—the women whose labor remakes the world
each and every morning
I have seen a woman sitting
between the stove and the stars
her fingers singed from snuffing out the candles
of pure theoryFinger and thumb: both scorched:
I have felt that sacred wax blister my hand
1988
LIVING MEMORY
Open the book of tales you knew by heart,
begin driving the old roads again,
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wordings you remembered.
A full moon on the first of May
drags silver film on the Winooski River.
The villages are shut
for the night, the woods are open
and soon you arrive at a crossroads
where late, late in time you recognize
part of yourself is buried.Call it Danville,
village of water-witches.
From here on instinct is uncompromised and clear:
the tales come crowding like the Kalevala
longing to burst from the tongue.Under the trees
of the backroad you rumor the dark
with houses, sheds, the long barn
moored like a barge on the hillside.
Chapter and verse.A mailbox.A dooryard.
A drink of springwater from the kitchen tap.
An old bed, old wallpaper.Falling asleep like a child
in the heart of the story.
Reopen the book.A light mist soaks the page,
blunt naked buds tip the wild lilac scribbled
at the margin of the road, no one knows when.
Broken stones of drywall mark the onset
of familiar paragraphs slanting up and away
each with its own version, nothing ever
has looked the same from anywhere.
We came like others to a country of farmers—
Puritans, Catholics, Scotch Irish, Québecois:
bought a failed Yankee’s empty house and barn
from a prospering Yankee,
Jews following Yankee footprints,
prey to many myths but most of all
that Nature makes us free.That the land can save us.
Pioneer, indigenous; we were neither.
You whose stories these farms secrete,
you whose absence these fields publish,
all you whose lifelong travail
took as given this place and weather
who did what you could with the means you had—
it was pick and shovel work
done with a pair of horses, a stone boat
a strong back, and an iron bar: clearing pasture—
Your memories crouched, foreshortened in our text.
Pages torn.New words crowding the old.
I knew a woman whose clavicle was smashed
inside a white clapboard house with an apple tree
and a row of tulips by the door.I had a friend
with six children and a tumor like a seventh
who drove me to my driver’s test and in exchange
wanted to see Goddard College, in Plainfield.She’d heard
women without diplomas could study there.
I knew a woman who walked
straight across cut stubble in her bare feet away,
women who said, He’s a good man, never
laid a hand to me as living proof.
A man they said fought death
to keep fire for his wife for one more winter, leave
a woodpile to outlast him.
I was left the legacy of a pile of stovewood
split by a man in the mute chains of rage.
The land he loved as landscape
could not unchain him.There are many,
Gentile and Jew, it has not saved.Many hearts have burst
over these rocks, in the shacks
on the failure sides of these hills.Many guns
turned on brains already splitting
in silence.Where are those versions?
Written-across like nineteenth-century letters
or secrets penned in vinegar, invisible
till the page is held over flame.
I was left the legacy of three sons
—as if in an old legend of three brothers
where one changes into a rufous hawk
one into a snowy owl
one into a whistling swan
and each flies to the mother’s side
as she travels, bringing something she has lost,
and she sees their eyes are the eyes of her children
and speaks their names and they become her sons.
But there is no one legend and one legend only.
This month the land still leafless, out from snow
opens in all directions, the transparent woods
with sugar-house, pond, cellar-hole unscreened.
Winter and summer cover the closed roads
but for a few weeks they lie exposed,
the old nervous-system of the land.It’s the time
when history speaks in a row of crazy fence-poles
a blackened chimney, houseless, a spring
soon to be choked in second growth
a stack of rusting buckets, a rotting sledge.
It’s the time when your own living
laid open between seasons
ponders clues like the One Way sign defaced
to Bone Way, the stones
of a graveyard in Vermont, a Jewish cemetery
in Birmingham, Alabama.
How you have needed these places,
as a tall gaunt woman used to need to sit
at the knees of bronze-hooded Grief
by Clover Adams’ grave.
But you will end somewhere else, a sift of ashes
awkwardly flung by hands you have held and loved
or, nothing so individual, bones reduced
with, among, other bones, anonymous,
or wherever the Jewish dead
have to be sought in the wild grass overwhelming
the cracked stones. Hebrew spelled in wilderness.
All we can read is life.Death is invisible.
A yahrzeit candle belongs
to life.The sugar skulls
eaten on graves for the Day of the Dead
belong to life.To the living.The Kaddish is to the living,
the Day of the Dead, for the living.Only the living
invent these plumes, tombs, mounds, funeral ships,
living hands turn the mirrors to the walls,
tear the boughs of yew to lay on the casket,
rip the clothes of mourning.Only the living
decide death’s color: is it white or black?
The granite bulkhead
incised with names, the quilt of names, were made
by the living, for the living.
I have watched
films from a Pathé camera, a picnic
in sepia, I have seen my mother
tossing an acorn into the air;
my grandfather, alone in the heart of his family;
my father, young, dark, theatrical;
myself, a six-month child.
Watching the dead we see them living
their moments, they were at play, nobody thought
they would be watched so.
When Selma threw
her husband’s ashes into the Hudson
and they blew back on her and on us, her friends,
it was life.Our blood raced in that gritty wind.
Such details get bunched, packed, stored
in these cellar-holes of memory
so little is needed
to call on the power, though you can’t name its name:
It has its ways of coming back:
a truck going into gear on the crown of the road
the white-throat sparrow’
s notes
the moon in her fullness standing
right over the concrete steps the way
she stood the night they landed there.
From here
nothing has changed, and everything.
