Circles on the Water (14 page)

What shall we do before

they crush us? How far will we travel

to no country on earth?

What houses should we build? and which tear down?

what chapels, what bridges, what power stations

and stations of that burning green energy

beyond the destruction of power?

Trust me with your hand. For us to be friends

is a mating of eagle and ostrich, from both sides.

As we wandered through the hill of graves,

men lost at sea, women in childbirth,

slabs on which were thriftily listed

nine children like drowned puppies,

all the Susan-B-wife-of-Joshua-Stones,

a woman in a long calico gown strolled toward us

bells jangling at waist, at wrists,

lank brown hair streaming.

We spoke to her but she smiled only

and drifted on into the overgrown woods.

Suppose, you said, she is a ghost.

You repeated a tale from Castanada

about journeying toward one’s childhood

never arriving but encountering

on the way many people, all dead,

journeying toward the land of heart’s desire.

I would not walk a foot into my childhood,

I said, picking blackberries for you to taste,

large, moist and sweet as your eyes.

My land of desire is the marches

of the unborn. The dead

are powerless to grant us

wishes, their struggles

are the wave that carried us here.

Our wind blows on toward those hills

we will never see.

The bulldozers come, they rip

a hole in the sand along

the new blacktop road with a tony name

(Trotting Park, Pamet Hills)

and up goes another glass-walled-

split-level-livingroom-vast-as-a-

roller-rink-$100,000

summer home for a psychiatrist

and family.

Nine months vacation homes

stand empty except for mice

and spiders, an occasional

bird with a broken back twitching

on the deck under a gape of glass.

I live in such a development

way at the end of a winding

road where the marsh begins

to close in: two houses,

the one next door a local

fisherman lost to the bank

last winter, ours a box

half buried in the sand.

This land is rendered

too expensive

to live on. We feed

four people off it,

a kind of organic tall corn

ornery joke at road’s end.

We planted for the birds cover

and berries, we compost, we set out

trees and at night

the raccoons come shambling.

Yet the foxes left us,

shrinking into the marsh.

I found their new den.

I don’t show it

to anyone.

Forgive us, grey fox, our stealing

your home, our loving

this land carved into lots

over a shrinking watertable

where the long sea wind that blows

the sand whispers to developers

money, money, money.

Mostly you don’t see the ocean

although when the surf is up

its roaring fills you

like a shell,

whistling through your

ears, your bones.

Nothing stands up here

but you, in the steady

rasp of the salt wind.

The oaks grow a foot high

dry gnarled jungles

you can’t wade through

where eyes watch.

The hog cranberry bronze

in the fall, shines

metallically revealing

every hump.

The dune grass ripples

like a pelt, and around every

clump is traced a circle,

fingers of the wind.

Fox grape on the high dunes,

poison ivy whose bright berries

the birds carry in their bodies

to scatter, the dune

colored grasshoppers,

the fox with fur of fine sand.

You are standing too tall for

this landscape. Lie down.

Let the grass blow

over you. Let the plover

pipe, the kestrel stand beating its wings

in the air, the wolf spider

come to the door of its burrow,

the mouse nibble on

your toe. Let the beach pea

entangle your legs in its vine

and ring you with purple blossoms.

Now get up slowly

and seek a way down off the dunes,

carefully: your heavy feet

assault the balance.

Come down on the bench

of the great beach arching

away into fog.

Lie down before the ocean.

It rises over you, it stands

hissing and spreading its

cobalt hood, rattling

its pebbles.

Cold it is and its rhythm

as it eats away the beach,

as it washes the dunes out to sea

to build new spits and islands,

enters your blood and slows

the beat of that newish contraption

your heart controlling the waves

of your inward salt sea.

Let your mind open

like a clam when the waters

slide back to feed it.

Plow out to the ancient cold

mothering embrace, cold

and weightless yourself

as a fish, over the buried

wrecks. Then with respect

let the breakers drive you

up and out into

the heavy air, your heart

pounding. The warm scratchy sand

like a receiving blanket

holds you up gasping with life.

We are trying to live

as if we were an experiment

conducted by the future,

blasting cell walls

that no protective seal or inhibition

has evolved to replace.

I am conducting a slow vivisection

on my own tissues, carried out

under the barking muzzle of guns.

Those who speak of good and simple

in the same sandwich of tongue and teeth

inhabit some other universe.

Good draws blood from my scalp and files my nerves.

Good runs the yard engine of the night over my bed.

Good pickles me in the brown vinegar of guilt.

Good robs the easy words as they rattle off my teeth,

leaving me naked as an egg.

Remember that pregnancy is beautiful only

at a distance from the distended belly.

A new idea rarely is born like Venus attended by graces.

More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.

More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

Most mutants die: only

a minority refract the race

through the prisms of their genes.

