Circles on the Water (6 page)

Jagged Susan, enamel Susan,

Susan of sullen sleeps and jabbing elbows,

of lists and frenetic starts,

of the hiss of compressed air and the doors slide shut,

you can’t hang in the air like a rainbow.

We are making the revolution out of each other.

We have no place else to begin

but with our hungers and our caring and our teeth.

Each love is singular

and the community still less than the addition of its parts.

We are each other’s blocks and bricks.

To build a house we must first dig a hole

and try not to fall in.

The city lies grey and sopping like a dead rat

under the slow oily rain.

Between the lower east side tenements

the sky is a snotty handkerchief.

The garbage of poor living slimes the streets.

You lie on your bed and think

soon it will be hot and violent,

then it will be cold and mean.

You say you feel as empty

as a popbottle in the street.

You say you feel full of cold water

standing like an old horse trough.

The clock ticks, somewhat wrong,

the walls crack their dry knuckles.

Work is only other rooms where people cough,

only the typewriter clucking like a wrong clock.

Nobody will turn the soiled water into wine,

nobody will shout cold Lazarus alive

but you. You are your own magician.

Stretch out your hand,

stretch out your hand and look:

each finger is a snake of energy,

a gaggle of craning necks.

Each electric finger conducts the world.

Each finger is a bud’s eye opening.

Each finger is a vulnerable weapon.

The sun is floating in your belly like a fish.

Light creaks in your bones.

You are sleeping with your tail in your mouth.

Unclench your hands and look.

Nothing is given us but each other.

We have nothing to give

but ourselves.

We have nothing to take but the time

that drips, drips anyhow

leaving a brown stain.

Open your eyes and your belly.

Let the sun rise into your chest and burn your throat,

stretch out your hands and tear the gauzy rain

that your world can be born from you

screaming and red.

The air swarms with piranhas

disguised as snow.

In the red chair my cat

licks her buttery paw.

The pear of my fever has ripened.

My clogged lungs percolate

as I simmer in sweet fat

above the flickering city.

The shocked limb of Broadway

jerks spasmodically below.

Knives flutter into ribs;

cars collapse into accordions.

My lungs shine, two lanterns.

I love the men who stand

at the foot of my bed,

whose voices tumble like bears

over the ceiling, whose hands

smell of tangerines and medicine.

Through nights of fire and grit

streaked with falling claws

they draw me golden with fever

borne safely, swiftly forward

on the galloping sleigh of my bed.

The death of the small commune

is almost accomplished.

I find it hard now to believe

in connection beyond the couple,

hard as broken bone.

Time for withdrawal and healing.

Time for lonely work

spun out of the torn gut.

Time for touching turned up earth,

for trickling seed from the palm,

thinning the shoots of green herb.

What we wanted to build

was a way station for journeying

to a new world,

but we could not agree long enough

to build the second wall,

could not love long enough

to move the heavy stone on stone,

not listen with patience

to make a good plan,

we could not agree.

Nothing remains but a shallow hole,

nothing remains

but a hole

in everything.

Pyramids of flesh sweated pyramids of stone

as slaves chiseled their stolen lives in rock

over the gilded chrysalis of dead royal grub.

The Romans built roads for marching armies

hacked like swords straight to the horizon.

Gothic cathedrals: a heaven of winter clouds

crystallizing as they rained into stone caves,

choirs of polyphonic light striking chilly slabs

where nobles with swords on and skinny saints

lay under the floor.

                            Fortresses, dungeons, keeps,

moats and bulwarks. Palaces with mirrored halls;

rooms whose views unfold into each other

like formal gardens, offer vistas and symmetry.

Skyscrapers where nobody lives filled with paper.

Where do the people live and what have they made themselves

splendid as these towers of glass, these groves of stone?

The impulse that in 1910 cast banks as temples,

where now does it build its numinous artifact?

The ziggurat, the acropolis, the palace of our dream

whose shape rings in the blood’s cave like belladonna,

take form in the eagle’s preyseeking soar

of the bomber, those planes expensive as cities,

the shark lean submarines of nuclear death,

the taut kinetic tower of the missile,

the dark fiery omphalos of the all-killing bomb.

The great dream stinks like a whale gone aground.

Somewhere in New York Harbor

in the lee of the iron maiden

it died of pollution

and was cast up on Cape Cod by the Racepoint Light.

The vast blubber is rotting.

Scales of fat ripple on the waters

until the taste of that decay

like a sulphurous factory of chemical plenty

dyes every tongue.

Marching, a dream of wind in our chests,

a dream of thunder in our legs,

we tied up midtown Manhattan for half an hour,

the Revolutionary Contingent and Harlem,

but it did not happen

because it was not reported in any newspaper.

The riot squad was waiting at the bottom of 42nd Street

to disperse us into uncertain memory.

A buffalo said to me

I used to crop and ruminate on LaSalle Street in Chicago.

The grasses were sweet under the black tower of the Board of Trade.

Now I stand in the zoo next to the yaks.

Let the ghosts of those recently starved rise

and like piranhas in ten seconds flat chew down to public bones

the generals and the experts on antipersonnel weapons

and the senators and the oil men and the lobbyists

and the sleek smiling sharks who dance at the Diamond Ball.

