Some Brilliant Sky

David was my brother

and killed himself

by the sea,

a dark night

without city lights

to obscure the milky way.

My hair glistens around me like stars

on the night when a man

cracks in half and falls

into the ocean.  

Sheets of water,

as I come out of sleep,

No lover,

only the sweaty body of dreams

                                                                        he stands over my bed

                                                                        as I wake up

                                                                        silent,

                                                                        whispering to himself,

                                                                        “no scars,

                                                                        no scars,”

but he forgets

he is David who died in the ocean

when the stars were visible in some brilliant sky,

and does not see my belly

mangled with scars

from childhood or birth.

Poetry is our history.

We study the stars

to understand temperatures.

Life and death are the only issues;

we often forget that –

arranging our furniture,

washing our cars.

When I look at the sky

I think of David

throwing himself off that cliff

Into the ocean, which moves with the moon,

dying,

the red blood in his mouth

in a night as black

as eels.

Published in Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch,

Black Sparrow Press, 1973; reprinted in Emerald Ice:

Selected Poems, 1962-1987, Black Sparrow Press, 1990,

Followed by a new edition by Godine Press, 2005.

Those Trigger Fish Again

Outside my window

the darkness

is complete.

For once,

I am not frightened by it.

I feel it swim past me

like some porpoise

I would touch with pleasure.

You are not

outside my window,

Old man,

not part of that softness which is the new night.

When I see you,

you are a brilliant dying sun,

ready to gobble several planets from the solar system

before you flare out.

Knowing this vision of light

at last I can love the darkness;

at peace.

Away from the terrible fires

that once burned me up.

As if I were the smallest planet in a tight orbit.

As if I had no chance against

that space,

that night.

Published in Dancing on the Grave of a

Son of a Bitch, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

The Hitchhikers

They burn you

like the berries of mountain ash in August,

standing by the road,

clearly defined,

Autumnal brilliant, heads

scorched from waiting

in the sun.

How can

you pass them up?

But you do,

and dream each night of a hell,

where you are a hitchhiker,

and no one will ever pick you up.

Excuses:

               I'm a woman alone;

               I'm moving all my books;

               I need the time for thinking;

               One of them might murder me;

but really, it is the look each one gives me

of need,

desperate need,

pick me up or I'll fail to reach my goal,

and that need frightens me,

so I look away,

speed on,

dream each night of a mountain ash

with its bunches of orange berries gleaming

like the failures of my life,

burning beautifully on the tree.

Oh, hitchhikers, hitchhikers,

And they remind me

that I drive across country often, looking for your face

in each car I pass,

or which passes me, knowing you would not hitchhike either,

thinking of the two years I spent with you,

reliving them over and over,

knowing that I had everything I wanted,

but like Midas was silent and stiff with the gold I had touched,

felt always as if I had been buried under a ton of diamonds,

still feel the dust of them glinting on me as I drive across country,

my hair sparkling with the brilliance you left,

and those hitchhikers,

reminding me of hell.  That I had what I wanted once,

and lost it,

failed, watched myself failing,

still not understanding why I failed,

but knowing I did,

and still passing – 65, 75, 85 miles an hour,

those hitchhikers,

burning by the side of the road,

burning,

burning me, as I sleep protected in my rings of fire,

the gleaming car which hurtles me through America,

and all I have

is not enough.

Mountain ash, not the ash from out of which a bird

with glinting neck feathers who flies suddenly up on the road

in front of the swift car, would come,

not the ash on the foreheads of holy sinners,

not the ash of immortality,

Ash – a tree with its berries not the color of any jewel,

not the color of blood, but a rare and exceptional color, given only

to plants,

and I see each one of you,

as I pass you on the road,

burning like the autumn berries.

and the beauty makes me pass by quickly.

In my car, is an altar, sacrificial stone and knife,

the tears of blame and understanding,

and blood; all the blood my body has lost;

Oh, hitchhikers, hitchhikers,

you would not want to travel with me.

You would not want to travel with me.

Published in The Man Who Shook Hands, Doubleday, 1978.

Uneasy Rider

Falling in love with a mustache

Is like saying you

You can fall in love with

The way a man polishes his shoes

                      Which,

                      of course,

                      is one of the things that turns on

                      my tuned-up engine

                      Those trim buckled boots

                      (I feel like an advertisement

                     for men's fashions

                     when I think of your ankles)

Yeats was hung up with a girl's beautiful face

And I find myself

a bad moralist,

a failing aesthetician

a sad poet,

wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles

that make a man's body have so much substance,

that makes a woman

lean and yearn in that direction

that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day

in your presence

the pool of wax under a burning candle

the foam from a waterfall

You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson.

She is the rain,

waits in it for you,

finds blood spotting her legs

from the long ride.

Published in the Motorcycle Betrayal Poems,

Simon and Schuster, 1971.

