Brenda Hillman

The earth had wanted us all to itself. The mountains wanted us back for themselves. The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us; that’s why it happened as it did, the split as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . . Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street and the tube that held the trout-colored train and the cords of action from triangular buildings and the terraced gardens that held camelias shook and shook, each flower a single thought. Mothers and children took cover under tables. I called out to her who was my life. From under the table—I hid under the table that held the begonia with the fiery stem, the stem that had been trying to root, that paused in its effort—I called to the child who was my life. And understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh’s army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a single awe and in that moment a promise is written out. However we remember California later the earth we loved will know the truth: that it wanted us back for itself with our mighty forms and our specific longings, wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn’t; the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted, the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed during the shaking lasted, the painting released by the wall, the mark and hook we placed on the wall, and the nail, and the memory of driving the nail in, these also lasted—

—Once more the poem woke me up, the dark poem. I was ready for it; he was sleeping, and across the cabin, the small furnace lit and re-lit itself—the flame a yellow “tongue” again, the metal benignly hard again; and a thousand insects outside called and made me nothing; moonlight streamed inside as if it had been ... I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, spirit held by matter: Mary, white as a sand dollar, and Christ, his sticky halo tilted— oh, to get behind it! The world had been created to comprehend itself as matter: table, the torn veils of spiders ... Even consciousness— missing my love— was matter, the metal box of a furnace. As the obligated flame, so burned my life ... What is the meaning of this suffering I asked and the voice—not Christ but between us— said you are the meaning. No no, I replied, That is the shape, what is the meaning. You are the meaning, it said—

The last ice age had been caused by a wobble. After it passed they made houses from stars; Visitors would peer in And see the tongs not slipping, Roomsized pebbles having been moved far. It’s like this more When we speak than when we write; Loving thus we have been Loved by ground, The word being A box with four of its corners hidden; Everything else is round.

A brenda is missing—where is she? Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch with the crowded beak;   a little pretenda is learning to read in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher, a skinny pretenda is learning to read till the missing brenda is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro. Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays & sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow or blue will find the brenda in 1962, Nancy                   who has no mother, who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them. Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference. Click of the smart dog’s nails on linoleum. Nancy bends over the clues, of brenda’s locket & dress. Word by word between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn— are they missing too? Maybe Nancy will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew: “neat pretty sly cute.” Syllable by syllable & still no brenda!   Nancy puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?

Each day the job gets up And rubs its eyes We are going to live on in dry amazement Workers push the granite bed under the avenue Bed of the married The re-          the pre-married Making a form as forms become infinite The scrapings       scraping Graywhacke    chert People wait for their bumpy little pizzas Theories of theories in gravity voices Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid Angel food in whole foods Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood Made everything a horizon Those walking upside down don’t know what to think The finch engineering itself to deep spring Or you        life       tired of being cured How many layers Of giving up are there One of it Two of everything in the arc you save

In a side booth at MacDonald’s before your music class you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio under the poster of the talking hamburger: two white eyes rolling around in the top bun, the thin patty of beef imitating the tongue of its animal nature. You eat merrily. I watch the Oakland mommies, trying to understand what it means to be “single.” * Across from us, females of all ages surround the birthday girl. Her pale lace and insufficient being can’t keep them out of her circle. Stripes of yellow and brown all over the place. The poor in spirit have started to arrive, the one with thick midwestern braids twisted like thought on her head; usually she brings her mother. This week, no mother. She mouths her words anyway across the table, space-mama, time-mama, mama who should be there. * Families in line: imagine all this translated by the cry of time moving through us, this place a rubble. The gardens new generations will plant in this spot, and the food will go on in another order. This thought cheers me immensely. That we will be there together, you still seven, bending over the crops pretending to be royalty, that the huge woman with one blind eye and dots like eyes all over her dress will also be there, eating with pleasure as she eats now, right up to the tissue paper, peeling it back like bright exotic petals. * Last year, on the sun-spilled deck in Marin we ate grapes with the Russians; the KGB man fingered them quickly and dutifully, then, in a sad tone to us “We must not eat them so fast, we wait in line so long for these,” he said. * The sight of food going into a woman’s mouth made Byron sick. Food is a metaphor for existence. When Mr. Egotistical Sublime, eating the pasta, poked one finger into his mouth, he made a sound. For some, the curve of the bell pepper seems sensual but it can worry you, the slightly greasy feel of it. * The place I went with your father had an apartment to the left, and in the window, twisted like a huge bowtie, an old print bedspread. One day, when I looked over, someone was watching us, a young girl. The waiter had just brought the first thing: an orange with an avocado sliced up CCCC in an oil of forceful herbs. I couldn’t eat it. The girl’s face stood for something and from it, a little mindless daylight was reflected. The businessmen at the next table were getting off on each other and the young chardonnay. Their briefcases leaned against their ankles. I watched the young girl’s face because for an instant I had seen your face there, unterrified, unhungry, and a little disdainful. Then the waiter brought the food, bands of black seared into it like the memory of a cage. * You smile over your burger, chattering brightly. So often, at our sunny kitchen table, hearing the mantra of the refrigerator, I’ve thought there was nothing I could do but feed you; and I’ve always loved the way you eat, you eat selfishly, humming, bending the french fries to your will, your brown eyes spotting everything: the tall boy who has come in with his mother, repressed rage in espadrilles, and now carries the tray for her. Oh this is fun, says the mother, You stand there with mommy’s purse. And he stands there smiling after her, holding all the patience in the world.

At sunrise the deer eat pieces of the quiet, they eat spaces between the quiet & the sounds—; & the numbers on the calendar lie flat in their boxes, they leak through tiny holes in the minutes, evenly so, so evenly, an active sense, before the sense was made… There, now, opposite to set down, the agreed-upon, the shape of the obvious drawn by an earlier enchantment before the new anxiety set in: the workers are safe; the terror stilled for an hour; a lover’s outline, dreamed or imagined, before you read the one-page book again, what was that book, it had no copyright— & what was before? a life, the dazzler, the dark, the singing dust, it turned when you turned, it orpheus-knew what you forgot when you took the bowl of burning time across the room— & if the previous is closer to you now, should you look, doesn’t matter if you do, you carry the some of it with it, out into it— for LG

Sometimes  ,  when i'm very tired  ,    i think of extremophiles    ,   chemolithoautotrophs & others with     power for changing not-life into lives  ,    of those that eat rock & fire in volcanoes   ,     before the death of the world but after   the death of a human ,    of their taste for ammonia or iron  ,     sulfur & carbon ,   somehow enough of it to go on ...     As workers taste revolt       ,   they grow at the vents of oceans   ,     turning mute vapor into respiration            ,   changing unhinged matter to hinges        ,  near the rims of sea trenches or the caves     ...     Our friend wrote of writers living              in gray hiding, ,     of those who love glass & early freedom   ,    steep sand & late freedom       ,     sex among gentle or bitter grasses     ,   those with a taste for blue or belligerence   ,obscure lives, she called them               ,   the writers of radical mind     … The living prefer life    ,  mostly they do ,   they are ravenous ,    making shapes in groups as the dying grow     one thought until the end ,   wanting more specifics   ,desert or delay until the i        drops away into i am not here,   the mineral other pumps & vast vapors  ,    ridges & shadows beyond the single life it had not thought of—

After Ed Sanders We’d been squatting     near the worms in the White House lawn, protesting the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>; i could sense      the dear worms through    the grillwork fence, twists & coils   of flexi-script, remaking the soil    by resisting it    ... After the ride in the police van telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffs pretty tight, when the presiding officer asked: —Do you have any tattoos? — Yes, officer, i have two. —What are they? — Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh & an alchemical sign on my ankle. —Please spell that? — Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L. —What is that? — It’s basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame. He started printing in the little square MOON, LILY, STAR Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked about his, but couldn’t cross that chasm.     Outside,   Ash Wednesday in our nation’s capital.     Dead grass, spring trees about to burst, two officers beside the newish van. Inside, alchemical notes for the next time —

—kept losing self control but how could one lose the self after reading so much literary theory? The shorter "i" stood under the cork trees, the taller "I" remained rather passive; the brendas were angry at the greed, angry that the trees would die, had lost interest in the posturing of the privileged, the gaps between can't & won't... Stood outside the gate of permissible sound & the wind came soughing through the doubt debris (soughing comes from swāgh— to resound... echo actually comes from this also—) we thought of old Hegel across the sea—the Weltgeist—& clouds went by like the bones of a Kleenex... it's too late for countries but it's not too late for trees... & the wind kept soughing with its sound sash, wind with its sound sash,    increasing bold wind with its sound sash, increasing bold—