winning hearts and minds
peeling the prickly pear
and dousing it in wine
8.
What would it mean to think
you are part of a generation
that simply must pass on?
What would it mean to live
in the desert, try to live
a human life, something
to hand on to the children
to take up to the Land?
What would it mean to think
you were born in chains and only time,
nothing you can do
could redeem the slavery
you were born into?
9.
Out of a knot of deadwood
on ghostly grey-green stems
the nightblooming cereus opens
On a still night, under Ursa Major
the tallest saguaro cracks with cold
The eaters of herbs are eaten
the carnivores’ bones fall down
and scavengers pick them clean
This is not for us, or if it is
with whom, and where, is the covenant?
10.
When it all stands clear you come to love
the place you are:
the bundle of bare sticks soaked
with resin
always, and never, a bush on fire
the blue sky without tale or text
and without meaning
the great swing of the horizontal circle
Miriam, Aaron, Moses
are somewhere else, marching
You learn to live without prophets
without legends
to live just where you are
your burning bush, your seven-branched candlestick
the ocotillo in bloom
11.
What’s sacred is nameless
moves in the eyeflash
holds still in the circle
of the great arid basin
once watered and fertile
probes outward through twigbark
a green ghost inhabiting
dormant stick, abstract thorn
What’s sacred is singular:
out of this dry fork, this
wreck of perspective
what’s sacred tries itself
one more time
1987–1988
DELTA
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking through it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread.
1987
6/21
It’s June and summer’s height
the longest bridge of light
leaps from all the rivets
of the sky
Yet it’s of earth
and nowhere else I have to speak
Only on earth has this light taken on
these swiveled meanings, only on this earth
where we are dying befouled, gritting our teeth
losing our guiding stars
has this light
found an alphabeta mouth
1987
FOR AN ALBUM
Our story isn’t a file of photographs
faces laughing under green leaves
or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving
away, our story is not about women
victoriously perched on the one
sunny day of the conference,
nor lovers displaying love:
when even slow motion moved too fast
for the shutter of the camera:
words that blew our lives apart, like so,
eyes that cut and caught each other,
mime of the operating room
where gas and knives quote each other
moments before the telephone
starts ringing: our story is
how still we stood,
how fast.
1987
DREAMWOOD
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day.If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole.If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come.If this cheap, massproduced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
massproduced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
1987
WALKING DOWN THE ROAD
On a clear night in Live Oak you can see
the stars glittering low as from the deck
of a frigate.
In Live Oak without pavements you can walk
the fronts of old homesteads, past tattered palms,
original rosebushes, thick walnut trees
ghosts of the liveoak groves
the whitemen cleared.On a night like this
the old California thickens and bends
the Baja streams out like lava-melt
we are no longer the United States
we’re a lost piece of Mexico
maybe dreaming the destruction
of the Indians, reading the headlines,
how the gringos marched into Mexico City
forcing California into the hand
of Manifest Destiny, law following greed.
And the pale lies trapped in the flickering boxes
here in Live Oak tonight, they too follow.
One thing follows on another, that is time:
Carmel in its death-infested prettiness,
thousands of skeletons stacked in the campo santo:
the spring fouled by the pickaxe:
the flag dragged on to the moon:
the crystal goblet smashed: grains of the universe
flashing their angry tears, here in Live Oak.
1988
THE SLIDES
Three dozen squares of light-inflicted glass
lie in a quarter-century’s dust
under the skylight. I can show you this:
also a sprung couch spewing
dessicated mouse-havens, a revolving bookstand
rusted on its pivot, leaning
with books of an era: Roosevelt vs Recovery
The Mystery & Lure of PerfumeMy Brother Was Mozart
I’ve had this attic in mind for years
Now you
who keep a lookout for
places like this, make your living
off things like this:You see, the books are rotting,
sunbleached, unfashionable
the furniture neglected past waste
but the lantern-slides—their story
could be sold, they could be a prize
I want to see
your face when you start to sort them. You want
cloched hats of the Thirties, engage
ment portraits
with marcelled hair, maillots daring the waves,
my family album:
This is the razing of the spinal cord
by the polio virus
this, the lung-tissue kissed by the tubercle bacillus
this with the hooked shape is
the cell that leaks anemia to the next generation
Enlarged on a screen
they won’t be quaint; they go on working; they still kill.
1987
HARPERS FERRY
Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads
glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading
across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,
rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills
and a white girl running away from home
who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how
do I know how the light quails from the trembling
waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge
how behind the gunmetal pines the guns
are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?
I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky
crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck
on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale
like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now
are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership
in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from
the ones who can get it to the ones
who have been refused. It’s a simple act,
to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought
it.
Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought
and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper
snows
than she has ever pictured
but this is one exact and definite place,
a wooden village at the junction of two rivers
two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,
low houses crawling up the mountains.
Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pine’s tooth, ties the leg
in a kerchief
knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town
has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will
know her family face
lies with her throbbing leg on the vined verandah where the woman
of the house
wanted her out of there, that was clear
yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned above her
with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring, mint from the same
source
later with rags wrung from a boiling kettle
and studying, staring eyes. Eyes ringed with watching. A peachtree
shedding yellowy leaves
and a houseful of men who keep off. So great a family of men, and
then this woman
who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.
But this girl is expert in overhearing
and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,
the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl
with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?
Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg
without which she won’t get past Virginia, though she’s running
north.
Whatever gave the girl the idea you could run away
from a family quarrel? Displace yourself, when nothing else
would change? It wasn’t books:
it was half-overheard, a wisp of talk:
escapeflightfree soil
softing past her shoulder
She has never dreamed of arsenals, though
she’s a good rifle-shot, taken at ten
by her brothers, hunting
and though they’ve climbed her over and over
leaving their wet clots in her sheets
on her new-started maidenhair
she has never reached for a gun to hold them off
for guns are the language of the strong to the weak
—How many squirrels have crashed between her sights
what vertebrae cracked at her finger’s signal
what wings staggered through the boughs
whose eyes, ringed and treed, has she eyed as prey?
There is a strategy of mass flight
a strategy of arming
questions of how, of when, of where:
the arguments soak through the walls
of the houseful of men where running from home
the white girl lies in her trouble.
There are things overheard and things unworded, never sung
or pictured, things that happen silently
as the peachtree’s galactic blossoms open in mist, the frost-star
hangs in the stubble, the decanter of moonlight pours its mournless
liquid down
steadily on the solstice fields
the cotton swells in its boll and you feel yourself engorged,
unnameable
you yourself feel encased and picked-open, you feel yourself
unenvisaged
There is no quarrel possible in this silence
You stop yourself listening for a word that will not be spoken:
listening instead to the overheard
fragments, phrases melting on air: No moreMany thousand go
And you know they are leaving as fast as they can, you whose child’s
eye followed each face wondering
not how could they leave but when: you knew they would leave
and so could you but not with them, you were not their child, they
had their own children
you could leave the house where you were daughter, sister, prey
picked open and left to silence, you could leave alone
This would be my scenario of course: that the white girl understands
what I understand and more, that the leg torn in flight
had not betrayed her, had brought her to another point of struggle
that when she takes her place she is clear in mind and her anger
true with the training of her hand and eye, her leg cured on the
porch of history
ready for more than solitary defiance. That when the General passes
through
in her blazing headrag, this girl knows her for Moses, pleads to
stand with the others in the shortened light
accepts the scrutiny, the steel-black gaze; but Moses passes and is
gone to her business elsewhere
leaving the men to theirs, the girl to her own.
But who would she take as leader?
would she fade into the woods
will she die in an indefensible position, a miscarried raid
does she lose the family face at last
pressed into a gully above two rivers, does Shenandoah or Potomac
carry her
north or south, will she wake in the mining camps to stoke the
stoves
and sleep at night with her rifle blue and loyal under her hand
does she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?
1988
ONE LIFE
A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs
recalls great bodily joys, much pain.
Nothing in her is apt to say
My heart aches, though she read those words
in a battered college text, this morning
as the sun rose. It is all too
mixed, the heart too mixed with laughter
raucousing the grief, her life
too mixed, she shakes her heavy
silvered hair at all the fixed
declarations of baggage.
I should be dead and I’m alive
don’t ask me how; I don’t eat like I should
and still I like how the drop of vodka
hits the tongue. I was a worker and a mother,
that means a worker and a worker
but for one you don’t pay union dues
or get a pension; for the other
the men ran the union, we ran the home.
It was terrible and good, we had more than half a life,
I had four lives at least, one out of marriage
when I kicked up all the dust I could
before I knew what I was doing.
One life with the girls on the line during the war,
yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together
one life with a husband, not the worst,
one with your children, none of it just what you’d thought.
None of it what it could have been, if we’d known.
We took what we could.
But even this is a life, I’m reading a lot of books
I never read, my daughter brought home from school,
plays where you can almost hear them talking,
Romantic poets, Isaac Babel. A lot of lives
worse and better than what I knew. I’m walking again.
My heart doesn’t ache; sometimes though it rages.
1988
DIVISIONS OF LABOR
The revolutions wheel, compromise, utter their statements:
a new magazine appears, mastheaded with old names,
an old magazine polishes up its act
with deconstructions of the prose of Malcolm X
The women in the back rows of politics
are still licking thread to slip into the needle’s
eye, trading bones for plastic, splitting pods
for necklaces to sell to the cruise-ships
producing immaculate First Communion dresses
with flatiron and irresolute hot water
still fitting the microscopic golden wires
into the silicon chips
still teaching, watching the children
quenched in the crossfire alleys, the flashflood gullies
the kerosene flashfires