egg-sac of a new world:
This is what she was to me, and this
is how I can love myself—
as only a woman can love me.
Homesick for myself, for her—as, after the heatwave
breaks, the clear tones of the world
manifest: cloud, bough, wall, insect, the very soul of light:
homesick as the fluted vault of desire
articulates itself: I am the lover and the loved,
home and wanderer, she who splits
firewood and she who knocks, a stranger
in the storm, two women, eye to eye
measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry beginning here.
Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow—
original domestic silk, the finest findings—
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance—
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.
1977
A WILD PATIENCE
HAS TAKEN ME
THIS FAR
(1978–1981)
THE IMAGES
Close to your body, in the
pain of the city
I turn. My hand half-sleeping reaches, finds
some part of you, touch knows you before language
names in the brain. Out in the dark
a howl, police sirens, emergency
our 3 a.m. familiar, ripping the sheath of sleep
registering pure force as if all transpired—
the swell of cruelty and helplessness—
in one block between West End
and Riverside. In my dreams the Hudson
rules the night like a right-hand margin
drawn against the updraft
of burning life, the tongueless cries
of the city. I turn again, slip my arm
under the pillow turned for relief,
your breathing traces my shoulder. Two women sleeping
together have more than their sleep to defend.
And what can reconcile me
that you, the woman whose hand
sensual and protective, brushes me in sleep,
go down each morning into such a city?
I will not, cannot withhold
your body or my own from its chosen danger
but when did we ever choose
to see our bodies strung
in bondage and crucifixion across the exhausted air
when did we choose
to be lynched on the queasy electric signs
of midtown when did we choose
to become the masturbator’s fix
emblem of rape in Riverside Parkthe campground
at Bandol the beach at Sydney?
We are trying to live
in a clearheaded tenderness—
I speak not merely of us, our lives
are “moral and ordinary”
as the lives of numberless women—
I pretend the Hudson is a right-hand margin
drawn against fear and woman-loathing
(water as purification, river as boundary)
but I know my imagination lies:
in the name of freedom of speech
they are lynching us no law is on our side
there are no boundaries
I can never romanticize language again
never deny its power for disguise for mystification
but the same could be said for music
or any form created
painted ceilings beaten gold worm-worn Pietàs
reorganizing victimizationfrescoes translating
violence into patterns so powerful and pure
we continually fail to ask are they true for us.
When I walked among time-battered stones
thinking already of you
when I sat near the sea
among parched yet flowering weeds
when I drew in my notebook
the thorned purple-tongued flower, each petal
protected by its thorn-leaf
I was mute
innocent of grammar as the waves
irrhythmically washingI felt washed clean
of the guilt of wordsthere was no word to read
in the book of that earthno perjury
the tower of Babel fallen once and for all
light drank at my body
thinking of you I felt free
in the cicadas’ pulse, their encircling praise.
When I saw hér face, she of the several faces
staringindrawnin judgmentlaughing for joy
her serpents twistingher arms raised
her breastsgazing
when I looked into hér world
I wished to cry loose my soul
into her, to become
free of speechat last.
And so I came homea woman starving
for images
to say my hunger is so old
so fundamental, that all the lost
crumbledburntsmashedshattereddefaced
overpaintedconcealed and falsely named
faces of every past we have searched together
in all the ages
could risereassemblere-collectre-member
themselves as I recollected myself in that presence
as every night close to your body
in the pain of the city, turning
I am remembered by you, remember you
even as we are dismembered
on the cinema screens, the white expensive walls
of collectors, the newsrags blowing the streets
—and it would not be enough.
This is the war of the images.
We are the thorn-leaf guarding the purple-tongued flower
each to each.
1976–1978
COAST TO COAST
There are days when housework seems the only
outletold funnel I’ve poured caldrons through
old servitudeIn grief and fury bending
to the accustomed tasksthe vacuum cleaner plowing
realms of dustthe mirror scouredgrey webs
behind framed photographsbrushed away
the grey-seamed sky enormous in the west
snow gathering in cornersof the north
Seeing through the prism
you who gave it me
You, bearing ceaselessly
yourselfthe witness
; Rainbow dissolves the HudsonThis chary, stinting
skin of late wintericeforming and breaking up
The unprotected seeing it through
with their ordinary valor
Rainbow composed of ordinary light
February-flat
grey-white of a cheap enamelled pan
breaking into veridian, azure, violet
You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing.…
I think of the word protection
who it is we try to protectand why
Seeing through the prismYour face, fog-hollowedburning
cold of eucalyptus hung with butterflies
lavender of rockbloom
O and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer
shattering the foglances of sun
piercing the grey Pacificunanswerable tide
carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock
Beauty of your breastsyour hands
turning a stone a shell a weed a prismin coastal light
traveller and witness
the passion of the speechless
driving your speech
protectless
If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back.
