to be fed and tended, you only want my life.
Ancient, living, a deep and tortuous river
that rose in the stark mountains beyond the desert,
you have gouged through rocks with slow persistence
enduring, meandering in long shining coils to the sea.
2.
A friend who had been close before being recruited
by the CIA once sent me a postcard of the ghetto at Tetuan
yellowed like old pornography numbered 17,
a prime number as one might say a prime suspect.
The photographer stood well clear of the gate
to shoot old clothes tottering in the tight street,
beards matted and holy with grease,
children crooked under water jugs,
old men austere and busy as hornets.
Flies swarmed on the lens.
Dirt was the color.
Oh, I understood your challenge.
My Jewishness seemed to you sentimental,
perverse, planned obsolescence.
Paris was hot and dirty the night I first
met relatives who had survived the war.
My identity squatted whining on my arm
gorging itself on my thin blood.
A gaggle of fierce insistent speakers of ten
languages had different passports mother
from son, brother from sister, had four
passports all forged, kept passports
from gone countries (Transylvania, Bohemia,
old despotisms fading like Victorian wallpaper),
were used to sewing contraband into coat
linings. I smuggled for them across two borders.
Their wars were old ones.
Mine was just starting.
Old debater, it’s easy in any manscape
to tell the haves from the have-nots.
Any ghetto is a Klein bottle.
You think you are outside gazing idly in.
Winners write history; losers
die of it, like the plague.
3.
A woman and a Jew, sometimes more
of a contradiction than I can sweat out,
yet finally the intersection that is both
collision and fusion, stone and seed.
Like any poet I wrestle the holy name
and know there is no wording finally
can map, constrain or summon that fierce
voice whose long wind lifts my hair
chills my skin and fills my lungs
to bursting. I serve the word
I cannot name, who names me daily,
who speaks me out by whispers and shouts.
Coming to the new year, I am picked
up like the ancient ram’s horn to sound
over the congregation of people and beetles,
of pines, whales, marshhawks and asters.
Then I am dropped into the factory of words
to turn my little wheels and grind my own
edges, back on piecework again, knowing
there is no justice we don’t make daily
like bread and love. Shekinah,
stooping on hawk wings prying into my heart
with your silver beak; floating down
a milkweed silk dove of sunset;
riding the filmy sheets of rain like a ghost
ship with all sails still unfurled;
bless me and use me for telling and naming
the forever collapsing shades and shapes of life,
the rainbows cast across our eyes by the moment
of sun, the shadows we trail across the grass
running, the opal valleys of the night flesh,
the moments of knowledge ripping into the brain
and aligning everything into a new pattern
as a constellation learned organizes blur
into stars, the blood kinship with all green, hairy
and scaled folk born from the ancient warm sea.
from
Mars and Her Children
The ark of consequence
The classic rainbow shows as an arc,
a bridge strung in thinning clouds,
but I have seen it flash a perfect circle,
rising and falling and rising again
through the octave of colors,
a sun shape rolling like a wheel of light.
Commonly it is a fraction of a circle,
a promise only partial, not a banal
sign of safety like a smile pin,
that rainbow cartoon affixed to vans
and baby carriages. No, it promises
only, this world will not self-destruct.
Account the rainbow a boomerang of liquid
light, foretelling rather that what we
toss out returns in the water table;
flows from the faucet into our bones;
what we shoot up into orbit falls
to earth through the roof one night.
Think of it as a promise that what
we do continues in an arc
of consequence, flickers in our
children’s genes, collects in each
spine and liver, gleams in the apple,
coats the down of the drowning auk.
When you see the rainbow iridescence
shiver in the oil slick, smeared
on the waves of the poisoned river,
shudder for the covenant broken, for we
are given only this floating round ark
with the dead moon for company and warning.
The ex in the supermarket
I see him among the breakfast foods
reading labels with a dissatisfied air.
He looks softened, blurred, as if his body
had been left underwater too long.
I reach for that old pain and find it
discrete, anonymous, mildly bitter
as aspirin. It dissolves in my blood
as I try to taste it, leaving a chemical burn.
The first severed year, I avoided him
like an open pit of acid that could peel
the flesh from the skeleton of my pain.
Each bone would squeal, disjointed, red.
Now I could walk through him like smoke
and only sneeze. The pain has dispersed
into its atoms. Yet in each tiny ball
is encoded immense violent energy.
Memory explodes of itself, cracked by a scent
of mayflower, of hot rubber, of cumin.
The past ignites in banal words of a pop song,
burning the walls of the present into gas.
I cannot walk the dog of the past at my
convenience. When memory howls gnashing
at the rusty moon, it does not even sniff at
that man pondering the peanut butter of his choice.
Your eyes recall old fantasies
The Aegean of your eyes—remembered
spring of thirty years ago
when you were an abused, drugged child
and I dragged through Greek villages
with a man who daily polished his anger
till it shone whitely as glass
in the sun, kept it hidden,
denied, until he buried
its dagger in my flesh.
The landscape loved me instead.
The poppies shouted orgasm.
The light brushed my bones
till they glowed secretly,
cuneiform shapes in the night
of my despair, an alphabet
beginning to form that when
I returned would shape
poems in my changing voice.
That sea was clear down to dark
sharp rocks, the shapes of ancient
wrecks; teemed with dancing octopi,
red mullet flashing like glimpses
of desire teasing me with hope.
Then the wind rouse
d it to opaque
fury, thudding like granite
against the prow of the boat
that bore a woman’s staring eye.
It was the eye of the bold
sensual woman of the Cretan wall
paintings who walked bare breasted
without fear across the goddess’s
rocky lap. Your joy is too young
for you, the oracle murmured,
but I was too young to understand,
promises etched in my flesh
in a language I could not yet read.
