Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.
Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.
Wet as onions, dry as salt.
Slow as honey, fast as seltzer,
my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love
my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple
I love you daily as milk,
I love you nightly as aromatic port.
The words trail a bitter slime like slugs,
then in the belly warm like cabbage borscht.
The words are hung out on the line,
sheets for the wind to bleach.
The words are simmering slowly
on the back burner like a good stew.
Words are the kindling in the wood stove.
Even the quilt at night is stuffed with word down.
When we are alone the walls sing
and even the cats talk but only in Yiddish.
When we are alone we make love in deeds.
And then in words. And then in food.
We tie our bodies in a lover's
knot and then gradually uncoil.
We turn and talk, the night lapping
at the sills of the casements, rising
in us like dark heavy wine.
Then we turn aside. Eskimo
crawling into private igloos,
bears retreating to distant lairs,
a leopard climbing its home tree,
we go unmated into sleep.
In sleep you fret about who a lover
untouched for years is sleeping with.
Some man with a face glimpsed once
in a crowd lies over me sweating.
Now I wear male flesh like a suit of armor.
In sleep I am speaking French again.
The Algerian War is still on.
I curse, back to the wall of the top
floor of a workers'-quarter house.
The war in Vietnam is still on.
I am carrying a memorized message
to a deserter who is hiding
in a church belfry. All night
I drive fast down back roads
with a borrowed car full of contraband.
In the morning, of what we remember,
what can we tell? In the mind
dreams flash their facets, but in words
they dim, brilliant rocks picked up
at low tide that dry to mud.
Nightly the tides of sleep enter
us in secret claret-red oceans
from whose deep slide serpents
wearing faces radiant and impure
as saints in Renaissance paintings.
Now as night pours in to fill the house
like a conch shell, we cling together,
muttered words between us, a spar
we hold to knowing that soon
we will let go, severed, to drown.
A friend from Greece
brought a tin house
on a plaque, designed
to protect our abode,
as in Greek churches
embossed legs or hearts
on display entreat aid.
I hung it but now
nail my own proper charm.
I refuse no offers of help,
at least from friends,
yet this presence
is long overdue. Mostly
we nurture our own
blessings or spoil them,
build firmly or undermine
our walls. Who are termites
but our obsessions gnawing?
Still the winds blow hard
from the cave of the sea
carrying off what they will.
Our smaller luck abides
like a worm snug in an apple
who does not comprehend
the shivering of the leaves
as the ax bites hard
in the smooth trunk.
We need all help proffered
by benign forces. Outside
we commit our beans to the earth,
the tomato plants started
in February to the care
of the rain. My little
pregnant grey cat offers
the taut bow of her belly
to the sun's hot tongue.
Saturday I watched alewives
swarm in their thousands
waiting in queues quivering
pointed against the white
rush of the torrents
to try their leaps upstream.
The gulls bald as coffin
nails stabbed them casually
conversing in shrieks, picnicking.
On its earth, this house
is oriented. We grow
from our bed rooted firmly
as an old willow into the water
of our dreams flowing deep
in the hillside. This hill
is my temple, my soul.
Malach hamoves
, angel of death
pass over, pass on.
I build stories. They own
their own shapes, their rightful
power and impetus, plot
them however I try, but always
that shape is broadly just.
I want to believe in justice
inexorable as the decay
of an isotope; I want to plot
the orbit of justice, erratic
but inevitable as a comet's return.
It is not blind chance I rail at,
the flood waters that carry off
one house and leave its neighbor
standing one foot above the high
water's swirling grasp.
It is that the good go down
not easily, not gently,
not occasionally, not by random
deviation and the topple
of mischance, but almost always.
Here is something new and true.
No, you are too different,
too raw, too spiced and gritty.
We want one like the last one.
We know how to sell that.
We want one that praises us,
we want one that puts down
the ones we squat on, no
aftertaste, no residue of fine
thought smeared on the eyes.
We want one just like all
the others, but with a designer
label and a clever logo.
We want one we saw advertised
in
The New York Times
.
Are the controls working?
Is the doorman on duty?
Is the intercom connected?
Is the monitor functioning?
Is the incinerator on?
It goes without saying:
The brie shall be perfectly
ripe, the wine shall be a second
cru Bordeaux from a decent year,
there shall be one guest
with a recent certified success
and we shall pass around plates
of grated contempt for those
who lack this much, of sugared
envy for those who have more.
For the young not facile enough
to imitate the powerful, not skilled
enough liars to pretend sucking them
is ecstasy, they erect a massive
wall, the Himalayas of exclusion.
For the old who speak too much
of pain, they have a special
Greenland of exile. Old Birnbaum.
Nobody reads her anymore.
I thought she was dead.
Once she is, and her cat
starves, she will become a growth
industry. Only kill yourself
and you can be consumed too,
an incense-proffered icon.
