VIII
Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.
IX
In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief; had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet’s words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timelessly speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds
and I start to speak again
1983
Virginia 1906
A white woman dreaming of innocence,
of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,
is held in a DC-10 above the purity
of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.
She feels safe. Here, no one can reach her.
Neither men nor women have her in their power.
Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,
I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash
cruelly, when she does what I don’t want to see.
I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,
sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.
Nothing has told me how to think of her power.
Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts
across rough earth, small trees contort and twist
making their own shapes, wild. Why should we love purity?
Can the woman in the DC-10 see this
and would she call this innocence? If no one can reach her
she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.
This woman I have been and recognize
must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies
a hated nation, hers,
earth whose wet places call to mind
still-open wounds: her country.
Do we love purity? Where do we turn for power?
Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says
But I was not culpable,
I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,
the susceptible one, I was sick,
the one who simply had to get out, and did
: I am still trying how to think of her power.
And if she was forced, this woman, by the same
white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey
her ignored dark sisters? What if at five years old
she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open
what if forever after, in every record
she wants her name inscribed as innocent
and will not speak, refuses to know, can say
I have been numb for years
does not want to hear of any violation
like or unlike her own, as if the victim
can be innocent only in isolation
as if the victim dare not be intelligent
(I have been numb for years): and if this woman
longs for an intact world, an intact soul,
longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?
What has she smelled of power without once
tasting it in the mouth? For what protections
has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?
There is a porch in Salem, Virginia
that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,
honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,
a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down
to the orchards, apple and peach,
divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.
A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia
refuses to come down, at last comes down
for a neighbor’s lying bribe. Now, if that child, grown old
feels safe in a DC-10 above thick white clouds
and no one can reach her
and if that woman’s child, another woman
chooses another way, yet finds the old vines
twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks
how does she stop dreaming the dream
of protection, how does she follow her own wildness
shedding the innocence, the childish power?
How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?
1983
Dreams Before Waking
Despair is the question.
—Elie Wiesel
Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo.
—Nancy Morejón
Despair falls:
the shadow of a building
they are raising in the direct path
of your slender ray of sunlight
Slowly the steel girders grow
the skeletal framework rises
yet the western light still filters
through it all
still glances off the plastic sheeting
they wrap around it
for dead of winter
At the end of winter something changes
a faint subtraction
from consolations you expected
an innocent brilliance that does not come
though the flower shops set out
once again on the pavement
their pots of tight-budded sprays
the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold
and at such a price
though someone must buy them
you study those hues as if with hunger
Despair falls
like the day you come home
from work, a summer evening
transparent with rose-blue light
and see they are filling in
the framework
the girders are rising
beyond your window
that seriously you live
in a different place
though you have never moved
and will not move, not yet
but will give away
your potted plants to a friend
on the other side of town
along with the cut crystal flashing
in the window-frame
will forget the evenings
of watching the street, the sky
the planes in the feathered afterglow:
will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold
where still you can manage
to go on paying rent
where still you can believe
it’s the old neighborhood:
even the woman who sleeps at night
in the barred doorway—wasn’t she always there?
and the man glancing, darting
for food in the supermarket trash—
when did his hunger come to this?
what made the difference?
what will make it for you?
What will make it for you?
You don’t want to know the stages
and those who go through them don’t want to tell
You have your four locks on the door
your savings, your respectable past
your strangely querulous body, suffering
sicknesses of the city no one can name
You have your pride
, your bitterness
your memories of sunset
you think you can make it straight through
if you don’t speak of despair.
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
1983
One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem
1.
From 1964: a color snapshot: you
riding a camel past the Great Pyramid
its rough earthy diagonal shouldering
the blue triangle of sky
I know your white shirt dark skirt your age
thirty-five as mine was then
your ignorance like mine
in those years and your curious mind
throw of your head bend of your gilt knees
the laugh exchanged with whoever took the picture
I don’t know how you were talking to yourself
I know I was thinking
with a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude
this will be the deciding year
I am sick of drift
Weren’t we always trying to do better?
Then the voices began to say: Your plans
are not in the book of plans
written, printed and bound while you
were absent
no, not here nor in Egypt
will you ever catch up
2.
So, then as if by plan
I turn and you are lost
How have I lived knowing
that day of your laugh so alive/so nothing
even the clothes you wore then
rotted away How can I live believing
any year can be the deciding year
when I know the book of plans
how it disallows us
time for change for growing older
truthfully in our own way
3.
I used to think you ought to be
a woman in charge in a desperate time
of whole populations
such seemed the power of your restlessness
I saw you a rescuer
amid huge events diasporas
scatterings and returnings
I needed this for us
I would have gone to help you
flinging myself into the fray
both of us treading free
of the roads we started on
4.
In the book of plans it is written
that our lifelines shall be episodic
faithless frayed lived out
under impure violent rains
and rare but violent sun
It is written there that we may reach
like wan vines across a window
trying to grasp each other
but shall lack care and tending
that water and air shall betray us
that the daughter born a poet
will die of dysentery
while the daughter born to organize
will die of cancer
5.
In the book of plans it says no one
will speak of the book of plans
the appearance will continue
that all this is natural
It says my grief for you is natural
but my anger for us is not
that the image of a white curtain trembling
across a stormy pane
is acceptable but not
the image I make of you
arm raised hurling signalling
the squatters the refugees
storming the food supply
The book of plans says only that you must die
that we all, very soon, must die
6.
Well, I am studying a different book
taking notes wherever I go
the movement of the wrist does not change
but the pen plows deeper
my handwriting flows into words
I have not yet spoken
I’m the sole author of nothing
the book moves from field to field
of testimony recording
how the wounded teach each other the old
refuse to be organized
by fools how the women say
in more than one language You have struck a rock—
prepare to meet the unplanned
the ignored the unforeseen that which breaks
despair which has always travelled
underground or in the spaces
between the fixed stars
gazing full-faced wild
and calm on the Revolution
7.
Love: I am studying a different book
and yes, a book is a finite thing
In it your death will never be reversed
the deaths I have witnessed since never undone
The light drained from the living eyes
can never flash again from those same eyes
I make you no promises
but something’s breaking open here
there were certain extremes we had to know
before we could continue
Call it a book, or not
call it a map of constant travel
Call it a book, or not
call it a song a ray
of images thrown on a screen
in open lots in cellars
and among those images
one woman’s meaning to another woman
long after death
in a different world
1983
What Was, Is;
What Might Have Been, Might Be
What’s kept. What’s lost. A snap decision.
Burn the archives. Let them rot.
Begin by going ten years back.
A woman walks downstairs in a brownstone
in Brooklyn. Late that night, some other night
snow crystals swarm in her hair
at the place we say, So long.
I’ve lost something. I’m not sure what it is.
I’m going through my files.
blue fire against an iron fence
Her head bent to a mailbox
long fingers ringed in gold in red-eyed
golden serpents
the autumn sun
burns like a beak off the cars
parked along Riverside we so deep in talk
in burnt September grass
I’m trying for exactitude
in the files I handle worn and faded labels
And how she drove, and danced, and fought, and worked
and loved, and sang, and hated
dashed into the record store then out
with the Stevie Wonder back in the car
flew on
Worn and faded labels . . . This was
our glamor for each other
underlined in bravado
Could it have been another way:
could we have been respectful comrades
parallel warriors none of that
fast-falling
could we have kept a clean
and decent slate
1984
Poetry: I
Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp
is studying the history of poetry.
Someone in the library at closing-time
has learned to say modernism,
trope, vatic, text.
She is listening for shreds of music.
He is searching for his name
back in the old country.
They cannot learn without
teachers.
They are like us what we were
if you remember.
In a corner of night a voice
is crying in a kind of whisper:
More!
Can you remember? when we thought
the poets taught how to live?
That is not the voice of a critic
nor a common reader
it is someone young in anger
hardly knowing what to ask
who finds our lines our glosses
wanting in this world.
1985
Poetry: II, Chicago
Whatever a poet is
at the point of conception is
conceived in these projects
of beige and grey bricks Yes, poets are born
in wasted tracts like these whatever color, sex
comes to term in this winter’s driving nights
And the child pushes like a spear
a cry through cracked cement through zero air
a spear, a cry of green Yes, poets endure
these schools of fear balked yet unbroken
where so much gets broken: trust
windows pride the mothertongue
Wherever a poet is born enduring
depends on the frailest of chances:
Who listened to your murmuring
over your little rubbish who let you be
who gave you the books
who let you know you were not
alone showed you the twist
of old strands raffia, hemp or silk
the beaded threads the fiery lines
saying: This belongs to you you have the right
you belong to the song
of your mothers and fathers You have a people
1984
Poetry: III
Even if we knew the children were all asleep
and healthy the ledgers balanced the water running
clear in the pipes
and all the prisoners free
Even if every word we wrote by then
were honest the sheer heft
of our living behind it
not these sometimes
lax, indolent lines
these litanies
Even if we were told not just by friends
that this was honest work
Even if each of us didn’t wear
a brass locket with a picture
of a strangled woman a girlchild sewn through the crotch
Even if someone had told us, young: This is not a key
nor a peacock feather
not a kite nor a telephone
This is the kitchen sink the grinding-stone
would we give ourselves
more calmly over feel less criminal joy
when the thing comes as it does come
clarifying grammar
and the fixed and mutable stars—?
1984
Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties