Circles on the Water (18 page)

Though the cod stifle in the seas, though

the rivers thicken to shit, still

writing implies faith in someone listening,

different in content but not in need

from the child who cries in the night.

Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,

on blind inertia, on the second law

of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,

on contempt, on the silence

that does not follow the chord resolved,

the sentence spoken, but the something

that cannot be said. Perhaps there are no

words yet, perhaps the words bend the thought

back on itself, perhaps the words can be said

but cannot yet be heard, and so

the saying arches through the air and crumbles.

Making is an act, but survival

is luck, caught in history

like a moth trapped in the subway.

There is nothing to do but make well,

finish, and let go. Words

live, words die

in the mouths of everybody.

You see before you an icing of skin,

a scum of flesh

narrowly wrapped around a tooth.

This tooth is red as a lion’s

heart and it throbs.

This tooth is hollowed out to a cave

big enough for tourists

to go through in parties with guides

in flat-bottomed boats.

This tooth sings opera all night

like a Russian basso prof undo.

This tooth plays itself like an organ

in an old movie palace; it is

the chief villain, Sydney Greenstreet,

and its laughter tickles with menace.

This tooth is dying, dying

like a cruel pharaoh, like a

fat gouty old tyrant assembling

his wives and his cabinet, his horse

and his generals, his dancing girls

and his hunting cheetah, all

to be burned on his tomb

in homage. I am nothing,

nothing at all, but a reluctant

pyramid standing here, a grandiose

talking headstone for my tooth.

Doors open in the mind

and close again like wounds

healing. Doors open in the

mind and close again like

dying fish whose gills fall

finally still. Doors in the mind

open and close like mountains

you see spired white past other

mountains but never reach.

Doors open flashing in the sundarkened wave,

doors in the brown carp pool,

doors in the beard of the waterfall,

doors in the green caverns

of the tree, doors in the eye

of the goat, of the alley cat,

doors in a hand held up,

doors in the astonished skin.

The self is last summer’s

clothes unpacked from suitcases.

The self is your old physics

notebook filled with experiments

you had to fake. A well thumbed

deck where the joker fills in

for the King of Diamonds

and the dog has eaten the Ace

of Spades, but there are

five battered sevens.

Always too at the root tips growing

or dying, dark osmotic exchange

of particles, of energy, of dreams

goes wetly on. The larger mysteries

come to us at morning and evening

crowned with bladderwrack and gull feathers,

wearing the heads of cows, of horned owls,

of our children who are not ours,

of strangers whose faces open

like doors where we enter

or flee.

You ask why sometimes I say stop

why sometimes I cry no

while I shake with pleasure.

What do I fear, you ask,

why don’t I always want to come

and come again to that molten

deep sea center where the nerves

fuse open and the brain

and body shine with a black wordless light

fluorescent and heaving like plankton.

If you turn over the old refuse

of sexual slang, the worn buttons

of language, you find men

talk of spending and women

of dying.

You come in a torrent and ease

into limpness. Pleasure takes me

farther and farther from shore

in a series of breakers, each

towering higher before it

crashes and spills flat.

I am open then as a palm held out,

open as a sunflower, without

crust, without shelter, without

skin, hideless and unhidden.

How can I let you ride

so far into me and not fear?

Helpless as a burning city,

how can I ignore that the extremes

of pleasure are fire storms

that leave a vacuum into which

dangerous feelings (tenderness,

affection, l  o  v  e) may rush

like gale force winds.

Anchored a ways off Buoy Rocks the sailboat

bobs jaunty, light, little. We slide

over the side after scraping bottom.

The water up to our waists looks brown

ahead. We wade onto Smalley Bar.

I leave the men clamming and walk

the bar toward shore.

By the time I walk back straight out

from the coast of the wild island the tide

is rushing in. My shoes already float.

I walk the bar, invisible now,

water to my thighs. The day’s

turned smoky. A storm is blowing

thick from the east. I stand

a quarter mile out in the bay with

the tide rising and only this

strange buried bridge of sandbar under me,

calling across the breaking grey waves,

unsure whether I can still wade

or must swim against the tide to the boat

dragging its anchor loose.

Unknown territory. Strange bottom.

I live on bridges that may or may

not be there under the breaking

water deepening. I never know

what I’ll step on. I never know

whether I’ll make it before dark,

before the storm catches me,

before the tide sweeps me out.

The neat white houses across the bay

are fading as the air thickens.

People in couples, in boxes, in clear

expectations of class and role

and income, I deserve no pity

shivering here as the water rushes past.

I find more than clams out on

the bar. It’s not my sailboat

ever, but it’s my choice.

History falls like rain

on the fields, like hailstones

that break the graceful

fleur de lis spears

of young corn. History falls

like freezing rain

on the small hopes, the

small pleasures of the morning,

the small struggles of a life.

