I. POWER

POWER
Living in the earth deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred year old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger ends
till she could no longer hold a test tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
(1974)

PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV

(leader of a womens climbing team all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak August 1974 Later Shatayevs husband found and buried the bodies)

The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder then the wind
died down and we slept
If in this sleep I speak
it is with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say with voices)
When the wind tore our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months for years each one of us
had felt her own “yes”
growing in her
slowly forming as she stood at windows waited
for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair
What we were to learn was simply what we had
up here out of all words that “yes”
gathered its forces fused itself and only just in time
to meet a No of no degrees
the black hole sucking the world in
I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated boot soles leaving their geometric bite
colossally embossed on microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus
Now I am further ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be
I have become the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind
the women I love lightly flung against the mountain
that blue sky
Our frozen eyes unribboned through the storm
we could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt
You come (I know this) with your love your loss
strapped to your body with your tape recorder camera
ice pick against advisement
to give us burial in the snow and in your mind
While my body lies out here flashing like a prism into your eyes
how could you sleep
You climbed here for yourself; we climbed for ourselves
When you have buried us told your story
ours does not end we stream
into the unfinished the unbegun the possible
Every cell’s core of heat pulsed out of us
into the thin air of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute
as those we underwent to bring each other here
choosing ourselves each other and this life
whose every breath every grasp every further foothold
is somewhere still enacted and continuing
In the diary I wrote “Now we are ready
and each of us knows it I have never loved
like this I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back”
After the long training the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love
In the diary as the wind began to tear
at the tents over us I wrote
“We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together but till now
we had not touched our strength”
In the diary torn from my fingers I had written
“What does love mean
What does it mean to survive”
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow
We will not live to settle for less
We have dreamed of this all of our lives
(1974)

ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I.
Night life Letters journals bourbon
sloshed in the glass Poems crucified on the wall
dissected the bird wings severed like trophies
No one lives in this room without living through some crisis
No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems the planks of books
the photographs of dead heroines
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry the drive to connect
the dream of a common language
Thinking of lovers their blind faith their experienced crucifixions
my envy is not simple I have dreamed of going to bed
as if walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets thinking “I will freeze in there”
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water is mild I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net has run
through fields of snow leaving no print
this water washes off the scent
You are clear now
of the hunter the trapper
the wardens of the mind
yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow flecked surface of the pool
and wakes and sleeps again
No one sleeps in this room without the dream
of a common language

II.
It was simple to meet you simple to take your eyes into mine saying
“These are eyes I have known from the first…”
It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background the grain of what we had been the choices the years…
It was even simple to take each others lives in our hands as bodies
What is not simple to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching…
to wake to something deceptively simple a glass
sweated with dew a ring of the telephone a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream
knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city
this century this life…
each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh and they are but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life)

III.
It is simple to wake from sleep with a stranger
dress go out drink coffee
enter a life again
It is not simple to wake from sleep
into the neighborhood of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust
Trusting untrusting we lowered ourselves into this
letting ourselves descend hand over hand as on a quivering rope over the unsearched
We did this Conceived of each other conceived each other
in a darkness I remember as drenched in light
I want to call this “life”
But I can not call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows cast on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness
and sleeps like a silent beast in the corner
(1972 1974)

SPLITTINGS

My body opens over San Francisco like the day
light raining down each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her I have been waking off and
on all night to that pain not simply absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now Yet if I could instruct
myself if we could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us if the mind the mind that lives
in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed
in that grasp it would loosen
Pain would have to stand off from me and listen its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer
We are older now
we have met before these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out all that is not mine
I am the pain of division creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time zones nor the miles
It is not separation calls me forth but I
who am separation And remember
I have no existence apart from you

I believe I am choosing something new
not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence or simply cry
primordial loneliness does the bed of the stream
once diverted mourning remember wetness
But we we live so much in these
configurations of the past I choose
to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out
her particular being the details of her love
I will not be divided from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills

The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head
in the space between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
between love and action I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

(1974)

HUNGER

(FOR AUDRE LORDE)

