to roll on the clean carpets.
By the next day it looks like
a rummage sale at five o’clock.
House-keeping
This box of house, like a child’s
treasure trove of colored stones, blue jay
and pheasant feathers, random playing cards,
is irrational in the pleasure it proffers
those who fill it slowly
with the detritus and the clothing
of their living. It is the burrow
of a sand worm decorated with pebble
and shell the tides bring in.
This house is part toy: we move lamps
and chairs about exactly as I did
in my dollhouse, where I first played
at creation and fashioned dramas,
gave names to china animals, like Adam;
and like a god, invented rules.
This house is part clothing, a warm
coat that keeps us snug from the cold,
a huge raincoat that covers us dry.
It is our facade to friend and stranger,
stuck over with emblems of our taste,
our friends, our flush times, our travels,
our previous misadventures.
This house displays our virtue to each other.
I swept the kitchen floor twice this week.
But I took the trash to the dump Tuesday.
I am putting up shelves, so kiss me.
See how the freshly polished table shines
like a red, red apple with love.
This house is a nest in which the eggs
of worries hatch fledglings
of cowbird’s young who usurp the care
and push the right nestlings out.
This house eats money and shits bills.
Bed, table, desk: here is the hearth of love.
I am territorial as my cats. When I return
I stroll the house singing arias of the familiar.
I leave here on a long tether that pulls
hard in the day and harder at night.
Return of the prodigal darling
At two a rabbit screamed.
A splash of blood on the floodlit needles.
The mice of the ashy dawn
nibbled my salted eyelashes.
Outside, the rough gears of the world
clanked on, bodies smashed
on every spoke and sprocket
oiling those grim wheels.
I dreamed your step, your warmth
against my side and woke to see
the weird grey stars of terror
wheeling around the pole of midnight.
The tears I spouted sleepless nights,
they are spangled on the grasses
among the small webs like flimsy tents,
now traps and prisms of the sun.
I am entire, grafted together,
satiated with you and shining
inside and outside, a hot orange,
liquid all through with joy.
Let me web and petal you with kisses,
let me deck you with love baubles
like a rich Christmas tree, hung
with totems and birds and lights.
My love is peeled to its prickly
bleeding quick. I want to lick you over
like a mother cat. Each hair of your
head is numbered in my love.
Down
Come let us raise our tent of skin.
Let me wrap you in the night of my hair
so our legs climb each other like pea vines.
The tiger lily is open on the freckled hour.
Bite into its ruddiness, a peach
splitting with ripeness and juice.
I stood in the sugar cane
near Cienfuegos and bit on the green
fibrous stem and the sweetness flowed.
We plunge into each other as into a pool
that closes over our heads. We float
suspended in liquid velvet.
The light comes from behind the eyes,
red, soft, thick as blood, ancient as sleep.
We build each other with our hands.
That is where flesh is translucent as water.
That is where flesh shines with its own light.
That is where flesh ripples as you walk
through it like fog and it closes around you.
That is where boundaries fail and wink out.
Flesh dreams down to rock and up to fire.
Here ego dissolves, a slug in vinegar,
although its loud demands will come back
like a bounced check as soon as we rise.
But this dim red place that waits at the pit
of the pool is real as the bone in the flesh
and there we make love as you make a table
where the blood roars like an ocean in the ears
remembering its source, and we remember
how we are bound and body of each other.
House built of breath
Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.
Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.
Wet as onions, dry as salt.
Slow as honey, fast as seltzer,
my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love
my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple
I love you daily as milk,
I love you nightly as aromatic port.
The words trail a bitter slime like slugs,
then in the belly warm like cabbage borscht.
The words are hung out on the line,
sheets for the wind to bleach.
The words are simmering slowly
on the back burner like a good stew.
Words are the kindling in the wood stove.
Even the quilt at night is stuffed with word down.
When we are alone the walls sing
and even the cats talk but only in Yiddish.
When we are alone we make love in deeds.
