Becoming Light (11 page)

nervous before flight,

do needlepoint—

blue irises & yellow daffodils

against a stippled woolen sky.

She pushes the needle

in & out

as she once pushed me:

sharp needle to the canvas of her life—

embroidering her faults

in prose & poetry,

writing the fiction

of my bitterness,

the poems of my need.

“You hate me,” she accuses,

needle poised,

“why not admit it?”

I shake my head.

The air is thick

with love gone bad,

the odor of old blood.

If I were small enough

I would suck your breast
…

but I say nothing,

big mouth,

filled with poems.

Whatever love is made of—

wool, blood, Sunday lamb,

books of verse

with violets crushed

between the pages,

tea with herbs,

lemon juice for hair,

portraits sketched of me asleep

at nine months old—

this twisted skein

of multicolored wool,

this dappled canvas

or this page of print

joins us

like the twisted purple cord

through which we first pulsed poems.

Mother, what I feel for you

is more

& less

than love.

2 /
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin & Mary Godwin Shelley

She was “lonesome

as a Crusoe,”

orphaned by childbirth,

orphaned being born,

killing her mother

with a stubborn afterbirth—

the medium they’d shared….

Puppies were brought

to draw off Mary’s milk,

& baby Mary screamed.

She grew up

to marry Shelley,

have four babes

(of whom three died)—

& one immortal monster.

Byron & Shelley

strutted near the lake

& wrote their poems

on purest alpine air.

The women had their pregnancies

& fears.

They bore the babies,

copied manuscripts,

& listened to the talk

that love was “free.”

The brotherhood of man

did not apply:

all they contributed

to life

was life.

& Doctor Frankenstein

was punished

for his pride:

the hubris of a man

creating life.

He reared a wretched

animated corpse—

& Shelley praised the book

but missed the point.

Who were these gothic monsters?

Merely men.

Self-exiled Byron

with his Mistress Fame,

& Percy Shelley

with his brains aboil,

the seaman

who had never learned to swim.

Dear Marys,

it was clear

that you were truer.

Daughters of daughters,

mothers of future mothers,

you sought to soar

beyond complaints

of woman’s lot—

& died in childbirth

for the Rights of Man.

3 /
Exiles

This was the sharpness

of my mother’s lesson.

Being a woman

meant eternal strife.

No colored wool could stitch

the trouble up;

no needlepoint

could cover it with flowers.

When Byron played

the exiled wanderer,

he left his ladies

pregnant or in ruin.

He left his children

fatherless for fame,

then wrote great letters

theorizing pain.

He scarcely knew

his daughters any more

than Mary knew the Mary

who expired giving her birth.

All that remained in him:

a hollow loneliness

about the heart,

the milkless tug of memory,

the singleness of creatures

who breath air.

Birth is the start

of loneliness

& loneliness the start

of poetry:

that seems a crude

reduction of it all,

but truth

is often crude.

& so I dream

of daughters

as a man might dream

of giving birth,

& as my mother dreamed

of daughters

& had three—

none of them her dream.

& I reach out for love

to other women

while my real mother

pines for me

& I pine for her,

knowing I would have to be

smaller than a needle

pierced with wool

to pierce the canvas of her life

again.

4 /
Dear Daughter

Will you change all this

by my having you,

& by your having everything—

Don Juan’s exuberance,

Childe Harold’s pilgrimage,

books & babies,

recipes & riots?

Probably not.

In making daughters

there is so much needlepoint,

so much doing & undoing,

so much yearning—

that the finished pattern cannot please.

My poems will have daughters

everywhere,

but my own daughter

will have to grow

into her energy.

I will not call her Mary

or Erica.

She will shape

a wholly separate name.

& if her finger falters

on the needle,

& if she ever needs to say

she hates me,

& if she loathes poetry

& loves to whistle,

& if she never

calls me Mother,

She will always be my daughter—

my filament of soul

that flew,

& caught.

She will come

in a radiance of new-made skin,

in a room of dying men

and dying flowers,

in the shadow of her large mother,

with her books propped up

& her ink-stained fingers,

lying back on pillows

white as blank pages,

laughing—

“I did it without

words!”

Francis, the only pregnant white whale in captivity, died last night of internal poisoning in her tank at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island….

—The New York Times,
May 26, 1974

Too big & too intelligent

to reproduce,

the ferns will outlast us,

not needing each other

with their dark spores,

& the cockroaches

with their millions of egg-cases,

& even the one-celled waltzers

dancing pseudopod to pseudopod,

but we are too big, too smart

to stick around.

Floating in Coney Island,

floating on her white belly—

while the fetus flips its flippers

in the womb

& she circles in the belly of the tank.

The last calf

beat her brains out

minutes after birth

& this one died unborn…

Fourteen months in the womb,

fourteen months to enter

the world of whaledom

through a tank in Coney Island.

Not worth it,

the calf decides,

& dies,

taking along its mother.

