Circles on the Water (9 page)

Oh, the downtrodden juicy longdrawn female blues:

you throbbed up there with your face slightly swollen

and your barbed hair flying energized and poured it out,

the blast of a furnace of which the whole life is the fuel.

You embodied that good done-in mama who gives and gives

like a fountain of boozy chicken soup to a rat race of men.

You embodied the pain hugged to the breasts like a baby.

You embodied the beautiful blowzy gum of passivity,

woman on her back to the world endlessly hopelessly raggedly

offering a brave front to be fucked.

That willingness to hang on the meathook and call it love,

that need for loving like a screaming hollow in the soul,

that’s the drug that hangs us and drags us down

deadly as the icy sleet of skag that froze your blood.

The turkey vulture,

a shy bird ungainly on the ground

but massively graceful in flight,

responds to attack

uniquely.

Men have contempt for this scavenger

because he eats without killing.

When an enemy attacks,

the turkey vulture vomits:

the shock and disgust of the predator

are usually sufficient

to effect his escape.

He loses only his dinner,

easily replaced.

All day I have been thinking

how to adapt

this method of resistance.

Sometimes only the stark

will to disgust

prevents our being consumed:

there are clearly times

when we must make a stink

to survive.

In the chapel where I could praise

that is just being built,

the light bleeding through one window blazons

a profiled centaur whose colors mellow the sun.

See her there: hoofs braced into the loam,

banner tail streaming, burnished thighs,

back with the sheen of china but sturdy as brick,

that back nobody rides on.

Instead of a saddle, the poised arms,

the wide apart breasts, the alert head

are thrust up from the horse’s supple torso

like a swimmer who breaks water to look

but doesn’t clamber out or drown.

She is not monstrous

but whole in her power, galloping:

both the body tacking to the seasons of her needs

and the tiger lily head aloft with tenacious gaze.

This torso is not ridden.

This face is no rider.

As a cascade is the quickening of a river,

here thought shoots in a fountain to the head

and then slides back through

those rippling flanks again.

I had grown invisible as a city sparrow.

My breasts had turned into watches.

Even my dreams were of function and meeting.

Maybe it was the October sun.

The streets simmered like laboratory beakers.

You took my hand, a pumpkin afternoon

with bright rind carved in a knowing grin.

We ran upstairs.

You touched me and I flew open.

Orange and indigo feathers broke through my skin.

I rolled in your coarse rag-doll hair.

I sucked you like a ripe apricot down to the pit.

Sitting crosslegged on the bed we chattered

basting our lives together with ragged stitches.

Of course it all came apart

but my arms glow with the fizz of that cider sun.

My dreams are of mating leopards and bronze waves.

We coalesced in the false chemistry of words

rather than truly touching

yet I burn cool glinting in the sun

and my energy sings like a teakettle all day long.

How it feels to be touching

you: an Io moth, orange

and yellow as pollen,

wings through the night

miles to mate,

could crumble in the hand.

Yet our meaning together

is hardy as an onion

and layered.

Goes into the blood like garlic.

Sour as rose hips,

gritty as whole grain,

fragrant as thyme honey.

When I am turning slowly

in the woven hammocks of our talk,

when I am chocolate melting into you,

I taste everything new

in your mouth.

You are not my old friend.

How did I used to sit

and look at you? Now

though I seem to be standing still

I am flying flying flying

in the trees of your eyes.

There is only time to say the first word,

there is only time to stammer the second.

Traffic jams the highways of nerve,

lungs fill with the plaster of demolition.

Each hour has sixty red and gold and black hands

welding and plucking and burning.

Your hair crosses my mouth in smoke.

The bridge of arms,

the arch of backs:

our fingers clutch.

The violet sky lights and crackles

and fades out.

I am at a desk adding columns of figures.

I am in a supermarket eyeing meat.

The scene repeats on the back of my lids

like an advertisement in neon

for another world.

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Being together is knowing

even if what we know

is that we cannot really be together

caught in the teeth of the machinery

of the wrong moments of our lives.

A clear umbilicus

goes out invisibly between,

thread we spin fluid and finer than hair

but strong enough to hang a bridge on.

That bridge will be there

a blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull

whenever you need

whenever you can open your eyes and want

to walk upon it.

Nobody can live on a bridge

or plant potatoes

but it is fine for comings and goings,

meetings, partings and long views

and a real connection to someplace else

where you may

in the crazy weathers of struggle

now and again want to be.

Trying to enter each other,

trying to interpenetrate and let go.

Trying not to lie down in the same old rutted bed

part rack, part cocoon.

We are bagged in habit

like clothes back from the cleaners.

