Circles on the Water (20 page)

Listening becomes eavesdropping and they

begin to feel my silence like a horse

in the diningroom. Gradually as I sit

my hair mats. Feathers stick up from

it, crow and eagle. My cheeks break

out into painted zigzag designs. My spear

leans against the back of my chair.

They begin to question me, oh, um,

do you live communally? What do

you mean, “open”? Hair breaks through

the back of my hands. My fangs

drum on the table top. In another moment

I will swing by my long prehensile

tail from the crystal chandelier,

shitting in the soup.

The men are laughing as I approach

and then they price me: that calculating

scan. Everything turns into hornets

buzzing, swarming. One will

tell me about his wife

weeping tears of pure beersuds;

one is even now swaggering down

the Tombstone set of his mind, the fastest

gun; one will let me know in the next

half hour he thinks political writers

are opportunistic simpletons, and women

have minds of goat fudge; one will

only try unceasingly to bed me as if

I were the week’s prize, and he wears

a chain of fellowships and grants

like sharpshooters’ medals. Mostly they

will chase the students and drink, mostly

they will gossip and put each other

down, mostly they will complain. I

am here for the women, a political

task. They think they have a label

for that. I am on vacation from sex

and love, from the fatty broth

of my life. I am seeking to be useful,

the good godmother. We are acting

in different fables. I know the plots

of theirs, but none of them recognize

mine, except the students, who understand

at once they will be allowed

to chew me to the bones.

I am sitting on a kitchen chair.

My feet do not reach the floor.

If I sit forward, they’ll rest on

a rung, but if I do that, the women

will stop talking and look at me

and I’ll be made to go outside

and “play” in this taffeta dress.

What they say is not what they

are talking about, which lumps

just underneath. If I listen, if I

screw up my face and hold my breath

and listen, I’ll see it, the moving

bump under the rug, that snake in the

tablecloth jungle, the bulge

in women’s dresses you aren’t supposed

to notice. I listen and listen

but it doesn’t go anyplace,

nobody comes out all

right in the end. I get bored

and kick the table leg and am sent

outside to sulk, still not knowing.

I never got there, into the hot

wet heart of the kitchen gossip,

to sit twisting the ring on my finger

worn smooth, saying my hubby, my old

man,
him.
I never grew up, Mama,

I grew off, I grew outside. I grew

like crazy. I am the calico

mouse gnawing at the foundations.

The sweet snake is my friend who chews

on the roots of the hangman’s tree

to bring it down. I am the lump

under the tablecloth that moves

stealthily toward the cream pitcher.

After years under the rug like a tumor

they invite me into the parlor, Mama,

they pay me by check and it doesn’t bounce.

I’m giving a speech tonight. Do they

think I’m kidding? The walls I write

on are for sale now, but the message

is the same as I wrote in

blood on the jail house wall.

Energy flowing through me gets turned

into money and they take that back,

but the work remains, Mama, under

the carpet, in the walls, out

in the open. It goes on talking

after they’ve shut me up.

Moments

when I care about nothing

except an apple:

red as a maple tree

satin and speckled

tart and winy.

Moments

when body is all:

fast as an elevator

pulsing out waves of darkness

hot as the inner earth

molten and greedy.

Moments

when sky fills my head:

bluer than thought

cleaner than number

with a wind

fresh and sour

cold from the mouth of the sea.

Moments

of sinking my teeth

into now like a hungry fox:

never otherwise

am I so cruel;

never otherwise

so happy.

Radiation is like oppression,

the average daily kind of subliminal toothache

you get almost used to, the stench

of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.

We comprehend the disasters of the moment,

the nursing home fire, the river in flood

pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane

crash with fragments of burnt bodies

scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,

the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.

But how to grasp a thing that does not

kill you today or tomorrow

but slowly from the inside in twenty years.

How to feel that a corporate choice

means we bear twisted genes and our

grandchildren will be stillborn if our

children are very lucky.

Slow death can not be photographed for the six

o’clock news. It’s all statistical,

the gross national product or the prime

lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw

in the right spectrum, how it would shine,

lurid as magenta neon.

If we could smell radiation like seeping

gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we

could hear it as a low ominous roar

of the earth shifting, then we would not sit

and be poisoned while industry spokesmen

talk of acceptable millirems and .02

cancer per population thousand.

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,

murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,

from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,

and fourteen years later statistics are printed

on the rise in leukemia among children.

We never see their faces. They never stand,

those poisoned children together in a courtyard,

and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.

The shipyard workers who built nuclear

submarines, the soldiers who were marched

into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-

bomb, the people who work in power plants,

they die quietly years after in hospital

wards and not on the evening news.

The soft spring rain floats down and the air

is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings

drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,

you run in it and feel clean and strong,

the spring rain blowing from the irradiated

cloud over the power plant.

Radiation is oppression, the daily average

kind, the kind you’re almost used to

and live with as the years abrade you,

high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,

a hacking cough: you take it inside

and it becomes pain and you say, not

They are killing me
, but
I am sick now.

This is a day to celebrate can-

openers, those lantern-jawed long-tailed

humping tools that cut through what keeps

us from what we need: a can of beans

trapped in its armor taunts the nails

and teeth of a hungry woman.

Today let us hear hurrahs for zippers,

those small shark teeth that part

politely to let us at what we want;

the tape on packages that unlock

us birthday presents; envelopes

we slit to thaw the frozen

words on the tundra of paper.

Today let us praise the small

rebirths, the emerging groundhog

from the sodden burrow; the nut

picked from the broken fortress of walnut

shell, itself pried from the oily fruit

shaken from the high turreted

city of the tree.

Today let us honor the safe whose door

hangs ajar; the champagne bottle

with its cork bounced off the ceiling

and into the soup tureen; the Victorian lady

in love who has removed her hood, her cloak,

her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress,

her underdress, her wool petticoat, her linen

petticoats, her silk petticoats, her whalebone

corset, her bustle, her chemise, her drawers, and

who still wants to! Today let us praise the cast

that finally opens, slit neatly in two

like a dinosaur egg, and out at last

comes somewhat hairier, powdered in dead skin

but still beautiful, the lost for months

body of my love.

I am someone who boots myself from bed

when the alarm cracks my sleep. Spineless

as raw egg on the tilted slab of day

I ooze toward breakfast to be born.

I stagger to my desk on crutches of strong coffee.

How sensuous then are the mornings we do

not rise. This morning we curl embracing

while rain crawls over the roof like a thousand

scuttling fiddler crabs. Set off a

twenty-one tea kettle salute

for a rainy 4th with the parade and races

cancelled, our picnic chilling disconsolate

in five refrigerators. A sneaky hooray

for the uneven gallop of the drops,

for the steady splash of the drainpipe,

for the rushing of the leaves in green

whooshing wet bellows, for the teeming wind

that blows the house before it in full sail.

We are at sea together in the woods.

The air chill enough for the quilt, warm

and sweet as cocoa and coconut we make

love in the morning when there’s never time.

Now time rains over us liquid and vast.

We talk facing, elastic parentheses.

We dawdle in green mazes of conversing

seeking no way out but only farther into

the undulating hedges, grey statues of nymphs,

satyrs and learned old women, broken busts,

past a fountain and tombstone

in the boxwood of our curious minds

that like the pole beans on the fence

expand perceptibly in the long rain.

And thus the people every year

in the valley of humid July

did sacrifice themselves

to the long green phallic god

and eat and eat and eat.

They’re coming, they’re on us,

the long striped gourds, the silky

babies, the hairy adolescents,

the lumpy vast adults

like the trunks of green elephants.

Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;

sauté with olive oil and cumin,

tomatoes, onion; frittata;

casserole of lamb; baked

topped with cheese; marinated;

stuffed; stewed; driven

through the heart like a stake.

Get rid of old friends: they too

have gardens and full trunks.

Look for newcomers: befriend

them in the post office, unload

on them and run. Stop tourists

in the street. Take truckloads

to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.

Beg on the highway: please

take my zucchini, I have a crippled

mother at home with heartburn.

Sneak out before dawn to drop

them in other people’s gardens,

in baby buggies at churchdoors.

Shot, smuggling zucchini into

mailboxes, a federal offense.

With a suave reptilian glitter

you bask among your raspy

fronds sudden and huge as

alligators. You give and give

too much, like summer days

limp with heat, thunderstorms

bursting their bags on our heads,

as we salt and freeze and pickle

for the too little to come.

What are you doing up, my cat

complains as I come into the living

room at two in the morning: she

is making eyes through the glass

at a squat ruffed grey tom. He fades

back, only the gold eyes shining

like headlights under the bird feeder.

Retreat with all deliberate speed

says the skunk in the path

at the marsh’s edge, tail upraised

quivering in shape like a question

mark but in meaning an exclamation

point.

You are too near my nest so I will

let you believe you can catch and

eat me, says the whip-poor-will

leading me through the thorniest thickets

uphill and down ravines of briar

as it drags its apparently broken wing.

This is my lair, my home, my master,

my piss-post, my good brown blanket,

my feeding dish, my bone farm, all

mine and my teeth are long and sharp

as icicles and my tongue is red as your

blood I will spill if you do not

run, the German shepherd says loudly

and for half a block.

In the center of her web the spider

crouches to charge me. In the woods

the blue jay shrieks and the squirrels

perch over my head chittering while all

the small birds bide silent in the leaves.

Wherever I march on two legs

I am walking on somebody’s roof.