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    Selected Poems II (1976-1986)

    Page 3
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    a Siamese twin.

      Why should we complain?

      He is ours and us,

      we made him.

      viii

      If I were a foreigner, as you say,

      instead of your second head,

      you would be more polite.

      Foreigners are not there:

      they pass and repass through the air

      like angels, invisible

      except for their cameras, and the rustle

      of their strange fragrance

      but we are not foreigners

      to each other; we are the pressure

      on the inside of the skull, the struggle

      among the rocks for more room,

      the shove and giveway, the grudging love,

      the old hatreds.

      Why fear the knife

      that could sever us, unless

      it would cut not skin but brain?

      ix

      You can't live here without breathing

      someone else's air,

      air that has been used to shape

      these hidden words that are not yours.

      This word was shut

      in the mouth of a small man

      choked off by the rope and gold/

      red drumroll

      This word was deported

      This word was guttural,

      buried wrapped in a leather throat

      wrapped in a wolfskin

      This word lies

      at the bottom of a lake

      with a coral bead and a kettle

      This word was scrawny,

      denied itself from year

      to year, ate potatoes,

      got drunk when possible

      This word died of bad water.

      Nothing stays under

      forever, everyone

      wants to fly, whose language

      is this anyway?

      You want the air

      but not the words that come with it:

      breathe at your peril.

      These words are yours,

      though you never said them,

      you never heard them, history

      breeds death but if you kill

      it you kill yourself.

      What is a traitor?

      x

      This is the secret: these hearts

      we held out to you, these party

      hearts (our hands

      sticky with adjectives

      and vague love, our smiles

      expanding like balloons)

      , these candy hearts we sent you

      in the mail, a whole

      bouquet of hearts, large as a country,

      these hearts, like yours,

      hold snipers.

      A tiny sniper, one in each heart,

      curled like a maggot, pallid

      homunculus, pinhead, glass-eyed fanatic,

      waiting to be given life.

      Soon the snipers will bloom

      in the summer trees, they will eat

      their needle holes through your windows

      (Smoke and broken leaves, up close

      what a mess, wet red glass

      in the zinnia border,

      Don't let it come to this, we said

      before it did.)

      Meanwhile, we refuse

      to believe the secrets of our hearts,

      these hearts of neat velvet,

      moral as fortune cookies.

      Our hearts are virtuous, they swell

      like stomachs at a wedding,

      plump with goodwill.

      In the evenings the news seeps in

      from foreign countries,

      those places with unsafe water.

      We listen to the war, the wars,

      any old war.

      xi

      Surely in your language

      no one can sing, he said, one hand

      in the small-change pocket.

      That is a language for ordering

      the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for

      counting stacks of cans. Groceries

      are all you are good for. Leave

      the soul to us. Eat shit.

      In these cages, barred crates,

      feet nailed to the floor, soft

      funnel down the throat,

      we are forced with nouns, nouns,

      till our tongues are sullen and rubbery.

      We see this language always

      and merely as a disease

      of the mouth. Also

      as the hospital that will cure us,

      distasteful but necessary.

      These words slow us, stumble

      in us, numb us, who

      can say even Open

      the door, without these diffident

      smiles, apologies?

      Our dreams though

      are of freedom, a hunger

      for verbs, a song

      which rises liquid and effortless,

      our double, gliding beside us

      over all these rivers, borders,

      over ice or clouds.

      Our other dream: to be mute.

      Dreams are not bargains,

      they settle nothing.

      This is not a debate

      but a duet

      with two deaf singers.

      The Bus to Alliston, Ontario

      Snow packs the roadsides, sends dunes

      onto the pavement, moves

      through vision like a wave or sandstorm.

      The bus charges this winter,

      a whale or blunt gray

      tank, wind whipping its flank.

      Inside, we sit wool-

      swathed and over-furred, made stodgy

      by the heat, our boots

      puddling the floor, our Christmas bundles

      stuffed around us in the seats, the paper bags

      already bursting; we trust

      the driver, who is plump and garrulous, familiar

      as a neighbor, which he is

      to the thirty souls he carries, as

      carefully as the time-

      table permits; he knows

      by experience the fragility of skulls.

      Travel is dangerous; nevertheless, we travel.

      The talk, as usual,

      is of disasters; trainwrecks, fires,

      herds of cattle killed in floods,

      the malice of weather and tractors,

      the clogging of hearts known

      and unknown to us, illness and death,

      true cases of buses

      such as ours,

      which skid, which hurtle

      through snake fences and explode

      with no survivors.

      The woman talking says she heard

      their voices at the crossroad

      one night last fall, and not

      a drop taken.

      The dead ride with us on this bus,

      whether we like it or not,

      discussing aunts and suicides,

      wars and the price of wheat,

      fogging the close air, hugging us,

      repeating their own deaths through these mouths,

      cramped histories, violent

      or sad, earthstained, defeated, proud,

      the pain in small print, like almanacs,

      mundane as knitting.

      In the darkness, each distant house

      glows and marks time,

      is as true in attics

      and cellars as in its steaming rich

      crackling and butter kitchens.

      The former owners, coupled and multiple,

      seep through the mottled plaster, sigh

      along the stairs they once rubbed concave

      with their stiff boots, still envious,

      breathe roasts and puddings through the floors;

      it's wise

      to set an extra plate.

      How else can you live but with the knowledge

      of old lives continuing in fading

      sepia blood under your feet?

      Outside, the moon is fossil

      white, the sky cold purple, the stars

      steely and har
    d; when there are trees they are dried

      coral; the snow

      is an unbroken spacelit

      desert through which we make

      our ordinary voyage,

      those who hear voices and those

      who do not, moving together, warm

      and for the moment safe,

      along the invisible road towards home.

