I depend, those few for whom
I will rise in the night to give
comfort, massage, medicine,
whose calls I always take.
My children are my books
that I gestate for years,
a slow-witted elephant
eternally pregnant, books
that I sit on for eras like the great
auk on a vast marble egg.
I raise them with loving care,
I groom and educate them,
I chastise, reward and adore.
I exercise them lean and fatten them up.
I roll them about my mind all night
and fuss over them in the mornings.
Then they march off into the world
to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,
to be loved for the wrong reasons,
to be fondled, beaten, lost.
Now and then I get a postcard
from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.
People take them in and devour them.
People marry them for love.
People write me letters and tell me
how they are my children too.
I have children whose languages
rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,
children born of the wind that blows
through me from the graves of the poor
and brave who struggled all their short
throttled lives to free people
whose faces they could not imagine.
Such are the children of my words.
Mr. Big
Darkest chocolate, bittersweet,
the muscled power of horse’s
haunches, the sleekness of a seal,
the swagger of a heavyweight
strolling to the ring:
Jim Beam works hard as overlord
hustling to rule his turf in winter
when only the great horned owl
can frighten him. But July Fourth
brings up the summer people
with their dogs, their cats,
their children, their dirt bikes,
their firecrackers. All summer
he collects scars and anger
trying to boss his ward.
He gets leaner, meaner.
He sulks and roars in baritone
O my unappreciated soul, all night.
He wants to be force-fed
love like chicken soup.
He wants love to chase him
like a panting dog,
without asking, without earning.
Jim Beam, you’re indistinguishable
from half the men I’ve adored.
Being a cat you are lucky.
I do carry you off by force
and today you lie by the computer
on a satin pillow and eat turkey
and suffer, suffer your belly
to be scratched and endure
your chin chucked and tickled, at ease,
air conditioned while it’s ninety out.
O Jim Beam, this must
be love: will you marry me?
The maternal instinct at work
In the bed Dinah curls,
kittens tumbling over kittens
at nipples pink and upright
against the silver blue fur.
Her mrow interrogates.
The second night she toted
them one by one into my bed
arranged them against my flank
nuzzling, then took off
flirting her tail.
Birthing box, bottoms
of closets, dark places,
the hell with that. She
crawled between my legs
when her water broke.
Think of them as ours
she urges us, have you
heard of any decent day care?
I think kitten raising
should be a truly collective
process, and besides, it’s all
your fault. You gave me
to that little silver-
balled brute to do his will
upon me. Now look.
Here I am a hot-water
bottle, an assembly line
of tits, a milk factory.
The least you can do
is take the night feeding.
Magic mama
The woman who shines with a dull comfortable glow.
The woman who sweats honey, an aphid
enrolled to sweeten the lives of others.
The woman who puts down her work like knitting
the moment you speak, but somehow it gets done
secretly in the night while everyone sleeps.
The woman whose lap is wide as the Nile
delta, whose flesh is a lullaby
of goosedown petals lacking the bite
of menace real lullabies ride on
(if the bough breaks, birds
and butterflies pecking out his eyes).
Whose own eyes are soft-focus mirrors.
Whose arms are bolsters. Whose love
is laid on like the municipal water.
She is not the mother goddess, vortex
of dark and light powers with her consorts,
her hungers, her favorites, her temper
blasting the corn so it withers in its ear,
her bloody humor that sends the hunter fleeing
to be tracked and torn by his hounds,
the great door into the earth’s darkness
where bones are rewoven into wheat,
who loves the hawk as she loves the rabbit.
Big mama has no power, not even over herself.
The taxpayer of guilt, whatever she gives
you both agree is never enough.
She is a one-way street down which pour
parades of opulent gifts and admiration
from a three-shift factory of love.
Magic mama has to make it right, straighten
the crooked, ease pain, raise the darkness,
feed the hungry and matchmake for the lonesome
and ask nothing in return. If you win
you no longer know her, and if you lose
it is because her goodness failed you.
