a Siamese twin.
Why should we complain?
He is ours and us,
we made him.
viii
If I were a foreigner, as you say,
instead of your second head,
you would be more polite.
Foreigners are not there:
they pass and repass through the air
like angels, invisible
except for their cameras, and the rustle
of their strange fragrance
but we are not foreigners
to each other; we are the pressure
on the inside of the skull, the struggle
among the rocks for more room,
the shove and giveway, the grudging love,
the old hatreds.
Why fear the knife
that could sever us, unless
it would cut not skin but brain?
ix
You can't live here without breathing
someone else's air,
air that has been used to shape
these hidden words that are not yours.
This word was shut
in the mouth of a small man
choked off by the rope and gold/
red drumroll
This word was deported
This word was guttural,
buried wrapped in a leather throat
wrapped in a wolfskin
This word lies
at the bottom of a lake
with a coral bead and a kettle
This word was scrawny,
denied itself from year
to year, ate potatoes,
got drunk when possible
This word died of bad water.
Nothing stays under
forever, everyone
wants to fly, whose language
is this anyway?
You want the air
but not the words that come with it:
breathe at your peril.
These words are yours,
though you never said them,
you never heard them, history
breeds death but if you kill
it you kill yourself.
What is a traitor?
x
This is the secret: these hearts
we held out to you, these party
hearts (our hands
sticky with adjectives
and vague love, our smiles
expanding like balloons)
, these candy hearts we sent you
in the mail, a whole
bouquet of hearts, large as a country,
these hearts, like yours,
hold snipers.
A tiny sniper, one in each heart,
curled like a maggot, pallid
homunculus, pinhead, glass-eyed fanatic,
waiting to be given life.
Soon the snipers will bloom
in the summer trees, they will eat
their needle holes through your windows
(Smoke and broken leaves, up close
what a mess, wet red glass
in the zinnia border,
Don't let it come to this, we said
before it did.)
Meanwhile, we refuse
to believe the secrets of our hearts,
these hearts of neat velvet,
moral as fortune cookies.
Our hearts are virtuous, they swell
like stomachs at a wedding,
plump with goodwill.
In the evenings the news seeps in
from foreign countries,
those places with unsafe water.
We listen to the war, the wars,
any old war.
xi
Surely in your language
no one can sing, he said, one hand
in the small-change pocket.
That is a language for ordering
the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for
counting stacks of cans. Groceries
are all you are good for. Leave
the soul to us. Eat shit.
In these cages, barred crates,
feet nailed to the floor, soft
funnel down the throat,
we are forced with nouns, nouns,
till our tongues are sullen and rubbery.
We see this language always
and merely as a disease
of the mouth. Also
as the hospital that will cure us,
distasteful but necessary.
These words slow us, stumble
in us, numb us, who
can say even Open
the door, without these diffident
smiles, apologies?
Our dreams though
are of freedom, a hunger
for verbs, a song
which rises liquid and effortless,
our double, gliding beside us
over all these rivers, borders,
over ice or clouds.
Our other dream: to be mute.
Dreams are not bargains,
they settle nothing.
This is not a debate
but a duet
with two deaf singers.
The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
Snow packs the roadsides, sends dunes
onto the pavement, moves
through vision like a wave or sandstorm.
The bus charges this winter,
a whale or blunt gray
tank, wind whipping its flank.
Inside, we sit wool-
swathed and over-furred, made stodgy
by the heat, our boots
puddling the floor, our Christmas bundles
stuffed around us in the seats, the paper bags
already bursting; we trust
the driver, who is plump and garrulous, familiar
as a neighbor, which he is
to the thirty souls he carries, as
carefully as the time-
table permits; he knows
by experience the fragility of skulls.
Travel is dangerous; nevertheless, we travel.
The talk, as usual,
is of disasters; trainwrecks, fires,
herds of cattle killed in floods,
the malice of weather and tractors,
the clogging of hearts known
and unknown to us, illness and death,
true cases of buses
such as ours,
which skid, which hurtle
through snake fences and explode
with no survivors.
The woman talking says she heard
their voices at the crossroad
one night last fall, and not
a drop taken.
The dead ride with us on this bus,
whether we like it or not,
discussing aunts and suicides,
wars and the price of wheat,
fogging the close air, hugging us,
repeating their own deaths through these mouths,
cramped histories, violent
or sad, earthstained, defeated, proud,
the pain in small print, like almanacs,
mundane as knitting.
In the darkness, each distant house
glows and marks time,
is as true in attics
and cellars as in its steaming rich
crackling and butter kitchens.
The former owners, coupled and multiple,
seep through the mottled plaster, sigh
along the stairs they once rubbed concave
with their stiff boots, still envious,
breathe roasts and puddings through the floors;
it's wise
to set an extra plate.
How else can you live but with the knowledge
of old lives continuing in fading
sepia blood under your feet?
Outside, the moon is fossil
white, the sky cold purple, the stars
steely and har
d; when there are trees they are dried
coral; the snow
is an unbroken spacelit
desert through which we make
our ordinary voyage,
those who hear voices and those
who do not, moving together, warm
and for the moment safe,
along the invisible road towards home.
