a bed till dragged out whining,
you permit yourself to be
captured and saved. You blink
then your goldengreen eyes
purr and collapse on your back
with paws up and your snowy
white belly exposed all curls
to the plume of your tail.
Ravish me, you say, with kisses
and tunafish because I know
how to accept pleasure. I am
your happy longhaired
id, taking the moment as I
do your finger in my mouth
without breaking its skin,
or eviscerating it instantly
like a mouse.
Cats like angels
Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;
pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.
People are mostly in between, a knob
of bone sticking out in the knee you might
like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging
over the belt. You punish yourself,
one of those rubber balls kids have
that come bouncing back off their own
paddles, rebounding on the same slab.
You want to be slender and seamless
as a bolt.
When I was a girl
I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces
all elbows and words and cartilage
ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,
faces to cut the eyes blind
on the glittering blade, chins
of Aegean prows bent on piracy.
Now I look for men whose easy bellies
show a love for the flesh and the table,
men who will come in the kitchen
and sit, who don’t think peeling potatoes
makes their penis shrink; men with broad
fingers and purple figgy balls,
men with rumpled furrows and the slightly
messed look at ease of beds recently
well used.
We are not all supposed
to look like undernourished fourteen year
old boys, no matter what the fashions
ordain. You are built to pull a cart,
to lift a heavy load and bear it,
to haul up the long slope, and so
am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid
shapely dark glazed clay pots that can
stand on the fire. When we put our
bellies together we do not clatter
but bounce on the good upholstery.
A new constellation
We go intertwined, him and you
and me, her and him, you and her,
each the center of our own circle
of attraction and compulsion and gravity.
What a constellation we make: I call it
the Matrix. I call it the dancing
family. I call it wheels inside wheels.
Ezekiel did not know he was seeing
the pattern for enduring relationship
in the late twentieth century.
All the rings shine gold as wedding bands
but they are the hoops magicians use
that seem solid and unbroken, yet can slip
into chains of other rings and out.
They are strong enough to hang houses on,
strong enough to serve as cranes, yet
they are open. We fall through each other,
we catch each other, we cling, we flip on.
No one is at the center, but each
is her own center, no one controls
the jangling swing and bounce and merry-
go-round lurching intertangle of this mobile.
We pass through each other trembling
and we pass through each other shrieking
and we pass through each other shimmering.
The circle is neither unbroken
nor broken but living, a molecule attracting
atoms that wants to be a protein,
complex, mortal, able to sustain life,
able to reproduce itself inexactly,
learn and grow.
Indian pipe
Fragile drooped heads
white as rag paper
raise their funereal grace
ghostly on blanched needles,
year old tattered oak leaves.
The jointed stems suggest
the bones of marionettes.
Chill waxen flowers
blacken as they age
as if with fire.
Saprophytic poor relations
of wintergreen, surely
they embody decadence.
Yet decay is necessary
as the fox’s lunge
bonded as we are
electron and proton,
eater and eaten. All
things have their uses
except morality
in the woods.
September afternoon
at four o’clock
Full in the hand, heavy
with ripeness, perfume spreading
its fan: moments now resemble
sweet russet pears glowing
on the bough, peaches warm
from the afternoon sun, amber
and juicy, flesh that can
make you drunk.
There is a turn in things
that makes the heart catch.
We are ripening, all the hard
green grasping, the stony will
swelling into sweetness, the acid
and sugar in balance, the sun
stored as energy that is pleasure
and pleasure that is energy.
Whatever happens, whatever,
we say, and hold hard and let
go and go on. In the perfect
moment the future coils,
a tree inside a pit. Take,
eat, we are each other’s
perfection, the wine of our
mouths is sweet and heavy.
Soon enough comes the vinegar.
The fruit is ripe for the taking
and we take. There is
no other wisdom.
Morning athletes
for Gloria Nardin Watts
Most mornings we go running side by side
two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward
in our baggy improvisations, two
bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.
Men in their zippy outfits run in packs
on the road where we park, meet
like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk
sedately around the corner out of sight
to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.
Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting
but talking as we trot, our old honorable
wounds in knee and back and ankle paining
us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian
and Jew, with our full breasts carefully
confined. We are rich earthy cooks
both of us and the flesh we are working
off was put on with grave pleasure. We
appreciate each other’s cooking, each
other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging
in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze
of young sun, talking over our work,
our plans, our men, our ideas, watching
each other like a pot that might boil dry
for that sign of too harsh fatigue.
It is not the running I love, thump
thump with my leaden feet that only
infrequently are winged and prancing,
but the light that glints off the cattails
as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries
reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines
blacken the sunlight on their bristles,
the hawk flapping three times, then floating
low over beige grasses,
and your company
as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving
tracks in the sand. The geese call
on the river wandering lost in sedges
and we talk and pant, pant and talk
in the morning early and busy together.
The purge
Beware institutions begun with a purge,
beware buildings that require the bones
of a victim under the cornerstone, beware
undertakings launched with a blood
sacrifice, watch out for marriages
that start with a divorce.
To break a champagne bottle over the prow
of a boat is prodigal but harmless; to break
a promise, a friendship much more exciting
(champagne doesn’t squeal); but doesn’t
the voyage require a lot of sightseeing
and loot to justify that splatter?
