Yes you said but the larynx is bloodied
the knife was well-aimed into the throat
Well I said love is hatedit has no price
No you saidyou are talking about feelings
Have you ever felt nothing?that is what war is now
Then a shadow skimmed your face
Go on talking in a normal voiceyou murmured
Nothing is listening
6.
You were telling a story about warit is our story
an old storyand still it must be told
the story of the new that fled the old
how the big dream strained and shifted
the ship of hope shuddered on the iceberg’s breast
the private affections swayed and staggered
So we are thrown togetherso we are racked apart
in a republic shivering onits glassy lips
partedas if the fundamental rift
had not been calculated from the first into the mighty scaffold.
1994
FROM PIERCÉD DARKNESS
New York/December
Taking the least griefcrusted avenue the last worst bridge away
somewhere beyond her Lost & Found we stopped in our flight to
check backward
in the rearview mirror into her piercéd darkness.A mirror is
either flat or deep
and ours was deep to the vanishing point:we saw showroom
mannequins draped and trundled
—black lace across blackening ice—
false pearls knotted by nervous fingers, backribs lacquered in
sauce.
Narrow waters rocking in spasms.The torch hand-held and the
poem of entrance.
Topless towers turned red and green.
Dripping faucet icicled radiator.
Eyes turned inward.Births arced into dumpsters.
Eyes blazing under knitted caps,
hands gripped on taxi-wheels, steering.
Fir bough propped in a cardboard doorway, bitter tinsel.
The House of the Jewish Book, the Chinese Dumpling House.
Swaddled limbs dreaming on stacked shelves of sleepopening
like knives.
•
Her piercéd darkness.Dragqueen dressed to kill in beauty
drawing her bridgelit shawls
over her shoulders.Her caves ghosted by foxes.Her tracked
arms.
Who climbs the subway stairs at the end of night
lugging a throwaway banquet.Her
Man Who Lived Underground and all his children.
Nightcrews uncapping her streets wildlamps strung up on high.
•
Fairy lights charming stunted trees.
Hurt eyes awake to the glamor.
I’ve walked this zone
gripping my nightstick, worked these rooms
in silver silk charmeuse and laid my offerings
next to the sexless swathed form lying in the doorway.
I’ve preached for justice rubbing crumbs
from sticky fingers for the birds.
Picked up a pretty chain of baubles
in the drugstore, bitten them to see if they were real.
I’ve boiled a stocking and called it Christmas pudding.
Bought freeborn eggs to cook
with sugar, milk and pears.
•
Altogether the angels arrive for the chorus
in rapidly grabbed robes they snatch scores of hallelujahs
complicit with television cameras they bend down their eyes.
However they sing their voices will glisten
in the soundmix.All of it good enough for us.
Altogether children will wake before the end of night
(“not good dawn” my Jewish grandmother called it) will stand
as we did
handheld in cold dark before the parents’ door
singing for glimpsed gilt and green
packages, the drama, the power of the hour.
•
Black lace, blackening ice.To give on one designated day—
a window bangs shut on an entire
forcefield of chances, connections.A window flies open
on the churning of birds in flight going surely somewhere else.
A snowflake like no other flies past, we will not hear of it
again, we will surely
hear of it
again.
1994–1995
Inscriptions
ONE:COMRADE
Little as I knew you I know you:little as you knew me you
know me
—that’s the light we stand under when we meet.
I’ve looked into flecked jaws
walked injured beaches footslick in oil
watching licked birds stumble in flight
while you drawn through the pupil of your eye
across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief
headlong and by choice took on the work of charting
your city’s wounds ancient and fertile
listening for voices within and against.
My testimony:yours:Trying to keep faith
not with each other exactly yet it’s the one known and unknown
who stands for, imagines the otherwith whom faith could
be kept.
In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope
(no stranger to bleakness you:worms have toothed at
your truths
but you were honest regarding that).
You conspired to compile the illegal discography
of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.
