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It is always the dispossessed— someone driving a huge rusted Dodge that’s burning oil, and must cost twenty-five dollars to fill. Today before seven I saw, through the morning fog, his car leave the road, turning into the field. It must be his day off, I thought, or he’s out of work and drinking, or getting stoned. Or maybe as much as anything he wanted to see where the lane through the hay goes. It goes to the bluff overlooking the lake, where we’ve cleared brush, swept the slippery oak leaves from the path, and tried to destroy the poison ivy that runs over the scrubby, sandy knolls. Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car needing a new muffler backs out to the road, headlights withdrawing from the lowest branches of the pines. Next day I find beer cans, crushed; sometimes a few fish too small to bother cleaning and left on the moss to die; or the leaking latex trace of outdoor love.... Once I found the canvas sling chairs broken up and burned. Whoever laid the fire gathered stones to contain it, like a boy pursuing a merit badge, who has a dream of work, and proper reward for work.

Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce, the name and drawing of a detective with magnifying glass on the sides of the crates of lettuce, form a great cross in man’s imagination and his desire to name the objects of this world. I think I’ll call this place Golgotha and have some salad for dinner.

You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them to your party and they don’t come, they’re too busy tending vaginal flowers, hating football, walking their golden and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem in which she was in love with a woman and the church but the church couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed. When I asked if our coworkers knew, she dropped her head and I said nothing for years until this morning I realized no one reads poems: my secrets and hers are safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne, Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice, the name’s been changed to protect women who can’t stand in a room holding hands because you can’t trust heterosexuals to love love, however it comes. So I recorded the party for her, for them, the mic a bit away from the action to catch the feel of waves touching shore and letting go, the wash of moods across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes were thrown and I breathed the quickening revelation of a cigarette, someone said “I gave up underwear for Lent” and I hope they play the tape while making love. As if finally the world’s made happy by who they are, laughing with, not at the nipple lick clit kiss hug in bed and after, the on and on of meals and moons and bills and burning days of pretending they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just a friend.” And oceans are merely dew upon the land.

I used to like being young, and I still do, Because I think I still am. There are physical Objections to that thought, and yet what Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels. And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all: A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening To the music floating through my living room each night. It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began. You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore; The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart. Along the way the self that you were born with turns into The self that you created, but they come together at the end, United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story, Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego, Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing, Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors, And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age, As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs. In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan, Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn, A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live. It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything, And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care. It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe That flows around them and dissolves them in the end, But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark, A small backyard beneath a boring California sky. I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood, Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

A book with poems about Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, William Tell, W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Sitting Bull, an otter, a fox, and a hare won the Pulitzer Prize in the first year of the war. In the second year, the year of insurgency, of bridges, corpses, blindfolds, and dogs, a poet who wrote about the only species that commits suicide received the prize. In the year of boycotts and stained fingertips, the third of the war, the prize went to a retired life insurance executive who lived on acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska. Disappearance, from one life to another, was the subject of the prizewinner in the year of growing sectarian violence, the fourth of the war, also the year of verdict and hanging. In the fifth year, of surge and black water, the civil war continued, and the prize was given to a book about our civil war, which ended 143 years earlier. In the sixth year, the prize was granted to a poet who wrote a lovely poem about war, the war in Europe, where white men killed each other by the millions; his poem still mentioned an Arab, a young man who performs an act of purification, removing hair from his body, before flying a plane into an office building, an act that took place fifty-eight years after the war the poem is actually about. The prize was shared in the sixth year of the war, the other book evoking pleasures (of family, beaches, and dogs) and horrors (of young men purifying their bodies with speed and conviction). In the seventh year, the year of ceasefire and effigy, the prize was presented to a book about loss, memory, and the continuum of time; the book was named after a dog in the sky. The war went on, for eight years now, and many soldiers (300,000) were returned home, and many others (not soldiers, too many to count) were returned to the earth; this was the year of exit strategies, and a book described as filled with “little thought-bombs” won the Pulitzer Prize. In the year of renaming, the ninth, a new dawn replaced freedom, and the prizewinner had served as United States Poet Laureate in the war’s sixth, seventh, and eighth years. The last year, the year of withdrawal, the prize was given to a book named after life on another planet, which is a yearning for another way to live, which is also another way to die. Long after life on Earth the depleted uranium in the Tigris will reach its half-life, four and a half billion years after the tenth year of the war, which is the end of time.

ONE From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters. Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys. Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart: Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner— “Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us, As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it. While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it, Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines. Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male— I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen, Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man. I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me. Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery, Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken, Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it; Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions; We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders, “Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos, Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it! TWO I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,” Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons; Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed, Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners, And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes, Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even. But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment. So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it? We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us, Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting. Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness, Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze, Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me, In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages. Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces. Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope! Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance. The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness. So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you: Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else. You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading. So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh, All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility! Meanwhile, have you used your mind today? What pomegranate raised you from the dead, Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena? THREE I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket. Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers. Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant, Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns. Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen; Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium, The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail. I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood, Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men, Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority! Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several, They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals, Aiming to please a posterity that despises them. But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret: Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity. But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive, Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees. Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy; They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread, Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown In the expectation of glory:she writes like a man! This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon. (One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.) But we’re emerging from all that, more or less, Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition. Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal; If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry; If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors; If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets; Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried; And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.

The cheap dropped ceiling jumped like a pot-lid boiling when our upstairs neighbor chased his girl that winter. Falling out of summer’s skimpy tops she’d want our phone. Her plush lips creased. Not exactly blonde, but luteous , we thought, pleased the right word was there for that shade of slightly slutty mermaid. Wincing, we’d hear him punch along the floor on crutch- es, a giant bat trying to mince a mayfly. Sex and Violence you called them; Blondie with Dagwood on crystal meth, I’d tell our friends over dinners stewed in noise. Even his truck cowed. Black, smoked glass, outsized wheels flaunted like chrome knuckles we shrank from, ducked, afraid we’d find her later, knocking at our door. Some nights we waited through like captured prey. To you I’d turn in bed, saying the furtive words against your back, I love ... You’d stroke my hair, or hip, all our years the same flip crack, I do , too .

In a movie I have never seen: a small-town drunk stumbles into a beam of light & wakes up convinced he was abducted by aliens, convinced a hole opened in the sky & swallowed him — said they did something strange to his body some kind of experiment, said a hole opened, said cold light cauterized him shut, redefined that red theory, chrome instrument turned him into a skinless puzzle, a scrambled egg sealed back into its shell. Madness, too, can be accumulative. When my blood seemed uncontrollable, ran messy with pulp down their fingers, my cousins finally left the room, laughing closing the basement door behind them.

She always writes poems. This summer she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already. The characters are easy—a girl and her friend who is a girl and the boy down the block with his first car, an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing in dressy clothes though it’s still light out. The girl has a brother who has lots of friends, is good in math, and just plain good which doesn’t help the story. The story should have rescues & escapes in it which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be the brother or the grandpa or the father either, or even the boy down the block with his first car. People in novels have to need something, she thinks, that it takes about two hundred pages to get. She can’t imagine that. Nothing she needs can be got; if it could she’d go get it: the answer to nightmares; a mother who’d be proud of her; doing things a mother could be proud of; having hips & knowing how to squeal at the beach laughing when the boy down the block picked her up & carried her & threw her in the water. If she’d laughed squealing he might still take her swimming & his mother wouldn’t say she’s crazy, she would not have got her teeth into his shoulder till well yes she bit him, and the marks lasted & lasted, his mother said so, but that couldn’t be in a novel. She’ll never squeal laughing, she’d never not bite him, she hates cute girls, she hates boys who like them. Biting is embarrassing and wrong & she has no intention of doing it again but she would if he did if he dared, and there’s no story if there’s no hope of change.

You are trying to solve a problem. You’re almost certainly halfway done, maybe more. You take some salt, some alum, and put it into the problem. Its color goes from yellow to royal blue. You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem, as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string. You enter the problem’s bodegas, its flea markets, souks. Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets, of jewelry, spices, and hair combs, you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours. You go inside the problem’s piano. You choose three keys. One surely must open the door of the problem, if only you knew only this: is the quandary edible or medical, a problem of reason or grief? It is looking back at you now with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog. Her whole body pitched for the fetch, the dog wants to please. If only she could ascertain which direction, what object, which scent of riddle, and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit, and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.