Whenever you create big mama from another
woman’s smile, a generosity of spirit working
like yeast in the inert matter of the day,
you are stealing from a woman her own ripe
grape sweet desire, the must of her fears,
the shadow she casts into her own future
and turning her into a diaper service,
the cleaning lady of your adventure.
Who thanks a light bulb for giving light?
Listen, your mother is not your mother.
She is herself and unmothered. It is time
to take the apron off your mind.
Nothing more will happen
You are rumpled like a sweater
smelling of burnt leaves and dried sea grasses.
Your smile belongs to an archaic boy of wasting stone on Delos.
You change shape like spilled mercury.
There is no part of you that touches me
not even your laugh catching like fur in your nose.
I am with you on a glacier
white snowfield gouged with blue-green crevasses
deep and the color of your eyes.
There is no place to go, we cannot lie down.
In the distance your people wait checking their gear.
We blaze like a refinery on the ice.
A dry snow begins to descend
as your hands fall clasped to your sides
as your eyes freeze to the rim of the sky.
Already I cannot see you for the snow.
Heavy iron gates like those in a levee or fortress
are closing in my breasts.
Blue Tuesday in August
The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.
Everybody had breathed this air repeatedly
and used it to cool an engine.
Oil hung in the sky in queasy clouds.
Then the rain swept through slamming doors.
Today is blue as a cornflower,
tall as a steel tower,
springy as a trampoline.
Beside the drive the ruffs of Queen Anne’s lace
are host to the striped caterpillar
that probes with its roan horns.
Dry as the white dunes under sunlight, the day
smells of cut curing grasses beige as Siamese cats.
The cicadas like little chainsaws inflame the air.
All things bear sharp corners of a pane of glass.
What a clean unused day to walk all over.
On such a morning I can almost believe
something blue and green and yellow
may survive us after we explode
and burn the sky down.
Some shoot may sprout and grow.
The Disinherited
We do not inherit the world from our parents,
we borrow it from our children.
Gandhi
The dreams of the children
reek of char and ashes.
The fears of the children
peer out through the brown eyes
of a calf tethered away from its mother,
a calf who bawls for the unknown
bad thing about to happen
as the butcher’s truck arrives.
The children finger their own sharp
bones in their wrists.
They knead their foreheads gingerly.
Last night I dreamed Mother was burning,
the little girl said in class,
my father, my dog, my brother,
fire was eating them all.
I wrote three postcards to the President.
I won’t be anything when I grow up,
the boy said, I won’t live that long.
I don’t like firecrackers anymore.
I always draw houses falling.
Blood seeps from the roof of the cave
of their minds, fear becoming rock.
In their dreams there is one great
loud noise. Then weeping. Then silence.
Cold head, cold heart
I suppose no one has ever died of a head cold
while not fearing or fervently
wishing to do so on the hour,
gasping through a nose the size of Detroit.
My mouth tastes of moldy sneaker.
My tongue is big as a liverwurst.
My throat steams like a sewer.
The gnome of snot has stuck a bicycle pump in my ear.
I am a quagmire, a slithy bog.
I exude effluvia, mumbled curses,
and a dropsy of wads of paper,
handkerchiefs like little leprosies.
The world is an irritant
full of friends jumping in noisy frolic.
The damned healthy: I breathe on them.
My germs are my only comfort.
Deferral
You’ll do it, what you really want.
You’ll start counting, you’ll
feel everything direct as rain
on your skin in mild May twilight.
You’ll start chewing every moment
like fresh corn on the cob hot
buttered and actually enjoy it
as soon as you grow up, leave home,
after you’ve got your diploma,
when you’ve passed your orals,
when you finish psychoanalysis,
as soon as you meet the one woman for you,
when Mr. Right comes charging along,
after you pay off the mortgage,
as soon as the children are in school,
when you finally get the divorce,
after the children finish college,
when you’re promoted as you deserve,
when you’re a complete success at last,
after you retire to Florida,
when you die and go to heaven.
