Great Poems by American Women (21 page)

I understand what you were running for,
Slim naked boy, and why from far inland
You came between dark hills. I know the roar
The sea makes in some ears. I understand.

 

I understand why you were running now,
And how you heard the sea resound, and how
You leaped and left your valley for the long
Brown road. I understand the song

 

You chanted with your running, with your feet
Marking the measure of your high heart's beat.
Now you are broken. Seeing your wide brow,
I see your dreams. I understand you now.

 

Since I have run like you, I understand
The throat's long wish, the breath that comes so quick,
The heart's light leap, the heels that drag so sick,
And warped heat wrinkles, lengthening the sand. . . .

 

Now you are broken. Seeing your wide brow
I see your dreams, understanding now
The cry, the certainty, wide arms—and then
The way rude ocean rises and descends. . . .

 

I saw you stretched and wounded where tide ends.
I do not want to walk that way again.

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

 

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

 

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

 

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

 

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

 

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

 

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

 

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

 

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Into her mother's bedroom to wash the ballooning body.
“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:
Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.
Only a habit would cry if she should die.
A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . .
Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?”
The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell's mother
Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.
Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks:
The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter,
Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie's black
And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine.
Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers
Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. . . .”
She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs,
Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,
Refueled
Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.
Her exquisite yellow youth. . . .

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

 

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

 

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

 

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

 

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

 

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

 

I have always been scared of
you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

 

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

 

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

 

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

 

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

 

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

 

If I've killed one man, I've killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

 

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always
knew
it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

 

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

 

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

 

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

 

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

 

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

 

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

 

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

 

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

 

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentleman, ladies,

 

These are my hands,
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

 

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

 

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

 

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

 

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

 

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

 

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

 

“A miracle!”
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

 

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

 

And there is a charge, very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

 

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

 

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

 

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

 

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

 

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

 

Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.

 

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Alcott, Louisa May

Allen, Elizabeth Akers

Bates, Katharine Lee

Beers, Ethel Lynn

Bleecker, Ann Eliza

Bogan, Louise

Bradstreet, Anne

Branch, Anna Hempstead

Bristol, Augusta Cooper

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Brooks, Maria Gowen

Cary, Alice

Cary, Phoebe

Cather, Willa

Channing-Stetson,

Child, Lydia Maria

Cooke, Rose Terry

Coolbrith, Ina Donna

Crosby, Fanny

Davidson, Lucretia

Dickinson, Emily

Dodge, Mary Mapes

Doolittle, Hilda

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

Embury, Emma C.

Fuller, Margaret

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Grimké,

Guiney, Louise Imogen

Hale, Sarah Josepha

Hall, Hazel

Harper, Frances E. W.

Hewitt, Mary E.

Howe, Julia Ward

Jackson, Helen Hunt

Jewett, Sarah Orne

Johnson, Georgia Douglas

Kinney,

Larcom, Lucy

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne

Lazarus, Emma

Lowell, Amy

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Monroe, Harriet

Moore, Marianne

Morton, Sarah Wentworth

Moulton, Louise Chandler

Oakes-Smith, Elizabeth

Osgood, Frances Sargent

Parker, Dorothy

Peabody, Josephine Preston

Perry, Nora

Piatt, Sarah Morgan

Plath, Sylvia

Reese, Lizette Woodworth

Rowson, Susanna Haswell

Sangster, Margaret E.

Sigourney, Lydia Huntley

Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Taggard, Genevieve

Teasdale, Sara

Thaxter, Celia

Thomas, Edith M.

Thorpe, Rose Hartwick

Townsend, Mary Ashley

Trask, Kate Nichols

Warren, Mercy Otis

Wharton, Edith

Wheatley, Phillis

Whitman, Sarah Helen

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Willard, Emma Hart

Woolson,

Wylie, Elinor