1978
INTEGRITY
the quality or state of being complete: unbroken condition: entirety
—Webster’s
A wild patience has taken me this far
as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.
The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.
The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself? … My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere—
even from a broken web.
The cabin in the stand of pines
is still for sale. I know this. Know the print
of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked that door,
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one’s sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat here through this hot
misblotted sunlight, critical light
imperceptibly scalding
the skin these hands will also salve.
1978
Culture and Anarchy
Leafshade stirring on lichened bark
Daylilies
run wild, “escaped” the botanists call it
from dooryard to meadow to roadside
Life-tingle of angled light
late summer
sharpening toward fall, each year more sharply
This headlong, loved, escaping life
Rainy days at the kitchen table typing,
heaped up letters, a dry moth’s
perfectly mosaiced wings, pamphlets on rape,
forced sterilization, snapshots in color
of an Alabama woman still quilting in her nineties,
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony….
I stained and varnished
the library bookcase today and superintended
the plowing of the orchard….
Fitted out a fugitive slave for Canada
with the help of Harriet Tubman….
The women’s committee failed
to report. I am mortified to death for them….
Washed every window in the house today.
Put a quilted petticoat in the frame.
Commenced Mrs. Browning’s Portuguese
Sonnets. Have just finished
Casa Guidi Windows, a grand poem
and so fitting to our struggle….
To forever blot out slavery is the only
possible compensation for this
merciless war….
The all-alone feeling will creep over me. …
Upstairs, long silence, then
again, the sudden torrent of your typing
Rough drafts we share, each reading
her own page over the other’s shoulder
trying to see afresh
An energy I cannot even yet
take for granted: picking up a book
of the nineteenth century, reading there the name
of the woman whose book you found
in the old town Athenaeum
beginning to stitch together
Elizabeth Ellet
Elizabeth Barrett
Elizabeth Blackwell
Frances Kemble
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Susan B. Anthony
On Saturday Mrs. Ford took us to Haworth,
the home of the Brontë sisters….
A most sad day it was to me
as I looked into the little parlor where
the sisters walked up and down
with their arms around each other
and planned their novels….
How much the world of literature has lost
because of their short and ill-environed lives
we can only guess.…
Anarchy of August: as if already
autumnal gases glowed in darkness underground
the meadows roughen, grow guttural
with goldenrod, milkweed’s late-summer lilac,
cat-tails, the wild lily brazening,
dooryards overflowing in late, rough-headed
bloom: bushes of orange daisies, purple mallow,
the thistle blazing in her clump of knives,
and the great SUNFLOWER turns
Haze wiping out the hills. Mornings like milk,
the mind wading, treading water, the line of vision blind
the pages of the book cling to the hand
words hang in a suspension
the prism hanging in the windowframe
is blank
A stillness building all day long to thunder
as the weedpod swells and thickens
No one can call this calm
Jane Addams, ma
rking time
in Europe: During most
of that time I was absolutely at sea
so far as any moral purpose was concerned
clinging only to the desire to live
in a really living world
refusing to be content
with a shadowy intellectual
or aesthetic reflection
finally the bursting of the sky
power, release
by sheets by ropes of water, wind
driving before or after
the book laid face-down on the table
spirit travelling the lines of storm
leaping the torrentall that water
already smelling of earth
Elizabeth Barrett to Anna Jameson:
… and is it possible you think
a woman has no business with questions
like the question of slavery?
Then she had better use a pen no more.
She had better subside into slavery
and concubinage herself, I think, …
and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.
Early dark; still raining; the electricity
out. On the littered table
a transparent globe half-filled
with liquid light, the soaked wick quietly
drinking, turning to flame
that faintly stains the slim glass chimney:
ancient, fragile contrivance
light welling, searching the shadows
Matilda Joslyn Gage; Harriet Tubman;
Ida B. Wells-Barnett; Maria Mitchell;
Anna Howard Shaw; Sojourner Truth;
Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Harriet Hosmer;
Clara Barton; Harriet Beecher Stowe;
Ida Husted Harper; Ernestine Rose
and all those without names
because of their short and ill-environed lives
False dawn. Gossamer tents in wet grass: leaflets
dissolving within hours,
spun of necessity and
leaving no trace
The heavy volumes, calf, with titles in smooth
leather, red and black, gilt letters spelling:
THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING
I brush my hand across my eyes
—this is a dream, I think—and read:
THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE