Poemunity — your poem community

The best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact. My mother took my heart out. She banked it on top of her stove. It glowed white. She put it back in my chest. Tita knew that overseas workers often had affairs. He licked me and I pretended it pinged through my body like a swift idea That I wrote about and considered like a bell of good craftsmanship. He also knew that their kids ate better He said your belly is like a cat’s. He said with his bowl up to his chin More please. At night the fireflies come out. They flock to my window. I put my hands up against the screen. I think how fragile it is to be inside a house. They say I want permission I paint my face. I say—just take it. Easy. If equally matched, we can offer battle. If unequal in any way, we can flee from him. Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages. I thought a lot about walking around at night. By myself. Just to think. But I never did. I thought I could just flick a switch. When I was born, my mother and father gave me a gardenia like personal star. Don’t you hate it when someone apologizes all the time? It’s like they are not even sorry.

Lordship is the same activity Whether performed by lord or lady. Or a lord who happens to be a lady, All the source and all the faults. A woman steadfast in looking is a callot, And any woman in the wrong place Or outside of her proper location Is, by definition, a foolish woman. The harlot is talkative and wandering By the way, not bearing to be quiet, Not able to abide still at home, Now abroad, now in the streets, Now lying in wait near the corners, Her hair straying out of its wimple. The collar of her shift and robe Pressed one upon the other. She goes to the green to see to her geese, And trips to wrestling matches and taverns. The said Margery left her home In the parish of Bishopshill, And went to a house, the which The witness does not remember, And stayed there from noon Of that day until the darkness of night. But a whip made of raw hippopotamus Hide, trimmed like a corkscrew, And anon the creature was stabled In her wits as well as ever she was biforn, And prayed her husband as so soon As he came to her that she might have The keys to her buttery To take her meat and drink. He should never have my good will For to make my sister for to sell Candle and mustard in Framlyngham, Or fill her shopping list with crossbows, Almonds, sugar and cloth. The captainess, the vowess, Must use herself to work readily As other gentilwomen doon, In the innermost part of her house, In a great chamber far from the road. So love your windows as little as you can, For we be, either of us, weary of other.

January. I pluck it, this feather flapping in the high mesquite only head-high, caught by the down, iridescent, turkey. Another feather hugging the ditch along the fence line and another... A coyote somewhere naps happy, grinning like the feather evolved from a leaf. What luck. Clouds lift above the field as if to swallow my eye into hunger. Good hunger. The greatest eye must behold me like an ember dropped into a finch nest, and I smoke at the mouth like a gun dreaming in a safe of a war it can win by virtue of its praise. I have lost the killer phrase I concocted on my country walk with the feather in my pocket. I cock it.

i. He could have taken you prisoner, of course when our two tribes were at war over whitefish and beaver territory and the Anishinaabeg chased your Indian ancestors from the woodlands he now brings you home to. Or your Dakota relatives might have waged a war party on their swift plains’ ponies to avenge your taking and bring you back from those uncivilized they named in disgust the rabbit-chokers. But those histories of dog-eaters and Chippewa crows are just a backdrop now for other stories told together by descendants of smallpox survivors and French fur traders, clan members of Wolf and of Water Spirit. And now you gather, trackers and scouts in new bloodless legal battles, still watch for mark and sign— for the flight of waterbirds. ii. Old histories that name us enemies don’t own us; nor do our politics grown so pow-wow liberal you seldom point out the follies of White Earth tribal leaders. (Except of course for the time our elected chair mistakenly and under the influence of civilization drove his pickup down the railroad tracks and made the tri-state ten o’clock news.) And Sundays behind the Tribune he seldom even mentions the rabid casino bucks or gets out his calculator and with lodge-pole eyebrows methodically measures beaded distances, results of territorial lines drawn in your homeland. And even though I have seen him sniff, glance over he really almost never checks the meat in your pot, nor reconnoiters the place of your rendezvous just to be sure.

