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    Selected Poems II (1976-1986)

    Page 6
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      the sticky air which pulses

      with moths, their powdery wings and velvet

      tongues. In the dusk, nighthawks and the fluting

      voices from the pond, its edges

      webbed with spawn. Everything

      leans into the pulpy moon.

      In the mornings the hens

      make egg after egg, warty-shelled

      and perfect; the henhouse floor

      packed with old shit and winter straw

      trembles with flies, green and silver.

      Who wants to leave it, who wants it

      to end, water moving

      against water, skin

      against skin? We wade

      through moist sun-

      light towards nothing, which is oval

      and full. This egg

      in my hand is our last meal,

      you break it open and the sky

      turns orange again and the sun rises

      again and this is the last day again.

      From INTERLUNAR (1984)

      From SNAKE POEMS

      Snake Woman

      I was once the snake woman,

      the only person, it seems, in the whole place

      who wasn't terrified of them.

      I used to hunt with two sticks

      among milkweed and under porches and logs

      for this vein of cool green metal

      which would run through my fingers like mercury

      or turn to a raw bracelet

      gripping my wrist:

      I could follow them by their odor,

      a sick smell, acid and glandular,

      part skunk, part inside

      of a torn stomach,

      the smell of their fear.

      Once caught, I'd carry them,

      limp and terrorized, into the dining room,

      something even men were afraid of.

      What fun I had!

      Put that thing in my bed and I'll kill you.

      Now, I don't know.

      Now I'd consider the snake.

      Bad Mouth

      There are no leaf-eating snakes.

      All are fanged and gorge on blood.

      Each one is a hunter's hunter,

      nothing more than an endless gullet

      pulling itself on over the still-alive prey

      like a sock gone ravenous, like an evil glove,

      like sheer greed, lithe and devious.

      Puff adder buried in hot sand

      or poisoning the toes of boots,

      for whom killing is easy and careless

      as war, as digestion,

      why should you be spared?

      And you, Constrictor constrictor,

      sinuous ribbon of true darkness,

      one long muscle with eyes and an anus,

      looping like thick tar out of the trees

      to squeeze the voice from anything edible,

      reducing it to scales and belly.

      And you, pit viper

      with your venomous pallid throat

      and teeth like syringes

      and your nasty radar

      homing in on the deep red shadow

      nothing else knows it casts...

      Shall I concede these deaths?

      Between us there is no fellow feeling,

      as witness: a snake cannot scream.

      Observe the alien

      chainmail skin, straight out

      of science fiction, pure

      shiver, pure Saturn.

      Those who can explain them

      can explain anything.

      Some say they're a snarled puzzle

      only gasoline and a match can untangle.

      Even their mating is barely sexual,

      a romance between two lengths

      of cyanide-colored string.

      Despite their live births and squirming nests

      it's hard to believe in snakes loving.

      Alone among the animals

      the snake does not sing.

      The reason for them is the same

      as the reason for stars, and not human.

      Eating Snake

      I too have taken the god into my mouth,

      chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones.

      Rattlesnake it was, panfried

      and good too though a little oily.

      (Forget the phallic symbolism:

      two differences:

      snake tastes like chicken,

      and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?)

      All peoples are driven

      to the point of eating their gods

      after a time: it's the old greed

      for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,

      the lust to feel what it does to you

      when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,

      when you swallow it down

      and you can see with its own cold eyes,

      look out through murder.

      This is a lot of fuss to make about mere lunch:

      metaphysics with onions.

      The snake was not served with its tail in its mouth

      as would have been appropriate.

      Instead the cook nailed the skin to the wall,

      complete with rattles, and the head was mounted.

      It was only a snake after all.

      (Nevertheless, the authorities are agreed:

      God is round.)

      Metempsychosis

      Somebody's grandmother glides through the bracken,

      in widow's black and graceful

      and sharp as ever: see how her eyes glitter!

      Who were you when you were a snake?

      This one was a dancer who is now

      a green streamer waved by its own breeze

      and here's your blunt striped uncle, come back

      to bask under the wicker chairs

      on the porch and watch over you.

      Unfurling itself from its cast skin,

      the snake proclaims resurrection

      to all believers

      though some tire soon of being born

      over and over; for them there's the breath

      that shivers in the yellow grass,

      a papery finger, half of a noose, a summons

      to the dead river.

      Who's that in the cold cellar

      with the apples and the rats? Whose is

      that voice of a husk rasping in the wind?

      Your lost child whispering Mother,

      the one more child you never had,

      your child who wants back in.

      Psalm to Snake

      O snake, you are an argument

      for poetry:

      a shift among dry leaves

      when there is no wind,

      a thin line moving through

      that which is not

      time, creating time,

      a voice from the dead, oblique

      and silent. A movement

      from left to right,

      a vanishing. Prophet under a stone.

      I know you're there

      even when I can't see you

      I see the trail you make

      in the blank sand, in the morning

      I see the point

      of intersection, the whiplash

      across the eye. I see the kill.

      O long word, cold-blooded and perfect

      Quattrocento

      The snake enters your dreams through paintings:

      this one, of a formal garden

      in which there are always three:

      the thin man with the green-white skin

      that marks him vegetarian

      and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts

      that look stuck on

      and the snake, vertical and with a head

      that's face-colored and haired like a woman's.

      Everyone looks unhappy,

      even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun,

      even the angel who's like a slab

      of flaming laundry, hovering

      up there with his sword of fire,

      unable a
    s yet to strike.

      There's no love here.

