of the walls of suburban
villas, so no prowler
can climb over.
What closeness remains
is that of samurai
in ritual sword dance
combat, each hoping to
behead the other and,
invulnerable and armored, escape.
Poetry festival lover
He reads his poem about you,
making sure everyone in town
knows you have been lovers
as if he published his own
tabloid with banner head
and passed it out at the door.
He kneels at your feet as you sit
a stuffed duck at autographings
and holds the hand others
wait to have sign their
purchased books.
Alone the last night he asks
favors (blurbs, readings,
your name on a folder) but
not your favor: he wants
the position but not the work.
His private parts lie quiet
and the public is all
he’s hot to screw.
Avoid the poet who tells
his love loudly in public;
in private he counts his money.
Complaint
of the exhausted author
Pain turns on its dull red warning light
dim and steady in the dark.
My back clanks like an old coal furnace.
My brain is a cellar bin
empty except for desiccated spiders.
Even the mice have dropped their neat
tracks and shipped out.
Everything I have to burn
is burned and the house grows cold.
I remember real hunger,
the urgency, then the lassitude,
a hollow pain roaring like a distant sea
and through it all the sense
of the body cutting its losses
of the cells shutting down one by one
the lights going out.
That hunger was bone chip sharp.
Not simple, not of the bargaining flesh,
this hunger snivels and whines.
The quaking, tail low but wagging
cur of the heart
has desires that hide and abide,
a lion in yellow dog clothing
who will, who will be fed.
Don’t think because I speak strong words
that I am always strong.
What moves through me moves
on and leaves me empty as a storm sewer
when the rains have gone.
My ribs squeal like a bad accordion.
Feed me, mother me. Coddle my fears.
Or I will go like a mole through the garden
chewing off roots for spite. I will crawl
into the rafters and become a leak
dripping on your chest in bed.
I will turn into a fat rheumatic yellow dog
who sprawls all day on the kitchen floor
in front of the stove in everybody’s way,
and if you make me move
I will fix you with a baleful blind eye
and sigh and limp.
I will turn into a cough you can’t get
rid of, or a fog bank
that broods on the house.
At night I will take my old form
and steal to the typewriter
to write damp querulous poems
like this one.
Feed me before it’s too late.
For strong women
A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why
aren’t you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
Apologies
Moments
when I care about nothing
except an apple:
red as a maple tree
satin and speckled
tart and winy.
Moments
when body is all:
fast as an elevator
pulsing out waves of darkness
hot as the inner earth
molten and greedy.
Moments
when sky fills my head:
bluer than thought
cleaner than number
with a wind
fresh and sour
cold from the mouth of the sea.
Moments
of sinking my teeth
into now like a hungry fox:
never otherwise
am I so cruel;
never otherwise
so happy.
The fisherman’s catalogue:
a found poem
Orvis nymphs: dark hendrickson,
leadwing coachman, pale evening dun.
Cream midge. Grizzly wulff hairwing fly.
Wet flies: hornberg, quill gordon, ginger quill.
Weighted nymphs: zug bug, hare’s ear, Ted’s stone fly.
Caddis pupa of great brown and speckled sedge.
Pale sulphur dun thorax dry fly, Rat Faced McDougal.
King’s river caddis downwing fly.
Silver doctor, green highlander, dusty miller,
black dose, rusty rat, hairy Mary
and the salmon muddler. And the popping frog.
Rainy 4th
I am someone who boots myself from bed
when the alarm cracks my sleep. Spineless
as raw egg on the tilted slab of day
I ooze toward breakfast to be born.
I stagger to my desk on crutches of strong coffee.
How sensuous then are the mornings we do
not rise. This morning we curl embracing
while rain crawls over the roof like a thousand
scuttling fiddler crabs. Set off a
twenty-one tea kettle salute
for a rainy 4th with the parade and races
cancelled, our picnic chilling disconsolate
in five refrigerators. A sneaky hooray
for the uneven gallop of the drops,
for the steady splash of the drainpipe,
for the rushing of the leaves in green
whooshing wet bellows, for the teeming wind
that blows the house before it in full sail.
We are at sea together in the woods.
The air chill enough for the quilt, warm
and sweet as cocoa and coconut we make
love in the morning when there’s never time.
Now time rains over us liquid and vast.
We talk facing, elastic parentheses.
We dawdle in green mazes of conversing
seeking no way out but only farther into
the undulating hedges, grey statues of nymphs,
satyrs and learned old women, broken busts,
past a fountain and tombstone
in the boxwood of our curious minds
that like the pole beans on the fence
expand perceptibly in the long rain.
Neurotic in July
Even desks and tables have edges sharp
as the blade of a guillotine today.
