I must allow her to be at last
political in her waysnot in mine
her urgencies perhapsimpervious to mine
defining revolution as she defines it
or, bored to the marrow of her bones
with “politics”
bored with the vast boredom of long pain
small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties
liking her roomher private life
living alone perhaps
no one you could interview
maybe filling a notebook herself
with secrets she has never sold
1980
MOTHER-IN-LAW
Tell me something
you say
Not: What are you working on now, is there anyone special,
how is the job
do you mind coming back to an empty house
what do you do on Sundays
Tell me something …
Some secret
we both know and have never spoken?
Some sentence that could flood with light
your life, mine?
Tell me what daughters tell their mothers
everywhere in the world, and I and only I
even have to ask….
Tell me something.
Lately, I hear it: Tell me something true,
daughter-in-law, before we part,
tell me something true before I die
And time was when I tried.
You married my son, and so
strange as you are, you’re my daughter
Tell me….
I’ve been trying to tell you, mother-in-law
that I think I’m breaking in two
and half of me doesn’t even want to love
I can polish this table to satin because I don’t care
I am trying to tell you, I envy
the people in mental hospitals their freedom
and I can’t live on placebos
or Valium, like you
A cut lemon scours the smell of fish away
You’ll feel better when the children are in school
I would try to tell you, mother-in-law
but my anger takes fire from yours and in the oven
the meal bursts into flames
Daughter-in-law, before we part
tell me something true
I polished the table, mother-in-law
and scrubbed the knives with half a lemon
the way you showed me to do
I wish I could tell you—
Tell me!
They think I’m weak and hold
things back from me. I agreed to this years ago.
Daughter-in-law, strange as you are,
tell me something true
tell me something
Your son is dead
ten years, I am a lesbian,
my children are themselves.
Mother-in-law, before we part
shall we try again? Strange as I am,
strange as you are? What do mothers
ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world?
Is there a question?
Ask me something.
1980
HEROINES
Exceptional
even deviant
you draw your long skirts
across the nineteenth century
Your mind
burns long after death
not like the harbor beacon
but like a pyre of driftwood
on the beach
You are spared
illiteracy
death by pneumonia
teeth which leave the gums
the seamstress’ clouded eyes
the mill-girl’s shortening breath
by a collection
of circumstances
soon to be known as
class privilege
The law says you can possess nothing
in a world
where property is everything
You belong first to your father
then to him who
chooses you
if you fail to marry
you are without recourse
unable to earn
a workingman’s salary
forbidden to vote
forbidden to speak
in public
if married you are legally dead
the law says
you may not bequeath property
save to your children
or male kin
that your husband
has the right
of the slaveholder
to hunt down and re-possess you
should you escape
You may inherit slaves
but have no power to free them
your skin is fair
you have been taught that light
came
to the Dark Continent
with white power
that the Indians
live in filth
and occult animal rites
Your mother wore corsets
to choke her spirit
which if you refuse
you are jeered for refusing
you have heard many sermons
and have carried
your own interpretations
locked in your heart
You are a woman
strong in health
through a collection
of circumstances
soon to be known
as class privilege
which if you break
the social compact
you lose outright
When you open your mouth in public
human excrement
is flung at you
you are exceptional
in personal circumstance
in indignation
you give up believing
in protection
in Scripture
in man-made laws
respectable as you look
you are an outlaw
Your mind burns
not like the harbor beacon
but like a fire
of fiercer origin
you begin speaking out
and a great gust of freedom
rushes in with your words
yet still you speak
in the shattered language
of a partial vision
You draw your long skirts
deviant
across the nineteenth century
registering injustice
failing to make it whole
How can I fail to love
your clarity and fury
how can I give you
all your due
take courage from your courage
honor your exact
legacy as it is
recognizing
as well
that it is not enough?
1980
GRANDMOTHERS
1. Mary Gravely Jones
We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,
always the formal guest under my father’s roof:
you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.
I see you walking up and down the garden,
restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem
my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.
You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,
yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,
ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.
One summer night you sat with my sister and me
in the wooden glider long after twilight,
holding us there with streams of pent-up words.
You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,
had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,
your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.
You married straight out of the convent school,
typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,
you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared
about your mind, you might have ended
elsewhere than in that glider
reciting your unwritten novels to the children.
2. Hattie Rice Rich
Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me,
you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china,
lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom
summer and fall, then took the Pullman train
in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama,
shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter.
Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone,
how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg,
fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread, took the street-car
downtown shopping
endlessly for your son’s whims, the whims of genius,
kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily.
All through World War Two the forbidden word
Jewish was barely uttered in your son’s house;
your anger flared over inscrutable things.
Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed,
knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing
your one brief memorable scene of rebellion:
you didn’t want to go back South that year.
