Circles on the Water
which you occasionally drop:
gross man with iron heels
who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning,
who hammers on scaffolding all night long,
who entertains sumo wrestlers and fat acrobats—
I pass you on the steps, we smile and nod.
Rage swells in me like gas.
Now rage too keeps me awake.
The friend
We sat across the table.
he said, cut off your hands.
they are always poking at things.
they might touch me.
I said yes.
Food grew cold on the table.
he said, burn your body.
it is not clean and smells like sex.
it rubs my mind sore.
I said yes.
I love you, I said.
That’s very nice, he said
I like to be loved,
that makes me happy.
Have you cut off your hands yet?
The morning half-life blues
Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.
Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.
Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.
Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.
Erasure
Falling out of love
is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.
It hurts more than you will remember.
It costs a pint of blood turned grey
and burning out a few high paths
among the glittering synapses of the brain,
a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy,
a configuration gone
imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst
that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.
When falling out of love is correcting vision
light grates on the eyes
light files the optic nerve hot and raw.
To find you have loved a coward and a fool
is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst
and take away your hands covered with small festering bites
and let the mouse go in a grey blur
into the baseboard.
The cyclist
Eleven-thirty and hot.
Cotton air.
Dry hands cupped.
The shadow of an empty chandelier
swings on a refrigerator door.
In the street a voice is screaming.
Your head scurries with ants.
Anyone’s arms drip with your sweat,
anyone’s pliant belly
absorbs your gymnastic thrusts
as your fury subsides into butter.
You are always in combat with questionnaires.
You are always boxing headless dolls
of cherry pudding.
You are the tedious marksman in a forest of thighs,
you with tomcat’s shrapnel memory
and irritable eyes.
Tenderness is a mosquito on your arm.
Your hands are calloused with careless touch.
You believe in luck and a quick leap forward
that does not move you.
You rub your sore pride into moist bodies
and pedal off, slightly displeased.
Juan’s twilight dance
Nobody understood Juan.
Slight, amiable, he did not stand upon ceremony
but was unfailingly polite.
Men liked him: he deferred with wry grace
though his pride was sore and supple with constant use.
He was fascinated by mirrors and women’s eyes.
When he spoke of the past he was always alone
half in shadow among shadowy forms.
No one in his stories had names. No one had faces.
He watched himself but did not listen to his voice.
Words were water or weapons.
He was always in love with the body that burned his eyes.
His need shone in the dark and the light, always new.
He could not bear suspense or indifference.
He had to be closed into love on the instant
while his need gleamed like a knife and the words spurted.
He never understood what the women minded.
He never could see how he cheated them
with words, the mercury words no one could grasp
as they gleamed and slipped and darted.
In the woman’s eyes he saw himself.
He was compiling a woman he would have to love.
He was building a woman out of a hill of bodies.
The sadness of his closets: hundreds of arms,
thousands of hollow and deflated breasts,
necks and thighs smooth as new cars,
forests of hair waving and limp.
Why do they mind? They do not learn.
Time after time they grapple to win back from him
what gleamed in his face before:
the mask of desperate beautiful need
which each woman claims.
They chase each other through his hard flesh.
The bed is his mirror.
He spends into peace and indifference. He sleeps.
He is unfailingly polite, even with Donna Elvira
howling outside his door and breaking glass.
They always lose.
Learning experience
The boy sits in the classroom
in Gary, in the United States, in NATO, in SEATO
in the thing-gorged belly of the sociobeast
in fluorescent light in slowly moving time
in boredom thick and greasy as vegetable shortening.
The classroom has green boards and ivory blinds,
the desks are new and the teachers not so old.
I have come out on the train from Chicago to talk
about dangling participles. I am supposed
to teach him to think a little on demand.
The time of tomorrow’s draft exam is written on the board.
The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary
where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke
and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel
while the slag goes out in little dumpcars smoking,
but even less does he want to be in Today’s Action Army
in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,
in death that hurts.
In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,
French irregular verbs, the names of friends
around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon
where tomorrow he will try and fail his license to live.
Half past home
Morning rattles the tall spike fence.
Already the old are set out to get dirty in the sun
spread like drying coverlets around the garden
by straggly hedges smelling of tomcat.
From the steep oxblood hospital
hunched under its miser’s frown of roof,
dishes mutter, pumps work, an odor
of disinfectant slops into the street
toward the greygreen quadrangles of the university.
Pickets with the facts of their poverty hoisted on sticks
turn in the street like a tattered washing.
The trustees decline to negotiate
for this is a charitable institution.
Among the houses of the poor and black nearby
a crane nods waist-high among broken bedrooms.
Already the university digs foundations
to be hallowed with the names of old trustees.
The dish and bottle washers, the orderlies march
carrying the crooked sick toward death on their backs.
The neighborhood is being cured of poverty.
Busses will carry the moppushers in and out.
Are the old dying too slowly in their garden?
Under elms spacious and dusty
as roominghouse porches the old men mutter
that they are closing the north wing,
for the land is valuable when you get down to it
and they will, down to the prairie dog bones.
This is the Home for Incurables: and the old are.
Many are the diseases that trustees are blind to,
or call incurable, like their own blindness
wide as the hoarse wind blows, mile after mile
where the city smokes sweetly as a barbecue
or sizzles like acid under nobody’s sun.
