The Woman I Kept to Myself

  to think you’re lost without it, por favor!

  You left in exile—that was not your fault.

  This passion is a second desertion.

  Before leaving, I touch the shelves of books,

  then close my study door reluctantly

  like a child casting a longing glance

  at bedtime at her bears and dressed-up dolls,

  posed to enact some simple ritual,

  a tea party, a classroom scene. Stay!

  Don’t you dare move! But English won’t obey,

  no living language will. When I come back

  it will take días to collect myself,

  pieces of me not fitting anywhere.

  MEDITATION

  Sometimes I’ll walk out in a field at night

  and sit under the stars, breathing in stars,

  moon, sky-reflecting pond; breathing out stars,

  moon, sky-reflecting—Whoa! What was that?

  A beaver in the pond? And now, a flood

  of other thoughts rush in—my aching back;

  so and so’s email; oh god, I forgot

  to pick up garlic! Soon, I cannot hear

  the owls hooting, the leaves rustling back,

  carried away by today’s trivia.

  Sometimes a busy, brassy place seems best:

  a shopping mall Saturday afternoon,

  crowded with warring teenage girls and moms,

  and little boys out of some matinee

  practicing their Karate kicks and cries—

  all of that roiling, noisy humanity

  I carry deep within me which is why

  I need to meditate. But sales beckon,

  shoppers hurry by, the food court fills, and down

  the spiritual tubes goes my meditation.

  My final stop is always on these lines,

  a breathless shipwreck crawling up a beach

  that seems deserted, not a sign of life.

  But in this emptiness, I find myself

  and lose myself as lines move in and out

  like breathing, like discovering a space

  which by turns is a shopping mall, a field,

  a pond, and all and none of the above.

  It’s hard to call what happens here a name—

  my poem, my practice, my meditation?

  AFICIONADOS

  I have a friend who tangos and attends

  meetings in Helsinki, amazingly

  the largest convention of tango lovers

  in the world: day after chilly day

  the couples one-two, swoon, one-two, and turn,

  across the mirrored ballroom as snows fall

  beyond the steamed-up windows. Just last year,

  he met a dental hygienist from Maine

  and fell madly in love. I see him dancing

  in shiny black shoes and red cummerbund,

  she in a long (I think, required) skirt,

  a slit revealing vistas never seen

  in Maine, vistas she surely never sees

  peering down throats, her hand on countless cheeks.

  Another man I know adores Star Trek

  and meets with other Trekkies once a year.

  Get him started and the dinner party

  is ruined, except for the amusement

  of seeing him so worked up. Every month

  I send a dying stamp-collecting friend

  stamps saved from letters sent by island aunts,

  gaudy virgins, miniature dictators,

  flowers so otherworldly my friend says

  he’ll soon be seeing native specimens.

  The man who cuts my hair spends his spare time

  making doll furniture. Each time I hear

  of some new passion, I feel gratitude

  at one more instance of the many ways

  we learn through what we love to love the world—

  which might be all that we are here to do.

  TOUCHING BOTTOM

  Sometimes the best advice comes randomly.

  “Please hold through the silence,” the machine voice said,

  the best advice I’ve ever come across

  for weathering writer’s block. At the restaurant,

  my friend tasted her buffalo steak and said,

  “It’s not like anything they say it is,”

  which words should be engraved upon my heart

  and piped into my memory each time

  that I assume the saying of the world

  is anything at all like living in it.

  And yet, I love how words can sound the world,

  how they can take you deep inside your life:

  you say something simple, and suddenly,

  that plank in reason breaks and down you drop—

  into a liberating train of thought.

  You’re drinking coffee, talking to a friend,

  and poetry unravels from her mouth,

  an Ariadne string that leads you out

  of that dark labyrinth where a minotaur

  of your own making has held you in thrall.

  “Keep your end level,” my husband advised

  as we built shelves, and as the high-strung one,

  I took his words to heart. “Take in my give,”

  my mother used to say as we made beds,

  which words taught me how to conduct myself

  in future bedrooms with the men I loved.

  My self-made father once said, “We should live

  like poor men with money.” When I thanked him,

  he asked, “For what?” I said, “Because I just

  touched bottom in my life when you said that.”

  CLEANING LADIES

  I feel so strange when she’s cleaning my house

  while I’m writing away in my study.

  I’m half-tempted to join her on all fours

  scrubbing the tiles, waxing the hardwood floors.

  Not only that but she’s an older blonde

  (older than me, I mean) and also trim

  like a movie star. Back where I came from,

  ladies like her have maids who look like me.

  How odd to have the tables turned on us—

  tables which she has polished, I might add.

  I try to ignore her and do my job—

  working her language—while she writes me notes,

  misspelled and overpunctuated

  with exclamation marks: Bathroom lite’s broke!!!

  Need more Murphy’s Oil & Mister Clean!!!

  Whatever she asks for I indulge her brands.

  Once when the local paper did a piece

  on my writing, she asked about my books.

  I gave her a signed copy of each one.

  She never said a word about them.

  She probably thinks I’m wasting my time,

  writing, rewriting, filling the garbage bin.

  (She’s emptied it and seen the dozen drafts.)

  One of these days, I’m going to ask her in

  and show her that I’m also working hard,

  polishing verbs, sweeping out excess words,

  mopping up sticky adjectives, adverbs,

  hoping to make her feel as much at home

  in her own language as she makes me feel

  in rooms that rhyme and sparkle with her skill.

  TOM

  stands before his triptych—three self-portraits—

  in the photo I took and later titled

  Portrait of the Artist as a Creation

  of His Creation, or more playfully,

  What Came First, the Real or Painted Tom?

  The first two panels show the painted Tom

  struggling to lift himself from the backdrop,

  as if to free his body from his work,

  but sinking back down in the last panel

  into the careful brushstrokes of a fire.

  Seeing him through my lens, I wonder if

  there’s any way an artist can escape
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  his work and be simply himself, plain Tom?

  Tom’s pose seems to suggest it’s possible

  to be the young creator in control

  of his creation—but behind his back

  the triptych mocks him with a triple self

  as if to say this making and remaking

  is also who you are. It touches me,

  this quadruple portrait of the young artist:

  the triptych and then my picture of Tom

  standing in front of the triptych

  in black jeans, black shirt, a white undershirt—

  as if all color went into the work,

  and Tom’s the washed-out version, what remains

  when the feast is over, and the soul joys

  in its temporal boundaries, which is why

  I’ve hung this photo by my writing desk

  as a reminder that we make our art

  out of ourselves and what we make makes us.

  I DREAM OF ALLEN GINSBERG

  April 6, 1997

  The night of Allen Ginsberg’s death I dream

  he comes to visit me, tearful because

  one of the best poets of our times has died.

  I embrace him, patting his heaving back

  as if I were burping a big baby,

  telling him how sorry I am, asking

  if he’ll recite some lines by the deceased.

  “I saw the best minds of my generation

  destroyed by madness—” He breaks down sobbing.

  Allen, I say, that’s yourself you’re quoting!

  “It’s all the same,” he says, and takes me up

  on my invitation to spend the night.

  He makes mi casa, su casa, all right!

  blaring his old LPs, dropping acid

  and dirty clothes wherever he takes them off.

  Upstairs, I trip on a purple parasol,

  which I assume is his. Meanwhile, downstairs

  my island familia pulls out all the stops,

  cooking sancocho, pastelitos, flan

  for el muchacho who needs his strength to grieve.

  Vexed by the relatives and added mess,

  I stay upstairs, reading the day’s headlines:

  “Allen Ginsberg Dies”! It’s up to me

  to go tell him. Howling laughter drifts up

  as he regales my tías with upbeat

  tales of his naughtiness. I brace myself,

  descend the stairs with newspaper in hand,

  and slip behind his chair, tongue-tied, weeping.

  Allen looks up, bewildered. “Jesus Christ!

  It’s raining in here! Where’s my umbrella?”

  FAMOUS POET, YEARS AFTERWARD

  There he is on the podium, the famous poet

  who pulled on my toes the night I stayed in his house

  over twenty-five years ago—a young MFA-er

  invited to crash on the couch by his beautiful wife.

  Surely, he’s joking, I told myself back then:

  the man is old; he’s already got a girl

  for a second wife! Next time it was his hand

  tapping my thigh as he read out my villanelle.

  “I’m here for poetry,” I protested. He laughed.

  “So am I, darlin’! You’ve got to loosen these rhymes!”

  This went on . . . I complained to his buddy

  who ran the department. He paid me no mind,

  complimenting my “talents,” promising

  to have a little talk with the old goat,

  a nudge and a hand slap over bourbon and rocks.

  By then, I had dropped out, feeling ashamed

  as women often do when Eden, marriages,

  or dreams don’t work—a sin to have refused

  to be muse fodder for a great man’s work,

  using the lame excuse: I’m here for art.

  But then, a glorious revenge ensued:

  he disappeared in anonymity!

  Over the years, I never heard his name

  in writerly discussions, never found his books

  whenever I searched the shelves, relieved each time

  he wasn’t there: another hammer blow

  on the coffin lid of a ghost.—Now, here he is!

  (no justice in the life or in the work?)

  a grizzled éminence, pronouncing stuff

  some girls in the front row are writing down.

  WHY I TEACH

  Instead of babies, I’ve raised my students,

  hundreds of them, truly, thousands of them.

  I’ve been an indiscriminate teacher:

  September after September, I say, “More!”

  Instead of their first milk tooth, baby steps,

  I celebrate first sonnets, villanelles,

  sestinas, slant rhymes, risky enjambments

  when they push over the edge of a line

  as if down a steep slide. “Hooray!” I say.

  They haven’t heard that since their playground days.

  I’ve weathered their stormy rebellions, too,

  the adolescence of their young talent,

  when all they want to do is write free verse

  —with emphasis on free—and only read

  Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds

  since everyone else is dead and white and male.

  (But Mark is white and male, I note.)

  Wisely, and while they rage, I read their poems,

  sending them back for one more revision.

  “Aren’t you ever satisfied?” they complain.

  They go off pouting to revise their poems.

  “Hey, guys,” I want to call out after them,

  “This is the writing life! Get used to it!”

  though I could just as well say, This is life—

  the chance to try a new draft every day,

  to work at what you love until the work

  becomes a way of life you can’t give up

  but have to share with others on the page

  and off the page—in subways, nursing homes,

  novels, bedrooms, essays, classrooms, poems.

  UNDERCOVER POET

  Under the cover of novels, I write poems.

  Between the first chapter where my heroine

  meets her hero and the second where they fall

  in love, I scribble a sonnet or I read a poem

  by Billy Collins and fall in love again

  with poetry. Why go to the trouble

  of describing the house, the doctor, the malady,

  when all I need is Emily’s fly buzzing

  in the sickroom or Blake’s wildflower

  to understand eternity in four lines?.

  Periodically, I ask myself why. Why

  give up my quiet isle of Innisfree

  to board a noisy ocean liner, filled

  with characters in conflict, squabbling

  with each other or themselves until

  three hundred pages later they decide

  to change their lives? Believe me, I believe

  everyone needs a voyage, a week on deck

  with all the messy, roiling humanity

  a heart can take, but then come home to this.

  In Catholic school, I’d tuck my Leaves of Grass

  inside my opened catechism book—

  How many persons in one God? I’d yawn

  and end up poring through the lustier poems

  omitted from our Whitman sampler. Did I

  already understand that subterfuge

  is part of poetry, that I have to tell the truth

  but tell it slant? That on board, when asked

  by a fellow passenger, “What do you do?”

  I should answer, “I write, mostly novels.”

  SMALL PORTIONS

  The earth is just too big, too beautiful:

  I like it small, through a window, catching

  the light at the day’s end. I prefer poems

  haiku-size; a
pair of binoculars

  through which I see one bluebird at a time,

  the pink bib at its throat, the lacquered claws

  curled upon an apple bough with the fruit

  just setting on, a green miniscule globe

  in whose meat I can taste Adam and Eve,

  the whole sad history of our human grief.

  See what I mean? Take one small thing in hand,

  open it up, and there’s another door,

  and another, long corridors of views

  into the heart of darkness or of light.

  There’s no such thing as a small portion

  once you bite in and savor the flavors.

  If truth is in the details, I’m the pope

  of the particular, imam of mites,

  a god in the minus numbers, a worm

  pearling the soil with the teensy bits

  I take in and deliver, laboring on

  my two-inch by two-inch ivory life.

  Friends worry I’m missing the big picture.

  But I can hear a chorus in one voice,

  and just this morning from my study chair

  I watched a master bluebird build Versailles

  in a maple’s cubby hole. By the compost bin

  I’ve got an ant hill of the pyramids.

  My lot’s to be a nibbler at life’s feast.

  Bit by bit, I’ll devour all of it!

  “POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN”?

  Listening to a poem on the radio,

  Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home

  from Laramie on Interstate 80,

  tapping his hand to the beat of Longfellow;

  while overcome by grief one lonesome night

  when the house still held her husband’s pills, May Quinn

  took down a book by Yeats and fell asleep

  reading, “When You Are Old,” not the poet’s best,

  but still, poetry made nothing happen,

  which was good, given what May had in mind.

  Writing a paper on a Bishop poem,

  Jenny Klein missed her ride but arrived home

  to the cancer news in a better frame of mind,

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master. . . .

  While troops dropped down into Afghanistan

  in the living room, Naomi Gordon clapped

  to the nursery rhyme her father had turned on,