111 Gender and feminism poems

When you hear the knives ring Turn the page. I wonder why I am not Myself of late, ridiculous glass edges Turn back on themselves And soon reveal The hand of an apprentice And godforsaken embarrassing torch, Stormy back hallways Out of the black and wooden theatres. Crystal Waters plus her driver Plus her entourage is still rolling out Of the Sands, Atlantic City On the soundtracks to shows Held over at The Fairmount She is throwing back shots With the mafia. I have learned To take apart this American Songbook And very fortunately as I would take My audience in confidence Threads of gold fall closely together Coming to break us off. At the first of the shows I sang this song And in between I saw him in the hall, What could I tell you? “Someday we’ll build on a hilltop high.”

I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam. You know, there is no account of her death in the Bible, and why am I not Eve? Emily Dickinson in a letter, 12 January, 1846 Wake up, you’ll need your wits about you. This is not a dream, but a woman who loves you, speaking. She was there when you cried out; she brushed the terror away. She knew when it was time to sin. You were wise to let her handle it, and leave that place. We couldn’t speak at first for the bitter knowledge, the sweet taste of memory on our tongues. Listen, it’s time. You were chosen too, to put the world together.

God and Mrs. God in watercolor blue skirt desolate. — David Schubert I am not a woman, I am a man. Made in His image. I keep the house, a gray Cape Cod, and broom it well. I wear a skirt to be comfortable. I build the fire. When my husband comes home I don’t pester Him with questions. He knows where to find His slippers and His pipe. Out our kitchen back door I see the prophets freight-hopping the long bad Western in ancient English that no one need read to know. Everyone speaks his part: the women keep their heads down while the men are losing theirs. Children? How often I’ve prayed for a child, which means slipping meaning looks to my husband as we rock together on the porch of an evening, drinking lemonade and playing Scrabble. If He lets me win it’s a sign. I haven’t won yet. But the neighbor children come and go and take the pies cooling on the windowsill without thanks. Sometimes terrible things happen to them — some man spills the blood cradled so carefully in every hand. I accept no blame. The pies were there to leave alone, or not. God says nothing but taps out His pipe, stands, with a hand to ease His aching back. Time for bed. Our bed is a rolling ocean that I tread alone just a head bobbing above the ash-colored waves while the moon waits for me and everything to drown, to know again the peace the moon knows, the silence interrupted by astronauts, little green men, the spectacle a mother can’t help but make of  herself. God comes to bed and I clutch a spar, a barrel, an oar, and ride out the night with it. When He fucks me still He doesn’t speak, for speech is creation but I rock with him, I roll inside what cannot be comprehended, in force. I forget that I’m a man, I forget the wild sea, I let slip my grasp and the colors I have that cover me. Once I dreamed of the morning: we left the house together in identical sober suits, we stood in the street and beheld the sad little town, wreathed in black crepe for its children. As though the morning could show me His face. He coughed. And when I awoke in our ordinary bed, streaked by sun through leaded windows, I held my baby to my breast and watched the roof  beam and whispered to her,It’s all right, we are safe only and always from our dreams.

with respect to Zora and the Ground of the African Church Sorrowtalked eye-to-eye forgiven is no mere burden. The one who sings is no mere beast. The one who slips the harness of the horror stands alive as earth. Today I can watch the wind and it is blue smoke. I shake myself inside my dress, consider rain and choose Shine. I was walking down Mississippi River Street and a ghost stopped me. No one could see it but me, standing in the middle of the sidewalk smilin at a haint with his hat in his hand instead of his head when he can tote that too. When one mule die the rest neigh-cry till the wagon take the dead thing away. Mississippi River Street rampant with noise, radiant, won’t hold still. But I have walked on blue black water. Watched dead rise before the wagon came. Everywhere I see mules, open mouths sing blues, then be human, then beyond. Funerals, weddings, baptisms I take off my skin, hang it up like a soaked quilt to dry the tears and sweat from feeling. I stand naked before Church, holding Dr. Watts closer than my sagging, girlish breasts. My soul wears no clothes when she sing. It is all being in love with more than one man who is one whole man you can look into his eyes without blinking. Where would I go to hide? Dr. Watts standing with my skin hooked on his finger and I am next to him solid and living the song with no words     . that every born-again mule knew in death and in life before birth, now hums true again hot in the chest and throat breaking natural out the mouth like breathing. Where would I go to hide? Sit down, rock my soul like my baby and Dr. Watts climb in my lap and moan for the milk no mother can buy or borrow only make in hearts of her eyes, in lines of the palms of her hands. And where would I find lines with no skin? Where would I go to hide? I tell you I am living now. Like in Mississippi Grandmama’s bedroom sitting on the high bed you could break your neck leaving. Cousin Chubby said fried fish, greens, and cornbread was good eatin. I am good livin. Blue smoke watching, naked, haint-smiling, entertaining Dr. Watts, dreaming of a man with a white liver who can’t kill me, who love mulish women, hainted ones, I am the sainted one naked with no sense of memory but good like God rocking hums in my lap and looking for no hiding place even if wind be blue smoke hurricane and I make red milk in the hearts of my eyes and reach out my lifelines to a hopeless haint I can stand myself. Naked now, where would I want to go to hide? From this funeral wedding death and birth baptism the sliding tears washing my soul cleaner than Dr. Watts’ whistle or the look in a sweatin man’s eyes when he lookin at a perfect, brutal sun killing him with living while he lick his lips and dream of water, then put his shoulder behind a woman guiding him while he dig in and groove the earth to the quick deep endless quick. Where would I go Where would I go to hide this yes-crying love yielding beyond flesh yet subsumed by sweat Where would I go naked so following blues and Dr. Watts like a double-seeing shadow standing before you with only blue smoke between us humming yes and yes and yes subsumed by sweat and yielding beyond mere flesh.

