fan and the mud colored bubble, among your teeth.
Attraction to me is a walking toward,
the doors in the hands and the mind slowly
swinging on their hinges so that something
can pass over and something new enter.
This flicking of the body like a cape before
a bull, this mincing of the hook under
the feathers is more war and less love than I need.
It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse
We have marsupial instincts, women
who lug purses as big as garbage igloos,
women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders:
we are hiding the helpless greedy naked worms
of our intentions shivering in chaos.
In bags the size of Manhattan studio apartments,
we carry not merely the apparatus of neatness
and legality, cards, licenses, combs,
mirrors, spare glasses, lens fluid,
but hex signs against disaster and loss.
Antihistamines—if we should sneeze.
Painkillers—suppose the back goes out.
On my keyring, flats I used to stay in,
a Volvo I traded in 1985, two unknown doors
opening on what I might sometime direly need.
Ten pens, because the ink may run out.
Band-Aids, safety pins, rubber bands, glue,
maps, a notebook in case, addresses of friends
estranged. So we go hopping lopsided, women
like kangaroos with huge purses bearing
our own helplessness and its fancied cures.
Your father’s fourth heart attack
The phone cord is the umbilicus
that binds him dying, shriveled,
to you his first son.
You try to draw him to you.
You give him advice. I hear
your voice tender, careful,
admonishing, arguing.
You ask him ten polite ways
why he is killing himself
by the teaspoonful, by the drop,
by the puff. Why he eats
ashes instead of apples,
why he sucks on death’s
icy dry tit, why he turns
his face into darkness.
You cajole him, a step, a step
like a father coaxing a toddler,
but he falls through your fingers
into a maze of knives giving him
his face back screaming.
Twelve hours a day he worked,
four hours commuting, up nights
in a chair by TV late show light
wolfing burnt steak and salami on rye,
counting other men’s paychecks.
He lived among men with boats,
sleek men, slick men, always richer.
He bought a boat from a moneyed neighbor,
fiberglass hulled, had it repaired,
started it, roared out and sank.
No place he lived was ever right,
but he was always talking up the next
move. He quarreled with brothers,
mother, friends, son, in-laws,
everyone except the bosses he twisted
and wrung himself to please.
He was always hungry. If he ate five
sandwiches, his hunger still knocked
on his bones like a broken radiator
and he was never full.
He lived a hunger bigger than a man,
a hunger to be other, golden,
a hollowness finally now filled
with pain. He holds you in the phone
but his eyes seek the dark in the mirror.
He slips in and out of his death bed
like a suit he keeps trying on, refitting.
He grabs at a hand and speaks the wrong
name, and the hand flops cold as a fish
while he calls till hoarseness, for himself.
Up and out
1. THE FOOT GNAWED OFF
We occupy neighborhoods like roominghouses.
The Irish lived here; the Italians, then the Jews,
then the Blacks up from the South and now
the Vietnamese fill this dirty decaying motel.
Nobody imagines staying. Success means getting out.
To be in a place then is only a move in a game;
who can love a box on a board? Remaining
is being stuck. My parents amused themselves
all through my childhood by choosing houses
from the Sunday paper to visit.
They could not afford to buy but pretended.
They wanted to walk through the large rooms
of their fantasies criticizing the wallpaper,
counting other people’s chairs, imagining
waking in that bedroom on that street.
How can we belong to ourselves, when home
is something to pry yourself out of
like a pickup stuck on a sand road;
when what holds you has to be sacrificed
as a fox will gnaw off a foot to be free.
Growing up, what you love most can trap you.
Friends are for discarding. Lovers
for saying goodbye. Marriage looks like a closet.
Even your faithful dog could slow you down.
Polish your loneliness until its headlight shines.
Always what formed you, those faces
that hung like ripe apples in the tree
of your childhood: the hands that caressed you,
whose furtive touch untied the knot of pleasure
and loosened your flesh till it fluttered
and streamed with joy; those who taught you
fear at the end of a bright knife; who taught
you patience as their lips fumbled to force into
sounds strange squiggles blurring on the page;
who taught you guile as the hand teases the eye
into illusion; who gave you the names you really
use for the parts of your body, for the rush
of your anger hard into your teeth and fists;
always what formed you will come trailing guilt
like a cloud of fine ashes from burnt hair.
You will always be struck into memory like a match
spurting and then burn out in silence, because
there is no one to say, yes, I too remember,
I know how it was. We litter our past
on the sides of roads in fast food wrappers.
2. SOFT COAL COUNTRY
We used to drive to Ebensburg in the soft coal
country of Pennsylvania, an old brick Victorian
on the bottom of High Street where trucks shifted gears
to start their descent or labored upward all night;
from the backbone of High the ribs of side streets
like a fish carcass fell sharply away into gullies.
Around it were the miners’ towns it served,
the grim company towns with the made-up names, Revloc,
Colver; the miners’ shanties clinging to the sides
of hogback ridges, Nantiglo, Monday’s Corner.
All the roads were blasted through rock.
On Horseshoe Curve you could watch the long long
freights toiling up and shrieking down, miles
around the crescent. The mountains had an anger
in them. The stone oozed bright water stained
with iron. I muttered the names of towns like prayers
returning with my father because a man must visit
his family. This was a place he had to leave,
so afraid of ending up with all grandmother’s Lloyds
grubbing in the mines that when they shone
their sweet smiles at weddings, funerals, he’d
pretend he could not tell cousin from cousin.
Later when the mines shut and all the first
>
and second cousins were out of work for the fifth
year running and their families cracking along
old troubles, where they’d been glued, he said,
See, you can’t make an honest living here.
I loved the mountains; he merely conquered them.
He returned not to see but to be seen, wearing
his one good suit, driving his nearly new car,
showing off the sexy black-haired wife not like any
in his high school yearbook, although they all knew
to sniff and say, Jew. Always the morning we left
he was up an hour early, tapping his foot under
the table, lighting cigarette from half-smoked butt
and then he would stomp his foot on the accelerator
and take the mountain roads clocking himself against
some pursuing maw so that if he did not push the car
and himself to the edge of danger, he would be back,
back with his desperate nagging sisters counting pennies
with a mountain on his chest pinning him down.
3. WHEN I WAS CADDY
Cleveland was the promised land of my childhood,
where my bubba cooked kosher and even her cat had good
manners and sat at the table, and she told me that
when they were alone, he used a knife and fork.
I always hoped he would do it while I was eating.
I remember the smell of the women when I pressed
against her side behind the mehitzeh, camphor,
eucalyptus, cinnamon, lavender, sweat. Aunt Ruth
was the smartest girl, closer in age to me
than to my mother. When I was ten she married
into the middle class and took Bobbah to the suburbs.
She worked for the Navy. What a pity you don’t
have a degree, they were always telling her,
but she did the work without a rating. Driven
to excel, she began to replace all the bowling
trophies with golfing trophies. We walked to
the course through the flat green morning swishing
with sprinklers, both of us almost tiptoeing. It was
so clean and neat, the streets like a funeral parlor
full of gladiolus, we tried to talk softly, properly.
All grandma’s cronies were back in the ghetto.
There was no synagogue for miles. No kosher butcher.
She ate a lot of canned salmon and packaged soup.
Without neighbors to gossip about important things
she turned to the soaps and worried about Helen Trent.
Suddenly my mother was taking phone calls at 1 a.m.
she was warning, Do you want to lose it all?
So he hit you. So what else is new to wives?
Then Bobbah and Ruth were back in the ghetto,
now partly Black and Bobbah was cooking again.
The kitchen smelled the way it should and so did she.
Old ladies were drinking tea in glasses and quoting
Lenin and their own rabbis. Every strike was fought over.
Every young woman’s reputation was put through a sieve.
Every grandchild was taken and properly raised.
And me, I was back, oh briefly, briefly back
in the promised land of love and endless stories
before cancer ate Bobbah, savoring each organ
but leaving her voice till the end. And Aunt Ruth
ran till she came to the Pacific and then fell down.
4. TOWARD A GOOD ROOTING MEDIUM
The Ogibwa said to me, my people have lived
on this sea since the mountains moved.
(The last ice age.) Our heart is here.
When we move to the cities, we blow into dust.
There are villages in Cornwall
continuously occupied for five thousand years.
Jericho has been a city since 7000 B.C.E.
I’ve known families who farmed their soil
and gave their bones to it till it was as known
to them as the face of a mother or the body
of one passionately loved; people who have come back
to the same place year after year and retired on it,
walking its seasons till they can read the sky
like a personal letter; fisherman who could taste
a stream and tell you what the trout were doing.
This is not a pastoral: once I loved Manhattan so.
A friend could walk Paris streets on a map, sketching
the precise light, the houses, the traffic sounds.
Perhaps we should practice by loving a lilac bush.
Practice on a brick, an oriole nest, a tire of petunias.
O home over the expressway under a sky like something
you step in and scrape off your boot, heaped
ashtray we are stubbed into with smoldering butts,
billboards touting cancer under the carbolic rain!
Will the Lenni Lenape take back New Jersey?
The fish glow in the dark thrashing in dying
piles on every chenille bedspread, a light by which
we can almost read the fine print on the ceiling.
Love it because you can’t leave it. Love it
or kill it. What we throw away returns in the blood
and leaves a chemical stain on the cell walls.
Huck honey, there’s no territory to light out to.
That glow is from refineries on the farther shore.
Take your trash out with you or hunker down.
This is the Last Chance Saloon and Health Spa.
In heaven as on earth the dishes must be done.
The task never completed
No task is ever completed,
only abandoned or pressed into use.
Tinkering can be a form of prayer.
Twenty-six botched worlds preceded
Genesis we are told in ancient commentary,
and ha Shem said not only,
of this particular attempt
It is good, but muttered,
if only it will hold.
Incomplete, becoming, the world
was given us to fix, to complete
and we’ve almost worn it out.
My house was hastily built,
on the cheap. Leaks, rotting
sills, the floor a relief map of Idaho.
Whenever I get some money, I stove
up, repair, add on, replace.
This improvisation permits me to squat
here on the land that owns me.
We evolve through mistakes, wrong
genes, imitation gone wild.
Each night sleep unravels me into wool,
then into sheep and wolf. Walls and fire
pass through me. I birth stones.
Every dawn I stumble from the roaring
vat of dreams and make myself up
remembering and forgetting by halves.
Every dawn I choose to take a knife
to the world’s flank or a sewing kit,
rough improvisation, but a start.
from
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
What are big girls made of?
The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips promising, her mouth pursed
in the dark red lipstick of desire.
She visited in ’68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt
/> lipstick pale as apricot milk,
hair loose as a horse’s mane. Oh dear,
I thought in my superiority of the moment,
whatever has happened to poor Cecile.
She was out of fashion out of the game,
disqualified, disdained, dis-
membered from the club of desire.
Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century:
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood.
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl.
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking.
On top is a grandiose headache:
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases,
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose.
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip.
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:
a woman made of pain.
How superior we are now:
see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food