Out of the bathroom mirror it glittered at me.
I plucked it, feeling thirty creep in my joints,
and found it silver. It does not melt.
My twentieth birthday lean as glass
spring vacation I stayed in the college town
twanging misery’s electric banjo offkey.
I wanted to inject love right into the veins
of my thigh and wake up visible:
to vibrate color
like the minerals in stones under black light.
My best friend went home without loaning me money.
Hunger was all of the time the taste of my mouth.
Now I am ripened and sag a little from my spine.
More than most I have been the same ragged self
in all colors of luck dripping and dry,
yet love has nested in me and gradually eaten
those sense organs I used to feel with.
I have eaten my hunger soft and my ghost grows stronger.
Gradually, I am turning to chalk,
to humus, to pages and pages of paper,
to fine silver wire like something a violin
could be strung with, or somebody garroted,
or current run through: silver truly,
this hair, shiny and purposeful as forceps
if I knew how to use it.
A married walk in a hot place
In a dusty square hemmed by pink stucco
smelling of exhaust, donkey turds and scented oil,
a tough shoves a woman loaded with sticks,
black-shawled, wizened as a dung beetle, into a wall.
He smooths his hair as he ambles.
The bus ends here. Paths go on.
In this landscape always there is someone
trying to break food from the mountains.
We came because winter had numbed us
and a torn man finally froze into the ground.
Two o’clock in hospital corridors, half
past five in the long winding halls of the body,
nights blurring, death rattled and rattled the throat
that had been his, that had been your father.
Marionette of reflexes suspended in cords
running up to bottles, down to machines,
while nurses cooed and doctors told codliver lies.
The blind eyes swerved in the swollen slots.
Legless the fish body flopped flopped
in a net of merciless functions.
We are animals the tip of a scalpel unselves.
Bulldust floats on the broken road. The brass sky
jangles. Goats’ hot amber eyes of rapists watch.
No shade, but squat by this thorny blistered slope,
your face talon sharp with the habit of question,
block body and a roundness in your arms.
Predators, we met and set up housekeeping,
bedded now on rocks and potsherds and sage.
The arid heavy whoosh of a raven’s flapping
chases his shadow across your pared face.
Sometimes here noon dust wisps are the dead.
On a rim a new war memorial sticks up
toothwhite. Above the joining of three defiles
totter the breached grey battlements of Phyle.
Inside among poppies we eat chicken, talking
old revolution. One standing lintel
gapes at the ravine. When the last man dies
these rocks will turn back to rock.
Only nine in the village died this winter,
the old woman said, offering nuts and sheepsmilk,
giving face of cypress, hands of olivewood,
giving kindness, myth and probably disease.
Twisted by pain I vomit. Then we grip hands
and go scrambling back over Parnes on goatpaths,
you and I, my wary love, eating our death as it eats us,
feeding each other on our living flesh
and thriving on that poison
mouthful by hot mouthful, cold breath by breath.
The Peaceable Kingdom
A painting by Edward Hicks, 1780–1849, hung in the Brooklyn Museum
Creamcheese babies square and downy as bolsters
in nursery clothing nestle among curly lions and lowing cattle,
a wolf of scythe and ashes, a bear smiling in sleep.
The paw of a leopard with eyes of headlights
rests near calf and vanilla child.
In the background under the yellow autumn tree
Indians and settlers sign a fair treaty.
The mist of dream cools the lake.
On the first floor of the museum Indian remains
are artfully displayed. Today is August sixth, Hiroshima.
Man eats man with sauces of newsprint.
The vision of that kingdom of satisfaction
where all bellies are round with sweet grasses
blows on my face pleasantly
though I have eaten five of those animals.
All the rich flat black land,
the wide swirlmarked browngreen rivers,
leafy wheat baking tawny, corn’s silky spikes,
sun bright kettles of steel and crackling wires, turn into
infinite shining weapons that scorch the earth.
The pride of our hive
packed into hoards of murderous sleek bombs.
We glitter and spark righteousness.
We are blinding as a new car in the sunshine.
Gasoline rains from our fluffy clouds.
Everywhere our evil froths polluting the waters—
in what stream on what mountain do you miss
the telltale brown sludge and rim of suds?
Peace: the word lies like a smooth turd
on the tongues of politicians ordering
the sweet flesh seared on the staring bone.
Guilt is added to the municipal water,
guilt is deposited in the marrow and teeth.
In my name they are stealing from people with nothing
their slim bodies. When did I hire these assassins?
My mild friend no longer paints mysteries of doors and mirrors.
On her walls the screams of burning children coagulate.
The mathematician with his webspangled language
of shadow and substance half spun
sits in an attic playing the flute all summer
for fear of his own brain, for fear that the baroque
arabesque of his joy will be turned to a weapon.
Three A.M. in Brooklyn: night all over my country.
Watch the smoke of guilt drift out of dreams.
When did I hire these killers? one day in anger,
in seaslime hatred at the duplicity of flesh?
Eating steak in a suave restaurant, did I give the sign?
Sweating like a melon in bed, did I murmur consent?
Did I contract it in Indiana for a teaching job?
Was it something I signed for a passport or a loan?
Now in my name blood burns like oil day and night.
This nation is founded on blood like a city on swamps
yet its dream has been beautiful and sometimes just
that now grows brutal and heavy as a burned out star.
Gasman invites the skyscrapers to dance
Lonely skyscrapers, deserted tombs of business risen
and gone home to the suburbs for the night,
your elevators are forlorn as empty cereal boxes,
your marble paved vestibules and corridors
might as well be solid rock.
Beautiful lean shafts, nobody loves you except pigeons,
nobody is cooking cabbage or instant coffee in your high rooms,
nobody draws moustaches, nobody pisses on your walls.
Even your toilet stalls have nothing to report about the flesh.
You could be inhabited by blind white cave
fish.
Only the paper lives in its metal drawers humming like bees.
The skyscrapers of the financial district dance with Gasman
The skyscrapers are dancing by the river,
they are leaping over their reflections
their lightning bright zigzag and beady reflections
jagged and shattered on East River.
With voices shrill as children’s whistles they hop
while the safes pop open like corn
and the files come whizzing through the air
to snow on the streets that lie throbbing,
eels copulating in heaps.
Ticker tape hangs in garlands from the wagging streetlamps.
Standard Oil and General Foods have amalgamated
and Dupont, Schenley and AT&T lie down together.
It does not matter, don’t hope, it does not matter.
In the morning the buildings stand smooth and shaven and straight
and all goes on whirring and ticking.
Money is reticulated and stronger than steel or stone or vision,
though sometimes at night
the skyscrapers bow and lean and leap under no moon.
Breaking camp
Now it begins:
sprays of forsythia against wet brick.
Under the paving mud seethes.
The grass is moist and tender in Central Park.
The air smells of ammonia and drains.
Cats howl their lean barbed sex.
Now we relinquish winter dreams.
In Thanksgiving snow we stood in my slum kitchen
and clasped each other and began and were afraid.
Snow swirled past the mattress on the floorboards,
snow on the bare wedding of our choice.
We drove very fast into a blizzard of fur.
Now we abandon winter hopes,
roasts and laughter of friends in a warm room,
fire and cognac, baking bread and goose on a platter,
cinnamon love in the satin feather bed,
the meshing of our neat and slippery flesh
while the snow flits like moths around the streetlamps,
while the snow’s long hair brushes the pane.
I will not abandon you. I come shuddering
from the warm tangles of winter sleep
choosing you compulsively, repetitiously, dumbly as breath.
You will never subside into rest. But how
can we build a city of love on a garbage dump?
How can we feed an army on stew from barbed
wire and buttons? We browse on The New York Times
and die swollen as poisoned sheep.
The grey Canadian geese like arrowheads are pulled north
beating their powerful wings over the long valleys.
Soon we will be sleeping on rocks hard as axes.
Soon I will be setting up camp in gulleys, on moraine,
drinking rusty water out of my shoe.
Peace was a winter hope
with down comforters, a wall of books and tawny pears.
We are headed into the iron north of resistance.
I am curing our roast meat to leather pemmican.
We will lie in the whips of the grass under the wind’s blade
fitting our bodies into emblems of stars.
We will stumble into the red morning to walk our feet raw.
The mills of injustice darken the sky with their smoke;
ash from the burning floats on every stream.
