Circles on the Water (23 page)

Hecate, lady of the crossroads, vampires

of despair you loose and the twittering

bats of sleepless fear. The three-headed

dog barking in the snow obeys you.

Tonight I honor you, lady of last things.

Without you to goad me I would lie

late in the warm bed of the flesh.

The blood I coughed from my lungs that year

you stood at the foot of my bed was sour,

acrid, the taste of promises broken

and since then I have run twice as fast.

Your teeth are in me, like tiny headstones.

This moon is the void around which the serpent

with its tail in its mouth curls.

Where there is no color, no light,

no sound, what is? The dark of the mind.

In terror begins vision. In silence

I learn my song, here at the stone

nipple, the black moon bleeding,

the egg anonymous as water,

the night that goes on and on,

a tunnel through the earth.

This month you carried me late and heavy

in your belly and finally near Tuesday

midnight you gave me light and life, the season

Kore returns to Demeter, and you suffer

and I cannot save you though I burn with dreams.

Memories the color of old blood,

scraps of velvet gowns, lace, chiffon veils,

your sister’s stage costumes (Ziegfeld

didn’t stint) we fingered together, you

padding in sneakers and wash-worn housedresses.

You grew celery by tucking sliced off

bottoms in the soil. You kept a compost

pile in 1940. Your tomatoes glowed

like traffic signals in the table-sized yard.

Don’t kill spiders, you warned.

In an asbestos box in Detroit where sputtering

factories yellow the air, where sheets

on the line turn ashen, you nurtured

a backyard jungle. Every hungry cat

wanted to enter and every child.

You who had not been allowed to finish

tenth grade but sent to be a frightened

chambermaid, carried home every week

armloads of books from the library

rummaging them late at night, insomniac,

riffling the books like boxes of chocolates

searching for the candied cherries, the nuts,

hunting for the secrets, the formulae,

the knowledge those others learned

that made them shine and never ache.

You were taught to feel stupid; you

were made to feel dirty; you were

forced to feel helpless; you were trained

to feel lost, uprooted, terrified.

You could not love yourself or me.

Dreamer of fables that hid their own

endings, kitchen witch, reader of palms,

you gave me gifts and took them back

but the real ones boil in the blood

and swell in the breasts, furtive, strong.

You gave me hands that can pick up

a wild bird so that the bird relaxes,

turns and stares. I have handled

fifty stunned and injured birds and killed

only two through clumsiness, with your touch.

You taught me to see the scale on the bird

leg, the old woman’s scalp pink as a rose

under the fluff, the golden flecks in the iris

of your eye, the silver underside of leaves

blown back. I am your poet, mother.

You did not want the daughter you got.

You wanted a girl to flirt as you did

and marry as you had and chew the same

sour coughed up cud, yet you wanted too

to birth a witch, a revenger, a sword

of hearts who would do all the things

you feared. Don’t do it, they’ll kill

you, you’re bad, you said, slapping me down

hard but always you whispered, I could have!

Only rebellion flashes like lightning.

I wanted to take you with me, you don’t

remember. We fought like snakes, biting

hard at each other’s spine to snap free.

You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries,

snuffed my panties looking for smudge of sex,

so I took off and never came back. You can’t

imagine how I still long to save you,

to carry you off, who can’t trust me

to make coffee, but your life and mine pass

in different centuries, under altered suns.

I see your blood soaking into the linoleum,

I see you twisted, a mop some giant hand

is wringing out. Pain in the careless joke

and shouted insult and knotted fist. Pain like knives

and forks set out on the domestic table.

You look to men for salvation and every year

finds you more helpless. Do I battle

for other women, myself included,

because I cannot give you anything

you want? I cannot midwife you free.

In my childhood bed we float, your sweet

husky voice singing about the crescent

moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would

climb into like a boat and row away

and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.

In the land where the moon hides, mothers

and daughters hold each other tenderly.

There is no male law at five o’clock.

Our sameness and our difference do not clash

metal on metal but we celebrate and learn.

My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.

The life you gave me burns its acetylene

of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,

the compost of discontent, flaring into words

strong for other women under your waning moon.

You hand me a cup of water;

I drink it and thank you pretending

what I take into me so calmly

could not kill me. We take food

from strangers, from restaurants

behind whose swinging doors flies

swarm and settle, from estranged

lovers who dream over the salad plates

of breaking the bones of our backs

with a sledgehammer.

Trust flits through the apple

blossoms, a tiny spring warbler

in bright mating plumage. Trust

relies on learned pattern

and signal to let us walk down

stairs without thinking each

step, without stumbling.

I breathe smog and pollen

and perfume. I take parts

of your body inside me. I give you

the flimsy black lace and sweat

stained sleaze of my secrets.

