strikers shot down at Pullman and Republic Steel,
women bled to death of abortions men made illegal,
sold, penned in asylums, lobotomized, raped and torn open,
every black killed by police, national guard, mobs and armies.
Live in us: give us your strength, give us your counsel,
give us your rage and your will to come at last into the light.
I fear the trial, I fear the struggle, it parches and withers me.
I fear the violence into whose teeth we march.
I long for the outcome with every cheated cell.
We shall all waken finally to being human.
I was trained to be numb, I was born to be numbered and pegged,
I was bred and conditioned to passivity, like a milk cow.
Waking is the sharpest pain I have ever known.
Every barrier that goes down takes part of my flesh
leaving me bloody. How can I live wide open?
Why must I think of you and you before I take a bite?
Why must I look to my sister before I scratch my itch?
I used to shuffle and giggle. I kept my eyes down
tucking my shoulders in so I would not rub the walls
of the rut, the place, the role.
Now anger blisters me.
My pride rumbles, sputtering lava.
Every day is dangerous and glad.
“Why do you choose to be noisy, to fight, to make trouble?”
you ask me, not understanding I have been born raw and new.
I can be killed with ease, I can be cut right down,
but I cannot crawl back in the cavern
where I lay with my neck bowed.
I have grown. I am not by myself.
I am too many.
OUTCOME OF THE MATTER:
The sun
Androgynous child whose hair curls into flowers,
naked you ride a horse without saddle or bridle
easy between your thighs from the walled garden outward.
Coarse sunflowers of desire whose seeds birds crack open
nod upon your journey, child of the morning whose sun
can only be born from us who strain bleeding to give birth.
Grow into your horse, let there be
no more riders or ridden.
Child, where are you heading with arms spread wide
as a shore, have I been there, have I seen that land shining
like sun spangles on clean water rippling?
I do not know your dances, I cannot translate your tongue
to words I use, your pleasures are strange to me
as the rites of bees: yet you are the yellow flower
of a melon vine growing out of my belly
though it climbs up where I cannot see in the strong light.
My eyes cannot decipher those shapes of children or burning clouds
who are not what we are: they go barefoot like savages,
they have computers as household pets; they are seven sexes
and only one sex; they do not own or lease or control.
They are of one body and of tribes. They are private as shamans
learning each her own magic at the teats of stones and trees.
They are all technicians and peasants.
They do not forget their birthright of self
or their mane of animal pride
dancing in and out through the gates of the body standing wide.
A bear lumbering, I waddle into the fields of their work games.
We are stunted slaves mumbling over the tales
of dragons our masters tell us, but we will be free.
Our children will be free of us uncomprehending
as we of those shufflers in caves who scraped for fire
and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,
the giant cave bear, predators
that had penned them up cowering so long.
The sun is rising, feel it: the air smells fresh.
I cannot look in the sun’s face, its brightness blinds me,
but from my own shadow becoming distinct
I know that now at last
it is beginning to grow light.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
TO BE OF USE
From LIVING IN THE OPEN
Living in the open
1.
People ask questions
but never too many.
They are listening for the button to push
to make it go away.
They wait for me to confess
nights hollowed out with jealousy.
Or people say, Isn’t that interesting
and believe nothing.
I must be public
as a dish of hors d’oeuvres on a bar.
I must hunt the shrubbery of couches for prey.
Loving not packaged in couples
shivers cracks down the closed world, the nuclear
at the base of the brain.
Can you imagine not having to lie?
To try to tell what you feel and want
till sometimes you can even see
each other clear and strange
as a photograph of your hand.
2.
We are all hustling and dealing
as we broil on the iron grates of the city.
Our minds charred, we collide and veer off.
Hard and spiny, we taste of DDT.
We trade each other in.
Talk is a poker game,
bed is a marketplace,
love is a soggy trap.
Property breeds theft and possession,
betrayal, the vinegar of contempt.
This woman, does she measure up?
This man, can I do better?
Each love is a purchase that can be returned
if it doesn’t fit.
Hard as building a wall of sand.
Hard as gathering blackberries naked
in the thorny sprawl of a bramble.