The wind gnashes its teeth in the oaks.
The translucent pearl fog of morning
is tarnished with my fear. One friend
dies at home in whatever pitted dignity
pain allows. Another friend lies dying
while the doctors in the hall mumble
their lies unsanctified as white lab rats.
Another comes out of a coma that almost
killed him, mischance exploding in the hands,
while in high glittery summer out on Route 6
tourists try to drive through each other’s
bodies. The rescue squad drags their fatigue
to the third accident today, broken
glass and broken organs, the stench
of spilled gas and blood.
I jerk with anxiety, the reflexes
of a severed tail. Straw and sleet I am.
My thoughts spill, the contents of a dash
board ashtray, butts, roaches, seeds,
cores, bottlecaps. What I dream stinks.
Only in political rage can I scorn danger.
In daily life I quiver like a mass of frog’s
eggs. Quaking I carry my breasts before
me like ripe figs a thumb could bruise
and, Be careful! Be careful! I croon
all day like a demented cuckoo with only
one harsh plaintive cry to those I love.
They pay no attention at all but wander
freely in and out of danger like sanderlings
feeding on the edge of the ocean as the tide
changes, chasing after each wave as it recedes,
racing before as the wave rushes back.
Attack of the squash people
And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.
They’re coming, they’re on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!
Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped by cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.
Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.
Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people’s gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.
With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.
The inquisition
Did you love him? you stab the old
photographs. And him? And him? And her?
Oh, you shrug then. What does it mean?
Your love comes round regularly as the truck
that sweeps the streets, welcome but
hardly monumental. It stirs up the dust,
it goes on its way, doing some kind
of temporary good, busy, truculent.
You were only eight years old then, I say,
how could I love you if I’d been mean
and proper, if I’d rationed myself
like some prescription drug, if I’d frozen
on grit at the core waiting for the perfect
sun to melt me. I’m a survivor, a scavenger
and I make the best I can out of the daily
disaster, I mold my icons out of newspaper mâché.
How could you make love to him in an elevator
you say. But it was a freight elevator
I say, it went up very slowly, you could lock
it between floors. Besides that was a decade
ago, I was more adventurist then. Oh, you say,
so you wouldn’t fuck me in an elevator, I see.
I like my comfort better now, I say, but you
are my only comfort. Have you an elevator in mind?
Look at this book, you say, you wrote him
twenty-two love poems. How could you? And publish
them. They weren’t all to him, I say, I was busy
that year. And they’re good, aren’t they? Still?
Oh, so it’s just literature, the ones you write
me. Words. But I write the truth out of my life
and if some truths are truer than others in
the long run, the short sprint makes poems too.
Listen, you idiot, we’re crawling up the far
slope of our third year and still sometimes
I weep after we make love. It is love we make
and it feeds me daily like a good cow.
I’m an old tart and you come late and I have
loyalties scattered over the landscape like lots
I bought and pay taxes on still, but it’s you
and Robert I live with, live in, live by.
Because we work together we are obscurely
joined deep in the soil, deep in the water
table where the pure vulnerable stream
flows in the dark sustaining all life. In dreams
you walk in my head arguing, we gallop
on thornapple quests, we lie in
each other’s
arms. What a richly colored strong warm coat
is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.
Arofa
My little carry-on baggage,
my howler monkey, my blue-
eyed sleek beige passion,
you want a monogamous relationship
with me. Othella, if you were
big as me you’d have nipped
my head off in a fit.
Gourmet, winebibber, you fancy
a good Bordeaux as much
as schlag, but would rather
be petted than eat.
You play Ivan the Terrible
to guests, you hiss and slap
at them to go away. Only
an occasional lover gains
your tolerance if my smell
rubs off on him and he
lets you sleep in the bed.
When I travel you hurtle
about upending the rugs.
When I return you run from me.
Not till I climb into bed
are you content and crouch
between my breasts kneading,
a calliope of purrs.
When I got a kitten a decade
and a half ago, I didn’t know
I was being acquired
by such a demanding lover,
such a passionate, jealous,
furry, fussy wife.
Cho-Cho
At the Animal Disposal League
you reached through the bars
avid to live. Discarded offspring
of Persian splendor and tuxedo
alley cat, your hunger saved
you, fuzzy and fist-sized.
Now you are sunny, opaque,
utterly beyond words, alien
as the dreams of a pine tree.
Sometimes when I look at you
you purr as if stroked.
Outside you turn your head
pretending not to see me
off on business, a rabbit
in the marshgrass, rendezvous
in the briars. In the house
you’re a sponge for love,
a recirculating fountain.
Angry, you sulk way under