a man has to ask it
a woman has to answer
you don’t even think
2
What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud
what a gone-and-come tidepool
what a look into eternity I took and did not return it
what a book I made myself
what a quicksilver study
bright little bloodstain
liquid pouches escaping
What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump
splitting
into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which
the sun’s eclipse could seem normal
what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask
eager to sinkto be found
to disembodywhat a mass of swimmy legs
3
Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face
laying hands first on your head
onto whose thighs pulled down your head
which fear of mine would have wound itself
around which of yourscould we have taken itnakedness
without spermin what insurrectionary
convulsion would we have done itmouth to mouth
mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anusearlobe to nipple
what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts
what tears boil up through sweat to bathe
what humiliatoriumswhat layers of imposture
What heroic tremor
released into pure moisture
might have soaked our shapetwo-headedavid
into your heretic
linen-service
sheets?
1997
“THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES”
1
The taxi meter clicking up
loose change who can afford to pay
basalt blurring spectral headlights
darkblue stabbed with platinum
raincoats glassy with evening wet
the city gathering
itself for darkness
into a bitter-chocolate vein
the east side with its trinkets
the west side with its memories
2
Wherever you had to connect:
question of passport, glances, bag
dumped late on the emptied carousel
departure zones
where all could become mislaid, disinvented
undocumented, unverified
all but the footprint of your soul
in the cool neutral air
till the jumbo jet groaned and gathered
itself over Long Island
gathered you into your earth-craving
belly-self, that desire
3
Gaze through the sliced-glass window
nothing is foreign here
nothing you haven’t thought or taught
nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know
your old poets and painters knew it
knocking back their wine
you’re just in a cab driven wild
on the FDR by a Russian Jew
who can’t afford to care if he lives or dies
you rode with him long ago
4
Between two silvered glass urns an expensive
textile is shouldered
it’s after dark now, floodlight
pours into the wired boutique
there are live roses in the urns
there are security codes
in the wallthere are children, dead, near death
whose fingers worked this
intricate
desirable thing
—nothing you haven’t seen on your palm
nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know
5
After one stroke she looks at the river
remembers her name—Muriel
writes it in her breath
on the big windowpane
never again perhaps
to walk in the city freely
but here is her landscape this old
industrial building converted
for artists
her riverthe Lordly Hudson
Paul named itwhich has no peer
in Europe or the East
her mind on that waterwidening
6
Among five men walks a woman
tall as the tallest man, taller than several
a mixed creature
from country povertygood schooling
and from that position seeing
further than many
beauty, fame, notwithstandingstanding
for something else
—Where do you come from?—
—Como tú, like you, from nothing—
Julia de Burgos, of herself, fallen
in Puerto Rican Harlem
7
Sometime tonight you’ll fall down
on a bed far from your heart’s desire
in the city as it is
for you now:her face or his
private across an aisle
throttling uptown
bent over clasped hands or
staring off then suddenly glaring:
Back off! Don’t ask!you will meet those eyes
(none of them meeting)
8
The wrapped candies from Cleveland
The acclaim of East St. Louis
deadweight trophies borne
through interboro fissures of the mind
in search of Charlie Parker
—Where are you sleeping tonight? with whom?
in crippled Roebling’s harbor room
where he watched his bridge transpire?—
HartMilesMurielJuliaPaul
you will meet the eyes you were searching for
and the day will break
as we say, it breaks
as we don’t say, of the night
as we don’t say of the night
1997
RUSTED LEGACY
Imagine a city where nothing’s
forgivenyour deed adheres
to you like a scar, a tattoobut almost everything’s
forgottendeer flattened leaping a highway for food
the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head
the small boys’ punishing of the frogs
—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions
Imagine the architecturethe governance
the men and the women in power
—tell me if it is not true you still
live in that city.
Imagine a city partitioneddivorced from its hills
where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices
a city brailling through fog
thicket and twisted wire
into dark’s velvet dialectic
sewers which are also rivers
art’s unchartered aquifersthe springhead
sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night
I finger the glass beads I strung and wore
under the pines while the arrests were going on
(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)
They brought trays with little glasses of cold water
into the dark parka final village gesture
before the villages were gutted.
They were trying to save what they could
—tell me if this is not the same city.
I have forced myself to come back like a daughter
required to put her mother’s house in order
whose hands need terrible gloves to handle
the medicinalsthe disease packed in those linens
Accomplished criminal I’ve been but
c
an I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets
into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter
like stonebut with water pleating across
Let water be water let stone be stone
Tell me is this the same city.
This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust
crammed with memory in a place
of little anecdotesno one left
to go around gathering the full dissident story?
Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips
yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears
—for one self only? each encysts a city.
1997
A LONG CONVERSATION
—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree
could you forget?do you
remember?not to
know you were cold?Altercations
from porchescolor still high in your cheeks
the leap for the catch
the game getting wilder as the lights come on
catching your death it was said
your death of cold
something you couldn’t see ahead, you couldn’t see
(energy:Eternal Delight)
•
a long conversation
between persistence and impatience
between the bench of forced confessions
hip from groin swiveled
apart
young tongues torn in the webbing
the order of the cities
founded on disorder
and intimate resistance
desire exposed and shameless
as the flags go by
•
Sometime looking backward
into this future, straining
neck and eyes I’ll meet your shadow
with its enormous eyes
you who will want to know
what this was all about
Maybe this is the beginning of madness
Maybe it’s your conscience …
as you, straining neck and eyes
gaze forward into this past:
what did it mean to you?
—to receive “full human rights”
or the blue aperture of hope?
•
Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear
who came in when the nights were
cold and drear and who sat where
well helmeted and who
was showing off his greasy hair
Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly
who spoke thickly or not at all
how you decided what you’d abide
what was proud and thus allowed
how you knew what to do
with all the city threw at you
Mrs. Bartender tell me true
we’ve been keeping an eye on you
and this could be a long conversation
we could have a long accommodation
•
On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.
Like a little cell. Let’s not aggrandize ourselves; we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.
Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.
•
A long conversation
pierced, jammed, scratched out:
bans, preventive detention, broken mouths
and on the scarred bench sequestered
a human creature with bloody wings
its private parts
reamed
still trying to speak
A hundred and fifty years. In 1848 a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.
So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil, we can judge. Mildew doesn’t worry us. We don’t want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … it creates a world after its own image.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed—a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
—Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?
She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there’s that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.
Someone: —Technology’s changing the most ordinary forms of human contact—who can’t see that, in their own life?
—But technology is nothing but a means.
—Someone, I say, makes a killing off war. You:—I’ve been telling you, that’s the engine driving the free market. Not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.
Another woman: —But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?
He comes in late, as usual he’s been listening to sounds outside, the tide scraping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn’t speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us.—It isn’t nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is there a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?
Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: —I can’t stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.
All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re only
as we weretrying
to keep an eye
on the weapons on the street
and under the street
Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc … & if it does not improve your thinking about the important question of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?
You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.
His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarser undertone.
At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.
•
So now your paledark face thrown up
into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes
o
n the hurl and flutter of the gull’s wings
over your dark leggings their leathery legs
flash past your hurling arm one hand
snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close
You, barefoot on that narrow strand
with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier
you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay
in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair
•
Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening
my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light
… small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants—
all these sink gradually into the proletariat
partly because their
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which
modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the
competition with the large capitalists
partly because their specialized
skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.
Thus, the proletariat is recruited
from all classes of the population. …
pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay
Collected Poems Page 56