Hard as saying I’ve made a mistake
and you were right.
How hard to love.
How painful to be friends.
My life frays into refuse,
parts of broken appliances,
into tapes recorded over, photographs
of people I no longer talk to
even on the phone.
How loud too the clash of my needs
in my pockets as I run to you
keys and coins jangling.
My hungers yowl and scrap in the gutter.
I will wring you for a few drops of reassurance.
My fears are telling the beads of your spine.
To hear your voice over the subway roar
of my will requires discipline.
No more lovers, no more husbands,
no masters or mistresses, contracts, no affairs,
only friends.
No more trade-ins or betrayals,
only the slow accretion of community,
hand on hand.
Help me to be clear and useful.
Help me to help you.
You are not my insurance, not my vacation,
not my romance, not my job, not my garden.
You wear your own flags and colors and your own names.
I will never have you.
I am a friend who loves you.
I awoke with the room cold
I awoke with the room cold and my cat
Arofa kneading my belly.
I had been walking around the lower east side
while from every alley and fruit market and stoop,
out from under the ravaged cars,
the cats came running to me.
All the cats had heard I was moving to the country
because of my lungs
and they began to cough and sneeze and
whine.
All the starving rat-gnawed rickety spavined cats
of the lower east side with their fleas and worms
and their siren of hunger
followed me through the teeming blocks.
They threw themselves under the wheels of trucks
in an effort to keep up.
They were rubbing my ankles and yowling
that I must take every one of them along.
They wanted to breathe air that was not stained.
They wanted to roll on wet grass.
They wanted to chase a bird that wasn’t a dirty pigeon.
Then the demands of the cats were drowned out.
As I ran, all of the eleven and twelve and thirteen year olds
who had died of skag in the smoking summer
began to miaou and miaou and miaou
till all of New York was white with pain like snow.
Gracious goodness
On the beach where we had been idly
telling the shell coins
cat’s paw, cross-barred Venus, china cockle,
we both saw at once
the sea bird fall to the sand
and flap grotesquely.
He had taken a great barbed hook
out through the cheek and fixed
in the big wing.
He was pinned to himself to die,
a royal tern with a black crest blown back
as if he flew in his own private wind.
He felt good in my hands, not fragile
but muscular and glossy and strong,
the beak that could have split my hand
opening only to cry
as we yanked on the barbs.
We borrowed a clippers, cut and drew out the hook.
Then the royal tern took off, wavering,
lurched twice,
then acrobat returned to his element, dipped,
zoomed, and sailed out to dive for a fish.
Virtue: what a sunrise in the belly.
Why is there nothing
I have ever done with anybody
that seems to me so obviously right?
Homesick
Finally I have a house
where I return.
House half into the hillside,
wood that will weather to the wind’s grey,
house built on sand
drawing water like a tree from its roots
where my roots too are set
and I return.
Where the men rode crosscountry on their dirt bikes in October
the hog cranberry will not grow back.
This land is vulnerable like my own flesh.
In New York the land seems cast out by a rolling mill
except where ancient gneiss pokes through.
Plains and mountain dwarf the human, seeming permanent,
but Indians were chasing mammoth with Folsom points
before glacial debris piled up Cape Cod where I return.
The colonists found beech and oak trees high as steeples
and chopped them down.
When Thor eau hiked from Sandwich outward
he crossed a desert
for they had farmed the land until it blew away
and slaughtered the whales and seals extinct.
Here you must make the frail dirt where your food grows.
Fertility is created of human castings and the sea’s.
In the intertidal beach around each sand grain
swims a minute world dense with life.
Each oil slick wipes out galaxies.
Here we all lie on the palm of the poisoned sea our mother
where life began and is now ending
and we return.
Seedlings in the mail
Like mail order brides
they are lacking in glamor.
Drooping and frail and wispy,
they are orphaned waifs of some green catastrophe
from which only they have been blown to safety
swaddled in a few wraiths of sphagnum moss.
Windbreaks, orchards, forests of the mind
they huddle in the dirt
smaller than our cats.
The catalog said they would grow
to stand one hundred feet tall.
