The Giant Book of Poetry
Page 41
passed glassed-in booths of lurking rodents—
had I known I’d find what I came for at last?
How did we get here, dear sloth, my soul, my sister?
Clinging to a tree-limb with your three-toed feet,
your eyes closed tight, you calm my idleness,
my immigrant isolation. But a tiny tamarin monkey
who shares your ersatz rainforest runs at you,
teasing, until you move one slow, dripping,
hairy arm, then the other, the other, the other,
pulling your tear-soaked body, its too-few
vertebrae, its inferior allotment of muscles
along the dead branch, going almost nowhere
slowly as is humanly possible, nudged
by the bright orange primate taunting, nipping,
itching at you all the time, like ambition.
Diane Wakoski (b. 1937)
George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth1
The ultimate
in the un-Romantic:
false teeth
This room became a room where your heaviness
and my heaviness came together,
an overlay of flower petals once new and fresh
pasted together queerly, as for some lady’s hat,
and finally false and stiff, love fearing
to lose itself, locks and keys become inevitable.
The truth is
that George cut down his father’s cherry tree,
his ax making chips of wood
so sweet with sap they could be
sucked, and he stripped, the bark like old bandages
from the tree for kindling.
In this tree he defied his dead father,
the man who could not give him
an education and left him to suffer
the ranting of Adams and others,
those fat sap-cheeked men who said
George did not know enough
to be president. He chopped that tree—
it was no small one—down and the dry leaves rustled
like the feet of cows on grass.
It was then that George lost his teeth. He
fell asleep next to his pile of kindling wood and dreamed
the old father came chasing him with a large penis
swung over his shoulder.
But George filled his mouth with cherries
and swallowed the bleeding flesh
and spit out the stones in a terrible torrent at his father.
With the pits of the
cherries
came all of George’s teeth,
pointed weapons to hurl from the mouth at his father,
We all come to such battles with our own flesh,
spitting out more than we have swallowed,
thus losing part of ourselves.
You came to me thus
with weapons
and this room is strewn with dead flowers
that grew out of my breasts and dropped off
black and weak.
This room is graveled with stones I dropped
from my womb, ossified in my own body
from your rocky white quartz sperm.
This room is built from the lumber of my thigh,
and it is heavy with hate.
George had a set of false teeth
made from the cherry wood. But it was his father’s tree
His lips closed painfully over the stiff set.
There is no question,
either,
where you
got the teeth in your mouth.
Robert Phillips (b. 1938)
Instrument of Choice1
She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,
`
so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba. Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,
its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
its body pressed to hers.
Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.
Charles Simic (b. 1938)
Country Fair2
If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
it doesn’t matter.
we did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
one got used to them quickly
and thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
to be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
and the dog went after it
on four legs, the other two flapping behind,
which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.
Fork1
This strange thing must have crept
right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
worn around the cannibal’s neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
as you stab with it into a piece of meat,
it is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
its head which like your fist
is large, bald, beakless and blind.
Northern Exposure2
When old women say, it smells of snow,
in a whisper barely audible
which still rouses the sick man upstairs
so he opens his eyes wide and lets them fill
with the grayness of the remaining daylight.
When old women say, how Quiet it is,
and truly no one came to visit,
while the one they still haven’t shaved
lifts the wristwatch to his ear and listens.
In it, something small, subterranean
and awful in intent, chews rapidly.
When old women say, time to turn on the lights,
and not a single one gets up to do so,
for now there are loops
and loose knots around their feet
as if someone is scribbling over them
with a piece of charcoal found in the cold stove.
Prodigy1
I grew up bent over a chessboard.
I loved the word endgame.
All my cousins looked worried.
It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.
A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.
That must have been in 1944.
In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.
The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.
I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.
I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.
In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.
The Old World1
I believe in the soul; so far
it hasn’t made much difference.
I remember an afternoon in Sicily.
the ruins of some temple.
Columns fallen in the grass like naked lovers.
The olives and goat cheese tasted delicious
and so did the wine
with which I toasted the coming night,
the darting swallows,
the Saracen wind and moon.
It got darker. There was something
long before there were words:
the evening meal of shepherds …
a fleeting whiteness among the trees …
eternity eavesdropping on time.
The goddess going to bathe in the sea.
She must not be followed.
