An Origin Like Water Read online

  that now makes me

  animal

  inanimate, satiate,

  and back I go

  to a slack tip,

  a light.

  I stint my worship,

  the cold watch I keep.

  Fires flint somewhere else.

  I winter

  into sleep.

  Menses

  It is dark again,

  I am sick of it

  filled with it,

  dulled by it,

  thick with it.

  To be the mere pollution of her wake!

  a water cauled by her light,

  a slick haul,

  a fallen self,

  a violence,

  a daughter.

  I am the moon’s looking-glass.

  My days are moon-dials.

  She will never be done with me.

  She needs me.

  She is dry.

  I leash to her,

  a sea,

  a washy heave,

  a tide.

  Only my mind is free

  among the ruffian growths,

  the bindweed

  and the meadowsweet,

  the riff-raff of my garden.

  How I envy them;

  each filament,

  each anther bred

  from its own style,

  its stamen,

  is to itself a christening,

  is to itself a marriage bed.

  They fall to earth,

  so ignorant

  so innocent

  of the sweated waters

  and the watered salts,

  of ecstasy,

  of birth.

  They are street-walkers,

  lesbians,

  nuns.

  I am not one of them

  and how they’d pity me

  now as dusk encroaches

  and she comes

  looking for her looking-glass.

  And it is me.

  Yes it is me

  she poaches her old face in.

  I am bloated with her waters.

  I am barren with her blood.

  Another hour

  and she will addle me

  till I begin

  to think like her.

  As when I’ve grown

  round and obscene with child,

  or when I moan,

  for him between the sheets,

  then I begin to know

  that I am bright and original

  and that my light’s my own.

  Witching

  My gifts

  are nightly,

  shifty, bookish.

  By my craft

  I bald the grass,

  abort the birth

  of calves

  and warts.

  I study dark.

  Another age

  and I’d have been

  waisted

  in a hedgy rage

  of prejudice

  and hate.

  But times have changed.

  They will be brought

  to book.

  these my enemies—

  and bell

  and candle too—

  who breed

  and breed,

  who talk and talk—

  birth

  and bleeding,

  the bacteria of feeds.

  Midnight.

  Now I own

  the earth

  The witching hour.

  You’d think

  you’d think

  the bitches

  couldn’t reach

  me here.

  But here they are.

  The nursery lights

  they shine, they shine,

  they multiply

  they douse

  mine!

  But I

  Know

  what to do:

  I will

  Reverse

  their arson,

  make

  a pyre of my haunch

  and so

  the last thing

  they know

  will be

  the stench

  of my crotch.

  Flaming

  tindering

  I’ll single

  a page

  of history

  for these my sisters

  for those kin

  they kindled.

  Yes it’s my turn

  to stack

  the twigs

  and twig the fire

  and smell

  how well

  a woman’s

  flesh

  can burn.

  Exhibitionist

  I wake to dark,

  a window slime of dew.

  Time to start

  Working

  from the text,

  making

  from this trash

  and gimmickry

  of sex

  my aesthetic:

  a hip first,

  a breast,

  a slow

  shadow strip

  out of clothes

  that busheled me

  asleep.

  What an artist am I!

  Barely light

  and yet—

  cold shouldering

  clipped laurel,

  nippling the road—

  I subvert

  sculpture,

  the old mode;

  I skin

  I dimple clay,

  I flesh,

  I rump stone.

  This is my way—

  to strip and strip

  until

  my dusk flush,

  nude shade,

  hush

  of hip,

  backbone,

  thigh

  blacks light

  and I

  become the night.

  What stars

  I harvest

  to my dark!

  Cast down

  Lucifers,

  spruce

  businessmen,

  their eyes

  cast down.

  I have them now.

  I’ll teach them now.

  I’ll show them how

  in offices,

  their minds

  blind on files,

  the view

  blues through

  my curves and arcs.

  They are

  a part

  of my dark plan:

  Into the gutter

  of their lusts

  I burn

  the shine

  of my flesh.

  Let them know

  for a change

  the hate

  and discipline,

  the lusts

  that prison

  and the light that is

  unyielding,

  frigid,

  constellate.