Those slimy fish with air sacs were ugly

as they hauled up on the mud flats

heaving and gasping. How clumsy we are

in this new air we reach with such effort

and cannot yet breathe.

To fight history as it carries us,

to swim upstream across the currents—no!—

to move the river, to create new currents

with the force of our arms and backs,

to shape this torrent as it shapes us

flowing, churning, dragging us under

into the green moil where the breath is pummeled

from the lungs and the eyes burst backward,

among rocks, the teeth of the white water

grinning like hungry bears,

ah, Phyllis, you complain too much!

We all carry in the gold lockets

of the good birthday child sentimental

landscapes in pale mauve where we have

everything we desire carried in on trays

serene as jade buddhas,

respectable as Jane Austen,

secure as an obituary in the
Times.

We were not made for a heaven of Sundays.

Most people are given hunger, the dim pain

of being used twisting through the bowels,

close walls and a low sky, troubles visited

from above like tornadoes that level the house,

pain early, pain late, and a death not chosen.

My friend, the amazons were hideous

with the white scars of knife wounds,

the welts of sword slashes, flesh that would

remind nobody of a ripe peach.

But age sucks us all dry.

Old campaigners waken to the resonant singing

of angels of pillars of fire and pillars of ash

that only trouble the sleep of women

who climb on a platform or crouch at a barricade.

Your smile is rich with risk

and subtle with enemies contested.

Your memories whistle and clang and moan

in the dark like buoys that summon

and give warning of danger

and the channel through.

I was not born a serf bound to a ryefield,

I was not born to bend over a pressing machine

in a loft while the sun rose and set, I was not born

to starve in the first year with big

belly and spindly legs, I was not born

to be gang raped by soldiers at fourteen,

I was not born to die in childbirth,

to be burned at the stake by the Church,

but of all these we are the daughters

born of luck round as an apple

and fat as a goose, to charge into battle

swinging our great-grandmother’s bones.

Millions of dead women keen in our hair

for food and freedom, the electricity

drives me humming. What privilege

to be the heiresses of so much wanting!

How can we ever give up?

Our laughter has been honed by adversity

till it gleams like an ax

and we will not die by our own hand.

There is no difference between being raped

and being pushed down a flight of cement steps

except that the wounds also bleed inside.

There is no difference between being raped

and being run over by a truck

except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it.

There is no difference between being raped

and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake

except that people ask if your skirt was short

and why you were out alone anyhow.

There is no difference between being raped

and going head first through a windshield

except that afterward you are afraid

not of cars

but half the human race.

The rapist is your boyfriend’s brother.

He sits beside you in the movies eating popcorn.

Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male

like a maggot in garbage.

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing

all of the time on a woman’s hunched back.

Never to stroll alone on a sand road through pine woods,

never to climb a trail across a bald

without that aluminum in the mouth

when I see a man climbing toward me.

Never to open the door to a knock

without that razor just grazing the throat.

The fear of the dark side of hedges,

the back seat of the car, the empty house

rattling keys like a snake’s warning.

The fear of the smiling man

in whose pocket is a knife.

The fear of the serious man

in whose fist is locked hatred.

All it takes to cast a rapist is seeing your body

as jackhammer, as blowtorch, as adding-machine-gun.

All it takes is hating that body

your own, your self, your muscle that softens to flab.

All it takes is to push what you hate,

what you fear onto the soft alien flesh.

To bucket out invincible as a tank

armored with treads without senses

to possess and punish in one act,

to rip up pleasure, to murder those who dare

live in the leafy flesh open to love.

My eyes catch and stick

as I wade in bellysoft heat.

Tree of miniature chocolates filled with liqueur,

tree of earrings tinkling in the mink wind,

of Bach oratorios spinning light at 33⅓,

tree of Thailand silks murmuring changes.

Pluck, eat and grow heavy.

From each hair a wine bottle dangles.

A toaster is strung through my nose.

An elevator is installed in my spine.

The mouth of the empire

eats onward through the apple of all.

Armies of brown men

are roasted into coffee beans,

are melted into chocolate,

are pounded into copper.

Their blood is refined into oil,

black river oozing rainbows

of affluence.

Their bodies shrink

to grains of rice.

I have lost my knees.

I am the soft mouth of the caterpillar.

People and landscapes are my food

and I grow fat and blind.

In the suburbs of the ganglia,

in the tract houses of the split-level brain,

in the bulldozed bowling alleys where staked saplings

shiver like ostriches in a zoo,

on streets empty of people

that dead-end at the expressway where cars bullet by,

in egg carton bedrooms, the dream is secreted.

On the clambering vines of the fingers

hard green dreams shape around seeds.

Sour enough to scald the tongue,

bitter with tannin and acid,

hard as granite chips, will these grapes ripen to give wine?

In the red Tau of the womb

dreams clot, clump, a dense pale smear

like a nebula.

Who has known this woman?

This woman has known herself.