Circles on the Water (7 page)

Zeus came to Danaë

in a golden shower.

I shall very carefully

wash my legs and ears.

In the form of a memorandum

you will get through.

All we need is a closet.

All we need is a big box.

All we need is a purse-

sized bed.

Missing is a pain

in everyplace

making a toothache

out of a day.

But to miss something

that never was:

the longest guilt

the regret that comes down

like a fine ash

year after year

is the shadow of what

we did not dare.

All the days that go out

like neglected cigarettes,

the days that dribble away.

How often does love strike?

We turn into ghosts

loitering outside doorways

we imagined entering.

In the lovers’ room

the floor creaks,

dust sifts from the ceiling,

the golden bed has been hauled away

by the dealer

in unused dreams.

My sweet ache

is gone.

Sweet and painful

caramel, honey

in a broken tooth.

You were with me

like a light cold

in the bones,

a rainy day gnawing.

An awareness

that would turn down

to a faint hum

to an edging of static.

This caring

colored my life,

a wine badly fermented

with sugar and vinegar

in suspension.

A body can grow used

to a weight,

used to limping

and find it hard

to learn again

to walk straight.

The bonsai tree

in the attractive pot

could have grown eighty feet tall

on the side of a mountain

till split by lightning.

But a gardener

carefully pruned it.

It is nine inches high.

Every day as he

whittles back the branches

the gardener croons,

It is your nature

to be small and cozy,

domestic and weak;

how lucky, little tree,

to have a pot to grow in.

With living creatures

one must begin very early

to dwarf their growth:

the bound feet,

the crippled brain,

the hair in curlers,

the hands you

love to touch.

You called yourself a dishwater blond,

body warm and flat as beer that’s been standing.

You always had to stand until your feet were sore

behind the counter

with a smile like an outsized safety pin

holding your lips off your buck teeth.

Most nights alone or alone with men

who wiped themselves in you.

Pass the damp rag over the counter again.

Tourist cabins and roadhouses of the deaf loudmouth,

ponds where old boots swim and drive-in moons.

You came to see yourself as a salesman’s bad joke.

What did you ever receive for free

except a fetus you had to pay to yank out.

Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,

smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside

but nobody could take nourishment

for lacking respect.

No husband, no baby, no house, nobody to own you

public as an ashtray you served

waiting for the light that came at last

straight into the windshield on the highway.

Two days later the truckers are pleased.

Your replacement is plain but ten years younger.

Women’s lives are shaped like cheap coffins.

How long will she wait for change?

My hips are a desk.

From my ears hang

chains of paper clips.

Rubber bands form my hair.

My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.

My feet bear casters.

Buzz. Click.

My head is a badly organized file.

My head is a switchboard

where crossed lines crackle.

Press my fingers

and in my eyes appear

credit and debit.

Zing. Tinkle.

My navel is a reject button.

From my mouth issue canceled reams.

Swollen, heavy, rectangular

I am about to be delivered

of a baby

Xerox machine.

File me under W

because I wonce

was

a woman.

Scalded cat,

claws, arched back and blistered pride:

my friend. You’d have cooked down

my ropy carcass in a kettle for soup.

I was honing my knife.

What is friendship

to the desperate?

Is it bigger than a meal?

Before any mirror or man we jostled.

Fought from angst to Zeno,

sucked the onion of suspicion,

poured lie on the telephone.

Always head on: one raw from divorce court

spitting toads and nail clippings,

the other fresh baked from a new final bed

with strawberry-cream-filled brain.

One cooing, while the other spat.

To the hunted

what is loyalty?

Is it deeper than an empty purse?

Wider than a borrowed bed?

Of my two best friends at school

I continued to love the first Marie better

because she died young

so I could carry her along with me,

a wizened embryo.

But you and I clawed at hardscrabble hill

willing to fight anyone

especially each other

to survive.

Couldn’t we have made alliance?

We were each so sure

of the way out,

the way in.

Now they’ve burnt out your nerves, my lungs.

We are better fed

but no better understood,

scabby and gruff with battle.

Bits of our love are filed in dossiers

of the appropriate organizations.

Bits of our love are moldering

in the Lost and Found offices of bankrupt railroads.

