Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Read online

a Siamese twin.

  Why should we complain?

  He is ours and us,

  we made him.

  viii

  If I were a foreigner, as you say,

  instead of your second head,

  you would be more polite.

  Foreigners are not there:

  they pass and repass through the air

  like angels, invisible

  except for their cameras, and the rustle

  of their strange fragrance

  but we are not foreigners

  to each other; we are the pressure

  on the inside of the skull, the struggle

  among the rocks for more room,

  the shove and giveway, the grudging love,

  the old hatreds.

  Why fear the knife

  that could sever us, unless

  it would cut not skin but brain?

  ix

  You can't live here without breathing

  someone else's air,

  air that has been used to shape

  these hidden words that are not yours.

  This word was shut

  in the mouth of a small man

  choked off by the rope and gold/

  red drumroll

  This word was deported

  This word was guttural,

  buried wrapped in a leather throat

  wrapped in a wolfskin

  This word lies

  at the bottom of a lake

  with a coral bead and a kettle

  This word was scrawny,

  denied itself from year

  to year, ate potatoes,

  got drunk when possible

  This word died of bad water.

  Nothing stays under

  forever, everyone

  wants to fly, whose language

  is this anyway?

  You want the air

  but not the words that come with it:

  breathe at your peril.

  These words are yours,

  though you never said them,

  you never heard them, history

  breeds death but if you kill

  it you kill yourself.

  What is a traitor?

  x

  This is the secret: these hearts

  we held out to you, these party

  hearts (our hands

  sticky with adjectives

  and vague love, our smiles

  expanding like balloons)

  , these candy hearts we sent you

  in the mail, a whole

  bouquet of hearts, large as a country,

  these hearts, like yours,

  hold snipers.

  A tiny sniper, one in each heart,

  curled like a maggot, pallid

  homunculus, pinhead, glass-eyed fanatic,

  waiting to be given life.

  Soon the snipers will bloom

  in the summer trees, they will eat

  their needle holes through your windows

  (Smoke and broken leaves, up close

  what a mess, wet red glass

  in the zinnia border,

  Don't let it come to this, we said

  before it did.)

  Meanwhile, we refuse

  to believe the secrets of our hearts,

  these hearts of neat velvet,

  moral as fortune cookies.

  Our hearts are virtuous, they swell

  like stomachs at a wedding,

  plump with goodwill.

  In the evenings the news seeps in

  from foreign countries,

  those places with unsafe water.

  We listen to the war, the wars,

  any old war.

  xi

  Surely in your language

  no one can sing, he said, one hand

  in the small-change pocket.

  That is a language for ordering

  the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for

  counting stacks of cans. Groceries

  are all you are good for. Leave

  the soul to us. Eat shit.

  In these cages, barred crates,

  feet nailed to the floor, soft

  funnel down the throat,

  we are forced with nouns, nouns,

  till our tongues are sullen and rubbery.

  We see this language always

  and merely as a disease

  of the mouth. Also

  as the hospital that will cure us,

  distasteful but necessary.

  These words slow us, stumble

  in us, numb us, who

  can say even Open

  the door, without these diffident

  smiles, apologies?

  Our dreams though

  are of freedom, a hunger

  for verbs, a song

  which rises liquid and effortless,

  our double, gliding beside us

  over all these rivers, borders,

  over ice or clouds.

  Our other dream: to be mute.

  Dreams are not bargains,

  they settle nothing.

  This is not a debate

  but a duet

  with two deaf singers.

  The Bus to Alliston, Ontario

  Snow packs the roadsides, sends dunes

  onto the pavement, moves

  through vision like a wave or sandstorm.

  The bus charges this winter,

  a whale or blunt gray

  tank, wind whipping its flank.

  Inside, we sit wool-

  swathed and over-furred, made stodgy

  by the heat, our boots

  puddling the floor, our Christmas bundles

  stuffed around us in the seats, the paper bags

  already bursting; we trust

  the driver, who is plump and garrulous, familiar

  as a neighbor, which he is

  to the thirty souls he carries, as

  carefully as the time-

  table permits; he knows

  by experience the fragility of skulls.

  Travel is dangerous; nevertheless, we travel.

  The talk, as usual,

  is of disasters; trainwrecks, fires,

  herds of cattle killed in floods,

  the malice of weather and tractors,

  the clogging of hearts known

  and unknown to us, illness and death,

  true cases of buses

  such as ours,

  which skid, which hurtle

  through snake fences and explode

  with no survivors.

  The woman talking says she heard

  their voices at the crossroad

  one night last fall, and not

  a drop taken.

  The dead ride with us on this bus,

  whether we like it or not,

  discussing aunts and suicides,

  wars and the price of wheat,

  fogging the close air, hugging us,

  repeating their own deaths through these mouths,

  cramped histories, violent

  or sad, earthstained, defeated, proud,

  the pain in small print, like almanacs,

  mundane as knitting.

  In the darkness, each distant house

  glows and marks time,

  is as true in attics

  and cellars as in its steaming rich

  crackling and butter kitchens.

  The former owners, coupled and multiple,

  seep through the mottled plaster, sigh

  along the stairs they once rubbed concave

  with their stiff boots, still envious,

  breathe roasts and puddings through the floors;

  it's wise

  to set an extra plate.

  How else can you live but with the knowledge

  of old lives continuing in fading

  sepia blood under your feet?

  Outside, the moon is fossil

  white, the sky cold purple, the stars

  steely and har
d; when there are trees they are dried

  coral; the snow

  is an unbroken spacelit

  desert through which we make

  our ordinary voyage,

  those who hear voices and those

  who do not, moving together, warm

  and for the moment safe,

  along the invisible road towards home.

