in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn’t say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don’t I dream of you?
That photo of the two of us—I have it still,
you and I looking hard into each other
and my painting behind us. How we used to work
side by side! And how I’ve worked since then
trying to create according to our plan
that we’d bring, against all odds, our full power
to every subject. Hold back nothing
because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about:
how life and death take one another’s hands,
the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
it is myself that kicks inside me,
myself I must give suck to, love . . .
I wish we could have done this for each other
all our lives, but we can’t . . .
They say a pregnant woman
dreams of her own death. But life and death
take one another’s hands. Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say.
1975–1976
A Woman Dead in Her Forties
1.
Your breasts/ sliced-off The scars
dimmed as they would have to be
years later
All the women I grew up with are sitting
half-naked on rocks in sun
we look at each other and
are not ashamed
and you too have taken off your blouse
but this was not what you wanted:
to show your scarred, deleted torso
I barely glance at you
as if my look could scald you
though I’m the one who loved you
I want to touch my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
You hadn’t thought everyone
would look so perfect
unmutilated
you pull on
your blouse again: stern statement:
There are things I will not share
with everyone
2.
You send me back to share
my own scars first of all
with myself
What did I hide from her
what have I denied her
what losses suffered
how in this ignorant body
did she hide
waiting for her release
till uncontrollable light began to pour
from every wound and suture
and all the sacred openings
3.
Wartime. We sit on warm
weathered, softening grey boards
the ladder glimmers where you told me
the leeches swim
I smell the flame
of kerosene the pine
boards where we sleep side by side
in narrow cots
the night-meadow exhaling
its darkness calling
child into woman
child into woman
woman
4.
Most of our love from the age of nine
took the form of jokes and mute
loyalty: you fought a girl
who said she’d knock me down
we did each other’s homework
wrote letters kept in touch, untouching
lied about our lives: I wearing
the face of the proper marriage
you the face of the independent woman
We cleaved to each other across that space
fingering webs
of love and estrangement till the day
the gynecologist touched your breast
and found a palpable hardness
5.
You played heroic, necessary
games with death
since in your neo-protestant tribe the void
was supposed not to exist
except as a fashionable concept
you had no traffic with
to yell at you
Don’t accept
Don’t give in
But would I be meaning your brave
irreproachable life, you dean of women, or
your unfair, unfashionable, unforgivable
woman’s death?
6.
You are every woman I ever loved
and disavowed
a bloody incandescent chord strung out
across years, tracts of space
How can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty
your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms
how can I go on this mission
without you
you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true?
7.
Time after time in dreams you rise
reproachful
once from a wheelchair pushed by your father
across a lethal expressway
Of all my dead it’s you
who come to me unfinished
You left me amber beads
strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave
I wear them wondering
How am I true to you?
I’m half-afraid to write poetry
for you who never read it much
and I’m left laboring
with the secrets and the silence
In plain language: I never told you how I loved you
we never talked at your deathbed of your death
8.
One autumn evening in a train
catching the diamond-flash of sunset
in puddles along the Hudson
I thought: I understand
life and death now, the choices
I didn’t know your choice
or how by then you had no choice
how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells
Most of our love took the form
of mute loyalty
we never spoke at your deathbed of your death
but from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid
I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
1974–1977
Toward the Solstice
The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
all the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
on this old slanting roof,
the slanted field below
thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
stand nakedly in the green,
stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
field.
My brain glows
more violently, more avidly
the quieter, the thicker
the quilt of crystals settles,
the louder, more relentlessly
the torrent beats itself out
on the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
the thirtieth of November,
a beginning or an end,
we are moving into the solstice
and there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
my life is still tangled
with dead weeds, thistles,
enormous burdocks, burdens
slowly shifting under
this first fall of snow,
beaten by this early, racking rain
calling all new life to declare itself strong
or die,
if I could know
in what language to address
the spirits that claim a place
beneath these low and simple ceilings,
tenants that neither speak nor stir
yet dwell in mute insistence
till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
spun over and over though brushed away
it seems I might some twilight
or dawn in the hushed country light
discern its greyness stretching
from molding or doorframe, out
into the empty dooryard
and following it climb
the path into the pinewoods,
tracing from tree to tree
in the failing light, in the slowly
lucidifying day
its constant, purposive trail,
till I reach whatever cellar hole
filling with snowflakes or lichen,
whatever fallen shack
or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
and there, under the first or last
star, trusting to instinct
the words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
year after year, winter
after summer, the right rune
to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
is still unaccomplished
between myself and the long-gone
tenants of this house,
between myself and my childhood,
and the childhood of my children,
it is I who have neglected
to perform the needed acts,
set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
in front of mirrors,
or merely pause and listen
to my own pulse vibrating
lightly as falling snow,
relentlessly as the rainstorm,
and hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture,
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
dead flesh, cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers,
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close.
1977
A Wild Patience Has
Taken Me This Far
* * *
Coast to Coast
There are days when housework seems the only
outlet old funnel I’ve poured caldrons through
old servitude In grief and fury bending
to the accustomed tasks the vacuum cleaner plowing
realms of dust the mirror scoured grey webs
behind framed photographs brushed away
the grey-seamed sky enormous in the west
snow gathering in corners of the north
Seeing through the prism
you who gave it me
You, bearing ceaselessly
yourself the witness
Rainbow dissolves the Hudson This chary, stinting
skin of late winter ice forming and breaking up
The unprotected seeing it through
with their ordinary valor
Rainbow composed of ordinary light
February-flat
grey-white of a cheap enamelled pan
breaking into veridian, azure, violet
You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing. . . .
I think of the word protection
who it is we try to protect and why
Seeing through the prism Your face, fog-hollowed burning
cold of eucalyptus hung with butterflies
lavender of rockbloom
O and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer
shattering the fog lances of sun
piercing the grey Pacific unanswerable tide
carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock
Beauty of your breasts your hands
turning a stone a shell a weed a prism in coastal light
traveller and witness
the passion of the speechless
driving your speech
protectless
If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back.
1978
Integrity
the quality or state of being complete: unbroken condition: entirely
—Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far
as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.
The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.
The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself? . . . My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere—
even from a
broken web.
The cabin in the stand of pines
is still for sale. I know this. Know the print
of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked that door,
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one’s sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat here through this hot
misblotted sunlight, critical light
imperceptibly scalding
the skin these hands will also salve.
1978
Transit
When I meet the skier she is always
walking, skis and poles shouldered, toward the mountain
free-swinging in worn boots
over the path new-sifted with fresh snow
her greying dark hair almost hidden by
a cap of many colors
her fifty-year-old, strong, impatient body
dressed for cold and speed
her eyes level with mine
And when we pass each other I look into her face
wondering what we have in common
where our minds converge
for we do not pass each other, she passes me
as I halt beside the fence tangled in snow,
she passes me as I shall never pass her
in this life
Yet I remember us together
climbing Chocorua, summer nineteen-forty-five
details of vegetation beyond the timberline
lichens, wildflowers, birds,
amazement when the trail broke out onto the granite ledge
sloped over blue lakes, green pines, giddy air
like dreams of flying
When sisters separate they haunt each other
as she, who I might once have been, haunts me
or is it I who do the haunting
halting and watching on the path
how she appears again through lightly-blowing
crystals, how her strong knees carry her,
how unaware she is, how simple
this is for her, how without let or hindrance
she travels in her body
until the point of passing, where the skier
and the cripple must decide
to recognize each other?
1979
For Memory
Old words: trust fidelity
Nothing new yet to take their place.
I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass
painfully green beneath the gold
and in this silent labor thoughts of you