Reading Bonjour, Tristesse  At The Florence Crittenden Home For Unwed Mothers

for the late David Smith, my greatest mentor               

I was empty as a new car, and

you brought me the novel, just published in English,

by the 17-year-old waif-like French girl.  It was

1956.  In 1957, the movie,

was the first one to star the also very young

and waif-like Jean Seberg conniving

to drive her father's mistress, Deborah Kerr as the Parisian

Haute Couture, off a cliff near the Riviera.

I was lying in the hospital bed,

ready to face the sad cafes of exile

without cars

but not without love, and I

didn't read this book as if it were about selfishness,

willful children, speed or decadence,

though it is,

but as if it portrayed

                 what?

men as betrayers, women

as poets, the singers.  The sacrificers?  I read it

as if it were about me, the girl with the extremely white

bare feet.

This isn't, I think,

a very accurate perception,

but it prepared me to want to be

like Piaf,

to sing like Juliette Greco,

to live my life

as if only love, which to me then WAS sex,

was the only whiteness, the only light, the only speed that

could articulate

beyond longing.

David, I walked in the dusty yard of The Home

memorizing Shakespeare's

“When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

I alone beweep my outcast state”.  I wanted

my Avocado-groves boyfriend to love me, I wanted him to wear

white bucks and have a crew cut like you, I wanted to look like Jean Seberg and be rich

on the Cote D'Azur, I wanted

a David Niven playboy father to love me, but I was

one of those pale chunky charity girls from the orange groves,

disgraced and only reading books.  

I read Tess of the D'Urbervilles

and Jude the Obscure while I was at that place,

books that have driven me through my life, whereas

I haven't once thought of Sagan's Bonjour

Tristesse since I flew off in my chariot drawn by dragons, not

off a cliff but into my Medea life.

Not once

until I watched the film on video this week

and found myself thinking

of you, David,  haunting your Point Dume house.

And of your beautiful French wife who defends me against

                 her sister who thinks I am an unnatural woman,

                 one who gave up her children

                 because they were simply flesh, and that was not the part of sex that I

                 believed in.

And of the past.

Do I still believe it is sex that has the only power to transform?

Do I still understand its urgent message that only

one moment

counts:

the one at hand?

Do I still believe that orgasm is the only clue

we have

to death?

Bare white feet, lily moon face,

a diamond wheel of fortune spinning out of control,

my once long hair cut into a silver cap

around my head,

just like the late fifties French haircut

of the legendary Jean Seberg?

Bonjour, Tristesse, hello sadness, hello death,

what lady sings that song now?

Written 1996, published in Argonaut Rose,

Black Sparrow Press, 1998.

The Eyes of Laura Mars:  An Orchid Myth

                                                                         for Adrienne Rich

What if by day I am Orpheus,

singing out of the rose bush, making the bees stand still

as they listen with pollen vibrating on their legs,

and by night, I am Eurydice, breathing

orchid breath, purple shadows

I must follow?  Dusk is breath, I enter through

one door tracing my own steps outlined in gold.  I want to be

both lover and beloved; I want to be the singer,

and the song.  But there is no model

of this doubleness.

Orpheus loved Eurydice so much he went after her

where no mortal can go.  And she was fleeing the advances of another,

when the hissing viper got her.  It was only an illusion that he could

bring her back.  For some of us, the reason is clear.  Those of us

who know there is no myth which allows women

to be the charmed singer, none which allows her to go after love.  She

can be the sorceress who beguiles lovers, or Penelope who waits,

but she can never be the poet, singer, questing lover.

History will never let her be Orpheus; she is always

the shadow.

There is then, a woman who will not step aside

for history, and she is the one who is Orpheus by day,

even willingly accepting the masculine role – lesbian, Teeth Mother,

career woman, nun or old maid.  But by night, she is

her own beloved, the one pulled down to darkness, the orchid earth

where she becomes her beautiful woman-self.  Orpheus tries to bring

her to the light/ his voice takes him anywhere.

But he turns as the first ray of morning, like daffodil

cracks the dark.  He turns, and she/

she beomes he/and disappears.  She can never appear,

for she and he are one.  While he is Orpheus,

she does not exist, except in his myth.

While Eurydice, he is only a song.

Thus: for women who want to be

the Orphic voices of their cultures –

Lesbian, Teeth Mother, strong woman, nun or old maid,

Hidden women, false men, Annie Oakleys all.

And with my orchid-shadowed eyes, I do not love women.

Nor have I ever been transformed into a man.

Yet by day I masquerade

as Orpheus and transform myself each night as I walk through

the door into the flower face of song.   Is it because

no man has ever followed me,

as he in the myth followed her, that I

describe a monster?  Or have we outlived the old

myths?

If we tear Orpheus apart this time, might he

come back as a woman?

Published in Medea The Sorceress,

Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

Neighborhood Light

The GrapesofWrath woman whose

husband beats her, and who

lives down the block from us,

lives in darkness

much of the time.