Give it up for me, she says, give him
up, give her up, look only in my eyes
and let me taste my power in their anguish.
How much do you love me? Let me count
the corpses as my cat brings home mangled
mice to arrange on my doormat like hors d’oeuvres.
But you know nobody dies of such executions.
Your discarded friends are drinking champagne
and singing off key just as if they were happy
without you. One person’s garbage is another’s
new interior decorating scheme. If she is your
whole world, how quickly the sun sets now.
Argiope
Your web spans a distance
of two of my hands spread
turning the space between unrelated
uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn
stalks into a frame. The patterned web
startles me, as if a grasshopper
spoke, as if a moth whispered.
The bold design cannot have
a predatory use: no fly,
no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag
as my gaze is. Then I see you,
big, much bigger than I feel
spiders ought to be. Black and gold
you are a shiny brooch with legs
of derricks. I remind you
I am a general friend to your
kind. I rescue your kinfolk
from the bathtub fall mornings
before I run the water. I
remind you nervously we are
artisans, we both make out
of what we take in and what
we pass through our guts a patterned
object slung on the world.
I detour your net carefully
picking my way through the
pumpkin vines. The mother
of nightmares fatal and hungry,
you kill for a living. Beauty
is only a sideline, and your mate
approaches you with infinite
caution or you eat him too.
You stare at me, you do not
scuttle or hide, you wait.
I go round and leave you mistress
of your territory, not in
kindness but in awe. Stay
out of my dreams, Hecate
of the garden patch, Argiope.
From the tool and die shop
All right, using myself like the eggs,
the butter, the flour measured out
for a cake that in no way recalls
the modest piles from which its golden
sponge was assembled, is my pain
only raw ingredient?
If aches are wrought into artifact,
if spilled blood is read for omens
and my outcries are carefully shaped
for perusal, do I hurt less?
Probably. The effort distracts.
Is art a better aspirin?
The worm decorates its burrows
in tidal silt with bits of shell.
My cat sits washing her fur, arranging
each hair. If she misses a leap,
she pretends she meant to. Art is
part apology, part artifice, part act.
I writhe in pain, bellow want, purr
my sensual ease while the richest part
of what I touched sticks to my fingers.
Words say more than they mean. The poems
turn toward you out of my dirt and the best
know far more than I, far more than me.
For the young who want to
Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.
Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.
Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.
The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms
is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.
The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
Memo to: Alta, Margaret Atwood, Olga Broumas, Diane DiPrima, Miriam Dyak, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, June Jordan, Faye Kicknosway, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Karen Lindsey, Audre Lorde, Mary Mackey, Honor Moore, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Kathleen Spivack, Alice Walker, and all the rest of us female poets
Subject: Alternatives to what has become expected
When living resembles airport food;
when the morning paper hands you Chile
with the throat slit; the black children of South
Africa wounded thrashing like fish in a basket,
blood on asphalt the sun dries; when your last lover
announces her conversion to the Reverend Moon
explaining how your impure body impeded her pure mind;
when the second to last lover publishes
his novel in which you sprawl with your legs
spread saying all those things he always
wanted you to say, garish scenes you will have
to live with as if you had lived them
like a candid snap of you
on the toilet for the next twenty years;
when your daughter elopes with an FBI accountant
stealing your only credit card; when your son
shoots sugar and shit; when disdain
mounts you on a colored toothpick
like a smoked clam; when your friends misunderstand
your books and your enemies
understand them far too well;
when you lie alone on the sharp stones of unspoken
retorts fallen in the ravine of garrulous night
in the canyon of echoes where the dead
whisper reproaches; when you are empty of words,
a worm in your own apple,
ignore, ignore that death murmuring at your ear
like a lover far too pretty for you, whose attentions
flatter you, and how people will talk,
&
nbsp; you will show them yet if you
but turn your head. Ignore those soft
shapes from the stone cold fog
welling from the back of the throat.
He is not pretty, that boy, only well
advertised. Give your enemies nothing.
Let our tears freeze to stones
we can throw from catapults.
Death is their mercenary, their agent.
He seduces you for hire.
After your death he will pander
your books and explain you.
I know we can’t make promises.
Every work pushed out through the jagged
bottleneck sewer of the industry
is a defeat, mutilated before it’s born.
My faucets drip at night too. I wake
tired. From the ceiling over my bed
troubles spin down on growing threads.
Only promise if you do get too weary,
take a bank president to lunch,
take a Rockefeller with you. Write
your own epitaph and say it loud.
This life is a war we are not yet
winning for our daughters’ children.
Don’t do your enemies’ work for them.
Finish your own.
THE LUNAR CYCLE
The moon is always female
The moon is always female and so
am I although often in this vale
of razorblades I have wished I could
put on and take off my sex like a dress
and why not? Do men wear their sex
always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher
all tell us they come to their professions
neuter as clams and the truth is
when I work I am pure as an angel
tiger and clear is my eye and hot
my brain and silent all the whining
grunting piglets of the appetites.
For we were priests to the goddesses
to whom were fashioned the first altars
of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal
in the wombdark caves, long before men
put on skirts and masks to scare babies.
For we were healers with herbs and poultices
with our milk and careful fingers
long before they began learning to cut up