The Read Online Free
  • Latest Novel
  • Hot Novel
  • Completed Novel
  • Popular Novel
  • Author List
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Young Adult
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    Circles on the Water

    Previous Page Next Page

      smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside

      but nobody could take nourishment

      for lacking respect.

      No husband, no baby, no house, nobody to own you

      public as an ashtray you served

      waiting for the light that came at last

      straight into the windshield on the highway.

      Two days later the truckers are pleased.

      Your replacement is plain but ten years younger.

      Women’s lives are shaped like cheap coffins.

      How long will she wait for change?

      The secretary chant

      My hips are a desk.

      From my ears hang

      chains of paper clips.

      Rubber bands form my hair.

      My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.

      My feet bear casters.

      Buzz. Click.

      My head is a badly organized file.

      My head is a switchboard

      where crossed lines crackle.

      Press my fingers

      and in my eyes appear

      credit and debit.

      Zing. Tinkle.

      My navel is a reject button.

      From my mouth issue canceled reams.

      Swollen, heavy, rectangular

      I am about to be delivered

      of a baby

      Xerox machine.

      File me under W

      because I wonce

      was

      a woman.

      Night letter

      Scalded cat,

      claws, arched back and blistered pride:

      my friend. You’d have cooked down

      my ropy carcass in a kettle for soup.

      I was honing my knife.

      What is friendship

      to the desperate?

      Is it bigger than a meal?

      Before any mirror or man we jostled.

      Fought from angst to Zeno,

      sucked the onion of suspicion,

      poured lie on the telephone.

      Always head on: one raw from divorce court

      spitting toads and nail clippings,

      the other fresh baked from a new final bed

      with strawberry-cream-filled brain.

      One cooing, while the other spat.

      To the hunted

      what is loyalty?

      Is it deeper than an empty purse?

      Wider than a borrowed bed?

      Of my two best friends at school

      I continued to love the first Marie better

      because she died young

      so I could carry her along with me,

      a wizened embryo.

      But you and I clawed at hardscrabble hill

      willing to fight anyone

      especially each other

      to survive.

      Couldn’t we have made alliance?

      We were each so sure

      of the way out,

      the way in.

      Now they’ve burnt out your nerves, my lungs.

      We are better fed

      but no better understood,

      scabby and gruff with battle.

      Bits of our love are filed in dossiers

      of the appropriate organizations.

      Bits of our love are moldering

      in the Lost and Found offices of bankrupt railroads.

      Bits stick like broken glass

      in the minds of our well-earned enemies.

      Regret is a damp wind

      off the used car lot

      where most of our peers came to rest.

      Now—years too late—my voice quavers,

      Can I help?

      In the men’s room(s)

      When I was young I believed in intellectual conversation:

      I thought the patterns we wove on stale smoke

      floated off to the heaven of ideas.

      To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse

      like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,

      suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.

      They were talking of integrity and existential ennui

      while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions

      in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.

      Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:

      when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,

      when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,

      they said, she is trying to attract our attention,

      she is offering up her breasts and thighs.

      I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:

      they saw a fish peddler hawking in the street.

      Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.

      I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.

      I try hard to remember to watch what people do.

      Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.

      Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,

      watch who they beat and who they eat,

      watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.

      The rest is decoration.

      The nuisance

      I am an inconvenient woman.

      I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.

      I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in

      or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.

      I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.

      I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.

      I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure

      and it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.

      I am an inconvenient woman.

      You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.

      You might trade me in for a yak.

      They are faithful and demand only straw.

      They make good overcoats.

      They never call you up on the telephone.

      I love you with my arms and my legs

      and my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.

      I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.

      I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.

      I want to read you poems about drowning myself

      laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings.

      I want you to read my old loverletters.

      I want you to want me

      as directly and simply and variously

      as a cup of hot coffee.

      To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.

      I carry my love for you

      around with me like my teeth

      and I am starving.

      I will not be your sickness

      Opening like a marigold

      crop of sun and dry soil

      acrid, bright, sturdy.

      Spreading its cancer

      through the conduits of the body,

      a slow damp murder.

      Breathing like the sea

      glowing with foam and plankton.

      Rigid as an iron post

      driven between my breasts.

      Will you lift your hands

      and shape this love

      into a thing of goodness?

      Will you permit me to live

      when you are not looking?

      Will you let me ask questions

      with my mouth open?

      I will not pretend any longer

      to be a wind or a mood.

      Even with our eyes closed

      we are walking on someone’s map.

      The thrifty lover

      At the last moment you decided

      to take the bus

      rather than the plane,

      to squander those hours

      staring at your reflection

      on a dark pane.

      Then all night you rummaged

      my flesh for some body else.

      You pinched and kneaded

      te
    sting for ripeness, rot,

      suspicious and about to reject me

      or knock down the price.

      You lectured me like a classroom

      on your reading of the week,

      used homilies, reconditioned anecdotes,

      jokes with rebuilt transmissions.

      All the time your eyes veered.

      What’s wrong, I would ask?

      Nothing, you’d answer, eyes full

      of nothing. He goes through women

      quickly, a friend said, and now

      I see how you pass through,

      in a sealed train

      leaving a hole like a tunnel.

      A shadow play for guilt

      1.

      A man can lie to himself.

      A man can lie with his tongue

      and his brain and his gesture;

      a man can lie with his life.

      But the body is simple as a turtle

      and straight as a dog:

      the body cannot lie.

      You want to take your good body off like a glove.

      You want to stretch it and shrink it

      as you change your abstractions.

      You stand in flesh with shame.

      You smell your fingers and lick your disgust

      and are satisfied.

      But the beaten dog of the body remembers.

      Blood has ghosts too.

      2.

      You speak of the collective.

      Then you form your decisions

      and visit them on others

      like an ax. Broken open I have learned

      to mistrust a man whose rhetoric is good

      and whose ambition is fierce:

      a man who says we, moving us,

      and means I and mine.

      3.

      Many people have a thing they want to protect.

      Sometimes the property is wheat, oil fields, slum housing,

      plains on which brown people pick green tomatoes,

      stocks in safety deposit boxes, computer patents,

      thirty dollars in a shoebox under a mattress.

      Maybe it’s a woman they own and her soft invisible labor.

      Maybe it’s images from childhood of how things should be.

      The revolutionary says, we can let go.

      We both used to say that a great deal.

      If what we change does not change us

      we are playing with blocks.

      4.

      Always you were dancing before the altar of guilt.

      A frowning man with clenched fists

      you fixed to my breasts with grappling hooks to feed

      gritting your teeth for fear

      a good word would slip out:

      a man who came back again and again

      yet made sure that his coming was attended by pain

      and marked by a careful coldness,

      as if gentleness were an inventory that could run low,

      as if loving were an account that could be overdrawn,

      as if tenderness saved drew interest.

      You are a capitalist of yourself.

      You hoard for fantasies and deceptions

      and the slow seep of energy from the loins.

      You fondle your fears and coddle them

      while you urge others on.

      Among your fantasies and abstractions

      ranged like favorite battered toys,

      you stalk with a new item, gutted

      from what was alive and curious.

      Now it is safe,

      private and tight as a bank vault

      or a tomb.

      Song of the fucked duck

      In using there are always two.

      The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.

      There are lies that glow so brightly we consent

      to give a finger and then an arm

      to let them burn.

      I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.

      Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide

      reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto

      and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward

      down is where my head is, next to my feet.

      Form follows function, says the organizer

      and turns himself into a paper clip,

      into a vacuum cleaner,

      into a machine gun.

      Function follows analysis

      but the forebrain

      is only an owl in the tree of self.

      One third of life we prowl in the grottoes of sleep

      where neglected worms ripen into dragons,

      where the spoiled pencil swells into an oak,

      and the cows of our early sins are called home chewing their cuds

      and turning the sad faces of our childhood upon us.