If there were ethical flowers one would surely be yours
and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines
across city’s whyless sleeplight I’d hand it
purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty afloat
on the bacterial waters.
When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous
when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.
The self unlocked to many selves.
A mirror handed to one who just released
from the locked ward from solitary from preventive detention
sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows
whole populations.
One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of home
at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult of his
own eye
how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote it.
TWO:MOVEMENT
Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light
Talking of angles of visionmovementsa black or a red tulip
opening
Times of walking across a streetthinking
not I have joined a movement butI am stepping in this deep current
Part of my life washing behind meterror I couldn’t swim with
part of my life waiting for mea part I had no words for
I need to live each day throughhave them and know them all
though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.
•
When does a life bend toward freedom?grasp its direction?
How do you know you’re not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,
stagnation
but entering that deep currentmalachite, colorado
requiring all your strength wherever found
your patience and your labor
desire pitted against desire’s inversion
all your mind’s fortitude?
Maybe through a teacher:someone with facts with numbers
with poetry
who wrote on the board:IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES
OUR DREAMS.
Maybe a student:one mind unfurling like a redblack peony
quenched into percentile, dropout, stubb
ed-out bud
—Your journals Patricia:Douglas your poems:but the
repetitive blows
on spines whose hope you were, on yours:
to see that quenching and decide.
—And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in
the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class … all that … but isn’t all that just history?
Aren’t people bored with it all?
She could be
myself at nineteenbut free of reverence of past ideas
ignorant of hopes piled on herShe’s a mermaid
momentarily precipitated from a solution
which could stop her heartShe could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal.
THREE:ORIGINS
Turning points.We all like to hear about those.Points
on a graph
Sudden conversions.Historical swings.Some kind of
dramatic structure.
But a life doesn’t unfold that wayit moves
in loopsby switchbacks loosely strung
around the swelling of one hillside toward another
one island toward another
A child’s knowinga child’s forgettingremain childish
till you meet themmirrored and echoingsomewhere else
Don’t ask me when I learned love
Don’t ask me when I learned fear
Ask about the size of roomshow many lived in them
what else the rooms contained
what whispers of the histories of skin
Should I simplify my life for you?
The Confederate Women of Maryland
on their dried-blood granite pedestal incised
IN DIFFICULTY AND IN DANGER...
“BRAVE AT HOME”
—words a child could spell out
standing in wetgreen grass stuck full of yellow leaves
monumental women bandaging wounded men
Joan of Arc in a booka peasant in armor
MussoliniAmelia Earhartthe President on the radio
—what’s taught, what’s overheard
FOUR:HISTORY
Should I simplify my life for you?
Don’t ask how I began to love men.
Don’t ask how I began to love women.
Remember the forties songs, the slowdance numbers
the small sex-filled gas-rationed Chevrolet?
Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?
Cigarette smoke of the movies, silver-and-gray
profiles, dreaming the dreams of he-and-she
breathing the dissolution of the wisping silver plume?
Dreaming that dream we leaned applying lipstick
by the gravestone’s mirror when we found ourselves
playing in the cemetery.In Current Events she said
the war in Europe is over, the Allies
and she wore no lipstick have won the war
and we raced screaming out of Sixth Period.
Dreaming that dream
we had to maze our ways through a wood
where lips were knives breasts razor and I hid
in the cage of my mind scribbling
this map stops where it all begins
into a red-and-black notebook.
Remember after the war when peace came down
as plenty for some and they said we were saved
in an eternal present and we knew the world could end?
—remember after the war when peace rained down
on the winds from Hiroshima Nagasaki Utah Nevada?
and the socialist queer Christian teacher jumps from the
hotel window?
and L.G. saying I want to sleep with you but not for sex
and the red-and-black enamelled coffee-pot dripped slow through
the dark grounds
—appetite terror power tenderness
the long kiss in the stairwell the switch thrown
on two Jewish Communists married to each other
the definitive crunch of glass at the end of the wedding?
(When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?)