  Making Up

  My naked face;

  I wake to it.

  How it’s dulsed and shrouded!

  It’s a cloud,

  a dull pre-dawn.

  But I’ll soon

  see to that.

  I push the blusher up,

  I raddle

  and I prink,

  pinking bone

  till my eyes

  are

  a rouge-washed

  flush on water.

  Now the base

  pales and wastes.

  Light thins

  from ear to chin,

  whitening in

  the ocean shine

  mirror set

  of my eyes

  that I fledge

  in old darks.

  I grease and full

  my mouth.

  It won’t stay shut:

  I look

  in the glass.

  My face is made,

  it says:

  Take nothing, nothing

  at its face value:

  Legendary seas,

  nakedness,

  that up and stuck

&nbs
p; lassitude

  of thigh and buttock

  that they prayed to—

  it’s a trick.

  Myths

  are made by men.

  The truth of this

  wave-raiding

  sea-heaving

  made-up

  tale

  of a face

  from the source

  of the morning

  is my own:

  Mine are the rouge pots,

  the hot pinks,

  the fledged

  and edgy mix

  of light and water

  out of which

  I dawn.

  from

  Night Feed

  1982

  Degas’s Laundresses

  You rise, you dawn

  roll-sleeved Aphrodites,

  out of a camisole brine,

  a linen pit of stitches,

  silking the fitted sheets

  away from you like waves.

  You seam dreams in the folds

  of wash from which freshes

  the whiff and reach of fields

  where it bleached and stiffened.

  Your chat’s sabbatical:

  brides, wedding outfits,

  a pleasure of leisured women

  are sweated into the folds,

  the neat heaps of linen.

  Now the drag of the clasp.

  Your wrists basket your waist.

  You round to the square weight.

  Wait. There behind you.

  A man. There behind you.

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  Why is he watching you?

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  Whatever you do don’t turn.

  See he takes his ease

  staking his easel so,

  slowly sharpening charcoal,

  closing his eyes just so,

  slowly smiling as if

  so slowly he is

  unbandaging his mind.

  Surely a good laundress

  would understand its twists,

  its white turns,

  its blind designs—

  it’s your winding sheet.

  Woman in Kitchen

  Breakfast over, islanded by noise,

  she watches the machines go fast and slow.

  She stands among them as they shake the house.

  They move. Their destination is specific.

  She has nowhere definite to go:

  she might be a pedestrian in traffic.

  White surfaces retract. White

  sideboards light the white of walls.

  Cups wink white in their saucers.

  The light of day bleaches as it falls

  on cups and sideboards. She could use

  the room to tap with if she lost her sight.

  Machines jigsaw everything she knows.

  And she is everywhere among their furor:

  the tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes.

  The round lunar window of the washer.

  The kettle in the toaster is a kingfisher

  swooping for trout above the river’s mirror.

  The wash done, the kettle boiled, the sheets

  spun and clean, the dryer stops dead.

  The silence is a death. It starts to bury

  the room in white spaces. She turns to spread

  a cloth on the board and irons sheets

  in a room white and quiet as a mortuary.

  A Ballad of Beauty and Time

  Plainly came the time

  the eucalyptus tree

  could not succor me,

  nor the honey pot,

  the sunshine vitamin.

  Not even getting thin.

  I had passed my prime.

  Then, when bagged ash,

  scalded quarts of water,

  oil of the lime,

  cinders for the skin

  and honey all had failed,

  I sorted out my money

  and went to buy some time.

  I knew the right address:

  the occult house of shame

  where all the women came

  shopping for a mouth,

  a new nose, an eyebrow

  and entered without knocking

  and stood as I did now.

  A shape with a knife

  stooped away from me

  cutting something vague—

  I couldn’t really see—

  it might have been a face.

  I coughed once and said

  —I want a lease of life.

  The room was full of masks.

  Lines of grins gaping.

  A wall of skin stretching.

  A chin he had re-worked,

  a face he had re-made.

  He slit and tucked and cut.

  Then straightened from his blade.

