Circles on the Water (16 page)

I never want to merge: only to overlap,

to grow sensitive in the moment so that we move

together as currents, so that carried

on that wave we sense skin upon skin

nerve into nerve with millions of tiny windows

open to each other’s light as we shine

from the nebulous center like squid

and then let go.

I lack a light touch.

I step on my own words,

a garden rake in the weeds.

I sweat and heave when I should slip away.

I am earnest into sermons when I should shrug.

I ram on.

The inhabitants of my life change,

tides in a subway car.

At every stop coming and going.

What is constant except a few travelers

in the same direction, and the will to continue

through the loud dark

in the hope of someday arriving?

My old friend, how we sustain

each other, how we bear witness.

We are each other’s light luggage of essentials.

We are each other’s film archive and museum

packed in the crumbling arch of the skull.

Trust is the slowest strength, growing

microscopic ring on ring of living wood.

The greater gift is caring,

the laying on of hands in the dark,

of words in the light.

The lesser gift is remembering,

the compass in the bush that makes clear the way

come, the way to go.

We have shaped each other.

My new friend, every beginning throws the scent

of a sunny morning in a pine grove after rain.

The senses stretch out the necks of giraffes

for the smallest leaf of data to understand.

We give with the doors wide open;

a gardener with too many tomatoes,

we count nothing, we fill bushels with joy.

When does the tallying start?

Slowly underground fears begin, invisible

as the mycelium of a toadstool

waiting only for a damp morning to sprout.

I ask you to give much, to give up more.

What comes easy to a man comes

out of women. Nothing will be easy here.

Good will starts out fat and sweet

as tub butter and turns slowly rancid.

It must be made again daily

if we want it fresh.

The waters of trust run as deep as the river of fear

through the dark caverns in the bone.

Work is my center, my trunk

yet we are rooted in loving connection

with a deep grasping and full green giving.

I am sick, sick to desperation

of the old defeats, of the broken treaties,

episodes of the same colonial war of women and men.

I want the cavalry to take off those bemedaled blue uniforms

the color of Zeus and those shiny boots clanking with spurs.

I want the horses to win this time and eat grass together.

In this movie the Army always comes bugling over the hill,

burns some squaws and pens up the rest on a reservation,

paves over the sacred dancing ground for a Stop and Shop,

and a ten-lane turnpike to the snowmobile factory.

Then they ask the doctor why nothing is fun.

Their eyes are the color of television screens.

They come by pretending, they die with their minds turned off.

Do you think on the tenting ground of General Bluster

young renegades may begin to steal away?

Or will they always go back for their paychecks?

I think it is time for the extras to burn down the movie.

Yes, I am sick of treaties with the enemy who brings to bed

his boots and his law, who is

still and after my enemy.

I have been trained to love him, and he to use me.

Yes, I am weary of war where I want exchange,

sick of harvesting disgust from the shoots of joy.

Fight with my tribe or die in your blue uniform

but don’t think you can take it off in bed.

It dyes your words, your brain runs cobalt

and your tear ducts atrophy to pebbles.

I love easily: never mind that.

Love is the paper script of this loose army.

Let us sleep on honesty at night like a board.

Talk with your body, talk with your life.

Grow me good will

rough and thick as meadow grass

but tend it like an invalid house plant,

a tender African violet in the best window.

A turn of the wheel, I thrust

up with effort pushing, braced and sweating,

then easy over down into sleep, body idle,

and the sweet loamy smell of the earth,

a turn of the twelve-spoked wheel flashing.

I have tried to forge my life whole,

round, integral as the earth spinning.

I have tried to bet my values,

poker played with a tarot deck,

all we hope and fear and struggle for,

where the white chips are the eyes of anguish,

the red the coins of blood paid on the streets

and the blues are all piled by the dealer.

We sit round the table gambling against the house:

the power hidden under the green felt,

the television camera that reads your hand,

the magnetic dice, the transistorized

computer controlled deck that riffles

with the sound of ice

blowing on the wind against glass.

A turn of the wheel: nothing

stays. The redwinged blackbirds implode

into a tree above the salt marsh one

March day piping and chittering

every year, but the banded pet

does not return. The cherry tree begins

to bear this June, a cluster

of sweet black fruit warm on the palm.

The rue died of the winter heaves.

We’ll plant a new one. It does not

taste the same, bitter always, but

even in bitterness there are shades,

flavors, subtle essences, discretions

in what sets the teeth on edge.

Down into the mud of pain,

buried, choking, shivering with despair,

the fire gone out in the belly’s hearth

and frogs hopping on the floor,

ears sealed with icy muck,

and the busy shrill cricket of the mad

ego twitching its legs in dry

compulsion all night. Up into the sun

that ripens you like a pear

bronze and golden, the hope that twines

its strands clambering up to the light

and bears fragrant wide blossoms opening

like singing faces.