  The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart

  It wasn't your crippled rhythm

  I could not forgive, or your dark red

  skinless head of a vulture

  but the things you hid:

  five words and my lost

  gold ring, the fine blue cup

  you said was broken,

  that stack of faces, gray

  and folded, you claimed

  we'd both forgotten,

  the other hearts you ate,

  and all that discarded time you hid

  from me, saying it never happened.

  There was that, and the way

  you would not be captured,

  sly featherless bird, fat raptor

  singing your raucous punctured song

  with your talons and your greedy eye

  lurking high in the molten sunset

  sky behind my left cloth breast

  to pounce on strangers.

  How many times have I told you:

  The civilized world is a zoo,

  not a jungle, stay in your cage.

  And then the shouts

  of blood, the rage as you threw yourself

  against my ribs.

  As for me, I would have strangled you

  gladly with both hands,

  squeezed you closed, also

  your yelps of joy.

  Life goes more smoothly without a heart,

  without that shiftless emblem,

  that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal

  eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks

  of hate, that vulgar magic,

  that organ the size and color

  of a scalded rat,

  that singed phoenix.

  But you've shoved me this far,

  old pump, and we're hooked

  together like conspirators, which

  we are, and just as distrustful.

  We know that, barring accidents,

  one of us will finally

  betray the other; when that happens,

  it's me for the urn, you for the jar.

  Until then, it's an uneasy truce,

  and honor between criminals.

  Solstice Poem

  i

  A tree hulks in the living-

  room, prickly monster, our hostage

  from the wilderness, prelude

  to light in this dark space of the year

  which turns again toward the sun

  today, or at least we hope so.

  Outside, a dead tree

  swarming with blue and yellow

  birds; inside, a living one

  that shimmers with hollow silver

  planets and wafer faces,

  salt and flour, with pearl

  teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear.

  This is our altar.

  ii

  Beyond the white hill which maroons us,

  out of sight of the white

  eye of the pond, geography

  is crumbling, the nation

  splits like an iceberg, factions

  shouting Good riddance from the floes

  as they all melt south,

  with politics the usual

  rats' breakfast.

  All politicians are amateurs:

  wars bloom in their heads like flowers

  on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps.

  Power is wine with lunch

  and the right pinstripes.

  There are no amateur soldiers.

  The soldiers grease their holsters,

  strap on everything

  they need to strap, gobble their dinners.

  They travel quickly and light.

  The fighting will be local,

  they know, and lethal.

  Their eyes flick from target

  to target: window, belly, child.

  The goal is not to get killed.

  ii

  As for the women, who did not

  want to be involved, they are involved.

  It's that blood on the snow

  which turns out to be not

  some bludgeoned or machine-gunned

  animal's, but your own

  that does it.

  Each has a knitting needle

  stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion

  heart complete with pins,

  a numbed body

  with one more entrance than the world finds safe,

  and not much money.

  Each fears her children sprout

  from the killed children of others.

  Each is right.

  Each has a father.

  Each has a mad mother

  and a necklace of lightblue tears.

  Each has a mirror

  which when asked replies Not you.

  iv

  My daughter crackles paper, blows

  on the tree to make it live, festoons

  herself with silver.

  So far she has no use

  for gifts.

  What can I give her,

  what armor, invincible

  sword or magic trick, when that year comes?

  How can I teach her

  some way of being human

  that won't destroy her?

  I would like to tell her, Love

  is enough, I would like to say,

  Find shelter in another skin.

  I would like to say, Dance

  and be happy. Instead I will say

  in my crone's voice, Be

  ruthless when you have to, tell

  the truth when you can,

  when you can see it.

  Iron talismans, and ugly, but

  more loyal than mirrors.

  v

  In this house (in a dying orchard,

  behind it a tributary

  of the wilderness, in front a road),

  my daughter dances

  unsteadily with a knitted bear.

  Her father, onetime soldier,

  touches my arm.

  Worn language clots our throats,

  making it difficult to say

  what we mean, making it

  difficult to see.

  Instead we sing in the back room, raising

  our pagan altar

  of oranges and silver flowers:

  our fools' picnic, our signal,

  our flame, our nest, our fragile golden

  protest against murder.

  Outside, the cries of the birds

  are rumors we hear clearly

  but can't yet understand. Fresh ice

  glints on the branches.

  In this dark

  space of the year, the earth

  turns again toward the sun, or

  we would like to hope so.

  Marsh, Hawk

  Diseased or unwanted

  trees, cut into pieces, thrown

  away here, damp and soft in the sun, rotting and half

  covered with sand, burst truck

  tires, abandoned, bottles and cans hit

  with rocks or bullets, a mass grave,

  someone made it, spreads on the

  land like a bruise and we stand on it, vantage

  point, looking out over the marsh.

  Expanse of green

  reeds, patches of water, shapes

  just out of reach of the eyes,

  the wind moves, moves it and it

  eludes us, it is full

  daylight. From the places

  we can't see, the guttural swamp voices

  impenetrable, not human,

  utter their one-note

  syllables, boring a
nd

  significant as oracles and quickly over.

  It will not answer, it will not

  answer, though we hit

  it with rocks, there is a splash, the wind

  covers it over; but

  intrusion is not what we want,

  we want it to open, the marsh rushes

  to bend aside, the water

  to accept us, it is only

  revelation, simple as the hawk

  which lifts up now against

  the sun and into

  our eyes, wingspread and sharp call

  filling the head/sky, this,

  to immerse, to have it slide

  through us, disappearance

  of the skin, this is what we are looking for,

  the way in.

  A Red Shirt

  (For Ruth)

  i