Circles on the Water (8 page)

In using there are always two.

The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.

There are lies that glow so brightly we consent

to give a finger and then an arm

to let them burn.

I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.

Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide

reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto

and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward

down is where my head is, next to my feet.

Form follows function, says the organizer

and turns himself into a paper clip,

into a vacuum cleaner,

into a machine gun.

Function follows analysis

but the forebrain

is only an owl in the tree of self.

One third of life we prowl in the grottoes of sleep

where neglected worms ripen into dragons,

where the spoiled pencil swells into an oak,

and the cows of our early sins are called home chewing their cuds

and turning the sad faces of our childhood upon us.

Come back and scrub the floor, the stain is still there,

come back with your brush and kneel down,

scrub and scrub again, it will never be clean.

Buried desires sprout like mushrooms on the chin of the morning.

The will to be totally rational

is the will to be made out of glass and steel:

and to use others as if they were glass and steel.

The cockroach knows as much as you about living.

We trust with our hands and our mouths.

The cunt accepts. The teeth and back reject.

What we have to give each other:

dumb and mysterious as water swirling.

Always in the long corridors of the psyche

doors are opening and doors are slamming shut.

We rise each day to give birth or to murder

selves that go through our hands like tiny fish.

You said: I am the organizer and took and used.

You wrapped your head in theory like yards of gauze

and touched others only as tools that fit to your task.

Arrogance is not a revolutionary virtue.

The mad bulldozers of ego level the ground.

I was a tool that screamed in the hand.

I have been loving you so long and hard and mean

and the taste of you is part of my tongue

and your face is burnt into my eyelids

and I could build you with my fingers out of dust.

Now it is over. Whether we want or not

our roots go down to strange waters,

we are creatures of the seasons and the earth.

You always had a reason and you have them still

rattling like dry leaves on a stunted tree.

Anger shines through me.

Anger shines through me.

I am a burning bush.

My rage is a cloud of flame.

My rage is a cloud of flame

in which I walk

seeking justice

like a precipice.

How the streets

of the iron city

flicker, flicker,

and the dirty air

fumes.

Anger storms

between me and things,

transfiguring,

transfiguring.

A good anger acted upon

is beautiful as lightning

and swift with power.

A good anger swallowed,

a good anger swallowed

clots the blood

to slime.

I used to watch it on the ledge:

a crippled bird.

How did it survive?

Surely it would die soon.

Then I saw a man

at one of the windows

fed it, a few seeds,

a crust from lunch.

Often he forgot

and it went hopping on the ledge

a starving

scurvy sparrow.

Every couple of weeks

he caught it in his hand

and clipped back one wing.

I call it a sparrow.

The plumage was sooty,

sometimes in the sun

scarlet as a tanager.

He never let it fly.

He never took it in.

Perhaps he was starving too.

Perhaps he counted every crumb.

Perhaps he hated

that anything alive

knew how to fly.

The head: egg of all.

He thinks of himself as a head thinking.

He is eating a coddled egg.

He drops a few choice phrases on his wife

who cannot seem to learn after twenty years

the perfection of egg protein

neither runny nor turned to rubber.

Advancing into his study he dabbles a forefinger

in the fine dust on his desk and calls his wife

who must go twitching to reprimand

the black woman age forty-eight who cleans the apartment.

Outside a Puerto Rican in a uniform

is standing in the street to guard his door

from the riffraff who make riots on television,

in which the university that pays him owns much stock.

Right thinking is virtue, he believes,

and the clarity of the fine violin of his mind

leads him a tense intricate fugue of pleasure.

His children do not think clearly.

They snivel and whine and glower and pant

after false gods who must be blasted with sarcasm

because their barbaric heads

keep growing back in posters on bedroom walls.

His wife does not dare to think.

He married her for her breasts

and soft white belly of surrender arching up.

The greatest pain he has ever known

was getting an impacted wisdom tooth out.

The deepest suffering he ever tasted

was when he failed to get a fellowship

after he had planned his itinerary.

When he curses his dependents

Plato sits on his right hand and Aristotle on his left.

Argument is lean red meat to him.

Moses and Freud and St. Augustine are in his corner.

He is a good man and deserves to judge us all

who go making uncouth noises and bangs in the street.

He is a good man: if you don’t believe me,

ask any god.

He says they all think like him.

This girlchild was born as usual

and presented dolls that did pee-pee

and miniature GE stoves and irons

and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.

Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:

You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was healthy, tested intelligent,

possessed strong arms and back,

abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.

She went to and fro apologizing.

Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.

She was advised to play coy,

exhorted to come on hearty,

exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.

Her good nature wore out

like a fan belt.

So she cut off her nose and her legs

and offered them up.

In the casket displayed on satin she lay

with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,

a turned-up putty nose,

dressed in a pink and white nightie.

Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.

Consummation at last.

To every woman a happy ending.

Are you You or Me or It?

I go littering you over the furniture

and picking you out of the stew.

Often I’ve wished you otherwise: sleek,

docile, decorative and inert.

Yet even in daydreams I cannot imagine myself

otherwise thatched: coarse, black and abundant

like weeds burst from the slagheaps of abandoned mines.

In the ’50’s children used to point and shout Witch.

Later they learned to say Beatnik and later yet, Hippie,

but old grandmamas with Thessaloniki or Kiev in their throats

thought I must be nice because I looked like a peasant.

In college my mother tried to change my life

by bribing me to cut it off and have it “done.”

Afterwards the hairdresser chased me waving my hair in a paper bag.

The next man who happened was a doctor’s son

who quoted the Lord Freud in bed and on the pot,

thought I wrote poems because I lacked a penis

and beat me when he felt ugly.

I grew my hair back just as quick as I could.

Cloud of animal vibrations,

tangle of hides and dark places

you keep off the tidy and the overly clean and the wango upright.

You proclaim the sharp limits of my patience

with trying to look like somebody’s wet dream.

Though I can trim you and throw you out with the coffee grounds,

when I am dead and beginning to smell worse than my shoes

presumably you will continue out of my skull

as if there were inside no brains at all

but only a huge bobbin of black wire unwinding.

They say that trees scream

under the bulldozer’s blade.

That when you give it water,

the potted coleus sings.

Vibrations quiver about leaves

our ears are too gross

to comprehend.

Yet I hear on this street

where sprinklers twirl

on exterior carpeting

a high rising whine.

The grass looks well fed.

It must come from inside

where a woman on downs is making

a creative environment

for her child.

The spring earth cracks

over sprouting seeds.

Hear that subliminal roar,

a wind through grass and skirts,

the sound of hair crackling,

the slither of anger

just surfacing.

Pressed against glass and yellowing,

scrawny, arching up to

the insufficient light, plants

that do not belong in houses

sing of what they want:

like a woman who’s been told

she can’t carry a tune,

like a woman afraid people will laugh

if she raises her voice,

like a woman whose veins surface

compressing a scream,

like a woman whose mouth hardens

to hold locked in her own

harsh and beautiful song.

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl

is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.

Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself

under ripples of conversation and debate.

The woman in the block of ivory soap

has massive thighs that neigh,

great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet

The woman of the golden fleece

laughs uproariously from the belly

inside the girl who imitates

a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,

who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,

who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,

a yam of a woman of butter and brass,

compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,

like a handgrenade set to explode,

like goldenrod ready to bloom.

Blizzards of paper

in slow motion

sift through her.

In nightmares she suddenly recalls

a class she signed up for

but forgot to attend.

Now it is too late.

Now it is time for finals:

losers will be shot.

Phrases of men who lectured her

drift and rustle in piles:

Why don’t you speak up?

Why are you shouting?

You have the wrong answer,

wrong line, wrong face.

They tell her she is womb-man,

babymachine, mirror image, toy,

earth mother and penis-poor,

a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream

rapidly melting.

She grunts to a halt.

She must learn again to speak

starting with I

starting with We

starting as the infant does

with her own true hunger

and pleasure

and rage.

When did I first become aware—

hearing myself on the radio?

listening to tapes of women in groups?—

of that diffident laugh that punctuates,

that giggle that apologizes,

that bows fixing parentheses before, after.

That little laugh sticking

in the throat like a chicken bone.

That perfunctory dry laugh

carries no mirth, no joy

but makes a low curtsy, a kowtow

imploring with praying hands:

forgive me, for I do not

take myself seriously.

Do not squash me.

My friend, on the deck we sit

telling horror stories

from the
Marvel Comics
of our lives.

We exchange agonies, battles and after each

we laugh madly and embrace.

That raucous female laughter

is drummed from the belly.

It rackets about kitchens,

flapping crows

up from a carcass.

Hot in the mouth as horseradish,

it clears the sinuses

and the brain.

Years ago I had a friend

who used to laugh with me

braying defiance, as we roar

with bared teeth.

After the locked ward

where they dimmed her with drugs

and exploded her synapses,

she has now that cough

fluttering in her throat

like a crippled pigeon

as she says, but of course

I was sick, you know,

and laughs blood.

Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone

of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy

that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases

until I could, partially, break free.

How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?

Your voice would grate right on the marrow-filled bone

that cooks up that rich stew of masochism where we swim,

that woman is born to suffer, mistreated and cheated.

We are trained to that hothouse of ripe pain.

Never do we feel so alive, so in character

as when we’re walking the floor with the all-night blues.

When some man not being there who’s better gone

becomes a lack that swells up to a gaseous balloon

and flattens from us all thinking and sensing and purpose.