If you fall,
Who is there to tell
Of the bloody theft
That is a woman’s life?
That we speak in fagged
And washed-gold icons because
We have no common language
Is nothing.
Your husband can only be just that,
But I read you like Braille,
A lesbos caress in that
Our sex knows
Where to touch.
Don’t fall, don’t.
Russian sister,
You drive me mad,
You drive too fast,
That sudden curve will get you yet.
And I’ll find you
In a summer field in Tsarskoye Selo
Awash in strawberries pickled in blood.
No.
I won’t have it.
Even if I have to come and get you,
Carry you on my back across that river
Deep down in the valley of the Alazan
And I can’t swim.
My heart is not that flat, hard
Male heart to which we all cleave,
But I value yours.
Whispering through our carved ivory fans
As the house-lights dim,
Listening to our heart’s murmurings …
Akhmatova,
If only you
Would turn in your license,
Akhmatova,
You must know by now
Russians shouldn’t drive.
For Anna Akhmatova, March 10, 1966
Anne Sexton
You shopped for Death
Like a housewife shopping for avocados.
You pinched it, weighed it, smelled it;
You pummeled it and chewed it
And worried it to Life.
It kept you good company
Until one holiday weekend,
You put on your best Pucci
And served it for dinner.
Dead Stars
Stars that have already died
Whose trillion year pulsations
Are just now reaching our unknotted flesh,
Reignite passion’s incandescense
Those ice stars of no light which
Join love’s feverish white heat with
God’s orgasmistic pleasures
Elnora
I remember a seventeen-year-old girl beaten by biology,
Lambent and asphalt-willed, she played the bass well.
When her child was ten and she, twenty-seven,
She described to me what it was like to lose one’s mind;
Serene and smiling, she held up three fingers of her right hand
“Insanity,” she said, “is like death by drowning,
You have three chances to surface.”
After that I tried with all my wily woman’s force
To keep her afloat.
No man, I held her in my arms
And chaffed her viola-callused hands
And kissed her long and hard upon the mouth,
But she sank under the bright Atlantic sea,
And as I watched her go down for the third time,
She assured me she could walk on water.
Sir James Stirling 1929-1991
A pyramid, an obelisk,
A column,
A tabernacle, a tenement,
A rotunda,
A dome, a coliseum,
A cathedral,
A cloister,
A circus, an atrium, a portal,
A skylight, a wigwam, an igloo,
A hacienda, a barrack,
A skyscraper, an almshouse, an asylum,
A terminus, a duplex,
A piazza, an ellipse, a penthouse,
A wheel,
A dike, a moat,
A pillar, a buttress,
A bell tower, an airport,
A tomb,
A tunnel,
A stairwell,
A stadium,
A sphinx,
A house without windows,
I used to live in once.
Sonia
To be a historian
I must make myself a poet.
Perfect strangers will
Come up to me and say
“I’m a poet, too.”
For a long time
I thought that
They were saying “two”
As in Creative Writing II
Or Advance Quantum Physics II
Then I realized
That it was “too” not “two”
As in also, as well,
Us. We.
Ya’ all.
Should I walk up to
Another member of humankind
Who might be the greatest poet
Who never wrote a single line
And say
I’m a poet II?
Saige is Dead
Woe our good Saige is dead, who will now wear the burning flag in his pigtail, who will turn the coffee grinder, who will entice the idyllic egret once confused with slave ships at sea with that little word parapluie and named the winds southern bee, father, oh no, Oh no, oh no, our pure gold Saige is dead, hell’s bells Saige is dead, the crayfish clatter in the chimes when one says his first name and so I keep sighing Saige, Saige, Saige, why have you become a star or a chain of water on a hot, whirlwind or an udder Of black light or a transparent brick on the groaning drum of rocky being now our heads and toes are drying up and the fairies half-charred at the stake now the black skuttle alley rumbles behind the sun and nobody winds the compasses or the steering wheel of the barge anymore, who will eat now with the rat, at the isolated table who will hose off the avail of the devil when he wants to lure the horses, who will explain to us the family crests, in the stars his bust will adorn the mantelpieces of all truly noble men but that is no consolation for the flag’s Death head, Oh woe is me, Saige is dead, who now will pave the streets of Bordeaux with gold, black gold flowing in the streets with names like Rue Saige, Rue Nairac, Rue David Gradis, Rue Theresia-Cabarrus, Rue Viard, Rue Gramont, Rue Wastenberg, Rue Laffon La-debat, soaking up stones of blood and swallowing them, Saige is dead, Oh woe is me after having served La Belle France, his vessels flying the colors of Catholic commerce and sun stroke