Circles on the Water (3 page)

Day like a grey sponge

the car spun out in mud.

My head broke the windshield:

long streamered impact star.

When Robert pulled me out

waking I asked

who he was. Later

I pissed blood and screamed,

I rehearsed your act.

Your face is gone, and now

what will they

do with your poems?

Both poems and cars:

artifacts that move.

Loss of control smashes.

Skill looks organic.

But poems do not

(outside of Gaelic)

kill: or save.

There’s nothing

of you here,

only words moving

from anger at waste

from an itch

sorry, self seeking

from bowels and breath

entering a longer arc

than the car that killed you

toward oblivion.

The joy of wax teeth,

to run masked through crackling bat black streets

a bag on the arm heavy with penny bars,

licorice, popcorn balls, suckers.

I knew that when I was grown out of me into glory,

doors would open every night to a reign of sugar,

into my cupped hands patter of kisses and coins.

When the last porch lights doused at the end of streets

I drifted home with stray glutted skeletons

to count over all I’d begged and for once got.

The pumpkins and pasteboard bones bore me.

I brush past tinseled children. The night

is low and noisy with a reddish neon glare

yet still a holy night ancient and silly.

My hands itch.

I light a candle and yawn, kicking the table,

but though I wait with meal and honey

no ghosts rise.

Lovers manage without ritual or the worn bits

mumbled over their hairiness damage nothing.

Birth is fat and has rooms.

But the dead sink like water into the ground.

While we are brushing our teeth a friend dies.

A month later someone tells us in a bar.

By the time we believe, everybody is embarrassed.

Then, then, we have to start wearing him out

month after month wearing down

till there’s a hole where he used to be in the mind.

My nothings, grey lambs I count on my back,

shriveled sea deep babies, why can’t

one night be allowed for adding postscripts,

urgent burrowing footnotes to frozen business?

Help the Poor! Utterly robbed, how could people

pray to their dead? You whom we slip over

our minds occasionally like costumes.

Don’t chip off my mural. Please prune my roses.

Now it is late and cold. The wind

twiddles leaves into rattling gutter dervishes.

The last lost witch has gone home

complaining of too much popcorn, not enough love.

Put the dolls of the dead back in their box:

they do not know

you have been talking to their faces.

Danny dead of heart attack,

mid-forties, pretzel thin

just out of the pen for passing bad checks.

He made it as he could

and the world narrowed on him,

aluminum funnel of hot California sky.

In family my mother tells a story.

My uncle is sitting on the front steps,

it is late in the Depression,

my brother has dropped out of school.

Somehow today they got staked and the horses ran.

My uncle sits on the rickety front steps

under wisteria pale mauve and littering scent.

I climb in his lap: I say

This is my Uncle Danny, I call him Donald for short,

oh how beautiful he is,

he has green eyes like my pussycat.

A Good Humor man comes jingling and Danny carries me

to buy a green ice on a stick,

first ice burning to sweet water on the tongue

in the long Depression

with cornmeal and potatoes and beans in the house to eat.

This story is told by my mother

to show how even at four I was cunning.

Danny’s eyes were milky blue-green,

sea colors I had never known.

The eyes of my cat were yellow. I was lying

but not for gain, mama. I squirm on his lap,

I am tangling my hands in his fiberglass hair.

The hook is that it pleases him

and that he is beautiful on the steps laughing

with money in the pockets of his desperate George Raft pants.

His eyes flicker like leaves,

his laugh breaks in his throat to pieces of sun.

Three years and he will be drafted and refuse to fight.

He will rot in stockade. He will swing an ax on his foot:

the total dropout who believed in his own luck.

I am still climbing into men’s laps

and telling them how beautiful they are.

Green ices are still brief and wet and sweet.

Laughing, Danny leaves on the trolley with my brother.

He is feeling lucky, their luck is running

—like smelt, Danny—and is hustled clean

and comes home and will not eat boiled mush.

Late, late the wall by my bed shakes with yelling.

Fish, proud nosed conman, sea eyed tomcat:

you are salted away in the dry expensive California dirt

under a big neon sign shaped like a boomerang

that coaxes Last Chance   Stop Here   Last Chance.

Uproot that burning tree of lightning struck veins.

Spine, wither like a paper match.

I’m telling you, this body could bake bread,

heat a house, cure rheumatic pains,

warm at least a bed.

Green wood won’t catch

but I held against my belly a green stone

frog colored with remorse and oozing words

pressed to me till the night was fagged and wan.

Reek of charred hair clotting in my lungs.

My teeth are cinders,

cured my lecherous tongue.

Only me burnt, and warmed:

no one.

In the livingroom you are someplace else like a cat.

You go fathoms down into abstraction

where the pressure and the cold would squeeze the juice from my tissues.

The diving bell of your head descends.

You cut the murk and peer at luminous razorthin creatures who peer back,

creatures with eyes and ears sticking out of their backsides

lit up like skyscrapers or planes taking off.

You are at home, you nod, you take notes and pictures.

You surface with a matter-of-fact pout,

obscene and full of questions and shouting for supper.

You talk to me and I get the bends.

Your eyes are bright and curious as robins

and your hands and your chest where I lay my head are warm.

I live in an orchard. Confetti of bruised petals.

Scents cascade over the gold furred bees,

over hummingbirds whose throats break light,

whose silver matings glint among the twigs.

