Crossing the Water

  On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get

  We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox

  And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read

  Aloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.

  So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted—

  A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,

  Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing,

  But ten years dead.

  The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.

  We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,

  Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.

  We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.

  I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls.

  What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?

  The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,

  And from our opposite continents we wave and call.

  Everything has happened.

  In Plaster

  I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

  This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,

  And the white person is certainly the superior one.

  She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints.

  At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality—

  She lay in bed with me like a dead body

  And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

  Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.

  I couldn’t sleep for a week, she was so cold.

  I blamed her for everything, but she didn’t answer.

  I couldn’t understand her stupid behavior!

  When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.

  Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:

  She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

  Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful.

  I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose

  Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,

  And it was I who attracted everybody’s attention,

  Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.

  I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up—

  You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

  I didn’t mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.

  In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun

  From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn’t help but notice

  Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:

  She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,

  Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.

  In time our relationship grew more intense.

  She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.

  I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,

  As if my habits offended her in some way.

  She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.

  And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces

  Simply because she looked after me so badly.

  Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

  She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,

  And I’d been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful—

  Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!

  And secretly she began to hope I’d die.

  Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,

  And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case

  Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it’s made of mud and water.

  I wasn’t in any position to get rid of her.

  She’d supported me for so long I was quite limp—

  I had even forgotten how to walk or sit,

  So I was careful not to upset her in any way

  Or brag ahead of time how I’d avenge myself.

  Living with her was like living with my own coffin:

  Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

  I used to think we might make a go of it together—

  After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

  Now I see it must be one or the other of us.

  She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,

  But she’ll soon find out that that doesn’t matter a bit.

  I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,

  And she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

  Leaving Early

  Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.

  When you kick me out, that’s what I’ll remember,

  Me, sitting here bored as a leopard

  In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,

  Velvet pillows the color of blood pudding

  And the white china flying fish from Italy.

  I forget you, hearing the cut flowers

  Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,

  Pitchers and Coronation goblets

  Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries

  Bow down, a local constellation,

  Toward their admirers in the tabletop:

  Mobs of eyeballs looking up.

  Are those petals or leaves you’ve paired them with—

  Those green-striped ovals of silver tissue?

  The red geraniums I know.

  Friends, friends. They stink of armpits

  And the involved maladies of autumn,

  Musky as a lovebed the morning after.

  My nostrils prickle with nostalgia.

  Henna hags: cloth of your cloth.

  They toe old water thick as fog.

  The roses in the Toby jug

  Gave up the ghost last night. High time.

  Their yellow corsets were ready to split.

  You snored, and I heard the petals unlatch,

  Tapping and ticking like nervous fingers.

  You should have junked them before they died.

  Daybreak discovered the bureau lid

  Littered with Chinese hands. Now I’m stared at

  By chrysanthemums the size

  Of Holofernes’ head, dipped in the same

  Magenta as this fubsy sofa.

  In the mirror their doubles back them up.

  Listen: your tenant mice

  Are rattling the cracker packets. Fine flour

  Muffles their bird feet: they whistle for joy.

  And you doze on, nose to the wall.

  This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.

  How did we make it up to your attic?

  You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.

  We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing

  With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,

  Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?

  Stillborn

  These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.

  They grew their toes and fingers well enough,

  Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.

  If they missed out on walking about like people

  It wasn’t for any lack of mother love.

  O I cannot understand what happened to them!

  They are proper in shape and number and every part.

  They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!

  They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.

  And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

  They are not pigs, they are not even fish,

  Though they have a piggy and a fishy air—

  It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.

  But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,

  And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.

  Private Ground

  First frost, and I walk among the rose-
fruit, the marble toes

  Of the Greek beauties you brought

  Off Europe’s relic heap

  To sweeten your neck of the New York woods.

  Soon each white lady will be boarded up

  Against the cracking climate.

  All morning, with smoking breath, the handyman

  Has been draining the goldfish ponds.

  They collapse like lungs, the escaped water

  Threading back, filament by filament, to the pure

  Platonic table where it lives. The baby carp

  Litter the mud like orangepeel.

  Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well

  I need hardly go out at all.

  A superhighway seals me off.

  Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars

  Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. In here, the grasses

  Unload their griefs on my shoes,

  The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself.

  I bend over this drained basin where the small fish

  Flex as the mud freezes.

  They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all.

  Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake

  Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections.

  Widow

  Widow. The word consumes itself—

  Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire

  Levitating a numb minute in the updraft

  Over the scalding, red topography

  That will put her heart out like an only eye.

  Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow

  Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall

  Behind which the secret passage lies—stale air,

  Fusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair

  That opens at the top onto nothing at all. . . .

