Circles on the Water (19 page)

Quiet setting the rough hairy roots

into the hole, tamping the compost;

quiet cutting the chicken between

the bones, so the knife

rarely needs sharpening as it

senses the way through;

quiet in the hollow setting

the feet down carefully so the quail

bow their heads and go on pecking;

silence as my cats walk round

and round me in bed butting

and kneading my chest with their

sharp morning feet;

silence of body on body until

the knot of the self loosens gushing;

my living is words placed end to end,

oddly assorted cuneiform bricks

half broken, crumbling, sharp,

just baked with shiny sides

and raw edges. Even in sleep

words clatter through my head

roughly, like a wheelbarrow of

bricks dumped out. Words are my work,

my tools, my weapons, my follies,

my posterity, my faith.

Yet when I grasp myself I find

the coarse black hair

and warm slowly heaving flank

of silence digging with strong

nailed feet its burrow

in the tongueless earth.

Last week a doctor told me

anemic after an operation

to eat: ordered to indulgence,

given a papal dispensation to run

amok in Zabar’s.

Yet I know that in

two weeks, a month I

will have in my nostrils

not the savor of roasting goose,

not the burnt sugar of caramel topping

the Saint-Honoré cake, not the pumpernickel

bearing up the sweet butter, the sturgeon

but again the scorched wire,

burnt rubber smell

of willpower, living

with the brakes on.

I want to pass into the boudoirs

of Rubens’ women. I want to dance

graceful in my tonnage like Poussin nymphs.

Those melon bellies, those vast ripening thighs,

those featherbeds of forearms, those buttocks

placid and gross as hippopotami:

how I would bend myself

to that standard of beauty, how faithfully

I would consume waffles and sausage for breakfast

with croissants on the side, how dutifully

I would eat for supper the blackbean soup

with Madeira, followed by the fish course,

the meat course, and the Bavarian cream.

Even at intervals during the day I would

suffer an occasional éclair

for the sake of appearance.

Grape conserve from the red Caco vine

planted five years ago:

rooted deep in the good dark loam

of the bottomland, where centuries

have washed the topsoil from the sandy

hill of pine and oak, whose bark

shows the scabs of fire.

Once this was an orchard on a farm.

When lilacs bloom in May I cap find

the cellar hole of the old house.

Once this was a village of Pamet Indians.

From shell middens I can find their campground.

From the locust outside my window the fierce

hasty October winds have stripped the delicate

grassgreen fingernails. Winter is coming early.

The birds that go are gone, the plants retreating

underground, their hope in tubers, bulb and seed.

The peaches, the tomatoes, the pears

glow like muted lanterns on their shelves. All

is put down for the winter except the root crops

still tunneling under the salt hay mulch

we gathered at the mouth of the Herring River

as the sun kippered our salty brown backs.

Even the fog that day was hot as soup.

At evening when we made love

our skin tasted of tears and leather.

This year the autumn colors are muted. Too

much rain, the winds tore the leaves loose

before they cured. I braid my life in its

strong and muted colors and I taste my love

in me this morning like something harsh

and sweet, like raw sugarcane I chewed in Cuba,

fresh cut, oozing sap.

On those Washington avenues that resemble

emperor-sized cemeteries, vast Roman mausoleum

after mausoleum where Justice and Health

are budgeted out of existence for the many,

men who smell of good cologne are pushing pins

across maps. It is time to attack the left

again, it is time for a mopping up

operation against those of us who opposed

their wars too soon, too seriously, too long.

It is time to silence the shrill voices

of women whose demands incommode men

with harems of illpaid secretaries, men

for whom industries purr, men who buy death wholesale.

Today some are released from prison and others

are sucked in. Those who would not talk

to grand juries are boxed from the light

to grow fungus on their brains and those

who talked receive a message it is time

to talk again.

I try hard to be simple, to remember always

to ask for whom what is done is done.

Who gets and who loses? Who pays

and who rakes off the profit? Whose

life is shortened? Whose heat

is shut off? Whose children end

shooting up or shot in the streets?

I try to remember to ask simple questions,

I try to remember to love my friends and fight

my enemies. But their faces are hidden

in the vaults of banks, their names are inscribed

on the great plains by strip mining and you can

only read the script from Mars. Their secret

wills are encoded in the computers that mind

nuclear submarines armed with the godheads

of death. They enter me in the drugs I buy

that erode my genes. They enter my blood invisible

as the Sevin in the water that flows

from the tap, as strontium 90 in milk.

You are part comrade and part enemy; you

are part guerrilla and part prison guard. Sometimes

you care more to control me than for winning

this lifelong war. If I am your colony

you differ only in scale from Rockefeller.

I want to trust you the way I want

to drink water when my tongue is parched

and blistered, the way I want to crouch

by a fire when I have hiked miles

through the snowy woods and my toes are numb.

