as it might be you.
Lightsblotted by unseen hulls
repetitive shapes passing
dull foam crusting the margin
barges sunk below the water-line with silence.
The scow, drudging on.
Lying in the dark, to think of you
and your harsh traffic
gulls pecking your rubbishnatural historians
mourning your lost purity
pleasure cruisers
witlessly careening you
but this
after all
is the narrows and after
all we have never entirely
known what was done to you upstream
what powers trepanned
which of your channels diverted
what rockface leaned to stare
in your upturned
defenseless
face.
1968
PLANETARIUM
Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750–1848, astronomer,
sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spacesof the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yetI stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslateable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deepso invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through meAnd has
takenI am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into imagesfor the relief
of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
1968
THE BURNING OF PAPER INSTEAD OF CHILDREN
I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.
—Fr. Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore
1.
My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state
of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven
and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics
text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his
house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house
during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible
sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset
me so much as the idea of burning a book.”
Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Dürer’s Complete Works
for MELENCOLIA, the baffled woman
the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color
and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn
2.
To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music
the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said
an age of long silence
relief
from this tonguethe slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coastwildgreenclayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind
knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor’s language
yet I need it to talk to you
3.
“People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence
to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not
had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money
to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food
for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears
in your eyes.”
(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)
4.
We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless
You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter
so it is with us
no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything
burn the textssaid Artaud
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.
1968
I DREAM I’M THE
DEATH OF ORPHEUS
I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror
1968
THE BLUE GHAZALS
9/21/68
Violently asleep in the old house.
A clock stays awake all night ticking.
Turning, turning their bruised leaves
the trees stay awake all night in the wood.
Talk to me with your body through my dreams.
Tell me what we are going through.
The walls of the room are muttering,
old trees, old utopians, arguing with the wind.
To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams
and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.
Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,
wading against the tide, and with the tide.
9/23/68
One day of equinoctial light after another,
moving ourselves through gauzes and fissures of that light.
Early and late I come and set myself against you,
your phallic fist knocking blindly at my door.
The dew is beaded like mercury on the coarsened grass,
the web of the spider is heavy as if with sweat.
Everything is yielding toward a foregone conclusion,
only we are rash enough to go on changing our lives.
An Ashanti woman tilts the flattened basin on her head
to let the water slide downward:I am that woman and that water.
9/26/68: I
A man, a woman, a city.
The city as object of love.
Anger and filth in the basement.
The furnace stoked and blazing.
A sexual heat on the pavements.
Trees erected like statues.
Eyes at the ends of avenues.
Yellow for hesitation.
I’m tired of walking your streets
he says, unable to leave her.
Air of dust and rising sparks,
the city burning her letters.
9/28/68: II
For Wallace Stevens
Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,
you were our poet of revolution all along.
A man isn’t what he seems but what he desires:
gaieties of anarchy drumming at the base of the skull.
Would this have left you cold, our scene, its wild parades,
the costumes, banners, incense, flowers, the immense marches?
Disorder is natural, these leaves absently blowing
in the drinking-fountain, filling the statue’s crevice.
The use of force in public architecture:
nothing, not even the honeycomb, manifests such control.
9/29/68
For Leroi Jones
Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,
half-sleepy, half-alert in that thicket of bitter roots.
Who doesn’t speak to me, who speaks to me more and more,
but from a face turned off, turned away, a light shut out.
Most of the old lecturers are inaudible or dead.
Prince of the night there are explosions in the hall.
The blackboard scribbled over with dead languages
is falling and killing our children.
Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light:
it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.
12/13/68
They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,
the edge of dark from the edge of dawn, your love is a lie.