Soon we will be setting up camp on a plain of nails.
The suns of power dance on the black sky.
They are stacking the dead like bricks.
You belong to me no more than the sun that drums on my head.
I belong to nothing but my work carried like a prayer rug on my back.
Yet we are always traveling through each other,
fellows in the same story and the same laboring.
Our people are moving and we must choose and follow
through all the ragged cycles of build and collapse,
epicycles on our long journey guided
by the north star and the magnetic pole of conscience.
BREAKING CAMP
From HARD LOVING
Walking into love
1. What feeling is this?
I could not tell
if I climbed up or down.
I could feel
that the ground
was not level
and often I stumbled.
I only knew
that the light was poor,
my hands damp
and sharp fears
sang, sang like crickets
in my throat.
2. Difference of ages
As I climb above the treeline
my feet are growing numb,
blood knocks in my wrists and forehead.
Voices chitter out of gnarled bushes.
I seem to be carrying
a great many useless objects,
a saw, a globe, a dictionary,
a doll leaking stuffing,
a bouquet of knitting needles,
a basin of dried heads.
Voices sigh from calendar pages
I have lived too long to love you.
Withered and hard as a spider
I crawl among bones:
awful charnel knowledge
of failure, of death, of decay.
I am old as stone.
Who can make soup of me?
A spider-peddler with pack of self
I scrabble under a sky of shame.
Already my fingers are thin as ice.
I must scuttle under a rock
and hide in webs
of mocking voices.
3. Meditation in my favorite position
Peace, we have arrived.
The touch point
where words end
and body goes on.
That’s all:
finite, all five-sensual
and never repeatable.
Know you and be known,
please you and be pleased
in act:
the antidote to shame
is nakedness together.
Words end,
body goes on
and something
small and wet and real
is exchanged.
4. A little scandal
The eyes of others
measure and condemn.
The eyes of others are watches ticking no.
My friend hates you.
Between you I turn and turn
holding my arm as if it were broken.
The air is iron shavings polarized.
Faces blink on and off.
Words are heavy.
I carry them back and forth in my skirt.
They pile up in front of the chairs.
Words are bricks that seal the doors and windows.
Words are shutters on the eyes
and lead gloves on the hands.
The air is a solid block.
We cannot move.
5. The words are said, the love is made
Sometimes your face
burns my eyes.
Sometimes your orange chest
scalds me.
I am loud and certain with strangers.
Your hands on the table
make me shy.
Your voice in the hall:
words rattle in my throat.
There is a bird in my chest
with wings too broad
with beak that rips me
wanting to get out.
I have called it
an idiot parrot.
I have called it
a ravening eagle.
But it sings.
Bird of no name
your cries are red and wet
on the iron air.
I open my mouth
to let you out
<
br /> and your shining
blinds me.
6. Behold: a relationship
Suddenly I see it:
the gradual ease.
I no longer know how many times.
Afternoons blur into afternoons,
evenings melt into evenings.
Almost everyone guesses—
those who don’t never will.
The alarms have stopped
except in my skin.
Tigers in a closet
we learn gentleness.
Our small habits together
are strange
as crows’ tears
and easy as sofas.
Sometimes, sometimes
I can ask for what I want:
I have begun to trust you.
Community
Loving feels lonely in a violent world,
irrelevant to people burning like last year’s weeds
with bellies distended, with fish throats agape
and flesh melting down to glue.
We can no longer shut out the screaming
that leaks through the ventilation system,
the small bits of bone in the processed bread,
so we are trying to make a community
warm, loose as hair but shaped like a weapon.
Caring, we must use each other to death.
Love is arthritic. Mistrust swells like a prune.
Perhaps we gather so they may dig one big cheap grave.
From the roof of the Pentagon which is our Bastille
the generals armed like Martians watch through binoculars
the campfires of draftcards and barricades on the grass.
All summer helicopters whine over the ghetto.
Casting up jetsam of charred fingers and torn constitutions
the only world breaks on the door of morning.
We have to build our city, our camp
from used razorblades and bumpers and aspirin boxes
in the shadow of the nuclear plant that kills the fish
with coke bottle lamps flickering
on the chemical night.
The neighbor
Man stomping over my bed in boots
carrying a large bronze church bell