legs kick hard.
The angel struck me
and we wrestled all that night.
My dust-stained gristle of a body
clad in proper village black
was pushed against him
and his fiery chest
fell through me like a star.
Raw with bruises, with my muscles
sawing like donkey’s brays,
I thought fighting can be
making love. Then in the grey
placental dawn I saw.
“I know you now, face
on a tree of fire
with eyes of my youngest sweetest
dead, face
I saw in the mirror
right after my first child
was born—before it failed—
when I was beautiful.
Whatever you are, whatever
I’ve won a blessing
from you. Bless me!”
The angel, “Yes, we have met
at doors thrust open to an empty room,
a garden, or a pit.
My gifts have human faces
hieroglyphs that command
you without yielding what they mean.
Cast yourself
and I will bless your cast
till your bones are dice
for the wind to roll.
I am the demon of beginnings
for those who leap their thresholds
and let the doors swing shut.”
My hair bristling, I stood.
“Get away from me, old
enemy. I know the lying
radiance of that face:
my friend, my twin, my
lover I trusted as the fish
the water, who left me
carrying his child.
The man who bought me
with his strength and beat
me for his weakness.
The girl I saved who turned
and sold her skin
for an easy bed in a house
of slaves. The boy fresh
as a willow sapling
smashed on the stones of war.”
“I am the spirit of hinges,
the fever that lives in dice
and cards, what is picked
up and thrown down. I am
the new that is ancient,
the hope that hurts,
what begins in what has ended.
Mine is the double vision
that everything is sacred, and trivial,
the laughter that bubbles in blood,
and I love the blue beetle
clicking in the grass as much
as you. Shall I bless you,
child and crone?”
“What has plucked the glossy
pride of hair from my scalp,
loosened my teeth in their sockets,
wrung my breasts dry as gullies,
rubbed ashes into my sleep
but chasing you?
Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.
wielder of the heart’s mirages.
I will follow you to no more graves.”
I spat
and she gathered her tall shuddering wings
and scaled the streaks of the dawn
a hawk on fire soaring
and I stood there and could hear the water burbling
and raised my hand
before my face and groped:
Why has the sun gone out?
Why is it dark?
White on black
LUIS
They say the year begins in January, but it
feels like the same old year to me. Things
give out now, the cabbages rot, the rent
in the coat sleeve’s too worn to be mended,
the boot finally admits it leaks, the candle
nub gutters out with a banner of pungent smoke.
The cracked dish of the frozen moon lights
the snow far longer than the old fox of the sun
that can hardly scale the hill, that crawls
feebly into the lower branches of the pine
and drops to earth exhausted.
Little sister
of the moon you prance on the ice with
delicate black feet. Your eyes shine red.
You comb your long tail and plume it out.
You mate under the porch. With sharp claws
you dig up the compost and scavenge the dump.
The air is crystal up to the ice splinters
of stars but you raise the quickest warm
nose in the woods, long, sharp as your hunger.
In the path you wait for me to give way.
Often you die bloody in the road because
you expect deference. The wise dog looks
the other way when you cross his yard.
The stupid dog never bothers you twice.
Little sister, mostly when we meet we bow
rather formally and go our ways, me
first. I read in a book that perhaps if one
lifted you by your tail, you could not spray
or perhaps you could. I envision a man
in a space suit lumbering over the plain
of the Herring River to catch and lift
you in the name of science. Then the space
suit would be burned perhaps or perhaps
not. My cats and I sit in the darkened
livingroom watching through the glass
as you dance and nibble, your long fur
sweeping the snow and your nailed feet quick.
Another country
NION
When I visited with the porpoises
I felt awkward, my hairy
angular body sprouting its skinny
grasping limbs like long mistakes.
The child of gravity and want I sank
in the salt wave clattering with gadgets,
appendages. Millennia past
they turned and fled back to the womb.
There they feel no fatigue but slip
through the water caressed and buoyed up.
Never do they sleep but their huge brains
hold life always turning it like a pebble
under the tongue, and lacking practice, death
comes as an astonishment.
In the wide murmur of the sea they fear
little. Together they ram the shark.
Food swims flashing in schools.
Hunger is only a teasing, endured
no longer than desired. Weather
is superficial decoration; they rise
to salute the thunder, romping their tails.
secure in a vast courtesy
firm enough to sustain a drowning man.
Nothing is said bluntly.