Getting it back
When the guests have gone, the house is twice
as big. Quiet blows through it like silver
light that touches every chair and plate
to the precision of objects in a Vermeer.
We face each other and slowly begin to talk,
not making conversation as one plans and then
cooks a company dinner, but improvising,
the words spiraling up and out in a dance
as intricate and instinctual as the choral
wave of swallows darting on the silken
twilight pale as a moon snail shell, till between
us the hanging nest of our intimacy is rewoven.
How the full moon wakes you
The white cat is curled up in the sky
its cloudy tail drawn round its flanks.
Waking, it struts over the roofs singing
down chimneys, its claws clicking
on the roof tiles that loosen and fall.
Now it runs along the bare boughs of the oak.
Now it leaps to the beech and sharpens
its long yellow claws. Sparks fly out.
The moon is hungry and calls to be fed,
cries to come into the bedroom through
the skylight and crawl under the covers,
to curl up at your breast and purr.
The moon caterwauls on the back fence
saying I burn, I am hot as molten silver.
I am the dancer on the roof who wakes you.
Rise to me and I will melt you to silk dust.
I am the passion you have forgotten
in your long sleep, but now your bones glow
through your flesh, your eyes see in the dark.
On owl wings you will hunt through the night.
The cat’s song
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.
Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am superior to you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
The hunger moon
The snow is frozen moonlight on the marshes.
How bright it is tonight, the air thin
as a skim of black ice and serrated,
cutting the lungs. My eyes sting.
Spring, I watch the moon for instruction
in planting; summer, I gauge her grasp
on the tides of the sea, the bay, my womb:
now you may gather oysters, now lay
the white, the red, the black beans
into the earth eyes rolled upwards.
But winters, we are in opposition.
I must fight the strong pulls of the body.
The blood croons, curl to sleep, embryo in a seed.
Early to sleep, late to rise from the down cave.
Even at seven night still squats in the pines.
Swim in the womb of dreams and grow new limbs.
Awake at last, the body begins to crave,
not salads, not crisp apples and sweet kiwis,
but haunches of beef and thick fatty stews.
Eat, whispers the crone in the bone, eat.
The hunger moon is grinning like a skull.
The bats are asleep. The little voles
streak starving through tunnels in the snow
and voracious shrews race after them.
Eat, make fat against famine, grow round
while there’s something rich to gnaw on,
urges the crone from her peasant wisdom.
She wants every woman her own pumpkin,
she wants me full as tonight’s moon
when I long to wane. Why must I fight her,
who taught my mother’s mother’s mothers
to survive the death marches of winters past?
For Mars and her children returning in March
Mars is the name of a female humpback whale
1.
To name is not to possess what cannot
be owned or even known in the small words
and endless excuses of human speech.
I have adopted a humpback whale, Mars.
When I renew my support for whale research
a photo comes, usually her flukes—
diving or perhaps slapping the water.
Fictional bond, sucker bait, gimmick.
Last winter while humpbacks
were washing up week by week, she birthed,
the year of heaviness issuing in life,
her sisters about her attending.
So every spring I wait to see if she
returns, for naming makes valuable to us
what is unique in itself, one of four hundred
thirty-five local humpbacks we haven’t yet killed.
2.
Jonah in the dark hears the immense heart throbbing
like a generator. Tours the cathedral of the lungs.
But now above the sloshing and churning,
the engine of the heart, he hears the voice of the whale.
He is inside the organ; the lungs are its bellows.
Its pipes are fathoms tall. He is a mouse hiding there.
He is carried inside a tenor the size of a concert hall
improvising on themes he hears now from all sides,
clicks, squeaks, moans, trills, it sounds electronic.
In the night the tones flicker and shimmer,
nets of sound trailing through the silence
constellations floating in the salty dark.
Our prayers rise like clouds of whining mosquitoes
give me, I want, I need, I must have him,
her, the heart of my enemy,
a mountain to strip-mine,
whales to harvest, while they sing
a dwindling psalm to the great eye that watches.
3.
Arcing out of the grey green moil of water
the humpback offers her plume of praise,
steam gusting from the hot stove of her heart.
They are houses leaping,
they are ore boats upending.
Lava flows, they float on the calm.
Leather icebergs, they are sunning in the current.
Breaching, now they travel in bow curves,
viaducts, strong arches of speed,
/> huge smooth wheels turning past us.
Now she rises just beside the boat,
thrusting herself out, dark joy towering
over me where I grip the slippery wet rail.
Her steam touches my face.
Her breath enters my nose and my lungs.
That small vulnerable eye bright like a chip
of obsidian looks at me, pale—staring in awe.
4.
Here on this question mark of sand sprawled
gracefully on the tumbling sea,
we know the whales one by one.
A dead warbler under the leafless bayberry
may provoke us to pass by with the flash
of mourning that flesh shudders out its breath
and turns cold, fading feathers in the brown
grasses dying back. But a dead whale:
a shrieking gyre of hungry seagulls turns
and turns over the heap of it, the eye
still open and not yet picked out.
Soon it stinks like a battlefield.
The bulldozer arrives to labor at burial.
We see the little as cute, the big as impressive
although we are oftener killed by viruses
than by an elephant in must.
But here the loss is not impersonal.
Each is known. Beltane, Comet, Point,
Talon noted among Cape friends dead this cycle.
We must praise each humpback breaching,
each a poet, a composer, a scholar of the roads
below. They are always singing, and what they know
is as alien to us as if they swam past Sirius.
Naming turns the crowd into faces,