873 Life poems

I Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins… as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky… or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips. White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin. II Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for— yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap, a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens. III A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down, of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls. When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places? IV There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves. For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern. They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows. Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves. V Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night. Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering…     Stage props mumble rigidities.        The audience… I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses…. And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through arias of reddest blossom.

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn: tallow, tinder and the silken rope of wick that burns slow, slow we wove the baskets from the long gold strands of wheat that were another silk: worm soul spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other. The fields lay fallow, swollen with frost, expectant winter. Mud clung to the edges of our gowns; we had hung back like shadows on the walls of trees and watched. In the little circles that our tapers threw, murdered men rose red in their clanging armor, muttered words that bled through the bars of iron masks:the lord who sold us to the glory fields, lied.

The saris go by me from the embassies. Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. They look back at the leopard like the leopard. And I.... this print of mine, that has kept its color Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so To my bed, so to my grave, with no Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief, The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief— Only I complain.... this serviceable Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns, Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap, Aging, but without knowledge of their age, Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death— Oh, bars of my own body, open, open! The world goes by my cage and never sees me. And there come not to me, as come to these, The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain, Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards Tearing the meat the flies have clouded.... Vulture, When you come for the white rat that the foxes left, Take off the red helmet of your head, the black Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man: The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn, To whose hand of power the great lioness Stalks, purring.... You know what I was, You see what I am: change me, change me!

Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist, sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain that nuzzles her fingertips when laced around a sifting handful. It’s like rain, like cupping water in your hand, she thinks, the cracks between the fingers like a sieve, except that less escapes you through the chinks when handling grain. She likes to feel it give beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell, so rich a fragrance she has never quite got used to it, under the seeming spell of the charm of the commonplace. The white hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes, till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.

I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years before, a hundred and fifty years before, I walk, my steps thump, a fantastic journey through epochs in which there was no me. How long is my minus life, nonexistence so much resembles immortality. Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster, Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband, The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern. I walk still further, what an echo, my steps thump through my minus life, through the reverse of life. I reach Adam and Eve, nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark. Now my nonexistence dies already with the trite death of mathematical fiction. As trite as the death of my existence would have been had I been really born.

Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season. Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course,red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones (a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.

They are thin and rarely marry, living out their long lives in spacious rooms, French doors giving view to formal gardens where aromatic flowers grow in profusion. They play their pianos in the late afternoon tilting their heads at a gracious angle as if listening to notes pitched above the human range. Age makes them translucent; each palpitation of their hearts visible at temple or neck. When they die, it’s in their sleep, their spirits shaking gently loose from a hostess too well bred to protest.

Mid-morning Monday she is staring peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard she wears flannel bedroom slippers she is sipping coffee she is thinking— —gazing at the weedy bumpy yard at the faces beginning to take shape in the wavy mud in the linoleum where floorboards assert themselves Women whose lives are food breaking eggs with care scraping garbage from the plates unpacking groceries hand over hand Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front tough plastic with detachable lids Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7 Friday the shopping mall open till 9 bags of groceries unpacked hand over certain hand Men whose lives are money time-and-a-half Saturdays the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home unfolded Monday morning Women whose lives are food because they are not punch-carded because they are unclocked sighing glad to be alone staring into the yard, mid-morning mid-week by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten There are long evenings panel discussions on abortions, fashions, meaningful work there are love scenes where people mouth passions sprightly, handsome, silly, manic in close-ups revealed ageless the women whose lives are food the men whose lives are money fidget as these strangers embrace and weep and mis- understand and forgive and die and weep and embrace and the viewers stare and fidget and sigh and begin yawning around 10:30 never made it past midnight, even on Saturdays, watching their braven selves perform Where are the promised revelations? Why have they been shown so many times? Long-limbed children a thousand miles to the west hitch-hiking in spring, burnt bronze in summer thumbs nagging eyes pleading Give us a ride, huh? Give us a ride? and when they return nothing is changed the linoleum looks older the Hawaiian Chicken is new the girls wash their hair more often the boys skip over the puddles in the GM parking lot no one eyes them with envy their mothers stoop the oven doors settle with a thump the dishes are rinsed and stacked and by mid-morning the house is quiet it is raining out back or not raining the relief of emptiness rains simple, terrible, routine at peace

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon babylon Once a great city in Biblical times, see Psalms 137. both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” starshine and clay, between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

We would go down to the fish market early to cleanse our vision: the fish were silver, and scarlet, and green, and the color of sea. The fish were lovelier than even the sea with its silvery scales. We thought of return. Lovely too the women with jars on their heads, olive-brown clay, shaped softly like thighs: we each thought of our women, their voices, their laughs, the way they walked down the street. And each of us laughed. And it rained on the sea. In vineyards that cling to cracks in the earth, water softens the leaves and the grape-stems. The sky is colored by occasional clouds that redden with pleasure and sun. On earth, flavors and smells; in the sky, color. And we were alone there. We thought of return the way a man thinks of morning after an utterly sleepless night. We took pleasure in the color of fish and the glisten of fruit, all so alive in the musk of the sea. We were drunk on the thought of impending return.