A fogged hill scene on an enormous continent
intimacy rigged with terrors
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painters ink stick planned
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed
leaning together in a sticklike boat
in the foreground Maybe we look like this
I dont know I am wondering
whether we even have what we think we have
lighted windows signifying shelter
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs I know I am partly somewhere else
huts strung across a drought stretched land
not mine dried breasts mine and not mine a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger
I live in my Western skin
my Western vision torn
and flung to what I cant control or even fathom
Quantify suffering you could rule the world

They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide
than a life of famine and suicide if a black lesbian dies
if a white prostitute dies if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others
self hatred battening on her body
Something that kills us or leaves us half alive
is raging under the name of an “act of god”
in Chad in Niger in the Upper Volta
yes that male god that acts on us and on our children
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutrition
yet sharpened by the passion for survival
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water

We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink scene
even our intimacies are rigged with terror
Quantify suffering My guilt at least is open
I stand convicted by all my convictions
you too We shrink from touching
our power we shrink away we starve ourselves
and each other were scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love
hose it on a city on a world
to wield and guide its spray destroying
poisons parasites rats viruses
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be

The decision to feed the world
is the real decision No revolution
has chosen it For that choice requires
that women shall be free
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me Yes I am alive to write these words
to leaf through Kollwitzs women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the “mothers” drained of milk the “survivors” driven
to self abortion self starvation to a vision
bitter concrete and wordless
I am alive to want more than life
want it for others starving and unborn
to name the deprivations boring
into my will my affections into the brains
of daughters sisters lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face hollow with anger and desire
Swathed in exhaustion on the trampled newsprint
a woman shields a dead child from the camera
The passion to be inscribes her body
Until we find each other we are alone

(1974 1975)

TO A POET

Ice splits under the metal
shovel another day
hazed light off fogged panes
cruelty of winter landlocked your life
wrapped round you in your twenties
an old bathrobe dragged down
with milkstains tearstains dust
Scraping egg crust from the childs
dried dish skimming the skin
from cooled milk wringing diapers
Language floats at the vanishing point
incarnate breathes the fluorescent bulb
primary states the scarred grain of the floor
and on the ceiling in torn plaster laughs
imago
and I have fears that you will cease to be
before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain
for you are not a suicide
but no one calls this murder
Small mouths needy suck you This is love
I write this not for you
who fight to write your own
words fighting up the falls
but for another woman dumb
with loneliness dust seeping plastic bags
with children in a house
where language floats and spins
abortion in
the bowl

(1974)

CARTOGRAPHIES OF SILENCE

A conversation begins
with a lie And each
speaker of the so called common language feels
the ice floe split the drift apart
as if powerless as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can begin
with a lie And be torn up
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy Cannot be torn
up Infiltrates our blood Repeats itself
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies

The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word

The technology of silence
The rituals etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

How calm how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays
to give a ground of meaning to our pain

The silence that strips bare
In Dreyers Passion of Joan
Falconettis face hair shorn a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words
stretched like a skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end
of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn

The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
This is useless to you and perhaps to others

It was an old theme even for me
Language cannot do everything
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs not letting you turn
till you and I who long to make this thing
were finally clarified together in its stare

No Let me have this dust
these pale clouds dourly lingering these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind childs fingers
or the newborn infants mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose woven sack
or of the bunsen flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain
for return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words these whispers conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green
(1975)

THE LIONESS

The scent of her beauty draws me to her place
The desert stretches edge from edge
Rock Silver grasses Drinking hole
The starry sky
The lioness pauses
in her back and forth pacing of three yards square
and looks at me Her eyes
are truthful They mirror rivers
seacoasts volcanoes the warmth
of moon bathed promontories
Under her haunches golden hide
flows an innate half abnegated power
Her walk is bounded
three square yards encompass where she goes
In country like this I say the problem is always
one of straying too far not of staying
within bounds There are caves
high rocks you dont explore Yet you know
they exist Her proud vulnerable head
sniffs toward them It is her country she
knows they exist
I come towards her in the starlight
I look into her eyes
as one who loves can look
entering the space behind her eyeballs
leaving myself outside
So at last through her pupils
I see what she is seeing
between her and the rivers flood
the volcano veiled in rainbow
a pen that measures three yards square
Lashed bars
The cage
The penance
(1975)

