Circles on the Water (13 page)

We are all hustling and dealing

as we broil on the iron grates of the city.

Our minds charred, we collide and veer off.

Hard and spiny, we taste of DDT.

We trade each other in.

Talk is a poker game,

bed is a marketplace,

love is a soggy trap.

Property breeds theft and possession,

betrayal, the vinegar of contempt.

This woman, does she measure up?

This man, can I do better?

Each love is a purchase that can be returned

if it doesn’t fit.

Hard as building a wall of sand.

Hard as gathering blackberries naked

in the thorny sprawl of a bramble.

Hard as saying I’ve made a mistake

and you were right.

How hard to love.

How painful to be friends.

My life frays into refuse,

parts of broken appliances,

into tapes recorded over, photographs

of people I no longer talk to

even on the phone.

How loud too the clash of my needs

in my pockets as I run to you

keys and coins jangling.

My hungers yowl and scrap in the gutter.

I will wring you for a few drops of reassurance.

My fears are telling the beads of your spine.

To hear your voice over the subway roar

of my will requires discipline.

No more lovers, no more husbands,

no masters or mistresses, contracts, no affairs,

only friends.

No more trade-ins or betrayals,

only the slow accretion of community,

hand on hand.

Help me to be clear and useful.

Help me to help you.

You are not my insurance, not my vacation,

not my romance, not my job, not my garden.

You wear your own flags and colors and your own names.

I will never have you.

I am a friend who loves you.

I awoke with the room cold and my cat

Arofa kneading my belly.

I had been walking around the lower east side

while from every alley and fruit market and stoop,

out from under the ravaged cars,

the cats came running to me.

All the cats had heard I was moving to the country

because of my lungs

and they began to cough and sneeze and whine.

All the starving rat-gnawed rickety spavined cats

of the lower east side with their fleas and worms

and their siren of hunger

followed me through the teeming blocks.

They threw themselves under the wheels of trucks

in an effort to keep up.

They were rubbing my ankles and yowling

that I must take every one of them along.

They wanted to breathe air that was not stained.

They wanted to roll on wet grass.

They wanted to chase a bird that wasn’t a dirty pigeon.

Then the demands of the cats were drowned out.

As I ran, all of the eleven and twelve and thirteen year olds

who had died of skag in the smoking summer

began to miaou and miaou and miaou

till all of New York was white with pain like snow.

On the beach where we had been idly

telling the shell coins

cat’s paw, cross-barred Venus, china cockle,

we both saw at once

the sea bird fall to the sand

and flap grotesquely.

He had taken a great barbed hook

out through the cheek and fixed

in the big wing.

He was pinned to himself to die,

a royal tern with a black crest blown back

as if he flew in his own private wind.

He felt good in my hands, not fragile

but muscular and glossy and strong,

the beak that could have split my hand

opening only to cry

as we yanked on the barbs.

We borrowed a clippers, cut and drew out the hook.

Then the royal tern took off, wavering,

lurched twice,

then acrobat returned to his element, dipped,

zoomed, and sailed out to dive for a fish.

Virtue: what a sunrise in the belly.

Why is there nothing

I have ever done with anybody

that seems to me so obviously right?

Finally I have a house

where I return.

House half into the hillside,

wood that will weather to the wind’s grey,

house built on sand

drawing water like a tree from its roots

where my roots too are set

and I return.

Where the men rode crosscountry on their dirt bikes in October

the hog cranberry will not grow back.

This land is vulnerable like my own flesh.

In New York the land seems cast out by a rolling mill

except where ancient gneiss pokes through.

Plains and mountain dwarf the human, seeming permanent,

but Indians were chasing mammoth with Folsom points

before glacial debris piled up Cape Cod where I return.

The colonists found beech and oak trees high as steeples

and chopped them down.

When Thor eau hiked from Sandwich outward

he crossed a desert

for they had farmed the land until it blew away

and slaughtered the whales and seals extinct.

Here you must make the frail dirt where your food grows.

Fertility is created of human castings and the sea’s.

In the intertidal beach around each sand grain

swims a minute world dense with life.

Each oil slick wipes out galaxies.

Here we all lie on the palm of the poisoned sea our mother

where life began and is now ending

and we return.

Like mail order brides

they are lacking in glamor.

Drooping and frail and wispy,

they are orphaned waifs of some green catastrophe

from which only they have been blown to safety

swaddled in a few wraiths of sphagnum moss.

Windbreaks, orchards, forests of the mind

they huddle in the dirt

smaller than our cats.

The catalog said they would grow

to stand one hundred feet tall.

I could plant them in the bathroom.

I could grow them in window pots,

twelve trees to an egg carton.

I could dig four into the pockets of my jeans.

I could wear some in my hair

or my armpits.

Ah, for people like us, followed

by forwarding addresses and dossiers and limping causes

it takes a crazy despairing faith

full of teeth as a jack o’lantern

to plant pine and fir and beech

for somebody else’s grandchildren,

if there are any.

We breed plants, order seeds from

the opulent pornography of the catalogs,

plant, weed, fertilize, water.

But the flowers do not shine for us.