The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart
It wasn't your crippled rhythm
I could not forgive, or your dark red
skinless head of a vulture
but the things you hid:
five words and my lost
gold ring, the fine blue cup
you said was broken,
that stack of faces, gray
and folded, you claimed
we'd both forgotten,
the other hearts you ate,
and all that discarded time you hid
from me, saying it never happened.
There was that, and the way
you would not be captured,
sly featherless bird, fat raptor
singing your raucous punctured song
with your talons and your greedy eye
lurking high in the molten sunset
sky behind my left cloth breast
to pounce on strangers.
How many times have I told you:
The civilized world is a zoo,
not a jungle, stay in your cage.
And then the shouts
of blood, the rage as you threw yourself
against my ribs.
As for me, I would have strangled you
gladly with both hands,
squeezed you closed, also
your yelps of joy.
Life goes more smoothly without a heart,
without that shiftless emblem,
that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal
eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks
of hate, that vulgar magic,
that organ the size and color
of a scalded rat,
that singed phoenix.
But you've shoved me this far,
old pump, and we're hooked
together like conspirators, which
we are, and just as distrustful.
We know that, barring accidents,
one of us will finally
betray the other; when that happens,
it's me for the urn, you for the jar.
Until then, it's an uneasy truce,
and honor between criminals.
Solstice Poem
i
A tree hulks in the living-
room, prickly monster, our hostage
from the wilderness, prelude
to light in this dark space of the year
which turns again toward the sun
today, or at least we hope so.
Outside, a dead tree
swarming with blue and yellow
birds; inside, a living one
that shimmers with hollow silver
planets and wafer faces,
salt and flour, with pearl
teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear.
This is our altar.
ii
Beyond the white hill which maroons us,
out of sight of the white
eye of the pond, geography
is crumbling, the nation
splits like an iceberg, factions
shouting Good riddance from the floes
as they all melt south,
with politics the usual
rats' breakfast.
All politicians are amateurs:
wars bloom in their heads like flowers
on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps.
Power is wine with lunch
and the right pinstripes.
There are no amateur soldiers.
The soldiers grease their holsters,
strap on everything
they need to strap, gobble their dinners.
They travel quickly and light.
The fighting will be local,
they know, and lethal.
Their eyes flick from target
to target: window, belly, child.
The goal is not to get killed.
ii
As for the women, who did not
want to be involved, they are involved.
It's that blood on the snow
which turns out to be not
some bludgeoned or machine-gunned
animal's, but your own
that does it.
Each has a knitting needle
stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion
heart complete with pins,
a numbed body
with one more entrance than the world finds safe,
and not much money.
Each fears her children sprout
from the killed children of others.
Each is right.
Each has a father.
Each has a mad mother
and a necklace of lightblue tears.
Each has a mirror
which when asked replies Not you.
iv
My daughter crackles paper, blows
on the tree to make it live, festoons
herself with silver.
So far she has no use
for gifts.
What can I give her,
what armor, invincible
sword or magic trick, when that year comes?
How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her?
I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.
I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone's voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can see it.
Iron talismans, and ugly, but
more loyal than mirrors.
v
In this house (in a dying orchard,
behind it a tributary
of the wilderness, in front a road),
my daughter dances
unsteadily with a knitted bear.
Her father, onetime soldier,
touches my arm.
Worn language clots our throats,
making it difficult to say
what we mean, making it
difficult to see.
Instead we sing in the back room, raising
our pagan altar
of oranges and silver flowers:
our fools' picnic, our signal,
our flame, our nest, our fragile golden
protest against murder.
Outside, the cries of the birds
are rumors we hear clearly
but can't yet understand. Fresh ice
glints on the branches.
In this dark
space of the year, the earth
turns again toward the sun, or
we would like to hope so.
Marsh, Hawk
Diseased or unwanted
trees, cut into pieces, thrown
away here, damp and soft in the sun, rotting and half
covered with sand, burst truck
tires, abandoned, bottles and cans hit
with rocks or bullets, a mass grave,
someone made it, spreads on the
land like a bruise and we stand on it, vantage
point, looking out over the marsh.
Expanse of green
reeds, patches of water, shapes
just out of reach of the eyes,
the wind moves, moves it and it
eludes us, it is full
daylight. From the places
we can't see, the guttural swamp voices
impenetrable, not human,
utter their one-note
syllables, boring a
nd
significant as oracles and quickly over.
It will not answer, it will not
answer, though we hit
it with rocks, there is a splash, the wind
covers it over; but
intrusion is not what we want,
we want it to open, the marsh rushes
to bend aside, the water
to accept us, it is only
revelation, simple as the hawk
which lifts up now against
the sun and into
our eyes, wingspread and sharp call
filling the head/sky, this,
to immerse, to have it slide
through us, disappearance
of the skin, this is what we are looking for,
the way in.
A Red Shirt
(For Ruth)
i
Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Page 3