Circles on the Water (21 page)

But when I sit still and alone

trees hatch warblers rapid as sparks.

The price of seeing is silence.

A voracious furnace of shrew darts

in the grass like a truncated snake.

On my arm a woodnymph lights probing

me curiously, faintly, as she opens

and closes the tapestried doors of flight.

Full in the hand, heavy

with ripeness, perfume spreading

its fan: moments now resemble

sweet russet pears glowing

on the bough, peaches warm

from the afternoon sun, amber

and juicy, flesh that can

make you drunk.

There is a turn in things

that makes the heart catch.

We are ripening, all the hard

green grasping, the stony will

swelling into sweetness, the acid

and sugar in balance, the sun

stored as energy that is pleasure

and pleasure that is energy.

Whatever happens, whatever,

we say, and hold hard and let

go and go on. In the perfect

moment the future coils,

a tree inside a pit. Take,

eat, we are each other’s

perfection, the wine of our

mouths is sweet and heavy.

Soon enough comes the vinegar.

The fruit is ripe for the taking

and we take. There is

no other wisdom.

Most mornings we go running side by side

two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward

in our baggy improvisations, two

bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.

Men in their zippy outfits run in packs

on the road where we park, meet

like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk

sedately around the corner out of sight

to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.

Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting

but talking as we trot, our old honorable

wounds in knee and back and ankle paining

us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian

and Jew, with our full breasts carefully

confined. We are rich earthy cooks

both of us and the flesh we are working

off was put on with grave pleasure. We

appreciate each other’s cooking, each

other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging

in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze

of young sun, talking over our work,

our plans, our men, our ideas, watching

each other like a pot that might boil dry

for that sign of too harsh fatigue.

It is not the running I love, thump

thump with my leaden feet that only

infrequently are winged and prancing,

but the light that glints off the cattails

as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries

reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines

blacken the sunlight on their bristles,

the hawk circling, stooping, floating

low over beige grasses,

and your company

as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving

tracks in the sand. The geese call

on the river wandering lost in sedges

and we talk and pant, pant and talk

in the morning early and busy together.

Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;

pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.

People are mostly in between, a knob

of bone sticking out in the knee you might

like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging

over the belt. You punish yourself,

one of those rubber balls kids have

that come bouncing back off their own

paddles, rebounding on the same slab.

You want to be slender and seamless

as a bolt.

             When I was a girl

I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces

all elbows and words and cartilage

ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,

faces to cut the eyes blind

on the glittering blade, chins

of Aegean prows bent on piracy.

Now I look for men whose easy bellies

show a love for the flesh and the table,

men who will come in the kitchen

and sit, who don’t think peeling potatoes

makes their penis shrink; men with broad

fingers and purple figgy balls,

men with rumpled furrows and the slightly

messed look at ease of beds recently

well used.

              We are not all supposed

to look like undernourished fourteen year

old boys, no matter what the fashions

ordain. You are built to pull a cart,

to lift a heavy load and bear it,

to haul up the long slope, and so

am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid

shapely dark glazed clay pots that can

stand on the fire. When we put our

bellies together we do not clatter

but bounce on the good upholstery.

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

A strong woman is a woman standing

on tiptoe and lifting a barbell

while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

A strong woman is a woman at work

cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,

and while she shovels, she talks about

how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens

the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up

develops the stomach muscles, and

she goes on shoveling with tears

in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t

you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why

aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way through a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside. A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds that bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving

her equally for the strength and for the weakness

from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.

Only water of connection remains,

flowing through us. Strong is what we make

each other. Until we are all strong together,

a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Talent is what they say

you have after the novel

is published and favorably

reviewed. Beforehand what

you have is a tedious

delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done

after the play is produced

and the audience claps.

Before that friends keep asking

when you are planning to go

out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you

had after the third volume

of remarkable poems. Earlier

they accuse you of withdrawing,

ask why you don’t have a baby,

call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

take workshops with fancy names

when all you can really

learn is a few techniques,

typing instructions and some-

body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks

a license to hang on the wall

like your optician, your vet

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose fillings fall into the stew

but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to

like it better than being loved.

Intent gets blocked by noise.

How often what we spoke

in the bathtub, weeping

water to water, what we framed

lying flat in bed to the spiked

night is not the letter that arrives,

the letter we thought we sent. We drive

toward each other on expressways

without exits. The telephone

turns our voices into codes,

then decodes the words falsely,

terms of an equation

that never balances, a scale

forever awry with its foot

stuck up lamely like a scream.

Drinking red wine from a sieve,

trying to catch love in words,

its strong brown river in flood

pours through our weak bones.

A kitten will chase the beam of a flash

light over the floor. We learn

some precious and powerful forces

cannot be touched, and what

we touch plump and sweet

as a peach from the tree, a tomato

from the vine, sheds the name

as if we tried to write in pencil

on its warm and fragrant skin.

Mostly the television is on

and the washer is running and the kettle

shrieks it’s boiling while the telephone

rings. Mostly we are worrying about

the fuel bill and how to pay the taxes

and whether the diet is working

when the moment of vulnerability

lights on the nose like a blue moth,

then flitters away. In the leaking

sieve of our bodies we carry

the blood of our love.

A woman is not a pear tree

thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity

into the world. Even pear trees bear

heavily one year and rest and grow the next.

An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting

fruit in the grass but the trees stretch

high and wiry gifting the birds forty

feet up among inch long thorns

broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

A woman is not a basket you place

your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood

hen you can slip duck eggs under.

Not a purse holding the coins of your

descendants till you spend them in wars.

Not a bank where your genes gather interest

and interesting mutations in the tainted

rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest

it to eat or sell. You put the lamb

in the pasture to fatten and haul it in

to butcher for chops. You slice

the mountain in two for a road and gouge

the high plains for coal and the waters

run muddy for miles and years.

Fish die but you do not call them yours

unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.

You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,

fields for growing babies like iceberg

lettuce. You value children so dearly

that none ever go hungry, none weep

with no one to tend them when mothers

work, none lack fresh fruit,

none chew lead or cough to death and your

orphanages are empty. Every noon the best

restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o’clock a
partera

is performing a table top abortion on an

unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid

any longer. In five days she will die

of tetanus and her little daughter will cry

and be taken away. Next door a husband

and wife are sticking pins in the son

they did not want. They will explain

for hours how wicked he is,

how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose

of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood

and every baby born has a right to love

like a seedling to sun. Every baby born

unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come

due in twenty years with interest, an anger

that must find a target, a pain that will

beget pain. A decade downstream a child

screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,

a firing squad is summoned, a button

is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes

flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

not your uranium mine, not your calf

for fattening, not your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold

shares in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you

I want it back. My life

is a non-negotiable demand.

Oak burns steady and hot and long

and fires of oak are traditional tonight

but we light a fire of pitch pine

which burns well enough in the salt wind

whistling while ragged flames lick the dark

casting our shadows high as the dunes.