privilege
about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,
a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,
who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy
river, woman dragged from her stalled car
into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death
young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening
walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing
availing his Blackness
Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion,
the men too holy to touch her hand;Jew who has
turned her back
on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her
breasts) hiking alone
found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs
(did she die as queer or as Jew?)
Solitude, O taboo, endangered species
on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend
you
In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:
your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread
her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true
And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?
have I traded off something I don’t name?
To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?
What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for
her spirit-vision
far from the protection of those she has called her own?
Will I find O solitude
your plumes, your breasts, your hair
against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s
singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?
in the old places, anywhere?
What is a Jew in solitude?
What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?
When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock,
crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide
into the sea
when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger
when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities
crushed together on which the world was founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our
loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and
forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are
chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in
multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will
solitude mean?
1984–1985
EDGES
In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream
the kingfisher cuts throughflashing
spirit-fire from his wingsbluer than violet’s edge
the slice of those wings
5 a.m., first light, hoboes of the past
are leaning through the window, what freightcars
did they hop hereI thought I’d left behind?
Their hands are stretched out but not for bread
they are past charity, they want me to heartheir names
Outside in the world where so much is possible
sunrise rekindles and the kingfisher—
the living kingfisher, not that flash of vision—
darts where the creek drags her wetness over stump and stone
where poison oak reddensacacia pods collect
curled and secretive against the bulkhead
and the firstlight ghosts go transparent
while the homeless line for bread
1985
III
Contradictions:
Tracking Poems
1.
Look:this is Januarythe worst onslaught
is ahead of usDon’t be lured
by these soft grey afternoonsthese sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paperby the thought
the days are lengthening
Don’t let the solstice fool you:
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moment of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly stilland our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life
2.
Heart of cold.Bones of cold.Scalp of cold.
the greythe blackthe blondthe red
hairs on a skull of cold.Within that skull
the thought of warthe sovereign thought
the coldest of all thought.Dreaming shut down
smirking with coldmemory
squashed and frozen coldbreath
half held-in for cold.The freezing people
of a freezing nationeating
luxury food or garbage
frozen tongues licking the luxury meat
or the pizza-crustthe frozen eyes
welded to other eyesalso frozen
the cold hands trying to strokethe coldest sex.
Heart of coldSex of coldIntelligence of cold
My countrywedged fast in history
stuck in the ice
3.
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bedwe are delicate
and toughso hot with joy we amaze ourselves
toughand delicatewe play rings
around each otherour daytime candle burns
with its peculiar lightand if the snow
begins to fall outsidefilling the branches
and if the night fallswithout announcement
these are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicateyour fingers
exactmy tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my lovehot on your scenton the cusp of winter
4.
He slammed his hand across my faceand I
let him do that untilI stopped letting him do it
so I’m in for life.
.… he kept saying I was crazy, he’d lock me up
until I went to Women’s Lib and they
told me he’d been abusing me as much
as if he’d hit me:emotional abuse.
They told me how to answer back.That I could
answer back.But my brother-in-law’s a shrink
with the State.I have to watch my step.
If I stay just within bounds they can’t come and get me.
Women’s Lib taught me the words to say
to remind myself and him I’m a person with rights
like anyone.But answering back’s no answer.
5.
She is carrying my madnessand I dread her
avoid her when I can
She walks along I.S. 93howling
in her bare feet
She is number 6375411
in a cellblock in Arkansas
and I dread what she is paying forthat is mine
She has fallen asleep at last in the battered
women’s safe-houseand I dread
her dreamsthat I also dream
If never I become exposed or confined like this
what am I hiding
O sister of nauseaof broken ribsof isolation
what is this freedom I protecthow is it mine
6.
Dear Adrienne:
I’m calling you up tonight
as I might call up a friendas I might call up a ghost
to ask what you intend to do
with the rest of your life.Sometimes you
act
as if you have all the time there is.
I worry about you when I see this.
The prime of life, old age
aren’t what they used to be;
making a good death isn’t either,
now you can walk around the corner of a wall
and see a light
that already has blown your past away.
Somewhere in Bostonbeautiful literature
is being read around the clock
by writersto signify
their dislike of this.
I hope you’ve got something in mind.
I hope you have some idea
about the rest of your life.
In sisterhood,
Adrienne
7.
Dear Adrienne,
I feel signified by pain
from my breastbone through my left shoulder down
through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain
I am typing this instead of writing by hand
because my wrist on the right side
blooms and rushes with pain
like a neon bulb
You ask me how I’m going to live
the rest of my life
Well, nothing is predictable with pain
Did the old poets write of this?
—in its odd spaces, free,
many have sung and battled—
But I’m already living the rest of my life
not under conditions of my choosing
wiredinto pain
rider on the slow train
Yours, Adrienne
8.
I’m afraid of prison.Have been all these years.
Afraid they’ll take my aspirin away
and of other things as well:
beatingsdamp and coldI have my fears.