These rocks, these cypress trees,
may be her old lovers.
Oh to be one of them, the wine whispered to me.
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
Manet’s Olympia1
She reclines, more or less.
Try that posture, it’s hardly languor.
Her right arm sharp angles.
With her left she conceals her ambush.
Shoes but not stockings,
how sinister. The flower
behind her ear is naturally
not real, of a piece
with the sofa’s drapery.
The windows (if any) are shut.
This is indoor sin.
Above the head of the (clothed) maid
is an invisible voice balloon: Slut.
But. Consider the body,
unfragile, defiant, the pale nipples
staring you right in the bull’s-eye.
Consider also the black ribbon
around the neck. What’s under it?
A fine red threadline, where the head
was taken off and glued back on.
The body’s on offer,
but the neck’s as far as it goes.
This is no morsel.
Put clothes on her and you’d have a schoolteacher,
the kind with the brittle whiphand.
There’s someone else in this room.
You, Monsieur Voyeur.
As for that object of yours
she’s seen those before, and better.
I, the head, am the only subject
of this picture.
You, Sir, are furniture.
Get stuffed.
Miss July Grows Older1
How much longer can I get away
with being so fucking cute?
Not much longer.
The shoes with bows, the cunning underwear
with slogans on the crotch—Knock Here
and so forth—
will have to go, along with the cat suit.
After a while you forget
what you really look like.
You think your mouth is the size it was.
You pretend not to care.
When I was young I went with my hair
hiding one eye, thinking myself daring;
off to the movies in my jaunty pencil
skirt and elastic cinch-belt,
chewed gum, left lipstick
imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery
sighs on the cigarettes of men
I hardly knew and didn’t want to.
Men were a skill, you have to have
good hands, breathe into
their nostrils, as for horses. It was something I did well,
like playing the flute, although I don’t.
In the forest of grey stems there are standing pools,
tan-colored, choked with the brown leaves.
Through them you can see an arm, a shoulder,
when the light is right, with the sky clouded.
The train goes past silos, through meadows,
the winter wheat on the fields like scary fur.
I still get letters, although not many.
A man writes me, requesting true-life stories
about bad sex. He’s doing an anthology.
He got my name off an old calendar,
the photo that’s mostly bum and daisies,
back when my skin had the golden slick
of fresh-spread margarine.
Not rape, he says, but disappointment,
more like a defeat of expectations.
Dear Sir, I reply, I never had any.
Bad sex, that is.
It was never the sex, it was the other things,
the absence of flowers, the death threats,
the eating habits at breakfast.
I notice I’m using the past tense.
Through the vaporous cloud
of chemicals that enveloped you
like a glowing eggshell, an incense,
doesn’t disappear: it just gets larger
and takes in more. You grow out
of sex like a shrunk dress
into your common senses, those you share
with whatever’s listening. The way the sun
moves through the hours becomes important,
the smeared raindrops
on the window, buds
on the roadside weeds, the sheen
of spilled oil on a raw ditch
filling with muddy water.
Don’t get me wrong: with the lights out
I’d still take on anyone,
if I had the energy to spare.
But after a while these flesh arpeggios get boring,
like Bach over and over;
too much of one kind of glory.
When I was all body I was lazy.
I had an easy life, and was not grateful.
Now there are more of me.
Don’t confuse me with any hen-leg elbows;
what you get is no longer
what you see.
Variations on the Word Sleep1
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
You Fit Into Me1
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
A Dream of Jealousy2
Walking with you and another lady
in wooded parkland, the whispering grass
ran its fingers through our guessing silence
and the trees opened into a shady
unexpected clearing where we sat down.
I think the candor of the light dismayed us.
We talked about desire and being jealous,
our conversation a loose single gown
or a white picnic tablecloth spread out
like a book or manners in the wilderness.
“Show me,” I said to our companion, what
I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.”
And she consented. O neither these verses
nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.
Clearances1
5
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
made me think the damp must still be in them
but when I took my corners of the linen
and pulled against he
r, first straight down the hem
and then diagonally, then flapped and shook
the fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
they’d make a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
for a split second as if nothing had happened
for nothing had that had not always happened
beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
coming close again by holding back
in moves where I was x and she was o
inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
Punishment2
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkening combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
ReQuiem for the Croppies1
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley …