Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Read online

  fading, out with me

  along the tiled corridors

  into the rest of the world,

  which thinks it is opaque and hard.

  I am being very careful.

  O heart, now that I know your nature,

  who can I tell?

  A Boat

  Evening comes on and the hills thicken;

  red and yellow bleaching out of the leaves.

  The chill pines grow their shadows.

  Below them the water stills itself,

  a sunset shivering in it.

  One more going down to join the others.

  Now the lake expands

  and closes in, both.

  The blackness that keeps itself

  under the surface in daytime

  emerges from it like mist

  or as mist.

  Distance vanishes, the absence

  of distance pushes against the eyes.

  There is no seeing the lake,

  only the outlines of the hills

  which are almost identical,

  familiar to me as sleep,

  shores unfolding upon shores

  in their contours of slowed breathing.

  It is touch I go by,

  the boat like a hand feeling

  through shoals and among

  dead trees, over the boulders

  lifting unseen, layer

  on layer of drowned time falling away.

  This is how I learned to steer

  through darkness by no stars.

  To be lost is only a failure of memory.

  Interlunar

  Darkness waits apart from any occasion for it;

  like sorrow it is always available.

  This is only one kind,

  the kind in which there are stars

  above the leaves, brilliant as steel nails

  and countless and without regard.

  We are walking together

  on dead wet leaves in the intermoon

  among the looming nocturnal rocks

  which would be pinkish gray

  in daylight, gnawed and softened

  by moss and ferns, which would be green,

  in the musty fresh yeast smell

  of trees rotting, earth returning

  itself to itself

  and I take your hand, which is the shape a hand

  would be if you existed truly.

  I wish to show you the darkness

  you are so afraid of.

  Trust me. This darkness

  is a place you can enter and be

  as safe in as you are anywhere;

  you can put one foot in front of the other

  and believe the sides of your eyes.

  Memorize it. You will know it

  again in your own time.

  When the appearances of things have left you,

  you will still have this darkness.

  Something of your own you can carry with you.

  We have come to the edge:

  the lake gives off its hush;

  in the outer night there is a barred owl

  calling, like a moth

  against the ear, from the far shore

  which is invisible.

  The lake, vast and dimensionless,

  doubles everything, the stars,

  the boulders, itself, even the darkness

  that you can walk so long in

  it becomes light.

  ***

  NEW POEMS (1985–1986)

  Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony

  The front lawn is littered with young men

  who want me to pay attention to them

  not to their bodies and their freshly-

  washed cotton skins, not to their enticing

  motifs of bulb and root, but

  to their poems. In the back yard

  on the other hand are the older men

  who want me to pay attention to their

  bodies. Ah men,

  why do you want

  all this attention?

  I can write poems for myself, make

  love to a doorknob if absolutely

  necessary. What do you have to offer me

  I can't find otherwise

  except humiliation? Which I no longer

  need. I gather

  dust, for practice, my attention

  wanders like a household pet

  once leashed, now

  out on the prowl, an animal

  neither dog nor cat, unique

  and hairy, snuffling

  among the damp leaves at the foot

  of the hedge, among the afterbloom

  of irises which melt like blue and purple

  ice back into air; hunting for something

  lost, something to eat or love, among

  the twists of earth,

  among the glorious bearclaw sun-

  sets, evidence

  of the red life that is leaking

  out of me into time, which become

  each night more final.

  Porcupine Tree

  A porcupine tree is always

  dead or half dead with chewed core

  and mangy bark. Droppings drool down it.

  In winter you can see it clear:

  shreds of wood, porcupine piss

  as yellow ice, toothwork, trails to and from

  waddling in the snow. In summer you smell it.

  This tree

  is bigger than the other trees,

  frowsy as my

  room or my vocabulary.

  It does not make

  leaves much any more,

  only porcupines and porcupines,

  fat, slow and lazy,

  each one a low note, the longest string

  on a cello,

  or like turning over in bed

  under the eiderdown in spring,

  early before the leaves are out;

  sunlight too hot on you through the window,

  your head sodden with marshy dreams

  or like a lungfish burrowed

  into mud. Oh pigsheart. Oh luxury.

  I'll come around at night

  and gnaw the salt off your hands,

  eat toilet seats and axe handles.

  That is my job in life: to sniff

  your worn skin music,

  to witness the border

  between flesh and the inert,

  lick up dried blood

  soaked into the grain,

  the taste of mortality in the wood.

  Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines

  Amazingly young beautiful woman poets

  with a lot of hair falling down around

  their faces like a bad ballet,

  their eyes oblique over their cheekbones;

  they write poems like blood in a dead person

  that comes out black, or at least deep

  purple, like smashed grapes.

  Perhaps I was one of them once.

  Too late to remember

  the details, the veils.

  If I were a man I would want to console them,

  and would not succeed.

  Porcupine Meditation

  I used to have tricks, dodges, a whole sackful.

  I could outfox anyone,

  double back, cover my tracks,

  walk backwards, the works.

  I left it somewhere, that knack

  of running, that good luck.

  Now I have only

  one trick left: head down, spikes out,

  brain tucked in.

  I can roll up:

  thistle as animal, a flower of quills,

  that's about it.

  I lie in the grass and watch the sunlight pleating

  the skin on the backs of my hands

  as if I were a toad, squashed and drying.

  I don't even wade through spring water

  to cover my scent.

  I can't be bothered.

  I squat and stin
k, thinking:

  peace and quiet are worth something.

  Here I am, dogs,

  nose me over,

  go away sneezing, snouts full of barbs

  hooking their way to your brain.

  Now you've got some

  of my pain. Much good may it do you.

  Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day

  I prop up my face and go out, avoiding the sunlight,

  keeping away from the curve where the burnt road

  touches the sky.

  Whatever exists at the earth's center will get me

  sooner or later. Sooner. Than I think.

  That core of light squeezed tight

  and shut, dense as a star, as molten

  mirrors. Dark red and heavy. Slab at the butcher's.

  Already it's dragging me down, already

  I become shorter, infinitesimally.

  The bones of my legs thicken—that's first—

  contract, like muscles.

  After that comes the frailty, a dry wind blowing

  inside my body,

  scouring me from within, as if I were

  a fossil, the soft parts eaten away.

  Soon I will turn to calcium. It starts with the heart.

  I do a lot of washing. I wash everything.

  If I could only get this clean once, before I die.

  To see God, they told me, you do not go

  into the forest or city; not the meadow,

  the seashore even unless it is cold.

  You go to the desert.

  You think of sand.

  Nightshade on the Way to School

  Nightshade grows more densely than most weeds:

  in the country of burdock and random stones,

  rooted in undersides of damp logs,

  leaf mold, worm castings.

  Dark foliage, strong tendrils, the flowers purple

  for mourning but with a center

  so yellow I thought buttercup or adder,

  the berries red, translucent,

  like the eggs of an unknown moth,

  feather-soft, nocturnal.

  Belladonna was its name, beautiful lady.

  Its other name was deadly.

  If you ate it it would stop your heart,

  you would sleep forever. I was told that.

  Sometimes it was used for healing,

  or in the eyes. I learned that later.

  I had to go down the mud path to the ravine,

  the wooden bridge across it rotting,

  walk across it, from good

  board to good board,

  level with the tips of the trees.

  Birds I don't remember.

  On the other side the thicket of nightshade

  where cats hunted, leaving their piss:

  a smell of ammonia and rust, some dead thing.

  All this in sunshine.

  At that time I did well, my fingers

  were eaten down to the blood.

  They never healed.

  The word Nightshade a shadow,

  the color of a recurring dream

  in which you cannot see color.

  Porridge, worn underwear, wool

  stockings, my fault. Not purple: some

  other color. Sick

  outside in a snowbank.

  I dreamed of falling from the bridge,

  one hand holding on, unable to call.

  In other dreams, I could step into the air.

  It was not flying. I never flew.

  Now some years I cross the new bridge,

  concrete, the path white gravel.

  The old bridge is gone,

  the nightshade has been cut down.

  The nightshade spreads and thickens

  where it always was,

  at this season the red berries.

  You would be tempted to eat them

  if you did not know better.

  Also the purple flowers.

  Mothers

  How much havoc this woman spills

  out of herself into us

  merely by being

  unhappy with such finality:

  The mothers rise up in us,

  rustling, uttering cooing

  sounds, their hands moving

  into our hands, patting anything

  smooth again. Her deprived eyes and deathcamp

  shoulders. There there

  we say, bringing

  bright things in desperation:

  a flower? We make

  dolls of other people and offer

  them to her. Have him, we say,

  what about her? Eat their heads off

  for all we care, but stop crying.

  She half sits in the bed, shaking

  her head under the cowl of hair.

  Nothing will do, ever.

  She discards us, crumples down

  into the sheets, twisting around

  that space we can never

  hope to fill,

  hugging her true mother,

  the one who left her here

  not among us:

  hugging her darkness.

  She

  The snake hunts and sinews

  his way along and is not his own

  idea of viciousness. All he wants is

  a fast grab, with fur and a rapid

  pulse, so he can take that fluttering

  and make it him, do a transfusion.

  They say whip or rope about him, but this

  does not give the idea; nor

  phallus, which has no bones,

  kills nothing and cannot see.

  The snake sees red, like a hand held

  above sunburn. Zeroes in,

  which means, aims for the round egg

  with nothing in it but blood.

  If lucky, misses the blade

  slicing light just behind him.

  He's our idea of a bad time, we are his.

  I say he out of habit. It could be she.

  Werewolf Movies

  Men who imagine themselves covered with fur and sprouting

  fangs, why do they do that? Padding among wet

  moonstruck treetrunks crouched on all fours, sniffing

  the mulch of sodden leaves, or knuckling

  their brambly way, arms dangling like outsized

  pajamas, hair all over them, noses and lips

  sucked back into their faces, nothing left of their kindly

  smiles but yellow eyes and a muzzle. This gives them

  pleasure, they think they'd be

  more animal. Could then freely growl, and tackle

  women carrying groceries, opening

  their doors with keys. Freedom would be

  bared ankles, the din of tearing: rubber, cloth,

  whatever. Getting down to basics. Peel, they say

  to strippers, meaning: take off the skin.

  A guzzle of flesh

  dogfood, ears in the bowl. But

  no animal does that: couple and kill,

  or kill first: rip up its egg, its future.

  No animal eats its mate's throat, except

  spiders and certain insects, when it's the protein

  male who's gobbled. Why do they have this dream then?

  Dress-ups for boys, some last escape

  from having to be lawyers? Or a

  rebellion against the mute

  resistance of objects: reproach of the

  pillowcase big with pillow, the tea-

  cosy swollen with its warm

  pot, not soft as it looks but hard

  as it feels, round tummies of saved string in the top

  drawer tethering them down. What joy, to smash the

  tyranny of the doorknob, sink your teeth

  into the inert defiant eiderdown with matching

  spring-print queensized sheets and listen to her

  scream. Surrender.

  How to Tell One Country From Another

  Whether it is possible to becom
e lost.

  Whether one tree looks like another.

  Whether there is water all around

  the edges or not. Whether

  there are edges or whether

  there are just insects.

  Whether the insects bite,

  whether you would die

  from the bites of the insects.

  Whether you would die.

  Whether you would die for your country.

  Whether anyone in the country would die for your country.

  Let's be honest here.

  A layer of snow, a layer of granite, a layer of snow.

  What you think lies under the snow.

  What you think lies.

  Whether you think white on white is a state of mind

  or blue on blue or green on green.

  Whether you think there is a state,

  of mind.

  How many clothes you have to take off

  before you can make love.

  This I think is important:

  the undoing of buttons, the gradual shedding.

  of one color after another. It leads

  to the belief that what you see is not

  what you get.

  Whether there are preliminaries,

  hallways, vestibules,

  basements, furnaces,

  chesterfields, silences

  between sentences, between pieces

  of furniture, parasites in your eyes,

  drinkable water.

  Whether there has ever been

  an invading army.

  Whether, if there were an invading army,