Either at my friend's daughter's
sixteen-year-old body dumped
on the morgue slab, T-shirt
stuck fast to one ripped
...
Luggage first, the lining of his suit jacket dangling
As always, just when you'd given up hope
Nimbly he backs out of the taxi
Eyes nervously extending, like brave crabs
Everywhere at once, keeping track of his papers
He pilots himself into the home berth
Like a small tug in a cloud of seagulls
Worries flutter around him so thick
It takes him some time to arrive
And you wonder if he's ever really been happy:
When the blue eyes blur
And stare out to sea
Whether it's only a daydream
Or a long pain that silences him
In such gray distances
You'll never know, but now
Turning to you, the delicate mouth
Like a magician
Is curious, sensitive, playing tricks,
Pouting like a wise turtle
It seems he has a secret
With the driver,
With the stewardess on the airplane
So that even when he opens his arms
When the warm voice surrounds you,
Wraps you in rough bliss,
Just before you go under
Suddenly you remember:
The beloved does not come
From nowhere: out of himself, alone
Often he comes slowly, carefully
After a long taxi ride
Past many beautiful men and women
And many dead bodies,
Mysterious and important companions.
...
Or will we be lost forever?
In the silence of the last breath
Not taken
The blue sweep of your arm like a dancer
Clowning, in wrinkled pajamas,
Across the sky the abrupt
Brief zigzag of a jay...
All night the whiteness
And all day.
Once we have been lifted up
Into empty morning like ice
In the darkness of these white fields
Neither the ghost tracks of skis
Nor steel skates will wake us
Where are we looking for each other, separated
On the opposite hillside I see you
Miles away from me, a dot
Of faint color reddening, small bruised warmth
Opening its cranberry mouth and saying,
What are you saying?
*
Under a cold blanket
An immense loneliness stretches
In every direction with no fences.
A few sticks tweak the crusted snow:
Thin remnants of an army
Of lost soldiers.
I see footsteps ahead of me but whose
And where will they lead me, parallel
Or converging? Is it not possible there will be one jet trail
That will not vanish,
Two phantom ribbons unfolding
That will not feather themselves away?
*
Wrapped in our white parkas
In what shifting laminations, snowflakes
That mean nothing, transparent eyes spitting,
What glacier will we choose to lie on,
In what igloo rest
Barely breathing, in an air pocket
Just below the surface
Rustling beneath blizzards
Where is your foot, most beautiful
With blue toenails
I will be looking for it always
Wherever it is, next to me
In the darkness
Of rumpled white sheets,
Pale siftings, clouds
Sudden scarves of ourselves gusting
Loose, sandpapery as snow lifting
In what chill citadel of ice crystals
Will I find you?
...
Whenever I see two women
crowned, constellated friends
it is as if three birch trees wept together
in a field by a constant spring.
The third woman isn't there
exactly, but just before them a flame
bursts out, then disappears
in a blurred, electric shining
that lifts my hair like an animal's.
In an aura of charged air I remember
my poor mother turned into royalty,
my sister and me in bobby socks
endlessly, all summer long
calling each other Margaret Rose
and Lillibet, Lillibet, Lillibet,
pretending to be princesses...
Now, swollen into these tall blooms
like paper cutouts in water,
in each new neighborhood garden
always, two women talking
nod their three curly heads together:
with bits of dirt on their foreheads, speckled
iris, flaming poppy
in the backyard dynasties of the multiflora
it is the famous funeral photograph
of the Dowager Queen, Queen Mother, stunned Young Queen,
three stepping stones in marble
that haunt me forever, clear
and mysterious as well water, the weight of it
in a bronze bucket swinging
powerfully from my hand.
As the plumcolored shadow rises,
full as a first child in the orchard,
the lost gardening glove on the path,
the single earring tucked
in an odd corner of the purse and then found
here double themselves, then triple:
in these soft trinities
the lives that begin in us
are born and born again like wings.
Secret as doves scuffling
in the wide envelope of wombs
like loose, comfortable aprons flung
over the heads of friends leaning together
in the hum of earth's plainsong
like a three part round,
like a single voice murmuring
the dream never leaves us, of the self
like a three masted vessel still voyaging:
out of the long matrix of memory,
the royal bulbs in the hold,
the ballast that keeps us upright, loyal
to the dark, deep-bedded throne
of the old country each new soul claims as its own.
...
I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.
The dun-colored hills have been good to me
And the gold rivers.
I have loved chrysantheumums, and children:
I have been grandmother to some.
In one pocket I have hidden chocolates from you
And knives.
Speaking my real thoughts to no one
In bars and at lecterns I have told the truth
Fairly often, but hardly ever to myself.
I have not cried out against the crimes of my country
But I have protected myself, I have watched from a safe corner
The rape of mountains, the eagle's reckless plunge.
Ever since high school I have waved goodbye to history:
I have assisted you to grow
In all ways that were convenient to me.
What is a block vote against steam shovels?
My current events teacher was a fine man
But his moral precepts were a put-up job and I followed them.
Well-dressed, in my new Adidas
At every gathering I investigated my psyche with friends
And they investigated theirs with me.
But whenever Trouble came in the front door I ran out the back
And fell into the pit of my bones.
Escaped from those burning buildings, the past,
What balance can any of us hope for?
I was comparing lipsticks
The day Nagasaki vanished.
The day Solzhenitsyn disappeared into the Gulag
I was attending a cocktail party.
Perhaps there are only ashes in my handbag.
