northeast with the ones who stayed
Are there spirits in me, diaspora-driven
that wanted to lodge somewhere
hooked into the “New” Englanders who hung on
here in this stringent space
believing their Biblical language
their harping on righteousness?
And, myself apart, what was this like for them,
this unlikely growing season
after each winter so mean, so mean
the tying-down of the spirit
and the endless rocks in the soil, the endless
purifications of self
there being no distance, no space around
to experiment with life?
X
These upland farms are the farms
of invaders, these villages
white with rectitude and death
are built on stolen ground
The persecuted, pale with anger
know how to persecute
those who feel destined, under god’s eye
need never ponder difference
and if they kill others for being who they are
or where they are
is this a law of history
or simply, what must change?
XI
If I try to conjure their lives
—who are not my people by any definition—
Yankee Puritans, Québec Catholics
mingled within sight of the Northern Lights
I am forced to conjure a passion
like the tropism in certain plants
bred of a natural region’s
repetitive events
beyond the numb of poverty
christian hypocrisy, isolation
—a passion so unexpected
there is no name for it
so quick, fierce, unconditional
short growing season is no explanation.
XII
And has any of this to do with how
Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?.
is the passion I connect with in this air
trace of the original
existences that knew this place
is the region still trying to speak with them
is this light a language
the shudder of this aspen-grove a way
of sending messages
the white mind barely intercepts
are signals also coming back
from the vast diaspora
of the people who kept their promises
as a way of life?
XIII
Coming back after sixteen years
I stare anew at things
that steeple pure and righteous
that clapboard farmhouse
seeing what I hadn’t seen before
through barnboards, crumbling plaster
decades of old wallpaper roses
clinging to certain studs
—into that dangerous place
the family home:
There are verbal brutalities
borne thereafter like any burn or scar
there are words pulled down from the walls
like dogwhips
the child backed silent against the wall
trying to keep her eyes dry; haughty; in panic
I will never let you know
I will never
let you know
XIV
And if my look becomes the bomb that rips
the family home apart
is this betrayal, that the walls
slice off, the staircase shows
torn-away above the street
that the closets where the clothes hung
hang naked, the room the old
grandmother had to sleep in
the toilet on the landing
the room with the books
where the father walks up and down
telling the child to work, work
harder than anyone has worked before?
—But I can’t stop seeing like this
more and more I see like this everywhere.
XV
It’s an oldfashioned, an outrageous thing
to believe one has a “destiny”
—a thought often peculiar to those
who possess privilege—
but there is something else: the faith
of those despised and endangered
that they are not merely the sum
of damages done to them:
have kept beyond violence the knowledge
arranged in patterns like kente-cloth
unexpected as in batik
recurrent as bitter herbs and unleavened bread
of being a connective link
in a long, continuous way
of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire
and the nearness of chaos.
XVI
The Jews I’ve felt rooted among
are those who were turned to smoke
Reading of the chimneys against the blear air
I think I have seen them myself
the fog of northern Europe licking its way
along the railroad tracks
to the place where all tracks end
You told me not to look there
to become
a citizen of the world
bound by no tribe or clan
yet dying you followed the Six Day War
with desperate attention
and this summer I lie awake at dawn
sweating the Middle East through my brain
wearing the star of David
on a thin chain at my breastbone
XVII
But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for. The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself. The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There’s nothing left now but the food and the humor. The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens. Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself. For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it’s your likeness that stares me in the face. There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands: there is something more.
XVIII
There is something more than self-hatred. That still outlives
these photos of the old Ashkenazi life:
we are gifted children at camp in the country
or orphaned children in kindergarten
we are hurrying along the rare book dealers’ street
with the sunlight striking one side
we are walking the wards of the Jewish hospital
along diagonal squares young serious nurses
we are part of a family group
formally taken in 1936
with tables, armchairs, ferns
(behind us, in our lives, the muddy street
and the ragged shames
the street-musician, the weavers lined for strike)
we are part of a family wearing white head-bandages
we were beaten in a pogrom
The place where all tracks end
is the place where history was meant to stop
but does not stop where thinking
was meant to stop but does not stop
where the pattern was meant to give way at last
but only
becomes a different pattern
terrible, threadbare
strained familiar on-going
XIX
They say such things are stored
in the genetic code—
half-chances, unresolved
possibilities, the life
passed on because unlived—
a mystic biology?—
I think of the women who sailed to Palestine
years before I was born—
halutzot, pioneers
believing in a new life
socialists, anarchists, jeered
as excitable, sharp of tongue
too filled with life
wanting equality in the promised land
carrying the broken promises
of Zionism in their hearts
along with the broken promises
of communism, anarchism—
makers of miracle who expected miracles
as stubbornly as any housewife does
that the life she gives her life to
shall not be cheap
that the life she gives her life to
shall not turn on her
that the life she gives her life to
shall want an end to suffering
Zion by itself is not enough.
XX
The faithful drudging child
the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,
hard work, style will win her prizes
becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes
but to change the laws of history.
How she gets this mission
is not clear, how the boundaries of perfection
explode, leaving her cheekbone grey with smoke
a piece of her hair singed off, her shirt
spattered with earth . . . Say that she grew up in a house
with talk of books, ideal societies—
she is gripped by a blue, a foreign air,
a desert absolute: dragged by the roots of her own will
into another scene of choices.
XXI
YERUSHALAYIM: a vault of golden heat
hard-pulsing from bare stones
the desert’s hard-won, delicate green
the diaspora of the stars
thrilling like thousand-year-old locusts
audible yet unheard
a city on a hill
waking with first light to voices
piercing, original, intimate
as if my dreams mixed with the cries
of the oldest, earliest birds
and of all whose wrongs and rights
cry out for explication
as the night pales and one more day
breaks on this Zion of hope and fear
and broken promises
this promised land
XXII
I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me. It’s been different with my father: he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead. But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists. I hate the way they use the dead.
Yet I can’t finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you. You knew there was more left than food and humor. Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain. The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; bowls of sour cream mixed with cut radishes, cucumber, scallions; green tomatoes and kosher dill pickles in half-translucent paper; these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.
That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
XXIII
Sixteen years ago I sat in this northeast kingdom
reading Gilbert White’s Natural History
of Selborne thinking
I can never know this land I walk upon
as that English priest knew his
—a comparable piece of earth—
rockledge soil insect bird weed tree
I will never know it so well because . . .
Because you have chosen
something else: to know other things
even the cities which
create of this a myth
Because you grew up in a castle of air
disjunctured
Because without a faith
you are faithful
I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I cán name, both here and in other tracts of the globe. But there is no finite knowing, no such rest. Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices. leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices: and here I write the words, in their fullness:
powerful; womanly.
August 1981–
August 1982
For the Record
The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions
and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings
intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred
Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds
so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it
and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.
1983
North American Time
I
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then I began to wonder
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
III
Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
that the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet
IV
It doesn’t matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
and this is verbal privilege
V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman’s hair—
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows—
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country
You have to know these things
VI
Poet, sister: words—
whether we like it or not—
stand in a time of their own.
No use protesting I wrote that
before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangladesh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
—those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time
VII
I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don’t go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things