History falls like bombs

scorching the birds on their nests,

burning the big-eyed voles in their tunnels,

the rabbits giving suck

curled in the green grass of June.

Craters pit the smoking fields.

A right hand, a left foot

scattered on the broken road.

History is manufactured like

plastic buckets. History is traded

on the stock exchange and the big

holding corporations

rake off a profit.

History is written to order

like the Sunday funnies. History

is floated like a bond issue

on the fat of banks.

Sometimes time funnels down

to the dripping of water

one drop at a time slow

as the slowest tears right

on the forehead of someone lying

awake remembering, remembering

another year and another face.

Sometimes time stalls in a door

opening, a moment balanced

on a blade of choice when the hand

falters, the face freezes,

and then finally the doors of the will

open or shut

on a yes or a no.

Beyond official history of texts,

of bronze generals,

a history flows of rivers and amoebas,

of the first creeping thing

that shuddered onto the land,

a history of the woman who

tamed corn, a history

of learning and losing, a history

of making good and being had,

of some great green organism

gasping to be free.

Sometimes time funnels down

to a woman who stands in a door

saying no to those who come

with guns and warrants.

Sometimes silence

is a song that carries on the soiled wind

like a flight of geese winging north

to clear cold waters. Sometimes

history that matters is seizing your own,

the old blood clots, the too short dresses,

the anguished masks of failures half

remembered like childhood fevers,

matchboxes from motels off freeways,

snapshots with faces torn out, letters

that said too much or too little,

and saying yes. Yes, I am the person

who acted, who spoke. I grow

from what I was

like a pitch pine after a fire

that pokes up green and bushy shoots

from the charred ground

where its roots spread deep and wide.

I grow from what I was,

more, not less, yes,

in me both egg and stone.

No, I am not a soldier in your

history, I live in my own tale

with others I choose to wake me in the morning,

to sit across the table in the evening,

to wipe my forehead, to touch

my hand, to carry in my throat

like a lullaby that murmurs

no, I do not fear you

and yes, I am not for sale.

How you shine from the inside

orange as a pumpkin’s belly,

your face beautiful as children’s

faces when they want

at white heat, when fear pinches

them, when they have not learned

how to lie well

yet.

Your pain flows into me through

my ears and fingers. Your pain

presses in, I cannot keep it away.

Like a baby in my body

you kick me as you stretch

and knock the breath out.

Yet when I shook with pain’s

fever, when fear chewed me

raw all night, you held me, you

held on. Then I was the baby

past words and blubbering.

The words, the comfort were yours

and you nurtured me shriveled

like a seed that would

never uncurl.

How strangely we mother each

other, sister and brother, lovers,

twins. For you to love me means

you must love yourself.

That is what loving is, I say,

it is not pain, it is not

pleasure, it is not compulsion

or fantasy. It is only a way

of living, wide open.

They give me a bad

reputation, those swart rowers

through the air, heavy winged

and heavy voiced, brass tipped.

Before us they lived here

in the tallest pine. Shortly

after coming I walked in

on a ceremony, the crows

were singing secretly

and beautifully a ritual.

They divebombed me. To make

peace I brought a sacrifice,

the remains of a leg

of lamb. Since then

we have had truce.

Smart, ancient, rowdy and far-

sighted, they use our land

as sanctuary for raiding

where men shoot at them.

They come down, settling like

unwieldy cargo jets, to the bird

food, scattering the

cardinals, the juncos.
God

they’re big, I’ve never seen

them so near a house,

the guest says. We look

at each other, the crows

and me. Outside

they allow my slow approach.

They do not touch our crops

even in the far garden

in the bottomland. I’m aware

women have been burned

for less. I stand

under the oldest white oak

whose arms coil fat as pythons

and scream at the hunters

driving them back

with black hair coarse and streaming:

Caw! Caw!

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil

a friend said,
Why are you happy?

He explained (we lay together

on a hard cold floor) what prison

meant because he had done

time, and I talked of the death

of friends.
Why are you happy

then,
he asked, close to

angry.

I said, I like my life. If I

have to give it back, if they

take it from me, let me only

not feel I wasted any, let me

not feel I forgot to love anyone

I meant to love, that I forgot

to give what I held in my hands,

that I forgot to do some little

piece of the work that wanted

to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine,

the muted grey light off the waters

of the bay at night, the white

light of the fog stealing in,

the first spears of the morning

touching a face

I love. We all lose

everything. We lose

ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do

lasts, what love sculps from us;

but what I count, my rubies, my

children, are those moments

wide open when I know clearly

who I am, who you are, what we

do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,

with all my senses hungry and filled

at once like a pitcher with light.