while the spirit of the masters
calls the freedwoman to forget the slave
With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
If there’s a conscience in these hills
it hurls that question
unquenched, relentless, to our ears
wild and witchlike
ringing every swamp
II.
The mountain laurel in bloom
constructed like needlework
tiny half-pulled stitches piercing
flushed and stippled petals
here in these woods it grows wild
midsummer moonrise turns it opal
the night breathes with its clusters
protected species
meaning endangered
Here in these hills
this valley we have felt
a kind of freedom
planting the soil have known
hours of a calm, intense and mutual solitude
reading and writing
trying to clarify connect
past and present near and far
the Alabama quilt
the Botswana basket
history the dark crumble
of last year’s compost
filtering softly through your living hand
but here as well we face
instantaneous violence ambush male
dominion on a back road
to escape in a locked car windows shut
skimming the ditch your split-second
survival reflex taking on the world
as it is not as we wish it
as it is not as we work for it
to be
III.
Strangers are an endangered species
In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst
cocktails are served the scholars
gather in celebration
their pious or clinical legends
festoon the walls like imitations
of period patterns
(. . . and, as I feared, my “life” was made a “victim”)
The remnants pawed the relics
the cult assembled in the bedroom
and you whose teeth were set on edge by churches
resist your shrine
escape
are found
nowhere
unless in words (your own)
All we are strangers—dear—The world is not
acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted
with her. And Pilgrims!—Do you hesitate? and
Soldiers oft—some of us victors, but those I do
not see tonight owing to the smoke.—We are hungry,
and thirsty, sometimes—We are barefoot—and cold—
This place is large enough for both of us
the river-fog will do for privacy
this is my third and last address to you
with the hands of a daughter I would cover you
from all intrusion even my own
saying rest to your ghost
with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands
open or closed as they prefer to lie
and ask no more of who or why or wherefore
with the hands of a mother I would close the door
on the rooms you’ve left behind
and silently pick up my fallen work
IV.
The river-fog will do for privacy
on the low road a breath
here, there, a cloudiness floating on the blacktop
sunflower heads turned black and bowed
the seas of corn a stubble
the old routes flowing north, if not to freedom
no human figure now in sight
(with whom do you believe your lot is cast?)
only the functional figure of the scarecrow
the cut corn, ground to shreds, heaped in a shape
like an Indian burial mound
a haunted-looking, ordinary thing
The work of winter starts fermenting in my head
how with the hands of a lover or a midwife
to hold back till the time is right
force nothing, be unforced
accept no giant miracles of growth
by counterfeit light
trust roots, allow the days to shrink
give credence to these slender means
wait without sadness and with grave impatience
here in the north where winter has a meaning
where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen
where nothing is promised
learn what an underground journey
has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code
let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.
V.
Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel
A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura
All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country
I want our own earth not the satellites, our
world as it is if not as it might be
then as it is: male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom
the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch
watching: will we do better?
The tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits
of place who understand travel but not amnesia
The world as it is: not as her users boast
damaged beyond reclamation by their using
Ourselves as we are in these painful motions
of staying cognizant: some part of us always
out beyond ourselves
knowing knowing knowing
Are we all in training for something we don’t name?
to exact reparation for things
done long ago to us and to those who did not
survive what was done to them whom we ought to honor
with grief with fury with action
On a pure night on a night when pollution
seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn
like a bowl of crystal in black ether
they are the piece of us that lies out there
knowing knowing knowing
1980
Frame
Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-
oratory, last class of the day
a pile of notebooks slung in her knapsack, coat
zipped high against the already swirling
evening sleet. The wind is wicked and the
busses slower than usual. On her mind
is organic chemistry and the issue
of next month’s rent and will it be possible to
bypass the professor with the coldest eyes
to get a reference for graduate school,
and whether any of them, even those who smile
can see, looking at her, a biochemist
or a marine biologist, which of the faces
can she trust to see her at all, either today
or in any future. The busses are worm-slow in the
quickly gathering dark. I don’t know her. I am
standing though somewhere just outside the frame
of all this, trying to see. At her back
the newly finished building suddenly looks
like shelter, it has glass doors, lighted halls
presumably heat. The wind is wicked. She throws a
glance down the street, sees no bus coming and runs
up the newly constructed steps into the newly
constructed hallway. I am standing all this time
just beyond the frame, trying to see. She runs
her hand through the crystals of sleet about to melt
on her hair. She shifts the weight of the books
on her back. It isn’t warm here exactly but it’s
out of that wind. Through the glass
door panels she can watch for the bus through the thickening
weather. Watching so, she is not
watching for the white man who watches the building
who has been watching her. This is Boston 1979.
I am standing somewhere at the edge of the frame
watching the man, we are both white, who watches the building
telling her to move on, get out of the hallway.
I can hear nothing because I am not supposed to be
present but I can see her gesturing
out toward the street at the wind-raked curb
I see her drawing her small body up
against the implied charges. The man
goes away. Her body is different now.
It is holding together with more than a hint of fury
and more than a hint of fear. She is smaller, thinner
more fragile-looking than I am. But I am not supposed to be
there. I am just outside the frame
of this action when the anonymous white man
to leave into the wind-raked night but already
the policeman is going to work, the handcuffs are on her
wrists he is throwing her down his knee has gone into
her breast he is dragging her down the stairs I am unable
to hear a sound of all this all that I know is what
I can see from this position there is no soundtrack
to go with this and I understand at once
it is meant to be in silence that this happens
in silence that he pushes her into the car
banging her head in silence that she cries out
in silence that she tries to explain she was only
waiting for a bus
in silence that he twists the flesh of her thigh
with his nails in silence that her tears begin to flow
that she pleads with the other policeman as if
he could be trusted to see her at all
in silence that in the precinct she refuses to give her name
in silence that they throw her into the cell
in silence that she stares him
straight in the face in silence that he sprays her
in her eyes with Mace in silence that she sinks her teeth
into his hand in silence that she is charged
with trespass assault and battery in
silence that at the sleet-swept corner her bus
passes without stopping and goes on
in silence. What I am telling you
is told by a white woman who they will say
was never there. I say I am there.
1980
A Vision
(thinking of Simone Weil)
You. There, with your gazing eyes
Your blazing eyes
A hand or something passes across the sun. Your eyeballs slacken,
you are free for a moment. Then it comes back: this
test of the capacity to keep in focus
this
unfair struggle with the forces of perception
this enforced
(but at that word your attention changes)
this enforced loss of self
in a greater thing of course, who has ever
lost herself in something smaller?
You with your cornea and iris and their power
you with your stubborn lids that have stayed open
at the moment of pouring liquid steel
you with your fear of blinding
Here it is. I am writing this almost
involuntarily on a bad, a junky typewriter that skips
and slides the text
Still these are mechanical problems, writing to you
is another kind of problem
and even so the words create themselves
What is your own will that it
can so transfix you
why are you forced to take this test
over and over and call it God
why not call it you and get it over
you with your hatred of enforcement
and your fear of blinding?
1981
Your Native Land, Your Life
* * *
Sources
For Helen Smelser
since 1949
I
Sixteen years. The narrow, rough-gullied backroads
almost the same. The farms: almost the same,
a new barn here, a new roof there, a rusting car,
collapsed sugar-house, trailer, new young wife
trying to make a lawn instead of a dooryard,
new names, old kinds of names: Rocquette, Desmarais,
Clark, Pierce, Stone. Gossier. No names of mine.
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5
south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen
to me, surviving, herding her cubs
in the silvery bend of the road
in nineteen sixty-five.
Shapes of things: so much the same
they feel like eternal forms: the house and barn
on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;
the face of milkweed blooming,
brookwater pleating over slanted granite,
boletus under pine, the half-composted needles
it broke through patterned on its skin.
Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.
Bladder-campion veined with purple.
Multifoliate heal-all.
II
I refuse to become a seeker for cures.
helped me has come through what already
lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong
across my heart.
This is from where
my strength comes, even when I miss my strength
even when it turns on me
like a violent master.
III
From where? the voice asks coldly.
This is the voice in cold morning air
that pierces dreams. From where does your strength come?
Old things . . .
From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew?
split at the root, raised in a castle of air?
Yes. I expected this. I have known for years
the question was coming. From where
(not from these, surely,
Protestant separatists, Jew-baiters, nightriders
who fired in Irasburg in nineteen-sixty-eight
on a black family newly settled in these hills)
From where
the dew grows thick late August on the fierce green grass
and on the wooden sill and on the stone
the mountains stand in an extraordinary
point of no return though still are green
collapsed shed-boards gleam like pewter in the dew
the realms of touch-me-not fiery with tiny tongues
cover the wild ground of the woods
IV
With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
From where does your strength come?
I think somehow, somewhere
every poem of mine must repeat those questions
which are not the same. There is a whom, a where
that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given
in the beginning we grasp whatever we can
to survive
V
All during World War II
I told myself I had some special destiny:
there had to be a reason
I was not living in a bombed-out house
or cellar hiding out with rats
there had to be a reason
I was growing up safe, American
with sugar rationed in a Mason jar
split at the root white-skinned social christian
neither gentile nor Jew
through the immense silence
of the Holocaust
I had no idea of what I had been spared
still less of the women and men my kin
the Jews of Vicksburg or Birmingham
whose lives must have been strategies no less
than the vixen’s on Route 5
VI
If they had played the flute, or chess
I was told I was not told what they told
their children when the Klan rode
how they might have seen themselves
a chosen people
of shopkeepers
clinging by strategy to a way of life
that had its own uses for them
proud of their length of sojourn in America
deploring the late-comers the peasants from Russia
I saw my father building
his rootless ideology
his private castle in air
in that most dangerous place, the family home
we were the chosen people
In the beginning we grasp whatever we can
VII
For years I struggled with you: your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love. For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you. I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him. All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.
After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers. I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.
VIII
Back there in Maryland the stars
showed liquescent, diffuse
in the breathless summer nights
the constellations melted
I thought I was leaving a place of enervation
heading north where the Drinking Gourd
stood cold and steady at last
pointing the way
I thought I was following a track of freedom
and for awhile it was
IX
Why has my imagination stayed