start up
I hear your voice: disloyalty betrayal
stinging the wires
I stuff the old leaves into sacks
and still they fall and still
I see my work undone
One shivering rainswept afternoon
and the whole job to be done over
I can’t know what you know
unless you tell me
there are gashes in our understandings
of this world
We came together in a common
fury of direction
barely mentioning difference
(what drew our finest hairs
to fire
the deep, difficult troughs
unvoiced)
I fell through a basement railing
the first day of school and cut my forehead open—
did I ever tell you? More than forty years
and I still remember smelling my own blood
like the smell of a new schoolbook
And did you ever tell me
how your mother called you in from play
and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust
that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from
to which we must return simply to say
this is where I came from
this is what I knew
The past is not a husk yet change goes on
Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
1979
What Is Possible
A clear night if the mind were clear
If the mind were simple, if the mind were bare
of all but the most classic necessities:
wooden spoon knife mirror
cup lamp chisel
a comb passing through hair beside a window
a sheet
thrown back by the sleeper
A clear night in which two planets
seem to clasp each other in which the earthly grasses
shift like silk in starlight
If the mind were clear
and if the mind were simple you could take this mind
this particular state and say
This is how I would live if I could choose:
this is what is possible
A clear night. But the mind
of the woman imagining all this the mind
that allows all this to be possible
is not clear as the night
is never simple cannot clasp
its truths as the transiting planets clasp each other
does not so easily
work free from remorse
does not so easily
manage the miracle
for which mind is famous
or used to be famous
does not at will become abstract and pure
this woman’s mind
does not even will that miracle
having a different mission
in the universe
If the mind were simple if the mind were bare
it might resemble a room a swept interior
but how could this now be possible
given the voices of the ghost-towns
their tiny and vast configurations
needing to be deciphered
the oracular night
with its densely working sounds
If it could ever come down to anything like
a comb passing through hair beside a window
no more than that
a sheet
thrown back by the sleeper
but the mind
of the woman thinking this is wrapped in battle
is on another mission
a stalk of grass dried feathery weed rooted in snow
in frozen air stirring a fierce wand graphing
Her finger also tracing
pages of a book
knowing better than the poem she reads
knowing through the poem
through ice-feathered panes
the winter
flexing its talons
the hawk-wind
poised to kill
1980
For Ethel Rosenberg
convicted, with her husband, of “conspiracy to commit espionage”: killed in the electric chair June 19, 1953
1.
Europe 1953:
throughout my random sleepwalk
the words
scratched on walls, on pavements
painted over railway arches
Liberez les Rosenberg!
Escaping from home I found
home everywhere:
the Jewish question, Communism
marriage itself
a question of loyalty
or punishment
my Jewish father writing me
letters of seventeen pages
finely inscribed harangues
questions of loyalty
and punishment
One week before my wedding
that couple gets the chair
the volts grapple her, don’t
kill her fast enough
Liberez les Rosenberg!
I hadn’t realized
our family arguments were so important
my narrow understanding
of crime of punishment
no language for this torment
mystery of that marriage
always both faces
on every front page in the world
Something so shocking so
unfathomable
it must be pushed aside
2.
She sank however into my soul A weight of sadness
I hardly can register how deep
her memory has sunk that wife and mother
like so many
who seemed to get nothing out of any of it
except her children
that daughter of a family
like so many
needing its female monster
she, actually wishing to be an artist
wanting out of poverty
possibly also really wanting
revolution
that woman strapped in the chair
no fear and no regrets
charged by posterity
not with selling secrets to the Communists
but with wanting to distinguish
herself being a bad daughter a bad mother
And I walking to my wedding
by the same token a bad daughter a bad sister
my forces focussed
on that hardly revolutionary effort
Her life and death the possible
ranges of disloyalty
so painful so unfathomable
they must be pushed aside
ignored for years
3.
Her mother testifies against her
Her brother testifies against her
After her death
she becomes a natural prey for pornographers
her death itself a scene
her body sizzling half-strapped whipped like a sail
She becomes the extremest victim
described nonetheless as rigid of will
what are her politics by then no one knows
Her figure sinks into my soul
a drowned statue
sealed in lead
For years it has lain there unabsorbed
first as part of that dead couple
on the front pages of the world the week
I gave myself in marriage
then slowly severing drifting apart
a separate death a life unto itself
no longer the Rosenbergs
no longer the chosen scapegoat
the family monster
till I hear how she sang
a prostitute to sleep
in the Women’s House of Detention
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg would you
have marched to take back the night
collected signatures
for battered women who kill
What would you have to tell us
would you have burst the net
4.
