no longer visible
where undocumented intelligences travailed
on earth they had no stake in
though the dark leaves growing beneath white veils
were beautifuland the barns opened out like fans
All this of course could have been done differently
This valley itself:one more contradiction
the paradise fieldsthe brute skyscrapers
the pesticidal wells
I have been wanting for years
to write a poemequal to these
material forces
and I have always failed
I wasn’t looking for a muse
only a reader by whomI could not be mistaken
21.
The cat-tails blaze in the cornersunflowers
shed their pale fiery duston the dark stove-lid
others stand guardheads bowedover the garden
the fierce and flaring garden you have made
out of your woes and expectations
tilled into the earthI circle close to your mind
crash into it sometimesas you crash into mine
Given this strip of earthgiven mere love
should we not be happy?
but happiness comes and goes as it comes and goes
the safe-house is temporarythe garden
lies open to vandals
this whole valley is one more contradiction
and more will be asked of uswe will ask more
22.
In a bald skull sits our friendin a helmet
of third-degree burns
her quizzical melancholy grace
her irreplaceable selfin utter peril
In the radioactive desert walks a woman
in a black dresswhite-hairedsteady
as the luminous hand of a clock
in circles she walksknitting
and unknitting her scabbed fingers
Her face is expressionlessshall we pray to her
shall we speak of the loose pine-needleshow they shook
like the pith of country summers
from the sacks of pitchblende ore in the tin-roofed shack
where it all began
Shall we accuse her of denial
first of the selfthen of the mixed virtue
of the purest scienceshall we be wise for her
in hindsightshall we scream It has come to this
Shall we praise hershall we let her wander
the atomic desertin peace?
23.
You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,
the chemical industriesand pay
that hush-money to the men
who landed out there at twentynot for belief
but because of who they wereand were called psychos
when they said their bodies contained dioxin
like memories they didn’t want to keep
whose kids came out deformed
You know nothing has changedno respect or grief
for the losers of a lost war everyone hated
nobody sent them to school like heroes
if they started suing for everything that was done
there would be no endthere would be a beginning
My countrywedged fast in history
stuck in the ice
24.
Someone said to me:It’s just that we don’t
know how to cope with the loss of memory.
When your own grandfather doesn’t know you
when your mother thinks you’re somebody else
it’s a terrible thing.
Now just like that is this idea
that the universe will forget us, everything we’ve done
will go nowhere
no one will know who we were.
No one will know who we were!
Not the young who will neverNor even the old folk
who knew us when we were younginsatiable
for recognition from them
trying so fiercely not to be them
counting on them to know usanywhere
25.
Did anyone ever know who we were
if we means more than a handful?
flower of a generationyoung white men
cut off in the named, commemorated wars
I stareJewishinto that loss
for which all names become unspeakable
not ever just the best and brightest
but the most wretched and bedeviled
the obscurethe strangethe driven
the twinsthe dwarfsthe geniusesthe gay
But ours was not the only loss
(to whom does annihilation speak
as if for the first time?)
You:air-drivenreftfrom the tuber-bitten soil
that was your portionfrom the torched-out village
the Marxist study-groupthe Zionist cell
café or chederZaddik or Freudianstraight or gay
woman or manO you
strippedbaredappalled
stretched to mere spirityet still physical
your irreplaceable knowledgelost
at the mud-slick bottom of the world
how you held fastwith your bone-meal fingers
to yourselveseach otherand strangers
how you touchedheld-up from falling
what was already half-cadaver
how your life-cry taunted extinction
with its wild, crudeso what?
Grief for you has rebellion at its heart
it cannot simply mourn
You:air-driven:reft:are yet our teachers
trying to speak to us in sleep
trying to help us wake
27.
The Tolstoyansthe Afro-American slaves
knew this:you could be killed
for teaching people to read and write
I used to think the worst affliction
was to be forbidden pencil and paper
well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls
for years of the Cultural Revolution
and truly, the magic of written characters
looms and dwindlesshrinks smallgrows swollen
depending on where you stand
and what is in your hand
and who can read and why
I think now the worst affliction
is not to know who you are or have been
I have learned this in part
from writersReading and writing
aren’t sacredyet people have been killed
as if they were
28.
This high summer we love will pour its light
the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment
then before we’re ready will crash into autumn
with a violence we can’t accept
a bounty we can’t forgive
Night frost will strike when the noons are warm
the pumpkins wildly glowingthe green tomatoes
straining huge on the vines
queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty
as the milkweed stakes her claim
she who will stand at lastdark sticks barely rising
up through the snowher testament of continuation
We’ll dream of a longer summer
but this is the one we have:
I lay my sunburnt hand
on your table:this is the time we have
29.
You who think I find words for everything
this is enough for now
cut it shortcut loose from my words
You for whom I write this
in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage
sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones
when the insect of detritus crawls
from shoulder to elbow to wristbone
remember:the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the samebut you can learn
from the edges
that blurO you who love clear edges
more than anythingwatch the edges that blur
1983–1985
TIME’S POWER
(1985–1988)
For Michelle
SOLFEGGIETTO
1.