I could plant them in the bathroom.
I could grow them in window pots,
twelve trees to an egg carton.
I could dig four into the pockets of my jeans.
I could wear some in my hair
or my armpits.
Ah, for people like us, followed
by forwarding addresses and dossiers and limping causes
it takes a crazy despairing faith
full of teeth as a jack o’lantern
to plant pine and fir and beech
for somebody else’s grandchildren,
if there are any.
The daily life of the worker bee
We breed plants, order seeds from
the opulent pornography of the catalogs,
plant, weed, fertilize, water.
But the flowers do not shine for us.
Forty days of life, working like a housewife
with six kids in diapers, at it like an oil rig pumping.
With condescension we pass on: busy as a bee.
Yet for them the green will of the plants
has thrust out colors, odors, the shapely trumpets and cups.
As the sun strikes the petals, the flower uncurls,
the bees come glinting and singing.
Now she crawls into the crimson rooms of the rose
where perfume reddens the air to port wine.
Marigolds sturdy in the grass barking like golden chow dogs
cry their wares to her. Enter. Devour me!
In her faceted eyes each image reverberates.
Cumulus clouds of white phlox
pile up for her in the heat of the sunburnt day.
Down into the soft well of the summer lilies,
cerise, citron, umber, rufous orange,
anthers with their palate of pollen
tremble as she enters.
She rubs her quivering fur
into each blue bell of the borage.
In the chamber of the peony she is massaged with silk.
Forty days she is drunk with nectar.
Each blossom utters fragrance to entice her,
offers up its soft flanks, its maddening colors,
its sweet and pungent fluids.
She never mates: her life is orgasm of all senses.
She dies one morning exhausted in the lap of the rose.
Like love letters turned up in an attic trunk
her honey remains to sweeten us.
Cod summer
June is the floodtide of green,
wet and lush and leafy, heavyladen.
In full summer the grass bleaches
to sand, hue of grasshoppers on the dunes.
The marsh begins to bronze.
Hot salty afternoons: the sun
stuns. Drops on our heads like a stone.
Among the pitch pines the sparse shade
simmers with resin.
Crickets shiver the air.
The path is white sand shimmering
leading down from the hill of scrub oak
crusty with lichens, reindeer moss,
ripe earth stars scattering their spores.
Nothing commands the eye
except the sea at the horizon.
We must actively look: textures
of ground cover, poverty grass, bearberry,
lowbush blueberry, wood lily, Virginia rose.
The dusty beach plums range on the gnarled branch
from soft dull green through blush and purple
like a tourist’s sunset in miniature.
Sandy, dwarfed, particular
this landscape yields nothing from a car.
A salt marsh must be learned on foot, wad
ing,
lumbering in the muck, hopping tussocks of salt meadow grass,
hay arising sideways from last year’s fallen harvest.
The marsh clicks and rustles
with fiddler crabs scuttling to their holes.
The blue-eyed grass has bloomed.
Now we find fat joints of samphire
turning orange, the intricate sea lavender.
Under us the tide undulates
percolating through the layers, slithering
with its smell of life feeding and renewing
like my own flesh after sex.
We go in this landscape together learning it
barefoot and studious with our guides in a knapsack
catching Fowler’s toads and letting them go.
A proposal for recycling wastes
Victim not of an accident
but of a life that was accidental
she sprawls on the nursing
home bed: has a photo
of herself at seventeen with long
brown hair, face paprikaed
with freckles, like a granddaughter
who may live
in San Diego. In Decatur
love picked her up
by the scruff and after
out of work wandering dumped
her in Back of the Yards Chicago.
A broken nose, the scar of love;
stretch marks and a tooth lost
each child, love like
tuberculosis, it happens.
And generation used
her like a rutted highway
the heavy trucks trundling
their burdens all day and all
night. Her body was a thing
stuffed, swollen, convulsed
empty, producing for the state
and Jesus three soldiers and one
sailor, two more breeding wombs
and a (defunct) prostitute.
The surviving corporal drives
hack, one mother waits tables;
the other typed, married into
the suburbs and is den
mother to cubscouts.