Unable one day to get up and walk
to do what must be done
Prison as ideait fills me
with fearthis exposure to my own weakness
at someone else’s whim
I watched that woman go over the barbed-wire fence
at the peace encampment
the wheelchair rider
I didn’t want to do what she did
I thought, They’ll get her for this
I thought, We are not such victims.
9.
Tearing but not yet torn:this page
The long late-winter rage
wild rain on the windshield
clenched stemsunyielding sticks
of maple, birchbleached grassthe range
of things resisting change
And this is how I am
and this is how you are
when we resist the charmer’s open sesame
the thief’s light-fingered touch
staying closed because we will
not give ourselves away
until the agentthe manipulatorthe false toucher
has leftand it is May
10.
Nightover the great and the little worlds
of Brooklynthe shredded communities
in ChicagoArgentinaPoland
in Holyoke MassachusettsAmsterdamManchester England
Night fallsthe day of atonement begins
in how many divided heartshow many defiant lives
TorontoManaguaSt. Johnsbury
and the great and little worlds of the women
Something ancient passes across the earth
lifting the dust of the blasted ghettos
You ask if I will eat and I say, Yes,
I have never fasted
but something crosses my life
not a shadowthe reflection of a fire
11.
I came out of the hospital like a woman
who’d watched a massacre
not knowing how to tell
my adhesionsthe lingering infections
from the pain on the streets
In my room on Yom Kippur they took me off morphine
I saw shadows on the wallthe dying and the dead
They said Christian Phalangists did it
then Kol Nidre on the radioand my own
unhoused spirittrying to find a home
Was it then or another day
in what order did it happen
I thoughtThey call this elective surgery
but we all have died of this.
12.
Violence as purification:the one idea.
One massacre great enough to undo another
one last-ditch operation to solve the problem
of the old operation that was bungled
Look:I have lain on their tables under their tools
under their drugsfrom the center of my body
a voice burstsagainst these methods
(wherever you made a mistake
batter with radiationdefoliatecut away)
and yes, there are merciful debridements
but burns turn into rotting flesh
for reasons of vengeance and neglect.
I have been too close to septic too many times
to play with either violence or non-violence.
13.
Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,
feelings are always about more than one thing.
You drag yourself back home and it is autumn
you can’t concentrate, you can’t lie on the couch
so you drive yourself for hours on the quiet roads
crying at the wheelwatching the colors
deepening, fadingand winter is coming
and you long for one idea
one simple, huge idea to take this weight
and you know you will never find it, never
because you don’t want to find it
You will drive and cry and come home and eat
and listen to the news
and slowly even at winter’s edge
the feelings come back in their shapes
and colorsconflictingthey come back
they are changed
14.
Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences
meaningless in ordinary American
like, Your mother, too, was a missionary of poets
and in another dream one of my old teachers
shows me a letter of reference
he has written for me, in a language
I know to be English but cannot understand,
telling me it’s in “transformational grammar”
and that the student who typed the letter
does not understand this grammar either.
Lately I dreamed about my father,
how I found him, alive, seated on an old chair.
I think what he said to me was,
You don’t know how lonely I am.
15.
You who think I find words for everything,
and you for whom I write this,
how can I show you what I’m barely
coming into possession of, invisible luggage
of more than fifty years, looking at first
glance like everyone else’s, turning up
at the airport carousel
and the waiting for it, knowing what nobody
would steal must eventually come round—
feeling obsessed, peculiar, longing?
16.
It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived
watching myself in the act of loss—the art of losing,
Elizabeth Bishop called it, but for me no art
only badly-done exercises
acts of the heart forced to question
its presumptions in this worldits mere excitements
acts of the body forced to measure
all instincts against pain
acts of partingtrying to let go
without giving upyesElizabetha city here
a village therea sister, comrade, cat
and moreno art to this but anger
; 17.
I have backroads I taketo places
like the hospital where night pain
is never tended enough but I can drive
under the overlacing boughs
of wineglass elm, oak, maple
from Mosquitoville to Wells River
along the double track with the greened hump
the slope with the great sugar-grove
New Age talk calls it “visualizing”but I know
under torture I would travel
from the West Barnet burying-ground
to Joe’s Brookby heartI know
all of those roads by heart
by heart I know what, and all, I have left behind
18.
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncuredun-grieved-overThe problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world
For it is the body’s world
they are trying to destroy forever
The best world is the body’s world
filled with creaturesfilled with dread
misshapen soyet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I longed to live on this earth
walking her boundariesnever counting the cost
19.
If to feel is to be unreliable
don’t listen to us
if to be in pain is to be predictable
embitteredbullying
then don’t listen to us
If we’re in danger of mistaking
our personal trouble for the pain on the streets
don’t listen to us
if my fury at being grounded frightens you
take off on your racing skis
in your beautiful tinted masks
Trapped in one idea, you can’t have feelings
Without feelings perhaps you can feel like a god
20.
The tobacco fields lie fallowthe migrant pickers