Now our Board of Water and Light

is installing

new lamps in front of our

houses, and she stands there

in the yard, where her purple crocuses

are covered with a thin film

of snow, and watches the

hard-hatted men

get ready to bring light

to our small neighborhood.

But she, like Persephone at this time of year,

isn't quite out of the darkness yet, no

April light in her tightly shuttered house,

whose small wooden squareness must squeeze her hips

and leave them more bruised than her husband does.

I see her standing there on the handkerchief lawn, looking

puzzled at the lights, the globes, the workmen.

She isn't Persephone: light and dark are the same

to her. No mother ever

pulled her back from the dark underground

and no lover, like Orpheus, ever thought to rush

down after her and kiss her

out of viper sleep.

The myth of women

with their healing powers

and their gifts for regeneration: she has been

sheathed against it.

She's not really a woman locked

down in her dark little house;

She is/

                                 What is she?

                             She has hidden her sex in faded housedresses.

                             She lives puzzled by light.

                             She has children who suffer with her.

                             She chooses a bad husband, one who could

                             not rescue a woman.

                             She is a disguise.  Don't pity

                             her/ pity her

                             children,

                             and, most of all, pity the child in her

                             who never knew a woman/

                             a goddess

                             for a mother.

                             Pity the long line

                             she is part of.

I turn away.

I turn away

from what I might have been.

One rescues because of

overwhelming love.

I do not have it.

I would not go down underground for her,

having already stumbled blindly, and

raggedly, through my own winter, to only

just now see the April light

flooding through my house.

Never

would I have the strength

to go down

in darkness again.  Never

have the strength

twice

to bring myself

back out of the dark.

Published in Medea the Sorceress,

Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

Our Lady of The Chanterelles

                                                                                                           for Judith Minty

I love knowing that when a person opens

her hand, there is a map there,

if only you know what to look for, how to read it.  

Looking into your American hand, Judith,

I see that you have surveyed San Francisco

and inscribed its arc-ing bridges

as rings on all your fingers.

You're driving your daughter the Chef over the Golden Gate

into Napa-Sonoma, on your way to white table cloths

and daily roues, drinking those nectar-y chardonnays

and wondering about how much more at home you feel

in Northern California, with baskets of Chanterelles and hedgehogs

rather than the wrinkled brainy morels of your own state.

In the light of Chanterelles that twist and crown you, Judith,

in Western light glinting from the sharpest knife,

in maplight, and in kitchenlight, together, you and Annie

will eat the bread of Marin County, dipped in green

olive oil and try a risotto cooked with fennel and porcini mushrooms,

and think of how the Redwoods

of California, and the Douglas Firs now

seem part of a Western map both you

and your daughter have on your hands.

The map of Michigan is a mitten, a throwback

to the first opposable thumbs.

No dexterous articulated fingers to accompany them.

No chef's hand so skillfully trained as Annie's; no eye

for beauty

like the one

she gets from you.

And your hands,

     Mother and daughter, traveling in mushroom light,

what do they really map or, touching,

see?  A dotted road of light,

leading to the center?

Like the illumination that reminds me I am in exile?

Unable, like you, to make two maps, or is it two roads?

turn into one inexorable

set of lines

on my palm?

I could say the map

was too watery here in Michigan,

though there is no Pacific Ocean

with its primal salty broth.

My hand's map seems empty and smooth,

dry as Death Valley.

Our Lady of Chanterelles,

I turn to you.  Open your hand:  show me the secret,

the beauty of this aging

desolated terrain.

Published in The Emerald City of Las Vegas,

Black Sparrow Press, 1995.

Hummingbirds Dazzling In From

                                     The California Desert

                                                                        For Craig Cotter and WCW

And the apple, like a Ruby Throat, was there,

so tempting, round and perfect as

the number zero, one of those slightly

tart, sweet-taffeta flavored beauties

from New Zealand, which crack against

your tongue, a fountain of glittering

snapshots.

Hummingbirds dazzling in from the California desert

mimic the quick motions that drive you

playing basketball, one on one, the fast dunk of your thoughts

about religion and sex, about chocolate words and Beatles' lyrics.

But you and I disagree on what men

owe women, on the possibilities of either

sex or celibacy.

I want the longed-for

to be fulfilled

but more, I want it to be sustained.  All the troubadours

I admire so much, including you –

I want them to love me more than any

other woman, but not to try to come

too close.  I want to be touched with language

And the something even more insidious – the mind,

which keeps its contents secret, celibate, untouched and pure.

                                                                 Who eats the apple

is looking for a way not to have to consume it, just as

what rises from the dead is still living.  These are paradoxes,

which means they are truths.  The

way I know that love cannot exist without sexual touch,

yet it does.  The way I know that romantic

silliness in movies, novels, and our teenage lives

is everything and nothing; it is not love

but makes love possible.  Love, invisible,

or is it just quick?  -- the way the hummingbird

is all quick airy motion – is nothing.

Love, love, why invent this word

if it is all zeros?

Published in Jason the Sailor,

Black Sparrow Press, 1993.