Let no one doubt, no onlookers, no heirs

of our agonies, how much I have loved

what I have loved. Flying back

from Washington, I saw the air steely

bright out to the huge bell of horizon.

I leaned against the plane window, cheek

to the plastic, crooning to see the curve

of the Cape hooking out in the embrace

of the water, to see the bays, the tidal

rivers, the intricate web of marshes,

the whole body of this land like beautiful

lace, like a fraying bronze net laid

on the glittering fish belly of the sea.

I sink my hands into this hillside wrist

deep. My nails are stubby and under them

always is my own land’s dirt. I bring you

this gift of grape conserve from shelves

of summer sun bottled like glowing lights

I hope we will survive free and contentious to taste,

as I bring myself, my mouth opening

to taste you, my hands that know how

to touch you, belly and back and cunt,

history and politics. I bring you trouble

like a hornet’s nest in a hat

to roost on your head. I bring you

struggle and trouble and love

and a gift of grape conserve to melt

on your tongue, red and winy,

the summer sun within like soft jewels

passing and strong and sweet.

Dance like a jackrabbit

in the dunegrass, dance

not for release, no

the ice holds hard but

for the promise. Yesterday

the chickadees sang
fever
,

fever
, the mating song.

You can still cross ponds

leaving tracks in the snow

over the sleeping fish

but in the marsh the red

maples look red

again, their buds swelling.

Just one week ago a blizzard

roared for two days.

Ice weeps in the road.

Yet spring hides

in the snow. On the south

wall of the house

the first sharp crown

of crocus sticks out.

Spring lurks inside the hard

casing, and the bud

begins to crack. What seems

dead pares its hunger

sharp and stirs groaning.

If we have not stopped

wanting in the long dark,

we will grasp our desires

soon by the nape.

Inside the fallen brown

apple the seed is alive.

Freeze and thaw, freeze

and thaw, the sap leaps

in the maple under the bark

and although they have

pronounced us dead, we

rise again invisibly,

we rise and the sun sings

in us sweet and smoky

as the blood of the maple

that will open its leaves

like thousands of waving hands.

Vol de nuit: It’s that French

phrase comes to me out of a dead

era, a closet where the bones of pets

and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams

of a twenty-year-old are salty water

and the residual stickiness of berry jam

but they have the power to paralyze

a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength.

Memory’s a minefield.

Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French

former husband. Every love has its

season, its cultural artifacts, shreds

of popular song like a billboard

peeling in strips to the faces behind,

endearments and scents, patchouli,

musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked

herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal

outing, vol de nuit.

Alone in a row on the half empty late

plane I sit by the window holding myself.

As the engines roar and the plane quivers

and then bursts forward I am tensed

and tuned for the high arc of flight

between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold

distant fires of the clustered stars. Below

the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,

ordered, radial, pulsing.

Sometimes hurtling down a highway through

the narrow cone of headlights I feel

moments of exaltation, but my night

vision is poor. I pretend at control

as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge

I am not really managing. I am in the hands

of strangers and of luck. By flight
he
meant

flying and I mean being flown, totally

beyond volition, willfully.

We fall in love with strangers whose faces

radiate a familiar power that reminds us

of something lost before we had it.

The braille of the studious fingers instructs

exactly what we have succumbed to, far too late

to close, to retract the self that has extruded

from us naked, vulnerable and sticky,

the foot, the tentative eyestalked head

of the mating snail.

To fall in love so late is dangerous. Below,

lights are winking out. Cars crawl into driveways

and fade into the snow. Planes make me think

of dying suddenly, and loving of dying

slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed

trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing

my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide

as I land. Love is plunging into darkness toward

a place that may exist.

“Learning to manage the process

of technological innovation

more productively” is the theme

of the speech the man beside me

on the plane to Washington

will be saying to a Congressional

subcommittee. He works at M.I.T.

He drinks a martini, glancing sideways.

His watch flashes numbers; it houses

a tiny computer. He observes

me in snatches, data to analyze:

the two-piece V-neck dress

from New York, the manuscript

I am cutting, the wild black

hair, the dirt under my stubby nails.

It doesn’t scan. I pretend

I do not see him looking

while I try to read his speech,

pretending not to: a neutron

bomb of deadly language that kills

all warm-blooded creatures

but leaves the system standing.

He rates my face and body at-

tractive but the presence

disturbing. Chop, chop, I want

to say, sure, we are enemies.

Watch out. I try to decide

if I can learn anything useful

to my side if I let him

engage me in a game of

conversation.

At the big round table in the university

club, the faculty are chatting

about wives, marriages, divorces, visiting

arrangements. They all belong

to the same kinship system. They have

one partner at a time, then terminate.

Monogamy means that the husband has

sex only a couple of times with each

other female, I figure out, and

the wife, only with him. Afterwards

the children spend summers/weekends/

Sundays with the father.