we are walking in a city
you fled, came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back, before I knew you,
before I knew myself.
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood
streets you have graven and erased in dreams:
scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth-century statues.
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past, the places
none of us can explain to anyone.
We are standing in the wind
on an empty beach, the onslaught of the surf
tells me Point Reyes, or maybe some northern
Pacific shoreline neither of us has seen.
In its fine spectral mist our hair
is grey as the sea
someone who saw us far-off would say we were two old women
Norns, perhaps, or sisters of the spray
but our breasts are beginning to sing together
your eyes are on my mouth
I wake early in the morning
in a bed we have shared for years
lie watching your innocent, sacred sleep
as if for the first time.
We have been together so many nights and days
this day is not unusual.
I walk to an eastern window, pull up the blinds:
the city around us is still
on a clear October morning
wrapped in her indestructible light.
The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.
1976
SIBLING MYSTERIES
For C.R.
1.
Remind me how we walked
trying the planetary rock
for foothold
testing the rims of canyons
fields of sheer
ice in the midnight sun
smelling the rains before they came
feeling the fullness of the moon
before moonrise
unbalanced by the life
moving in us, then lightened
yet weighted still
by children on our backs
at our hips, as we made fire
scooped claylifted water
Remind me how the stream
wetted the claybetween our palms
and how the flame
licked it to mineral colors
how we traced our signs by torchlight
in the deep chambers of the caves
and how we drew the quills
of porcupines between our teeth
to a keen thinness
and brushed the twisted raffia into velvet
and bled our lunar knowledge thirteen times
upon the furrows
I know by heart, and still
I need to have you tell me,
hold me, remind me
2.
Remind me how we loved our mother’s body
our mouths drawing the first
thin sweetness from her nipples
our faces dreaming hour on hour
in the salt smell of her lapRemind me
how her touch melted childgrief
how she floated great and tender in our dark
or stood guard over us
against our willing
and how we thought she loved
the strange male body first
that took, that took, whose taking seemed a law
and how she sent us weeping
into that law
how we remet her in our childbirth visions
erect, enthroned, above
a spiral stair
and crawled and panted toward her
I know, I remember, but
of how her woman’s flesh was made taboo to us
3.
And how beneath the veil
black gauze or white, the dragging
bangles, the amulets, we dreamedAnd how beneath
the strange male bodies
we sank in terror or in resignation
and how we taught them tenderness—
the holding-back, the play,
the floating of a finger
the secrets of the nipple
And how we ate and drank
their leavings, how we served them
in silence, how we told
among ourselves our secrets, wept and laughed
passed bark and root and berry
from hand to hand, whispering each one’s power
washing the bodies of the dead
making celebrations of doing laundry
piecing our lore in quilted galaxies
how we dwelt in two worlds
the daughters and the mothers
in the kingdom of the sons
4.
Tell me again because I need to hear
how we bore our mother-secrets
straight to the end
tied in unlawful rags
between our breasts
muttered in blood
in looks exchanged at the feast
where the fathers sucked the bones
and struck their bargains
in the open square when noon
battered our shaven heads
and the flames curled transparent in the sun
in boats of skin on the ice-floe
—the pregnant set to drift,
too many mouths for feeding—
how sister gazed at sister
reaching through mirrored pupils
back to the mother
5.
C. had a son on June 18th … I feel acutely that we are strangers, my sister and I; we don’t get through to each other, or say what we really feel. This depressed me violently on that occasion, when I wanted to have only generous and simple feelings towards her, of pleasure in her joy, affection for all that was hers. But we are not really friends, and act the part of sisters. I don’t know what really gives her pain or joy, nor does she know how I am happy or how I suffer.
(1963)
There were years you and I
hardly spoke to each other
then one whole night
our father dying upstairs
we burned our childhood, reams of paper,
talking till the birds sang
Your face across a table now: dark
with illumination
This face I have watched changing
for forty years
has watched me changing
this mind has wrenched my thought
I feel the separateness
of cells in us, split-second choice
of one ovum for one sperm?
We have seized different weapons
our hair has fallen long
or short at different times
words flash from you I never thought of
we are translations into different dialects
of a text still being written
in the original
yet our eyes drink from each other
our lives were driven down the same dark canal
6.
We have returned so far
that house of childhood seems absurd
its secrets a fallen hair, a grain of dust
on the photographic plate
we are eternally exposing to the universe
I call you from anoth
er planet
to tell a dream
Light-years away, you weep with me
The daughters never were
true brides of the father
the daughters were to begin with
brides of the mother
then brides of each other
under a different law
Let me hold and tell you
1976
A WOMAN DEAD IN HER FORTIES
1.
Your breasts/sliced-offThe scars
dimmedas they would have to be
years later
All the women I grew up with are sitting
half-naked on rocksin sun
we look at each other and
are not ashamed
and you too have taken off your blouse
to show your scarred, deleted torso
I barely glance at you
as if my look could scald you
though I’m the one who loved you
I want to touch my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
You hadn’t thought everyone
would look so perfect
unmutilated
you pull on
your blouse again:stern statement:
There are things I will not share
with everyone
2.
You send me back to share
my own scarsfirst of all
with myself
What did I hide from her
what have I denied her
what losses suffered
how in this ignorant body
did she hide
waiting for her release
till uncontrollable light began to pour
from every wound and suture
and all the sacred openings
3.
Wartime.We sit on warm
weathered, softening grey boards
the ladder glimmers where you told me
the leeches swim
I smell the flame
of kerosenethe pine
boards where we sleep side by side
in narrow cots
the night-meadow exhaling
its darknesscalling
child into woman
child into woman
woman
4.
Most of our love from the age of nine
took the form of jokes and mute
loyalty:you fought a girl
who said she’d knock me down
we did each other’s homework
wrote letterskept in touch, untouching
lied about our lives:I wearing
the face of the proper marriage
you the face of the independent woman
We cleaved to each other across that space
fingering webs
of love and estrangementtill the day
the gynecologist touched your breast
and found a palpable hardness
5.
You played heroic, necessary
games with death
since in your neo-protestant tribe the void
was supposed not to exist
except as a fashionable concept
you had no traffic with
I wish you were here tonightI want
to yell at you
Don’t accept
Don’t give in
But would I be meaning your brave
irreproachable life, you dean of women, or
your unfair, unfashionable, unforgivable
woman’s death?
6.
You are every woman I ever loved
and disavowed
a bloody incandescent chord strung out
across years, tracts of space
How can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty
your Calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms
how can I go on this mission
without you
you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true?
7.
Time after time in dreams you rise
reproachful
once from a wheelchair pushed by your father
across a lethal expressway
Of all my dead it’s you
who come to me unfinished
You left me amber beads
Strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave
I wear them wondering
How am I true to you?
I’m half-afraid to write poetry
for youwho never read it much
and I’m left laboring
with the secrets and the silence
In plain language:I never told you how I loved you
we never talked at your deathbed of your death
8.
One autumn evening in a train
catching the diamond-flash of sunset
in puddles along the Hudson
I thought:I understand
life and death now, the choices
I didn’t know your choice
or how by then you had no choice
how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells
Most of our love took the form
of mute loyalty
we never spoke at your deathbed of your death
but from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid
I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
1974–1977
MOTHER-RIGHT
For M.H.
Woman and childrunning
in a fieldA man planted
on the horizon
Two handsone long, slimone
small, starlikeclasped
in the razor wind
Her hair cut short for faster travel
the child’s curls grazing his shoulders
the hawk-winged cloudover their heads
The man is walking boundaries
measuringHe believes in what is his
the grassthe waters underneaththe air
the airthrough which child and mother
are runningthe boy singing
the womaneyes sharpened in the light
heart stumblingmaking for the open
1977
NATURAL RESOURCES
1.
The core of the strong hill: not understood:
the mulch-heat of the underwood
where unforeseen the forest fire unfurls;
the heat, the privacy of the mines;
the rainbow laboring to extend herself
where neither men nor cattle understand,
arching her lusters over rut and stubble
purely to reach where she must go;
the emerald lying against the silver vein
waiting for light to reach it, breathing in pain;
the miner laboring beneath
the ray of the headlamp: a weight like death.
2.
The miner is no metaphor. She goes
into the cage like the rest, is flung
downward by gravity like them, must change
her body like the rest to fit a crevice
to work a lode
on her the pick hangs heavy, the bad air
lies thick, the mountain presses in on her
with boulder, timber, fog
slowly the mountain’s dust descends
into the fibers of her lungs.
3.
The cage drops into the dark,
the routine of life goes on:
a woman turns a doorknob, but so slowly
so quietly, that no one wakes
and it is she alone who gazes
into the dark of bedrooms, ascertains
how
they sleep, who needs her touch
what window blows the ice of February
into the room and who must be protected:
It is only she who sees; who was trained to see.
4.
Could you imagine a world of women only,
the interviewer asked. Can you imagine
a world where women are absent. (He believed
he was joking.) Yet I have to imagine
at one and the same moment, both. Because
I live in both. Can you imagine,
the interviewer asked, a world of men?
(He thought he was joking.) If so, then,
a world where men are absent?
Absently, wearily, I answered: Yes.
5.
The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,
the lost brother, the twin—
for him did we leave our mothers,
deny our sisters, over and over?