Circles on the Water (5 page)

Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,

plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and strawberry breasts,

swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,

the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry

and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.

Living is later. This is your rented death.

You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts

to make up, to pay for each day

which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,

afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,

you will be less at forty than at twenty.

Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.

I would fix you like buds to a city where people work

to make and do things necessary and good,

where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks

where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

Falling out of love

is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.

It hurts more than you will remember.

It costs a pint of blood turned grey

and burning out a few high paths

among the glittering synapses of the brain,

a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy,

a configuration gone

imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst

that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.

When falling out of love is correcting vision

light grates on the eyes

light files the optic nerve hot and raw.

To find you have loved a coward and a fool

is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst

and take away your hands covered with small festering bites

and let the mouse go in a grey blur

into the baseboard.

Eleven-thirty and hot.

Cotton air.

Dry hands cupped.

The shadow of an empty chandelier

swings on a refrigerator door.

In the street a voice is screaming.

Your head scurries with ants.

Anyone’s arms drip with your sweat,

anyone’s pliant belly

absorbs your gymnastic thrusts

as your fury subsides into butter.

You are always in combat with questionnaires.

You are always boxing headless dolls

of cherry pudding.

You are the tedious marksman in a forest of thighs,

you with tomcat’s shrapnel memory

and irritable eyes.

Tenderness is a mosquito on your arm.

Your hands are calloused with careless touch.

You believe in luck and a quick leap forward

that does not move you.

You rub your sore pride into moist bodies

and pedal off, slightly displeased.

Nobody understood Juan.

Slight, amiable, he did not stand upon ceremony

but was unfailingly polite.

Men liked him: he deferred with wry grace

though his pride was sore and supple with constant use.

He was fascinated by mirrors and women’s eyes.

When he spoke of the past he was always alone

half in shadow among shadowy forms.

No one in his stories had names. No one had faces.

He watched himself but did not listen to his voice.

Words were water or weapons.

He was always in love with the body that burned his eyes.

His need shone in the dark and the light, always new.

He could not bear suspense or indifference.

He had to be closed into love on the instant

while his need gleamed like a knife and the words spurted.

He never understood what the women minded.

He never could see how he cheated them

with words, the mercury words no one could grasp

as they gleamed and slipped and darted.

In the woman’s eyes he saw himself.

He was compiling a woman he would have to love.

He was building a woman out of a hill of bodies.

The sadness of his closets: hundreds of arms,

thousands of hollow and deflated breasts,

necks and thighs smooth as new cars,

forests of hair waving and limp.

Why do they mind? They do not learn.

Time after time they grapple to win back from him

what gleamed in his face before:

the mask of desperate beautiful need

which each woman claims.

They chase each other through his hard flesh.

The bed is his mirror.

He spends into peace and indifference. He sleeps.

He is unfailingly polite, even with Donna Elvira

howling outside his door and breaking glass.

They always lose.

The boy sits in the classroom

in Gary, in the United States, in NATO, in SEATO

in the thing-gorged belly of the sociobeast

in fluorescent light in slowly moving time

in boredom thick and greasy as vegetable shortening.

The classroom has green boards and ivory blinds,

the desks are new and the teachers not so old.

I have come out on the train from Chicago to talk

about dangling participles. I am supposed

to teach him to think a little on demand.

The time of tomorrow’s draft exam is written on the board.

The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary

where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke

and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel

while the slag goes out in little dumpcars smoking,

but even less does he want to be in Today’s Action Army

in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,

in death that hurts.

In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,

French irregular verbs, the names of friends

around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon

where tomorrow he will try and fail his license to live.

Morning rattles the tall spike fence.

Already the old are set out to get dirty in the sun

spread like drying coverlets around the garden

by straggly hedges smelling of tomcat.

From the steep oxblood hospital

hunched under its miser’s frown of roof,

dishes mutter, pumps work, an odor

of disinfectant slops into the street

toward the greygreen quadrangles of the university.

Pickets with the facts of their poverty hoisted on sticks

turn in the street like a tattered washing.

The trustees decline to negotiate

for this is a charitable institution.

Among the houses of the poor and black nearby

a crane nods waist-high among broken bedrooms.

Already the university digs foundations

to be hallowed with the names of old trustees.

The dish and bottle washers, the orderlies march

carrying the crooked sick toward death on their backs.

The neighborhood is being cured of poverty.

Busses will carry the moppushers in and out.

Are the old dying too slowly in their garden?

Under elms spacious and dusty

as roominghouse porches the old men mutter

that they are closing the north wing,

for the land is valuable when you get down to it

and they will, down to the prairie dog bones.

This is the Home for Incurables: and the old are.

Many are the diseases that trustees are blind to,

or call incurable, like their own blindness

wide as the hoarse wind blows, mile after mile

where the city smokes sweetly as a barbecue

or sizzles like acid under nobody’s sun.

When we are going toward someone we say

you are just like me

your thoughts are my brothers and sisters

word matches word

how easy to be together.

When we are leaving someone we say

how strange you are

we cannot communicate

we can never agree

how hard, hard and weary to be together.

We are not different nor alike

but each strange in our leather bodies

sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands

and loving is an act

that cannot outlive

the open hand

the open eye

the door in the chest standing open.

When I hug you, you are light as a grasshopper.

Your bones are ashwood the Indians used for bows.

You bend and spring back and can burn the touch,

a woman with hands that know how to pick things up.

Stiff as frozen rope words poke out

lopsided, in a fierce clothespin treble.

You move with a grace that is all function,

you move like a bow drawn taut and released.

Sometimes your wrists are transparent.

Sometimes an old buffalo man

frozen on the prairie stares from your face.

Your hair and eyes are the color of creek

running in the afternoon opaque under slanted sun.

You are stubborn and hardy as a rubber mat.

You are light as a paper airplane and as elegant

and you can fly.

The secret of moving heavy objects is balance, you said

in a grey loft full of your sculpture,

figures piercing or hung on boundaries,

leaping their thresholds, impaled on broken mirrors,

passing and gone into new space.

Objects born from you are mended, makeshift.

Their magic rides over rust and splinters and nails,

over shards of glass and cellophane beginning to rip.

Fragments of your work litter the banks of minor highways,

shattered faces of your icons lie on Hoboken junkyards,

float as smog over the East River,

grow black with the dust of abandoned coalbins.

One summer you made small rooms of wax

where people stood in taut ellipses staring and blind

with tenderness, with agony, with question and domestic terror.

They were candles burning.

You wanted to cast them in bronze but could not afford to.

The August sun melted them all.

The dancers in your plays move too in the dark

with masks and machines and chairs that trot and wail,

flimsy ragtag things that turn holy and dance

till no one is audience

but all grope and stumble in your world.

When you enter, we feel your presence burn blue,

no longer a woman, not wiry warm quick flesh

but a makeshift holy artifact

moving on the blank face of the dark as on a river:

ark, artifact, dancer of your own long breaking dance

which makes itself through you fiercely, totally passing in light

leaving you thin and darkened as burnt glass.

A flame from each finger,

my hands are candelabra,

my hair stands in a torch.

Out of my mouth a long flame hovers.

Can’t anyone see, handing me a newspaper?

Can’t anyone see, stamping my book overdue?

I walk blazing along Sixth Avenue,

burning gas blue I buy subway tokens,

a bouquet of coals, I cross the bridge.

Invisible I singe strangers and pass.

Now I am on your street.

How your window flickers.

I come bringing my burning body

like an armful of tigerlilies,

like a votive lantern,

like a roomful of tassels and leopards and grapes

for you to come into,

dance in my burning

and we will flare up together like stars

and fall to sleep.

They are light as flakes of dandruff with scrawny legs.

Like limpets they cling to the base of each curly hair,

go lurching among the underbrush for cover.

Our passions are their weathers.

Coitus is the
Santa Maria
hitting on virgin land,

an immigrant ship coming into harbor,

free homesteads for all.

Or native crabs vs. conquistadors wrestle and nip.

Or maybe they too mingle.

As the boat glides in, there they are, the native crabs

with mandolins and bouquets of bougainvillaea

swaying on the dock singing Aloha.

For three generations we haven’t seen a new face.

O the boredom, the stale genes, the incest.

Or perhaps when the two shores approach

the crabs line up to leap the gap like monkeys,

the hair always lusher on the other side.

They travel as fast as gossip.

They multiply like troubles.

They cling and persist through poison and poking and picking,

dirt and soap, torrents and drought,

like love or any other stubborn itch.

Round Susan, somewhere Susan,

Susan with suitcase and Berlitz book and stuffed shoulderbag

flies in the air sitting down.

Your spices are waiting under the falling dust.

Strange pussies are sticking their paws under the door.

Gottlieb sits in a corner with his head loose in his hands

and plays at poking out his eyes.

The ceilings are blackboards he has scrawled with hieroglyphics.

The mailman fills up the box with nothing.

Quail Susan, pheasant Susan

riding an aluminum paperclip

between the cold stars and the jellyfish,

remember us in the broken net,

come back to us in the wooly strands of the caring web

stuck between jammed weeks and waiting testily.

Each love is singular.

The strands hang loose.

Apricot Susan, applesauce Susan

stuck up in the sky like a painted angel,

you think the web is a trap.

You see mouths open to swallow you in pieces.

You see gaping beaks and hear piercing cries of fill-me.

Susan, you are a hungry bird too with mouth wide open.

The nets we build never hold each other.

The minnow instant darts through the fingers

leaving a phosphorescent smear

and nothing else.