Collected Poems
Page 58
drops from the penis?
Your glove then meets my handthis is our meeting
Which of us has gone furthest?
To meet you like this I’ve had to rise
from love in a room
of green leaves larger than my clitoris or my brain
in a climate where winter never precisely
does or does not engrave its name on the windowpane
while the Pacific lays down its right of way
to the other side of the world
: : to a table where singed manifestos
curl back crying to be reread
but can I even provoke you
joking or
in tears
youin long-stiffened glovesstill
protector of despair?
For H.C.
1998–1999
SIGNATURES
It would have made no difference who commanded us in
those first hours. …
—veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944
That was no country for old women … Someone from D-Day
at the redgold turn of the party
recites his line of Yeats with a sex-change
someone already stricken
in his urethrarising four times nightly
Went through that and still despises …
Here an old woman’s best country is her art
or it’s not her country
Here the old don’t pity the old
As when young we scale our rock face
relentless, avid
looking sometimes back at the whole terrain:
—those scrapings on the rocks
are they a poet’s signature?
a mother’s who tried for all her worth to cling
to the steepwith the small soft claws gripping her back?
1998
NORA’S GAZE
Clayton, we can’t
have it both ways:
Nora’s art
was erotic
not sensual
yet how can that be?
Mostly, she handled
the body in a bleak light
—surely that was her right
to make such paintings, drawings more
than paintings anyway—
grey-brown, black, white-grey
—not the usual hues encoding
sensual encounter
but how she figured it
and stained it
And had she painted
the deep-dyed swollen shaft
the balls’ magenta shadow
in dark dominion
that
might have “done well”
But to paint and paint again
the penis as a workaday
routine
wintry morning thing
under a gaze
expert and merciful as hers
that was heinous
and her genius
still lies chained
till that is told
You a man
I a woman tell it
none of it lessens her
For Clayton Eshleman
1998
ARCHITECT
Nothing he had done before
or would try for later
will explain or atone
this facile suggestion of crossbeams
languid elevations traced on water
his stake in white colonnades cramping his talent
showing up in
facsimile mansions overbearing the neighborhood
his leaving the steel rods out of the plinths
(bronze raptors gazing from the boxwood)
You could say he spread himself too thina plasterer’s term
you could say he was then
skating thin icehis stake in white colonnades against the
thinness of
ice itselfa slickened ground
Could say he did not then love
his art enough to love anything more
Could say he wanted the commission so
badly betrayed those who hired himan artist
who in dreams followed
the crowds who followed him
Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized
hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung
by hands expert and steady on powerful machines
his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the
other (as it did in Egypt)
—while devising the little fountain to run all night
outside the master bedroom
1998–1999
FOX
I needed foxBadly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated faceburnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of foxbriars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox
And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her peltif my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between themsharp truth distressing surfaces
of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms
For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and tornendless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a femalethe yet-to-be woman
1998
MESSAGES
I love the infinity of these silent spaces
Darkblue shot with deathrays but only a short distance
Keep of course water and batteries, antibiotics
Always look at California for the last time
We weren’t birds, were we, to flutter past each other
But what were we meant to do, standing or lying down
Together on the bare slope where we were driven
The most personal feelings become historical
Keep your hands knotted deep inside your sweater
While the instruments of force are more credible than beauty
Inside a glass paperweight dust swirls and settles (Manzanar)
Where was the beauty anyway when we shouldered past each other
Where is it now in the hollow lounge
Of the grounded airline where the cameras
For the desouling project are being handed out
Each of us instructed to shoot the others naked
If you want to feel the true time of our universe
Put your hands over mine on the stainless pelvic rudder
No, here(sometimes the most impassive ones will shudder)
The infinity of these spaces comforts me
Simple textures falling open like a sweater
1999
FIRE
in the old cityincendiaries abound
who hate this place stuck to their foot soles
Michael Burnhard is being held and I
can tell you about himpushed-out and living
across the riverlow-ground given to flooding
in a shotgun house
his mother working for a hospital
or restaurantdumpstersshe said a restaurant
hospital cafeteria who cares
what story
you bring home with the food
I can tell you Michael knows beauty
from the frog-iris in mud
the squelch of ankles
stalking the waterlily
the blues beat flung across water from the old city
Michael Burnhard in Black History Month
not his month only he was born there
not black and almost with
out birthday one
February 29 Michael Burnhard
on the other side of the river
glancing any night at his mother’s wrists
crosshatched raw
beside the black-opal stream
Michael Burnhard still beside himself
when fire took the old city
lying like a black spider on its back
under the satellites and a few true stars
1999
TWILIGHT
Mudseason dusk schoolmaster:pressed out of rain my spine
on your grey dormitory
chiseled from Barre
caught now in your blurred story
hauling my jacket overshoulder
against your rectilinear stones
Out of the rain I waited