      The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart

      It wasn't your crippled rhythm

      I could not forgive, or your dark red

      skinless head of a vulture

      but the things you hid:

      five words and my lost

      gold ring, the fine blue cup

      you said was broken,

      that stack of faces, gray

      and folded, you claimed

      we'd both forgotten,

      the other hearts you ate,

      and all that discarded time you hid

      from me, saying it never happened.

      There was that, and the way

      you would not be captured,

      sly featherless bird, fat raptor

      singing your raucous punctured song

      with your talons and your greedy eye

      lurking high in the molten sunset

      sky behind my left cloth breast

      to pounce on strangers.

      How many times have I told you:

      The civilized world is a zoo,

      not a jungle, stay in your cage.

      And then the shouts

      of blood, the rage as you threw yourself

      against my ribs.

      As for me, I would have strangled you

      gladly with both hands,

      squeezed you closed, also

      your yelps of joy.

      Life goes more smoothly without a heart,

      without that shiftless emblem,

      that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal

      eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks

      of hate, that vulgar magic,

      that organ the size and color

      of a scalded rat,

      that singed phoenix.

      But you've shoved me this far,

      old pump, and we're hooked

      together like conspirators, which

      we are, and just as distrustful.

      We know that, barring accidents,

      one of us will finally

      betray the other; when that happens,

      it's me for the urn, you for the jar.

      Until then, it's an uneasy truce,

      and honor between criminals.

      Solstice Poem

      i

      A tree hulks in the living-

      room, prickly monster, our hostage

      from the wilderness, prelude

      to light in this dark space of the year

      which turns again toward the sun

      today, or at least we hope so.

      Outside, a dead tree

      swarming with blue and yellow

      birds; inside, a living one

      that shimmers with hollow silver

      planets and wafer faces,

      salt and flour, with pearl

      teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear.

      This is our altar.

      ii

      Beyond the white hill which maroons us,

      out of sight of the white

      eye of the pond, geography

      is crumbling, the nation

      splits like an iceberg, factions

      shouting Good riddance from the floes

      as they all melt south,

      with politics the usual

      rats' breakfast.

      All politicians are amateurs:

      wars bloom in their heads like flowers

      on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps.

      Power is wine with lunch

      and the right pinstripes.

      There are no amateur soldiers.

      The soldiers grease their holsters,

      strap on everything

      they need to strap, gobble their dinners.

      They travel quickly and light.

      The fighting will be local,

      they know, and lethal.

      Their eyes flick from target

      to target: window, belly, child.

      The goal is not to get killed.

      ii

      As for the women, who did not

      want to be involved, they are involved.

      It's that blood on the snow

      which turns out to be not

      some bludgeoned or machine-gunned

      animal's, but your own

      that does it.

      Each has a knitting needle

      stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion

      heart complete with pins,

      a numbed body

      with one more entrance than the world finds safe,

      and not much money.

      Each fears her children sprout

      from the killed children of others.

      Each is right.

      Each has a father.

      Each has a mad mother

      and a necklace of lightblue tears.

      Each has a mirror

      which when asked replies Not you.

      iv

      My daughter crackles paper, blows

      on the tree to make it live, festoons

      herself with silver.

      So far she has no use

      for gifts.

      What can I give her,

      what armor, invincible

      sword or magic trick, when that year comes?

      How can I teach her

      some way of being human

      that won't destroy her?

      I would like to tell her, Love

      is enough, I would like to say,

      Find shelter in another skin.

      I would like to say, Dance

      and be happy. Instead I will say

      in my crone's voice, Be

      ruthless when you have to, tell

      the truth when you can,

      when you can see it.

      Iron talismans, and ugly, but

      more loyal than mirrors.

      v

      In this house (in a dying orchard,

      behind it a tributary

      of the wilderness, in front a road),

      my daughter dances

      unsteadily with a knitted bear.

      Her father, onetime soldier,

      touches my arm.

      Worn language clots our throats,

      making it difficult to say

      what we mean, making it

      difficult to see.

      Instead we sing in the back room, raising

      our pagan altar

      of oranges and silver flowers:

      our fools' picnic, our signal,

      our flame, our nest, our fragile golden

      protest against murder.

      Outside, the cries of the birds

      are rumors we hear clearly

      but can't yet understand. Fresh ice

      glints on the branches.

      In this dark

      space of the year, the earth

      turns again toward the sun, or

      we would like to hope so.

      Marsh, Hawk

      Diseased or unwanted

      trees, cut into pieces, thrown

      away here, damp and soft in the sun, rotting and half

      covered with sand, burst truck

      tires, abandoned, bottles and cans hit

      with rocks or bullets, a mass grave,

      someone made it, spreads on the

      land like a bruise and we stand on it, vantage

      point, looking out over the marsh.

      Expanse of green

      reeds, patches of water, shapes

      just out of reach of the eyes,

      the wind moves, moves it and it

      eludes us, it is full

      daylight. From the places

      we can't see, the guttural swamp voices

      impenetrable, not human,

      utter their one-note

      syllables, boring a
    nd

      significant as oracles and quickly over.

      It will not answer, it will not

      answer, though we hit

      it with rocks, there is a splash, the wind

      covers it over; but

      intrusion is not what we want,

      we want it to open, the marsh rushes

      to bend aside, the water

      to accept us, it is only

      revelation, simple as the hawk

      which lifts up now against

      the sun and into

      our eyes, wingspread and sharp call

      filling the head/sky, this,

      to immerse, to have it slide

      through us, disappearance

      of the skin, this is what we are looking for,

      the way in.

      A Red Shirt

      (For Ruth)

      i

     


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