Home caved, shuddered, yet held
without Absence’s consent. Home took a walk
in several parks, Home shivered
in outlying boroughs, slept on strange floors,
cried many riffs of music, many words.
Home went out to teach school, Home studied pain control
Home learned to dive and came up blind with blood
Home learned to live on each location
but whenever Absence called, called, Home had to answer
in the grammar of Absence.
Home would hitch-hike
through flying snow, Home would roast meat,
light candles, to withstand the cold. Home washed the dishes
faithfully. But Absence
always knew when to call.
What if Absence calls
and a voice answers
in the accent of Home?
1986
IN MEMORIAM: D.K.
A man walking on the street
feels unwellhas felt unwell
all week, a littleYet the flowers crammed
in pots on the corner:furled anemones:
he knows they open
burgundy, violet, pink, Amarillo
all the way to their velvet cores
The flowers hanging over the fence:fuchsias:
each tongued, staring,all of a fire:
the flowersHe who has
been happy oftener than sad
carelessly happywell oftener than sick
one of the luckyis thinking about death
and its musicabout poetry
its translations of his life
And what good will it do you
to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?
Read Keats?How will culture cure you?
Poor, unhappy
unwell culturewhat can it sing or say
six weeks from now, to you?
Give me your living handIf I could take the hour
death moved into youundeclared, unnamed
—even if sweet, if I could take that hour
between my forcepstear at it like a monster
wrench it out of your fleshdissolve its shape in quicklime
and make you well again
no, not again
but still. …
1986
CHILDREN PLAYING CHECKERS
AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST
Two green-webbed chairs
a three-legged stool between
Your tripod
Spears of grass
longer than your bare legs
cast shadows on your legs
drawn up
from the red-and-black
cardboard squares
the board of play
the board of rules
But you’re not playing, you’re talking
It’s midsummer
and greater rules are breaking
It’s the last
innocent summer you will know
and I
will go on awhile pretending that’s not true
When I have done pretending
I can see this:
the depth of the background
shadows
not of one moment only
erased and charcoaled in again
year after year
how the tree looms back behind you
the first tree of the forest
the last tree
from which the deer step out
from protection
the first tree
into dreadfulness
The last and the first tree
1987
SLEEPWALKINGNEXT TO DEATH
Sleephorns of a snail
protruding, retracting
What we choose to know
or not know
all these years
sleepwalking
next to death
I
This snail could have been eaten
This snail could have been crushed
This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet
This snail could have driven fast at night
putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:
This snail could have ridden
in the back of the pick-up, handing guns
II
Knows, chooses not to know
It has always
been about death and chances
The Dutch artist wrote and painted
one or more strange and usable things
For I mean to meet you
in any landin any language
This is my promise:
I will be there
if you are there
III
In between this and that there are different places
of waiting, airports mostly where the air
is hungover, visibility lowboarding passes not guaranteed
If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi
I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth
I would begin reading you like a dream
That’s how extreme it feels
that’s what I have to do
IV
Every stone around your neck you know the reason for
at this time in your lifeRelentlessly
you tell me their names and furiously I
forget their namesForgetting the names of the stones
you love, you lover of stones
what is it I do?
V
What is it I do? I refuse to take your place
in the worldI refuse to make myself
your courierI refuse so much
I might ask, what is it I do?
I will not be the dreamer for whom
you are the only dream
I will not be your channel
I will wrestle you to the end
for our difference (as you have wrestled me)
I will change your name and confuse
the Angel
VI
I am stupid with you and practical with you
I remind you to take a poulticeforget a quarrel
I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you
vitamins you hate to take
VII
Calmly you look over my shoulderat this pageand say
It’s all about youNone of this
tells my story
VIII
Yesterday noon I stood by a river
and many waited to cross over
from the Juarez barrio
to El Paso del Norte
First day of springa stand of trees
in Mexico were in palegreen leaf
a man casting a net
into the Rio Grande
and women, in pairs, strolling
across the border
as if taking a simple walk
Many thousands go
I stood by the river and thought of you
youngin Mexicoin a time of hope
IX
The practical nurse is the only nurse
with her plastic valise of poultices and salves
her hands of glove leather and ebony
her ledgers of pain
The practical nurse goes down to the river
in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace
eating a burrito in hand
it will be a long day
a long labor
the midwife will be glad to see her
it will be a long nightsomeone bleeding
from a botched abortiona beatingWill you let her touch you
now?
Will you tell her you’re fine?
X
I’m afraid of the border patrol
Not those men
of La Migra who could have run us
into the irrigation canal with their van
I’m afraid
of the patrollers
the sleepwalker in me
the loner in you
XI
I want five hours with you
in a train running south
maybe ten hours
in a Greyhound bound for the border
the two seats side-by-side that become a home
an island of light in the continental dark
the time that takes the place of a lifetime
I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down
I will not be lulled
Promise you won’t jump the train
vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.
that you won’t defect
that we’ll travel
like two snails
our four horns erect
1987
LETTERS IN THE FAMILY
I: Catalonia 1936
Dear Parents:
I’m the daughter
you didn’t bless when she left,
an unmarried woman wearing a khaki knapsack
with a poor mark in Spanish.
I’m writing now
from a plaster-dusted desk in a town
pocked street by street with hand grenades,
some of them, dear ones, thrown by me.
This is a school: the children are at war.
You don’t need honors in schoolroom Spanish here
to be of use and my right arm
’s as strong as anyone’s. I sometimes think
all languages are spoken here,
even mine, which you got zero in.
Don’t worry. Don’t try to write. I’m happy,
if you could know it.
Rochelle.
II: Yugoslavia, 1944
Dear Chana,
where are you now?
Am sending this pocket-to-pocket
(though we both know pockets we’d hate to lie in).
They showed me that poem you gave Reuven,
about the match:
Chana, you know, I never was
for martyrdom. I thought we’d try our best,
ragtag mission that we were,
then clear out if the signals looked too bad.
Something in you drives things ahead for me
but if I can I mean to stay alive.
We’re none of us giants, you know,
just small, frail, inexperienced romantic people.
But there are things we learn.
You know the sudden suck of empty space
between the jump and the ripcord pull?
I hate it. I hate it so,
I’ve hated you for your dropping
ecstatically in free-fall, in the training,
your look, dragged on the ground, of knowing
precisely why you were there.
My mother’s
still in Palestine. And yours
still there in Hungary. Well, there we are.
When this is over—
I’m
your earthbound friend to the end, still yours—
Esther.
III: Southern Africa, 1986
Dear children:
We’ve been walking nights
a long time over rough terrain,
sometimes through marshes. Days we hide
under what bushes we can find.
Our stars steer us. I write
on my knee by a river with a weary hand,
and the weariness will come through
this letter that should tell you
nothing but love. I can’t say where we are,
what weeds are in bloom, what birds cry at dawn.
The less you know the safer.
But not to know how you are going on—
Matile’s earache, Emma’s lessons, those tell-tale
eyes and tongues, so quick—are you remembering
to be brave and wise and strong?
At the end of this hard road
we’ll sit all together at one meal
and I’ll tell you everything: the names
of our comrades, how the letters
were routed to you, why I left.
And I’ll stop and say, “Now you,
grown so big, how was it for you, those times?
Look, I know you in detail, every inch of each
sweet body, haven’t I washed and dried you
a thousand times?”
And we’ll eat and tell our stories
together. That is my reason.
Ma.
1987
THE DESERT AS GARDEN OF PARADISE
1.
Guard the knowledge
from the knowledgeable,
those who gobble:
make it unpalatable.
Stars in this place
might look
distant to me as you,
to you as me.
Monotheism. Where it began.
But all the spirits, too.
Desert says: What you believe
I can prove. I: amaranth flower,
I: metamorphic rock, I: burrow,
I: water-drop in tilted catchment,
I: vulture, I: driest thorn.
Rocks in a trance. Escaped
from the arms of other rocks.
Roads leading to gold and to false gold.
2.
I ask you to sing, Chavela, in the desert
on tapes pirated from smuggled LP’s
I bring you here with me: I ask you to sing
It’s not for me, your snarling contralto
caught on a backdrop of bitter guitar
I don’t pray oftenNever to male or female
sometimes to music or the flask of sunset
quick winter eveningsdraining into the ground
our blood is mixed in, borderland magenta
and vermilion, never to become one
yet what we’re singing, dying in, that color
two-worlded, never oneWhere from bars
lit by candle and earthquake your music finds me
whom it didn’t look forThis is why I ask you,
when the singing escapes the listener and goes
from the throat to where the mountains hang in chains
as if they never listenedwhy the song
wants so much to go where no song has ever gone.
3.
In this pale clear light where all mistakes are bathed
this afterglow of westernness
I write to you, head wrapped in your darkred scarf
framed by the sharp spines of the cholla
you love, the cruel blonde
spirit of the Mohave blossoming
in the spring twilights
of much earlier ages
Off at this distance I’m safe
to conjure the danger
you undergo daily, chin outthrust
eyelid lowered against the storm
that takes in an inkling whole ranches down
with the women the men and the children
the horses and cattle
—that much, flash-flood, lightning
all that had been done right, gone to hell
all crimes washed down the gulch
of independence, lost horse trail
Well, this was your country, Malinche,
and is, where you choose to speak
4.
Every drought-resistant plant has its own story
each had to learn to live
with less and less water, each would have loved
to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
after the thunderstorm
each could do without deprivation
but where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves
minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain with the way things are
5.
Then there were those, white-skinned
r
iding on camels
fast under scorching skies
their lives a tome of meaning
holding all this in fief:
star-dragged heavens, embroidered saddle-bags
coffee boiled up in slim urns
the salt, the oil, the roads
linking Europe with Asia
Crusaders, Legionnaires
desert-rats of empire
sucking the kid’s bones, drunk with meaning
fucking the Arab, killing the Jew
6.
Deutsches Blut, Ahmad the Arab
tells Arnold the Jew
tapping the blue
veins of his own brown wrist
in his own walled garden
spread with figured carpets
summer, starlight, 1925
Was it the Crusader line?
Did they think it made them brothers?
Arnold the Jew my father
told me the story, showed me
his photograph of Ahmad: Deutsches Blut
7.
Then there were those, black-robed
on horseback, tracing the great plateaus
cut by arroyos, cleft by ravines
facing Sierra San Pedro San Mártir
a fixed bar welding Baja California
to the mainland north:
a land the most unfortunate
ungrateful and miserable of this world
Padre Miguel Venegas wrote
yet they ordered the missions raised
from fragile ramadas
the thin stream drawn from the watering-hole
into gardens of fig, palm, sugarcane
tried to will what cannot be willed
killed many in the trying:
unpacked smallpox, measles, typhus
from the chests with the linens and chalices
packed the sufferers in plague-ridden rooms
baptized in one village walk
all the children, who then died.
(San Ignacio!Soledad!)
There were those: convinced the material
was base, the humanity less
—Out of what can I bring forth a Christian soul?
For these, naked and dark
I come to do the work of Cross and Crown?