Why do I even want to call her up
to console my pain (she feels no pain at all)
why do I wish to put such questions
to ease myself (she feels no pain at all
she finally burned to death like so many)
why all this exercise of hindsight?
since if I imagine her at all
I have to imagine first
the pain inflicted on her by women
her mother testifies against her
her sister-in-law testifies against her
and how she sees it
not the impersonal forces
not the historical reasons
why they might have hated her strength
If I have held her at arm’s length till now
if I have still believed it was
my loyalty, my punishment at stake
if I dare imagine her surviving
I must be fair to what she must have lived through
I must allow her to be at last
political in her ways not in mine
her urgencies perhaps impervious to mine
defining revolution as she defines it
or, bored to the marrow of her bones
with “politics”
bored with the vast boredom of long pain
small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties
liking her room her private life
living alone perhaps
no one you could interview
maybe filling a notebook herself
with secrets she has never sold
1980
Heroines
Exceptional
even deviant
you draw your long skirts
across the nineteenth century
Your mind
burns long after death
not like the harbor beacon
but like a pyre of driftwood
on the beach
You are spared
illiteracy
death by pneumonia
teeth which leave the gums
the seamstress’ clouded eyes
the mill-girl’s shortening breath
by a collection
of circumstances
soon to be known as
class privilege
The law says you can possess nothing
in a world
where property is everything
You belong first to your father
then to him who
chooses you
if you fail to marry
you are without recourse
unable to earn
a workingman’s salary
forbidden to vote
forbidden to speak
in public
if married you are legally dead
the law says
you may not bequeath property
save to your children
or male kin
that your husband
has the right
of the slaveholder
to hunt down and re-possess you
should you escape
You may inherit slaves
but have no power to free them
your skin is fair
you have been taught that light
came
to the Dark Continent
with white power
that the Indians
live in filth
and occult animal rites
Your mother wore corsets
to choke her spirit
which if you refuse
you are jeered for refusing
you have heard many sermons
and have carried
your own interpretations
locked in your heart
You are a woman
strong in health
through a collection
of circumstances
soon to be known
as class privilege
which if you break
the social compact
you lose outright
When you open your mouth in public
human excrement
is flung at you
you are exceptional
in personal circumstance
in indignation
you give up believing
in protection
in Scripture
in man-made laws
respectable as you look
you are an outlaw
Your mind burns
not like the harbor beacon
but like a fire
of fiercer origin
you begin speaking out
and a great gust of freedom
rushes in with your words
yet still you speak
in the shattered language
of a partial vision
You draw your long skirts
deviant
across the nineteenth century
registering injustice
failing to make it whole
How can I fail to love
your clarity and fury
all your due
take courage from your courage
honor your exact
legacy as it is
recognizing
as well
that it is not enough?
1980
Grandmothers
1. Mary Gravely Jones
We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,
always the formal guest under my father’s roof:
you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.
I see you walking up and down the garden,
restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem
my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.
You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,
yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,
ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.
One summer night you sat with my sister and me
in the wooden glider long after twilight,
holding us there with streams of pent-up words.
You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,
had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,
your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.
You married straight out of the convent school,
your background was country, you left an unperformed
typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,
you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared
about your mind, you might have ended
elsewhere than in that glider
reciting your unwritten novels to the children.
2. Hattie Rice Rich
Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me,
you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china,
lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom
summer and fall, then took the Pullman train
in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama,
shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter.
Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone,
how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg,
fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread,
took the street-car downtown shopping
endlessly for your son’s whims, the whims of genius,
kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily.
All through World War Two the forbidden word
Jew
ish was barely uttered in your son’s house;
your anger flared over inscrutable things.
Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed,
knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing
your one brief memorable scene of rebellion:
you didn’t want to go back South that year.
You were never “Grandmother Rich” but “Anana”;
you had money of your own but you were homeless,
Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch,
dispersed among the children and grandchildren.
3. Granddaughter
Easier to encapsulate your lives
in a slide-show of impressions given and taken,
to play the child or victim, the projectionist,
easier to invent a script for each of you,
myself still at the center,
than to write words in which you might have found
yourselves, looked up at me and said
“Yes, I was like that; but I was something more. . . .”
Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi;
the “war between the states” a living memory
its aftermath the plague-town closing
its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons.
I can almost touch that little town. . . .
a little white town rimmed with Negroes,
making a deep shadow on the whiteness.
Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind
—twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—
in those defended hamlets of half-truth
broken in two by one strange idea,
“blood” the all-powerful, awful theme—
what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe
the daughter of one of you—Amnesia was the answer.
1980
The Spirit of Place
For Michelle Cliff
I.
Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett
driving with you in spring road
like a streambed unwinding downhill
fiddlehead ferns uncurling
spring peepers ringing sweet and cold
while we talk yet again
of dark and light, of blackness, whiteness, numbness
rammed through the heart like a stake
trying to pull apart the threads
from the dried blood of the old murderous uncaring
halting on bridges in bloodlight
where the freshets call out freedom
to frog-thrilling swamp, skunk-cabbage
trying to sense the conscience of these hills
knowing how the single-minded, pure
solutions bleached and dessicated
within their perfect flasks
for it was not enough to be New England
as every event since has testified:
New England’s a shadow-country, always was
it was not enough to be for abolition
while the spirit of the masters
flickered in the abolitionist’s heart
it was not enough to name ourselves anew