raisins, tomahawks and beads, old Saige, Woe is me, Saige is dead and his compatriots the Negriers, mostly came late to Bordeaux but Saige has been there for two generations from Francois Saige his great-grandfather the richest shipbuilder of the 17th century, who bought a one-sixth interest in the slaver the S. S. Glorious, which left La Rochelle for Africa in 1687, inherited by Jean Saige who enriched himself in trade with the Indies, and in 1740 enlisted the S.S. Lion and the S.S. Bourbon in the Trade for the Caribbean to his grandfather Guillaume-Joseph Saige, merchant and above all shipbuilder until his death in 1764, who with his wealth purchased the ennobling office of Secretaire du Roi and six other titles, married the daughter of another Secretaire who produced his father Franfois-Armand Saige who after becoming Avocat-General, married Jacqueline de Verthamon and after selling his office for a boat load of gold, made dramatic profits from the Trade and was elected Mayor of Bordeaux in 1791 and executed in 1793, survived by his son Guillaume Joseph Saige born in 1746, Woe our good Saige is dead. Hell’s bells, Saige is dead, dead in the water, his street paved with gold, the stones swallowed in blood, not worth a Death Head’s mascaron, Oh Saige, Oh Saige, Oh who will wear the burning flag in his pigtail, my grandson’s great-great- great-great-great-grandfather is dead
Irenishka
How I’d like to be like you
When I reach age eight-two
Once over luncheon of caviar and pickles
You complained to your mother that Trotsky’s beard tickled
Lenin danced you on his knee
Stalin waltzed you round Capri
Cornflower blue eyes that never sleep
Ocean cool eyes that never weep
Chain-smoking, vodka & wicked fornic
ation
Swearing in twelve languages without duplication
Shoeless in winter, Oh White Russian Princess
You taught me survival’s a matter of inches
Bastille Day For Gayle Jones
A madwoman’s pen chastened
By a suicide’s guillotine will not be stilled
By a husband’s slashed vocal chords.
Pride sequestered on a switchblade pike
Hemorrhaged delusions which pump through
The muddy arteries of Kentucky Rivers
Breaking against Southern Penitentiaries, knightly
Chain fences shimmering along moats, making music.
Resurrection is a quiet grave in Lexington
But not yours, Corregidora,
Lunacy is a white women’s sanctuary
Insane asylums don’t accept colored inmates,
Except by Supreme Court Decision: 30 years to life
In solitary—with no parole
—Paris, July 14, 1998
The Crying Room
I
Desmond
Tutu which rhymes with
Truth if you stutter,
Crouched in the wing of the
East London City Hall stage
Johannesburg, South Africa
Which had been made into
The Crying Room of the
Truth and Reconciliation trial
Which spoke in Xhosa and Afrikaans:
And the cruel and double voice
Of Apartheid:
The one the cold logic of the oppression
The other the primordial cry of resistance,
The interpreter’s voice amplified
In megawatts imitating that of God
Washed over the Bishiop, a crippled
Ailing ANC veteran named
Singgokwana Malgas
Regularly broke down weeping
Recalling his 9-month torture
At the hands of the SASS
Secret police which had left him
Sterile and 98 percent blind.
II
Desmond,
Tutu which rhymes with
Truth if you stutter,
Covered his face with his hands
And wept, no longer able to endure more,
His gold bishop’s ring flashed
In the flickering torchlight
As beyond, voilated women waited
Patiently to be admitted to
The Crying Room,
10,000 strong and each with her
Story of rape and murder
Each, a widow, orphan, madwoman,
Kohl-eyed under wide brimmed hats
Full fleshed and potent
They chant dirges of grief
In Xhosa, some gasping for breath
To explain their travail and supplice
Searching for dignity in their scars,
Tutu embraced them one by one
Until he had no arms, no legs, no eyes
No teeth, no ears, no mouth,
Only a wretched human stump
Of Truth and Reconciliation.
IX.
THE LIGHTNESS OF MY WHOREDOM
2000-2009
Jeremiah: 3-9 And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom that she defiled the land and committed adultery… with the basest idols, those made of wood and stone.
—King James Bible
The Lightness of My Whoredom
I
The lightness of my whoredom
Sways even the neocolonials.
Seduced, they nod their heads
And ejaculate as He plunders the five Continents,
Lit in strobe lights and bathed
In heliogenic megawatts, He floats
Between heaven and earth, Spirit and Flesh,
Black and white, male and female,
Man and child, a dirge of celestial
Combustion, the negrodization of the planet.
II
Bleached skin, mailed fist, spiked gloves
White socks, padded crotch, pale fire loins
In a happy prism of spotlight and
Shattered Pepsi Cola bottles.
