Circles on the Water (15 page)

The wind impregnated me,

the wind galloping with tangled mane through the brush

with burrs snarled in the shimmering coat.

The wind fills me, I am her sail and shoot before.

The wind slips through the tawny feathered grass

and enters my breath.

Six hours after I had dropped acid

I began to labor. I was brought to a room with men

and a woman who belonged to the men.

Mosquito fears bothered them.

They held me down till my muscles tore

but I was granted blindness.

The drum of my uterus pounded.

The fist of my womb clenched and unclenched

on me, in the surging cave.

Death crooned under the roar of the waterfall

calling to the child to rest, to stay, to sleep;

calling to the mother to falter, to sink, to fade.

Weeping and screaming I gave birth, I was born.

When I came down

I was handed shame like a cup of sour coffee

for the noise I had made when I had not known them,

when I had been knowing myself.

In the proper ritual we change roles and give assistance.

We bring each other through on that wind.

In the dim tunnels of library stacks

the dream is laid in the spines of books

like the eggs of beetles, in fairy stories,

broken statues and painted vases, mythologies,

legends of queens, old wives’ tales.

The eggs hatch larvae who chew and change.

The dream advances like a wave of purple dye

through the conduits of the blood.

The vision alters dreams till the night is hung

with bold faces painted on shields,

the voices of women like bright scarves on the wind,

the cries of women wet as blood,

women who dance in fire burning and charred

but still dance

together.

I wait for the dream to enter the brain

and turn on the power to connect,

clearing the roads of the instincts.

The fountains will run water and the fruit of the senses

offer its sweetness and knowledge on every stall.

The office workers will go out to the green belt to plant

and the peasants of the belly will also give law.

I wait for the dream to reach the eyes

and shatter the mirror where the moon of the face

eclipses energy’s sun.

I wait for the dream to reach the belly

and make us serious as lean grey wolves

whose shadows race far behind as they hunt.

I wait for the dream to enter the muscles

till we ride our anger like elephants into battle.

We are sleep walkers troubled by nightmare flashes.

In locked wards, we closet our vision, renouncing.

We turn love loud on the radio to shut out cries in the street.

Ours is the sleep of objects given, sold, taken, discarded,

a shuddering sleep whose half remembered dreams

are cast on the neat lawn of the domestic morning,

red blossoms torn by a high wind from a crab apple tree.

Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision,

only when we are the wind together streaming and singing,

only in the dream we become with our bones for spears,

we are real at last

and wake.

Who decided what is useful in its beauty

means less than what has no function besides beauty

(except its weight in money)?

Art without frames: it held parched corn,

it covered the table where soup misted savor,

it covered the bed where the body knit

to self and other and the

dark wool of dreams.

The love of the ordinary blazes out: the backyard

miracle: Ohio Sunflower,

Snail’s Track,

                   Sweet Gum Leaf,

                Moon over the Mountain.

In the pattern Tulip and Peony the sense

of design masters the essence of what sprawled

in the afternoon: called conventionalized

to render out the choice, the graphic wit.

Some have a wistful faded posy yearning:

  Star of the Four Winds,

                Star of the West,

Queen Charlotte’s Crown.

In a crabbed humor as far from pompous

as a rolling pin, you can trace wrinkles

from smiling under a scorching grasshopper sun:

                 Monkey Wrench,

     The Drunkard’s Path,

               Fool’s Puzzle,

                 Puss in the Corner,

          Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,

and the deflating

Hearts and Gizzards.

Pieced quilts, patchwork from best gowns,

winter woolens, linens, blankets, worked jigsaw

of the memories of braided lives, precious

scraps: women were buried but their clothing wore on.

Out of death from childbirth at sixteen, hard

work at forty, out of love for the trumpet vine

and the melon, they issue to us:

         Rocky Road to Kansas,

                Job’s Troubles,

    Crazy Ann,

               The Double Irish Chain,

                The Tree of Life:

       this quilt might be

the only perfect artifact a woman

would ever see, yet she did not doubt

what we had forgotten, that out of her

potatoes and colic, sawdust and blood

she could create; together, alone,

she seized her time and made new.

You strop my anger, especially

when I find you in restaurant or bar

and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.

In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas

some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her

shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.

She’s supposed to pay for each of them

and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.

Sometimes a woman in a uniform’s on duty

black or whatever the prevailing bottom is

getting thirty cents an hour to make sure

no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door.

Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources

for the greatest good of the smallest number

where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean

and at the end of the row one free toilet

oozes from under its crooked door,

while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies

wait and wait and wait to do

what only the dead find unnecessary.

Loss is also clearance.

Emptiness is also receptivity.

No, I cannot pretend:

the cells of my body lack you

and keen their specific hunger.

Yet, a light slants over this bleak landscape

from the low yellow sun,

a burning kite caught in the branches.

There is a lightness in me, the absence

of the weight of your judgment

bearing on my nape,

the slow stain of your judgment

rusting the moment.

I go out with empty hands

and women touch me, lightly, while we talk.

The words, the problems, the sharp faces

jostle like winter birds at a feeding station

although the crumpled fields look deserted.

I stroll in the cold gelid morning.

When it becomes clear I am not replacing you

don’t think it is primarily

because you cannot be replaced.

Consider that I am taking pleasure

in space, visited but unoccupied

for every man I have loved

was like an army.

Open, love, open.

I tell you we are able

I tell you we are able

now and then gently

with hands and feet

cold even as fish

to curl into a tangle

and grow a single hide,

slowly to unknit all other skin

and rest in flesh

and rest in flesh entire.

Come all the way in, love,

it is a river

with a strong current

but its brown waters

will not drown you.

Let go.

Do not hold out

your head.

The current knows the bottom

better than your feet can.

You will find

that in this river

we can breathe

we can breathe

and under water see

small gardens and bright fish

too tender

too tender

for the air.

Wrote two letters while rain

trickled in lean streaks down my window.

One crowed of friends hiking, steamers, hot pie,

fat with bobwhite, peas planted and rhubarb dug in.

There are facts offered in the hand like ripe raspberries,

common phrases gentle as the caress of trailing hair.

The other malingered in a recitativo of wrongs,

counterpoint of minor and major abuse

quavering on a few tones of No.

A defense after my execution, a sense

that catches on the lip like a chipped glass

of having been used: used like a coin in a slot

or a borrowed towel slung sopping on a chair.

Tanglement that broke raw, in physical threat.

Months later the lies still come back

letters battered and stained, from a false address.

Happiness is simple

a box of sunshine

body against body, closed circuit of response.

Only misery is so complicated.

When another year turns over

compost in the pile

last year’s feast breeding knots of juicy worms,

I do not want to be indicting

new accusations to another exlover

who has thrown off the scarlet cloak of desire to reveal

the same skeletal coldness, the need to control

crouching like an adding machine in his eyes,

the same damp doggy hatred of women,

the eggshell ego and the sandpaper touch,

the boyish murderer spitting mommy on his bayonet.

I am tired of finding my enemy in my bed.

For two years I broke from these cycles, simply.

I thought the death of sex would quiet the air to crystal.

I would see what there was between women and men

besides itch, dependency, habit.

I learned less than I expected.

Judgment sat on my shoulder like a pet crow.

My dreams were skim milk and albumin.

I lacked irrational joy, a lion

lying on my chest purring, the hawk’s talons and cry,

the coarse glory of the daylily that every midsummer morning

raises a new trumpet, that withers with dusk.

My head was severed like a flower in a glass

that would never make seeds.

Like an oak my tap goes deep,

more of me is in the earth than spread into air.

I think best rooted grappling past words.

Better, I thought, for me in my rough being

to force makeshift connections,

patches, encounters, rows,

better to swim in trouble like a muddy river rising

than to become at last all thesis

correct, consistent but hollow

the finished ghost

of my own struggle.

Madeline, in your purity I find myself rebuked.

Madeline, in your clarity I find myself restored.

You are the stream that breaks out

of a living tree; like the peach

you open your blossoms

to the wind that bears frost

a knife in its teeth,

you bloom in a ravaged landscape

black spring

old deaths coming to light

bones and split bellies of hunger,

the remaindered pages of the fall.

You stand and open from bare wood

fertile alone like the peach tree.

Long delicate leaves, slim green moons,

ripple over the sweet fruit

rounding on its stones.

You strike on marble at the core, rock

metamorphosed in pain and pressure,

the texture of agonized flesh.

You are vulnerable as the first buds of the maple

the deer arch their necks to crop.

Delicacy and honesty, unicorn and amazon wrestle

in your high sugar maple forest,

the Vermont hillside you love,

hard wood that drips sweetness you mistrust,

the symmetrical sculpture of each leaf,

the dome of the summer tree

heavy and dense as syrup, as sleep.

You grow deep into your rock, down into the cold

crevices of the fear of first and last things.

The stone of your death you crack and enter

with your lightning brain, with your fingers that ache.

Pain is the familiar whispering in your ear.

I come with my raggedy loves dragging

into the sphere of your clear regard.

I praise our common fight.

I praise friendship embarked on suddenly as a bus that arrives.

I praise friendship maturing like a tall beech tree.

I praise the differences that define us.

I love what I cannot be

as well as what I am.

Seeking from women nurturance, feedback, idea,

my politics, my collective, why then this

open frontier with men? Yet I tell you in the other

I meet the dream exotic as a dragonfly’s eye,

the grenade of a phrase, the joke that would never

leap the gap of the poles of my mind,

the angers struck unexpected

a spade clanging on rock in sand.

Talking without words on the body’s drum:

it is flat, it is woody, it is lean as a shark’s belly,

spiny as a sea urchin, leathery, gross, tulip sleek,

fur of the hare or wool of the sheep,

the toadstool of sex raising its ruddy bald head.

I find you beautiful, I find you funny, I find

you not translatable to words of my blood.

In that meeting I seep

out to the limits where my ego fades

into flesh, into electricity of the muscles thrumming,

into light patterns imploding on the nerves,

into the wet caves where my strength is born again.