An Origin Like Water Page 5

  Nor even summer’s ample things,

  But decay’s simple trust.

  And since we had been like them cut

  But from the flowering not the root

  Then we had thanks to give—

  That they and we had opened once,

  Had found the light, had lost its glance

  And still had lives to live.

  Song

  Where in blind files

  Bats outsleep the frost

  Too fast, too fast

  For ice, afraid he’d slip

  By me I asked him first.

  Round as a bracelet

  Clasping the wet grass,

  An adder drowsed by berries

  Which change blood to cess.

  Dreading delay’s venom

  I risked the first kiss.

  My skirt in my hand.

  Lifting my hem high

  I forded the river there.

  Drops splashed my thigh.

  Ahead of me at last

  He turned at my cry:

  “Look how the water comes

  Boldly to my side.

  See the waves attempt

  What you have never tried.”

  And he late that night

  Followed the leaping tide.

  The Botanic Gardens

  (FOR KEVIN)

  Guided by love, leaving aside dispute—

  Guns on the pages of newspapers, the sound

  Urgent of peace—we drive in real pursuit

  Of another season, spring, where each has found

  Something before, new, and then sense

  In the Botanic Gardens, terms of reference.

  You take my hand. Three years ago, your bride,

  I felt your heart in darkness, a full moon

  Hauling mine to it like a tide.

  Still at night our selves reach to join.

  To twine like these trees in peace and stress

  Before the peril of unconsciousness.

  Corsican pine, guerrilla poison plants,

  The first gardener here by foreign carriage

  And careful seeding in this circumference

  Imitated the hours of our marriage:

  The flowers of forced proximity, swollen, fed,

  Flourishing here, usually sheltered,

  Exposed this once.

  Now you have overstepped

  My reach, searching for something this February

  Like a scholar in poor light over a script,

  Able at last to decipher its coded story.

  And so preoccupied you do not see

  My absence in the conservatory

  Where you, while African grotesqueries

  Sweat in sandy heat, at last stand

  Wondering at cacti, deformed trees

  Most ridicule. Each pumpkin history

  Turns coach at a touch of your hand.

  I watch and love you in your mystery.

  Prisoners

  I saw him first lost in the lion cages

  of the zoo. Before he could tear it out,

  I screamed my heart out. But his rages

  had been left behind. All he had left was his lope,

  his mane as—bored as a socialite

  with her morning post—I saw him slit

  A rabbit open like an envelope.

  Everything after that was parody:

  I glimpsed him at the hearth in a jet

  cat, in a school annual tamed in type,

  in a screen safari. The irony

  of finding him here in the one habitat

  I never expected—alive and well in our suburban

  world, present as I garden, sweep,

  wring the teacloth dry, domesticate

  acanthus in a bowl, orbit each chair

  exactly round our table. Your pullover

  lies on the bed upstairs, spread out where

  you can no more free yourself from the bars

  of your arms round me than can over us

  the lion flee, silently, his stars.

  Ready for Flight

  From this I will not swerve nor fall nor falter:

  If around your heart the crowds disperse,

  And I who at their whim now freeze or swelter

  Am allowed to come to a more temperate place.

  And if a runner starts to run to me

  Dispatched by you, crying that all is trampled

  Underfoot, terraces smashed, the entry

  Into holy places rudely sampled,

  Then I would come at once my love with love

  Bringing to wasted areas the sight

  Of butterfly and swan and turtle dove

  Their wings ruffled like sails ready for flight.

  In such surroundings, after the decease

  Of devils, you and I would live in peace.

  Anon

  I sympathize but wonder what he fled

  From: the press, an unimpressed boss,

  His wife smirking as he came to bed,

  Aunts whispering that he’d turned to verse

  As though to vice?

  Maybe they weren’t far wrong.

  Some guilty midnight, the idea spawned, shawled

  In words, he abandoned it, a foundling

  To be forever afterwards the love child

  Of anthologies. Then back to work,

  His moment’s indiscretion a secret

  Until one day rifling through a book

  To find it, accusing, illegitimate.

  Suburban Woman

  I

  Town and country at each other’s throat—

  between a space of truce until one night

  walls began to multiply, to spawn

  like lewd whispers of the goings-on,

  the romperings, the rape on either side.