A crescendo of electromagnetic voltage,
Sainted in sonar decimals and break-dance,
He floats from humanoid to God head
In a halleluiah of gyrating stars
Levitating on public gulps of Walk-Arounds,
Enlightening the Deo Volente of Madison Square Garden.
III
Like private parts, his sweat-tears fall
Upon his white clown’s face:
Spliced nose, electroed beard,
Kholed eyes, permed hair—even his heart
Is a transplant, a sexless dildo
For fourteen-year-old Virgins,
The walking wounded with the Mick Jagger prance.
He rides the rails, a moveable feast,
Sucking chocolate-covered Popsicles, entitled
SONY & PARAMOUNT & ATLANTIC.
IV
“What do you say we divest ourselves of
This son-of-a-bitch White Negro,” says Wall Street;
Thus begins the whore’s demise
Eulogized by Elizabeth Taylor and Toyota.
Can there be a greater claim to immortality than
A remake of Jesus Christ’s fastest selling video?
As for the color line, unlike Pushkin,
His uncomely Negroidess has vanished
Into plastic surgery’s immobile and lifeless eternity,
As unknowable as the sex of angels.
Requiem
I will leave your white house and tranquil garden
Let life be empty and bright.
—Anna Akhmatova
I
I think about you to the point of tears,
Catch the hundreds of intonations of your voice,
The self-taught justice of your smile,
The many alleys of your brilliant mind,
The bottomless reservoir of sweetness.
How could you leave so suddenly?
Drowning out the sound of my own voice speaking
Into the bitter virgin silence you have left behind,
Polite to the end, closing the door softly
On foreseen pain, everything upside-down forever,
In secret places never shown to me,
Laughing together in passing.
II
Thus you bear my heart away chilled,
Amongst the peonies which bloomed yesterday,
Where only my tears live and my fear reflected
In the serene waters of the Strait of Pertuis where patiently
I wait each day for one last conversation,
In that bronze twilight between being and not being, And the melancholy frustration of a loved one’s
Cancelled rendezvous. I can’t be angry.
I wasn’t there; only grief and darkness were there,
In my place, deep and velvety and above all,
Incomprehensible as are other people’s dreams, as is,
A distant light-house or a burden in an outstretched palm,
I don’t even recognize my own wailing voice,
Or the unsolvable riddle burning like a night lamp
Before an eternal door, eternally closed.
III
Your home is now the waters of Nantes where Nigriers plowed
Grown silent from the sun’s bright blaze.
Your limpid countenance and tender eyes
Watch from its depths the long day extinguished
and the even longer night when penguins
Dance on shore in a grove of singing nightingales
And illegal aliens take flight for the border.
You are quiet, resplendent as moonlight on sea salt harvest
Your judicial eyes are closed wide open.
Your lips curve in an arc at our ongoing dialogue
And incessant mu
rmurings because: you are quiet.
Dark blue drifts over the sea’s lacquer.
My Requiem is no longer sorrowful, but radiant,
A copper penny thrown over my shoulder, slicing
The satin surface, a silver coffin.
IV
Rest. Rest. Rest Michel
Leave our sobbing and our prayers
Facing your magnificent smile
How bright the lunar eyes and relentless battle weary gaze
That has come to rest on the doorstop of Paradise.
Glancing back he cries: “I will wait”
Which like a wax seal on the heart, unique, valedictory,
Erases all remaining memory,
Forgiving all with a wave of his tawny hand so that
Each day becomes Remembrance Day. And can’t return!
But even beyond courage, I shall take him with me,
Hold to the living outline of his soul: “I will wait” he cries,
A sacred reproach from one who died to those who cannot
Imagine his death, which is neither a magnificent of roses nor a
Host of Archangels, but a gracious acquittal of the living.
—Paris, January 19, 2008
For Michele Fabre and, in slightly
different form, Ruth Bloomrosen
Bullock’s Liverpool Museum
I am most affected by this spectacle
And I must say, I am happy to be in the company
Of one of my own sex.
For I am ashamed by the pudeur and forbearance
This poor woman displayed
In the face of the brutish, pornographic,
Voyeurism of my countrymen (and women).
They pluck and prod this small creature and called her names
And verily act like a bunch of baboons.
The comedy of manners being exhibited
By the masters of the world
Towards its colonized slaves
Is more like a morality play of oppression
On one hand, versus a kind of defiance
Of all white English morals on the other.
It is not an amusement.
It is an erasure of time and distance
Between our civilization and its antithesis,
This African Venus
The irony of whose name is not lost on me or the audience
And even plays its part in this charade.
For the Venus is a parody of English beauty and womanhood,
As far from our pretensions of gentility
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