This woman/the heart of the matter.
Heart of the law/heart of the prophets.
Their voices buzzing like raspsaws in her brain.
Taking ship without a passport.
How does she do it. Even the ships have eyes.
Are painted like birds.
This woman has no address book.
This woman perhaps has a toothbrush.
Somewhere dealing for red/blue dyes to crest her
rough-clipped hair.
On the other side:stranger to women and to children.
Setting her bare footsole in the print of the stranger’s bare foot in
the sand.
Feeding the stranger’s dog from the sack of her exhaustion.
Hearing the male prayers of the stranger’s tribe/rustle of the
stranger’s river.
Lying down asleep and dreamless in one of their doorways.
She has long shed the coverings.
On the other side she walks bare-armed, bare-legged, clothed
in voices.
Here or there picks up a scarf/a remnant.
Day breaks cold on her legs and in her sexual hair.
Her punk hair/her religious hair.
Passing the blue rectangles of the stranger’s doors.
Not one opens to her.
Threading herself into declining alleys/black on white plaster/
olive on violet.
To walk to walk to walk.
To lie on a warm stone listening to familiar insects.
(Exile, exile.)
This woman/the heart of the matter.
Circling back to the city where her name crackles behind
creviced stones.
This woman who left alone and returns alone.
Whose hair again is covered/whose arms and neck are covered/
according to the law.
Underneath her skin has darkened/her footsoles roughened.
Sand from the stranger’s doorway sifting from her plastic
carry-all/ drifting into the sand
whirling around in her old quarter.
1993
REVOLUTION IN PERMANENCE (1953, 1993)
Through a barn window, three-quartered
the profile of Ethel Rosenberg
stares down past a shattered apple-orchard
into speechless firs.
Speechless this evening.Last night
the whole countryside thrashed in lowgrade fever
under low swollen clouds
the mist advanced and the wind
tore into one thing then another
—you could think random but you know
the patterns are there—
a sick time, and the human body
feeling it, a loss of pressure,
an agitation without purpose …
Purpose?Do you believe
all agitation has an outcome
like revolt, like Bread and Freedom?
—or do you hang on to the picture
of the State as a human body
—some people being heads or hearts
and others only hands or guts or legs?
But she—how did she end up here
in this of all places?
What she is seeing I cannot see,
what I see has her shape.
There’s an old scythe propped
in an upper window of the barn—
—does it call up marches of peasants?
what is it with you and this barn?
And, no, it’s not an old scythe,
it’s an old rag, you see how it twitches.
And Ethel Rosenberg? I’ve worried about her
through the liquid window in that damp place.
I’ve thought she was coughing, like me,
but her profile stayed still watching
what held her in that position.
1993
Then or Now
Is it necessary for me to write obliquely
about the situation? Is that what
you would have me do?
FOOD PACKAGES: 1947
Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea,
salamis, aspirin:
Four packages a month to her old professor in Heidelberg
and his Jewish wife:
Europe is trying to revive an intellectual life
and the widow of the great sociologist needs flour.
Europe is trying/to revive/
with the Jews somewhere else.
all the way from New York, with orders for butter from Denmark,
sending dispatches into the fog
of the European spirit:
I am no longer German. I am a Jew and the German language
was once my home.
1993
INNOCENCE: 1945
“The beauty of it was the guilt.
It entered us, quick schnapps,
forked tongue of ice.The guilt
made us feel innocent again.
We had done nothing while some
extreme measures were taken.We drifted.In the
Snow Queen’s huge ballroom had dreamed
of the whole world and a new pair of skates.
But we had suffered too.
The miracle was:felt
nothing.Felt we had done
nothing.Nothing to do.Felt free.
And we had suffered, too.
It was that freedom we craved,
cold needle in the bloodstream.
Guilt after all was a feeling.”
1993
SUNSET, DECEMBER, 1993
Dangerous of course to draw
ParallelsYet more dangerous to write
as if there were a steady course, we and our poems
protected:the individual life, protected
poems, ideas, gliding
in mid-air, innocent
I walked out on the deck and every board
was luminous with cold dewIt could freeze tonight
Each board is different of course but each does gleam
wet, under a complicated sky:mounds of swollen ink
heavy gray unloading up the coast
a rainbow suddenly and casually
unfolding its span
Dangerous not to think
how the earth still wasin places
while the chimneys shuddered with the first dischargements
1993
DEPORTATIONS
It’s happened already while we were still
searching for patternsA turn of the head
toward a long horizontal window overlooking the city
to see people being taken
neighbors, vendors, paramedicals
hurried from their porches, their tomato stalls
their auto-mechanic arguments
and children from schoolyards
There are far more of the takers-away than the taken
at this point anyway
Then:dream-cut:our house:
four men walk through the unlatched door
One in light summer wool and silken tie
One in work clothes browned with blood
One with open shirt, a thin
thong necklace hasped with silver around his neck
One in shorts naked up from the navel
And they have come for us, two of us and four of them
and I think, perhaps they are still human
and I ask themWhen do you think this all began?
as if trying to distract them from their purpose
as if trying to appeal to a common bond
as if one of them might be you
as if I were practicing for something
yet to come
1994
AND NOW
And now as you read these poems
—you whose eyes and hands I love
—you whose mouth and eyes I love
—you whose words and minds I love—
don’t think I was trying to state a case
or construct a scenery:
I tried to listen to
the public voice of our time
tried to survey our public space
as best I could
—tried to remember and stay
faithful to details, note
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock’s hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
was declared obsolete.
