Poems 1962-2012 (29 page)

The terrible reunions in store for her

will take up the rest of her life.

When the passion for expiation

is chronic, fierce, you do not choose

the way you live. You do not live;

you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death

which seem, finally,

strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want

when the forces contending over you

could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,

white of safety—

They say

there is a rift in the human soul

which was not constructed to belong

entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat

disguised as suggestion—

as we have seen

in the tale of Persephone

which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—

the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen

the meadow without the daisies.

Suddenly she is no longer

singing her maidenly songs

about her mother's

beauty and fecundity. Where

the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,

song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul

shattered with the strain

of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,

when it is your turn in the field with the god?

PRISM

1.

Who can say what the world is? The world

is in flux, therefore

unreadable, the winds shifting,

the great plates invisibly shifting and changing—

2.

Dirt. Fragments

of blistered rock. On which

the exposed heart constructs

a house, memory: the gardens

manageable, small in scale, the beds

damp at the sea's edge—

3.

As one takes in

an enemy, through these windows

one takes in

the world:

here is the kitchen, here the darkened study.

Meaning: I am master here.

4.

When you fall in love, my sister said,

it's like being struck by lightning.

She was speaking hopefully,

to draw the attention of the lightning.

I reminded her that she was repeating exactly

our mother's formula, which she and I

had discussed in childhood, because we both felt

that what we were looking at in the adults

were the effects not of lightning

but of the electric chair.

5.

Riddle:

Why was my mother happy?

Answer:

She married my father.

6.

“You girls,” my mother said, “should marry

someone like your father.”

That was one remark. Another was,

“There is no one like your father.”

7.

From the pierced clouds, steady lines of silver.

Unlikely

yellow of the witch hazel, veins

of mercury that were the paths of the rivers—

Then the rain again, erasing

footprints in the damp earth.

An implied path, like

a map without a crossroads.

8.

The implication was, it was necessary to abandon

childhood. The word “marry” was a signal.

You could also treat it as aesthetic advice;

the voice of the child was tiresome,

it had no lower register.

The word was a code, mysterious, like the Rosetta stone.

It was also a roadsign, a warning.

You could take a few things with you like a dowry.

You could take the part of you that thought.

“Marry” meant you should keep that part quiet.

9.

A night in summer. Outside,

sounds of a summer storm. Then the sky clearing.

In the window, constellations of summer.

I'm in a bed. This man and I,

we are suspended in the strange calm

sex often induces. Most sex induces.

Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that?

In the window, constellations of summer.

Once, I could name them.

10.

Abstracted

shapes, patterns.

The light of the mind. The cold, exacting

fires of disinterestedness, curiously

blocked by earth, coherent, glittering

in air and water,

the elaborate

signs that said
now plant, now harvest—

I could name them, I had names for them:

two different things.

11.

Fabulous things, stars.

When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia.

Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake;

I took the dog for company.

Did I say “suffered”? That was my parents' way of explaining

tastes that seemed to them

inexplicable: better “suffered” than “preferred to live with the dog.”

Darkness. Silence that annulled mortality.

The tethered boats rising and falling.

When the moon was full, I could sometimes read the girls' names

painted to the sides of the boats:

Ruth Ann, Sweet Izzy, Peggy My Darling—

They were going nowhere, those girls.

There was nothing to be learned from them.

I spread my jacket in the damp sand,

the dog curled up beside me.

My parents couldn't see the life in my head;

when I wrote it down, they fixed the spelling.

Sounds of the lake. The soothing, inhuman

sounds of water lapping the dock, the dog scuffling somewhere

in the weeds—

12.

The assignment was to fall in love.

The details were up to you.

The second part was

to include in the poem certain words,

words drawn from a specific text

on another subject altogether.

13.

Spring rain, then a night in summer.

A man's voice, then a woman's voice.

You grew up, you were struck by lightning.

When you opened your eyes, you were wired forever to your true love.

It only happened once. Then you were taken care of,

your story was finished.

It happened once. Being struck was like being vaccinated;

the rest of your life you were immune,

you were warm and dry.

Unless the shock wasn't deep enough.

Then you weren't vaccinated, you were addicted.

14.

The assignment was to fall in love.

The author was female.

The ego had to be called the soul.

The action took place in the body.

Stars represented everything else: dreams, the mind, etc.

The beloved was identified

with the self in a narcissistic projection.

The mind was a subplot. It went nattering on.

Time was experienced

less as narrative than ritual.

What was repeated had weight.

Certain endings were tragic, thus acceptable.