And then in words. And then in food.
The infidelity of sleep
We tie our bodies in a lover’s
knot and then gradually uncoil.
We turn and talk, the night lapping
at the sills of the casements, rising
in us like dark heavy wine.
Then we turn aside. Eskimo
crawling into private igloos,
bears retreating to distant lairs,
a leopard climbing its home tree,
we go unmated into sleep.
In sleep you fret about who a lover
untouched for years is sleeping with.
Some man with a face glimpsed once
in a crowd lies over me sweating.
Now I wear male flesh like a suit of armor.
In sleep I am speaking French again.
The Algerian War is still on.
I curse, back to the wall of the top
floor of a workers’-quarter house.
The war in Vietnam is still on.
I am carrying a memorized message
to a deserter who is hiding
in a church belfry. All night
I drive fast down back roads
with a borrowed car full of contraband.
In the morning, of what we remember,
what can we tell? In the mind
dreams flash their facets, but in words
they dim, brilliant rocks picked up
at low tide that dry to mud.
Nightly the tides of sleep enter
us in secret claret-red oceans
from whose deep slide serpents
wearing faces radiant and impure
as saints in Renaissance paintings.
Now as night pours in to fill the house
like a conch shell, we cling together,
muttered words between us, a spar
we hold to knowing that soon
we will let go, severed, to drown.
Nailing up the mezuzah
A friend from Greece
brought a tin house
on a plaque, designed
to protect our abode,
as in Greek churches
embossed legs or hearts
on display entreat aid.
I hung it but now
nail my own proper charm.
I refuse no offers of help,
at least from friends,
yet this presence
is long overdue. Mostly
we nurture our own
blessings or spoil them,
build firmly or undermine
our walls. Who are termites
but our obsessions gnawing?
Still the winds blow hard
from the cave of the sea
carrying off what they will.
Our smaller luck abides
like a worm snug in an apple
who does not comprehend
the shivering of the leaves
as the ax bites hard
in the smooth trunk.
We need all help proffered
by benign forces. Outside
we commit our beans to the earth,
the tomato plants started
in February to the care
of the rain. My little
pregnant grey cat offers
the taut bow of her belly
to the sun’s hot tongue.
Saturday I watched alewives
swarm in their thousands
waiting in queues quivering
pointed against the white
rush of the torrents
to try their leaps upstream.
The gulls bald as coffin
nails stabbed them casually
conversing in shrieks, picnicking.
On its earth, this house
is oriented. We grow
from our bed rooted firmly
as an old willow into the water
of our dreams flowing deep
in the hillside. This hill
is my temple, my soul.
Malach hamoves, angel of death
pass over, pass on.
CHIAROSCURO
The good go down
I build stories. They own
their own shapes, their rightful
power and impetus, plot
them however I try, but always
that shape is broadly just.
I want to believe in justice
inexorable as the decay
of an isotope; I want to plot
the orbit of justice, erratic
but inevitable as a comet’s return.
It is not blind chance I rail at,
the flood waters that carry off
one house and leave its neighbor
standing one foot above the high
water’s swirling grasp.
It is that the good go down
not easily, not gently,
not occasionally, not by random
deviation and the topple
of mischance, but almost always.
Here is something new and true.
No, you are too different,
too raw, too spiced and gritty.
We want one like the last one.
We know how to sell that.
We want one that praises us,
we want one that puts down
the ones we squat on, no
aftertaste, no residue of fine
thought smeared on the eyes.
We want one just like all
the others, but with a designer
label and a clever logo.
We want one we saw advertised
in The New York Times.
Are the controls working?
Is the doorman on duty?
Is the intercom connected?
Is the monitor functioning?
Is the incinerator on?
It goes without saying:
The brie shall be perfectly
ripe, the wine shall be a second
cru Bordeaux from a decent year,
there shall be one guest
with a recent certified success
and we shall pass around plates
of grated contempt for those
who lack this much, of sugared
envy for those who have more.