in a damp parlor ghosted
with little gifts and candy toys
pitting my brain against your will
Could rays from my pupils dissect
mortarpry boards from floor
probe the magnetic field of your
granitic clarity
Schoolmaster: could swear I’ve caught your upper-window profile
bent down on this little kingdomdreamed your advice:
Always read with the dark falling over your left shoulder
—seen you
calculate volume of blocks required
inspect the glazing
pay the week’s wages
blueprints scrolled under arm
treading home over snow
driven virgin then cow-pied
five o’clock’s blue eyeballs
strung open day after day
a few seconds longer
an ascendant planet
following in your footprints possibly
1999
OCTOBRISH
—it is to have these dreams
still married/where
you tell me In those days
instead of working
I was playing on the shore with a wolf
coming to a changed
house/you
glad of the changes
but still almost
transparent
and bound to disappear
A life thrashes/half unlived/its passions
don’t desist/displaced from their own habitat
like other life-forms take up other dwellings
so in my body’s head
so in the stormy spaces
that life
leads itself which could not be led
1999
SECOND SIGHT
1
Tonight I could write many verses
beginningLet this not happen
for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing
in hot Julyworn webbed-plastic
chairs aglare on the nickel-colored balcony
foreseeing in tracked patterns
of a project landscape
the hammer brought
down by one child upon another’s skull
Not moved yetsheand hers
her child insidegazing
at a screen
and she a reader oncenow a woman foreseeing
elbows sore with the weight
she has placed on them
a woman on a balcony with a child inside
gazing at a screen
2
A womanneither architect nor engineerconstrues the dustmotes
of a space primed for neglect
Indoor, outdoor exhausted air
Paths that have failed as pathstrees
that have failed as trees
Practiced in urban literacy she
traverses and assesses streets and bridges
tilting the cumbrous ornamental sewer lids ajar
in search of reasons underground
which there why this must be
1999–2000
GRATING
I
Not having worn
the pearly choker
of innocence around my throat
willed by a woman
whose leavings I can’t afford
Not having curled up like that girl
in maternal gauze
Not
having in great joy gazing
on another woman’s thick fur
believed I was unsexed for that
Now let me not
younot Ibut who ought to be
hang like a leaf twisting
endlessly toward the past
nor reach for a woman’s skinned-off mask
to hide behind
You
not I but who ought to be
get me out of this, human
through some
air vent, grating
II
There’s a place where beauty names itself:
“I am beauty,” and becomes irreproachable
to the girl transfixed beside the mother
the artist and her mother
There must be a color for the mother’s
Othernessmust be some gate of chalk some slit or stain
through which the daughter sees outside that otherness
Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags
still smelling of umbrage
that can be crushed into a color
there must be such a color
if, lying full length
on the studio floor
the artist were to paint herself
in monochrome
from a mirror in the ceiling
an elongated figure suspended across the room
first horizontal
then straight up and naked
free of beauty
ordinary in fact
III
The task is to row a strong-boned, legally blind
hundred-and-one-year-old woman
across the Yangtze River
An emergency or not, depending
Others will have settled her in the boat with pillows but the arms
wielding the oars will be yours
crepitus of the shoulders yours
the conversation still hers
Three days’ labor
with you … that was torture
—to pilot through current and countercurrent
requiring silence and concentration
There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies
—as might have been said
in an older diction
Try to row deadweight someone without
death skills
Shouldering the river a pilot figures
how
The great rock shoulders overlook
in their immensity all decisions
1999–2000
NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS
Late night on the undersidea spectral glare
abnormalEverything below
must and will betray itself
as a floodlit truckstop out here
on the North American continent stands revealed
and we’re glad because it’s late evening and no town
but this, diesel, regular, soda, coffee, chips, beer and video
no government no laws but LIGHT in the continental dark
and thenand thenwhat smallness the soul endures
rolling out on the ramp from such an isle
onto the harborless Usonian plateau
Dear Strangercan I raise a poem
to justiceyou not here
with your sheet-lightning apprehension
of nocturne
your surveyor’s eye for distance
as if any forest’s fallen tree were for you
a possible hypotenuse
Can I wake as I once woke with no thought of you
into the bad light of a futureless motel
This thing I am calling justice:
I could slide my hands into your leather gloves
but my feet would not fit into your boots
Every art
leans on some other:yours
on mine in spasm retching
last shreds of vanity
We swayed together like cripples when the wind
suddenly turned a corneror was it we who turned
Once more I invite you into this
in retrospect it will be clear
1999
IF YOUR NAME IS ON THE LIST
If your name is on the list of judges
you’re one of them
though you fought their hardening
assumptionswent and stood
alone by the window while they
concurred
It wasn’t enough to hold your singular
minority opinion
You had to face the three bridges
down the river
your old ambitions
flamboyant in bloodstained mist
You had to carry off under arm
and write up in perfect loneliness
your soul-splitting dissent
Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country
In all the new inhere old judgments
loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke
We want to be part of the futuredragging in
what pure futurity can’t use
Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century
screamsDon’t let me go
Don’t let me dieDo you forget
what we were to each other