Poemunity — your poem community

he came in his seedy brown jacket smelling of paint.   all thumbs, a man stumbling over his own muscles, unable to hold some part of himself and rock it, gently.   she gave up, seeing him come in the door, wanting to show him her flat belly just an hour before, looking at her own corpse in the mirror.   she lay there reduced, neither virgin nor mother. it had been decided.   the winter was too cold in the garage. they would live with her mother.   the old bedroom was already prepared, cleaned, the door opened.   the solitary twin bed remained; he would sleep on the porch. she looked at him and tried to feel her way into the body of a woman, a thing which has to be taken care of, held safely in his arms. she lay there, trying to hold on to what she had, knowing she had to let it go.

Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead at once, I listened to my father’s urgings about “the future” and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below. I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out in the middle of a big double bed. —But no, finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine for who I’ll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back and forth to “the world” out there, and here to this one spot on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low in a little plane and when I looked down at the church, the trees I’ve felt with my hands, the neighbors’ houses and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was, it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted to reach down and pat it, while letting it know I wouldn’t interfere for the world, the world being everything this isn’t, this unknown buried in the known.

The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared before a man pushing a mower might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?" That was a question we could never answer. I loved the name of the place, White Hall, imagined that each interior was a stretch of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling photos of the family. Our own halls were brailled with nail holes of former tenants, the spackled rounds of fists. But doesn't longing clarify the body? The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing the World War II trenching tool; Danny, whose father, so much older than the other parents, died in his recliner one sunny afternoon while watching baseball; Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing, waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys who, on those latch-key days, held themselves in narrow passages when no one was there to show them what to do.

Does no dishes, dribbles sauce across the floor. Is more dragon than spaniel, more flammable than fluid. Is the loosening in the knit of me, the mixed-fruit marmalade in the kitchen of me. Wakes my disco and inner hibiscus, the Hector in the ever-mess of my Troy. All wet mattress to my analysis, he’s stayed the loudest and longest of any houseguest, is calling now as I write this, tiny B who brings the joy.

1 Sometime after I had entered that time of   life people prefer to allude to in others but not in themselves, in the middle of the night the phone rang. It rang and rang as though the world needed me, though really it was the reverse. I lay in bed, trying to analyze the ring. It had my mother’s persistence and my father’s pained embarrassment. When I picked it up, the line was dead. Or was the phone working and the caller dead? Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps? 2 My mother and father stood in the cold on the front steps. My mother stared at me, a daughter, a fellow female. You never think of us, she said. We read your books when they reach heaven. Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of  your sister. And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger, tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms. But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist. And your sister — you have your sister’s soul. After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries. 3 The street was white again, all the bushes covered with heavy snow and the trees glittering, encased with ice. I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end. It seemed the longest night I had ever known, longer than the night I was born. I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you. 4 Outside the street was silent. The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets, its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before. I left it as it was; its long cord drifting under the furniture. I watched the snow falling, not so much obscuring things as making them seem larger than they were. Who would call in the middle of the night? Trouble calls, despair calls. Joy is sleeping like a baby.

When I was two feet tall and held the hand above, how could I know how far that limping bond would go, that finger-inch of love.

Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked, The daughters of California Educate reluctant humanists; Drive into their skulls with tennis balls The unhappy realization That nature is still stronger than man. The special Hellenic privilege Of the special intellect seeps out At last in this irrigated soil. Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers Are stronger than Socrates’ hemlock; And the games of scrupulous Euclid Vanish in the gymnopaedia.

When I met Vivaldi it was dark, a ragman lashed his horse’s bells, streets tilted into slow wind tunnels, no, it was another night, in winter, snow as soft as opium, two winoes wassailed down an alley through a milk truck’s ruts, in the subways a violin was whistling down chrome tracks, past cobalt semaphores, rats and pennies underneath the 3rd rail . . . Has it never been so quiet that you’ve heard the manhole covers rumble when the El goes overhead? Icicles growing? Could you tell the difference between the sound of filaments in light bulbs burning down, and a dulcimer played in a padded cell? A meager music hovers everywhere: at mouths of drains, echoing stairwells where girls in muslin disappear whispering “allegro.” When I closed my eyes, less than a ghost, Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp like a match against the wind.

Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known! —Walt Whitman I. The Red Flag The newspapers said the strikers would hoist the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers' helper from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor, lifted up  his hand and said here is the red flag: brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away for six dollars a week in the dye house. He sat down without another word, sank back into the fumes, name and face rubbed off by oblivion's thumb like a Roman coin from the earth of his birthplace dug up after a thousand years, as the strikers shouted the only praise he would ever hear. II. The River Floods the Avenue He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young, but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab. He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino's back. His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife. Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery. Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around the tombstones.Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal, thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea. III. The Insects in the Soup Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines. Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business, Reed said:Poet. The judge said:Twenty days in the county jail. Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs, the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write: There's war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa. IV. The Little Agitator The cops on horseback charged into the picket line. The weavers raised their hands across their faces, hands that knew the loom as their fathers' hands knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers. Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line, the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called her a little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again, he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton. Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge's sentence of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing. She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist, the counter at her husband's candy store, the words for shame. V. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers and dyers' helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam, Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour. Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups. Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour's work at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood. The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too: the Sons of Italy, the Workmen's Circle, Local 152, Industrial Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day. Mazziotti's son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet. Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.

Comet of stillness princess of what is over high note held without trembling without voice without sound aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences never caught in words warden of where the river went touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished window onto the hidden place and the other time at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you even now you are unharmed even now perfect as you have always been now when your light paws are running on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars from the creeds of difference and the contradictions that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications as long as it lasted until something that we were had ended when you are no longer anything let me catch sight of you again going over the wall and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures guttering on a screen let my words find their own places in the silence after the animals