  The smiling killing. That you were better dead

  than let them get you. But they came, armed

  with blades and ladders, with slimed

  knives, day after day, week by week—

  a proxy violation. She woke

  one morning to the usual story. Withdrawing

  neither side had gained, but there, dying,

  caught in cross fire, her past lay. Like a pride

  of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died

  and her world with them. She saw their power to sever

  with a scar. She is the sole survivor.

  II

  Morning, mistress of talcums, spun

  and second cottons, run tights

  she is, courtesan to the lethal

  rapine of routine. The room invites.

  She reaches to fluoresce the dawn.

  The kitchen lights like a brothel.

  III

  The chairs dusted and the morning

  coffee break behind, she starts pawning

  her day again to the curtains, the red

  carpets, the stair rods, at last to the bed

  the unmade bed where once in an underworld

  of limbs, his eyes freckling the night like jeweled

  lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled

  bargained out of nothingness her child,

  bartered from the dark her only daughter.

  Waking, her cheeks dried, to a brighter

  dawn she sensed in her as in April earth

  a seed, a life ransoming her death.

  IV

  Late, quiet across her garden

  sunlight shifts like a cat

  burglar, thieving perspectives,

  leaving her in the last light

  alone, where, as shadows harden,

  lengthen, silent she perceives

  veteran dead-nettles, knapweed

  crutched on walls, a summer’s seed

  of roses trenched in peat moss, and stares

  at her life falling with her flowers,

  like military tribute, or the tears

  of shell-shocked men, into arrears.

  V

  Her kitc
hen blind down—a white flag—

  the day’s assault over, now she will shrug

  a hundred small surrenders off as images

  stillborn, unwritten metaphors, blank pages.

  And on this territory, blindfold, we meet

  at last, veterans of a defeat

  no truce will heal, no formula prevent

  breaking out fresh again. Again the print

  of twigs stalking her pillow will begin

  a new day and all her victims then—

  hopes unreprieved, hours taken hostage—

  will newly wake, while I, on a new page

  will watch, like town and country, word, thought

  look for ascendancy, poise, retreat

  leaving each line maimed, my forces used.

  Defeated we survive, we two, housed

  together in my compromise, my craft—

  who are of one another the first draft.

  from

  In Her Own Image

  1980

  Tirade for the Mimic Muse

  I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout

  So here you are fumed in candle-stink.

  Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass.

  How you arch and pout in it!

  How you poach your face in it!

  Anyone would think you were a whore—

  An aging out-of-work kind-hearted tart.

  I know you for the ruthless bitch you are:

  Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse—

  Our Muse of Mimic Art.

  Eye shadow, swivel brushes, blushers,

  Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks,

  Ice for the pores, a mud mask—

  All the latest tricks.

  Not one of them disguise

  That there’s a dead millennium in your eyes.

  You try to lamp the sockets of your loss:

  The lives that famished for your look of love.

  Your time is up. There’s not a stroke, a flick

  Can make your crime cosmetic.

  With what drums and dances, what deceits

  Rituals and flatteries of war,

  Chants and pipes and witless empty rites

  And war-like men

  And wet-eyed patient women

  You did protect yourself from horrors,

  From the lizarding of eyelids

  From the whiskering of nipples,

  From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors—

  How you fled

  The kitchen screw and the rack of labor,

  The wash thumbed and the dish cracked,

  The scream of beaten women,

  The crime of babies battered,

  The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief

  That seeks asylum behind suburb walls—

  A world you could have sheltered in your skirts—

  And well I know and how I see it now,

  The way you latched your belt and twitched your hem

  And shook it off like dirt.

  And I who mazed my way to womanhood

  Through all your halls of mirrors, making faces,

  To think I waited on your trashy whim!

  Hoping your lamp and flash,

  Your glass, might show

  This world I needed nothing else to know

  But love and again love and again love.

  In a nappy stink, by a soaking wash

  Among stacked dishes

  Your glass cracked,

  Your luck ran out. Look. My words leap

  Among your pinks, your stench pots and sticks.

  They scatter shadow, swivel brushes, blushers.

  Make your face naked,

  Strip your mind naked,

  Drench your skin in a woman’s tears.

  I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.

  I will show you true reflections, terrors.

  You are the Muse of all our mirrors.

  Look in them and weep.