Bits stick like broken glass

in the minds of our well-earned enemies.

Regret is a damp wind

off the used car lot

where most of our peers came to rest.

Now—years too late—my voice quavers,

Can I help?

When I was young I believed in intellectual conversation:

I thought the patterns we wove on stale smoke

floated off to the heaven of ideas.

To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse

like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,

suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.

They were talking of integrity and existential ennui

while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions

in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.

Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:

when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,

when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,

they said, she is trying to attract our attention,

she is offering up her breasts and thighs.

I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:

they saw a fish peddler hawking in the street.

Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.

I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.

I try hard to remember to watch what people do.

Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.

Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,

watch who they beat and who they eat,

watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.

The rest is decoration.

I am an inconvenient woman.

I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.

I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in

or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.

I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.

I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.

I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure

and it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.

I am an inconvenient woman.

You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.

You might trade me in for a yak.

They are faithful and demand only straw.

They make good overcoats.

They never call you up on the telephone.

I love you with my arms and my legs

and my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.

I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.

I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.

I want to read you poems about drowning myself

laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings.

I want you to read my old loverletters.

I want you to want me

as directly and simply and variously

as a cup of hot coffee.

To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.

I carry my love for you

around with me like my teeth

and I am starving.

Opening like a marigold

crop of sun and dry soil

acrid, bright, sturdy.

Spreading its cancer

through the conduits of the body,

a slow damp murder.

Breathing like the sea

glowing with foam and plankton.

Rigid as an iron post

driven between my breasts.

Will you lift your hands

and shape this love

into a thing of goodness?

Will you permit me to live

when you are not looking?

Will you let me ask questions

with my mouth open?

I will not pretend any longer

to be a wind or a mood.

Even with our eyes closed

we are walking on someone’s map.

At the last moment you decided

to take the bus

rather than the plane,

to squander those hours

staring at your reflection

on a dark pane.

Then all night you rummaged

my flesh for some body else.

You pinched and kneaded

testing for ripeness, rot,

suspicious and about to reject me

or knock down the price.

You lectured me like a classroom

on your reading of the week,

used homilies, reconditioned anecdotes,

jokes with rebuilt transmissions.

All the time your eyes veered.

What’s wrong, I would ask?

Nothing, you’d answer, eyes full

of nothing. He goes through women

quickly, a friend said, and now

I see how you pass through,

in a sealed train

leaving a hole like a tunnel.

A man can lie to himself.

A man can lie with his tongue

and his brain and his gesture;

a man can lie with his life.

But the body is simple as a turtle

and straight as a dog:

the body cannot lie.

You want to take your good body off like a glove.

You want to stretch it and shrink it

as you change your abstractions.

You stand in flesh with shame.

You smell your fingers and lick your disgust

and are satisfied.

But the beaten dog of the body remembers.

Blood has ghosts too.

You speak of the collective.

Then you form your decisions

and visit them on others

like an ax. Broken open I have learned

to mistrust a man whose rhetoric is good

and whose ambition is fierce:

a man who says
we
, moving us,

and means
I
and
mine.

Many people have a thing they want to protect.

Sometimes the property is wheat, oil fields, slum housing,

plains on which brown people pick green tomatoes,

stocks in safety deposit boxes, computer patents,

thirty dollars in a shoebox under a mattress.

Maybe it’s a woman they own and her soft invisible labor.

Maybe it’s images from childhood of how things should be.

The revolutionary says, we can let go.

We both used to say that a great deal.

If what we change does not change us

we are playing with blocks.

Always you were dancing before the altar of guilt.

A frowning man with clenched fists

you fixed to my breasts with grappling hooks to feed

gritting your teeth for fear

a good word would slip out:

a man who came back again and again

yet made sure that his coming was attended by pain

and marked by a careful coldness,

as if gentleness were an inventory that could run low,

as if loving were an account that could be overdrawn,

as if tenderness saved drew interest.

You are a capitalist of yourself.

You hoard for fantasies and deceptions

and the slow seep of energy from the loins.

You fondle your fears and coddle them

while you urge others on.

Among your fantasies and abstractions

ranged like favorite battered toys,

you stalk with a new item, gutted

from what was alive and curious.

Now it is safe,

private and tight as a bank vault

or a tomb.