Carolyn Kizer

I. Sirs, in our youth you love the sight of us. Older, you fall in love with what we’ve seen, Would lose yourselves by living in our lives. I’ll spin you tales, play the Arabian girl; Working close, alone in the blond arena, Flourish my cape, the cloth on the camera. For women learn to be a holy show. I’ll tell you where I’ve been, not what I am: In Rotterdam, womb where my people sprang, I find my face, my father, everywhere. New cousins I must stoop to greet, the get Of tall, whey-colored burghers, sturdy dams, As children fed on tulip bulbs and dirt, Tugged at dry dugs and sucked at winter’s rind. My cousins, dwarfed by war! Your forms rebuke The butcher and the bystander alike. To ease you I can’t shrink this big Dutch frame Got of more comfortable ancestors. But from my Southern side I pluck a phrase, “I’ll carry you.” And it means “rest in me,” To hold you as I may, in my mind’s womb. But snap the album, get the guidebook out! Rotterdam: her raw, gray waterfront, Zadkine’s memorial burning on the quay; This bronze is mortal, gaping in defeat, The form that wombed it split to let it be. It mends; he lurches up, in blood reborn, The empty heavens his eternal frame. II. Move to my room beside the Golden Horn Where minarets strike fire against the sky. The architecture: breasts and phalluses. Where are the words to say that words are lies? Yeats lied. And here Byzantium lies dead. Constantinople? Syllables in a text. Istanbul. Real. Embalmed in dancing dust. Everywhere the dark-brown past gives way To the beige of progress, that wide vacant lot. Turkey without coffee! Endlessly we sip tea From bud vases, and I lust for the guide, A sultry, serious, pedantic boy In a tight brown suit, thirsting to get out Of the triple city weighing on his mind. Oh, he was doomed, doomed like the dogs On Dog Island, in the sea, Netted and dumped and exiled, left to die, Then skinned. We heard imaginary canine howls, Like the rustlings of a thousand gauzy girls, Film-eyed cattle, perishing of ennui In abandoned harems where he guided me. Meanwhile the Faithful, prostrate and intoning, Stare into the light as blind as death, Knowing for sure their end is instant Heaven. We Infidels concede them Paradise, Having seen heaven-as-harem, a eunuch God In charge: the virgin slowly fattening to blubber. Love, become feminized, tickles like a feather. The saints of Art? Sophia, that vast barn Holds no small Savior waiting to get born. The formal scribble on the assaulted walls— Five hundred years of crossing out His name! Some famous, glittering pebbles mark the place As God’s most grandiose sarcophagus. Decay, decay. And the mind, a fetus, dies. III. Return me to the airfield near Shanghai Where I am very young: shy, apprehensive, Seated like Sheba on a baggage mountain Waiting for the first adventure to begin. The train will glide through fields of rice and men, Bodies like thongs, and glorious genitals, Not alien as Chinese, but Adam-strange. Rejoiced by her first look at naked men, Her soul swims out the window of the train! She goes where newborn daughters clog the creeks; Bank-porticoes are strewn with starving rags. Here the old dragon, China, thrashes, dying. But the ancient, virile music of the race Is rising, drenched in gongs and howls of dogs Islanded, the sighs of walled-up women Dreaming of peasants in their prisoning fields… But we break out of the harem of history! No longer that young foreigner on the train, I listen like a bird, although I ruminate Like a cow, in my pale Holland body, riven By love and children. These eyes are what they see. Come die with me in the mosques of Rotterdam.

Remembering the past And gloating at it now, I know the frozen brow And shaking sides of lust Will dog me at my death To catch my ghostly breath. I think that Yeats was right, That lust and love are one. The body of this night May beggar me to death, But we are not undone Who love with all our breath. I know that Proust was wrong, His wheeze: love, to survive, Needs jealousy, and death And lust, to make it strong Or goose it back alive. Proust took away my breath. The later Yeats was right To think of sex and death And nothing else. Why wait Till we are turning old? My thoughts are hot and cold. I do not waste my breath.

In the laboratory waiting room containing one television actor with a teary face trying a contact lens; two muscular victims of industrial accidents; several vain women—I was one of them— came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye. It was a long day: Deborah waiting for the blood vessels painted on her iris to dry. Her mother said that, holding Deborah when she was born, “First I inspected her, from toes to navel, then stopped at her head ...” We wondered why the inspection hadn’t gone the other way. “Looking into her eye was like looking into a volcano: “Her vacant pupil went whirling down, down to the foundation of the world ... When she was three months old they took it out. She giggled when she went under the anaesthetic. Forty-five minutes later she came back happy! ... The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face (you know, it never bled?), stayed happy, even when I went to pieces. She’s five, in June. “Deborah, you get right down from there, or I’ll have to slap!” Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap of one vain lady, who had been discontented with her own beauty. Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily in the empty eye.

themes from the Tzu Yeh and the Book of Songs I have carried my pillow to the windowsill And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it, But no breeze stirs the tepid morning. Only I stir ... Come, tease me a little! With such cold passion, so little teasing play, How long can we endure our life together? No use. I put on your long dressing-gown; The untied sash trails over the dusty floor. I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror And pluck my eyebrows. I don’t care if the robe slides open Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh. I can accuse that nonexistent breeze ... I am as monogamous as the North Star, But I don’t want you to know it. You’d only take advantage. While you are as fickle as spring sunlight. All right, sleep! The cat means more to you than I. I can rouse you, but then you swagger out. I glimpse you from the window, striding toward the river. When you return, reeking of fish and beer, There is salt dew in your hair. Where have you been? Your clothes weren’t that wrinkled hours ago, when you left. You couldn’t have loved someone else, after loving me! I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window. Later, when you hold me in your arms It seems, for a moment, the river ceases flowing.

After you left me forever, I was broken into pieces, and all the pieces flung into the river. Then the legs crawled ashore and aimlessly wandered the dusty cow-track. They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine: A tiny table set up between the thighs held a dusty candle, weed-and-fieldflower chains placed reverently there by children and old women. My knees were hung with tin triangular medals to cure all forms of hysterical disease. After I died forever in the river, my torso floated, bloated in the stream, catching on logs or stones among the eddies. White water foamed around it, then dislodged it; after a whirlwind trip, it bumped ashore. A grizzled old man who scavenged along the banks had already rescued my arms and put them by, knowing everything has its uses, sooner or later. When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, and, using my arms as paddles, he rowed me up and down the scummy river. When catfish nibbled my fingers he scooped them up and blessed his reusable bait. Clumsy but serviceable, that canoe! The trail of blood that was its wake attracted the carp and eels, and the river turtle, easily landed, dazed by my tasty red. A young lad found my head among the rushes and placed it on a dry stone. He carefully combed my hair with a bit of shell and set small offerings before it which the birds and rats obligingly stole at night, so it seemed I ate. And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets so my lungs would sigh, and my dead tongue mutter. Attached to my throat like a sacred necklace was a circlet of small snails. Soon the villagers came to consult my oracular head with its waterweed crown. Seers found occupation, interpreting sighs, and their papyrus rolls accumulated. Meanwhile, young boys retrieved my eyes they used for marbles in a simple game till somebody’s pretty sister snatched at them and set them, for luck, in her bridal diadem. Poor girl! When her future groom caught sight of her, all eyes, he crossed himself in horror, and stumbled away in haste through her dowered meadows. What then of my heart and organs, my sacred slit which loved you best of all? They were caught in a fisherman’s net and tossed at night into a pen for swine. But they shone so by moonlight that the sows stampeded, trampled one another in fear, to get away. And the fisherman’s wife, who had thirteen living children and was contemptuous of holy love, raked the rest of me onto the compost heap. Then in their various places and helpful functions, the altar, oracle, offal, canoe and oars learned the wild rumor of your return. The altar leapt up, and ran to the canoe, scattering candle grease and wilted grasses. Arms sprang to their sockets, blind hands with nibbled nails groped their way, aided by loud lamentation, to the bed of the bride, snatched up those unlucky eyes from her discarded veil and diadem, and rammed them home. Oh, what a bright day it was! This empty body danced on the riverbank. Hollow, it called and searched among the fields for those parts that steamed and simmered in the sun, and never would have found them. But then your great voice rang out under the skies my name!—and all those private names for the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar, and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment, and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles, and the runaway groom, and the fisherman’s thirteen children set up such a clamor, with their cries of “Miracle!” that our two bodies met like a thunderclap in midday—right at the corner of that wretched field with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. We fell in a heap on the compost heap and all our loving parts made love at once, while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes and then went decently about their business. And here it is, moonlight again; we’ve bathed in the river and are sweet and wholesome once more. We kneel side by side in the sand; we worship each other in whispers. But the inner parts remember fermenting hay, the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, and passion, its bloody labor, its birth and rebirth and decay.

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.

Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown until heaps of rich, beautiful fabric were strewn over the chairs and sofas. They posed before mirrors, with their diamonds and trinkets and floor-length furs. Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help. They became distracted—by constantly ringing phones, by obsequious secretaries, bustling in with packages, flowers, messages, all the paraphernalia, all part of the uninterruptible rounds of the rich, the nice rich, smiling soothingly, as they touched their hair or picked up their phone extensions. Absently patting my arm, they smiled, “It will be all right.” Dusk fell on the city as I ran, naked, weeping, into the streets. I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, Who, as a young girl, rescued four Loyalist soldiers from a Spanish prison; in her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks, she drove an old car sagging with Loyalist pamphlets across the Pyrenees all the way to Paris without being caught. And not long ago, she helped save a group of men from Franco’s sentence of death. In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona. I realize this isn’t quite right, but I just stand there paralyzed, as one does in dreams. Then, dimly, from the other end of the line, through the chatter of international operators, we hear artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men, cracked voices singing, “Los Quartros Generales” through the pulsations of the great, twisted cable under the ocean. Agonía, agonía, sueño, fermente & sueño. Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía. “No, Barbara!” I scream. "We are not back there. That’s the old revolution. Call up the new one.” Though I know that, every day, your friends, Nicanor, telephone Santiago, where the number rings and rings and rings with never an answer. And now the rings are turning into knells: The church bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda, his poems looted, his autobiography stolen, his books desecrated in his house on Isla Negra. And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture, his desk overturned, the ruined books strewn over the floor, lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish academy, the wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over. And the bells toll on… Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone. She dials the number again, then turns to me, smiling, smiling like an angel: “He is there.” Trembling, I take the phone from her, and hear your voice, Nicanor, sad, humorous, infinitely disillusioned, infinitely consoling: “Dear Carolyn…” It is Nicanor! And the connection is broken, because I wake up, in this white room, in this white silence, in this backwater of silence on this Isla Blanca: Nicanor, Nicanor, are you, too, silent under the earth, Brother, Brother?

We who must act as handmaidens To our own goddess, turn too fast, Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse Gliding below her lake or sea, Are left, long-staring after her, Narcissists by necessity; Or water-carriers of our young Till waters burst, and white streams flow Artesian, from the lifted breast: Cupbearers then, to tiny gods, Imperious table-pounders, who Are final arbiters of thirst. Fasten the blouse, and mount the steps From kitchen taps to Royal Barge, Assume the trident, don the crown, Command the Water Music now That men bestow on Virgin Queens; Or goddessing above the waist, Appear as swan on Thames or Charles Where iridescent foam conceals The paddle-stroke beneath the glide: Immortal feathers preened in poems! Not our true, intimate nature, stained By labor, and the casual tide. Masters of civilization, you Who moved to riverbank from cave, Putting up tents, and deities, Though every rivulet wander through The final, unpolluted glades To cinder-bank and culvert-lip, And all the pretty chatterers Still round the pebbles as they pass Lightly over their watercourse, And even the calm rivers flow, We have, while springs and skies renew, Dry wells, dead seas, and lingering drouth. Water itself is not enough. Harness her turbulence to work For man: fill his reflecting pools. Drained for his cofferdams, or stored In reservoirs for his personal use: Turn switches! Let the fountains play! And yet these buccaneers still kneel Trembling at the water's verge: “Cool River-Goddess, sweet ravine, Spirit of pool and shade, inspire!” So he needs poultice for his flesh. So he needs water for his fire. We rose in mists and died in clouds Or sank below the trammeled soil To silent conduits underground, Joining the blindfish, and the mole. A gleam of silver in the shale: Lost murmur! Subterranean moan! So flows in dark caves, dries away, What would have brimmed from bank to bank, Kissing the fields you turned to stone, Under the boughs your axes broke. And you blame streams for thinning out, plundered by man’s insatiate want? Rejoice when a faint music rises Out of a brackish clump of weeds, Out of the marsh at ocean-side, Out of the oil-stained river’s gleam, By the long causeways and gray piers Your civilizing lusts have made. Discover the deserted beach Where ghosts of curlews safely wade: Here the warm shallows lave your feet Like tawny hair of magdalens. Here, if you care, and lie full-length, Is water deep enough to drown.

who took heroin, then sleeping pills, and who lies in a New York hospital The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea; White in either case, for you are pale As they are, “blooming early and profusely” Though the azalea grows in sandier soil, Needing less care; while cyclamen’s fleshy tubers Are adored, yes, rooted out by some. One flourishes in aridness, while the other Feeds the love which devours. But what has flung you here for salvaging From a city’s dereliction, this New York? A world against whose finger-and-breath-marked windows These weak flares may be set. Our only bulwark is the frailest cover: Lovers touch from terror of being alone. The urban surface: tough and granular, Poor ground for the affections to take root. Left to our own devices, we devise Such curious deaths, comas, or mutilations! You may buy peace, white, in sugary tincture, No way of knowing its strength, or your own, Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signaling, Self-amazed, its willingness to endure. The thing to cling to is the sense of expectation. Who knows what may occur in the next breath? In the pallor of another morning we neither Anticipated nor wanted! Eve, waken to flowers Unforeseen, from someone you don’t even know. Azalea or cyclamen ... we live in wonder, Blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension Though once we lay and waited for a death.

My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off. Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter. Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet ...” The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes. Then we saw, And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed. The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop. But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, Whose denizens can turn upon the world With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw, To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot. She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap, She washed and washed the pity from her hands.