of a movement
for many years unnoticed
or greatly misrepresented in the public press
its records usually not considered
of sufficient value to be
officially preserved
and conjure up again
THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING
like bound back issues of a periodical
stretching for miles
OF HUMAN SUFFERING: borne,
tended, soothed, cauterized,
stanched, cleansed, absorbed, endured
by women
our records usually not considered
of sufficient value to be
officially preserved
The strongest reason
for giving woman all the opportunities
for higher education, for the full
development of her forces of mind and body …
the most enlarged freedom of thought and action
a complete emancipation
from all the crippling influences of fear—
is the solitude and personal
responsibility
of her own individual life.
Late afternoon: long silence.
Your notes on yellow foolscap drift on the table
you go down to the garden to pick chard
while the strength is in the leaves
crimson stems veining upward into green
How you have given back to me
my dream of a common language
my solitude of self.
I slice the beetroots to the core,
each one contains a different landscape
of bloodlight filaments, distinct rose-purple
striations like the oldest
strata of a Southwestern canyon
an undiscovered planet laid open in the lens
I should miss you more than any other
living being from this earth…
Yes, our work is one,
we are one in aim and sympathy
and we should be together….
1978
FOR JULIA IN NEBRASKA
Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpreter of man’s growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.
On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance of work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky….
In the Midwest of Willa Cather
the railroad looks like a braid of hair
a grandmother’s strong hands plaited
straight down a grand-daughter’s back.
Out there last autumn the streets
dreamed copper-lustre, the fields
of winter wheat whispered long snows yet to fall
we were talking of matrices
and now it’s spring again already.
This stormy Sunday lashed with rain
I call you in Nebraska
hear you’re planting your garden
sanding and oiling a burl of wood
hear in your voice the intention to
survive the long war between mind and body
and we make a promise to talk
this year, about growing older
and I think: we’re making a pledge.
Though not much in books of ritual
is useful between women
we still can make vows together
long distance, in electrical code:
Today you were promising me
to live, and I took your word,
Julia, as if it were my own:
we’ll live to grow old and talk about it too.
I’ve listened to your words
seen you stand by the caldron’s glare
rendering grammar by the heat
of your womanly wrath.
Brave linguist, bearing your double axe and shield
painfully honed and polished,
no word lies cool on your tongue
bent on restoring meaning to
our lesbian names, in quiet fury
weaving the chronicle so violently torn.
On this beautiful, ever-changing land
—the historical marker says—
man fought to establish a home
(fought whom? the marker is mute.)
They named this Catherland, for Willa Cather,
lesbian—the marker is mute,
the marker white men set on a soil
of broken treaties, Indian blood,
women wiped out in childbirths, massacres—
for Willa Cather, lesbian,
whose letters were burnt in shame.
Dear Julia, Willa knew at her death
that the very air was changing
that her Archbishop’s skies
she knew as well that history
is neither your script nor mine
it is the pictograph
from which the young must learn
like Tom Outland, from people
discredited or dead
that it needs a telling as plain
as the prairie, as the tale
of a young girl or an old woman
told by tongues that loved them
And Willa who could not tell
her own story as it was
left us her stern and delicate
respect for the lives she loved—
How are we going to do better?
for that’s the question that lies
beyond our excavations,
the question I ask of you
and myself, when our maps diverge,
when we miss signals, fail—
And if I’ve written in passion,
Live, Julia! what was I writing
but my own pledge to myself
where the love of women is rooted?
And what was I invoking
but the matrices we weave
web upon web, delicate rafters
flung in audacity to the prairie skies
nets of telepathy contrived
to outlast the iron road
laid out in blood across the land they called virgin—
nets, strands, a braid of hair
a grandmother’s strong hands plaited
straight down a grand-daughter’s back.
1978, 1981
TRANSIT
When I meet the skier she is always
walking, skis and poles shouldered, toward the mountain
free-swinging in worn boots
over the path new-sifted with fresh snow
her greying dark hair almost hidden by
a cap of many colors
her fifty-year-old, strong, impatient body
dressed for cold and speed
her eyes level with mine
And when we pass each other I look into her face
wondering what we have in common
where our minds converge
for we do not pass each other, she passes me
as I halt beside the fence tangled in snow,
she passes me as I shall never pass her
in this life
Yet I remember us together
climbing Chocorua, summer nineteen-forty-five
details of vegetation beyond the timberline
lichens, wildflowers, birds,
amazement when the trail broke out onto the granite ledge
sloped over blue lakes, green pines, giddy air
like dreams of flying
When sisters separate they haunt each other
as she, who I might once have been, haunts me
or is it I who do the haunting
halting and watching on the path
how she appears again through lightly-blowin
g
crystals, how her strong knees carry her,
how unaware she is, how simple
this is for her, how without let or hindrance
she travels in her body
until the point of passing, where the skier
and the cripple must decide
to recognize each other?
1979
FOR MEMORY
Old words:trustfidelity
Nothing new yet to take their place.