  Widow. The bitter spider sits

  And sits in the center of her loveless spokes.

  Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar.

  The moth-face of her husband, moonwhite and ill,

  Circles her like a prey she’d love to kill

  A second time, to have him near again—

  A paper image to lay against her heart

  The way she laid his letters, till they grew warm

  And seemed to give her warmth, like a live skin.

  But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one.

  Widow: that great, vacant estate!

  The voice of God is full of draftiness,

  Promising simply the hard stars, the space

  Of immortal blankness between stars

  And no bodies, singing like arrows up to heaven.

  Widow, the compassionate trees bend in,

  The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning.

  They stand like shadows about the green landscape

  Or even like black holes cut out of it.

  A widow resembles them, a shadow-thing,

  Hand folding hand, and nothing in between.

  A bodiless soul could pass another soul

  In this clear air and never notice it—

  One soul pass through the other, frail as smoke

  And utterly ignorant of the way it took.

  That is the fear she has—the fear

  His soul may beat and be beating at her dull sense

  Like blue Mary’s angel, dovelike against a pane

  Blinded to all but the grey, spiritless room

  It looks in on, and must go on looking in on.

  Candles

  They are the last romantics, these candles:

  Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,

  And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,

  Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.

  It is touching, the way they’ll ignore

  A whole family of prominent objects

  Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye

  In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,

  And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.

  Daylight would be more judicious,

  Giving everybody a fair hearing.

  They should have gone out with balloon flights and the stereopticon.

  This is no time for the private point of view.

  When I light them, my nostrils prickle.

  Their pale, tentative yellows

  Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,

  And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.

  As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.

  The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.

  And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,

  Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,

  Floating in a high-church hush

  Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.

  These little globes of light are sweet as pears.

  Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,

  They mollify the bald moon.

  Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.

  The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.

  In twenty years I shall be retrograde

  As these drafty ephemerids.

  I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.

  How shall I tell anything at all

  To this infant still in a birth-drowse?

  Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,

  The shadows stoop over like guests at a christening.

  Magi

  The abstracts hover like dull angels:

  Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye

  Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals.

  Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry,

  Snow, chalk or suchlike. They’re

  The real thing, all right: the Good, the True-

  Salutary and pure as boiled water,

  Loveless as the multiplication table.

  While the child smiles into thin air.

  Six months in the world, and she is able

  To rock on all fours like a padded hammock.

  For her, the heavy notion of Evil

  Attending her cot is less than a bellyache,

  And Love the mother of milk, no theory.

  They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.

  They want the crib of some lamp-headed Plato.

  Let them astound his heart with their merit.

  What girl ever flourished in such company?

  Love Letter

  Not easy to state the change you made.

  If I’m alive now, then I was dead,

  Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,

  Staying put according to habit.

  You didn’t just toe me an inch, no—

  Nor leave me to set my small bald eye

  Skyward again, without hope, of course,

  Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

  That wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake

  Masked among black rocks as a black rock

  In the white hiatus of winter—

  Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure

  In the million perfectly chiseled

  Cheeks alighting each moment to melt

  My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,

  Angels weeping over dull natures,

  But didn’t convince me. Those tears froze.

  Each dead head had a visor of ice.

  And I slept on like a bent finger.

  The first thing I saw was sheer air

  And the locked drops rising in a dew

  Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay

  Dense and expressionless round about.

  I didn’t know what to make of it.

  I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded

  To pour myself out like a fluid

  Among bird feet and the stems of plants.

  I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.

  Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.

  My finger-length grew lucent as glass.

  I started to
bud like a March twig:

  An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.

  From stone to cloud, so I ascended.

  Now I resemble a sort of god

  Floating through the air in my soul-shift

  Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.

  Small Hours

  Empty, I echo to the least footfall,

  Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.

  In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,

  Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies

  Exhale their pallor like scent.

  I imagine myself with a great public,

  Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.

  Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.

  The moon lays a hand on my forehead,

  Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

  Sleep in the Mojave Desert

  Out here there are no hearthstones,

  Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.

  And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly

  On the mind’s eye, erecting a line

  Of poplars in the middle distance, the only

  Object beside the mad, straight road

  One can remember men and houses by.

  A cool wind should inhabit those leaves

  And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,

  In the blue hour before sunup.

  Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,

  Or those glittery fictions of spilt water

  That glide ahead of the very thirsty.

  I think of the lizards airing their tongues

  In the crevice of an extremely small shadow

  And the toad guarding his heart’s droplet.

  The desert is white as a blind man’s eye,

  Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird

  Doze behind the old masks of fury.

  We swelter like firedogs in the wind.

  The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie