Alicia Ostriker

—for J.P.O. I have wished you dead and myself dead, How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar And you've set your dogs on me. You have been a hurricane to me And a pile of broken sticks A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasping, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top– Strong and warm, that summer wind.

And all this while I have been playing with toys A toy power station a toy automobile a house of blocks And all this while far off in other lands Thousands and thousands, millions and millions— You know—you see the pictures Women carrying their bony infants Men sobbing over graves Buildings sculpted by explosion Earth wasted bare and rotten— And all this while I have been shopping, I have Been let us say free And do they hate me for it Do they hate me

They remember the dead who died in the resistance. It is in sweet tones that they speak of them. They shake their heads, still, after the dinner Walking back to the car, while an evening snow That has started windlessly, white from pearl-gray, Falls into streets that are already slushy. They shake their heads, as we do when there is something Too strange to believe, Or as a beast does, stunned by a blow. “To die in the resistance,”   they say, “is to fail To turn into slush, to escape this ugliness. It is at once to leap, a creamy swan, Upward.”   Three voices: oboe, piano, cello. The high one wishes to be pleasing, the middle To be practical, the deep to persevere. A movie theater lobby in front of them Throws its light on the sidewalk, like a woman Swiftly emptying a bucket of water: The flakes are falling in its yellow light. Then they pass a café, its light red neon, Then a closed pharmacy. —They pull sharp air Into their lungs, a pain that is a pleasure. “Try to live as if there were no God,” They don’t say, but they mean. A recollection of purity, a clean Handkerchief each man feels in his own pocket, Perturbs them, slows their pace down. Now they have seen A yellow stain on a pile of old snow Between two parked cars, where a man has peed: The resistance. The falling flakes, falling On the men’s hats. And now The snow grows heavier, falls on their stooping shoulders.

To tell the truth, those brick Housing Authority buildings For whose loveliness no soul had planned, Like random dominoes stood, worn out and facing each other, Creating the enclosure that was our home. Long basement corridors connected one house to another And had a special smell, from old bicycles and baby carriages In the storage rooms. The elevators Were used by kissing teenagers. The playground—iron swingchains, fences, iron monkey bars, Iron seesaw handles, doubtless now rusted— Left a strong iron smell on my hands and in the autumn air And rang with cries. To me it is even precious Where they chased the local Mongoloid, yelling “Stupid Joey! Stupid Joey!” Now I’ve said everything nice I can about this.

Some claim the origin of song was a war cry some say it was a rhyme telling the farmers when to plant and reap don’t they know the first song was a lullaby pulled from a mother’s sleep said the old woman A significant factor generating my delight in being alive this springtime is the birdsong that like a sweeping mesh has captured me like diamond rain I can’t hear it enough said the tulip lifetime after lifetime we surged up the hill I and my dear brothers thirsty for blood uttering our beautiful songs said the dog

the man made me soften and melt said the old woman the bee made me shiver like a rag said the dark red tulip the bitch made me push said the dog

Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic The cranes are flying ... —Chekhov And here it comes: around the world, In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved, Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer, Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt In a township of corrugated metal roofs) And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse Strains of premeditated art, is now improvisation, The desperately new, where to the sine-curved Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates The death and cremation of history, Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes, And a girl wearing a skull That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain, Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen. Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions Of shootouts, of tortured ones in basements, Of cold insinuations before sex Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal. The girl tosses her head and dances The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume, The boy dances stealing the truck, Shooting his father. The point is to become a flying viper, A diving vulva, the great point Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself Into far other habitats, or seed That travels a migrant bird’s gut To be shit overseas. The creatures gamble on the whirl of life And every adolescent body hot Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots, These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip My hair and vibrate my pelvis Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise That imitates history’s catastrophe Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive, Maybe we’ll all survive. . . . At the intersection of poverty and plague The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

If time is an arrow, what is its target If a Flexible Flyer is the sled I had as a child, when may I become a child again Do you need help digging the potatoes out of your garden of insults Do you plan to vote in the next election Is our country headed in the right direction or the wrong direction and what did the bulldozer tell the yellow helmet’s ear Which part of your body is like biting into a ripe peach which part shames you like a rotten banana Would you like to find out how to lower your interest rate When you go to heaven how old will you choose to be will you have cocktails on the well-watered lawn where Bach conducts Bach Will you still chase after the Grateful Dead Is your life like air leaking out of a balloon, or like rain falling on a pond dot dot dot      dear pocks     pocking the surface     dot dot dot Can it be like snow falling on the ocean Can desire drown you like syrup over pancakes When an ambulance siren wakes you at 3 a.m. do you feel relieved not to be strapped to that stretcher speeding toward the grim unknown do you then snuggle next to someone Are you satisfied with your detergent Can you name a more perfect irony than the new world trade center, sacred icon of capitalism, revered lingam of profit, soaring above the 
memorial pools of people killed when the first towers fell Can you describe the scent of dried blood What about the smell of iron chains in your cell can you sing the threnody of the maggots When I removed my mask did I frighten you like a drone crossing your sky Are you satisfied with your auto insurance When ecstasy approaches why do you resist What are you afraid of Can you please unbutton your shirt now

Like a bowerbird trailing a beakful of weeds Like prize ribbons for the very best The lover, producer Of another’s pleasure He whom her swollen lips await Might wing through any day of the decade A form of health insurance For which it is never too late Titanic, silver brush Hindenburg, of exploding cigars a climax The watery below, the fiery above Ashes of print between—pigment between If the crippled woman were to descend From her bed, her fortress beyond midnight Downstairs (nude/staircase) to the kitchen Naked to sit at the table (writing/thinking) She might hear the washer spin like a full orchestra Complete a cycle like a train crash Before the fiend would stare through the window Step smoothly into the kitchen, stop some clocks. Envy shapes a fig tree in one’s breast, That is, bluntly to say, a cancer, That is to say In a mind, a fertile windy field. A murdered child. Well then, fear, primarily of falling. Ebony surf toils on the beach, a glaze At the same moment I am (from a cliff) falling The kitchen fiend removes his Dior tie Places his hand over the woman’s And softly says: I am the lover. Now if the crippled woman began to dance To pirouette, to rumba Growling for her child Her burning page, the devil would be shamed (Materialism is not for everyone / Religion is The extension of politics by other means

Matisse, too, when the fingers ceased to work, Worked larger and bolder, his primary colors celebrating The weddings of innocence and glory, innocence and glory Monet when the cataracts blanketed his eyes Painted swirls of rage, and when his sight recovered Painted water lilies, Picasso claimed I do not seek, I find, and stuck to that story About himself, and made that story stick. Damn the fathers. We are talking about defiance.