1994
SENDING LOVE
Voice
from the grain
of the forest bought
and condemned
sketched bond
in the rockmass
the earthquake sought
and threw
•
Sending love:Molly sends it
Ivan sends it, Kaori
sends it to Brian, Irina sends it
on pale green aerograms Abena sends it
to Charlie and to Joséphine
Arturo sends it, Naomi sends it
Lourdes sends it to Naoual
Walter sends it to Arlene
Habib sends it, Vashti
floats it to Eqbal in a paper plane
Bored in the meeting, on a postcard
Yoel scribbles it to Gerhard
Reza on his e-mail
finds it waiting from Patricia
Mario and Elsie
send it to Francísco
Karolina sends it monthly
home with a money order
June seals it with a kiss to Dahlia
Mai sends it, Montserrat
scrawls it to Faíz on a memo
Lenny wires it with roses
to Lew who takes it on his
whispery breath, Julia sends it
loud and clear, Dagmar brailles it
to Maureen, María Christina
sends it, Meena and Moshe send it
Patrick and Max are always
sending it back and forth
and even Shirley, even George
are found late after closing
sending it, sending it
•
Sending love is harmless
doesn’t bind youcan’t make you sick
sending love’s expected
precipitousand wary
sending love can be carefree
Joaquín knew it, Eira knows it
sending love without heart
—well, people do that daily
•
Terrence years ago
closed the window, wordless
Grace who always laughed is leaning
her cheek against bullet-proof glass
her tears enlarged
like scars on a planet
Vivian hangs her raincoat
on a hook, turns to the classroom
her love entirely
there, supreme
Victor fixes his lens
on disappearing faces
—caught now or who will ever
see them again?
1992–1994
TAKE
At the head of this poem I have laid out
a boning knife a paring knife a wooden spoon a pair of tongs.
Oaken grain beneath them olive and rusty light
around them.
And you looming:This is not your scene
this is the first frame of a film
I have in mind to make:move on, get out.
And you here telling me:What will be done
with these four objects will be done
through my lens not your words.
The poet shrugs:I was only in the kitchen
looking at the chopping board.(Not the whole story.)
And you telling me:Awful is the scope
of what I have in mind, awful the music I shall deploy, most
awful the witness of the camera moving
out from the chopping board to the grains of snow
whirling against the windowglass to the rotating
searchlights of the tower.The humped snow-shrouded tanks
laboring toward the border.This is not your bookish art.
But say the poet picks up the boning knife and thinks my bones
if she touching the paring knife thinks carrot, onion, celery
if staring at the wooden spoon I see the wood is split
as if from five winters of war
when neither celery, onion, carrot could be found
or picking up the tongs I whisper What this was for
And did you say get on, get out or just look out?
Were you speaking from exhaustion from disaster from your last
assignment were you afraid.
for the vision in the kitchen, that it could not be saved
—no time to unload the heavy
cases to adjust
the sensitive equipment
to seize the olive rusty light to scan the hand that reaches
hovering
over a boning knife a paring knife a wooden spoon a pair
of tongs
to cull the snow before it blows away across the border’s blacked-
out sheds
and the moon swims in a bluish bubble dimmed
by the rotating searchlights of the tower?Here
it is in my shorthand, do what you have in mind.
1994
LATE GHAZAL
Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.
First rains of the wintermorning’s smallest hour.
Go back to the ghazal thenwhat will you do there?
Life always pulsed harder than the lines.
Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?
The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?
Everything there was cast in an image of desire.
The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.
I took my body anyplace with me.
In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.
Life was always stronger … the critics couldn’t get it.
Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.
1994
SIX NARRATIVES
1
You drew up the story of your lifeI was in that story
Nights on the coast I’d meet you flashlight in hand
curving my soles over musseled rockscracked and raw we’d lick
inside the shells for danger
You’d drop into the barI’d sit upstairs at my desk writing
the pages
you hoped would make us famousthen in the face of my
turned back
you went to teach at the freedom school as if
you were teaching someone else to get free from methis was
your story
Like a fogsmeared planet over the coast
I’d walked into, served, your purposeful longingsI knew, I did
not stoptill I turned my back
2
You drew up a story about meI fled that story
Aching in mind I noticed names on the helms of busses:
COP CITYSHEEPSHEAD BAY
I thought I saw the city where the cops came home
to lay kitchen linoleumbarbecue on balconies
I saw the bloodied head of the great sheep dragged through
the underpasses
trucked to the bay where the waters would not touch it
left on the beach in its shroud of flies
On the bus to La Guardia my arms ached with all my findings
anchored under my breasts with all my will
I cried sick day, O sick day, this is my day and I, for this I will
not pay
as the green rushed bleeding out through the snarled cracks of
the expressway
3
You were telling a story about women to young menIt was
not my story
it was not a story about women it was a story about men
Your hunger a spear gripped in hand a tale unspun in your
rented campground
clothed in captured whale-songs tracked with synthesized
Andes flutes
it was all about youbeaded and beardedmisfeathered and
miscloaked
where the TV cameras found you in your sadness
4
You were telling a story about loveit was your story
I came and stood outside
listening::death was in the doorway
death was in the air but the story
had its own lifeno pretenses
about women in that lovesong for a man
Listening I went inside the bow scraping the bass-string
inside the horn’s heartbroken cry
I was the breath’s intake the bow’s rough mutter:
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain …
5.
I was telling you a story about love
how even in war it goes on speaking its own language