A man at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second Street
Tried to sweep me into a trash barrel and I almost agreed.
Already the dried blood was sifting along my wrists.
Already my own hands
Were tightening around my throat
But Sorrow saved me, Sorrow gave me an image
Of bombs like human tears watering the world's gardens.
How could I not answer?
Since then I have been planting words
In every windowbox, poking them to grow up.
What's God, That he should be mindful of me?
Sometimes I feel like wood
Waiting for someone to peel me.
Indeed I have been lukewarm
At heart, which is all that matters.
Of tiny bread-colored atoms,
Equal fragments equally dispersed
That love each other and are never hungry.
What have I ever ignited
That warmed anyone?
I have not followed the rivers.
Dangerous as a pine needle
Packed in among others, in the dense multitudes
And dry timbers of the West
I am afraid of greed,
The rich taste of it, the anger
Hidden in my pockets.
Columns of smoke on the horizon,
Pillars of green fire.
But I have arrived here somehow,
Neither have I stopped talking.
Numberless are the kitchens I have sat in,
Chewing my fingers, trying to say something,
Anything, so that the daughters of men should see
As many sides of themselves as possible.
Word after word my footprints
Have stumbled across deserts.
How should I escape them?
They keep following after me.
A little wind stirs itself,
Whisks across my eyelids,
And I know what it is before I say it:
What if the world really articulates itself
In the socket of a human knee?
God save me
From the swamps of hubris but it may be, it may be.
Before the idea, the impulse.
I feel it moving in me, it is there
Arthritic but still powerful, a seizure
Delicate as grasshoppers, a light
Gathering in the skull.
Between thumb and forefinger
And the ballbearing joints of the tongue
In soft, glottal convulsions
Out of no alien skies
But out of the mind's muscle
The hieroglyph figures rise.
The little histories of words
Cannot be eaten.
I know it, you know it
And the children...
But the images we make are our own.
In the cool caves of the intellect
The twisted roots of them lead us
Backwards and then forwards.
If only we could understand
What's in our pockets is for everyone!
I have a dictionary in one hand, a mirror.
Strangers look at themselves in it,
Tracing the expressions they use
From one family to the next
They comfort themselves, murmuring
The tongues we speak are a blizzard
Of words like warm wool flying:
In the shy conjugal rites
Of verb, consonant, vowel,
In the dark mucosal flesh lining
The prismed underside of the skin
Each one is a spark sheared
From the veined fleece of the spirit
Of the looking-glass body we live in.
It is the one I have been cherishing,
The one all of us speak from,
For the world as we know it moves
Necessarily by steps.
Breath, pulse beat, ten digital stops.
At the foot of the mountains I look up. Does God
Lift up His hand to cover them?
Blinded by tears like rain
My bones turn granite, the spine of the hills congeals them.
Where is the eye of the storm,
Or where is the center of my seeing?
The wind of my breath is a hurricane:
I am locked inside myself.
Painfully, up the bald stepladder I climb,
But sometimes the light in my head goes on
More like the sun than a match.
Just as they said in Arabia
There's a huge pantalooned angel swelling
Inside the body's glass jar.
The white-haired thread of steam
From the teakettle on the range whistles
And sharpens itself into a voice
Bodiless as history, invisible
But still whispering in ears
That keep trying to hear it.
It is as if midgets were bellowing their names
Down sets of cardboard cylinders.
But we have not disappeared
Yet.
My friends, we have said many things to each other
In new combinations, seed upon seed exploding
And blossoming in kitchen gardens.
I confess I am ashamed of myself:
I have not tried hard enough to understand
Or listen to you speak.
But the Word is mindful of itself
And always has been.
Littering every street
In the sly eyes of tin cans,
Drops of water in the gutter
The world looks back at us
From every known language:
Yoruba, Hebrew, Chinese,
Arrogant English, the subject
Subjecting all to its desires,
Even the softer tongues, romantic
Self-reflexive, done to
As we would be done by,
Whatever life we cultivate
Out of the animal moans of childhood
It is all wheat fields, all grass
Growing and being grown.
With poisoned bread in my pockets, or gumdrops,
Or armies like Myrmidons rising
What I say is true
For a time only, thank God,
If I have only arrived anywhere it is to look
Carefully, at all I thought I knew.
In living rivers of speech
The reflections I make are my own
And yet not:
Though the old growth rings are hidden from us
And the echoing tomorrows of the acorn,
The warm currents of the senses
Are a two-way street, my friends:
The palms of our hands are crisscrossed
With as many intersections as a leaf.
...
You could pick it up by the loose flap of a roof
and all the houses would come up together
in the same pattern attached, inseparable
white cubes, olive trees, flowers
dangling from your hand
a few donkey hooves might stick out
flailing the air for balance,
but the old women would cling like sea urchins
and no children would fall.
Even though it is small,
the people are Greek, and it sits
like an oyster in the middle of the Aegean
still it is tough, it reminds you
of wagon trains, prairie schooners
drawn up in circles by night
you could swing it around your head
and still nothing would happen,
it would stay
solid, the white walls
rising up out of the sea
the pillared crown of the temple...
For twenty-six hundred years
it has endured everything, but now
we who have forgotten everything,
we whose homes have all gone
to super highways, belt cities, long thin lines
our glittering buses snort into the main square,
the spider web with sticky fingers
glues itself to the town,
slowly it begins to revolve, faster and faster
tighter and tighter it is wound
till the young men cannot stand it,
they pack up and leave town
the sky is full of children
with wild eyes and huge faces
falling to the ground.
...