Circles on the Water (12 page)

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Fusion is miracle and there is no other way, it is necessary.

Every new age is unbelievable beforehand and after, inevitable.

History is a game played backwards only.

I fling my eyes into the maw of the sun.

With all our strength, we thrust into fierce light.

We are yearning like frogs bulging our throats in the spring marsh

and croaking harsh and ridiculous spasms of hope.

I tell you, roses want to bloom out of the wood,

the goodness in people wants to break free

of the blind ego.

Birth is a miracle in every germinating seed.

We had thought we were waiting our Messiah, our Lenin,

our golden Organizer who would fuse us into one body

but now we see when we grow heads they lop them off.

We must be every one the connection between energy and mass,

every one the lightning that strikes to topple the tower.

Each must conduct light, heat and crackling strength

into each other: we must open a thousand fiery eyes and mouths

of flame that make us visible and pass to others.

The lion arches in my back, the goat kicks in my legs.

You skim, a glinting dragonfly, into my head and we couple in air.

Each time we say
sisters,

each time you say
brothers
, we are making magic

for we were born each to scream alone, a worm in armor,

trained to grab at all and cherish nothing.

Every soul must become a magician; the magician is in touch.

The magician connects. The magician helps each thing

to open into what it truly wants to utter.

The saying is not the magic: we have drunk words and eaten

manifestoes and grown bloated on resolutions

and farted winds of sour words that left us weak.

It is in the acting with the strength we cannot

really have till we have won.

Give birth to me, sisters, in struggle we transform

ourselves, but how often, how often

we need help to cut loose, to cry out, to breathe!

In the skull, floating on drugs, everybody is born again good

but how hard to make that miracle pass in the streets.

This morning we must make each other strong.

Change is qualitative: we are

each other’s miracle.

A poem is a dancing: it goes out of a mouth to your ears

and for some moments aligns us,

so we wheel and turn together.

The blackbirds dance over the marsh as they drive off the hawk.

The marsh hawks hunt in spirals paired, crying.

The bees dance where the pollen is to be gathered, and dance their fierce mating.

When I dance I forget myself, I am danced.

Music fills me to overflowing and the power moves

up from my feet to my fingers, making leaves as sap does.

My dance is of you: we are dancing together though scattered,

atomistic as Brownian motes, the same music holds us.

Even after Altamont, even after we have discovered

we are still death’s darling children, born of the print-out,

the laser, the war-game, the fragmentation weapons of education,

still we must bear joy back into the world.

We must rise up in joy and endurance,

we must shake off the oil of passivity and no more be spectators

even before the masque of our own dark and bright dreams.

We grew up in Disneyland with ads for friends

and believed we could be made new by taking a pill.

We wanted instant revolution, where all we had to add

was a little smoke.

There is no tribe who dance and then sit down

and wait for the crops to harvest themselves

and supper to roll over before the pot.

We shall survive only if we win; they will kill us

if they can, and killing is what they do best.

We have learned to do nothing well.

We are still strangers to our bodies,

tools fit awkwardly in our hands, our weapons explode,

we speak to each other haltingly in words they gave us.

Taste what is in your mouth,

if it is water, still taste it.

Wash out the cups of your fingers,

clean your eyes with new tears for your sister.

We are not worse revolutionaries if we remember

that the universe itself pulses like a heart;

that the blood dances within us; that joy is a power

treading with hoofs and talons on our flimsy bodies;

that water flows and fire leaps and the land gives strength

if you build on it with respect, if you dance on it with vigor,

if you put seeds in with care and give back what is left over;

that a ritual of unity makes some of what it pretends;

that every thing is a part of something else.

In the house of power grown old but unyielding

the emperor sits severe in mail, watching all that creep;

even over the grasshoppers and the minnows, over the leaves

that catch sun into food, he wields barrenness.

He holds a globe like something he might bite into

and an ankh, for he will carry his dominion into the living cells

and the ancient cabala of the genes he plans to revise

till everything born is programmed to obey.

The Man from Mars with sterile mountains at his back—

perhaps strip-mined, perhaps the site of weapons testing—

if we opened that armor like a can, would we find a robot?

quaking old flesh? the ghost of an inflated bond issue?

Evil old men banal as door knobs

who rule the world like a comic strip,

you are the Father Who Eats His Young.

Power abhors a vacuum, you say and sit down at the Wurlitzer

to play the color organ of poison gases.

All roads lead to the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill

where hearts are torn out and skulls split to feed

the ultimate ejaculating machine, the ruling class climax by missile.

The gnats of intelligence who have bugged every pay toilet

in the country sing in your beard of court cases and jails to come.

It is reason enough to bomb a village if it cannot be bought.

Heavy as dinosaurs, plated and armored,

you crush the land under your feet and flatten it.

Lakes of smoking asphalt spread where your feet have trod.

You exiled the Female into blacks and women and colonies.

You became the armed brain and the barbed penis and the club.

You invented agribusiness, leaching the soil to dust,

and pissed mercury in the rivers and shat slag on the plains,

withered your emotions to ulcers,

strait-jacketed the mysteries and sent them to shock therapy.

Your empress is a new-model car with breasts.

There is in the dance of all things together no profit

for each feeds the next and all pass through each other,

the serpent whose tail is in her mouth,

our mother earth turning.

Now the wheel of the seasons sticks and the circle is broken

and life spills out in an oil slick to rot the seas.

You are the God of the Puritans playing war games on computers:

you can give birth to nothing

except death.

I call on the dead, I call on the defeated, on the starved,

the sold, the tortured, the executed, the robbed:

Indian women bayoneted before their children at Sand Creek,

miners who choked on the black lung,

strikers shot down at Pullman and Republic Steel,

women bled to death of abortions men made illegal,

sold, penned in asylums, lobotomized, raped and torn open,

every black killed by police, national guard, mobs and armies.

Live in us: give us your strength, give us your counsel,

give us your rage and your will to come at last into the light.

I fear the trial, I fear the struggle, it parches and withers me.

I fear the violence into whose teeth we march.

I long for the outcome with every cheated cell.

We shall all waken finally to being human.

I was trained to be numb, I was born to be numbered and pegged,

I was bred and conditioned to passivity, like a milk cow.

Waking is the sharpest pain I have ever known.

Every barrier that goes down takes part of my flesh

leaving me bloody. How can I live wide open?

Why must I think of you and you before I take a bite?

Why must I look to my sister before I scratch my itch?

I used to shuffle and giggle. I kept my eyes down

tucking my shoulders in so I would not rub the walls

of the rut, the place, the role.

Now anger blisters me.

My pride rumbles, sputtering lava.

Every day is dangerous and glad.

“Why do you choose to be noisy, to fight, to make trouble?”

you ask me, not understanding I have been born raw and new.

I can be killed with ease, I can be cut right down,

but I cannot crawl back in the cavern

where I lay with my neck bowed.

I have grown. I am not by myself.

I am too many.

Androgynous child whose hair curls into flowers,

naked you ride a horse without saddle or bridle

easy between your thighs from the walled garden outward.

Coarse sunflowers of desire whose seeds birds crack open

nod upon your journey, child of the morning whose sun

can only be born from us who strain bleeding to give birth.

Grow into your horse, let there be

no more riders or ridden.

Child, where are you heading with arms spread wide

as a shore, have I been there, have I seen that land shining

like sun spangles on clean water rippling?

I do not know your dances, I cannot translate your tongue

to words I use, your pleasures are strange to me

as the rites of bees: yet you are the yellow flower

of a melon vine growing out of my belly

though it climbs up where I cannot see in the strong light.

My eyes cannot decipher those shapes of children or burning clouds

who are not what we are: they go barefoot like savages,

they have computers as household pets; they are seven sexes

and only one sex; they do not own or lease or control.

They are of one body and of tribes. They are private as shamans

learning each her own magic at the teats of stones and trees.

They are all technicians and peasants.

They do not forget their birthright of self

or their mane of animal pride

dancing in and out through the gates of the body standing wide.

A bear lumbering, I waddle into the fields of their work games.

We are stunted slaves mumbling over the tales

of dragons our masters tell us, but we will be free.

Our children will be free of us uncomprehending

as we of those shufflers in caves who scraped for fire

and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,

the giant cave bear, predators

that had penned them up cowering so long.

The sun is rising, feel it: the air smells fresh.

I cannot look in the sun’s face, its brightness blinds me,

but from my own shadow becoming distinct

I know that now at last

it is beginning to grow light.

People ask questions

but never too many.

They are listening for the button to push

to make it go away.

They wait for me to confess

nights hollowed out with jealousy.

Or people say, Isn’t that interesting

and believe nothing.

I must be public

as a dish of hors d’oeuvres on a bar.

I must hunt the shrubbery of couches for prey.

Loving not packaged in couples

shivers cracks down the closed world, the nuclear

egg of childhood, radioactive stone

at the base of the brain.

Can you imagine not having to lie?

To try to tell what you feel and want

till sometimes you can even see

each other clear and strange

as a photograph of your hand.