Any contact could give sudden sharp pain.
2.
All too long I have been carrying a weight
balanced on my head: a large iron pot
supposed to hold something. Only now
when I have been forced to put it down,
do I find it empty except for a gritty stain
on the bottom. You have told me
this exercise was good for my posture.
Why then did my back always ache?
3.
All too often I have wakened at night
with that weight crouched on my chest,
an attack dog pinning me down. I would
open my eyes and see its eyes glowing
like the grates of twin coal furnaces
in red and hot menacing regard.
A low growl sang in its chest, vibrating
into my chest and belly its warning.
4.
If it rained for three weeks in August,
you knew I had caused it by weeping.
If your paper was not accepted, I had
corrupted the judges or led you astray
into beaches, dinner parties and cleaning
the house when you could have been working
an eighteen-hour day. If a woman would not
return the importunate pressure of your hand
on her shoulder, it was because I was watching
or because you believed she thought I
was watching. My watching and my looking away
equally displeased. Whatever I gave you
was wrong. It did not cost enough;
it cost too much. It was too fancy, for
that week you were a revolutionary
trekking on dry bread salted with sweat
and rhetoric. It was too plain; that week
you were the superb connoisseur whose palate
could be struck like a tuning fork only
by the perfect, to sing its true note.
5.
Wife was a box you kept pushing me down
into like a trunk crammed to overflowing
with off-season clothes, whose lid
you must push on to shut. You sat
on my head. You sat on my belly.
I kept leaking out like laughing
gas and you held your nose
lest I infect you with outrageous joy.
Gradually you lowered all the tents
of our pleasures and stowed them away.
We could not walk together in dunes or
marsh. No talk or travel. You would only fuck
in one position on alternate Thursdays
if the moon was in the right ascendancy.
Go and do with others all the things
you told me we could not afford.
Your anger was a climate I inhabited
like a desert in dry frigid weather
of high thin air and ivory sun,
sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging
clouds that blinded and choked me,
where my flesh froze to black ice.
Very late July
July in the afternoon, the sky
rings, a crystal goblet without a crack.
One gull passes over mewing for company.
A tiger swallowtail hovers near magenta
phlox, while a confetti cloud
of fritillaries covers the goldenglow.
Half under the tent of my skirt, my cat
blinks at the day, content watching,
allowing the swallowtail to light
within paw reach, purring too softly
to be heard, only the vibration from his
brown chest buzzing into my palm.
Among the scarlet blossoms of the runner
beans twining on their tripods
the hummingbird darts like a jet fighter.
Today in think tanks, the data analysts
not on vacation are playing war games.
A worker is packing plutonium by remote
control into new warheads. An adviser
is telling a president as they golf,
we could win it. July without a crack
as we live inside the great world egg.
Mornings in various years
1.
To wake and see the day piled up
before me like dirty dishes: I have
lived years knitting a love that
he would unravel, as if Penelope
spent every night making a warm
sweater that Odysseus would tear
in his careless diurnal anger.
2.
Waking alone I would marshal my tasks
like battalions of wild geese to bear me
up on the wings of duty over
the checkered fields of other lives.
Breakfast was hardest. I would trip
on ghostly shards of broken
domestic routines that entangled
my cold ankles as the cats yowled
to be fed, and so did I.
3.
I wake with any two cats, victors
of the nightly squabble of who
sleeps where, and beside me, you,
your morning sleepyhead big as a field
pumpkin, sleep caught in your fuzzy
hair like leaves. The sun pours in
sweet as orange juice or the rain licks
the windows with its tongue or the snow
softly packs the house in cotton batting.
This opal dawn glows from the center
as we both open our eyes and reach out
asking, are you there? You! You’re
there, the unblemished day before us
like a clean white ironstone platter
waiting to be filled.
Digging in
This fall you will taste carrots
you planted, you thinned, you mulched,
you weeded and watered.
You don’t know yet how sweet
they will taste, how yours.
This earth is yours as you love it.
We drink the water of this hill
and give our garbage to its soil.
We haul thatch for it and seaweed.
Out of it rise supper and roses
for the bedroom and herbs
for your next cold.
Your flesh grows out of this hill
like the maple trees. Its sweetness
is baked by this sun. Your eyes
have taken in sea and the light leaves
of the locust and the dark bristles
of the pine.
When we work in the garden you say
that now it feels sexual, the plants
pushing through us, the shivering
of the leaves. As we make love
later the oaks bend over us,
the hill listens.
The cats come and sit on the foot
of the bed to watch us.
Afterward they purr.
The tomatoes grow faster and the beans.
You are learning to live in circles
as well as straight lines.
The working writer
I admire you to tantrums they say,
you’re so marvelously productive,
those plump books in litters
like piglets.
Then the comments light on my face
stinging like tiny wasps,
busy-busy, rush-rush, such a steamy
pressured life. Why don’t
you take a week off
when I visit? I spend July
at the beach myself. August
I go to Maine. Martinique
in January. I keep in shape
Thursdays at the exercise salon.
Every morning I do yoga for two
hours; it would mellow you.
Then I grind wheat berries
for bread, weave macrame hammocks
and whip up a f
luffy mousseline dress.
Oh, you buy your clothes.
I just don’t know how you live
with weeds in the living room,
piles of papers so high the yellow
snow on top is perennial. Books
in the shower, books in bed,
a freezer full of books.
You need a cleaning lady or two.
I saw a bat in the bedroom
last night, potatoes flowering
behind the toilet.
My cats clean the house, I say.
I have them almost trained.
In winter we dig the potatoes.
All year we eat the books.
The back pockets of love
Your toes:
modest stalagmites
sticking up in the ice caves
of the winter bed.
Your toes:
succulent mushrooms,
stumpy chimney pots
rising in their row.
Wee round faces
anonymous as nuns,
callused, worn as coolies
aging in their traces.
Small fry,
wriggling moonbeam
minnows escaped from the dark
traps of your shoes.
Pipsqueak puppets,
piglets nosing,
soft thimbles, dumpy
sofa pillows of flesh.
Love dwells in the major caves of the psyche,
chewing on the long bones of the limbs of courage,
the great haunches of resolution,
sucking the marrow bones, caves lit
by the lasting flames of the intellect,
but love cherishes too the back pockets,
the pencil ends of childhood fears,
the nose picking and throbbing sweet tooth,
the silly hardworking toes that curl
now blamelessly as dwarf cats
in the tousled nest of mutual morning bed.
Snow, snow
Like the sun on February ice dazzling;
like the sun licking the snow back
roughly so objects begin to poke through,
logs and steps, withered clumps of herb;
like the torch of the male cardinal
borne across the clearing from pine
to pine and then lighting among the bird
seed and bread scattered; like the sharp
shinned hawk gliding over the rabbit
colored marsh grass, exulting
in talon-hooked cries to his larger mate;
like the little pale green seedlings sticking
up their fragile heavy heads on white stalks
into the wide yellow lap of the pregnant sun;
like the sky of stained glass the eye seeks
for respite from the glitter that makes the lips
part; similar to all of these pleasures
of the failing winter and the as yet unbroken
blue egg of spring is our joy as we twist
and twine about each other in the bed
facing the window where the sun plays
the tabla of the thin cold air
and the snow sings soprano
and the emerging earth drones bass.
In which she begs (like everybody else) that love may last
The lilac blooms now in May,
our bed awash with its fragrance,
while beside the drive, buds
of peony and poppy swell
toward cracking, slivers of color
bulging like a flash of eye
from someone pretending to sleep.
Each in its garden slot, each
in its season, crocus gives way
to daffodil, through to fall
monkshood and chrysanthemum.
Only I am the wicked rose
that wants to bloom all year.
I am never replete with loving
you. Satisfaction
makes me greedy. I want
to blossom out with my joy of you
in March, in July, in October.