I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass
painfully green beneath the gold
and in this silent labor thoughts of you
start up
I hear your voice:disloyaltybetrayal
stinging the wires
I stuff the old leaves into sacks
and still they fall and still
I see my work undone
One shivering rainswept afternoon
and the whole job to be done over
I can’t know what you know
unless you tell me
there are gashes in our understandings
of this world
We came together in a common
fury of direction
barely mentioning difference
(what drew our finest hairs
to fire
the deep, difficult troughs
unvoiced)
I fell through a basement railing
the first day of school and cut my forehead open—
did I ever tell you? More than forty years
and I still remember smelling my own blood
like the smell of a new schoolbook
And did you ever tell me
how your mother called you in from play
and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust
that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from
to which we must return simply to say
this is where I came from
this is what I knew
The past is not a huskyet change goes on
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
1979
WHAT IS POSSIBLE
A clear nightif the mind were clear
If the mind were simple, if the mind were bare
of all but the most classic necessities:
wooden spoonknifemirror
cuplampchisel
a comb passing through hair beside a window
a sheet
thrown back by the sleeper
A clear night in which two planets
seem to clasp each otherin which the earthly grasses
shift like silk in starlight
If the mind were clear
and if the mind were simpleyou could take this mind
this particular stateand say
This is how I would live if I could choose:
this is what is possible
A clear night.But the mind
of the woman imagining all thisthe mind
that allows all this to be possible
is not clear as the night
is never simplecannot clasp
its truths as the transiting planets clasp each other
does not so easily
work free from remorse
does not so easily
manage the miracle
for which mind is famous
or used to be famous
does not at will become abstract and pure
this woman’s mind
does not even will that miracle
having a different mission
in the universe
If the mind were simpleif the mind were bare
it might resemble a rooma swept interior
but how could this nowbe possible
given the voices of the ghost-towns
their tiny and vast configurations
needing to be deciphered
the oracular night
with its densely working sounds
if it could ever come down to anything like
a comb passing through hair beside a window
no more than that
a sheet
thrown back by the sleeper
but the mind
of the woman thinking thisis wrapped in battle
is on another mission
a stalk of grassdried feathery weedrooted in snow
in frozen air stirringa fierce wand graphing
Her finger also tracing
pages of a book
knowing better than the poem she reads
knowing through the poem
through ice-feathered panes
the winter
flexing its talons
the hawk-wind
poised to kill
1980
FOR ETHEL ROSENBERG
convicted, with her husband, of “conspiracy to commit espionage”: killed in the electric chair June 19, 1953
1.
Europe 1953:
throughout my random sleepwalk
the words
scratched on walls, on pavements
painted over railway arches
Liberez les Rosenberg!
Escaping from home I found
home everywhere:
the Jewish question, Communism
marriage itself
a question of loyalty
or punishment
my Jewish father writing me
letters of seventeen pages
finely inscribed harangues
questions of loyalty
and punishment
One week before my wedding
that couple gets the chair
the volts grapple her, don’t
kill her fast enough
Liberez les Rosenberg!
I hadn’t realized
our family arguments were so important
my narrow understanding
of crimeof punishment
no language for this torment
mystery of that marriage
always both faces
on every front page in the world
Something so shockingso
unfathomable
it must be pushed aside
2.
She sank however into my soulA weight of sadness
I hardly can register how deep
her memory has sunkthat wife and mother
like so many
who seemed to get nothing out of any of it
except her children
that daughterof a family
like so many
needing its female monster
she, actually wishing to bean artist
wanting out of poverty
possibly also really wanting
revolution
that womanstrapped in the chair
no fear and no regrets
charged by posterity
not with selling secrets to the Communists
but with wantingto distinguish
herselfbeing a bad daughtera bad mother
And Iwalking to my wedding
by the same token a bad daughtera bad sister
my forces focussed
on that hardly revolutionary effort
Her life and death the possible
ranges of disloyalty
so painfulso unfathomable
they must be pushed aside
ignored for years
3.
Her mother testifies against her
Her brother testifies against her
After her death
she becomes a natural prey for pornographers
her death itself a scene
her body sizzlinghalf-strappedwhipped like a sail
She becomes the extremest vi
ctim
described nonetheless as rigid of will
what are her politics by thenno one knows
Her figure sinks into my soul
a drowned statue
sealed in lead
For years it has lain thereunabsorbed
first as part of that dead couple
on the front pages of the worldthe week
I gave myself in marriage
then slowly severingdrifting apart
a separate deatha life unto itself
no longer the Rosenbergs
no longer the chosen scapegoat
the family monster
till I hear how she sang
a prostitute to sleep
in the Women’s House of Detention
Ethel Greenglass Rosenbergwould you
have marched to take back the night
collected signatures
for battered women who kill
What would you have to tell us
would you have burst the net
4.
Why do I even want to call her up
to console my pain(she feels no pain at all)
why do I wish to put such questions
to ease myself(she feels no pain at all
shefinally burned to deathlike so many)
why all this exercise of hindsight?
sinceif I imagine her at all
I have to imagine first
the pain inflicted on herby women
her mother testifies against her
her sister-in-law testifies against her
and how she sees it
not the impersonal forces
not the historical reasons
why they might have hated her strength
If I have held her at arm’s length till now
if I have still believed it was
my loyalty, my punishment at stake
if I dare imagine her surviving
I must be fair to what she must have lived through