Maxine Kumin

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey And short the season, first rubythroat in the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom, a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding heart on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm him underground. Wet feet, wet cuffs, little flecks of buttercup on my sneaker toes, bluets, violets crowding out the tufts of rich new grass the horses nose and nibble like sleepwalkers held fast— brittle beauty—might this be the last?

They are weighing the babies again on color television. They are hanging these small bags of bones up in canvas slings to determine which ones will receive the dried-milk mush, the concentrate made out of ground-up trash fish. For years we have watched them, back-lit by the desert, these miles of dusty hands holding out goatskins or cups, their animals dead or dying of rinderpest, and after the credits come up I continue to sit through Dinner with Julia, where, in a French fish poacher big enough for a small brown baby, an Alaska salmon simmers in a court bouillon. For a first course, steak tartare to awaken the palate. With it Julia suggests a zinfandel. This scene has a polite, a touristy flavor to it, and I let it play. But somewhere Oxfam goes on spooning gluey gruel between the parched lips of potbellied children, the ones who perhaps can be saved from kwashiorkor—an ancient Ghanaian word— though with probable lowered IQs, the voiceover explains, caused by protein deficiencies linked to the drought and the drought has grown worse with the gradual increase in herds overgrazing the thin forage grasses of the Sahel. This, says the voice, can be laid to the natural greed of the nomad deceived by technicians digging new wells which means (a slow pan of the sand) that the water table has dropped. And now to Julia’s table is borne the resplendent fish. Always the camera is angled so that the guests look up. Among them I glimpse that sly Dean, Jonathan Swift. After the credits come up I continue to sit with those who are starving to death in a distant nation squatting, back-lit by the desert, hands out, in my head and the Dublin Dean squats there too, observing the population that waits for too little dried milk, white rice, trash fish. Always the camera is angled so they look up while their babies are weighed in slings on color television, look into our living rooms and the shaded rooms we sleep in.

The water closing over us and the going down is all. Gills are given. We convert in a town of broken hulls and green doubloons. O you dead pirates hear us! There is no salvage. All you know is the color of warm caramel. All is salt. See how our eyes have migrated to the uphill side? Now we are new round mouths and no spines letting the water cover. It happens over and over, me in your body and you in mine.

My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand the bill from Strawbridge’s held high the bill from Bonwit Teller and the all plum-colored Blum Store. His anger smells like dinner parties like trays of frothy daiquiris. Against the pre-World-War-Two prime standing ribs his carving knife flashes a little drunkenly. He charms all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives but something overripe malingers. I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers. Oh God it is so noisy! Under my bed a secret stair a gold and purple escalator takes me nightly down under the sea. Such dancings, such carryings on with the prince of this-or-that with the duke of ne’er-do-well I the plain one, a size too large to tell grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly see shopping is an art form a kind of costume ball. Papá, would we so humbly come to the scene in the upstairs hall on the first of every month, except you chose the mice for footmen, clapped to call up the coach and four? You sent to Paris for the ermine muff that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor little things had their heads chopped off to keep my hands unseemly warm! When you went fishing down the well for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes velvet evening capes, what else befell? You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.

