August Poems - Poems For August

Surely I will be disquieted by the hospital, that body zone- bodies wrapped in elastic bands, bodies cased in wood or used like telephones, bodies crucified up onto their crutches, bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs, bodies vomiting up their juice like detergent, Here in this house there are other bodies. Whenever I see a six-year-old swimming in our aqua pool a voice inside me says what can't be told... Ha, someday you'll be old and withered and tubes will be in your nose drinking up your dinner. Someday you'll go backward. You'll close up like a shoebox and you'll be cursed as you push into death feet first. Here in the hospital, I say, that is not my body, not my body. I am not here for the doctors to read like a recipe. No. I am a daisy girl blowing in the wind like a piece of sun. On ward 7 there are daisies, all butter and pearl but beside a blind man who can only eat up the petals and count to ten. The nurses skip rope around him and shiver as his eyes wiggle like mercury and then they dance from patient to patient to patient throwing up little paper medicine cups and playing catch with vials of dope as they wait for new accidents. Bodies made of synthetics. Bodies swaddled like dolls whom I visit and cajole and all they do is hum like computers doing up our taxes, dollar by dollar. Each body is in its bunker. The surgeon applies his gum. Each body is fitted quickly into its ice-cream pack and then stitched up again for the long voyage back.

Listen here. I've never played it safe in spite of what the critics say. Ask my imaginary brother, that waif, that childhood best friend who comes to play dress-up and stick-up and jacks and Pick-Up-Sticks, bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics. Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex. Pop-gunning the street lights like crows. Not knowing what to do with funny Kotex so wearing it in our school shoes. Friend, friend, spooking my lonely hours you were there, but pretend.

This was its promise, held to faithfully: The early morning sun came in this way Until the angle of its saffron beam Between the curtains and the sofa lay, And with its ochre heat it spread across The village houses, and the nearby wood, Upon my bed and on my dampened pillow And to the corner where the bookcase stood. Then I recalled the reason why my pillow Had been so dampened by those tears that fell- I'd dreamt I saw you coming one by one Across the wood to wish me your farewell. You came in ones and twos, a straggling crowd; Then suddenly someone mentioned a word: It was the sixth of August, by Old Style, And the Transfiguration of Our Lord. For from Mount Tabor usually this day There comes a light without a flame to shine, And autumn draws all eyes upon itself As clear and unmistaken as a sign. But you came forward through the tiny, stripped, The pauperly and trembling alder grove, Into the graveyard's coppice, russet-red, Which, like stamped gingerbread, lay there and glowed. And with the silence of those high treetops Was neighbour only the imposing sky And in the echoed crowing of the cocks The distances and distances rang by: There in the churchyard underneath the trees, Like some surveyor from the government Death gazed on my pale face to estimate How large a grave would suit my measurement. All those who stood there could distinctly hear A quiet voice emerge from where I lay: The voice was mine, my past; prophetic words That sounded now, unsullied by decay: 'Farewell, wonder of azure and of gold Surrounding the Transfiguration's power: Assuage now with a woman's last caress The bitterness of my predestined hour! 'Farewell timeless expanse of passing years! Farewell, woman who flung your challenge steeled Against the abyss of humiliations: For it is I who am your battlefield! 'Farewell, you span of open wings outspread, The voluntary obstinacy of flight, O figure of the world revealed in speech, Creative genius, wonder-working might!'

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky of this black August. My sister, the sun, broods in her yellow room and won't come out. Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume like a kettle, rivers overrun; still, she will not rise and turn off the rain. She is in her room, fondling old things, my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls like a crash of plates from the sky, she does not come out. Don't you know I love you but am hopeless at fixing the rain ? But I am learning slowly to love the dark days, the steaming hills, the air with gossiping mosquitoes, and to sip the medicine of bitterness, so that when you emerge, my sister, parting the beads of the rain, with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness, all with not be as it was, but it will be true (you see they will not let me love as I want), because, my sister, then I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones, The black rain, the white hills, when once I loved only my happiness and you.