At the end of winter something changes
a faint subtraction
from consolations you expected
an innocent brilliance that does not come
though the flower shops set out
once again on the pavement
their pots of tight-budded sprays
the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold
and at such a price
though someone must buy them
you study those hues as if with hunger
Despair falls
like the day you come home
from work, a summer evening
transparent with rose-blue light
and see they are filling in
the framework
the girders are rising
beyond your window
that seriously you live
in a different place
though you have never moved
and will not move, not yet
but will give away
your potted plants to a friend
on the other side of town
along with the cut crystal flashing
in the window-frame
will forget the evenings
of watching the street, the sky
the planes in the feathered afterglow:
will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold
where still you can manage
to go on paying rent
where still you can believe
it’s the old neighborhood:
even the woman who sleeps at night
in the barred doorway—wasn’t she always there?
and the man glancing, darting
for food in the supermarket trash—
when did his hunger come to this?
what made the difference?
what will make it for you?
What will make it for you?
You don’t want to know the stages
and those who go through them don’t want to tell
You have your four locks on the door
your savings, your respectable past
your strangely querulous body, suffering
sicknesses of the city no one can name
You have your pride, your bitterness
your memories of sunset
you think you can make it straight through
if you don’t speak of despair.
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
1983
WHEN/THEN
Tell us
how we’ll be together
in that time
patch of sun on a gritty floor; an old newspaper, torn
for toilet paper and coughed-up scumDon’t talk, she said
when we still love but are no longer young
they bring you a raw purple stick and say
it is one of her fingers;it could be
Tell us
about aging, what it costs, how women
have loved forty, fifty years
enamel basin, scraped
down to the bare ironsome ashen hairsred fluid
they say is her bloodhow can you
Tell us about the gardens we will keep, the milk
we’ll drink from our own goats
she needs
anti-biotics they say which will be given
when you name namesthey show you her fever chart
Tell us about communitythe joy
of coming to rest
among women
who will love us
you choose between your community
and herlater others
will come through the cellnot all of them will love you
whichever way you choose
Don’t talk, she said(you will learn to hear
only her voice when they close in on you)Don’t talk
Why are you telling us this?
patch of sun on a gritty
floor, bad dreams, a torn newspaper, someone’s blood
in a scraped basin. …
1983
UPCOUNTRY
The silver shadowwhere the line falls grey
and pearlythe unborn villages quivering
under the rockthe snailtraveling the crevice
the furred, flying white insect like a tiny
intelligence lacing the air
this woman whose lips lie parted
after long speech
her white hair unrestrained
All that you never paid
or have with difficulty paid
attention to
Change and be forgiven!the roots of the forest
mutteredbut you tramped throughguilty
unable to take forgivenessneither do you
give mercy
She is asleep nowdangerousher mind
slits the air like silktravels faster than sound
like scissors flung into the next century
Even as you watch for the trout’s hooked stagger
across the lakethe crack of light and the crumpling bear
her mind was on them first
when forgiveness ends
her love means danger
1983
ONE KIND OF TERROR: A LOVE POEM
1.
From 1964: a color snapshot:you
riding a camel past the Great Pyramid
its rough earthy diagonal shouldering
the blue triangle of sky
I know your white shirtdark skirtyour age
thirty-fiveas mine was then
your ignorance like mine
in those yearsand your curious mind
throw of your headbend of your gilt knees
the laugh exchanged with whoever took the picture
I don’t know how you were talking to yourself
I know I was thinking
with a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude
this will be the deciding year
I am sick of drift
Weren’t we always trying to do better?
Then the voices began to say:Your plans
are not in the book of plans
written, printed and bound while you
were absent
no, not here nor in Egypt
will you ever catch up
2.
So, thenas if by plan
I turnand you are lost
How have I livedknowing
that day of your laughso alive/so nothing
even the clothes you wore then
rotted awayHow can I live believing
any year can be the deciding year
when I know the book of plans
how it disallows us
time for changefor growing older
truthfullyin our own way
3.
I used to think you ought to be
a womanin chargein a desperate time
of whole populations
such seemed the power of your restlessness
I saw you a rescuer
amid huge eventsdiasporas
scatterings and returnings
I needed this for us
I would have gone to help you
flinging myself into the fray
both of us treading free
of the roads we started on
4.
In the book of plans it is written
that our lifelines shall be episodic
faithlessfrayedlived out
under impure violent rains
and rare but violent sun
It is written there that we may r
each
like wan vines across a window
trying to grasp each other
but shall lack care and tending
that water and air shall betray us
that the daughter born a poet
will die of dysentery
while the daughter born to organize
will die of cancer
5.
In the book of plans it says no one
will speak of the book of plans
the appearance will continue
that all this is natural
It says my grief for you is natural
but my anger for us is not
that the image of a white curtain trembling
across a stormy pane
is acceptablebut not
the image I make of you
arm raised hurlingsignalling
the squattersthe refugees
storming the food supply
The book of plans says only that you must die
that we all, very soon, must die
6.