  “A tuck, a hem,” he said—

  “I only seam the line,

  I only mend the dress.

  It wouldn’t do for you:

  your quarrel’s with the weave.

  The best I achieve

  is just a stitch in time.”

  I started out again.

  I knew a studio

  strewn with cold heels,

  closed in marble shock.

  I saw the sculptor there

  chiseling a nose,

  and buttonholed his smock:

  “It’s all very well

  when you have bronzed a woman—

  pinioned her and finned

  wings on either shoulder.

  Anyone can see

  she won’t get any older.

  What good is that to me?

  “See the last of youth

  slumming in my skin,

  my sham pink mouth.

  Here behold your critic—

  the threat to your aesthetic.

  I am the brute proof.

  Beauty is not truth.”

  “Truth is in our lies—”

  he angrily replied.

  “This woman fledged in stone,

  the center of all eyes,

  her own museum blind:

  we sharpen with our skills

  the arts of compromise.

  “And all I have cast

  in crystal or in glass,

  in lapis or in onyx,

  comes from my knowledge when—

  above the honest flaw—

  to lift and stay my hand

  and say ‘let it stand’.”

  It’s a Woman’s World

  Our way of life

  has hardly changed

  since a wheel first

  whetted a knife.

  Maybe flame

  burns more greedily,

  and wheels are steadier

  but we’re the same

  who milestone

  our lives

  with oversights—

  living by the lights

  of the loaf left

  by the cash register,

  the washing powder

  paid for and wrapped,

  the wash left wet:

  like most historic peoples

  we are defined

  by what we forget,

  by what we never will be—

  star-gazers,

  fire-eaters.

  It’s our alibi

  for all time:

  as far as history goes

  we were never

  on the scene of the crime.

  So when the king’s head

  gored its basket—

  grim harvest—

  we were gristing bread

  or getting the recipe

  for a good soup

  to appetize

  our gossip.

  It’s still the same.

  By night our windows

  moth our children

  to the flame

  of hearth not history.

  And still no page

  scores the low music

  of our outrage.

/>   Appearances

  still reassure:

  that woman there,

  craned to the starry mystery

  is merely getting a breath

  of evening air,

  while this one here—

  her mouth

  a burning plume—

  she’s no fire-eater,

  just my frosty neighbor

  coming home.

  Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark

  I have written this

  so that,

  in the next myth,

  my sister will be wiser.

  Let her learn from me:

  the opposite of passion

  is not virtue

  but routine.

  Look at me.

  I can be cooking,

  making coffee,

  scrubbing wood, perhaps,

  and back it comes:

  the crystalline, the otherwhere,

  the wood

  where I was

  when he began the chase.

  And how I ran from him!

  Pan-thighed,

  satyr-faced he was.

  The trees reached out to me.

  I silvered and

  I quivered. I shook out

  my foil of quick leaves.

  He snouted past.

  What a fool I was!

  I shall be here forever,

  setting out the tea,

  among the coppers and the branching alloys and

  the tin shine of this kitchen;

  laying saucers on the pine table.

  Save face, sister.

  Fall. Stumble.

  Rut with him.

  His rough heat will keep you warm and

  you will be better off than me,

  with your memories

  down the garden,

  at the start of March,

  unable to keep your eyes

  off the chestnut tree—

  just the way

  it thrusts and hardens.

  The New Pastoral

  The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel

  to read his world.

  I’m in the dark.

  I am a lost, last inhabitant—

  displaced person

  in a pastoral chaos.

  All day I listen to

  the loud distress, the switch and tick of

  new herds.

  But I’m no shepherdess.

  Can I unbruise these sprouts or cleanse this mud flesh

  till it roots again?

  Can I make whole

  this lamb’s knuckle, butchered from its last crooked suckling?

  I could be happy here,

  I could be something more than a refugee

  were it not for this lamb unsuckled, for the nonstop

  switch and tick

  telling me

  there was a past,

  there was a pastoral,

  and these chance sights

  are little more than

  amnesias of a rite

  I danced once on a frieze.

  The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

  Unpod

  the bag,

  the seed.

  Slap

  the flanks back.