The husband, cocksman, luckless
horse and numbersplayer, security
guard and petty thief, died
at fifty-six of cancer
of the colon.
Now like an abandoned car
she has been towed here
to fall apart.
She wastes, drugged,
in a spreading pool
of urine.
Surely she could be used,
her eyes, her heart
still strangely sturdy,
her one good kidney
could be salvaged for the rich
who are too valuable at seventy-four
to throw away.
The bumpity road to mutual devotion
Do you remember the first raw winter
of our women’s group, both of us fierce as mother bears?
Every day came down like a pile driver in the morning
shaking the bed empty
stomping sleep like a run-over bag.
Our pain was new, a too sharp kitchen knife.
We bled on everything we touched.
I could hardly type for scars.
Rage sang like a coloratura doing trills
in my head as I ricocheted up male streets.
You came on like a sergeant of marines.
You were freshly ashamed of your beauty
believing if you frowned a lot no one
would notice your face.
The group defined us the strong ones
loved us, hated us, baited us, set us
one on the other. We met
almost clandestinely. You brought flowers.
We praised lesbian love intellectually, looking
hard in each other’s black eyes, and each stayed
on her side of the kitchen exuding
a nervous whine like an avalanche of white mice.
What a rutted road through thick gassy clouds of nightmare,
political bedlam. Each has let
the other down and picked her up.
We will never be lovers; too scared
of losing each other. What tantalizes past flesh
—too mirrored, lush, dark haired and soft in the belly—
is the strange mind rasping, clanging, engaging.
What we fantasize—rising like a bird kite
on the hot afternoon air—is work together.
Projects, battles, schemes, manifestoes
are born from the brushing of wills
like small sparks from loose hair,
and will we let them fade, static electricity?
What shall we do before
they crush us? How far will we travel
to no country on earth?
What houses should we build? and which tear down?
what chapels, what bridges, what power stations
and stations of that burning green energy
beyond the destruction of power?
Trust me with your hand. For us to be friends
is a mating of eagle and ostrich, from both sides.
On Castle Hill
As we wandered through the hill of graves,
men lost at sea, women in childbirth,
slabs on which were thriftily listed
nine children like drowned puppies,
all the Susan-B-wife-of-Joshua-Stones,
a woman in a long calico gown strolled toward us
bells jangling at waist, at wrists,
lank brown hair streaming.
We spoke to her but she smiled only
and drifted on into the overgrown woods.
Suppose, you said, she is a ghost.
You repeated a tale from Castanada
about journeying toward one’s childhood
never arriving but encountering
on the way many people, all dead,
journeying toward the land of heart’s desire.
I would not walk a foot into my childhood,
I said, picking blackberries for you to taste,
large, moist and sweet as your eyes.
My land of desire is the marches
of the unborn. The dead
are powerless to grant us
wishes, their struggles
are the wave that carried us here.
Our wind blows on toward those hills
we will never see.
From Sand Roads
7. The development
The bulldozers come, they rip
a hole in the sand along
the new blacktop road with a tony name
(Trotting Park, Pamet Hills)
and up goes another glass-walled-
split-level-livingroom-vast-as-a-
roller-rink-$100,000
summer home for a psychiatrist
and family.
Nine months vacation homes
stand empty except for mice
and spiders, an occasional
bird with a broken back twitching
on the deck under a gape of glass.
I live in such a development
way at the end of a winding
road where the marsh begins
to close in: two houses,
the one next door a local
fisherman lost to the bank
last winter, ours a box
half buried in the sand.
This land is rendered
too expensive
to live on. We feed
four people off it,
a kind of organic tall corn
ornery joke at road’s end.
We planted for the birds cover
and berries, we compost, we set out
trees and at night
the raccoons come shambling.
Yet the foxes left us,
shrinking into the marsh.
I found their new den.
I don’t show it
to anyone.
Forgive us, grey fox, our stealing
your home, our loving
this land carved into lots
over a shrinking watertable
where the long sea wind that blows
the sand whispers to developers
money, money, money.
8. The road behind the last dune
Mostly you don’t see the ocean
although when the surf is up
its roaring fills you
like a shell,
whistling through your
ears, your bones.
Nothing stands up here
but you, in the steady
rasp of the salt wind.
The oaks grow a foot high
dry gnarled jungles
you can’t wade through
where eyes watch.
The hog cranberry bronze
in the fall, shines
metallically revealing
every hump.
The dune grass ripples
like a pelt, and around every
clump is traced a circle,
fingers of the wind.
Fox grape on the high dunes,
poison ivy whose bright berries
the birds carry in their bodies
to scatter, the dune
colored grasshoppers,
the fox with fur of fine sand.
You are standing too tall for
this landscape. Lie down.
Let the grass blow
over you. Let the plover
pipe, the kestrel stand beating its wings
in the air, the wolf spider
come to the door of its burrow,
the mouse nibble on
your toe. Let the beach pea
entangle your legs in its vine
and ring you with purple blossoms.
Now get up slowly
and seek a way down off the dunes,
carefully: your heavy feet
assault the balance.
Come down on the bench
of the great beach arching
away into fog.
Lie down before the ocean.
It rises over you, it stands
hissing and spreading its
cobalt hood, rattling
its pebbles.
Cold it is and its rhythm
as it eats away the beach,
as it washes the dunes out to sea
to build new spits and islands,
enters your blood and slows
the beat of that newish contraption
your heart controlling the waves
of your inward salt sea.
Let your mind open
like a clam when the waters
slide back to feed it.
Plow out to the ancient cold
mothering embrace, cold
as a fish, over the buried
wrecks. Then with respect
let the breakers drive you
up and out into
the heavy air, your heart
pounding. The warm scratchy sand
like a receiving blanket
holds you up gasping with life.
Rough times
for Nancy Henley
We are trying to live
as if we were an experiment
conducted by the future,
blasting cell walls
that no protective seal or inhibition
has evolved to replace.
I am conducting a slow vivisection
on my own tissues, carried out
under the barking muzzle of guns.
Those who speak of good and simple
in the same sandwich of tongue and teeth
inhabit some other universe.
Good draws blood from my scalp and files my nerves.
Good runs the yard engine of the night over my bed.
Good pickles me in the brown vinegar of guilt.
Good robs the easy words as they rattle off my teeth,
leaving me naked as an egg.
Remember that pregnancy is beautiful only
at a distance from the distended belly.
A new idea rarely is born like Venus attended by graces.
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Most mutants die: only
a minority refract the race
through the prisms of their genes.
Those slimy fish with air sacs were ugly
as they hauled up on the mud flats
heaving and gasping. How clumsy we are
in this new air we reach with such effort
and cannot yet breathe.
Phyllis wounded
To fight history as it carries us,
to swim upstream across the currents—no!—
to move the river, to create new currents
with the force of our arms and backs,
to shape this torrent as it shapes us
flowing, churning, dragging us under
into the green moil where the breath is pummeled
from the lungs and the eyes burst backward,
among rocks, the teeth of the white water
grinning like hungry bears,
ah, Phyllis, you complain too much!
We all carry in the gold lockets
of the good birthday child sentimental
landscapes in pale mauve where we have
everything we desire carried in on trays
serene as jade buddhas,
respectable as Jane Austen,
secure as an obituary in the Times.
We were not made for a heaven of Sundays.
Most people are given hunger, the dim pain
of being used twisting through the bowels,
close walls and a low sky, troubles visited
from above like tornadoes that level the house,
pain early, pain late, and a death not chosen.
My friend, the amazons were hideous
with the white scars of knife wounds,
the welts of sword slashes, flesh that would
remind nobody of a ripe peach.
But age sucks us all dry.
Old campaigners waken to the resonant singing
of angels of pillars of fire and pillars of ash
that only trouble the sleep of women
who climb on a platform or crouch at a barricade.
Your smile is rich with risk
and subtle with enemies contested.
Your memories whistle and clang and moan
in the dark like buoys that summon
and give warning of danger
and the channel through.
I was not born a serf bound to a ryefield,
I was not born to bend over a pressing machine
in a loft while the sun rose and set, I was not born
to starve in the first year with big
belly and spindly legs, I was not born
to be gang raped by soldiers at fourteen,
I was not born to die in childbirth,
to be burned at the stake by the Church,
but of all these we are the daughters
born of luck round as an apple
and fat as a goose, to charge into battle
swinging our great-grandmother’s bones.
Millions of dead women keen in our hair
for food and freedom, the electricity
drives me humming. What privilege
to be the heiresses of so much wanting!
How can we ever give up?
Our laughter has been honed by adversity
till it gleams like an ax
Rape poem
There is no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that the wounds also bleed inside.
There is no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it.
There is no difference between being raped
and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake
except that people ask if your skirt was short
and why you were out alone anyhow.
There is no difference between being raped
and going head first through a windshield
except that afterward you are afraid
not of cars
but half the human race.
The rapist is your boyfriend’s brother.
He sits beside you in the movies eating popcorn.
Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male
like a maggot in garbage.
Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing
all of the time on a woman’s hunched back.
Never to stroll alone on a sand road through pine woods,
never to climb a trail across a bald
without that aluminum in the mouth
when I see a man climbing toward me.
Never to open the door to a knock
without that razor just grazing the throat.
The fear of the dark side of hedges,
the back seat of the car, the empty house
rattling keys like a snake’s warning.
The fear of the smiling man
in whose pocket is a knife.
The fear of the serious man
in whose fist is locked hatred.
All it takes to cast a rapist is seeing your body
as jackhammer, as blowtorch, as adding-machine-gun.
All it takes is hating that body
your own, your self, your muscle that softens to flab.
All it takes is to push what you hate,
what you fear onto the soft alien flesh.
To bucket out invincible as a tank
armored with treads without senses
to possess and punish in one act,
to rip up pleasure, to murder those who dare
live in th
e leafy flesh open to love.
The consumer
My eyes catch and stick
as I wade in bellysoft heat.
Tree of miniature chocolates filled with liqueur,
tree of earrings tinkling in the mink wind,
of Bach oratorios spinning light at 33⅓,
tree of Thailand silks murmuring changes.
Pluck, eat and grow heavy.
From each hair a wine bottle dangles.
A toaster is strung through my nose.
An elevator is installed in my spine.
The mouth of the empire
eats onward through the apple of all.
Armies of brown men
are roasted into coffee beans,
are melted into chocolate,
are pounded into copper.
Their blood is refined into oil,
black river oozing rainbows
of affluence.
Their bodies shrink
to grains of rice.
I have lost my knees.
I am the soft mouth of the caterpillar.
People and landscapes are my food
and I grow fat and blind.
The provocation of the dream
In the suburbs of the ganglia,
in the tract houses of the split-level brain,
in the bulldozed bowling alleys where staked saplings
shiver like ostriches in a zoo,
on streets empty of people
that dead-end at the expressway where cars bullet by,
in egg carton bedrooms, the dream is secreted.
On the clambering vines of the fingers
hard green dreams shape around seeds.
Sour enough to scald the tongue,
bitter with tannin and acid,
hard as granite chips, will these grapes ripen to give wine?
In the red Tau of the womb
dreams clot, clump, a dense pale smear
like a nebula.
Who has known this woman?
This woman has known herself.
The wind impregnated me,
the wind galloping with tangled mane through the brush
with burrs snarled in the shimmering coat.
The wind fills me, I am her sail and shoot before.
The wind slips through the tawny feathered grass
and enters my breath.