Circles on the Water (4 page)

On the first floor of the museum Indian remains

are artfully displayed. Today is August sixth, Hiroshima.

Man eats man with sauces of newsprint.

The vision of that kingdom of satisfaction

where all bellies are round with sweet grasses

blows on my face pleasantly

though I have eaten five of those animals.

All the rich flat black land,

the wide swirlmarked browngreen rivers,

leafy wheat baking tawny, corn’s silky spikes,

sun bright kettles of steel and crackling wires, turn into

infinite shining weapons that scorch the earth.

The pride of our hive

packed into hoards of murderous sleek bombs.

We glitter and spark righteousness.

We are blinding as a new car in the sunshine.

Gasoline rains from our fluffy clouds.

Everywhere our evil froths polluting the waters—

in what stream on what mountain do you miss

the telltale brown sludge and rim of suds?

Peace: the word lies like a smooth turd

on the tongues of politicians ordering

the sweet flesh seared on the staring bone.

Guilt is added to the municipal water,

guilt is deposited in the marrow and teeth.

In my name they are stealing from people with nothing

their slim bodies. When did I hire these assassins?

My mild friend no longer paints mysteries of doors and mirrors.

On her walls the screams of burning children coagulate.

The mathematician with his webspangled language

of shadow and substance half spun

sits in an attic playing the flute all summer

for fear of his own brain, for fear that the baroque

arabesque of his joy will be turned to a weapon.

Three
A.M.
in Brooklyn: night all over my country.

Watch the smoke of guilt drift out of dreams.

When did I hire these killers? one day in anger,

in seaslime hatred at the duplicity of flesh?

Eating steak in a suave restaurant, did I give the sign?

Sweating like a melon in bed, did I murmur consent?

Did I contract it in Indiana for a teaching job?

Was it something I signed for a passport or a loan?

Now in my name blood burns like oil day and night.

This nation is founded on blood like a city on swamps

yet its dream has been beautiful and sometimes just

that now grows brutal and heavy as a burned out star.

Lonely skyscrapers, deserted tombs of business risen

and gone home to the suburbs for the night,

your elevators are forlorn as empty cereal boxes,

your marble paved vestibules and corridors

might as well be solid rock.

Beautiful lean shafts, nobody loves you except pigeons,

nobody is cooking cabbage or instant coffee in your high rooms,

nobody draws moustaches, nobody pisses on your walls.

Even your toilet stalls have nothing to report about the flesh.

You could be inhabited by blind white cavefish.

Only the paper lives in its metal drawers humming like bees.

The skyscrapers are dancing by the river,

they are leaping over their reflections

their lightning bright zigzag and beady reflections

jagged and shattered on East River.

With voices shrill as children’s whistles they hop

while the safes pop open like corn

and the files come whizzing through the air

to snow on the streets that lie throbbing,

eels copulating in heaps.

Ticker tape hangs in garlands from the wagging streetlamps.

Standard Oil and General Foods have amalgamated

and Dupont, Schenley and AT&T lie down together.

It does not matter, don’t hope, it does not matter.

In the morning the buildings stand smooth and shaven and straight

and all goes on whirring and ticking.

Money is reticulated and stronger than steel or stone or vision,

though sometimes at night

the skyscrapers bow and lean and leap under no moon.

Now it begins:

sprays of forsythia against wet brick.

Under the paving mud seethes.

The grass is moist and tender in Central Park.

The air smells of ammonia and drains.

Cats howl their lean barbed sex.

Now we relinquish winter dreams.

In Thanksgiving snow we stood in my slum kitchen

and clasped each other and began and were afraid.

Snow swirled past the mattress on the floorboards,

snow on the bare wedding of our choice.

We drove very fast into a blizzard of fur.

Now we abandon winter hopes,

roasts and laughter of friends in a warm room,

fire and cognac, baking bread and goose on a platter,

cinnamon love in the satin feather bed,

the meshing of our neat and slippery flesh

while the snow flits like moths around the streetlamps,

while the snow’s long hair brushes the pane.

I will not abandon you. I come shuddering

from the warm tangles of winter sleep

choosing you compulsively, repetitiously, dumbly as breath.

You will never subside into rest. But how

can we build a city of love on a garbage dump?

How can we feed an army on stew from barbed

wire and buttons? We browse on
The New York Times

and die swollen as poisoned sheep.

The grey Canadian geese like arrowheads are pulled north

beating their powerful wings over the long valleys.

Soon we will be sleeping on rocks hard as axes.

Soon I will be setting up camp in gulleys, on moraine,

drinking rusty water out of my shoe.

Peace was a winter hope

with down comforters, a wall of books and tawny pears.

We are headed into the iron north of resistance.

I am curing our roast meat to leather pemmican.

We will lie in the whips of the grass under the wind’s blade

fitting our bodies into emblems of stars.

We will stumble into the red morning to walk our feet raw.

