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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