1 She was twenty-two. He was fifty-three, a duke, a widower with ten children. They met in Paris, each in exile from the English Civil War. Virginal and terrified, still she agreed to marry him. Though women were mere chattel spinsterhood made you invisible in the sixteen hundreds. Marriage was arranged —hers a rare exception. Despite a dowry a woman never could own property. Your womb was just for rent. Birth control contrivances—a paste of ants, cow dung mashed with honey, tree bark with pennyroyal— all too often failed the applicant. 2 If anything went wrong you bled to death. You bore & bore & bore as you were taught screaming sometimes for days in childbirth. To bring forth was a woman’s fate but not for Margaret Cavendish, childless Duchess of Newcastle. After the head of Charles the First had been detached and the Restoration seated a new monarch, she and the duke returned to his estate where nothing discomposed their paradise. How rare, two lovers scribbling away, admiring each other’s words in privacy. He: polymath, equestrian, playwright. She: philosopher, fantasist, poet. 3 His the first book on the art of dressage, till then an untried humane approach to teaching classic paces in the man è ge, the grace of the levade and the piaffe. Hers the goofy utopian fantasy, The Blazing-World. The heroine is adrift with her kidnapper in a wooden skiff. A storm comes up conveniently, and they are blown to the North Pole. He freezes to death but she is carried to a contiguous North Pole, a new world where the emperor falls in love with her, makes her his empress and cedes her all his powers over clans of wildly invented creatures. 4 Poems, plays, philosophical discourses on Platonick love, a chapter on her Birth, Breeding, and Life and an Apology for Writing so Much Upon this Book about herself, even some inquiries into science… years in chosen isolation the Duchess filled with words, and the Duke with reassurance. Even this outburst did not discomfit him: Men are so unconscionable and cruel … they would fain Bury us in their...beds as in a grave…[T]he truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. Pepys called her mad, conceited, and ridiculous. 5 Virginia Woolf, in 1928, found her Quixotic and high-spirited as well as somewhat crack-brained and bird witted but went on to see in her a vein of authentic fire. Eighty-odd years on, flamboyant, eccentric, admittedly vain, now she’s a respected foremother among women of letters. Founded in 1997, the Margaret Cavendish Society — “international, established to provide communication between scholars worldwide”— is plumped with learned papers, confabs, dues. She’s an aristocrat who advocates —words worn across centuries—for women’s rights. 6 I went to college in the nineteen forties read Gogol, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert. Read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and wrote exams that asked: contrast and compare. Male novelists, male profs, male tutors, not a single woman on the faculty nor was there leaven found among the poets I read and loved: G.M. Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Auden, Yeats, only Emily (not quite decoded or yet in the canon). Ten years later, I struggled to break in the almost all-male enclave of poetry. Here’s a small glimpse in the the hierarchy: famed Robert Lowell praising Marianne 7 as the best woman poet in America, put down by Langston Hughes, bless his egalitarian soul, who rose at the dinner to pronounce her the best Negro woman poet in the nation. Terrified of writing domestic poems, poems pungent with motherhood, anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs, somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse. I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone with another restless mother, Anne Sexton, and poco a poco our poems filled up the house. Then one of us sold a poem to The New Yorker. A week later, the other was welcomed in Harper’s. 8 But even  as we published our first books the visiting male bards required care. We drove them to their readings far and near, thence to the airport just in time to make their flight to the next gig.You drive like a man, they said by way of praise, and if a poem of ours seemed worthy they said,you write like a man. When asked what woman poet they read, with one voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson. Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern women poets were dismissed as immature, their poems pink with the glisten of female organs. The virus of their disdain hung in the air but women were now infected with ambition. 9 We didn’t merely saunter decade by decade. We swept on past de Beauvoir and Friedan, and took courage from Carolyn Kizer’s knife-blade Pro Femina:I will speak about women of letters for I’m in the racket,urging, Stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors. If a woman is to write, Virginia Woolf has Mary Beton declare, she has to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door, a sacred space where Shakespeare’s sister Judith might have equaled his prodigious gift or not. She might have simply floated there, set loose in the privilege of privacy, her self unwritten, under no one else’s eyes… 10 Oh, Duchess, come hurdle five centuries to a land of MFA’s in poetry, of journals in print and even more online, small presses popping up like grapes on vines, reading staking place in every cranny, prizes for first books, some with money. Come to this apex of tenured women professors where sessions on gender and race fill whole semesters and students immerse themselves in women’s studies. Meet famous poets who are also unabashed mothers or singletons by choice or same-sex partners— black, Latina, Asian, native American, white , Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist— come join us, Duchess Margaret Cavendish.

It will be an island on strings well out to sea and austere bobbing as if at anchor green with enormous fir trees formal as telephone poles. We will arrive there slowly hand over hand without oars. Last out, you will snip the fragile umbilicus white as a beansprout that sewed us into our diaries. We will be two bleached hermits at home in our patches and tears. We will butter the sun with our wisdom. Our days will be grapes on a trellis perfectly oval and furred. At night we will set our poems adrift in ginger ale bottles each with a clamshell rudder each with a piggyback spider waving them off by dogstar and nothing will come from the mainland to tell us who cares, who cares and nothing will come of our lovelock except as our two hearts go soft and black as avocado pears.

From a documentary on marsupials I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue. They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of maternal genes. Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn. Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn. And had there been a wild child— filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called in one nineteenth-century account— a wild child to love, it is safe to assume, given my fireside inked with paw prints, there would have been room. Think of the language we two, same and not-same, might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

We visit by phone as the morphine haze retreats, late afternoon, most days. Our mingled past is set against the pin- hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets: we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz, honors students carrying heavy course loads tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding our virginities on the altar of inverse pride, ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders, ensigns in training for the Second World War in the Business School across the Charles River. We called ourselves the Unholy Four. Whenever any three of us met on campus we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia! in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit! Post graduation one year, look at us: my new husband atop your even newer one's car singing the bawdy verses of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor while the scandalized uncles and aunties —it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese— wrung their hands. You drove off trailing Just Married in two languages. Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say, only days. It is my plan to go with you as far as the border. I've been that far— Did I come back from there morally improved? Somehow better equipped to support you this side of the douane and wave, your two cats curled like commas beside you as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?

Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv The roasting alive of rabbis in the ardor of the Crusades went unremarked in Europe from the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,

Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.