with the women in the mirror
if you have not come to terms
with the inscription
the terms of the ordeal
the disciplinethe verdict
if still you are on your way
still She awaits your coming
16.
“Such women are dangerous
to the order of things”
and yes, we will be dangerous
to ourselves
groping through spines of nightmare
(datura tangling with a simpler herb)
because the line dividing
lucidity from darkness
is yet to be marked out
Isolation, the dream
of the frontier woman
leveling her rifle along
the homestead fence
still snares our pride
—a suicidal leaf
laid under the burning-glass
in the sun’s eye
Any woman’s death diminishes me
1974
THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME
means there is something to hold
onto with both hands
while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood
and taking it away
one of the oldest motions of suffering
as Makeba sings
a courage-song for warriors
music is suffering made powerful
I think of the story
of the goose-girl who passed through the high gate
where the head of her favorite mare
was nailed to the arch
and in a human voice
If she could see thee now, thy mother’s heart would break
said the head
of Falada
Now, again, poetry,
violent, arcane, common,
hewn of the commonest living substance
into archway, portal, frame
I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your
ancient and stubborn poise
—as the earth trembles—
burning out from the grain
1974
THE DREAM OF A
COMMON LANGUAGE
(1974–1977)
I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity
—H. D., The Flowering of the Rod
I
Power
POWER
Livingin the earth-depositsof our history
Today a backhoe divulgedout of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottleamberperfecta hundred-year-old
cure for feveror melancholya tonic
for living on this earthin the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she sufferedfrom radiation sickness
her body bombarded for yearsby the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skinof her finger-ends
till she could no longer holda test-tube or a pencil
She dieda famous womandenying
her wounds
denying
her woundscamefrom the same source as her power
1974
PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV
(Leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.)
The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colderthen the wind
died down and we slept
If in this sleep I speak
It’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to saywith voices)
When the wind toreour breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For monthsfor yearseach one of us
had felt her own yesgrowing in her
slowly formingas she stood at windowswaited
for trainsmended her rucksackcombed her hair
What we were to learnwas simplywhat we had
up hereas out of all wordsthat yesgathered
its forcesfused itselfand only just in time
to meet a No of no degrees
the black holesucking the world in
I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated bootsoles leavingtheir geometric bite
colossally embossedon microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus
Now I am further
aheadthan either of us dreamedanyone would be
I have become
the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind
the women I lovelightly flungagainst the mountain
that blue sky
our frozen eyes unribbonedthrough the storm
we could have stitched that bluenesstogetherlike a quilt
You come (I know this)with your loveyour loss
strapped to your bodywith your tape-recordercamera
ice-pickagainst advisement
to give us burial in the snowand in your mind
While my body lies out here
flashing like a prisminto your eyes
how could you sleepYou climbed here for yourself
we climbed for ourselves
When you have buried ustold your story
ours does not endwe stream
into the unfinishedthe unbegun
the possible
Every cell’s core of heatpulsed out of us
into the thin airof the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountainwhich has takenthe imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute
as those we underwent
to bring each other here
choosing ourselveseach otherand this life
whose every breathand graspand further foothold
is somewherestill enactedand continuing
In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready
and each of us knows itI have never loved
like thisI have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long trainingthe early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love
In the diary as the windbegan to tear
at the tents over usI wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here togetherbut till now
we had not touched our strength
In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
What does it mean“to survive”
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snowWe will not live
to settle for lessWe have dreamed of this
all of our lives
1974
ORIGINS AND HISTORY
OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a sno
wy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent—
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind—
yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.
No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.
II
It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first…. It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years…. It was even simple
to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.
What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream
knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
this century, this life …
each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).
III
It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.
1972–1974
SPLITTINGS
1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day-
light raining downeach pore crying the change of light
I am not with herI have been waking off and on
all night to that painnot simply absence but
the presence of the pastdestructive
to living here and nowYet if I could instruct
myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps usif the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuseto let itself be crushed
in that graspit would loosenPain would have to stand
off from me and listenits dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met beforethese are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting outall that is not mine
I am the pain of divisioncreator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones nor the miles
It is not separation calls me forthbut I
who am separationAnd remember
I have no existenceapart from you
2.
I believe I am choosing something new
not to suffer uselesslyyet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence?or simply cry
primordial loneliness?does the bed of the stream
once divertedmourningremember wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the pastI choose
to separate herfrom my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyesblotting out
her particular beingthe details of her love
I will not be dividedfrom her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burningon these hills
3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I want to crawl into her for refugelay my head
in the spacebetween her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have doneor hiding
from power in her lovelike a man
I refuse these givensthe splitting
between love and actionI am choosing
not to suffer uselesslyand not to use her
I choose to lovethis timefor once
with all my intelligence
1974
HUNGER
For Audre Lorde
1.
A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,
intimacy rigged with terrors,
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter’s ink-stick planned,
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed,
leaning together in a sticklike boat
in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,
I don’t know. I’m wondering
whether we even have what we think we have—
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. I know I’m partly somewhere else—
huts strung across a drought-stretched land
not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger.
I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can’t control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
2.
They cán rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,
if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others,
self-hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive
is raging under the name of an “act of god”
in Chad, in Niger, in the Upper Volta—
yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutrition,
yet sharpened by the passion for survival,
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a sin
gle trembling drop of water.
3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions—
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we’re scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses—
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.
4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I’m alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz’s women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the “mothers” drained of milk, the “survivors” driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I’m alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.