You were never “Grandmother Rich” but “Anana”;
you had money of your own but you were homeless,
Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch,
dispersed among the children and grandchildren.
3. Granddaughter
Easier to encapsulate your lives
in a slide-show of impressions given and taken,
to play the child or victim, the projectionist,
easier to invent a script for each of you,
myself still at the center,
than to write words in which you might have found
yourselves, looked up at me and said
“Yes, I was like that; but I was something more….”
Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi;
the “war between the states” a living memory
its aftermath the plague-town closing
its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons.
I can almost touch that little town….
a little white town rimmed with Negroes,
making a deep shadow on the whiteness.
Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind
—twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—
in those defended hamlets of half-truth
broken in two by one strange idea,
“blood” the all-powerful, awful theme—
what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe
the daughter of one of you—Amnesia was the answer.
1980
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
For Michelle Cliff
I.
Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett
driving with you in springroad
like a streambed unwinding downhill
fiddlehead ferns uncurling
spring peepers ringing sweet and cold
while we talk yet again
of dark and light, of blackness, whiteness, numbness
rammed through the heart like a stake
trying to pull apart the threads
from the dried blood of the old murderous uncaring
halting on bridges in bloodlight
where the freshets call out freedom
to frog-thrilling swamp, skunk-cabbage
trying to sense the conscience of these hills
knowing how the single-minded, pure
solutions bleached and dessicated
within their perfect flasks
for it was not enough to be New England
as every event since has testified:
New England’s a shadow-country, always was
it was not enough to be for abolition
while the spirit of the masters
flickered in the abolitionist’s heart
it was not enough to name ourselves anew
while the spirit of the masters
calls the freedwoman to forget the slave
With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
If there’s a conscience in these hills
it hurls that question
unquenched, relentless, to our ears
wild and witchlike
ringing every swamp
II.
The mountain laurel in bloom
constructed like needlework
tiny half-pulled stitches piercing
flushed and stippled petals
here in these woods it grows wild
midsummer moonrise turns it opal
the night breathes with its clusters
protected species
meaning endangered
Here in these hills
this valleywe have felt
a kind of freedom
planting the soilhave known
hours of a calm, intense and mutual solitude
reading and writing
trying to clarifyconnect
past and presentnear and far
the Alabama quilt
the Botswana basket
historythe dark crumble
of last year’s compost
filtering softly through your living hand
but here as well we face
instantaneous violenceambushmale
dominion on a back road
to escape in a locked carwindows shut
skimming the ditchyour split-second
survival reflex taking on the world
as it isnot as we wish it
as it isnot as we work for it
to be
III.
Strangers are an endangered species
In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst
cocktails are servedthe scholars
gather in celebration
their pious or clinical legends
festoon the walls like imitations
of period patterns
(… and, as I feared, my “life” was made a “victim”)
The remnants pawedthe relics
the cult assembled in the bedroom
and youwhose teeth were set on edge by churches
resist your shine
escape
are found
nowhere
unless in words
(your own)
All we are strangers—dear—The world is not
acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted
with her. And Pilgrims!—Do you hesitate? and
Soldiers oft—some of us victors, but those I do
not see tonight owing to the smoke.—We are hungry,
and thirsty, sometimes—We are barefoot—and cold—
This place is large enough for both of us
the river-fog will do for privacy
this is my third and last address to you
with the hands of a daughter I would cover you
from all intrusioneven my own
sayingrest to your ghost
with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands
open or closed as they prefer to lie
and ask no more of who or why or wherefore
with the hands of a mother I would close the door
on the rooms you’ve left behind
and silently pick up my fallen work
IV
The river-fog will do for privacy
on the low road a breath
here, there, a cloudiness floating on the blacktop
sunflower heads turned black and bowed
the seas of corn a stubble
the old routes flowing north, if not to fr
eedom
no human figure now in sight
(with whom do you believe your lot is cast?)
only the functional figure of the scarecrow
the cut corn, ground to shreds, heaped in a shape
like an Indian burial mound
a haunted-looking, ordinary thing
The work of winter starts fermenting in my head
how with the hands of a lover or a midwife
to hold back till the time is right
force nothing, be unforced
accept no giant miracles of growth
by counterfeit light
trust roots, allow the days to shrink
give credence to these slender means
wait without sadness and with grave impatience
here in the north where winter has a meaning
where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen
where nothing is promised
learn what an underground journey
has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code
let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.
V.
Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Traila parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel
A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura
All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country
I want our own earthnot the satellites, our
world as it isif not as it might be
then as it is:male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom
the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch
watching:will we do better?
The tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits
of placewho understand travel but not amnesia
The world as it is:not as her users boast
damaged beyond reclamation by their using
Ourselves as we arein these painful motions
Collected Poems Page 37