Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Adrienne Rich - Fox

 FOX



BY ADRIENNE RICH


     Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

     Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

     Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

     Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

     An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

     Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988

     Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985

     Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

     The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984

     Sources

     A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981

     On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978

     The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

     Twenty-one Love Poems

     Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

     Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

     Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

     The Will to Change

     Leaflets

     Necessities of Life

     Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

     The Diamond Cutters

     A Change of World


FOX


     POEMS 1998–2000


 ADRIENNE RICH


      

     W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

     NEW YORK • LONDON


    Copyright © 2001 by Adrienne Rich

     All rights reserved

     For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

     Production manager: Leelo Märjamaa-Reintal.

     Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     Rich, Adrienne Cecile.
  Fox: poems 1998–2000 / by Adrienne Rich.
     p. cm.
  ISBN: 978-0-393-07078-1
    I. Title.
     PS3535.I233 F69 2001
811'.54—dc21
                                                                2001031240
     W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

     W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London
W1T3QT

     My appreciation to the journals where these poems first appeared:
Connect, Doubletake, Fence, Paris Review,
 Poetry International, Sulfur, The American Poetry Review,
 The Progressive, The Radcliffe Quarterly


    For Michelle, again,
after twenty-five years

     Y in alto cielo, su fondo estrellado
 Y en las multitudes, la mujer que amo


CONTENTS


      Victory

      Veterans Day

      For This

      Regardless

      Signatures

      Nora's Gaze

      Architect

      Fox

      Messages

      Fire

      Twilight

      Octobrish

      Second Sight

      Grating

      Noctilucent Clouds

      If Your Name Is on the List

      1999

      Terza Rima

      Four Short Poems

      Rauschenberg's Bed

      Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

      Ends of the Earth

      Notes


FOX



VICTORY


     Something spreading underground won't speak to us
     under skin won't declare itself
     not all life-forms want dialogue with the
     machine-G-ds in their drama hogging down
     the deep bush clear-cutting refugees
     from ancient or transient villages into
     our opportunistic fervor to search
     crazily for a host a lifeboat
     Suddenly instead of art we're eyeing
     organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
     cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows
     a beautiful tumor
     I guess you're not alone I fear you're alone
     There's, of course, poetry:
     awful bridge rising over naked air: I first
     took it as just a continuation of the road:
     "a masterpiece of engineering
     praised, etc." then on the radio:
     "incline too steep for ease of, etc."
     Drove it nonetheless because I had to
     this being how—So this is how
     I find you: alive and more
     As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
     I'm driving to your side
     —an intimate collusion—
     packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain
     glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck
     rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden

     poetries, old glue shredding from their spines
     my time exposure of the Leonids
     over Joshua Tree

     As if we're going to win this O because
     If you have a sister I am not she
     nor your mother nor you my daughter
     nor are we lovers or any kind of couple
     except in the intensive care

     of poetry and

     death's master plan architecture-in-progress
     draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome
     the master left on your doorstep
     with a white card in black calligraphy:
     Make what you will of this

     As if leaving purple roses
     If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
     I tell you a letter from the master
     is lying on my own doorstep
     glued there with leaves and rain
     and I haven't bent to it yet
     if I tell you I surmise

     he writes differently to me:
     Do as you will, you have had your life

     many have not
     signing it in his olden script:
     Meister aus Deutschland

     In coldest Europe end of that war
     frozen domes iron railings frozen stoves lit in the streets
     memory banks of cold
     the Nike of Samothrace
     on a staircase wings in blazing
     backdraft said to me
     : : to everyone she met
     Displaced, amputated never discount me

     Victory
     indented in disaster striding at the head of stairs
     for Tory Dent
     1998

VETERANS DAY


     1
     No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face
     this body swung home from home sewn into its skin
     Let you entrusted to close the box
     for final draping take care
     what might be due
     to the citizen wounded
     by no foreign blast nor shell (is this
     body a child's? if? why?)
     eyes hooded in refusal—
     over these to lower the nation's pall, thick flutter
     this body shriveled into itself
     —a normal process they have said
     The face? another story, a flag
     hung upside down against glory's orders
    
