Circles on the Water (17 page)

Oh, we wouldn’t want to put you

up at a motel, we here at

Southwestern Orthodontic Methodist,

we want you to feel homey:

drafty rooms where icicles

drip on your forehead, dorm cubicles

under the belltower where

the bells boom all night on each

quarter hour, rooms in faculty attics

two miles from a bathroom.

       The bed

is a quarter inch mattress

flung upon springs of upended

razor blades: the mattress

is stuffed with fingernail

clippings and the feathers of buzzards.

If you roll over or cough it

sounds like a five car collision.

The mattress is shaped that way

because our pet hippo Sweetie

likes to nap there. It’s homey,

isn’t it, meaning we’re going to keep

you up with instant coffee

until two
A.M.
discussing why

we at Middle Fork State Teachers College

don’t think you are truly great.

You’ll love our dog Ogre,

she adores sleeping with guests

especially when she’s in heat.

Don’t worry, the children

will wake you. (They do.)

In the morning while all

fourteen children (the ones

with the flu and whooping cough

and oh, you haven’t had

the mumps—I mean, yet?) assault

you with tomahawks and strawberry

jam, you are asked, oh

would you like breakfast?

Naturally we never eat

breakfast ourselves, we believe

fasting purifies the system.

Have some cold tofu,

don’t mind the mold.

No, we didn’t order

your books, that’s rampant

commercialism. We will call you

Miz Percy and make a joke about

women’s libbers. The mike was run

over by a snowplow.

If we were too busy to put

up posters, we’ve obtained the

outdoor Greek Amphitheater

where you’ll read to me and my wife.

If we blanketed five states

with announcements, we will be astounded

when five hundred cram into

the women’s restroom we reserved.

Oh yes, the check will be four

months late. The next hungry poet

will be told, you’ll be real comfortable

here, What’s-her-name, she wrote that book

The Flying Dyke
, she was through last year

and she found it real homey

in the Athens of the West.

The whiskey-colored sun

cruises low as a marshhawk

over the dun grass.

Long intricate shadows bar the path.

Then empty intense winter sky.

Dark crouches against the walls of buildings.

The ground sinks under it.

Pale flat lemon sky,

the trees all hooks scratching.

If I could soar I could

prolong daylight on my face.

I could float on the stark

wooden light, levitating

like dried milkweed silk.

Only December and already

my bones beg for sun.

Storms have gnawed the beach

to the cliffs’ base. Oaks

in the salty blast clutch ragged

brown leaves, a derelict’s

paperbag of sad possessions.

Like the gulls that cross from sea to bay

at sunset screaming, I am hungry.

Among sodden leaves and hay-colored needles

I scavenge for the eye’s least

nibble of green.

Suppose some peddler offered

you can have a color TV

but your baby will be

born with a crooked spine;

you can have polyvinyl cups

and wash and wear

suits but it will cost

you your left lung

rotted with cancer; suppose

somebody offered you

a frozen precooked dinner

every night for ten years

but at the end

your colon dies

and then you do,

slowly and with much pain.

You get a house in the suburbs

but you work in a new plastics

factory and die at fifty-one

when your kidneys turn off.

But where else will you

work? where else can

you rent but Smog City?

The only houses for sale

are under the yellow sky.

You’ve been out of work for

a year and they’re hiring

at the plastics factory.

Don’t read the fine

print, there isn’t any.

Good Martha

you back into town like a tug

small yet massive, hooting, thumping

butting and steering through

the shoals, the temptations, the rocks.

Your politics like a good engine

rattles the decks and churns the wake lively.

Sweet Martha

bulldog butterfly, koala

bear among the eucalyptus

of the Oakland hills,

your heart is shy and your

eyes dart like swallows.

Bereft Martha,

bleeding losses, you are all

you have ever loved in woman after

woman, you yourself, and in your belly

you carry your dead mother,

a pearl of an egg

with a small wet embryo bird

folded inside dreaming of wings.

You are those wings, Martha,

and in you your mother

and your mother’s mother climb

to the synagogue roof, standing there

black against the sun flapping,

flapping, and take off heavily

as albatrosses, running

to lurch, lumber into the dirty air

and hang unlikely as a boot.

Then off, the big wings

hinging gracefully, higher.

For months at a time, Martha,

for years the albatross

sails the ocean winds and never

bothers to touch land

except to mate.

With a pale green curly

lust I gloat over it nestled

there on the wet earth

(oakleaf, buttercrunch, ruby, cos)

like so many nests

waiting for birds

who lay hard boiled eggs.

The first green eyes

of the mustard, the frail

wands of carrots, the fat

thrust of the peas: all

are precious as I kneel

in the mud weeding

and the thinnings go into the salad.

The garden with crooked

wandering rows dug

by the three of us

drunk with sunshine has

an intricate pattern emerging

like the back of a rug.

The tender seedlings

raise their pinheads

with the cap of seed stuck on.

Cruel and smiling with sharp

teeth is the love of lettuce.

You grow out of last year’s

composted dinner and you

will end in my hot mouth.

It isn’t supposed to happen:

snow on the apple boughs

beside the blossoms, the hills

green and white at once.