Forty days of life, working like a housewife

with six kids in diapers, at it like an oil rig pumping.

With condescension we pass on: busy as a bee.

Yet for them the green will of the plants

has thrust out colors, odors, the shapely trumpets and cups.

As the sun strikes the petals, the flower uncurls,

the bees come glinting and singing.

Now she crawls into the crimson rooms of the rose

where perfume reddens the air to port wine.

Marigolds sturdy in the grass barking like golden chow dogs

cry their wares to her. Enter. Devour me!

In her faceted eyes each image reverberates.

Cumulus clouds of white phlox

pile up for her in the heat of the sunburnt day.

Down into the soft well of the summer lilies,

cerise, citron, umber, rufous orange,

anthers with their palate of pollen

tremble as she enters.

She rubs her quivering fur

into each blue bell of the borage.

In the chamber of the peony she is massaged with silk.

Forty days she is drunk with nectar.

Each blossom utters fragrance to entice her,

offers up its soft flanks, its maddening colors,

its sweet and pungent fluids.

She never mates: her life is orgasm of all senses.

She dies one morning exhausted in the lap of the rose.

Like love letters turned up in an attic trunk

her honey remains to sweeten us.

June is the floodtide of green,

wet and lush and leafy, heavyladen.

In full summer the grass bleaches

to sand, hue of grasshoppers on the dunes.

The marsh begins to bronze.

Hot salty afternoons: the sun

stuns. Drops on our heads like a stone.

Among the pitch pines the sparse shade

simmers with resin.

Crickets shiver the air.

The path is white sand shimmering

leading down from the hill of scrub oak

crusty with lichens, reindeer moss,

ripe earth stars scattering their spores.

Nothing commands the eye

except the sea at the horizon.

We must actively look: textures

of ground cover, poverty grass, bearberry,

lowbush blueberry, wood lily, Virginia rose.

The dusty beach plums range on the gnarled branch

from soft dull green through blush and purple

like a tourist’s sunset in miniature.

Sandy, dwarfed, particular

this landscape yields nothing from a car.

A salt marsh must be learned on foot, wading,

lumbering in the muck, hopping tussocks of salt meadow grass,

hay arising sideways from last year’s fallen harvest.

The marsh clicks and rustles

with fiddler crabs scuttling to their holes.

The blue-eyed grass has bloomed.

Now we find fat joints of samphire

turning orange, the intricate sea lavender.

Under us the tide undulates

percolating through the layers, slithering

with its smell of life feeding and renewing

like my own flesh after sex.

We go in this landscape together learning it

barefoot and studious with our guides in a knapsack

catching Fowler’s toads and letting them go.

Victim not of an accident

but of a life that was accidental

she sprawls on the nursing

home bed: has a photo

of herself at seventeen with long

brown hair, face paprikaed

with freckles, like a granddaughter

who may live

in San Diego. In Decatur

love picked her up

by the scruff and after

out of work wandering dumped

her in Back of the Yards Chicago.

A broken nose, the scar of love;

stretch marks and a tooth lost

each child, love like

tuberculosis, it happens.

And generation used

her like a rutted highway

the heavy trucks trundling

their burdens all day and all

night. Her body was a thing

stuffed, swollen, convulsed

empty, producing for the state

and Jesus three soldiers and one

sailor, two more breeding wombs

and a (defunct) prostitute.

The surviving corporal drives

hack, one mother waits tables;

the other typed, married into

the suburbs and is den

mother to cubscouts.

The husband, cocksman, luckless

horse and numbersplayer, security

guard and petty thief, died

at fifty-six of cancer

of the colon.

Now like an abandoned car

she has been towed here

to fall apart.

She wastes, drugged,

in a spreading pool

of urine.

Surely she could be used,

her eyes, her heart

still strangely sturdy,

her one good kidney

could be salvaged for the rich

who are too valuable at seventy-four

to throw away.

Do you remember the first raw winter

of our women’s group, both of us fierce as mother bears?

Every day came down like a pile driver in the morning

shaking the bed empty

stomping sleep like a run-over bag.

Our pain was new, a too sharp kitchen knife.

We bled on everything we touched.

I could hardly type for scars.

Rage sang like a coloratura doing trills

in my head as I ricocheted up male streets.

You came on like a sergeant of marines.

You were freshly ashamed of your beauty

believing if you frowned a lot no one

would notice your face.

The group defined us the strong ones

loved us, hated us, baited us, set us

one on the other. We met

almost clandestinely. You brought flowers.

We praised lesbian love intellectually, looking

hard in each other’s black eyes, and each stayed

on her side of the kitchen exuding

a nervous whine like an avalanche of white mice.

What a rutted road through thick gassy clouds of nightmare,

political bedlam. Each has let

the other down and picked her up.

We will never be lovers; too scared

of losing each other. What tantalizes past flesh

—too mirrored, lush, dark haired and soft in the belly—

is the strange mind rasping, clanging, engaging.

What we fantasize—rising like a bird kite

on the hot afternoon air—is work together.

Projects, battles, schemes, manifestoes

are born from the brushing of wills

like small sparks from loose hair,

and will we let them fade, static electricity?