     2
     Trying to think about
     something else—what?—when
     the story broke
     the scissor-fingered prestidigitators
     snipped the links of concentration
     State vs memory
     State vs unarmed citizen
     wounded by no foreign blast nor shell
     forced into the sick-field
     brains-out coughing downwind
     backing into the alley hands shielding eyes
     under glare-lit choppers coming through low
    
     3
     In the dream you—is it?—set down
     two packages in brown paper
     saying, Without such means
     there can be no end
     to the wrenching of mind
     from body, the degradation
     no end to everything you hate
     and have exposed, lie upon lie
     I think: We've been dying slowly
     now we'll be blown to bits
     I think you're testing me
     "how vitally we desired disaster"
     You say, there can be no poetry
     without the demolition
     of language, no end to everything you hate
     lies upon lies
     I think: you're testing me
     testing us both
     but isn't this what it means to live—
     pushing further the conditions in which we breathe?
    
     4
     In the college parlor by the fireplace
     ankled and waisted with bells
     he, inclined by nature toward tragic themes
     chants of the eradication of tribal life
     in a blue-eyed trance
     shaking his neckbent silvering hair
     Afterward, wine and cake at the Provost's house
     and this is surely no dream, how the beneficiary
     of atrocities yearns toward innocence
     and this is surely a theme, the vengeful rupture
     of prized familiar ways
     and calculated methods
     for those who were there But for those elsewhere
     it's something else, not herds hunted down cliffs
     maybe a buffalo burger in the
     tribal college cafeteria
     and computer skills after lunch Who wants to be tragic?
     The college coheres out of old quonset huts
     demolition-scavenged doors, donated labor
     used textbooks, no waste, passion
    
     5
     Horned blazing fronds of Sierra ice
     grow hidden rivulets, last evening's raindrop pulses
     in the echeveria's cup next morning, fogdrip darkens the road
     under fire-naked bishop pines
     thick sweats form on skins of pitched-out nectarines, dumpster shrine
     of miracles of truths of mold Rain streaming, stroking
     a broken windowpane
     When the story broke I thought
     I was thinking about water
     how it is most of what we are
     and became bottled chic
     such thoughts are soon interrupted
    
     6
     When the story broke we were trying to think
     about history went on stubbornly thinking
     though history plunged
     with muddy spurs screamed at us for trying
     to plunder its nest seize its nestlings
     capture tame and sell them or something
     after the manner of our kind
     Well, was it our secret hope?
     —a history you could seize
     (as in old folios of "natural history"
     each type and order pictured in its place?)
     —Back to the shambles, comrades,
     where the story is always breaking
     down having to be repaired
    
     7
     Under the small plane's fast shadow an autumn
     afternoon bends sharply
     —swathes of golden membrane, occult blood
     seeping up through the great groves
     where the intestinal the intestate
     blood-cords of the stags are strung from tree to tree
     I know already where we're landing
     what cargo we'll take on
     boxed for the final draping
     coming home from home sewn into its skin
     eyes hooded in refusal
     —what might be due—
     1998–1999

FOR THIS


     If I've reached for your lines (I have)
     like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
     dowsed you for a springhead
     to water my thirst
     dug into my compost skeletons and petals
     you surely meant to catch the light:
     —at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
     stateless underground
     have I a plea?
     If I've touched your finger
     with a ravenous tongue
     licked from your palm a rift of salt
     if I've dreamt or thought you
     a pack of blood fresh-drawn
     hanging darkred from a hook
     higher than my heart
     (you who understand transfusion)
     where else should I appeal?
     A pilot light lies low
     while the gas jets sleep
     (a cat getting toed from stove
     into nocturnal ice)
     language uncommon and agile as truth
     melts down the most intractable silence
     A lighthouse keeper's ethics:
     you tend for all or none
     for this you might set your furniture on fire
     A this we have blundered over
     as if the lamp could be shut off at will
     rescue denied for some
     and still a lighthouse be
     1999

REGARDLESS


     An idea declared itself between us
     clear as a washed wineglass
     that we'd love
     regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed
     my optimism of the will
     regardless
     your wincing at manifestos
     your practice of despair you named
     anarchism
     : : an idea we could meet
     somewhere else a road
     straggling unmarked through ice-plant
     toward an ocean heartless as eternity
     Still hungry for freedom I walked off
     from glazed documents becalmed
     passions time of splintering and sawdust
     pieces lying still I was not myself but
     I found a road like that it straggled
     The ocean still
     looked like eternity
     I drew it on a
     napkin mailed it to you
     On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened
     in liquids your own body has expressed
     : : what stiffens hardest? tears? blood? urine? sweat? the
     first drops from the penis?

