Poemunity — your poem community

A woman’s looks Are barbed hooks, That catch by art The strongest heart, When yet they spend no breath. But let them speak, And sighing break Forth into tears, Their words are spears That wound our souls to death. The rarest wit Is made forget, And like a child Is oft beguiled With Love’s sweet-seeming bait. Love with his rod So like a god Commands the mind We cannot find, Fair shows hide foul deceit. Time, that all things In order brings, Hath taught me now To be more slow In giving faith to speech: Since women’s words No truth affords, And when they kiss They think by this Us men to overreach.

It is her right, to bind with warmest ties, The lordly spirit of aspiring man, Making his home an earthly paradise, Rich in all joys allotted to life’s span; Twining around each fibre of his heart, With all the gentle influence of love’s might, Seeking no joy wherein he has no part – This is undoubtedly – a woman’s right! It is her right to teach the infant mind, Training it ever upward in its course, To root out evil passions that would bind The upward current of his reason’s force; To lead the erring spirit gently back, When it has sunk in gloom of deepest night; To point the shining path of virtue’s track, And urge him forward. This is woman’s right. It is her right to soothe the couch of pain; There her pure mission upon earth to prove, To calm with gentle care the frenzied brain, And keep her vigil there of holiest love; To watch untiring by the lonely bed, Through the bright day, and in the solemn night, ’Til health ensues, or the loved form is laid To rest for ever. This is woman’s right. She is a flower that blossoms best, unseen, Sheltered within the precincts of her home; There, should no dark’ning storm-cloud intervene, There, the loud-strife of worldlings never come. Let her not scorn to act a woman’s part, Nor strive to cope with manhood in its might, But lay this maxim closely to her heart – That that which God ordains is surely right.

Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound. I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did mourning. I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic and the noon's new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.

Lightning hits the roof, shoves the knife, darkness, deep in the walls. They bleed light all over us and your face, the fan, folds up, so I won’t see how afraid to be with me you are. We don’t mix, even in bed, where we keep ending up. There’s no need to hide it: you’re snow, I’m coal, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But open your mouth, I’ll give you a taste of black you won’t forget. For a while, I’ll let it make you strong, make your heart lion, then I’ll take it back.

I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years before, a hundred and fifty years before, I walk, my steps thump, a fantastic journey through epochs in which there was no me. How long is my minus life, nonexistence so much resembles immortality. Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster, Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband, The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern. I walk still further, what an echo, my steps thump through my minus life, through the reverse of life. I reach Adam and Eve, nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark. Now my nonexistence dies already with the trite death of mathematical fiction. As trite as the death of my existence would have been had I been really born.

In the ocean one fish swallows the other: a geometric progression of loss. You are bigger than I. The calamity of love swelling out larger than us. And what destiny partakes of our dilemma? Swallows the cause and effect: eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged parts wanting to breathe and wanting. There is no gentle sense to this. Is there? Only a kind of terror at the chain of events, the scale of loss, the ordered destruction one against the other— all that something larger awaits its moment.

The woman who cannot bring forth her child: go to a dead man’s grave and then step three times over the grave, and then say these words three times: This is my cure for the loathsome late-birth This is my cure for the bitter black-birth This is my cure for the loathsome imperfect-birth And when that woman is with child and she goes to her lord in his bed, then let her say: Up I go, over you I step, with a quick child, not a quelled one, with a full-born one, not a doomed one. And when the mother feels the child is quick, go then to a church, and when she comes before the altar say then: Christ, I said it. This has been uttered. The woman who cannot bring forth her child: grasp a handful of her own child’s grave, and after that, bind it in black wool and sell it to peddlers, and say then: I sell it, you sell it. This blackened wool, this sorrow seed. Translated from the Old English

Has them in every room of her house, wall hangings, statues, paintings, quilts and blankets, ark lampshades, mobiles, Christmas tree ornaments, t-shirts, sweaters, necklaces, books, comics, a creamer, a sugar bowl, candles, napkins, tea-towels and tea-tray, nightgown, pillow, lamp. Animals two-by-two in plaster, wood, fabric, oil paint, copper, glass, plastic, paper, tinfoil, leather, mother-of-pearl, styrofoam, clay, steel, rubber, wax, soap. Why I cannot ask, though I would like to know, the answer has to be simply because. Because at night when she lies with her husband in bed, the house rocks out into the bay, the one that cuts in here to the flatlands at the center of Texas. Because the whole wood structure drifts off, out under the stars, beyond the last lights, the two of them pitching and rolling as it all heads seaward. Because they hear trumpets and bellows from the farther rooms. Because the sky blackens, but morning finds them always safe on the raindrenched land, bird on the windowsill.

I. Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners, platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you I emulated there, in that Godawful place. What kind of face to put on it? How simple is a simon's sign? To my mind laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not a pleasantry that spread; instead it's intimate with sheer delirium: spilt brain on split lip, uncontainable interiority— (make no mistake, it is a horror, this inmated, intimated self, revealed as your material: red smear, white swipe). It's said the brain stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery, and then—what's left? a little cartilage for ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps of a delapidated strut—and this is just the sort of stuff, insensate, to which life (which comes again as slime) has always loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't laugh? Your inner life! Your pet pretense! It can't be kept up, can't be kept clean, even in a thought, except a good bloodworks or shitpump keeps it so. II. Out of the mouth comes a tongue, it calls itself linguistic and it never quite effects the cover-up (good Lord, there's much to cover up: so many belches, outcries, upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and coughs)— so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself on being the most intellectual) can't help but come out, snorting. Nothing smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's got teeth to send it off, and spit to keep it company, and rot to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's a grimacing with wind. It will (the will be damned) burst out in bad cacaphonies of brouhaha and borborygma—it's the stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake— the vent of rage and irony, and right there in the very shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean, is sorrow's archery and signature, while flesh is being hoisted and arrayed on roosts of skeleton. III. I saw what good comes to; I saw the figure human being cuts, upon its frame. The laugh was a cry from my own perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted armature. Despite your consternations, oh you meekened warners and polite conventioneers, the thieves were better served upon that day. For the heart is a muscle, where cruelty's humored. The tooth of moral rectitude's a fang. What I gave at the sight of him there was up. What I got of humanity there was the hang . . .

Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season. Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course,red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones (a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.