The scratched and treasured photograph Richard showed me
taken in ’29, the year I was born:
it’s the same road I saw
strewn with the Perseids one August night,
looking older, steeper than now
and rougher, yet I knew it.Time’s
power, the only just power—would you
give it away?
1988
TURNING
1.
Deadstillness over droughtlands.
Parched, the heart of the matter.
Panic among smaller animals
used to licking water from cool stones.
Over the great farms, a burning-glass
one-eyed and wild as a jack,
the corn snatched in a single afternoon
of the one-eyed jack’s impassive stare.
And in that other country
of choices made by others
that country I never chose
that country of terrible leavings and returnings
in that country whose map I carry on my palm
the forests are on fire: history is on fire.
My foot drags in the foothills of two lands;
At the turn the spirit pauses
and faces the high passes:
bloodred granite, sandstone steeped in blood.
At the turn the spirit turns,
looks back—if any follow—
squints ahead—if any lead—
What would you bring along on a trek like this?
What is bringing you along?
2.
In a time of broken hands
in a broken-promised land
something happens to the right hand
Remembering a city, it forgets
flexion, gestures that danced like flames
the lifeline buried in the fist
forgets the pedlar’s trinket, fine to finger and lay forth,
the scalpel’s path, the tracing of the pulse
the sprinkle of salt and rip of chicken feathers
forgets the wrist’s light swivel breaking bread
the matzoh crumb
fingered to secret lips in stinking fog
forgets its own ache, lying
work-stiffened, mute
on the day most like Paradise
Becomes the handle of a club
an enemy of hands
emptied of all memories but one
When the right hand forgets its cunning, what of the other?
Shall we invent its story?
Has it simply lain in trance
disowned, written-off, unemployed?
Does it twitch now, finger and thumb,
does the prickle of memory race through?
When the right hand becomes the enemy of hands
what does the left hand make of their old collaboration?
Pick up the book, the pinch of salt, the matzoh crumb,
hand, and begin to teach.
3.
Finally, we will make change. This eyeflash,
this touch, handling the drenched flyers,
these glances back at history—
riverside where harps hang from the trees,
cracked riverbed with grounded hulks,
unhealed water to cross—
leaving superstition behind—
first our own, then other’s—
that barrier, that stream
where swimming against the current will become
no metaphor: this is how you land, unpurified,
winded, shivering, on the further shore
where there are only new kinds of tasks, and old:
writing with others that open letter or brief
that might—if only—we know it happens:
no sudden revelation but the slow
turn of consciousness, while every day
climbs on the back of the days before:
no new day, only a list of days,
no task you expect to see finished, but
you can’t hold back from the task.
4.
A public meeting.I glance at a woman’s face:
strong lines and soft, listening, a little on guard:
we have come separately, are sitting apart,
know each other in the room, have slept twelve years
in the same bed, attend now to the speaker.
Her subject is occupation, a promised land,
displacement, deracination, two peoples called Semites,
humiliation, force, women trying to speak with women,
the subject is how to break a mold of discourse,
how little by little minds change
but that they do change.We two have fought
our own battles side by side, at dawn, over supper,
our changes of mind have come
with the stir of hairs, the sound of a cracked phrase:
we have depended on something.
What then?Sex isn’t enough, merely to trust
each other’s inarticulate sounds,
—what then?call it mutual recognition.
5.
Whatever you are that has tracked us this far,
I never thought you were on our side,
I only thought you did not judge us.
Yet as a cell might hallucinate
behind the lens of the microscope
so I have thought of you,
whatever you are—a mindfulness—
whatever you are: the place beyond all places,
beyond boundaries, green lines,
wire-netted walls
the place beyond documents.
Unnameable by choice.
So why am I out here, trying
to read your name in the illegible air?
—vowel washed from a stone,
solitude of no absence,
forbidden face-to-face
—trying to hang these wraiths
of syllables, breath
without echo, why?
1988
AN ATLAS OF THE
DIFFICULT WORLD
(1988–1991)
—For John Benedict, in memory—
I
An Atlas of the
Difficult World
I
A dark woman, head bent, listening for something
—a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or
voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast
past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires
THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes
dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand
in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,
Malathion in the throat, communion,
the hospital at the edge of the fields,
prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,
the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching
planes dusting rows of pickers.
Elsewhere declarations are made:at the sink
rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market
one says: “On the pond this evening is a light
finer than my mother’s handkerchief
received from her mother, hemmed and initialed
by the nuns in Belgium.”
One says:“I can lie for hours
reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.
I’d rather lie awake and read.”One writes:
“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks
in this cabin’s walls, the road
in winter is often impassable,
I live here so I don’t have to go out and act,
I’m trying to
hold onto my life, it feels like nothing.”
One says: “I never knew from one day to the next
where it was coming from:I had to make my life happen
from day to day.Every day an emergency.
Now I have a house, a job from year to year.
What does that make me?”
In the writing workshop a young man’s tears
wet the frugal beard he’s grown to go with his poems
hoping they have redemption stored
in their lines, maybe will get him home free.In the classroom
eight-year-old faces are grey.The teacher knows which children
have not broken fast that day,
remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal.
•
I don’t want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,
tore up her writing, threw the kerosene
lantern into her face waiting
like an unbearable mirror of his own.I don’t
want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer
how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck
and backed it into her.I don’t want to think
how her guesses betrayed her—that he meant well, that she
was really the stronger and ought not to leave him
to his own apparent devastation.I don’t want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
•
Within two miles of the Pacific rounding
this long bay, sheening the light for miles
inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over
strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind
returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with
ever-changing words, always the same language
—this is where I live now.If you had known me