      Maybe it's the boredom.

      And that's no apple but a heart

      torn out of someone

      in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.

      This is the possibility of death

      the snake is offering:

      death upon death squeezed together,

      a blood snowball.

      To devour it is to fall out

      of the still unending noon

      to a hard ground with a straight horizon

      and you are no longer the

      idea of a body but a body,

      you slide down into your body as into hot mud.

      You feel the membranes of disease

      close over your head, and history

      occurs to you and space enfolds

      you in its armies, in its nights, and you

      must learn to see in darkness.

      Here you can praise the light,

      having so little of it:

      it's the death you carry in you

      red and captured, that makes the world

      shine for you

      as it never did before.

      This is how you learn prayer.

      Love is choosing, the snake said.

      The kingdom of God is within you

      because you ate it.

      After Heraclitus

      The snake is one name of God,

      my teacher said:

      All nature is a fire

      we burn in and are

      renewed, one skin

      shed and then another.

      To talk with the body

      is what the snake does, letter

      after letter formed on the grass,

      itself a tongue, looping its earthy hieroglyphs,

      the sunlight praising it

      as it shines there on the doorstep,

      a green light blessing your house.

      This is the voice

      you could pray to for the answers

      to your sickness:

      leave it a bowl of milk,

      watch it drink

      You do not pray, but go for the shovel,

      old blood on the blade

      But pick it up and you would hold

      the darkness that you fear

      turned flesh and embers,

      cool power coiling into your wrists

      and it would be in your hands

      where it always has been.

      This is the nameless one

      giving itself a name,

      one among many

      and your own name as well.

      You know this and still kill it.

      ***

      From INTERLUNAR

      Bedside

      You sit beside the bed

      in the extremis ward, holding your father's feet

      as you have not done since you were a child.

      You would hold his hands, but they are strapped down,

      emptied at last of power.

      He can see, possibly, the weave of the sheet

      that covers him from chest to ankles;

      he does not wish to.

      He has been opened. He is at the mercy.

      You hold his feet,

      not moving. You would like

      to drag him back. You remember

      how you have judged each other

      in silence, relentlessly.

      You listen intently, as if for a signal,

      to the undersea ping of the monitors,

      the waterlogged lungs breathed into by machines,

      the heart, wired for sound

      and running too quickly in the stuck body,

      the murderous body, the body

      itself stalled in a field of ice

      that spreads out endlessly under it,

      the snowdrifts tucked by the wind around

      the limbs and torso.

      Now he is walking

      somewhere you cannot follow,

      leaving no footprints.

      Already in this whiteness

      he casts no shadow.

      Precognition

      Living backwards means only

      I must suffer everything twice.

      Those picnics were already loss:

      with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway.

      What good did it do me to know

      how far along you would come with me

      and when you would return?

      By yourself, to a life you call daily.

      You did not consider me a soul

      but a landscape, not even one

      I recognize as mine, but foreign

      and rich in curios:

      an egg of blue marble,

      a dried pod,

      a clay goddess you picked up at a stall

      somewhere among the dun and dust-green

      hills and the bronze-hot

      sun and the odd shadows,

      not knowing what would be protection,

      or even the need for it then.

      I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway

      shattered, and the glass and blood,

      from an intersection that has happened

      already, though I can't say when.

      Simply that it will happen.

      What could I tell you now that would keep you

      safe or warn you?

      What good would it do?

      Live and be happy.

      I would rather cut myself loose

      from time, shave off my hair

      and stand at a crossroads

      with a wooden bowl, throwing

      myself on the dubious mercy

      of the present, which is innocent

      and forgetful and hits the eye bare

      and without words and without even

      than do this mourning over.

      Keep

      I know that you will die

      before I do.

      Already your skin tastes faintly

      of the acid that is eating through you.

      None of this, none of this is true,

      no more than a leaf is botany,

      along this avenue of old maples

      the birds fall down through the branches

      as the long slow rain of small bodies

      falls like snow through the darkening sea,

      wet things in turn move up out of the earth,

      your body is liquid in my hands, almost

      a piece of solid water.

      Time is what we're doing,

      I'm falling into the flesh,

      into the sadness of the body

      that cannot give up its habits,

      habits of the hands and skin.

      I will be one of those old women

      with good bones and stringy necks

      who will not let go of anything.

      You'll be there. You'll keep

      your distance,

      the same one.

      Anchorage

      This is the sea then, once

      again, warm this time

      and swarming. Sores fester

      on your feet in the tepid

      beach water, where French

      wine bottles float among grape-

      fruit peels and the stench of death

      from the piles of sucked-out shells

      and emptied lunches.

      Here is a pool with nurse sharks

      kept for the tourists

      and sea turtles scummy with algae,

      winging their way through their closed

      heaven of dirty stones. Here

      is where the good ship Envious

      rides at anchor.

      The land is red with hibiscus

      and smells of piss; and here

      beside the houses built on stilts,

      warped in the salt and heat,

      they plant their fathers in the yards,

      cover them with cement

      tender as blankets:

      Drowned at sea, the same one

      the mermaids swim in, hairy

      and pallid, with rum on the beach after.

     
    But that's a day trip.

      Further along, there are tents

      where the fishers camp,

      cooking their stews of claws

      and spines, and at dawn they steer

      further out than you'd think

      possible, between the killer

      water and the killer sun,

      carried on hollow pieces

      of wood with the names of women,

      not sweethearts

      only but mothers, clumsy

      and matronly, though their ribbed bodies

      are fragile as real bodies

     


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