Circles on the Water (22 page)

Come into the fire and catch,

come in, come in. Fire that burns

and leaves entire, the silver flame

of the moon, trembling mercury laying

on the waves a highway to the abyss,

the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith

of the year and potency, midsummer’s eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.

This is the briefest night and just

under the ocean the fires of the sun

roll toward us. Already your skin is dark,

already your wiry curls are tipped with gold

and my black hair begins to redden.

How often I have leapt into that fire,

how often burned like a torch, my hair

streaming sparks, and wakened to weep

ashes. I have said, love is a downer we take,

love is a habit like sucking on death tit cigarettes,

love is a bastard art. Instead of painting

or composing, we compose a beloved.

When you love for a living, I have said,

you’re doomed to early retirement without benefits.

For women have died and worms have eaten them

and just for love. Love of the wrong man or

the right. Death from abortion, from the first

child or the eighteenth, death at the stake

for loving a woman or freedom or the wrong

deity. Death at the open end of a gun

from a jealous man, a vengeful man,

Othello’s fingers, Henry’s ax.

It is romance I loathe, the swooning moon

of June which croons to the tune of every goon.

Venus on the half shell without the reek

of seaweed preferred to Artemis of the rows

of breasts like a sow and the bow

ready in her hand that kills and the herbs

that save in childbirth.

Ah, my name hung once like a can

on an ink stained girl blue as skim milk

lumpy with elbows, spiky with scruples,

who knelt in a tower raised of Shelley’s bones

praying my demon lover asceticism

to grant one icy vision.

I found my body in the arms of lovers

and woke in the flesh alive, astounded

like a corpse sitting up in a judgment

day painting. My own five hound senses

turned on me, chased me, tore me

head from trunk. Thumb and liver

and jaw on the bloody hillside

twanged like frogs on the night I am alive!

A succession of lovers like a committee

of Congress in slow motion put me back

together, a thumb under my ear, the ear

in an armpit, the head sprouting feet.

Kaleidoscope where glass sparks pierced

my eyes, in love’s funhouse I was hung

a mirror of flesh reflecting flaccid ideas

of men scouting their mothers through my womb,

a labyrinth of years in other

people’s thoroughly furnished rooms.

I built myself like a house a poor family

puts up in the country: first the foundation

under a tarred flat roof like a dugout,

then the well in the spring and you get

electricity connected and maybe the next

fall you seal in two rooms and add some

plumbing but all the time you’re living

there constructing your way out of a slum.

Yet for whom is this built if not to be shared

with the quick steps and low voice of love?

I cherish friendship and living that starts

in liking but the body is the church

where I praise and bless and am blessed.

My strength and my weakness are twins

in the same womb, mirrored dancers under

water, the dark and light side of the moon.

I know how truly my seasons have turned

cold and hot

around that lion-bodied sun.

Come step into the fire, come in,

come in, dance in the flames of the festival

of the strongest sun at the mountain top

of the year when the wheel starts down.

Dance through me as I through you.

Here in the heart of fire in the caves

of the ancient body we are aligned

with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming

in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams

who drink the tide and the heartwood clock

of the oak and the astronomical clock

in the blood thundering through the great heart

of the albatross. Our cells are burning

each a little furnace powered by the sun

and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.

This night the sun and moon dance

and you and I dance in the fire of which

we are the logs, the matches and the flames.

In the natural year come two thanksgivings,

the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall,

two times when we eat and drink and remember our dead

under the golden basin of the moon of plenty.

Abundance, Habondia, food for the winter,

too much now and survival later. After

the plant bears, it dies into seed.

The blowing grasses nourish us, wheat

and corn and rye, millet and rice, oat

and barley and buckwheat, all the serviceable

grasses of the pasture that the cow grazes,

the lamb, the horse, the goat; the grasses

that quicken into meat and cheese and milk,

the humble necessary mute vegetable bees,

the armies of the grasses waving their

golden banners of ripe seed.

       The sensual

round fruit that gleams with the sun

stored in its sweetness.

The succulent

ephemera of the summer garden, bloodwarm

tomatoes, tender small squash, crisp

beans, the milky corn, the red peppers

exploding like cherry bombs in the mouth.

We praise abundance by eating of it,

reveling in choice on a table set with roses

and lilies and phlox, zucchini and lettuce

and eggplant before the long winter

of root crops.

                  Fertility and choice:

every row dug in spring means weeks

of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings

choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.

The goddess of abundance Habondia is also

the spirit of labor and choice.

         In another

life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat

children. In another life, my sister, I too

would love another woman and raise one child

together as if that pushed from both our wombs.