I lay my sleeping body naked

at your side. Jump, you shout.

I do and you catch me.

In love we open wide as a house

to a summer afternoon, every shade up

and window cranked open and doors

flung back to the probing breeze.

If we love for long, we stand like row

houses with no outer walls

on the companionable side.

Suddenly we are naked,

abandoned. The plaster of bedrooms

hangs exposed to the street, wall

paper, pink and beige skins of broken

intimacy torn and flapping.

To fear you is fearing my left

hand cut off, a monstrous crab

scaling the slippery steps of night.

The body, the lineaments of old

desire remain, but the gestures

are new and harsh. Words unheard

before are spat out grating

with the rush of loosed anger.

Friends bear back to me banner

headlines of your rewriting of our

common past. You explain me away,

a dentist drilling a tooth.

I wonder at my own trust, how absolute

it was, mortal but part of me

like the bones of my pelvis.

You were the true center of my

cycles, the magnetic north

I used to plot my wanderings.

It is not that I will not love

again or give myself into partnership

or lie naked sweating secrets

like nectar, but I will never

share a joint checking account

and when some lover tells me,
Always
,

baby
, I’ll be thinking, sure,

until this one too meets an heiress

and ships out. After a bone breaks

you can see in X rays

the healing and the damage.

All over America women are burning dinners.

It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock

in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago

tofu delight in Big Sur; red

rice and beans in Dallas.

All over America women are burning

food they’re supposed to bring with calico

smile on platters glittering like wax.

Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined

but spewing out missiles of hot fat.

Carbonized despair presses like a clinker

from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.

If she wants to grill anything, it’s

her husband spitted over a slow fire.

If she wants to serve him anything

it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly

ticking like the heart of an insomniac.

Her life is cooked and digested,

nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.

Look, she says, once I was roast duck

on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Much of what I had thought mine

essentially has fallen from me

of death, desertion, of ideas changed

conveniently as the temperature

drops and glaciers begin to creep.

The strong broad wind of autumn brushes

before it torn bags, seared apple skins,

moth wings, scraps of party velvet.

The hickory is a hard yellow scream

among maples’ open raging mouths.

Lye in the wind eats the flesh from the land

till black skeletons arch against the sky,

till earth’s great backbone rears, granite

picked clean of all abundance, consolation.

The road is strewn with broken ribs of branches.

Sparks spring up against the morning

devouring the last green, frying the sap.

A sheet of flame covers the day,

a cushion of haze in the bleeding afternoon,

a violent sunset over before supper.

I reach up into the sky and find

in ash of leaves, days and works, a love

I had expected to die still weaving,

dropping away to expose I must hope

some core to wait out this winter,

uncertain now if this is the winter

of my life or only a season like all

others to be entertained like a tyran-

nical guest or even enjoyed for the anatomy

it teaches as it rapidly dissects me.

That sweet sinewy green nymph

eddying in curves through the grasses:

she must stop and stare at him.

Of all the savage secret creatures

he imagines stealthy in the quivering

night, she must be made to approach,

she must be tamed to love him.

The power of his wanting will turn

her from hostile dark wandering

other beyond the circle of his

campfire into his own, his flesh,

his other wanting half. To keep her

she must be filled with his baby,

weighted down.

                      Then suddenly

the horror of it: he awakens,

wrapped in the coils of the mother,

the great old serpent hag,

the hungry ravening witch who gives

birth and demands, and the lesser

mouths of the grinning children

gobbling his substance. He

must cut free.

                  An epic battle

in courts and beds and offices,

in barrooms and before the bar

and then free at last, he wanders.

There on the grassy hill, how the body

moves,

         her, the real one,

green

as a mayfly she hovers and he pounces.

Like the sun on February ice dazzling;

like the sun licking the snow back

roughly so objects begin to poke through,

logs and steps, withered clumps of herb;

like the torch of the male cardinal

borne across the clearing from pine

to pine and then lighting among the bird

seed and bread scattered; like the sharp

shinned hawk gliding over the rabbit

colored marsh grass, exulting

in talon-hooked cries to his larger mate;

like the little pale green seedlings sticking

up their fragile heavy heads on white stalks

into the wide yellow lap of the pregnant sun;

like the sky of stained glass the eye seeks

for respite of the glitter that makes the lips

part; similar to all of these pleasures

of the failing winter and the as yet unbroken

blue egg of spring is our joy as we twist

and twine about each other in the bed

facing the window where the sun plays

the tabla of the thin cold air

and the snow sings soprano

and the emerging earth drones bass.

This fall you will taste carrots

you planted, you thinned, you mulched,

you weeded and watered. You don’t

know yet they will taste like yours,

not others, not mine.

This earth is yours as you love it.