For the young not facile enough
to imitate the powerful, not skilled
enough liars to pretend sucking them
is ecstasy, they erect a massive
wall, the Himalayas of exclusion.
For the old who speak too much
of pain, they have a special
Greenland of exile. Old Birnbaum.
Nobody reads her anymore.
I thought she was dead.
Once she is, and her cat
starves, she will become a growth
industry. Only kill yourself
and you can be consumed too,
an incense-proffered icon.
It is the slow mean defeat
of the good that I rail against,
the small pallid contempt of the well
placed for those who do not lack
the imaginative power to try,
the good who are warped by passion
as granite is twisted into mountains
and metamorphosed by fire into marble;
who speak too loud in vulgar tongues
because they have something to say;
who mean what they make down to their
bones; who commit the uncouth error
of feeling, of saying what they feel,
of making others feel. Their reward
is to be made to feel worthless.
Goodness is not dangerous enough.
I want goodness like a Nike armed
with the warhead of rightful anger.
I want goodness that can live on sand
and stones and wring wine from burrs,
goodness that can put forth fruit,
manured with the sewage of hatred.
The good must cultivate their anger
like fields of wheat that must feed
them, if they are ever to win.
Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein
We all wanted to go to you.
Even women who had not heard
of you, longed for you, our
cool grey mother who would
gently, carefully and slowly, using
no nurse but ministering herself,
open our thighs and our vaginas
and show us the os smiling
in the mirror like a full rising moon.
You taught us our health, our sickness
and our regimes, presiding over
the raw ends of life, a priestess eager
to initiate. Never did you tell us
we could not understand what you
understood. You made our bodies
glow transparent. You did not think
you had a license to question us
about our married state or lovers’ sex.
Your language was as gentle and caring
as your hands. On the mantel
in the waiting room the clippings hung,
old battles, victories, marches.
You with your flower face, strong
in your thirties in the thirties,
were carted to prison for the crime
of prescribing birth control
for workingclass women in Lynn.
The quality of light in those quiet
rooms where we took our shoes off
before entering and the little
dog accompanied you like a familiar,
was respect: respect for life,
respect for women, respect for choice,
a mutual respect I cannot imagine
I shall feel for any other doctor,
bordering on love.
Where is my half-used tube of Tom’s fennel to
othpaste tonight?
Here I am I think in Des Moines,
in Dubuque, in Moscow Idaho, in a cube of motel room
but where is my wandering luggage tonight?
Where is my bathrobe slippery as wet rock,
green as St. Patrick’s Day icing?
Are my black boots keeled over under another bed?
Do my tampons streak across the night
little white rockets trailing contrails of string?
Are women in Alaska dicing for my red shoes?
Did TWA banish my suitcase to Siberia?
Where is that purple dress in which my voice
is twice as loud, with the gold belt
glittering like the money I hope to get paid,
sympathetic magic to lure checks
out of comptrollers before time molders?
I feel like an impostor, a female impersonator,
a talking laundry bag dialing head calls
to all my clothes in Port Huron, in Biloxi, in Tucson,
collect calls into the night: I’m lonely and dirty.
I’m sorry I spilled chili on you, chocolate sauce,
Elmer’s Glue. I’ll wear an apron at all times.
I’ll never again eat tacos. O my wandering clothes,
fly through the night to me, homing pigeons
trailing draperies like baroque saints, come home.
Your cats are your children
Certain friends come in, they say
Your cats are your children.
They smile from a great height on down.
Clouds roll in around their hair.
I have real children, they mean,
while you have imitation.
My cats are not my children.
I gave Morgaine away yesterday
to a little boy she liked.
I’m not saving to send them to Harvard.
When they stay out overnight
I don’t call the police.
I like the way they don’t talk,
the way they do, eyes shining
or narrowed, tails bannering,
paws kneading, cats with private
lives and passions sharp as their claws,
hunters, lovers, great sulkers.
No, my children are my friends,
my lover, my dependents on whom