In another life, sister, I too would dwell

solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks

or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.

Praise all our choices. Praise any woman

who chooses, and make safe her choice.

Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,

Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,

Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us

All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,

Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,

Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,

Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:

the names flesh out our histories, our choices,

our passions and what we will never embody

but pass by with respect. When I consecrate

my body in the temple of our history,

when I pledge myself to remain empty

and clear for the voices coming through

I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.

Habondia, the real abundance, is the power

to say yes and to say no, to open

and to close, to take or to leave

and not to be taken by force or law

or fear or poverty or hunger.

To bear children or not to bear by choice

is holy. To bear children unwanted

is to be used like a public sewer.

To be sterilized unchosen is to have

your heart cut out. To love women

is holy and holy is the free love of men

and precious to live taking whichever comes

and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.

Praise the lives you did not choose.

They will heal you, tell your story, fight

for you. You eat the bread of their labor.

You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you

after I went under the surgeon’s knife

for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet

an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.

Then my womb learned to open on the full

moon without pain and my pleasure deepened

till my body shuddered like troubled water.

When my friend gave birth I held her in joy

as the child’s head thrust from her vagina

like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.

Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway

open to us was taken by squads of fighting

women who paid years of trouble and struggle,

who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives

that we might walk through these gates upright.

Doorways are sacred to women for we

are the doorways of life and we must choose

what comes in and what goes out. Freedom

is our real abundance.

How do we know where we are going?

How do we know where we are headed

till we in fact or hope or hunch

arrive? You can only criticize,

the comfortable say, you don’t know

what you want. Ah, but we do.

We have swung in the green verandas

of the jungle trees. We have squatted

on cloud-grey granite hillsides where

every leaf drips. We have crossed

badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.

We have paddled into the tall dark sea

in canoes. We always knew.

Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow

of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night

and not too much Monday morning,

a chance to choose, a change to grow,

the power to say no and yes, pretties

and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.

The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows

like a computer, like a violinist, like

a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember

backwards a little and sometimes forwards,

but mostly we think in the ebbing circles

a rock makes on the water.

The salmon hurtling upstream seeks

the taste of the waters of its birth

but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile

trek follows charts mapped on its genes.

The brightness, the angle, the sighting

of the stars shines in the brain luring

till inner constellation matches outer.

The stark black rocks, the island beaches

of waveworn pebbles where it will winter

look right to it. Months after it set

forth it says, home at last, and settles.

Even the pigeon beating its short whistling

wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.

In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips

and the moon pulls blood from my womb.

Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown

off course yet if I turn back it feels

wrong. Navigating by chart and chance

and passion I will know the shape

of the mountains of freedom, I will know.

The longest night is long drawn

as a freight blocking a grade crossing

in a prairie town when I am trying

to reach Kansas City to sleep and one

boxcar clatters after the other, after

and after in faded paint proclaiming

as they trundle through the headlights

names of 19th-century fortunes, scandals,

labor wars. Stalled between factory

and cemetery I lean on the cold wheel.

The factory is still, the machines

turned off; the cemetery looks boring

and factual as a parking lot. Too cold

for the dead to stir, tonight even

my own feel fragile as brown bags

carted to the dump. Ash stains the air.

Wheels of the freight clack by. Snow

hisses on the windshield of the rented car.

Always a storm at the winter solstice.

New moon, no moon, old moon dying,

moon that gives no light, stub

of a candle, dark lantern, face

without features, the zone of zero:

I feel the blood starting. Monthly

my womb opens on the full moon but

my body is off its rhythms. I am

jangled and raw. I do not celebrate

this blood seeping as from a wound.

I feel my weakness summoning me

like a bed of soft grey ashes

I might crawl into.

Here in the pit of the year scars overlap

scabs, the craters of the moon, stone

breaking stone. In the rearview mirror

my black hair fades into the night,

my cheeks look skeletal, my dark eyes,

holes a rat might hide in. I sense

death lurking up the road like a feral

dog abroad in the swirling snow.

Defeat, defeat, defeat, tedious

as modern headstones, regular as dentures.

My blood tastes salty as tears and rusty

as an old nail. Yet as I kick the car

over the icy tracks toward nowhere

I want to be, I am grinning. Lady, it’s been

worse before, bad as the moon burning,

bad as the moon’s horn goring my side,

that to give up now is a joke told

by the FBI minding the tap or the binoculars

staking me out on such a bitter night

when the blood slows and begins to freeze.

I grew up among these smoke-pitted houses

choking over the railroad between the factory

shuddering and the cemetery for the urban

poor, and I got out. They say that’s

what you ask for. And how much more

I ask. To get everybody out.