Everything else was failure.

15.

Deceit. Lies. Embellishments we call

hypotheses—

There were too many roads, too many versions.

There were too many roads, no one path—

And at the end?

16.

List the implications of “crossroads.”

Answer: a story that will have a moral.

Give a counter-example:

17.

The self ended and the world began.

They were of equal size,

commensurate,

one mirrored the other.

18.

The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind.

The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

19.

The room was quiet.

That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.

In the same way, the night was dark.

It was dark, but the stars shone.

The man in bed was one of several men

to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,

that is without limit.

Without limit, though it recurs.

The room was quiet. It was an absolute,

like the black night.

20.

A night in summer. Sounds of a summer storm.

The great plates invisibly shifting and changing—

And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other's arms.

We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,

who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,

the stranger.

CRATER LAKE

There was a war between good and evil.

We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil.

It turned the soul

against death completely.

Like a foot soldier wanting

to serve a great warrior, the soul

wanted to side with the body.

It turned against the dark,

against the forms of death

it recognized.

Where does the voice come from

that says suppose the war

is evil, that says

suppose the body did this to us,

made us afraid of love—

ECHOES

1.

Once I could imagine my soul

I could imagine my death.

When I imagined my death

my soul died. This

I remember clearly.

My body persisted.

Not thrived, but persisted.

Why I do not know.

2.

When I was still very young

my parents moved to a small valley

surrounded by mountains

in what was called the lake country.

From our kitchen garden

you could see the mountains,

snow covered, even in summer.

I remember peace of a kind

I never knew again.

Somewhat later, I took it upon myself

to become an artist,

to give voice to these impressions.

3.

The rest I have told you already.

A few years of fluency, and then

the long silence, like the silence in the valley

before the mountains send back

your own voice changed to the voice of nature.

This silence is my companion now.

I ask:
of what did my soul die?

and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life

are you living and

when did you become that person?

FUGUE

1.

I was the man because I was taller.

My sister decided

when we should eat.

From time to time, she'd have a baby.

2.

Then my soul appeared.

Who are you, I said.

And my soul said,

I am your soul, the winsome stranger.

3.

Our dead sister

waited, undiscovered in my mother's head.

Our dead sister was neither

a man nor a woman. She was like a soul.

4.

My soul was taken in:

it attached itself to a man.

Not a real man, the man

I pretended to be, playing with my sister.

5.

It is coming back to me—lying on the couch

has refreshed my memory.

My memory is like a basement filled with old papers:

nothing ever changes.

6.

I had a dream: my mother fell out of a tree.

After she fell, the tree died:

it had outlived its function.

My mother was unharmed—her arrows disappeared, her wings

turned into arms. Fire creature: Sagittarius. She finds herself in—

a suburban garden. It is coming back to me.

7.

I put the book aside. What is a soul?

A flag flown

too high on the pole, if you know what I mean.

The body

cowers in the dreamlike underbrush.

8.

Well, we are here to do something about that.

(In a German accent.)

9.

I had a dream: we are at war.

My mother leaves her crossbow in the high grass.

(Sagittarius, the archer.)

My childhood, closed to me forever,

turned gold like an autumn garden,

mulched with a thick layer of salt marsh hay.

10.

A golden bow: a useful gift in wartime.

How heavy it was—no child could pick it up.

Except me: I could pick it up.

11.

Then I was wounded. The bow

was now a harp, its string cutting

deep into my palm. In the dream

it both makes the wound and seals the wound.

12.

My childhood: closed to me. Or is it

under the mulch—fertile.

But very dark. Very hidden.

13.

In the dark, my soul said

I am your soul.

No one can see me; only you—

only you can see me.

14.

And it said, you must trust me.

Meaning: if you move the harp,

you will bleed to death.

15.

Why can't I cry out?

I should be writing
my hand is bleeding,

feeling pain and terror—what

I felt in the dream, as a casualty of war.

16.

It is coming back to me.

Pear tree. Apple tree.

I used to sit there

pulling arrows out of my heart.

17.

Then my soul appeared. It said

just as no one can see me, no one

can see the blood.

Also: no one can see the harp.

Then it said

I can save you. Meaning

this is a test.

18.

Who is “you”? As in

“Are you tired of invisible pain?”

19.

Like a small bird sealed off from daylight:

that was my childhood.

20.

I was the man because I was taller.

But I wasn't tall—

didn't I ever look in a mirror?

21.

Silence in the nursery,

the consulting garden. Then:

What does the harp suggest?

22.

I know what you want—