All conversation is a singing,
all telling alludes to and embodies
minute displacements in epic,
counter-epic, comic opera, or the four hundred
forty-one other genres they recognize
as current. Every exchange comes
as aria, lyric, set piece, recitativo,
and even a cry for help is couched
in a form brief and terse,
strict as haiku.
Greed has no meaning when no one
is hungry. Thus they swim toward
us with broad grins and are slaughtered
by the factory ships
that harvest the tuna like wheat.
Crescent moon like a canoe
FEARN
This month you carried me late and heavy
in your belly and finally near Tuesday
midnight you gave me light and life, the season
Kore returns to Demeter, and you suffer
and I cannot save you though I burn with dreams.
Memories the color of old blood,
scraps of velvet gowns,
lace, chiffon veils,
your sister’s stage costumes (Ziegfeld
didn’t stint) we lingered together, you
padding in sneakers and wash-worn housedresses.
You grew celery by tucking sliced off
bottoms in the soil. You kept a compost
pile in 1940. Your tomatoes glowed
like traffic signals in the table-sized yard.
Don’t kill spiders, you warned.
In an asbestos box in Detroit where sputtering
factories yellow the air, where sheets
on the line turn ashen, you nurtured
a backyard jungle. Every hungry cat
wanted to enter and every child.
You who had not been allowed to finish
tenth grade but sent to be a frightened
chambermaid, carried home every week
armloads of books from the library
rummaging them late at night, insomniac,
riffling the books like boxes of chocolates
searching for the candied cherries, the nuts,
hunting for the secrets, the formulae,
the knowledge those others learned
that made them shine and never ache.
You were taught to feel stupid; you
were made to feel dirty; you were
forced to feel helpless; you were trained
to feel lost, uprooted, terrified.
You could not love yourself or me.
Dreamer of fables that hid their own
endings, kitchen witch, reader of palms,
you gave me gifts and took them back
but the real ones boil in the blood
and swell in the breasts, furtive, strong.
You gave me hands that can pick up
a wild bird so that the bird relaxes,
turns and stares. I have handled
fifty stunned and injured birds and killed
only two through clumsiness, with your touch.
You taught me to see the scale on the bird
leg, the old woman’s scalp pink as a rose
under the fluff, the golden flecks in the iris
of your eye, the silver underside of leaves
blown back. I am your poet, mother.
You did not want the daughter you got.
You wanted a girl to flirt as you did
and marry as you had and chew the same
sour coughed up cud, yet you wanted too
to birth a witch, a revenger, a sword
of hearts who would do all the things
you feared. Don’t do it, they’ll kill
you, you’re bad, you said, slapping me down
hard but always you whispered, I could have!
Only rebellion flashes like lightning.
I wanted to take you with me, you don’t
remember. We fought like snakes, biting
hard at each other’s spine to snap free.
You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries,
snuffed my panties looking for smudge of sex,
so I took off and never came back. You can’t
imagine how I still long to save you,
to carry you off, who can’t trust me
to make coffee, but your life and mine pass
in different centuries, under altered suns.
I see your blood soaking into the linoleum,
I see you twisted, a mop some giant hand
is wringing out. Pain in the careless joke
and shouted insult and knotted fist. Pain like knives
and forks set out on the domestic table.
You look to men for salvation and every year
finds you more helpless. Do I battle
for other women, myself included,
because I can not give you anything
you want? I can not midwife you free.
In my childhood bed we float, your sweet
husky voice singing about the crescent
moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would
climb into like a boat and row away
and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.
In the land where the moon hides, mothers
and daughters hold each other tenderly.
There is no male law at five o’clock.
Our sameness and our difference do not clash
metal on metal but we celebrate and learn.
My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.
The life you gave me burns its acetylene
of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,
the compost of discontent, flaring into words
strong for other women under your waning moon.
O!
Oh, the golden bauble of your rising
wet from the waves rippling,
radiating like orgasm, round
as a singing mouth at full stretch,
round as the vagina when it takes,
round as a full belly, round
as a baby’s head, you come to us
riding over the white manes
of the waves, walking on their backs
like a circus rider. Hoop
of cool fire, goose egg,
silver mirror in which we see
ourselves dimly but truly reflected,
our blood is salty water
you tug at, drawing us.
Red onion, I peel you layer
by layer and weep. The nights
carve you and then you swell
again, lady of the wild animals
whose homes are paved and poisoned,
lady of the furry mammals at teat
and the shimmering fish whose sides
echo you, of those who hunt for roots
and berries, hunt for the island
in the sea where love rules and women
are free to wax and wane and wander
in the sweet strict seasons
of our desires and needs.