  In Her Own Image

  It is her eyes:

  the irises are gold

  and round they go

  like the ring on my wedding finger,

  round and round

  and I can’t touch

  their histories or tears.

  To think they were once my satellites!

  They shut me out now.

  Such light-years!

  She is not myself

  anymore she is not

  even in my sky

  anymore and I

  am not myself.

  I will not disfigure

  her pretty face.

  Let her wear amethyst thumbprints,

  a family heirloom,

  a sort of burial necklace

  and I know just the place:

  Where the wall glooms,

  where the lettuce seeds,

  where the jasmine springs

  no surprises

  I will bed her.

  She will bloom there,

  second nature to me,

  the one perfection

  among compromises.

  In His Own Image

  I was not myself, myself.

  The celery feathers,

  the bacon flitch,

  the cups deep on the shelf

  and my cheek

  coppered and shone

  in the kettle’s paunch,

  my mouth

  blubbed in the tin of the pan—

  they were all I had to go on.

  How could I go on

  With such meager proofs of myself?

  I woke day after day.

  Day after day I was gone.

  From the self I was last night.

  And then he came home tight.

  Such a simple definition!

  How did I miss it?

  Now I see

  that all I needed

  was a hand

  to mold my mouth

  to scald my cheek,

  was this concussion

  by whose lights I find

  my self-possession,

  where I grow complete.

  He splits my lip with his fist,

  shadows my eye with a blow,

  knuckles my neck to its proper angle.

  What a perfectionist!

  His are a sculptor’s hands:

  they summon

  form from the void,

  they bring

  me to myself again.

  I am a new woman.

  Anorexic

  Flesh is heretic.

  My body is a witch.

  I am burning it.

  Yes I am torching

  her curves and paps and wiles.

  They scorch in my self-denials.

  How she meshed my head

  in the half-truths

  of her fevers till I renounced

  milk and honey

  and the taste of lunch.

  I vomited

  her hungers.

  Now the bitch is burning.

  I am starved and curveless.

  I am skin and bone.

  She has learned her lesson.

  Thin as a rib

  I turn in sleep.

  My dreams probe

  a claustrophobia

  a sensuous enclosure.

  How warm it was and wide

  once by a warm drum,

  once by the song of his breath

  and in his sleeping side.

  Only a little more,

  only a few more days

  sinless, foodless.

  I will slip

  back into him again

  as if I have never been away.

  Caged so

  I will grow

  angular and holy

  past pain

  keeping his heart

  such company

  as will make me forget

  in a small space

  the fall

  into forked dark,

  into python needs

  heaving to hips and brea
sts

  and lips and heat

  and sweat and fat and greed.

  Mastectomy

  My ears heard

  their words.

  I didn’t believe them.

  No, even through my tears

  they couldn’t deceive me.

  Even so

  I could see

  through them

  to the years

  opening

  their arteries,

  fields gulching

  into trenches

  cuirasses stenching,

  a mulch of heads

  and towns

  as prone

  to bladed men

  as women.

  How well

  I recognized

  the specialist

  freshing death

  across his desk,

  the surgeon,

  blade-handed,

  standing there

  urging patience.

  How well

  they have succeeded!

  I have stopped bleeding

  I look down.

  It has gone.

  So they have taken off

  what slaked them first,

  what they have hated since:

  blue-veined

  white-domed

  home

  of wonder

  and the wetness

  of their dreams.

  I flatten

  to their looting,

  to the sleight

  of their plunder.

  I am a brute site.

  Theirs is the true booty.

  Solitary

  Night:

  An oratory of dark,

  a chapel of unreason.

  Here in the shrubbery

  the shrine.

  I am its votary,

  its season.

  Flames

  single

  to my fingers

  expert

  to pick out

  their heart,

  the sacred heat

  none may violate.

  You could die for this.

  The gods could make you blind.

  I defy them.

  I know,

  only I know

  these incendiary

  and frenzied ways:

  I am alone.

  No one’s here,

  no one sees

  my hands

  fan and cup,

  my thumbs tinder.

  How it leaps

  from spark to blaze!

  I flush

  I darken.

  How my flesh summers,

  how my mind shadows

  meshed in this brightness.

  How my cry

  blasphemes

  light and dark,

  screams

  land from sea,

  makes word flesh