Constance Urdang

Because a black bird flew across the road; Because the attendant at the pump turned surly; Because the uncertain weather Made Mother nervous, And, back home, the telephone kept ringing In an empty house; Because a white bird flew across the road. How far had they come? How far did they go? Seeing, along river after river, Between shores of brush and willow, Only the bend ahead and the bend behind Under a sky featureless and hard As a shallow bowl; through tautologies Of a landscape unendingly repeated Mile after mile; down Main Street After Main Street, replications Of the same petty civic scenery; Hearing the ghosts of trains Crossing between cornfields, Clattering over the points, moaning Above creosote and cinders, As if the imagination Could produce nothing more Than the same landscape, cornfields, Rivers, and Main Streets Pulling them, like a magnet, not toward But away from , not into the future, But away from the past; Until a white bird flew across the road With its mysterious message, that said to some, “Turn back,” and to the rest, “Go on.”

The boy who is kind to animals has tied a firecracker to the cat’s tail he is stoning the spotted bitch he is called Wind-Chaser Yesterday he gave bread and broken meat to the street dogs, his friends His friends are catching lizards behind the wall they killed a songbird with their catapults with the boy who is kind to animals they set fire to a grasshopper, laughing Along the road the children are shaking boxes something wants to get out The mother spits curses she says we should pay because they are hungry Wind-Chaser, Eye-of-the-Heart, Comes-Again, run away from their baffled eyes

1 Take your boulevards, your Locust Street, Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive, Take your Forest Park and Shaw’s Garden, Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence, Past your West End, past your Limit, To shabby suburban crime, Vandalism in the parking-lot, Abductions from the shopping mall— Like making the same mistake over and over On the piano or typewriter keys, Always hitting the wrong note— How “very alive, very American” They are, how chockful of metaphysics, Hellbent to obliterate the wilderness. 2 Learn to live with sycamores, Their sad, peeling trunks, scabbed all over With shabby patches, their enormous leaves In dingy shades of ochre and dun Rattling like castanets, their roots Thick as a man’s leg, crawling Like enormous worms out of the broken pavements, Continually thrusting themselves up From pools of shade they make, Sculpturing the street With dappled dark and light As glaucoma, a disease of the eye, Makes the world more beautiful With its mysterious rainbows. 3 Already in Iowa the monarchs are emerging, Signaling with their tawny wings; In regalia of burnt orange and umber The spangled imperial procession Meanders along the democratic roadsides, Across straight state lines, Over rivers and artificial lakes And the loneliness of middle America On the way to Mexico. The tiny wind of their passing Is not even recorded As a disturbance in the atmosphere. 4 Driving back into the American past, Homesick for forests, flowers without names, vast savannahs, Lowlands or mountains teeming with game, Bluffs crowned with cottonwoods, mudbanks Where crocodiles might sun themselves; Finding instead the remains of strange picnics, Replications of old selves, a cacophony of changes Like a room crowded with chairs In which no one can sit, as if history were furniture Grown splintered and shabby; Studying a picturesque rustic architecture To master its splendid abstractions, Shady verandas and porches, Or the republican simplicity of a cow.

This old house lodges no ghosts! Those swaggering specters who found their way Across the Atlantic Were left behind With their old European grudges In the farmhouses of New England And Pennsylvania Like so much jettisoned baggage Too heavy To lug over the Piedmont. The flatlands are inhospitable To phantoms. Here Shadows are sharp and arbitrary Not mazy, obscure, Cowering in corners Behind scary old boots in a cupboard Or muffled in empty coats, deserted By long-dead cousins (Who appear now and then But only in photographs Already rusting at the edges)— Setting out in the creaking wagon Tight-lipped, alert to move on, The old settlers had no room For illusions. Their dangers were real. Now in the spare square house Their great-grandchildren Tidy away the past Until the polished surfaces Reflect not apparitions, pinched, Parched, craving, unsatisfied, But only their own faces.

This is the factory Where they manufacture old maids At one end of the assembly line The women are jostled into their places They wonder where they are going What will happen to them One says, “Where is my sister?” But the foreman is not permitted to answer First she will be hollowed out Her juices extracted Her natural organs replaced By parts she is not permitted to name Her five senses Are replaced by substitutes Guaranteed non-inflammable Non-toxic Her sister is replaced by a substitute At the end of the assembly line The old maid minces out Into what she calls America She has forgotten she is a woman She has no sister In her shriveled brain Something murmurs that life is an accident She wonders how it happened to her

Travel is a vanishing act Only to those who are left behind. What the traveler knows Is that he accompanies himself, Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked, Stolen, or lost, or mistaken. So one took, past outposts of empire, “Calmly as if in the British Museum,” Not only her Victorian skirts, Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith In the civilizing mission of women, Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor; Another, friend of witch-doctors, Living on native chop, Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes, Heralded her astonishing arrival Under shivering stars By calling, “It’s only me!” A third, Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate That a woman could travel as easily as a man, Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears And only once permitted a tribal chieftain To stroke her long, golden hair.

If I am in the house beams posts planks siding slate protect us Wall guard us against the night-terrors Floor shore us up above the void below cover us roof enclose us from the void above door keep out the angry stranger Hearth cherish the fire windows be beacons breathe out my warm air chimney while I am in the house In this room my eyes be twelve-paned windows clock pump my blood cover my nakedness, rug curtains be eyelids sofa, I rest on your strong thighs Where is the soul’s seat? Doctors have cut up frogs and not found love. Is this my reason? I in myself

The sober reality Was a double line of orphans in blue smocks Marching above the blue river Under the smoky eye of winter. It is possible to envy them; The picture of which they formed a part Was so well composed, In shades of blue and smoke And the dull brick red of the asylum walls; How orderly and tranquil the effect Of the wintry ranks of children Under the silent sky.