Circles on the Water
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