did we invent him, conjure him
over the charring log,
nights, late, in the snowbound cabin
did we dream or scry his face
in the liquid embers,
the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?
6.
It was never the rapist:
it was the brother, lost,
the comrade/twin whose palm
would bear a lifeline like our own:
decisive, arrowy,
forked-lightning of insatiate desire
It was never the crude pestle, the blind
ramrod we were after:
merely a fellow-creature
with natural resources equal to our own
7.
Meanwhile, another kind of being
was constructing itself, blindly
—a mutant, some have said:
the blood-compelled exemplar
of a “botched civilization”
as one of them called it
children picking up guns
for that is what it means to be a man
We have lived with violence for seven years
It was not worth one single life—
but the patriot’s fist is at her throat,
her voice is in mortal danger
and that kind of being has lain in our beds
declaring itself our desire
requiring women’s blood for life
a woman’s breast to lay its nightmare on
8.
And that kind of being has other forms:
a passivity we mistake
—in the desperation of our search—
for gentleness
But gentleness is active
gentleness swabs the crusted stump
invents more merciful instruments
to touch the wound beyond the wound
does not faint with disgust
will not be driven off
keeps bearing witness calmly
against the predator, the parasite
9.
I am tired of faintheartedness,
their having to be exceptional
to do what an ordinary woman
does in the course of things
I am tired of women stooping to half our height
to bring the essential vein to light
tired of the waste of what we bear
with such cost, such elation, into sight
(—for what becomes of what the miner probes
and carves from the mountain’s body in her pain?)
10.
This is what I am: watching the spider
rebuild—“patiently”, they say,
but I recognize in her
impatience—my own—
the passion to make and make again
where such unmaking reigns
the refusal to be a victim
we have lived with violence so long
Am I to go on saying
for myself, for her
This is my body,
take and destroy it?
11.
The enormity of the simplest things:
in this cold barn tables are spread
with china saucers, shoehorns
of german silver, a gilt-edged book
that opens into a picture-frame—
a biscuit-tin of the thirties.
Outside, the north lies vast
with unshed snow, everything is
at once remote and familiar
each house contains what it must
women simmer carcasses
of clean-picked turkeys, store away
the cleaned cutglass and soak the linen cloths
Dark rushes early at the panes
12.
These things by women saved
are all we have of them
or of those dear to them
these ribboned letters, snapshots
faithfully glued for years
onto the scrapbook page
these scraps, turned into patchwork,
doll-gowns, clean white rags
for stanching blood
the bride’s tea-yellow handkerchief
In this cold barn we dream
a universe of humble things—
and without these, no memory
no faithfulness, no purpose for the future
no honor to the past
13.
There are words I cannot choose again:
humanismandrogyny
Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence
before the raging stoic grandmothers:
their glint is too shallow, like a dye
that does not permeate
the fibers of actual life
as we live it, now:
this fraying blanket with its ancient stains
we pull across the sick child’s shoulder
or wrap around the senseless legs
of the hero trained to kill
this weaving, ragged because incomplete
we turn our hands to, interrupted
over and over, handed down
unfinished, found in the drawer
of an old dresser in the barn,
her vanished pride and care
still urging us, urging on
our works, to close the gap
in the Great Nebula
to help the earth deliver.
14.
The women who first knew themselves
miners, are dead. The rainbow flies
like a flying buttress from the walls
of cloud, the silver-and-green vein
awaits the battering of the pick
the dark lode weeps for light
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
1977
TOWARD THE SOLSTICE
The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
all the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
on this old slanting roof,
the slanted field below
thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
stand nakedly in the green,
stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
field.
My brain glows
more violently, more avidly
the quieter, the thicker
the quilt of crystals settles,
the louder, more relentlessly
the torrent beats itself out
on the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
the thirtieth of November,
a beginning or an end,
we are moving into the solstice
and there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
my life is still tangled
with dead weeds, thistles,
enormous burdocks, burdens
slowly shifting under
this first fall of snow,
beaten by this early, racking rain
calling all new life to declare itself strong
or die,
if I could know
in what language to address
the spirits that claim a place
beneath these low and simple ceilings,
tenants that neither speak nor stir
yet dwell i
n mute insistence
till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
spun over and over though brushed away
it seems I might some twilight
or dawn in the hushed country light
discern its greyness stretching
from molding or doorframe, out
into the empty dooryard
and following it climb
the path into the pinewoods,
tracing from tree to tree
in the failing light, in the slowly
lucidifying day
its constant, purposive trail,
till I reach whatever cellar hole
filling with snowflakes or lichen,
whatever fallen shack
or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
and there, under the first or last
star, trusting to instinct
the words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
year after year, winter
after summer, the right rune
to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
is still unaccomplished
between myself and the long-gone
tenants of this house,
between myself and my childhood,
and the childhood of my children,
it is I who have neglected
to perform the needed acts,
set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
in front of mirrors,
or merely pause and listen
to my own pulse vibrating
lightly as falling snow,
relentlessly as the rainstorm,
and hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture,
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
dead flesh, cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers,
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close.
1977
TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE
For Michelle Cliff
This August evening I’ve been driving
over backroads fringed with queen anne’s lace
my car startling young deer in meadows—one
gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all
four fawns sprang after her
into the dark maples.
Three months from today they’ll be fair game
for the hit-and-run hunters, glorying
in a weekend’s destructive power.
triggers fingered by drunken gunmen, sometimes
so inept as to leave the shattered animal
stunned in her blood. But this evening deep in summer
the deer are still alive and free,
nibbling apples from early-laden boughs
so weighted, so englobed
with already yellowing fruit
they seem eternal, Hesperidean
in the clear-tuned, cricket-throbbing air.
Later I stood in the dooryard,
my nerves singing the immense
fragility of all this sweetness,
this green world already sentimentalized, photographed,
advertised to death. Yet, it persists
stubbornly beyond the fake Vermont
of antique barnboards glazed into discothèques,
artificial snow, the sick Vermont of children
conceived in apathy, grown to winters
of rotgut violence,
poverty gnashing its teeth like a blind cat at their lives.
Still, it persists. Turning off onto a dirt road
from the raw cuts bulldozed through a quiet village
for the tourist run to Canada,
I’ve sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field
of musing heifers, a farmstead
slanting its planes calmly in the calm light,
a dead elm raising bleached arms
above a green so dense with life,
minute, momentary life—slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats,
spiders, moths, hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies—
a lifetime is too narrow
to understand it all, beginning with the huge
rockshelves that underlie all that life.
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on
everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.
Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep up with, learn by heart
what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
—even when all the texts describe it differently.
And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing
against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her
What makes a virtuoso?—Competitiveness.)
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell.
But there come times—perhaps this is one of them—
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a deeper listening, cleansed
of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.
Only: that it is unnatural,
the homesickness for a woman, for ourselves,
for that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms
cast on a wall, her heavy or slender
thighs on which we lay, flesh against flesh,
eyes steady on the face of love; smell of her milk, her sweat,
terror of her disappearance, all fused in this hunger
for the element they have called most dangerous, to be
lifted breathtaken on her breast, to rock within her
—even if beaten back, stranded again, to apprehend
in a sudden brine-clear thought
trembling like the tiny, orbed, endangered