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The maggot dreams of the ear and the wound, that welcome dark between gauze and knee, cheek and skull, and any open moment in the body that will have it. The child- fly wants a mouth to grow into, a burn to salve, a heart to feed on. It calls for sugar and Job and marrow. The maggot loves St. Lazarus, though he walked away, loves the warm cutbanks of the chest. When the maggot asks for wings, we will answer with painted hands, eyes beneath coins, a promise of graves.

Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest, With single rites the common debt to pay? On some green headland fronting to the East Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day. Naked, uplifting in a laden tray New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine, Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine. The morning planet poised above the sea Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid; Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity Shall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid, That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes, Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs.

Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed), Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue

Nude bodies like peeled logs sometimes give off a sweetest odor, man and woman under the trees in full excess matching the cushion of aromatic pine-drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine a sonnet might be made of it Might be made of it! odor of excess odor of pine needles, odor of peeled logs, odor of no odor other than trailing woodbine that has no odor, odor of a nude woman sometimes, odor of a man.

Thy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain, Hears thee, by cruel men and impious, call'd Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th' enthrall'd From exile, public sale, and slav'ry's chain. Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd, Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain! Thou hast achiev'd a part; hast gain'd the ear Of Britain's senate to thy glorious cause; Hope smiles, joy springs, and tho' cold caution pause And weave delay, the better hour is near, That shall remunerate thy toils severe By peace for Afric, fenc'd with British laws. Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love From all the just on earth, and all the blest above!

1 She was twenty-two. He was fifty-three, a duke, a widower with ten children. They met in Paris, each in exile from the English Civil War. Virginal and terrified, still she agreed to marry him. Though women were mere chattel spinsterhood made you invisible in the sixteen hundreds. Marriage was arranged —hers a rare exception. Despite a dowry a woman never could own property. Your womb was just for rent. Birth control contrivances—a paste of ants, cow dung mashed with honey, tree bark with pennyroyal— all too often failed the applicant. 2 If anything went wrong you bled to death. You bore & bore & bore as you were taught screaming sometimes for days in childbirth. To bring forth was a woman’s fate but not for Margaret Cavendish, childless Duchess of Newcastle. After the head of Charles the First had been detached and the Restoration seated a new monarch, she and the duke returned to his estate where nothing discomposed their paradise. How rare, two lovers scribbling away, admiring each other’s words in privacy. He: polymath, equestrian, playwright. She: philosopher, fantasist, poet. 3 His the first book on the art of dressage, till then an untried humane approach to teaching classic paces in the man è ge, the grace of the levade and the piaffe. Hers the goofy utopian fantasy, The Blazing-World. The heroine is adrift with her kidnapper in a wooden skiff. A storm comes up conveniently, and they are blown to the North Pole. He freezes to death but she is carried to a contiguous North Pole, a new world where the emperor falls in love with her, makes her his empress and cedes her all his powers over clans of wildly invented creatures. 4 Poems, plays, philosophical discourses on Platonick love, a chapter on her Birth, Breeding, and Life and an Apology for Writing so Much Upon this Book about herself, even some inquiries into science… years in chosen isolation the Duchess filled with words, and the Duke with reassurance. Even this outburst did not discomfit him: Men are so unconscionable and cruel … they would fain Bury us in their...beds as in a grave…[T]he truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. Pepys called her mad, conceited, and ridiculous. 5 Virginia Woolf, in 1928, found her Quixotic and high-spirited as well as somewhat crack-brained and bird witted but went on to see in her a vein of authentic fire. Eighty-odd years on, flamboyant, eccentric, admittedly vain, now she’s a respected foremother among women of letters. Founded in 1997, the Margaret Cavendish Society — “international, established to provide communication between scholars worldwide”— is plumped with learned papers, confabs, dues. She’s an aristocrat who advocates —words worn across centuries—for women’s rights. 6 I went to college in the nineteen forties read Gogol, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert. Read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and wrote exams that asked: contrast and compare. Male novelists, male profs, male tutors, not a single woman on the faculty nor was there leaven found among the poets I read and loved: G.M. Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Auden, Yeats, only Emily (not quite decoded or yet in the canon). Ten years later, I struggled to break in the almost all-male enclave of poetry. Here’s a small glimpse in the the hierarchy: famed Robert Lowell praising Marianne 7 as the best woman poet in America, put down by Langston Hughes, bless his egalitarian soul, who rose at the dinner to pronounce her the best Negro woman poet in the nation. Terrified of writing domestic poems, poems pungent with motherhood, anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs, somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse. I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone with another restless mother, Anne Sexton, and poco a poco our poems filled up the house. Then one of us sold a poem to The New Yorker. A week later, the other was welcomed in Harper’s. 8 But even  as we published our first books the visiting male bards required care. We drove them to their readings far and near, thence to the airport just in time to make their flight to the next gig.You drive like a man, they said by way of praise, and if a poem of ours seemed worthy they said,you write like a man. When asked what woman poet they read, with one voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson. Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern women poets were dismissed as immature, their poems pink with the glisten of female organs. The virus of their disdain hung in the air but women were now infected with ambition. 9 We didn’t merely saunter decade by decade. We swept on past de Beauvoir and Friedan, and took courage from Carolyn Kizer’s knife-blade Pro Femina:I will speak about women of letters for I’m in the racket,urging, Stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors. If a woman is to write, Virginia Woolf has Mary Beton declare, she has to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door, a sacred space where Shakespeare’s sister Judith might have equaled his prodigious gift or not. She might have simply floated there, set loose in the privilege of privacy, her self unwritten, under no one else’s eyes… 10 Oh, Duchess, come hurdle five centuries to a land of MFA’s in poetry, of journals in print and even more online, small presses popping up like grapes on vines, reading staking place in every cranny, prizes for first books, some with money. Come to this apex of tenured women professors where sessions on gender and race fill whole semesters and students immerse themselves in women’s studies. Meet famous poets who are also unabashed mothers or singletons by choice or same-sex partners— black, Latina, Asian, native American, white , Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist— come join us, Duchess Margaret Cavendish.

for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of nagasaki, for the eyes of the children of middle passage, for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us, amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men.

Tsung Ping (375—443): "Now I am old and infirm. I fear I shall no more be able to roam among the beautiful mountains. Clarifying my mind, I meditate on the mountain trails and wander about only in dreams." -in The Spirit of the Brush, tr. by Shio Sakanishi, p. 34 for Kenneth Rexroth I always say I won't go back to the mountains I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules And pancakes every morning of the world Mr. Edward Wyman (63) Steams along the trail ahead of us all Moaning, "My poor feet ache, my back Is tired and I've got a stiff prick" Uprooting alder shoots in the rain Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge Encircled by chiming mountains With one sun roaring through the house all day & the others crashing through the glass all night Conscious even while sleeping Morning fog in the southern gorge Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo The high cirque-lake black half-open eye Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow Bear peers through the wall at noon Deer crowd up to see the lamp A mouse nearly drowns in the honey I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy Much later I write down: "raging. Viking sunrise The gorgeous death of summer in the east!" (Influence of a Byronic landscape— Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.) Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite Mountain hot September sun but inside my head Calm dark night with all the other stars HERACLITUS: "The waking have one common world But the sleeping turn aside Each into a world of his own." I keep telling myself what I really like Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes The way light falls across them, diffusion of Light through agate, light itself . . . I suppose I'm still afraid of the dark "Remember smart-guy there's something Bigger something smarter than you." Ireland's fear of unknown holies drives My father's voice (a country neither he Nor his great-grandfather ever saw) A sparkly tomb a plated grave A holy thumb beneath a wave Everything else they hauled across Atlantic Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains Among these trees and mountains From Duns Scotus to this page A thousand years (". . . a dog walking on this hind legs— not that he does it well but that he does it at all.") Virtually a blank except for the hypothesis That there is more to a man Than the contents of his jock-strap EMPEDOCLES: "At one time all the limbs Which are the body's portion are brought together By Love in blooming life's high season; at another Severed by cruel Strife, they wander each alone By the breakers of life's sea." Fire and pressure from the sun bear down Bear down centipede shadow of palm-frond A limestone lithograph—oysters and clams of stone Half a black rock bomb displaying brilliant crystals Fire and pressure Love and Strife bear down Brontosaurus, look away My sweat runs down the rock HERACLITUS: "The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind. . . . It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires." I move out of a sweaty pool (The sea!) And sit up higher on the rock Is anything burning? The sun itself! Dying Pooping out, exhausted Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus This rock, me, To no purpose I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . . Flies & other insects come from miles around To listen I also address the rock, the heather, The alpine fir BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street: "IF YOU CAN'T COME IN SMILE AS YOU GO BY LOVE THE BUTCHER I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds of ficus religiosa Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.

Give me back my father walking the halls of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company with sawdust clinging to his shoes. Give me back his tape measure and his keys, his drafting pencil and his order forms; give me his daydreams on lined paper. I don't understand this uncontainable grief. Whatever you had that never fit, whatever else you needed, believe me, my father, who wanted your business, would squat down at your side and sketch you a container for it.

How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural: Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell. She’s been nominated for the position of Featured Saint on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate— me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open. Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron. Letters that I could not read. Why I feel qualified for the position based on letters I could not read amounts to this: Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference between the broken gates and the forbidden letters. So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints? How might we otherwise remember— without an image to fasten in that lonely place— the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever? Without an icon or church, spell “gates of Hell.” Spell “those years ago unfolding.” Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read. Spell “fling yourself skyward.” Spell “fever.”