Genial poets, pink-faced earnest wits— you have given the world some choice morsels, gobbets of language presented as one presents T-bone steak and Cherries Jubilee. Goodbye, goodbye, I don’t care if I never taste your fine food again, neutral fellows, seers of every side. Tolerance, what crimes are committed in your name. And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread, blood donors. Your crumbs choke me, I would not want a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never falter: irresponsive to nightmare reality. It is my brothers, my sisters, whose blood spurts out and stops forever because you choose to believe it is not your business. Goodbye, goodbye, your poems shut their little mouths, your loaves grow moldy, a gulf has split the ground between us, and you won’t wave, you’re looking another way. We shan’t meet again— unless you leap it, leaving behind you the cherished worms of your dispassion, your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous, wry-humored balanced judgment, leap over, un- balanced? ... then how our fanatic tears would flow and mingle for joy ...

Lying in bed and waiting to find out Whatever is going to happen: the window shade Making its slightest sound as the night wind, Outside, in the night, breathes quietly on it; It is parental hovering over the infantile; Something like that; it is like being a baby, And over the sleep of the baby there is a father, Or mother, breathing, hovering; the streetlight light In the nighttime branches breathing quietly too; Altering; realtering; it is the body breathing; The crib of knowing: something about what the day Will bring; and something about what the night will hold, Safely, at least for the rest of the night, I pray.

Is it the glassy, empty potential of the unfilled blouses their prescient capability, flat as catalogued moths hung on racks that require realization? A poem, for instance, pulls something thin over itself. A transparency with a weird fur collar. A skin of microscopic dirtiness. Or, is it the soul comes to clothing already intricately made. seeks a garment a white horse hair to enfold its deviation pink as a petal, foldable as a Kleenex. It’s raining outside the thrift store at night. My clothing is stained by strangers. The poem slips away through slots of lace liquefied as a fat caterpillar dressed in the capsule of a  cocoon.

(dirt stolen from an infant’s grave around midnight) Do not try to take it from my child’s grave, nor from the grave of my childhood, nor from any infant’s grave I guard—voodoo, juju, boo-hoo rites calling for it or not! This dust, this dirt, will not be taken at dawn or noon or at the dusky time, and if you approach this sacred place near midnight, then I will chop, one by one, your fingers off with which you do your harm. Goofer-dust: if you want it, if you need it, then erect downwind from a baby’s grave a fine-meshed net and gather it one-half grain, a flaky mote, an infinitesimally small fleck of a flake at a time and in such a way it is given to you by the day, the wind, the world, it is given to you, thereby diminishing the need to steal this dirt displaced by a child in a child’s grave.

Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe, the girl thought she had never guessed what earthly majesty was before then, as he strode unconcernedly holding a vicious gander by the horny mitts and let the big wings batter his knees. She was also surprised to feel a liberating satisfaction in the coming bloodshed, and that notwithstanding all the times she had been beleaguered and had fled, today she did not fear the barnyard hubub. Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as the pronged head skipped sideways and the neck plumes stiffened with blood from the cleft, she was angry; and, when the headless goose ran to the brook and was carried off into the woods alive, she rejoiced, and subsequently frequented those woods and avoided her father. When the goose began to mend she brought him small hominy, which was welcome though she had to press the kernels one by one into the pink neck that throbbed into her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would not spare handkerchiefs, and stanching the spot she felt a thrill of sympathy. But for the most part there was steady progress, and growing vigor was accompanied by restlessness, and one cool day the blind thing was batted out of existence by a motorcycle. She had no time for tears. She ran upstairs to miss her father’s barytone commiseration, then out onto the fields, and, holding an old red pinwheel, ran ran ran ran.

On the long shore, lit by the moon To show them properly alone, Two lovers suddenly embraced So that their shadows were as one. The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood That silently they took at flood, And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised. Then, as if shaken by stage-fright Beneath the hard moon’s bony light, They stood together on the sand Embarrassed in each other’s sight But still conspiring hand in hand, Until they saw, there underfoot, As though the world had found them out, The goose fish turning up, though dead, His hugely grinning head. There in the china light he lay, Most ancient and corrupt and grey. They hesitated at his smile, Wondering what it seemed to say To lovers who a little while Before had thought to understand, By violence upon the sand, The only way that could be known To make a world their own. It was a wide and moony grin Together peaceful and obscene; They knew not what he would express, So finished a comedian He might mean failure or success, But took it for an emblem of Their sudden, new and guilty love To be observed by, when they kissed, That rigid optimist. So he became their patriarch, Dreadfully mild in the half-dark. His throat that the sand seemed to choke, His picket teeth, these left their mark But never did explain the joke That so amused him, lying there While the moon went down to disappear Along the still and tilted track That bears the zodiac.