It is the slow mean defeat
of the good that I rail against,
the small pallid contempt of the well
placed for those who do not lack
the imaginative power to try,
the good who are warped by passion
as granite is twisted into mountains
and metamorphosed by fire into marble;
who speak too loud in vulgar tongues
because they have something to say;
who mean what they make down to their
bones; who commit the uncouth error
of feeling, of saying what they feel,
of making others feel. Their reward
is to be made to feel worthless.
Goodness is not dangerous enough.
I want goodness like a Nike armed
with the warhead of rightful anger.
I want goodness that can live on sand
and stones and wring wine from burrs,
goodness that can put forth fruit,
manured with the sewage of hatred.
The good must cultivate their anger
like fields of wheat that must feed
them, if they are ever to win.
We all wanted to go to you.
Even women who had not heard
of you, longed for you, our
cool grey mother who would
gently, carefully and slowly, using
no nurse but ministering herself,
open our thighs and our vaginas
and show us the os smiling
in the mirror like a full rising moon.
You taught us our health, our sickness
and our regimes, presiding over
the raw ends of life, a priestess eager
to initiate. Never did you tell us
we could not understand what you
understood. You made our bodies
glow transparent. You did not think
you had a license to question us
about our married state or lovers' sex.
Your language was as gentle and caring
as your hands. On the mantel
in the waiting room the clippings hung,
old battles, victories, marches.
You with your flower face, strong
in your thirties in the thirties,
were carted to prison for the crime
of prescribing birth control
for workingclass women in Lynn.
The quality of light in those quiet
rooms where we took our shoes off
before entering and the little
dog accompanied you like a familiar,
was respect: respect for life,
respect for women, respect for choice,
a mutual respect I cannot imagine
I shall feel for any other doctor,
bordering on love.
Here I am I think in Des Moines,
in Dubuque, in Moscow Idaho, in a cube of motel room
but where is my wandering luggage tonight?
Where is my bathrobe slippery as wet rock,
green as St. Patrick's Day icing?
Are my black boots keeled over under another bed?
Do my tampons streak across the night
little white rockets trailing contrails of string?
Are women in Alaska dicing for my red shoes?
Did TWA banish my suitcase to Siberia?
Where is that purple dress in which my voice
is twice as loud, with the gold belt
glittering like the money I hope to get paid,
sympathetic magic to lure checks
out of comptrollers before time molders?
I feel like an impostor, a female impersonator,
a talking laundry bag dialing head calls
to all my clothes in Port Huron, in Biloxi, in Tucson,
collect calls into the night: I'm lonely and dirty.
I'm sorry I spilled chili on you, chocolate sauce,
Elmer's Glue. I'll wear an apron at all times.
I'll never again eat tacos. O my wandering clothes,
fly through the night to me, homing pigeons
trailing draperies like baroque saints, come home.
Certain friends come in, they say
Your cats are your children.
They smile from a great height on down.
Clouds roll in around their hair.
I have real children, they mean,
while you have imitation.
My cats are not my children.
I gave Morgaine away yesterday
to a little boy she liked.
I'm not saving to send them to Harvard.
When they stay out overnight
I don't call the police.
I like the way they don't talk,
the way they do, eyes shining
or narrowed, tails bannering,
paws kneading, cats with private
lives and passions sharp as their claws,
hunters, lovers, great sulkers.
No, my children are my friends,
my lover, my dependents on whom
I depend, those few for whom
I will rise in the night to give
comfort, massage, medicine,
whose calls I always take.
My children are my books
that I gestate for years,
a slow-witted elephant
eternally pregnant, books
that I sit on for eras like the great
auk on a vast marble egg.
I raise them with loving care,
I groom and educate them,
I chastise, reward and adore.
I exercise them lean and fatten them up.
I roll them about my mind all night
and fuss over them in the mornings.
Then they march off into the world
to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,
to be loved for the wrong reasons,
to be fondled, beaten, lost.
Now and then I get a postcard
from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.
People take them in and devour them.
People marry them for love.
People write me letters and tell me
how they are my children too.
I have children whose languages
rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,
children born of the wind that blows
through me from the graves of the poor
and brave who struggled all their short
throttled lives to free people
whose faces they could not imagine.
Such are the children of my words.
Darkest chocolate, bittersweet,
the muscled power of horse's
haunches, the sleekness of a seal,
the swagger of a heavyweight
strolling to the ring:
Jim Beam works hard as overlord
hustling to rule his turf in winter
when only the great horned owl
can frighten him. But July Fourth
brings up the summer people
with their dogs, their cats,
their children, their dirt bikes,
their firecrackers. All summer
he collects scars and anger
trying to boss his ward.
He gets leaner, meaner.
He sulks and roars in baritone
O my unappreciated soul, all night.
He wants to be force-fed
love like chicken soup.
He wants love to chase him
like a panting dog,
without asking, without earning.
Jim Beam, you're indistinguishable
from half the men I've adored.
Being a cat you are lucky.
I do carry you off by force
and today you lie by the computer
on a satin pillow and eat turkey
and suffer, suffer your belly
to be scratched and endure
your chin chucked and tickled, at ease,
air conditioned while it's ninety out.
O Jim Beam, this must
be love: will you marry me?