I am the earth magician about to disappear into the ground.

This is butterfly’s war song about to darken into the fire.

Put the eagle to sleep.

I see from the afternoon papers

that we have bought another country

and are cutting the natives down to built jet airstrips.

A common motif of monuments in the United States

is an eagle with wings spread, beak open

and the globe grasped in his claws.

Put the eagle to sleep.

This is butterfly’s war song addressed to the Congress of Sharks.

You eat bunches of small farmers like radishes for breakfast.

You are rotting our teeth with sugar

refined from the skulls of Caribbean children. Thus far

we have only the power of earth magicians, dream and song and marching,

to dance the eagle to sleep.

We are about to disappear into the fire.

There is only time for a brief curse by a chorus of ghosts

of Indians murdered with smallpox and repeating rifles on the plains,

of Indians shot by the marines in Santo Domingo,

napalmed in the mountains of Guatemala last week.

There will be no more spring.

Your corn will sprout in rows and the leaves will lengthen

but there will be no spring running clean water through the bones,

no soft wind full of bees, no long prairie wind bearing feathers of geese.

It will be cold or hot. It will step on your necks.

A pool of oil will hang over your cities,

oil slick will scum your lakes and streams killing the trout and the ducklings,

concrete and plastic will seal the black earth and the red earth,

your rivers hum with radioactivity and the salmon float belly up,

and your mountains be hollowed out to hold the files of great corporations,

and shale oil sucked from under the Rockies till the continent buckles.

Look! children of the shark and the eagle

you have no more spring. You do not mind.

You turn on the sunlamp and the airconditioning

and sit at the television watching the soldiers dance.

Your face scrapes my sleep tonight

sharp as a broken girder.

My hands are empty shoppingbags.

Never plastered on the walls of subway night

in garish snake-lettered posters of defeat.

I was always stomping on your toes eager to stick

clippings that should have interested you into the soup.

I told and retold stories weeping mascara on your shirt.

If I introduced a girl she would sink fangs in your shin

or hang in the closet for months, a sleazy kimono.

I brought you my goathaired prickheavy men to bless

while they glowered on your chairs turning green as Swiss hats.

I asked your advice and worse, took it.

I was always hauling out the dollar watch of my pride.

Time after time you toted me home in a wheelbarrow drunk

with words sudsing, dress rumpled and randomly amorous

teasing you like an uncle made of poles to hold clotheslines up.

With my father you constantly wished I had been born

a boy or a rowboat or a nice wooden chest of drawers.

In the morning you delivered clanking chronicles of my faults.

Now you are respectable in Poughkeepsie.

Every couple of years I call you up

and your voice thickens with resentment and shame.

It is all done, it is quiet and still,

a piece of old cheese too hard to chew.

I list my own faults now ledger upon ledger

yet it’s you I cannot forgive who have given me up.

Are you comfortable in Poughkeepsie with Vassar and IBM?

Do you stoke up your memory on cold mornings?

My rector, I make no more apologies,

I say my dirt and chaos are more loving

than your cleanliness and I exile no one,

this smelly hunting dog you sent to the vet’s

to be put away, baby, put to sleep with all her fleas.

You murdered me out of your life.

I do not forgive, I hate it, I am not resigned.

I will howl at every hydrant for thirty years.

The rabbit who used to belong to Matthew

of the Parks Department now lives with Joanne,

She keeps him in an orange crate

for shitting raisins in shoes,

on bathmats, under pianos and in beds.

He is white, fat and runs like a faucet;

freed, would scuffle in closetbottoms

and with a rug for footing

do jigs, his red idiot eyes flashing.

In the crate he sulks.

His sinewy bent legs are stiff.

I am sorry for animals who scrounge their living from people

whether scavenging among ashcans and busted tenths

or tricksy and warm in kitchens:

it is hard enough for people to stand people

hard and sharp as the teeth of a saw

and at least we fuck each other.

Responsibilities roost on our fingers and toes

clucking and blinking.

Yes, they shall get their daily corn

the minutes of our lives scattered.

The love which I bear to you

must be scrubbed and washed and beaten on the rocks.

We will clean it

until it smells like yellow soap.

We will scrub it

until it is thin and scratchy as an old man’s beard.

You are turning yourself into the Sensible Machine.

The beads of old problems rattle in your spine.

You are congealing your anger

into a hard green stone you suck and suck,

beautiful as a tiger’s eye and poisonous.

You are becoming gnarled.

You are twisting like an old root inside yourself.

You will embrace nothing but paper and spines.

If you open to me, you are afraid

all your anxieties will burst free

like crows flying out of a broken safe.

Where would they fly? on whose head perch?

How would you catch them again?

No, I must keep still and mind business.

I must turn into a clock on a stick.

Look, my arms are already rough with bark.

We need a private bush

to sprout in the clash of traffic

and deep in its thicket

we will root together.

There is a jacket on the wall.

We will leap into the pocket.

In that fuzzy hollow

our hairs will knot.

Behold the pencil sharpener

on the filing cabinet.

We will crawl through the hole,

we will bed upon shavings.