Deena Metzger

Everything dies. Without you I saw one million flamingos ignite a lake in Africa. The same darkness descended everywhere. When you dropped your body, I hoped you would tremble for the beak of God. Why did we wash you three times tearing off the girl’s white dress to swaddle you in an austere shroud? Some say, dying, not death, teaches. You gained nothing from that reduction. Months in the narrow foxhole of disease– you dug it; we filled it in. My father is thin as you were in his hospital bed, both of you let everything go, care for nothing except that barbed hook– life. It grabbed you like a thorn until you begged me, “Pull it out.”

I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office. I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility. There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man. I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly. I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying? I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions. Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter. I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children. So I packed my little bag as if I were going to the hospital and I left a note and the Wearever pots and sterilized nipples upon the glass missiles, and took the cradle board than an American Indian friend had given me for the baby and that had made my husband snort– “You’re not going to carry the thing on your back, are you?” I took some money, the car, some books, paper and pens, my walking shoes, an unwieldly IBM electric typewriter, my pregnant belly and a dozen cloth diapers, and I went out. I knew how to carry a baby and how to carry a poem and I would learn how to have a baby and even how to have a poem. I would have enough milk for both. I would learn how to walk with them. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, how to have a husband and a matched set of Wearever pots.

This is the silence around the poem of the death of my father. This is the silence before the poem. While my father was dying, the Challenger was exploding on TV Again and again. I watched it happen. In his hospital room, I followed his breath. Then it stopped. This is the silence in a poem about the dying of the father. We’re burning the earth. We’re burning the sky. Here is another silence in the middle of the poem about the immolation of the Fathers. The pyres of bodies in Saigon. The burned air The charred limbs. Ash. Rancid flames. Heat Light Fire We turn away. Here is another silence within the poem about the burial of the fire. When my father died, the rains poured down the moment I picked up the shovel of earth. I staggered under the weight of the water. Another silence please. I have always wanted to be a woman of fire. I will have to learn how to rain. Gently, I will learn how to rain. I have set fire to your green fields, May I be water to your burning lands. Please join me in this last silence at the end of the poem of fire.

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Who have taught us. Who have guided us. Who have sustained us. Who have healed us. Please heal the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whom we have slaughtered. Whom we have feared. Whom we have caged. Whom we have persecuted. Whom we have slandered. Whom we have cursed. Whom we have tortured. Protect the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whose habitat we have stolen. Whose territory we have plundered. Whose feeding grounds we have paved and netted. Whose domain we have poisoned. Whose food we have eaten. Whose young we have killed. Whose lives and ways of life we threaten. Restore the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Forgive us. Have mercy. May the animals return. Not as a resurrection but as living beings. Here. On earth. On this earth that is also theirs. Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the animals. Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored. Oh Spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake. Teach us, again, how to live.

After seven lean years we are promised seven fat ones, if the cows do not die first. Some care must be taken to prevent their demise in the scrub or the slaughterhouse. There must be enough bones to throw and to bury. The skull of a cow, I put it on. There are many strewn in the field, there has not been much rain. I look through the eyes, that is, my eyes replace the eyes that death has taken. I can see out or through. It is not a bad fate to be a cow, to be, at once, so awkward, so full of grace, so full of milk. Everywhere the udders are full, the teats are ready, the mouth of the calf is soft and deep. I would thrust my hand in it for the wet joy of being so used. My own breasts are marked from the time the milk came in too fast; I did not have time to grow to the moment of giving. It is fitting that beauty leaves such scars. Milk has passed through my fingers, has spurted through my fingers, but not once during these seven lean years.