     Your glove then meets my hand this 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
     you in long-stiffened gloves still
     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 urethra rising 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 steep with 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 thin a plasterer's term
     you could say he was then

     skating thin ice his stake in white colonnades against the
     thinness of
     ice itself a 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 him an 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 fox Badly I needed
     a vixen for the long time none had come near me
     I needed recognition from a
     triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
     fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
     I needed history of fox briars 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 pelt if my hands could even slide
     past or her body slide between them sharp 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 torn endless
     and sudden
     back far enough it blurts
     into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
     pushed out of a female the 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 city incendiaries abound
     who hate this place stuck to their foot soles
     Michael Burnhard is being held and I
     can tell you about him pushed-out and living
     across the river low-ground given to flooding
     in a shotgun house
     his mother working for a hospital
     or restaurant dumpsters she 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 without 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
     mortar pry 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 kingdom dreamed 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
     beginning Let this not happen
     for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing
     in hot July worn 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 yet she and hers
     her child inside gazing
     at a screen
     and she a reader once now 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 woman neither architect nor engineer construes the
     dustmotes
     of a space primed for neglect
     Indoor, outdoor exhausted air
     Paths that have failed as paths trees
     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
     you not I but 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
     otherness must 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 underside a spectral glare
     abnormal Everything 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 then and then what smallness the soul endures
     rolling out on the ramp from such an isle
     onto the harborless Usonian plateau
     Dear Stranger can I raise a poem
     to justice you 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 corner or 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
     assumptions went 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 future dragging in
     what pure futurity can't use
     Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century
     screams Don't let me go
     Don't let me die Do you forget
     what we were to each other

1999


     Before the acute
     point of the severing
     I wanted to see into my century's
     hinged and beveled mirror
     clear of smoke
     eyes of coal and ruby
     stunned neck the carrier of bricks and diamonds
     brow of moonlit oyster shells
     barbed wire lacework disgracing
     the famous monument
     Behind it spread the old
     indigenous map landscape
     before conquerors horizon ownless

TERZA RIMA


     1
     Hail-spurting sky sun
     splashing off persimmons left
     in the quit garden
     of the quit house The realtor's swaying name
     against this cloudheap this
     surrendered acre
     I would so help me tell you if I could
     how some great teacher
     came to my side and said:
     Let's go down into the underworld
     —the earth already crazed
     Let me take your hand
     —but who would that be?
     already trembling on the broken crust
     who would I trust?
     I become the default derailed memory-raided
     limping
     teacher I never had I lead and I follow
    
     2
     Call it the earthquake trail:
     I lead through live-oak meadows
     to the hillside where the plates shuddered
     rewind the seismic story
     point to the sundered
     fence of 1906 the unmatching rocks
     trace the loop under dark bay branches
     blurred with moss
     behaving like a guide
     Like a novice I lag
     behind with the little snake
     dead on the beaten path
     This will never happen again
    
     3
     At the end of the beaten path we're sold free
     tickets for the celebration
     of the death of history
     The last page of the calendar
     will go up a sheet of flame
     (no one will be permitted on the bridge)
     We'll assemble by letters
     alphabetical
     each ticket a letter
     to view ourselves as giants
     on screen-surround
     in the parking lot
     figures of men and women firmly pushing
     babies in thickly padded prams
     through disintegrating malls
     into the new era
    
     4
     I have lost our way the fault is mine
     ours the fault belongs
     to us I become the guide
     who should have defaulted
     who should have remained the novice
     I as guide failed
     I as novice trembled
     I should have been stronger held us
     together
    
     5
     I thought I was
     stronger my will the ice-sail
     speeding my runners
     along frozen rivers
     bloodied by sunset
     thought I could be forever
     will-ful my sail filled
     with perfect ozone my blades
     flashing clean into the ice
    
     6
     Was that youth? that clear
     sapphire on snow
     a distinct hour
     in Central Park that smell
     on sidewalk and windowsill
     fresh and unmixt
     the blizzard's peace and drama
     over the city
     a public privacy
     waiting

     in the small steamed-up copy shop
     slush tracked in across a wooden floor
     then shivering elated
     in twilight
     at the bus stop with others a public happiness
    
     7
     Not simple is it to do
     a guide's work the novices
     irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor
     knowing not who they are
     every phase of moon an excuse
     for fibrillating
     besides the need in today's world
     to consider
     outreach the new thinking
     —Or: love will strongly move you
     or commerce will
     You want a priest? go to the altar
     where eternal bargains are struck
     want love?
     go down inside your destructible heart
    
     8
     In Almodóvar's film
     we go for truth to the prostitutes' field
     to find past and future
     elegant beaten-up and knifed
     sex without gender
     preyed-on and preying
     transactions zones of play
     the circling drivers
     in search of their desires
     theater of love Ninth Circle
     there are so many teachers
     here no fire can shrink them
     Do you understand? you could get your face
     slashed in such a place
     Do you think this is a movie?
    
     9
     She says: I gave my name and it was taken
     I no longer have my name
     I gave my word and it was broken
     My words are learning
     to walk on crutches
     through traffic
     without stammering
     My name is a prisoner
     who will not name names
     She says: I gave my tongue
     to love and this
     makes it hard to speak
     She says: When my life depended
     on one of two
     opposite terms
     I dared mix beauty with courage
     they were my lovers
     together they were tortured
    
     10
     Sick of my own old poems caught
     on rainshower Fifth Avenue
     in a bookstore
     I reach to a shelf
     and there you are Pier Paolo
     speaking to Gramsci's ashes
     in the old encircling rhyme
     Vivo nel non volere del
     tramontato dopoguerra:
     amando

     il mondo che odio…
     that vernacular voice
     intimately political
     and that was how you died
     so I clasp my book to my heart
     as the shop closes
    
     11
     Under the blackened dull-metal corners
     of the small espresso pot
     a jet flares blue
     a smell tinctures the room
     —some sniff or prescience of
     a life that actually could be
     lived a grain of hope
     a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway
     to pull on our senses
     without them we're prey
     to the failed will
     its science of despair
    
     12
     How I hate it when you ascribe to me
     a "woman's vision"
     cozy with coffeepots drawn curtains
     or leaning in black leather dress
     over your chair
     black fingernail tracing your lines
     overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle
     How I've hated speaking "as a woman"
     for mere continuation
     when the broken is what I saw
     As a woman do I love
     and hate? as a woman
     do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?
     Yes. No. You too
     sexed as you are hating
     this whole thing you keep on it remaking
    
     13
     Where the novice pulls the guide
     across frozen air
     where the guide suddenly grips the shoulder
     of the novice where the moss is golden
     the sky sponged with pink at sunset
     where the urine of reindeer barely vanished
     stings the air like a sharp herb
     where the throat of the clear-cut opens
     across the surrendered forest
     I'm most difficultly
     with you I lead
     and I follow
     our shadows reindeer-huge
     slip onto the map
     of chance and purpose figures
     on the broken crust
     exchanging places bites to eat
     a glance
     2000

FOUR SHORT POEMS


     l
     (driving home from Robin Blaser's reading)
     The moon
     is not romantic. No. It's
     a fact of life and still
     we aren't inured. You would think, it reflects
     the waves not draws them. So
     I'd compel you as I
     have been compelled by you. On the coast road
     between drafts of fog
     that face (and yes, it is
     expressioned) breaking in and out
     doth speak to us
     as he did in his courtliness
     and operatic mystery.
    
     2
     We're not yet out of the everglades
     of the last century
     our body parts are still there

     though we would have our minds careen and swoop
     over the new ocean
     with a wild surmise

     the bloody strings
     tangled and stuck between
     become our lyre

    
     3
     Beethoven's "Appassionata" played on a parlor grand
     piano
     in a small California town by a boy from Prague
     here for a month to learn American
     This is not "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
     Reproduction"
     This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning
     of the transmissible heritage one evening
     then for the whole month droops over the Internet.
    
     4
     From the new crudities, from the old
     apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,
     back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa
     or Kafka of the intransmissible
     tradition
     the stolen secrets in the cleft
     reside and this, beloved poets
     is where our hearts, livers and lights still
     dwell unbeknownst and vital
     for Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi
     2000

RAUSCHENBERG'S BED


     How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes
     unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed
     their exaltation loathing exhaustion
     what horse of night has pawed those sheets
     what talk under the blanket raveled
     what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion
     what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding
     and felt stiff tatters under his fingers
     How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical
     inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow
     How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads
     while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing
     Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts
     sometimes eking forth from its laden springs
     pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne
     Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes
     for the nether hole the everywhere
     How the children sleep and wake
     the children sleep awake upstairs
     How on a single night the driver of roads comes back
     into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer
     leans toward what's there for warmth
     human limbs human crust
     2000

WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT


     I sat down facing the steep place where
     tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the
     redwoods outstanding all
     A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:
     "We are always hungry," the older sister said laughing,
     "and we always bring our food"
     Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that
     speared the redwoods
     We'd gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour
     found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses
     scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper
     stickers
     and postcards of men you wouldn't be left alone with
     a moment if you could help it, illustrating
     the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon
     Your tour was called and you started upward. I went
     back
     to my redwood bench
     "The mystai streamed"

     toward the

     mystery

     But if anything up there was occult
     nothing at ground level was: tiny beings flashing around
     in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby
     grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and
     loved friends
     You could see how it was when each tour was called and
     gathered itself
     who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands
     the languages all different, English the least of these
     I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration
     of sunshafts through the redwoods the great spears
     folding up
     into letters from the sun deposited through dark green
     slots
     each one saying
     I love you but

     I must draw away Believe, I will return
     Then: happiness! your particular figures
     in the descending crowd: Anne, Jacob, Charlie!
     Anne with her sandals off
     in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder
     2000

ENDS OF THE EARTH


     All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set.
     Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.
     Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations dissolve
     into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/
     ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning
     I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds
     questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My
     fear.
     Call it Galisteo but that's not the name of what happened
     here.
     If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces
     lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders
     against the white wall after work and after dark
     but never saw the hand
     how inhale the faint mist of another's gazing, pacing, dozing
     words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware
     thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of
     the earth
     web agitating between my life and another's?
     Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?

NOTES


     Again, I thank the Lannan Foundation for their encouragement and for the breadth of their vision.
     The lines in Spanish in the dedication are from Violeta Parra's "Gracias a la Vida."
     NORA'S GAZE
     Alludes to works by the painter Nora Jaffe (1928–1994). See Clayton Eshleman, "Nora's Roar," in his From Scratch (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), pp. 31–49.
     MESSAGES
     Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): Le silence éternel de ces espaces m'affraye. (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me). See Pensées of Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman's Library no. 874 (London: Dent, 1948), p. 61.
     MANZANAR
     Site of the First War Relocation Center activated in World War II for the internment of Japanese Americans, Manzanar is located east of the Sierra Nevada range and northeast of Death Valley.
     TWILIGHT
     Brownington, Vermont, is the site of the "Old Stone House" completed in 1836 as a dormitory for the Orleans County Grammar School. Its architect and builder, African American Alexander Lucius Twilight, served as principal of the school for most of its existence ("The Old Stone House Museum" [Orleans, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1996]). A working granite quarry still operates in Barre, Vermont.
     NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS
     "Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen 'noctilucent clouds,' which develop about 50 miles above the earth's surface—clouds so high that they reflect the sun's rays long after nightfall…. [G]lobal warming seems to be driving them toward the equator…. In retrospect it will be clear." Bill McKibben, "Indifferent to a Planet in Pain," New York Times, Saturday, 4 September 1999, sec. A.
     "Usonian": The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.
     TERZA RIMA, 3
     Vivo nel non volare…: "I live in the failed will / of the post-war time: / loving the world I hate"—Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Le Ceneri di Gramsci," in Lawrence R. Smith, ed. and trans., The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–81. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1982), pp. 10–11.
     WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT:
     "The mystai streamed toward [the Telestrion]." C. Kerényi, Eleusis, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen series 65, vol. 4 (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1967), p. 82.

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