Simple-song
When we are going toward someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers and sisters
word matches word
how easy to be together.
When we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.
We are not different nor alike
but each strange in our leather bodies
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving is an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.
For Jeriann’s hands
for Jeriann Hilderley
When I hug you, you are light as a grasshopper.
Your bones are ashwood the Indians used for bows.
You bend and spring back and can burn the touch,
a woman with hands that know how to pick things up.
Stiff as frozen rope words poke out
lopsided, in a fierce clothespin treble.
You move with a grace that is all function,
you move like a bow drawn taut and released.
Sometimes your wrists are transparent.
Sometimes an old buffalo man
frozen on the prairie stares from your face.
Your hair and eyes are the color of creek
running in the afternoon opaque under slanted sun.
You are stubborn and hardy as a rubber mat.
You are light as a paper airplane and as elegant
and you can fly.
The secret of moving heavy objects is balance, you said
in a grey loft full of your sculpture,
figures piercing or hung on boundaries,
leaping their thresholds, impaled on broken mirrors,
passing and gone into new space.
Objects born from you are mended, makeshift.
Their magic rides over rust and splinters and nails,
over shards of glass and cellophane beginning to rip.
Fragments of your work litter the banks of minor highways,
shattered faces of your icons lie on Hoboken junkyards,
float as smog over the East River,
grow black with the dust of abandoned coalbins.
One summer you made small rooms of wax
where people stood in taut ellipses staring and blind
with tenderness, with agony, with question and domestic terror.
They were candles burning.
You wanted to cast them in bronze but could not afford to.
The August sun melted them all.
The dancers in your plays move too in the dark
with masks and machines and chairs that trot and wail,
flimsy ragtag things that turn holy and dance
till no one is audience
but all grope and stumble in your world.
When you enter, we feel your presence burn blue,
no longer a woman, not wiry warm quick flesh
but a makeshift holy artifact
moving on the blank face of the dark as on a river:
ark, artifact, dancer of your own long breaking dance
which makes itself through you fiercely, totally passing in light
leaving you thin and darkened as burnt glass.
I am a light you could read by
A flame from each finger,
my hands are candelabra,
my hair stands in a torch.
Out of my mouth a long flame hovers.
Can’t anyone see, handing me a newspaper?
Can’t anyone see, stamping my book overdue?
I walk blazing along Sixth Avenue,
burning gas blue I buy subway tokens,
a bouquet of coals, I cross the bridge.
Invisible I singe strangers and pass.
Now I am on your street.
How your window flickers.
I come bringing my burning body
like an armful of tigerlilies,
like a votive lantern,
like a roomful of tassels and leopards and grapes
for you to come into,
dance in my burning
and we will flare up together like stars
and fall to sleep.
Crabs
They are light as flakes of dandruff with scrawny legs.
Like limpets they cling to the base of each curly hair,
go lurching among the underbrush for cover.
Our passions are their weathers.
Coitus is the Santa Maria hitting on virgin land,
an immigrant ship coming into harbor,
free homesteads for all.
Or native crabs vs. conquistadors wrestle and nip.
Or maybe they too mingle.
As the boat glides in, there they are, the native crabs
with mandolins and bouquets of bougainvillaea
swaying on the dock singing Aloha.
For three generations we haven’t seen a new face.
O the boredom, the stale genes, the incest.
Or perhaps when the two shores approach
the crabs line up to leap the gap like monkeys,
the hair always lusher on the other side.
They travel as fast as gossip.
They multiply like troubles.
They cling and persist through poison and poking and picking,
dirt and soap, torrents and drought,
like love
or any other stubborn itch.
Trajectory of the traveling Susan
Round Susan, somewhere Susan,
Susan with suitcase and Berlitz book and stuffed shoulderbag
flies in the air sitting down.
Your spices are waiting under the falling dust.
Strange pussies are sticking their paws under the door.
Gottlieb sits in a corner with his head loose in his hands
and plays at poking out his eyes.
The ceilings are blackboards he has scrawled with hieroglyphics.
The mailman fills up the box with nothing.
Quail Susan, pheasant Susan
riding an aluminum paperclip
between the cold stars and the jellyfish,
remember us in the broken net,
come back to us in the wooly strands of the caring web
stuck between jammed weeks and waiting testily.
Each love is singular.
The strands hang loose.
Apricot Susan, applesauce Susan
stuck up in the sky like a painted angel,
you think the web is a trap.
You see mouths open to swallow you in pieces.
You see gaping beaks and hear piercing cries of fill-me.
Susan, you are a hungry bird too with mouth wide open.
The nets we build never hold each other.
The minnow instant darts through the fingers
leaving a phosphorescent smear
and nothing else.
Jagged Susan, enamel Susan,
Susan of sullen sleeps and jabbing elbows,
of lists and frenetic starts,
of the hiss of compressed air and the doors slide shut,
you can’t hang in the air like a rainbow.
We are making the revolution out of each other.
We have no place else to begin
but with our hungers and our caring and our teeth.
Each love is singular
and the community still less than the addition of its parts.
We are each other’s blocks and bricks.
To build a house we must first dig a hole
and try not to fall in.
The butt of winter
The city lies grey and sopping like a dead rat
under the slow oily rain.