I want to drop my red red
petals on the hard black ice.
Let us gather at the river
I am the woman who sits by the river
river of tears
river of sewage
river of rainbows.
I sit by the river and count the corpses
floating by from the war upstream.
I sit by the river and watch the water
dwindle and the banks poke out like sore gums.
I watch the water change from green to shit brown.
I sit by the river and fish for your soul.
I want to lick it clean.
I want to turn it into a butterfly
that will weave drunkenly from orchid to rose.
Oh, close your eyes tight and push hard
and evolve, all together now. We can
do it if we try. We can take our world
back if we want. It’s an araucana
egg, all blue and green
swaddled in filmy clouds.
Don’t let them cook and gobble it,
azure and jungle green egg laid
by the extinct phoenix of the universe.
Send me your worn hacks of tired themes,
your dying horses of liberation,
your poor bony mules of freedom now.
I am the woman sitting by the river.
I mend old rebellions and patch them new.
Now the river turns from shit brown to bubbling blood
as an arm dressed in a uniform
Up too high to see, bombers big as bowling alleys
streak over and the automated battlefield
lights up like a Star Wars pinball machine.
I am the old woman sitting by the river scolding corpses.
I want to stare into the river and see the bottom
glinting like clean hair.
I want to outlive my usefulness
and sing water songs, songs
in praise of the green brown river
flowing clean through the blue green world.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down
1.
We walk on the earth and feed of it;
we breathe in the air or we choke;
we drink water or die, but you:
you cannot enter us. No pain
is like your touch.
Once we lived wholly without you,
plucking fruit, digging roots, shaking
down nuts, scavenging like bears.
Our cousin mammals ignore or flee
your angry lion’s roar.
Emblem of all we have seized upon
in nature, energy made property,
as what we use uses us; what
we depend on enslaves us; what
we live by kills us.
We stretch out our hands to the fire
place watching the colors shift
until the mind gives up buried images
like the secret blue in the log
the flame unlocks.
2.
Burning, burning, that fall I galloped,
the cries of torn children ringing
in my skull. Even cats mating in my Brooklyn
alley invoked images of thatched villages
scorched by bombing.
Burning, burning, I turned and roared
simple, loud as a trumpet blown, sonorous,
brassy, commanded and commanding. In that
heat everything dried from the inside,
baked to ashes.
Passion simplifies like surgery.
We burn, and what we burn are the books,
the couch, the rug, the bed, the houseplants,
the friends who can’t clear out
fast enough.
Yet a passionless life: all the virtues
gilded like saints in their niches
and nothing to move them. The architecture
of airports, laundromats. Cafeteria food
for the tepid will.
On one hand hopping along, a well-appointed
portly toad licking up bugs, patrolling
the garden. On the other, flying
through the night like a skunked dog,
howling and drooling.
Burning, burning, we can’t live
in the fire. Nor can we in ice.
Long ago we wandered from our homeland
tropics following game to these harsh
but fertile shores.
3.
On solstices, our ancestors leapt
through fire, to bring the sun around.
Surely some were not nimble enough
and a trailing scarf or skirt turned
burning shroud.
Without risk maybe the sun won’t return.
Without risk gradually the temperature
drops, slowly, slowly. One day you notice
the roses have all died. The next year
no corn ripens.
Then even the wheat rots where it stands.
Glaciers slide down the mountains
choking the valleys. The birds are gone.
On the north side of the heart, the snow
never melts.
When I stare into fire, I see figures
dancing. People of our merry potlatch,
ghosts, demons or simply the memory
of times I have danced in ecstasy all night,
my hair on fire.
5.
Even breathing is a little burning.
The banked fire of the cells eats
oxygen like the arsonist’s blaze.
All the minute furnaces stoked inside
warm our skin.
Life is a burning, and what we burn
is all the others we eat and drink.
We burn the carrot, we burn the cow,
we burn the calf, we burn the peach,
we burn the wine.
Life is a burning, and what we burn