Sun drips through those nets to puddle the grass.

If I eat from the wrong tree (whose sign I cannot

guess from bark cuneiform) my plumpness will wither,

the orchard crab and rot, the leaves blow

like cicada wings on dry winds, and dunes bury

the grey upclawing talons of choked trees.

My father was a harrier. My mother a thornbush.

My first seven years I crawled on the underside

of leaves offering at the world with soft tentative horns.

Then with lithe dun body and quick-sorting nose

I crept through a forest of snakegrass, nibbling seeds.

Before the razor shadow streaked for my hole.

With starved shanks and pumping ribs of matchstick

I squeaked my fears and scrabbling, burrowed my hopes.

Seven years a fox, meat on the wind

setting the hot nerve jangling in my throat.

Silence like dew clung to my thick brush.

The splintering lunge. Scorch of blood on my teeth.

Then a pond. Brown and brackish, alkali rimmed.

In drought a cracked net of fly-tunneled sores.

After rain, brimming and polluted by wading cattle,

sudden swarming claws and bearded larvae.

Now I live in an orchard. My breasts

are vulnerable as ripe apricots and fragrant.

To and fro my bare feet graze on the lawn,

deer sleek with plenty. My hair is loose.

These trees only intrude upon the desert.

There, in crannies and wind scraped crevices,

digging in chaparral, among rock and spine

live all the others I love except my love.

I sit on a rock on the border and call and call

in voice of cricket and coyote, of fox and mouse,

in my voice that the rocks smash back on me.

The wings of the hawk beat overhead as he hovers,

baffled but waiting, on the warm reek of my flesh.

The cats of Greece have

eyes grey as plague.

Their voices are limpid,

all hunger.

As they dodge in the gutters

their bones clack.

Dogs run from them.

In tavernas they sit

at tableside and

watch you eat.

Their moonpale cries

hurl themselves

against your full spoon.

If you touch one gently

it goes crazy.

Its eyes turn up.

It wraps itself

around your ankle

and purrs a rusty millennium,

you liar,

you tourist.

The first white hair coils in my hand,

more wire than down.

Out of the bathroom mirror it glittered at me.

I plucked it, feeling thirty creep in my joints,

and found it silver. It does not melt.

My twentieth birthday lean as glass

spring vacation I stayed in the college town

twanging misery’s electric banjo offkey.

I wanted to inject love right into the veins

of my thigh and wake up visible:

to vibrate color

like the minerals in stones under black light.

My best friend went home without loaning me money.

Hunger was all of the time the taste of my mouth.

Now I am ripened and sag a little from my spine.

More than most I have been the same ragged self

in all colors of luck dripping and dry,

yet love has nested in me and gradually eaten

those sense organs I used to feel with.

I have eaten my hunger soft and my ghost grows stronger.

Gradually, I am turning to chalk,

to humus, to pages and pages of paper,

to fine silver wire like something a violin

could be strung with, or somebody garroted,

or current run through: silver truly,

this hair, shiny and purposeful as forceps

if I knew how to use it.

In a dusty square hemmed by pink stucco

smelling of exhaust, donkey turds and scented oil,

a tough shoves a woman loaded with sticks,

black-shawled, wizened as a dung beetle, into a wall.

He smooths his hair as he ambles.

The bus ends here. Paths go on.

In this landscape always there is someone

trying to break food from the mountains.

We came because winter had numbed us

and a torn man finally froze into the ground.

Two o’clock in hospital corridors, half

past five in the long winding halls of the body,

nights blurring, death rattled and rattled the throat

that had been his, that had been your father.

Marionette of reflexes suspended in cords

running up to bottles, down to machines,

while nurses cooed and doctors told codliver lies.

The blind eyes swerved in the swollen slots.

Legless the fish body flopped flopped

in a net of merciless functions.

We are animals the tip of a scalpel unselves.

Bulldust floats on the broken road. The brass sky

jangles. Goats’ hot amber eyes of rapists watch.

No shade, but squat by this thorny blistered slope,

your face talon sharp with the habit of question,

block body and a roundness in your arms.

Predators, we met and set up housekeeping,

bedded now on rocks and potsherds and sage.

The arid heavy whoosh of a raven’s flapping

chases his shadow across your pared face.

Sometimes here noon dust wisps are the dead.

On a rim a new war memorial sticks up

toothwhite. Above the joining of three defiles

totter the breached grey battlements of Phyle.

Inside among poppies we eat chicken, talking

old revolution. One standing lintel

gapes at the ravine. When the last man dies

these rocks will turn back to rock.

Only nine in the village died this winter,

the old woman said, offering nuts and sheepsmilk,

giving face of cypress, hands of olivewood,

giving kindness, myth and probably disease.

Twisted by pain I vomit. Then we grip hands

and go scrambling back over Parnes on goatpaths,

you and I, my wary love, eating our death as it eats us,

feeding each other on our living flesh

and thriving on that poison

mouthful by hot mouthful, cold breath by breath.

Creamcheese babies square and downy as bolsters

in nursery clothing nestle among curly lions and lowing cattle,

a wolf of scythe and ashes, a bear smiling in sleep.

The paw of a leopard with eyes of headlights

rests near calf and vanilla child.

In the background under the yellow autumn tree

Indians and settlers sign a fair treaty.

The mist of dream cools the lake.