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:
the thread their lives
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
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
1972
POEMS
(1973–1974)
DIEN BIEN PHU
A nurse on the battlefield
wounded herself, but working
dreams
that each man she touches
is a human grenade
an anti-personnel weapon
that can explode in her arms
How long
can she go on like this
putting mercy
ahead of survival
She is walking
in a white dress stained
with earth and blood
down a road lined
with fields long
given upblasted
cemeteries of one name
or two
A hand
juts out like barbed wire
it is terribly alone
if she takes it
will it slash her wrists again
if she passes it by
will she turn into a case
of shell-shock, eyes
glazed forever on the
blank chart of
amnesia
1973
ESSENTIAL RESOURCES
I don’t know
how late it is. I’m writing
with a chewed blunted lead
under a bridge while snow blankets the city
or with a greasy ballpoint
the nurse left
in a ward of amnesiacs who can be trusted
not to take notes
You talk of a film we could make
with women’s faces naked
of make-up, the mist of sweat
on a forehead, lips dry
the little bloodspot from a coldsore
I know the inmates are encouraged
to express themselves
I’m wondering how
I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive:
I want to write
a script about plumbing, how e
very pipe
is joined
to every other
the wash of pure water and sewage
side by side
or about the electrical system
a study of the sources of energy
till in the final shot
the whole screen goes dark
and the keepers of order are screaming
I forget
what year it is. I am thinking
of films we have made but cannot show
yet, films of the mind unfolding
and our faces, still young
sweated with desire and
premature clarity
1973
BLOOD-SISTER
For Cynthia
Shoring up the ocean. A railroad track
ran close to the coast for miles
through the potato-fields, bringing us
to summer. Weeds blur the ties,
sludge clots the beaches.
During the war, the shells we found—
salmon-and-silver coins
sand dollars dripping sand
like dust. We were dressed
in navy dotted-swiss dresses in the train
not to show the soot. Like dolls
we sat with our dolls in the station.
When did we begin to dress ourselves?
Now I’m wearing jeans spider-webbed
with creases, a black sweater bought years ago
worn almost daily since
the ocean has undergone a tracheotomy
and lost its resonance
you wear a jersey the color of
Navaho turquoise and sand
you are holding a naked baby girl
she laughs into your eyes
we sit at your table drinking coffee
light flashes off unwashed sheetglass
you are more beautiful than you have ever been
we talk of destruction and creation
ice fits itself around each twig of the lilac
like a fist of law and order
your imagination burns like a bulb in the frozen soil
the fierce shoots knock
at the roof of waiting
when summer comes the ocean may be closed for good
we will turn
to the desert
where survival
takes naked and fiery forms
1973
THE WAVE
For J.B.
To give you back this wave
I would have to give back
the black
spaces
fretted with film of spray,
darker and deeper than the mind
they are emblems of
Not only the creator fury
of the whitest churn
the caldron of all life
but the blankness underlying
Thinking of the sea I think of light
lacing, lancing the water
the blue knife of a radiant consciousness
bent by the waves of vision as it pierces
to the deepest grotto
And I think of those lives we tried to live
in our globed helmets, self-enclosed
bodies self-illumined gliding
safe from the turbulence
and how, miraculously, we failed
1973
RE-FORMING THE CRYSTAL
I am trying to imagine
how it feels to you
to want a woman
trying to hallucinate
desire
centered in a cock
focused like a burning-glass
desire without discrimination:
to want a woman like a fix
Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of ’flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.
Tonight is a different kind of night.
I sit in the car, racing the engine,
calculating the thinness of the ice.
In my head I am already threading the beltways
that rim this city,
all the old roads that used to wander the country
having been lost.
Tonight I understand
my photo on the license is not me,
my
name on the marriage-contract was not mine.
If I remind you of my father’s favorite daughter,
look again. The woman
I needed to call my mother
was silenced before I was born.
Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice; I want to understand my fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name of the one she has chosen.
1973
THE FOURTH MONTH OF THE
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT
It is asleep in my body.
For now, I am myself,
like anyone, like a man
whose body contains simply: itself.
I draw a too-big sweater
over my breasts, walk into the drafting-room
and stand there, balancing.
The sun sprays acid points of light
on the tools of my trade, the metal,
the edged instruments. My work has always been
with edges. For a while I listen:
will there be a knock, is the neighbor
so near me stirring behind his walls?
The neighbor is quiet. I am not
a body, I am no body, I am I,
a pair of hands ending in fingers
that think like a brain.
I draw a sheet of paper toward me
on the slanted drafting-table.
I start to imagine
plans for a house, a park
stretching in every direction to the horizon
which is no horizon
which is merely a circle of volcanoes.
I touch stylus, T-square, pens
of immeasurable fineness,
the hard-edge. I am I,
this India ink my rain
which can irrigate gardens, terraces
dissolve or project horizons
flowing like lava from the volcano of the inkpot
at the stirring of my mind.
A city waits at the back of my skull
eating its heart out to be born:
how design the first
city of the moon? how shall I see it
for all of us who are done
with enclosed spaces, purdah, the salon, the sweatshop loft,
the ingenuity of the cloister?
My mind flies at the moon
beating, a pale-green kite.
Something else is beating.
In my body.
Spaces fold in. I’m caught
in the enclosure of the crib my body
where every thought I think
simply loosens to life another life.
1973
THE ALLEGED MURDERESS
WALKING IN HER CELL
Nine months we conspired:
first in panic, then in a quieter dread,
finally an unfamiliar kind of peace.
In the new year voices began,
they said I’d helped beat a man to death,
even my
lover said so.
You were no bigger than a cyst
then, a bead of life
lit from within.
I took that life in my hands
with mine; a key turned
and the voices shrank away.
Then began that whispered conversation
telling each other we were alive,
twins in the prison womb,
exchanging vows against the future.
Justice, they say, and clemency
installed our nursery in the house
of detention. I don’t know what
it means, that we have each other.
Do they mean to—can they use you
against me? I walk up and down
more at peace than in any prison night
here or outside—
your warmth washing into my ribcage
your frail silken skull asleep against my throat
your anxious pleading stilled—
unable to remember
whether or not I ever killed
whether I ever lived
without this—the blue pulse of your life
with its blind stroke: Not-Guilty
fledging my twenty-one-year life
of unmeaning, my worthless life
they framed in their contempt.
1973
WHITE NIGHT
Light at a window. Someone up
at this snail-still hour.
We who work this way have often worked
in solitude. I’ve had to guess at her
sewing her skin together as I sew mine
though
with a different
stitch.
Dawn after dawn, this neighbor
burns like a candle
dragging her bedspread through the dark house
to her dark bed
her head