The map of your veins has been studied,

your thighs have been read and reported,

a leaden mistrust of the rhetoric of tenderness

thickens your tongue.

At the worst you see old movies in my eyes.

How can I persuade you that every day we choose

to give birth, to murder or feed our friends, to die a little.

You are an opening in me.

Smoke thick as pitch blows in,

a wind bearing ribbons of sweet rain,

and the sun as field of dandelions, as rusty razor blade.

Scent colors the air with tear gas, with lemon lilies.

Most of the time you are not here.

Mostly I do not touch you.

Mostly I am talking to someone else.

I crawl into you, a bee furry with greed

into the deep trumpeting throat of a crimson lily

speckled like a newly hatched robin.

I roll, heavy with nectar.

Later, I will turn this afternoon into honey

and live on it, frugally.

It will sweeten my tea.

In the pit of the night our bodies merge,

dark clouds passing through each other in lightning,

the joining of rivers far underground in the stone.

I feel thick but hollow, a polyp floating on currents.

My nerves have opened wide mouths

to drink you in and sing O O on the dark

till I cannot fix boundaries where you start and I stop.

Then you are most vulnerable.

In me that nakedness does not close by day.

My quick, wound, door, my opening,

my lidless eye.

Don’t you think it takes trust,

your strength, your temper always

in the room with us like a doberman leashed.

Touch is the primal sense—

for in the womb we swam lapped and tingling.

Fainting, practicing death, we lose

sight first, then hearing, the mouth and nose deaden

but still till the end we can touch.

I fear manipulation by that handle.

Trust flourishes like a potato plant, mostly underground:

wan flowers, dusty leaves chewed by beetles,

but under the mulch as we dig

at every node of the matted tangle

the tubers, egg-shaped and golden with translucent skin,

tumble from the dirt to feed us

homely and nourishing.

The Digger Indians were too primitive,

pushed onto the sparse alkaline plateau,

to make pottery that could stand on the fire.

They used to make soup by heating an oval stone

and dropping it in the pot cracking hot.

When traders came and sold them iron kettles

the women found cooking easier

but said the soup never tasted so good again.

Soup stone

blunt, heavy in my hands,

you soak, you hold, you radiate warmth,

you can serve as a weapon,

you can be used again and again

and you give a flavor to things I could miss.

Beds that are mirrors,

beds that are rotisseries where I am the barbecue,

beds that are athletic fields for the Olympic trials,

beds that are dartboards, beds that are dentist’s chairs,

beds that are consolation prizes floating on chicken soup,

beds where lobotomies are haphazardly performed, beds

that ride glittering through lies like a ferris wheel,

all the beds where a woman and a man

try to steal each other’s bones

and call it love.

Yet that small commitment floating on a sea of spilled blood

has meaning if we inflict it.

Otherwise we fail into dry accommodation.

If we do not build a new loving out of our rubble

we will fall into a bamboo-staked trap on a lush trail.

You will secrete love out of old semen and gum and dreams.

What we do not remake

plays nostalgic songs on the jukebox of our guts,

and leads us into the old comfortable temptation.

You lay in bed depressed, passive as butter.

I brought you a rose I had grown. You said

the rose was me, dark red and perfumed and three-quarters open,

soft as sometimes with embarrassment you praise my skin.

You talked of fucking the rose. Then you grew awkward;

we would never be free of roles, dominance and submission,

we slam through the maze of that pinball machine forever.

I say the rose is a place where we make love.

I am a body beautiful only when fitted with yours.

Otherwise, it walks, it lifts packages, it spades.

It is functional or sick, tired or sturdy. It serves.

Together we are the rose, full, red as the inside

of the womb and head of the penis,

blossoming as we encircle, we make that symmetrical fragrant emblem,

then separate into discrete workday selves.

The morning mail is true. Tomorrow’s picketline is true.

And the rose, the rose of our loving

crimson and sonorous as a cellist

bowing on the curve of our spines, is true.

We will be equal, we say, new man and new woman.

But what man am I equal to before the law of court or custom?

The state owns my womb and hangs a man’s name on me

like the tags hung on dogs, my name is, property of.

The language betrays us and rots in the mouth

with its aftertaste of monastic sewers on the palate.

Even the pronouns tear my tongue with their metal plates.

You could strangle me: my hands

can’t even encircle your neck.

Because I open my mouth wide and stand up roaring

I am the outlawed enemy of men.

A party means what a bullfight does to the bull.

The street is a gauntlet.

I open my mail with tongs.

All the images of strength in you, fathers and prophets and heroes,

pull against me, till what feels right to you

wrongs me, and there is no rest from struggle.