Well, I am studying a different book
taking notes wherever I go
the movement of the wrist does not change
but the pen plows deeper
my handwriting flows into words
I have not yet spoken
I’m the sole author of nothing
the book moves from field to field
of testimonyrecording
how the wounded teach each otherthe old
refuse to be organized
by foolshow the women say
in more than one languageYou have struck a rock—
prepare to meet the unplanned
the ignoredthe unforeseenthat which breaks
despairwhich has always travelled
undergroundor in the spaces
between the fixed stars
gazing full-facedwild
and calmon the Revolution
7.
Love:I am studying a different book
and yes, a book is a finite thing
In it your death will never be reversed
the deaths I have witnessed sincenever undone
The light drained from the living eyes
can never flash again from those same eyes
I make you no promises
but something’s breaking open here
there were certain extremes we had to know
before we could continue
Call it a book, or not
call it a map of constant travel
Call it a book, or not
call it a songa ray
of images thrown on a screen
in open lotsin cellars
and among those images
one woman’s meaning to another woman
long after death
in a different world
1983
IN THE WAKE OF HOME
1.
You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains
postersa pile of animals on the bed
A woman and a man who love you
and each otherslip the door ajar
you are almost asleepthey crouch in turn
to stroke your hairyou never wake
This happens every night for years.
This never happened.
2.
Your lipssteadynever say
It should have been this way
That’s not what you say
Youso carefully not asking, Why?
Your eyeslooking straight in mine
remind me of a woman’s
auburn hairmy mother’s hair
but you never saw that hair
The family coilso twisted, tight and loose
anyone trying to leave
has to strafe the field
burn the premises down
3.
The home houses
miragesmemory fogs the kitchen panes
the rush-hour traffic outside
has the same old ebb and flow
Out on the darkening block
somebody calls you home
night after nightthen never again
Useless for you to know
they tried to do what they could
before they left for good
4.
The voice that used to call you home
has gone off on the wind
beaten into thinnest air
whirling down other streets
or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash
maybe the tongue was torn out
brownlung has stolen the breath
or fear has stolen the breath
maybe under another name
it sings on AM radio:
And if you knew, what would you know?
5.
But you will be drawn to places
where generations lie
side by side with each other:
fathers, mothers and children
in the family prayerbook
or the country burying-ground
You will hack your way through the bush
to the Jodensavanne
where the gravestones are black with mould
You will stare at old family albums
with their smilestheir resemblances
wandered offbecame strange
no woman dropped her baby and ran
no father took off for the hills
no axe splintered the door
—that once at least it was all in order
and nobody came to grief
6.
Anytime you go back
where absence began
the kitchen faucet sticks in a way you know
you have to pull the basement door
in before drawing the bolt
the last porch-step is still loose
the water from the tap
is the old drink of water
Any time you go back
the familiar underpulse
will start its throbbing:Home, home!
and the hole torn and patched over
will gape unseen again
7.
Even where love has run thin
the child’s soul musters strength
calling on dust-motessong on the radio
closet-floor of galoshes
stray catpiles of autumn leaves
whatever comes along
—the rush of purpose to make a life
worth living past abandonment
building the layers up again
over the torn holefilling in
8.
And what of the stern and faithful aunt
the fierce grandmotherthe anxious sister
the good teacherthe one
who stood at the crossing when you had to cross
the woman hired to love you
the skeleton who held out a crust
the breaker of rulesthe one
who is neither a man nor a womanthe one
who warmed the liquid vein of life
and day after day whatever the need
handed it on to you?
You who did and had to do
so much for yourselfthis was done for you
by someone who did what they could
when others left for good
9.
You imagine an alleya little kingdom
where the mother-tongue is spoken
a village of shelterswoven
or sewn of hidesin a long-ago way
a shanty standing up
at the edge of sharecropped fields
a tenement where life is seized by the teeth
a farm battened down on snowswept plains
a porch with rubber-plant and glider
on a steep city street
You imagine the people would all be there
fathers mothers and children
the ones you were promised would all be there
eatinga
rguingworking
trying to get on with life
you imagine this used to be
for everyoneeverywhere
10.
What if I told you your home
is this continent of the homeless
of children soldtaken by force
driven from their mothers’ land
killed by their mothers to save from capture
—this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood
of languages tabooed
diasporas unrecorded
undocumented refugees
underground railroadstrails of tears
What if I tell you your home
is this planet of warworn children
women and children standing in line or milling
endlessly calling each others’ names
What if I tell you, you are not different
it’s the family albums that lie
—will any of this comfort you
and how should this comfort you
11.
The child’s soul carries on
in the wake of home
building a complicated house
a tree-house without a tree
finding places for everything
the songthe stray catthe skeleton
The child’s soul musters strength
where the holes were torn
but there are no miracles:
even children become exhausted
And how shall they comfort each other
who have come young to grief?
Who will number the grains of loss
and what would comfort be?