♦

The whales are friendly, social animals,

& produce big, brainy babies;

produce them one by one

in the deep arctic waters,

produce them painfully

through months of mating

& pregnancies that last more than a year.

They croon to their unborn calves

in poetry—whale poetry

which only a few humans

have been privileged to hear.

Melville died for the privilege

& so will I

straining my ears

all the way to Coney Island.

♦

Dear Francis, dead at ten

in your second pregnancy,

in the seventh year of captivity…

Was it weariness of the tank, the cage,

the zoo-prison of marriage?

Or was it loneliness—

the loneliness of pregnant whales?

Or was it nostalgia for the womb,

the arctic waste,

the belly of your own cold mother?

When a whale dies at sixteen hundred pounds

we must make big moans.

When a whale dies with an unborn baby

of one hundred and fifty pounds—

a small elegy is not enough;

we must weep loud enough

to be heard

all the way to Coney Island.

♦

Why am I weeping

into
The New York Times

for a big beluga whale

who could never have been

my sister?

Why am I weeping for a baby whale

who died happy

in the confines of the womb?

Because when the big-brained babies

die, we are all dying;

& the ferns live on

shivering

in the warm wind.

Narrowing life because of the fears,

narrowing it between the dust motes,

narrowing the pink baby

between the green-limbed monsters,

& the drooling idiots,

& the ghosts of Thalidomide infants,

narrowing hope,

always narrowing hope.

Mother sits on one shoulder hissing:

Life is dangerous
.

Father sits on the other sighing:

Lucky you
.

Grandmother, grandfather, big sister:

You’ll die if you leave us,

you’ll die if you ever leave us
.

Sweetheart, baby sister,

you’ll die anyway

& so will I.

Even if you walk the wide greensward,

even if you

& your beautiful big belly

embrace the world of men & trees,

even if you moan with pleasure,

& smoke the sweet grass

& feast on strawberries in bed,

you’ll die anyway—

wide or narrow,

you’re going to die.

As long as you’re at it,

die wide.

Follow your belly to the green pasture.

Lie down in the sun’s dapple.

Life is not as dangerous

as mother said.

It is more dangerous,

more wide.

You sleep in the darkness,

you with the back I love

& the gift of sleeping

through my noisy nights of poetry.

I have taken other men into my thoughts

since I met you.

I have loved parts of them.

But only you sleep on through the darkness

like a mountain where my house is planted,

like a rock on which my temple stands,

like a great dictionary holding every word—

even some

I have never spoken.

You breathe.

The pages of your dreams are riffled

by the winds of my writing.

The pillow creases your cheek

as I cover pages.

Element in which I swim

or fly,

silent muse, backbone, companion—

it is unfashionable

to confess to marriage—

yet I feel no bondage

in this air we share.

These beautifully grown men. These hungerers.

Look at them looking!

They’re overdrawn on all accounts but hope

& they’ve missed

(for the hundredth time) the express

to the city of dreams

& settled, sighing, for a desperate local;

so who’s to blame them

if they swim through swimming pools of twelve-

year-old scotch, or fall

in love with widows (other than their wives)

who suddenly can’t ride

in elevators? In that suburb of elms

& crabgrass (to which

the angel banished them) nothing is more real

than last night’s empties.

So, if they pack up, stuff their vitals

in a two-suiter,

& (with passports bluer than their eyes)

pose as barons

in Kitzbühel, or poets in Portofino,

something in us sails

off with them (dreaming of bacon-lettuce-

and-tomato sandwiches).

Oh, all the exiles of the twenties knew

that America

was discovered this way: desperate men,

wearing nostalgia

like a hangover, sailed out, sailed out

in search of passports,

eyes, an ancient kingdom, beyond the absurd

suburbs of the heart.

On line at the supermarket

waiting for the tally,

the blue numerals

tattooed

on the white skins

of paper,

I read your open book

of folly

and take heart,

poet of my heart.

The poet as housewife!

Keeper of steak & liver,

keeper of keys, locks, razors,

keeper of blood & apples,

of breasts & angels,

Jesus & beautiful women,

keeper also of women

who are not beautiful—

you glide in from Cape Ann

on your winged broomstick—

the housewife’s Pegasus.

You are sweeping the skies clear

of celestial rubbish.

You are placing a child there,

a heart here…

You are singing for your supper.

Dearest wordmother & hunger-teacher,

full professor of courage,

dean of women

in my school of books,

thank you.

I have checked out

pounds of meat & cans of soup.

I walk home laden,

light with writing you.

My dearest Anne,

I am living by a lake

with a young man

I met one week after you died.

His beard is red,

his eyes flicker like cat’s eyes,

& the amazing plum of his tongue

sweetens my brain.

He is like nobody

since I love him.

His cock sinks deep

in my heart.

♦

I have owed you a letter

for months.

♦

I wanted to chide