Your windfall at fifteenyour Steinway grand
paid for by fire insurance
came to me as birthrighta black cave
with teeth of ebony and ivory
twanging and thundering over the head
of the crawling childuntil
that child was set on the big book on the chair
to face the keyboard world of black and white
—already knowing the world was black and white
The child’s handssmaller than a sand-dollar
set on the keyswired to their mysteries
the child’s wits facing the ruled and ruling staves
2.
For years we battled over music lessons
mine, taught by youNor did I wonder
what that keyboard meant to you
the hours of solitudethe practising
your life of prize-recitalslifted hopes
Piatti’s nephew praising you at sixteen
scholarships to the North
boarding-school girls what won’t be used
shelving ambitionbeating time
to “On the Ice at Sweet Briar” or
“The Sunken Cathedral” for a child
counting the minutes and the scales to freedom
3.
Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me?
—Summers of ’36, ’37, Europe untuned
what I remember isn’t lessons
not Bach or Brahms or Mozart
but the rented upright in the summer rental
One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack
And so you played, evenings and so we sang
“Steal Away” and “Swanee River,”
“Swing Low,” and most of all
“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”
How we sang out the chorushow I loved
the watchfires of the hundred circling camps
and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free
4.
Piano lessonsThe mother and the daughter
Their doomed exhaustiontheir common mystery
worked out in finger-exercisesCzerny, Hanon
The yellow Schirmer albumsquarter-restsdouble-holds
glyphs of an astronomythe mother cannot teach
the daughter because this is not the story
of a mother teaching magic to her daughter
Side by side I see us locked
My wristsyour voiceare tightened
Passion lives in old songsin the kitchen
where another woman cooksteachesand sings
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd
and in the booklined room
where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches
Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs
The daughter struggles with the strange notations
—dark chart of music’s ocean flowers and flags
but would rather learn by ear and heartThe mother
says she must learn to read by sightnot ear and heart
5.
Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—
even today a scrip of music balks me—
I feel illiterate in this
your mother-tongueHad it been Greek or Slovak
no more could your native alphabet have baffled
your daughterwhom you taught for years
held by a tetherover the ivory
and ebony teeth of the Steinway
It is
the three hundredth anniversary of Johann
Sebastian BachMy earliest life
woke to his English Suitesunder your fingers
I understand a language I can’t read
Music you played streams on the car radio
in the freeway night
You kept your passions deepYou have them still
I ask you, both of us
—Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?
Did I see power in yours?
What was worth fighting for?What did you want?
What did I want from you?
1985–1988
THIS
Face flashing freechild-arms
lifting the collie pup
torn paper on the path
Central ParkApril ’72
behind youminimal
those benches and that shade
that brilliant light in which
you laughed longhaired
and I’m the keeper of
this little piece of paper
this little piece of truth
I wanted this from you—
laughtera child turning
into a boyat ease
in the spring lightwith friends
I wanted this for you
I could mutterGive back
that daygive me again
that childwith the chance
of making it all right
I could yellGive back that light
on the dog’s teeththe child’s hair
but no rough drafts are granted
—Do you think I don’t remember?
did you think I was all-powerful
unimpairedunappalled?
yesyou needed that from me
I wanted this from you
1985
LOVE POEM
Tell me, bristler, where
do you get such hair
so quick a flareso strong a tongue
Green eyesfierce curls
there and here a mole
a girl’s
dimplesa warrior’s mind
dark blood under gold skin
testing, testing the world
the word
and so to write for you
a pretty sonnet
would be untrue
to your mud-river flashing
over rocksyour delicate
coffee-bushes
and more I cannot know
and some I labor with
and I mean to stay true
even in poems, to you
But there’s something more
Beauty, when you were young
we both thought we were young
now that’s all done
we’re serious now
about deathwe talk to her
daily, as to a neighbor
we’re learning to be true
with hershe has the keys
to this houseif she must
she can sleep over
1986
NEGOTIATIONS
Someday if someday comes we will agree
that trust is not about safety
that keeping faith is not about deciding
to clip our fingernails exactly
to the same length or wearing
a uniform that boasts our unanimity
Someday if someday comes we’ll know
the difference between liberal laissez-faire
pluralism and the way you cut your hair
and the way I clench my hand
against my cheekbone
both being possible gestures of defiance
Someday if there’s a someday we will
bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought
I’ll say Have some in the name of our
trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?
We’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit
we’ve tasted stranger
Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go
back and reread those poems and manifestos
that so enraged us in each other’s hand
I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I
couldn’t write it offYou’l
l say
I read you always, even when I hated you
1986
IN A CLASSROOM
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking
What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.
1986
THE NOVEL
All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and
Peace
Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield
were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound
like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers
You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary
as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand
on the slight strand that held your tattered mind
blown like an old stocking from a wire
on the wind between two rivers.
All winter you asked nothing
of that book though it lay heavy on your knees
you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk
you were old woman, child, commander
you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing
you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages
you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-
hand growing few, you knew the end was coming
you knew beyond the ending lay
your own, unwritten life
1986
A STORY
Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home.
but Absence left without a glance at Home.
Home tried to hold in Absence’s despite,