1.
Deliberately, long ago
the carcasses
of old bugs crumbled
into the rut of the window
and we started sleeping here
Fresh June bugs batter this June’s
screens, June-lightning batters
the spiderweb
I sweep the wood-dust
from the wood-box
the snout of the vacuum cleaner
sucks the past away
2.
Other lives were lived here:
mostly un-articulate
yet someone left her creamy signature
in the trail of rusticated
narcissus straggling up
through meadowgrass and vetch
Families breathed close
boxed-in from the cold
hard times, short growing season
the old rainwater cistern
hulks in the cellar
3.
Like turning through the contents of a drawer:
these rusted screws, this empty vial
useless, this box of watercolor paints
dried to insolubility—
but this—
this pack of cards with no card missing
still playable
and three good fuses
and this toy: a little truck
scarred red, yet all its wheels still turn
The humble tenacity of things
waiting for people, waiting for months, for years
4.
Often rebuked, yet always back returning
I place my hand on the hand
of the dead, invisible palm-print
on the doorframe
spiked with daylilies, green leaves
catching in the screen door
or I read the backs of old postcards
curling from thumbtacks, winter and summer
fading through cobweb-tinted panes—
white church in Norway
Dutch hyacinths bleeding azure
red beach on Corsica
set-pieces of the world
stuck to this house of plank
I flash on wife and husband
embattled, in the years
that dried, dim ink was wet
those signatures
5.
If they call me man-hater, you
would have known it for a lie
but the you I want to speak to
has become your death
If I dream of you these days
I know my dreams are mine and not of you
yet something hangs between us
older and stranger than ourselves
like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water
a dusty window
the irreducible, incomplete connection
between the dead and living
or between man and woman in this
savagely fathered and unmothered world
6.
The other side of a translucent
curtain, a sheet of water
a dusty window, Non-being
utters its flat tones
the speech of an actor learning his lines
phonetically
the final autistic statement
of the self-destroyer
All my energy reaches out tonight
to comprehend a miracle beyond
raising the dead: the undead to watch
back on the road of birth
7.
I am an American woman:
I turn that over
like a leaf pressed in a book
I stop and look up from
into the coals of the stove
or the black square of the window
Foot-slogging through the Bering Strait
jumping from the Arbella to my death
chained to the corpse beside me
I feel my pains begin
I am washed up on this continent
shipped here to be fruitful
my body a hollow ship
bearing sons to the wilderness
sons who ride away
on horseback, daughters
whose juices drain like mine
into the arroyo of stillbirths, massacres
Hanged as witches, sold as breeding-wenches
my sisters leave me
I am not the wheatfield
nor the virgin forest
I never chose this place
yet I am of it now
In my decent collar, in the daguerreotype
I pierce its legend with my look
my hands wring the necks of prairie chickens
I am used to blood
When the men hit the hobo track
I stay on with the children
my power is brief and local
but I know my power
I have lived in isolation
from other women, so much
in the mining camps, the first cities
the Great Plains winters
Most of the time, in my sex, I was alone
8.
Tonight in this northeast kingdom
striated iris stand in a jar with daisies
the porcupine gnaws in the shed
fireflies beat and simmer
caterpillars begin again
their long, innocent climb
the length of leaves of burdock
or webbing of a garden chair
plain and ordinary things
speak softly
the light square on old wallpaper
where a poster has fallen down
Robert Indiana’s LOVE
leftover of a decade
9.
I do not want to simplify
Or: I would simplify
by naming the complexity
It was made over-simple all along
the separation of powers
the allotment of sufferings
her spine cracking in labor
his plow driving across the Indian graves
her hand unconscious on the cradle, her mind
with the wild geese
his mother-hatred driving him
into exile from the earth
the refugee couple with their cardboard luggage
tanding on the ramshackle landing-stage
he with fingers frozen around his Law
she with her down quilt sewn through iron nights
—the weight of the old world, plucked
drags after them, a random feather-bed
10.
Her children dead of diphtheria, she
set herself on fire with kerosene
(O Lord I was unworthy
Thou didst find me out)
she left the kitchen scrubbed
down to the marrow of its boards
The penalty for barrenness
is emptiness
my punishment is my crime
what I have failed to do, is me . . .
—Another month without a show
and this the seventh year
O Father let this thing pass out of me
I swear to You
I will live for the others, asking nothing
I will ask nothing, ever, for myself
11.
Out back of this old house
datura tangles with a gentler weed
its spiked pods smelling
of bad dreams and death
I reach through the dark, groping
past spines of nightmare
to brush the leaves of sensuality
A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history
I cannot now lie down
with a man who fears my power
or reaches for me as for death
or with a lover who imagines
we are not in danger
12.
If it was lust that had defined us—
their lust and fear of our deep places
we have done our time
as faceless torsos licked by fire
we are in the open, on our way—
our counterparts
the pinyon jay, the small
gilt-winged insect
the Cessna throbbing level
the raven floating in the gorge
the rose and violet vulva of the earth
filling with darkness
yet deep within a single sparkle
of red, a human fire
and near and yet above the western planet
calmly biding her time
13.
They were the distractions, lust and fear
but are
themselves a key
Everything that can be used, will be:
the fathers in their ceremonies
the genital contests
the cleansing of blood from pubic hair
the placenta buried and guarded
their terror of blinding
by the look of her who bore them
If you do not believe
that fear and hatred
read the lesson again
in the old dialect
14.
But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
she said
I try to understand
he said
what will you undertake
she said
will you punish me for history
he said
what will you undertake
she said
do you believe in collective guilt
he said
let me look in your eyes
she said
15.
Who is here. The Erinyes.
One to sit in judgment.
One to speak tenderness.
One to inscribe the verdict on the canyon wall.
If you have not confessed
the damage
if you have not recognized
the Mother of reparations
if you have not come to terms
with the women in the mirror
if you have not come to terms
with the inscription
the terms of the ordeal
the discipline the verdict
if still you are on your way
still She awaits your coming
16.
Such women are dangerous
to the order of things
and yes, we will be dangerous
to ourselves
groping through spines of nightmare
(datura tangling with a simpler herb)
because the line dividing
lucidity from darkness
is yet to be marked out
Isolation, the dream
of the frontier woman
leveling her rifle along
the homestead fence
still snares our pride
—a suicidal leaf
laid under the burning-glass
in the sun’s eye
Any woman’s death diminishes me
1974