FIVE:VOICES
“That year I began to understand the words burden of proof
—how the free market of ideas depended
on certain lives laboring under that burden.
I started feeling in my body
how that burden was bound to our backs
keeping us cramped in old repetitive motions
crouched in the same mineshaft year on year
or like children in school striving to prove
proofs already proven over and over
to get into the next grade
but there is no next grade no movement onward only this
and the talk goes on, the laws, the jokes, the deaths, the way of
life goes on
as if you had proven nothing as if this burden were what
you are.”
•
(Knotted crowns of asparagus lowered by human hands
into long silver trenches fogblanched mornings
the human spine translated into fog’s
almost unbearable rheumatic beauty flattering pain
into a daze a mystic text of white and white’s
absolute faceless romance::the photographer’s
darkroom thrill discerning two phantoms caught
trenchside deep in the delicate power
of fog::phantoms who nonetheless have to know
the length of the silvery trenches how many plants how long
this bending can go on and for what wage and what
that wage will buy in the Great Central Valley 1983.)
•
for justice and peacethe sex of the woman
the bleached green-and-goldof the cotton print bedspread
in the distance the soundof the week’s demonstration
July sun louvered shuttersoff Riverside Drive
shattered glass in the courtyardthe sex of the woman
her body entire aroused to the hair
the sex of the women our bodies entire
molten in purpose each body a tongue
each body a river and over and over
and after to walkin the streets still unchanging
a stormy light, eveningtattered emblems, horse-droppings
DO NOT CROSS POLICE BARRIERyellow boards kicked awry
the scattering crowdsat the mouth of the subway
A thumbprint on a glass of icy water
memory that scours and fogs
night when I threw my face
on a sheet of lithic scatter
wrapped myself in a sack of tears”
•
“My thiefmy counsellor
tell me how it was then under the bridge
in the long cashmere scarf
the opera-lover left
silken length rough flesh violet light meandering
the splash that trickled down the wall
O tell me what you hissed to him and how he groaned to you
tell me the opera-lover’s body limb by limb and touch by touch
how his long arms arched dazzling under the abutment
as he played himself to the hilt
cloak flocked with light
My thiefmy counsellor
tell me was it good or bad, was it good and bad, in the
unbefriended archway of your first ardor?
was it an oilstain’s thumbprint on moving water?
the final drench and fizzle on the wall?
was it freedom from names from rank from color?
Thieving the leather trenchcoat of the night, my counsellor?
Breathing the sex of night of water never having to guess its
source, my thief
?
O thief
I stand at your bedsidefeed you segments of orange
O counsellor
you have too many vanishing children to attend
There were things I was meant to learn from youthey wail out
like a train leaving the city
Desire the locomotivedeath the tracksunder the bridge
the silken roughness drench of freedom the abruptly
floodlit parapet
LOVE CONQUERS ALL spelled out in flickering graffiti
—my counsellor, my thief”
•
“In the heart of the capital of Capital
against banked radiations of azalea
I found a faux-marble sarcophagus inscribed
HERE LIES THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE
I had been wondering why for so long so little
had been heard from that quarter.
I found myself there by deepest accident
wandering among white monuments
looking for the Museum of Lost Causes.
A strangely focused many-lumened glare
was swallowing alive the noon.
I saw the reviewing stand the podium draped and swagged
the huge screen all-enhancing and all-heightening
I heard the martial bands the choirs the speeches
amplified in the vacant plaza
swearing to the satellites it had been a natural death.”
SIX:EDGELIT
Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love
I could have forgotten other women I desired
so much I wanted to love them but
here are some reasons love would not let me:
One had a trick of dropping her lashes along her cheekbone
in an amazing screen so she saw nothing.
Another would stand in summer arms rounded and warm
catching wild apricots that fell
either side of a broken fence but she caught them on one
side only.
One, ambitious, flushed
to the collarbone, a shapely coward.
One keen as mica, glittering,
full at the lips, absent at the core.
One who flirted with danger
had her escape route planned when others had none