The mills of injustice darken the sky with their smoke;

ash from the burning floats on every stream.

Soon we will be setting up camp on a plain of nails.

The suns of power dance on the black sky.

They are stacking the dead like bricks.

You belong to me no more than the sun that drums on my head.

I belong to nothing but my work carried like a prayer rug on my back.

Yet we are always traveling through each other,

fellows in the same story and the same laboring.

Our people are moving and we must choose and follow

through all the ragged cycles of build and collapse,

epicycles on our long journey guided

by the north star and the magnetic pole of conscience.

I could not tell

if I climbed up or down.

I could feel

that the ground

was not level

and often I stumbled.

I only knew

that the light was poor,

my hands damp

and sharp fears

sang, sang like crickets

in my throat.

As I climb above the treeline

my feet are growing numb,

blood knocks in my wrists and forehead.

Voices chitter out of gnarled bushes.

I seem to be carrying

a great many useless objects,

a saw, a globe, a dictionary,

a doll leaking stuffing,

a bouquet of knitting needles,

a basin of dried heads.

Voices sigh from calendar pages

I have lived too long to love you.

Withered and hard as a spider

I crawl among bones:

awful charnel knowledge

of failure, of death, of decay.

I am old as stone.

Who can make soup of me?

A spider-peddler with pack of self

I scrabble under a sky of shame.

Already my fingers are thin as ice.

I must scuttle under a rock

and hide in webs

of mocking voices.

Peace, we have arrived.

The touch point

where words end

and body goes on.

That’s all:

finite, all five-sensual

and never repeatable.

Know you and be known,

please you and be pleased

in act:

the antidote to shame

is nakedness together.

Words end,

body goes on

and something

small and wet and real

is exchanged.

The eyes of others

measure and condemn.

The eyes of others are watches ticking no.

My friend hates you.

Between you I turn and turn

holding my arm as if it were broken.

The air is iron shavings polarized.

Faces blink on and off.

Words are heavy.

I carry them back and forth in my skirt.

They pile up in front of the chairs.

Words are bricks that seal the doors and windows.

Words are shutters on the eyes

and lead gloves on the hands.

The air is a solid block.

We cannot move.

Sometimes your face

burns my eyes.

Sometimes your orange chest

scalds me.

I am loud and certain with strangers.

Your hands on the table

make me shy.

Your voice in the hall:

words rattle in my throat.

There is a bird in my chest

with wings too broad

with beak that rips me

wanting to get out.

I have called it

an idiot parrot.

I have called it

a ravening eagle.

But it sings.

Bird of no name

your cries are red and wet

on the iron air.

I open my mouth

to let you out

and your shining

blinds me.

Suddenly I see it:

the gradual ease.

I no longer know how many times.

Afternoons blur into afternoons,

evenings melt into evenings.

Almost everyone guesses—

those who don’t never will.

The alarms have stopped

except in my skin.

Tigers in a closet

we learn gentleness.

Our small habits together

are strange

as crows’ tears

and easy as sofas.

Sometimes, sometimes

I can ask for what I want:

I have begun to trust you.

Loving feels lonely in a violent world,

irrelevant to people burning like last year’s weeds

with bellies distended, with fish throats agape

and flesh melting down to glue.

We can no longer shut out the screaming

that leaks through the ventilation system,

the small bits of bone in the processed bread,

so we are trying to make a community

warm, loose as hair but shaped like a weapon.

Caring, we must use each other to death.

Love is arthritic. Mistrust swells like a prune.

Perhaps we gather so they may dig one big cheap grave.

From the roof of the Pentagon which is our Bastille

the generals armed like Martians watch through binoculars

the campfires of draftcards and barricades on the grass.

All summer helicopters whine over the ghetto.

Casting up jetsam of charred fingers and torn constitutions

the only world breaks on the door of morning.

We have to build our city, our camp

from used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes

in the shadow of the nuclear plant that kills the fish

with coke bottle lamps flickering

on the chemical night.

Man stomping over my bed in boots

carrying a large bronze church bell

which you occasionally drop:

gross man with iron heels

who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning,

who hammers on scaffolding all night long,

who entertains sumo wrestlers and fat acrobats—

I pass you on the steps, we smile and nod.

Rage swells in me like gas.

Now rage too keeps me awake.

We sat across the table.

he said, cut off your hands.

they are always poking at things.

they might touch me.

I said yes.

Food grew cold on the table.

he said, burn your body.

it is not clean and smells like sex.

it rubs my mind sore.

I said yes.

I love you, I said.

That’s very nice, he said

I like to be loved,

that makes me happy.

Have you cut off your hands yet?

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work

in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.

The shop windows snicker

flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:

you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning

we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,

the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,

that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,

lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,

and need barter ourselves for nothing.

not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,

that party to which no one will give or sell us the key

though we have all thought briefly we found it

drunk or in bed.