1989
OLIVIA
Among fundamentalist Christians, she was one of them;
in our anti-apartheid groups, she was the
most militant. … She was a chameleon.
—White South African student activist interviewed on National Public Radio, 10/11/88
Yes, I saw you, see you, come
into the meetings, out of the rain
with your wan cheek and your thin waist—
did anyone see you eat?
Did anyone see you eat, did you wear
a woman’s body, were you air
to their purpose, liquid at their call
when you stood, spine against the wall?
And I know your stance, back to the wall,
overlooking the others, your bent head
your sense of timing, your outraged tongue
the notes you take when you get home.
I see the white joints of your wrist
moving across the yellow pad
the exhausted theatre of your sleep:
I know the power you thought you had—
to know them all, better than they
knew you, than they knew you knew,
to know better than those who paid
you—paid by them, to move
at some pure point of mastery
as if, in your slight outline, moon
you could dwell above them, light and shade,
travel forever to and fro
above both sides, all sides, none,
gliding the edges, knapsack crammed
—was that it? to lift above
loyalty, love and all that trash
higher than power and its fields of force?
—never so much as a woman friend?
You were a woman walked on a leash.
And they dropped you in the end.
1988
EASTERN WAR TIME
1
Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,
single isinglass windowkerosene
stove in the streetcar barnhalfset moon
8:15 a.m. Eastern War Time dark
Number 29 clanging in and turning
looseleaf notebookLatin for Americans
Breasted’s History of the Ancient World
on the girl’s lap
money for lunch and war-stamps in her pocket
darkblue wool wet acrid on her hands
three pools of lightweak ceiling bulbs
a schoolgirl’s hope-spilt terrified
sensations wired to smells
of kerosene wool and snow
and the sound of the dead language
praised as keytorchlight of the great dead
Grey spreadingbehind still-flying snow
the lean and sway of the streetcar she must ride
to become oneof a hundred girls
rising white-cuffed and collared in a study hall
to sing For those in peril on the sea
under plaster casts of the classic frescoes
chariots horses draperies certitudes.
2
Girl between home and schoolwhat is that girl
Swinging her plaid linen bookbagwhat’s an American girl
in wartimeher permed friz of hair
her glasses for school and movies
between school and homeignorantly Jewish
trying to grasp the world
through books:Jude the ObscureThe Ballad
of Reading Gaol Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Story
NV15CABLE-LIVERPOOL 1221/63NFD
HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER
CONSIDERATION
ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED
GERMANY
NUMBER 3 1/2 – TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER
DEPORTATION
AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST
AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE
ONCE AND FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE
3
How telegrams used to come:ring
of the doorbellserious messenger
bicycling with his sheafenveloped pasted strips
yellow on yellowthe stripped messages
DELAYED STOP MEET 2:27 THURSDAY
DAUGHTER BORN LAST NIGHT STOP BOTH DOING
WELL
also: PARENTS DEPORTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION
EAST
SITUATION DIFFICULTether of messages
in capital letterssilence
4
What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push
onto children?and the deadweight of Leo Frank
thirty years lynchedhangs heavy
:“this is what our parents were trying to spare us”:
here in Americabut in terrible Europe
anything was possiblesurely?
:“But this is the twentieth century”:
what the grown-ups can’t teachchildren must learn
how do you teach a child what you won’t believe?
how do you sayunfold, my flower, shine, my star
and we are hated, being what we are?
5
A young girl knows she is young and meant to live
taken on the closed journey
her pockets drained of meaning
her ankles greased in vomit and diarrhea
driven naked across the yard
a young girl remembers her youth:
anythingtextbooksforbidden novels
school songspetnames
the single time she bled and never since
having her hair doneits pale friz
clipped and shapedstill frizpale Jewish hair
over her green Jewish eyes
thinking she was pretty and that others would see it
and not to bleed again and not to die
in the gasbut on the operating table
of the famous doctor
who plays string quartets with his staff in the laboratory
6
A girl wanders with a boy into the woods
a romantic walka couple in a poem
hand-in-handbut you’re not watching each other
for signs of desireyou’re watching the woods
for signs of the secret baseslines
converging toward the resistancewhere the guns
are cachedthe precious tools
the strategies arguedyou’re fourteen, fifteen
classmates from Vilnawalking away from Vilna
your best marks were in history and geometryhis
in chemistryyou don’t intend to die
too much you think is waiting in youfor you
you never knew the forest outside Vilna
could hide so manywould have to
you’d dreamed of living in the forest
as in a folksonglying on loose pine-needles
light ribboning from sky cross-hatched with needles
you and one dearest friendnow you will meet the others
7
A woman of sixtydriving
the great gradessea-level to high desert
a century slipping from her shoulders
a blink in geological time
though heavy to those who had to wear it
Knowledge has entered her connective tissue and
into sand dissolved her cartilage
If her skeleton is found this will be clear
or was it knowledgemaybe a dangerous questioning
At night she lieseyes openseeing
the young who do not wander in the moonlight
as in a poemfaces seen
for thirty yearsunder the fire-hoses
walking through mobs to school
dragged singing from the buses
following the coffins
and herebrows knotted under knotted scarfs
dark eyessearching armed streets
for the end of degradation
8
A woman wired in
memories
stands by a housecollapsed in dust
her son beaten in prisongrandson
shot in the stomachdaughter
organizing the campsan aunt’s unpublished poems
grandparents’ photographsa bridal veil
phased into smokeup the obliterate air
With whom shall she let down and tell her story
Who shall hear her to the end
standing if need be for hoursin wind
that swirls the leveled dust
in sun that beats through their scarfed hair
at the lost gate by the shattered prickly pear
Who must hear her to the end
but the womanforbidden to forget
the blunt groats freezing in the wooden ladle
old windsdusting the ovens with light snow?
9
Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners
with open mouths and eyesMemory speaks:
You cannot live on me alone
you cannot live without me
I’m nothing if I’m just a roll of film
stills from a vanished world
fixed lightstreaked mute
left for another generation’s
restoration and framingI can’t be restored or framed
I can’t be stillI’m here
in your mirrorpressed leg to leg beside you
intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing
with what makes me unkillable though killed
10
Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.
I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating
I’m a mass graveI’m the life that returns
I’m a table set with room for the Stranger
I’m a field with corners left for the landless
I’m accused of child-deathof drinking blood
I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man
I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken
I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket
I’m a family dispersed between night and fog
I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat
is not a piece of cloth onlyI sway
in the learnings of the master-mystics
I have dreamed of ZionI’ve dreamed of world revolution
I have dreamed my children could live at last like others
I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred
I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin
a river in MississippiI’m a woman standing
with other women dressed in black
on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem
there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night
I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks
I stand on a road in Ramallahwith naked facelistening
I am standing here in your poemunsatisfied
lifting my smoky mirror
1989–1990
TATTERED KADDISH
Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:
Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved
Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved
Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough
Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us
Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable
Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.
1989
THROUGH CORRALITOS UNDER ROLLS OF CLOUD
I
Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud
between winter-stiff, ranged apple-trees
each netted in transparent air,
thin sinking light, heartsick within and filmed
in heartsickness around you, gelatin cocoon
invisible yet impervious—to the hawk
steering against the cloudbank, to the clear
oranges burning at the rancher’s gate
rosetree, agave, stiff beauties holding fast
with or without your passion,
the pruners freeing up the boughs
in the unsearched faith these strange stiff shapes will bear.
II
Showering after ’flu;stripping the bed;
running the shrouds of sickness through the wash;
airing the rooms;emptying the trash;
it’s as if part of you had died in the house
sometime in that last low-lit afternoon
when your dreams ebbed salt-thick into the sheets
and now this other’s left to wash the corpse,
burn eucalyptus, turn the mirrors over—
this is other who herself barely came back,
whose breath was fog to your mist, whose stubborn shadow
covered you as you lay freezing, she survived
uncertain who she is or will be without you.
III
If you know who died in that bed, do you know
who has survivedIf you say, she was weaker,
held life less dear, expected others
to fight for herif pride lets you name her
victimand the one who got up and threw
the windows open, stripped the bed, survivor
—what have you said, what do you know
of the survivor when you know her
only in opposition to the lost?
What does it mean to say I have survived
until you take the mirrors and turn them outward
and read your own face in their outraged light?
IV
That light of outrage is the light of history
springing upon us when we’re least prepared,
thinking maybe a little glade of time
leaf-thick and with clear water
is ours, is promised us, for all we’ve hacked
and tracked our way through:to this:
What will it be?Your wish or mine?your
prayers or my wish then:that those we love
be well, whatever that means, to be well.
Outrage:who dare claim protection for their own
amid such unprotection?What kind of prayer
is that?To what kind of god?What kind of wish?
V
She who died on that bed sees it her way:
She who went under peers through the translucent shell
cupping her death and sees her other well,
through a long lens, in silvered outline, well
she sees her other and she cannot tell
why when the boom of surf struck at them both
she felt the undertow and heard the bell,
thought death would be their twinning, till the swell
smashed her against the reef, her other still
fighting the pull, struggling somewhere away
further and further, calling her all the while:
she who went under summons her other still.
1989–1990
FOR A FRIEND IN TRAVAIL
Waking from violence:the surgeon’s probe left in the foot
paralyzing the body from the waist down.
Dark before dawn:wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house
the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,
half-slice of moon to the south
through dark panes.A time to speak to you.
What are you going through? she said, is the great question.
Philosopher of oppression, theorist
of the victories of force.
We write from the marrow of our
bones.What she did not
ask, or tell:how victims save their own lives.
That crawl along the ledge, then the raveling span of fibre
strung
from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.
Waking, not sure we made it.Relief, appallment, of waking.
Consciousness.O, no.To sleep again.
O to sleep without dreaming.
How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon
melting into moon-colored air
moist and sweet, here on the western edge.
Love for the world, and we are part of it.
How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes
she did not tell.
What are you going through, there on the other edge?
1990
1948: JEWS
A mother’s letter, torn open
in a college mailroom:
… Some of them will be
the most brilliant, fascinating
you’ll ever meet
but don’t get taken up by any clique
trying to claim you
—Marry out, like your father
she didn’t writeShe wrote forwrote
againsthim
It was a burden for anyone
to be fascinating, brilliant
after the six million
Never mind just coming home
and trying to get some sleep
like an ordinary person
1990
TWO ARTS
1
I’ve redone you by daylight.
Squatted before your gauntness
chipping away.Slivers of rock
piling up like petals.
All night I’d worked to illuminate the skull.
By dawn you were pure electric.You pulsed like a star.