Turn and turn again and turn,

always rolling on with massive thumps

and sudden lurching dives, I am pinned

to the wheel of the seasons,

hot and cold, sober and glad and menacing,

bearing and losing. I turn head high,

head low, my feet brushing the pine boughs,

moss in my ears, my nose gathering

snow, my feet soaked like a tree’s

roots. I go rolling on, heads and tails,

turn and turn again and turn,

pinned to the wheel of my choice and choosing still,

stretched on the wheel of the seasons,

learning and forgetting and moving

some part of the way toward

a new and better place, some part

of the way toward dying.

Mirror from the twenties

in a gilded frame muting

pleasantly dull, you hung

over the secondhand buffet

in the diningroom

that proved we were practically

middleclass: table with claw

legs, cave of genteel lace.

Underneath I crawled

running my toy car.

In that asbestos box

no room was big enough

to pace more than one stride.

When we shut up we could hear

neighbors in multifamily cages

six feet each side, yelling.

We could smell the liver

and onions frying, we could

hear the tubercular cough

racking an old man’s lungs.

When the sun hit your

beveled edge, rainbows would

quiver out to stripe the walls

clear as sugar candy, pure as

the cry of my hunger.

Now you hang in this rented

space, my only heirloom, over

a radiator, and as I rise

I see my naked body

poised in you like a diver

about to leap.

Your carved frame in childhood

I feared as an owl’s head,

eyes of a predator.

You carry in your depths

like mouse bones the starving

blue face of that

unwanted brat. Survival

knocks and hisses. I still

see the wooden owl staring

but beneath I recognize

your sides are gently

curved in and out

female as my own facing

me inside you. I smile

at you, at me, at

that battered surviving heiress

of mousebone soup.

In all of Greater Grand Rapids you

are the only one who knows me

the shape of my thighs and my fears

working like yeast

the taste of my laughter

how my teeth chatter

in a cold wind of despairing.

Slowly I evaporate here

drying into a paper scarecrow,

simplified into a scaffolding

of pipes in which a neon

womanfist blinks. I am all

facade and fixed grimaces

like a pinochle deck.

My blood is slowing with

the wide cold brown river.

My frog heart burrows

deep in the mud of the bank.

My hands fold up

and harden on sticks to wait for spring.

My voice flies out over

the stiff grasses of the field

searching and comes back hungry.

Here you have fourteen lovers

and I only one. At home

I have fourteen lovers but here only you

precious as drops of winter sun.

Have you had your vitamin C,

I ask you, take another piece of

chicken, let me massage you,

solicitous as an heir

fingering a parchment will.

Curious as snails meeting on a gate

we exchange with soft horns

and wet organs, words and signals,

information, tricks, the history of the soft

flowing foot and the intricate

masonry bower of shell. How the strange

minds twine and glitter and swing

looped in words like a hammock.

How the strange minds joining stand,

charmed snakes glittering

to dance their knowledge.

Round and round I turn

in you, a cat making a bed,

kneading you with my velvet and claws,

butting and nudging and licking,

round and round, and my hair

grows another foot and my eyes

shine gold and red like a carnival.

Then I walk outside and the cold

wind plucks the fur and the shine

from all the branches of my bones.

So you turn up like an old

arrest record, so you turn

up like a single boot

after I finally threw the other

away, so you turn up

like a drunken wobbly angel

making your own fierce annunciation

to this wilting female

trouble, garlands of trouble.

Tomorrow you go to jail

and tonight you sit before me

brushing me with the gaze

of your eyes burning

and smoky: your eyes that

change, grey into blue,

and that look that never changes.

Lately I haven’t thought

of you every day, lately it hasn’t

been as bad,
you say, and

when I laugh, your mouth

calls me cruel.

Ah, you chew your heart

like a steak rare and salty.

When you are cozy in my bed

you twitch with restlessness,

you want to be mirroring your

face in shopwindows in Port

au Prince. When you are gone

a thousand miles you wake up

with the veins of your arm

boring like sirens, and you

want me night and morning

till your belly wrings dry.

I am simple and dogged

as a turtle crossing a road

while you dance jagged epicycles

around me. Now you are

laughing because you know

how to unzip shells. For a few

hours we will both get

just what we want: this is Act

Forty Four in a play

that would be tedious to observers

but for us strict

and necessary as a bullfight,

a duel, the dance of double

suns, twinned stars

whose attraction and repulsion

balance as they inscribe

erratic orbits whose center

is where the other was

or will be.

Of course the plane is late

two hours twisting bumpily

over Chicago in a droning grey funk

with the seatbelt sign on.

Either you are met by seven

young Marxists who want to know

at once What Is To Be Done

or one professor who says, What?

You have luggage? But I

parked in the no

parking zone.