You’ll have considerable practice
at being dead by then.
Breaking out
My first political act? I am seeing
two doors that usually stood open,
leaning together like gossips, making
a closet of their corner.
A mangle stood there, for ironing
what I never thought needed it:
sheets, towels, my father’s underwear;
an upright vacuum with its stuffed
sausage bag that deflated with a gusty
sigh as if weary of housework as I,
who swore I would never dust or sweep
after I left home, who hated
to see my mother removing daily
the sludge the air lay down like a snail’s track
so that when in school I read of Sisyphus
and his rock, it was her I
thought of, housewife scrubbing
on raw knees as the factories rained ash.
Nasty stork king of the hobnobbing
doors was a wooden yardstick dusty
with chalk marks from hems’ rise and fall.
When I had been judged truly wicked
that stick was the tool of punishment.
I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive
as if noise could ward off blows.
My mother wielded it more fiercely
but my father far longer and harder.
I’d twist my head in the mirror to inspect.
I’d study those red and blue mountain
ranges as on a map that offered escape,
the veins and arteries the roads
I could travel to freedom when I grew.
When I was eleven, after a beating
I took and smashed the ruler to kindling.
Fingering the splinters I could not believe.
How could this rod prove weaker than me?
It was not that I was never again beaten
but in destroying that stick that had measured my pain
the next day I was an adolescent, not a child.
This is not a tale of innocence lost but power
gained: I would not be Sisyphus.
There were things that I should learn to break.
Paper birds
Paper birds:
can they fly?
Not far.
Can they dive after fish?
Do they lay edible eggs?
Do they eat harmful insects?
No, but they sing
both long and short
and scratch real fleas.
Can you cook them?
How do they taste?
Like you. Like me.
They fill the mind
but half an hour later
you want more.
How many kinds are there?
They evolve, like other
birds, fill empty niches,
become extinct.
But each species
is composed of only one.
How do they reproduce then?
By fission. By fusion.
By one hell of a lot of work.
Listening to a speech
The woman carefully dressed
in quasimale drag
fashionable among her friends
spoke scornfully from the podium
of bourgeois housewives.
Bourgeois? Someone who works
for nothing
who owns zip,
who receives no pension,
who possesses no credit, no name.
I thought the bourgeoisie
owned the means of production?
She is a means of reproduction
&nbs
p; leased by her husband,
liable to be traded in.
Those widows who live on cat food,
those ladies who eat in cafeterias
once a day, taking fifteen
minutes to choose their only dish,
their houses have deserted them.
This bag lady chewing stale hot-
dog buns from the garbage igloo,
who pees in the alley squatting,
who sleeps in an abandoned car,
was a bourgeois housewife.
Your superiority licks itself
like a pleased cat. No housewife
is bourgeois any more than pets
are, just one owner away
from the streets and starvation.
Making a will
Over the shoulder peer cartoon images
of skinny misers and bloated bankers
disinheriting wayward daughters in love
with honest workingclass boys;
the dowager in her bed writing in
the gardener, writing out her nephew.
Little goes the way we plan it
even with us to knead and pull,
stir and sweeten and cook it down.
How many scenes written flat on the back
in bed ever play in the moonlight?
How often revenge bubbles itself flat.
Given wobbly control with all our
muscle and guile and wit bearing down
like a squad of tactical police,
how do we suppose when we’re ashes
what we think we want will matter?
Less than the spider in the rafters.
We cannot protect those we love
no matter how we gild and dip them
in the molten plastic of our care;
when we are gone our formulae
in legal sludge guarantee nothing
but that all lawyer’s fees be paid.
Maybe it is an act of faith
not in anything but the goodwill
of a few, those documents of intent
we scatter in which we claim sound mind
and try to stuff a log in the jaws
of fate to keep those teeth from closing.