Multiplying in a column M by F do we get one or two as a result? May the body stay glued to the soul, may the soul fear the body. Do I ask too much? I only wish the crucible of tenderness would melt memories, and I would sleep, my cheek pressed against your back, as on a motorbike

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.

I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men. Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels have never made nice with me. In the shipyard, I worked alone, in the dark, deep in the bilges of frigates. For two months, I hooked a torch to an oxygen tank with a green line and pulled a red hose through bulkheads to gas. The brass tool hissed like an ostrich when it fed on metal. That day, my flame cut permanent deck fittings; the loops fell like bright oranges; I ripened the rusty metal. I knew that this was a job to baby-sit me, a job they gave to bad burners, beginners playing with their tools: who pretended their brass torches were trumpets, and that gulls in the bay were tables of distracted diners. When my father was a boy, his father loaded him and his siblings in the car and dropped them off downtown so my grandfather could get drunk and my grandmother could pretend he wasn't drinking again. When I was a boy, I enjoyed watching my father dig; with dirt between his palms, he spun the shovel before he dug. As I grew, I tried to stay away from work, even when he paid me. I stayed away from him too. I never understood how he could work around so much grass. For him, life was work. For him, everything was hard. For me, it was not hard. He stalked my mother a long time after their divorce. He never understood she was not sod to be laid, or a sprinkler to be attached to a pvc pipe seven inches in the ground. That pregnant at fifteen was too soon. Neither of us is the most mechanical of men, yet we still pride ourselves on how we fashion our tools. I wake up shivering and crying in an empty bed, the afternoon light entering and leaving an empty bottle of wine near an emptier glass—or roll over and try, and fail, to remember a woman's name, which never really gets old, just uncouth to say so, and feel fixed. To feel fixed is to feel a mechanical spirit, to feel love, or at least to play at paste for an evening, to make believe she will never leave me, as life almost did when I cut the green hose, and was lonely and shaking that day on the deck of the destroyer, looking into the green water, and wondered what would be written on my tomb: "Killed by oxygen was this unmechanical man." In that moment close to death, I only wanted my own lungs. I didn't regret returning home and sleeping on my father's couch. And that summer, I returned to each of the women of my past and bedded them all, trying to reheat our want. I don't regret that—drinking wine and making love, or writing poems and making love, of wanting to stay but nonetheless leaving. I don't regret returning with Said and Spivak, with Weil and Augustine, of telling my father "All sins are an attempt to fill voids" or rebuilding my grandfather's house with Hopkins in my head as I ripped the tar and shingles off the old roof with a shovel. And I am not mad for being the second favorite son, Esau turned inside out. Can't regret saying that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man than my father because I understood more. I didn't mind he favored my younger brother, who knew less than him. I favored my brother's way of living, of skating in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all. How ridiculous I was that summer for us all; for not attempting to rebuild any of his love that summer, at all.

It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof when you love something or someone, scuffing a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough, yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef, thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof. Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere, from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro, from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla, I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World, I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God! in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains, concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy. I've arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get? With what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with the three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves over my very own zero, my own non-existence? Pity that brave heart awaiting its call or the man enfolded by warmer love, nothing's left today except my flimsy skeleton, my eyes unhinged, confronting the era's beginning. The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks, these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters, this cloddish insecurity of my poor families, is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door? Well, enough said, I, at least, discreet, as in office, patched and pensive, I proclaim the redundancy of the inaugural: I've arrived here with all my baggage, bad luck and worse jobs, misery always waiting with open arms, the mobilization of people piled up on top of each other, and the manifold geography of hunger.

As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern, you watch the late-afternoon drunks coming and going, sunlight breaking through the smoky dark as the door opens and closes, and it’s the future flashing ahead like the taillights of a semi as you drop over a rise in the road on your way to Amarillo, bright lights and blonde-haired women, as Billy used to say, slumped over his beer like a snail,make a real man out of you