      Come back and scrub the floor, the stain is still there,

      come back with your brush and kneel down,

      scrub and scrub again, it will never be clean.

      Buried desires sprout like mushrooms on the chin of the morning.

      The will to be totally rational

      is the will to be made out of glass and steel:

      and to use others as if they were glass and steel.

      The cockroach knows as much as you about living.

      We trust with our hands and our mouths.

      The cunt accepts. The teeth and back reject.

      What we have to give each other:

      dumb and mysterious as water swirling.

      Always in the long corridors of the psyche

      doors are opening and doors are slamming shut.

      We rise each day to give birth or to murder

      selves that go through our hands like tiny fish.

      You said: I am the organizer and took and used.

      You wrapped your head in theory like yards of gauze

      and touched others only as tools that fit to your task.

      Arrogance is not a revolutionary virtue.

      The mad bulldozers of ego level the ground.

      I was a tool that screamed in the hand.

      I have been loving you so long and hard and mean

      and the taste of you is part of my tongue

      and your face is burnt into my eyelids

      and I could build you with my fingers out of dust.

      Now it is over. Whether we want or not

      our roots go down to strange waters,

      we are creatures of the seasons and the earth.

      You always had a reason and you have them still

      rattling like dry leaves on a stunted tree.

      A just anger

      Anger shines through me.

      Anger shines through me.

      I am a burning bush.

      My rage is a cloud of flame.

      My rage is a cloud of flame

      in which I walk

      seeking justice

      like a precipice.

      How the streets

      of the iron city

      flicker, flicker,

      and the dirty air

      fumes.

      Anger storms

      between me and things,

      transfiguring,

      transfiguring.

      A good anger acted upon

      is beautiful as lightning

      and swift with power.

      A good anger swallowed,

      a good anger swallowed

      clots the blood

      to slime.

      The crippling

      I used to watch it on the ledge:

      a crippled bird.

      How did it survive?

      Surely it would die soon.

      Then I saw a man

      at one of the windows

      fed it, a few seeds,

      a crust from lunch.

      Often he forgot

      and it went hopping on the ledge

      a starving

      scurvy sparrow.

      Every couple of weeks

      he caught it in his hand

      and clipped back one wing.

      I call it a s
    parrow.

      The plumage was sooty,

      sometimes in the sun

      scarlet as a tanager.

      He never let it fly.

      He never took it in.

      Perhaps he was starving too.

      Perhaps he counted every crumb.

      Perhaps he hated

      that anything alive

      knew how to fly.

      Right thinking man

      The head: egg of all.

      He thinks of himself as a head thinking.

      He is eating a coddled egg.

      He drops a few choice phrases on his wife

      who cannot seem to learn after twenty years

      the perfection of egg protein

      neither runny nor turned to rubber.

      Advancing into his study he dabbles a forefinger

      in the fine dust on his desk and calls his wife

      who must go twitching to reprimand

      the black woman age forty-eight who cleans the apartment.

      Outside a Puerto Rican in a uniform

      is standing in the street to guard his door

      from the riffraff who make riots on television,

      in which the university that pays him owns much stock.

      Right thinking is virtue, he believes,

      and the clarity of the fine violin of his mind

      leads him a tense intricate fugue of pleasure.

      His children do not think clearly.

      They snivel and whine and glower and pant

      after false gods who must be blasted with sarcasm

      because their barbaric heads

      keep growing back in posters on bedroom walls.

      His wife does not dare to think.

      He married her for her breasts

      and soft white belly of surrender arching up.

      The greatest pain he has ever known

      was getting an impacted wisdom tooth out.

      The deepest suffering he ever tasted

      was when he failed to get a fellowship

      after he had planned his itinerary.

      When he curses his dependents

      Plato sits on his right hand and Aristotle on his left.

      Argument is lean red meat to him.

      Moses and Freud and St. Augustine are in his corner.

      He is a good man and deserves to judge us all

     
    Previous Page Next Page
© The Read Online Free 2022~2025