Backs steaming, horses

stand in the crusted pasture

switching their tails

in the snow, their broad

flanks like doors of leather

ovens. We lie on a mattress

in the high room with no

heat. Your body chills.

I keep taking parts of you

into my mouth, finny nose,

ears like question marks,

fatfaced toes, raspberry

cock, currant nipples, plum

balls. The snow hangs

sheets over the windows.

My grandmother used to drink

tea holding a sugar cube

between her teeth: hot boiling

strong black tea

from a glass. A gleaming

silver spoon stood up.

Before we make a fire of

our bodies I braid my black

hair and I am Grandmother braiding

her greystreaked chestnut hair

rippling to her waist before

she got into bed with me

to sleep, dead now

half my life. Ice on the palm

of my hand melting,

so cold it burns me.

Woman dancing with hair

on fire, woman writhing in the

cone of orange snakes, flowering

into crackling lithe vines:

Woman

you are not the bound witch

at the stake, whose broiled alive

agonized screams

thrust from charred flesh

darkened Europe in the nine millions.

Woman

you are not the madonna impaled

whose sacrifice of self leaves her

empty and mad as wind,

or whore crucified

studded with nails.

Woman

you are the demon of a fountain of energy

rushing up from the coal hard

memories in the ancient spine,

flickering lights from the furnace in the solar

plexus, lush scents from the reptilian brain,

river that winds up the hypothalamus

with its fibroids of pleasure and pain

twisted and braided like rope,

firing the lanterns of the forebrain

till they glow blood red.

You are the fire sprite

that charges leaping thighs,

that whips the supple back on its arc

as deer leap through the ankles:

dance of a woman strong

in beauty that crouches

inside like a cougar in the belly

not in the eyes of others measuring.

You are the icon of woman sexual

in herself like a great forest tree

in flower, liriodendron bearing sweet tulips,

cups of joy and drunkenness.

You drink strength from your dark fierce roots

and you hang at the sun’s own fiery breast

and with the green cities of your boughs

you shelter and celebrate

woman, with the cauldrons of your energies

burning red, burning green.

Every day alone whittles me.

I go to bed unmated and wake

with a vulture perched on my chest.

I suck my solitude

like a marrowbone, nothing

left but a memory of feasts.

Wait in the silence, wait

empty as a cracked eggshell

for the beating of heavy fast wings,

the soft pad of the big cat,

the dry grate of scales sliding over rock,

the boiling of the waves as It breaches.

I wait for the repressed, the unnamed,

the familiar twisted masks of early

terrors, or what I have always really known

lurks behind the door at night groping

from the corner of my eye, what breaks

through the paper hoop of sleep.

When all of my loves fall from me

like clothing, like the sweet flesh, what

stands but the bones of my childhood

ringed like a treetrunk with hunger

and glut, the tortured gaping

grin of my adolescence homely

as death. Then my bones drop away

like petals, my bones wither

and scatter and still I am waiting

empty as a grey arching sky, waiting

till I fall headlong into my center

the great roaring fiery heart

the crackling golden furnace of the sun.

Only accidents preserve.

Athena Promachos, warrior goddess thirty feet tall,

no longer exists. Phidias

made her between wars in ruins

of a fort that had not kept the enemy out.

Making is an attack too, on bronze, on air, on time.

Sailors out on the Argo-Saronic

of gull and dolphin and bone-dry island

could see the sunlight creaking on her helmet.

A thousand years she stood over fire and mud,

then hauled as booty to Constantinople,

where the Crusaders, bouncy legionnaires

on the town, melted her down for coins.

These words are pebbles

sucked from mouth to mouth since Chaucer.

I don’t believe the Etruscans or the Mayans

lacked poets, only victories.

Manuscripts under glass, women’s quilts packed away

lie in the attics of museums sealed from the streets

where the tactical police are clubbing the welfare mothers.

There are no cameras, so it is not real.

Wring the stones of the hillside

for the lost plays of Sophocles they heard.

Art is nonaccident. Like love, it is

a willed tension up through the mind

balancing thrust and inertia, energy

stored in a bulb. Then the golden

trumpet of the narcissus pokes up

willfully into the sun, focusing the world.

The epigraphs stabbed the Song of Songs

through the smoking heart (The Church

Prepares for Her Bridegroom). The seven hundred thousand

four hundred fifty second tourist stared

the Venus de Milo into a brassiere ad.

Generations of women wrote poems and hid

them in drawers, because an able

woman is a bad woman. They expired

leaking radioactivity among pastel underwear.

A woman scribbling for no one doodles,

dabbles in madness, dribbles shame.

Art requires a plaza in the mind, a space

lit by the sun of regard. That tension

between maker and audience, that feedback,

that force field of interest, sustains

an I less guilty than Ego, who can utter

the truths of vision and nightmare,

the truths that spill like raw egg from the

cracking of body on body, the thousand

soft and slimy names of death, the songs

of the blind fish that swim

the caverns of bone, the songs

of the hawks who soar and stoop grappling

and screaming through the crystalline

skies of the forehead.