That’s why I want to speak to you now.To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.(I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
XXIII
Sixteen years ago I sat in this northeast kingdom
reading Gilbert White’s Natural History
of Selbornethinking
I can never know this land I walk upon
as that English priest knew his
—a comparable piece of earth—
rockledgesoilinsectbirdweedtree
I will never know it so well because …
Because you have chosen
something else:to know other things
even the cities which
create of this a myth
Because you grew up in a castle of air
disjunctured
Because without a faith
you are faithful
I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I cán name, both here and in other tracts of the globe.But there is no finite knowing, no such rest. Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices. leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices:and here I write the words, in their fullness:
powerful;womanly.
August 1981–
August 1982
II
North American Time
… traigo este calendario.
Sí; aquí se marca el tiempo.
Es almanaque por lo tanto, solo
que es tiempo injusto el que aparece …
—Georgina Herrera
(… I offer this calendar.
Yes; here time is marked.
It’s an almanac therefore, but
only unjust time appears.)
FOR THE RECORD
The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions
and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings
intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred
Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds
so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it
and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all:ask where you were.
1983
NORTH AMERICAN TIME
I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then I began to wonder
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We movebut our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
III
Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
that the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet
IV
It doesn’t matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent.Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
and this is verbal privilege
V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman’s hair—
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-stand plaits or corn-rows—
you had better know the thickness
the lengththe pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country
You have to know these things
VI
Poet, sister:words—
whether we like it or not—
stand in a time of their own.
No use protestingI wrote that
before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangladesh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
—those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time
VII
I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don’t go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things
VIII
Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and da
rkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.
IX
In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief;had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet’s words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timelessly speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds
and I start to speak again
1983
EDUCATION OF A NOVELIST
(Italicized lines quoted from Ellen Glasgow’s autobiography, The Woman Within.)
I
Looking backtrying to decipher
yourself and Lizzie Jones:
We were strange companions, but
that everyone knew us:a dark
lean, eager colored woman
and a small, pale, eager little girl
roaming together, hand-in-hand
Waking early, Mammy and I
would be dressed before the family had risen
spurred on by an inborn love
of adventure
a vital curiosity
… visiting
the neighbors and the neighbors’ cooks and with the neighbors’ maids
sweeping the brick pavement
and the apothecary
and the friendly light-colored letter-carrier
But when you made one visit to the almshouse
“Mammy” was reprimanded
II
I revolted from sentimentality
less because it was false then because
it was cruel …
In the country, later
the Black artist spent her genius on the white children
Mammy was with us; we were all happy together
(I revolted from sentimentalitywhen it suited me)
She would dress us as gypsies, darken
our faces with burnt cork
We would start
on a long journey, telling fortunes
wherever we came to a farm or a Negro cabin
I was always the one who would
think up the most exciting fortunes
(I, too, was always the one)
III
Where or how I learned to read
(you boast so proudly)I could never
rememberAfter supper
in front of the fire, undressing by candlelight
Mammy and I would take up and spin out
the story left from the evening before
Nobody ever taught me to read
(Nobody had to,
it was your birthright, Ellen.)
“As soon as I learn my letters,
Mammy, I’m going to teach you yours”
IV
Givens, Ellen. That we’d pick out our way
through the Waverly novels
that our childish, superior fire
was destined for fortune
even though femaledeafor lame
dewomanizedThe growing suspicion
haunting the growing life
the sense of exile in a hostile world
how do we use that?
and for what?
with whom?
Givens.The pale skin, the eager look, the fact
of having been known
by everyone
our childish, superior fire, and all
I was always the one …
Deafness finally drives you
here, there, to specialists in Europe
for hardening of the Eustachian tube
Finding no cure you build
a wall of deceptive gaietyto shield your pain:
That I, who was winged for flying, should be
wounded and caged!
V
Lizzie Jones vanishes.Her trace is lost.
She, who was winged for flying
Where at the end
of the nineteenth centuryyou ask
could one find the Revolution?
In what mean streets and alleys of the South
was it then lying in ambush?Though I suffered
with the world’s suffering. …
“As soon
as I learn my letters, Mammy,
I’m going to teach you yours”
but by your own admission
you never did
Where at the end of the twentieth century
in what streets and alleys, north or south
is it now lying in ambush?
It’s not enough
using your words to damn you, Ellen:
they could have been my own:
this criss-cross
map of kept and broken promises
I was always the one
1983
VIRGINIA 1906
A white woman dreaming of innocence,
of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,
is held in a DC-10 above the purity
of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.
She feels safe.Here, no one can reach her.
Neither men nor women have her in their power.
Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,
I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash
cruelly, when she does what I don’t want to see.
I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,
sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.
Nothing has told me how to think of her power.
Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts
across rough earth, small trees contort and twist
making their own shapes, wild.Why should we love purity?
Can the woman in the DC-10 see this
and would she call this innocence?If no one can reach her
she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.
This woman I have been and recognize
must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies
a hated nation, hers,
earth whose wet places call to mind
still-open wounds:her country.
Do we love purity?Where do we turn for power?
Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says
But I was not culpable,
I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,
the susceptible one, I was sick,
the one who simply had to get out, and did
: I am still trying how to think of her power.
And if she was forced, this woman, by the same
white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey
her ignored dark sisters?What if at five years old
she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open
what if forever after, in every record
she wants her name inscribed as innocent
and will not speak, refuses to know, can say
I have been numb for years
does not want to hear of any violation
like or unlike her own, as if the victim
can be innocent only in isolation
as if the victim dare not be intelligent
(I have been numb for years):and if this woman
longs for an intact world, an intact soul,
longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?
What has
she smelled of power without once
tasting it in the mouth? For what protections
has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?
There is a porch in Salem, Virginia
that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,
honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,
a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down
to the orchards, apple and peach,
divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.
A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia
refuses to come down, at last comes down
for a neighbor’s lying bribe.Now, if that child, grown old
feels safe in a DC-10 above thick white clouds
and no one can reach her
and if that woman’s child, another woman
chooses another way, yet finds the old vines
twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks
how does she stop dreaming the dream
of protection, how does she follow her own wildness
shedding the innocence, the childish power?
How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?
1983
DREAMS BEFORE WAKING
Despair is the question.
—Elie Wiesel
Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo.
—Nancy Morejón
Despair falls:
the shadow of a building
they are raising in the direct path
of your slender ray of sunlight
Slowly the steel girders grow
the skeletal framework rises
yet the western light still filters
through it all
still glances off the plastic sheeting
they wrap around it
for dead of winter