II. TWENTY ONE LOVE POEMS

I.
Wherever in this city screens flicker
with pornography with science fiction vampires
victimized hirelings bending to the lash
we also have to walk if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
from those rancid dreams that blurt of metal those disgraces
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high
or the long legged young girls playing ball
in the junior high school playground
No one has imagined us We want to live like trees
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air
dappled with scars still exuberantly budding
our animal passion rooted in the city

II.
I wake up in your bed I know I have been dreaming
Much earlier the alarm broke us from each other
you have been at your desk for hours I know what I dreamed
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I have been writing for days
drafts carbons poems are scattered everywhere
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life But I hesitate
and wake You have kissed my hair
to wake me I dreamed you were a poem
I say a poem I wanted to show someone
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity which is not simple
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the up breathing air

III.
Since we are not young weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we are not young
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty
my limbs streaming with a purer joy
Did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring
And you you move toward me with the same tempo
Your eyes are everlasting the green spark
of the blue eyed grass of early summer
the green blue wild cress washed by the spring
At twenty yes we thought we would live forever
At forty five I want to know even our limits
I touch you knowing we were not born tomorrow
and somehow each of us will help the other live
and somewhere each of us must help the other die

IV.
I come home from you through the early light of spring
flashing off ordinary walls the Pez Dorado
the Discount Wares the shoe store
I am lugging my sack
of groceries I dash for the elevator
where a man taut elderly carefully composed
lets the door almost close on me
For gods sake hold it
I croak at him Hysterical he breathes my way
I let myself into the kitchen unload my bundles
make coffee open the window put on Nina Simone
singing Here comes the sun
I open the mail drinking delicious coffee delicious music
my body still both light and heavy with you
The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27 a hostage tortured in prison
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep me constantly awake with the pain
Do whatever you can to survive
You know I think that men love wars
And my incurable anger my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears I am crying helplessly
and they still control the world and you are not in my arms

V.
This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws the bulging eyes
of monsters easily Once open the books you have to face
the underside of everything you have loved
the rack and pincers held in readiness the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through
the silence burying unwanted children
women deviants witnesses in desert sand
Kenneth tells me he has been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types
yes and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the womens flesh while praising her mind
Goethes dread of the Mothers Claudel vilifying Gide
and the ghosts their hands clasped for centuries
of artists dying in childbirth wise women charred at the stake
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not women who could not speak
to our life this still unexcavated hole
called civilization this act of translation this half world

VI.
Your small hands precisely equal to my own
only the thumb is larger longer in these hands
I could trust the world or in many hands like these
handling power tools or steering wheel
or touching a human face
Such hands could turn
the unborn child right ways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue ship
through icebergs or piece together
the fine needle like sherds of a great krater cup
bearing on its sides
figures of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyls den or the Eleusinian cave
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete

VII.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words
What atonement is this all about
and yet writing words like these I am also living
Is all this close to the wolverines howled signals
that modulated cantata of the wild
or when away from you I try to create you in words
am I simply using you like a river or a war
and how have I used rivers how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all
not the crimes of others not even our own death
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms sick rivers massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves

VIII.
I can see myself years back at Sunion
hurting with an infected foot Philoctetes
in womens form limping the long path
lying on a headland over the dark sea
looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl
of white told me a wave had struck
imagining the pull of that water from that height
knowing deliberate suicide wasnt my metier
yet all the time nursing measuring that wound
Well that is finished The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead I am her descendant
I love the scar tissue she handed on to me
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain

IX.
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun
It is not my own face I see there but other faces
even your face at another age
Whatever is lost there is needed by both of us
a watch of old gold a water blurred fever chart
a key Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition I fear this silence
this inarticulate life I am waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once and show me what I can do
for you who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others even for me

X.
Your dog tranquil and innocent dozes through
our cries our murmured dawn conspiracies
our telephone calls She knows what can she know
If in my human arrogance I claim to read
her eyes I find there only my own animal thoughts
that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort
that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh
further than the dense brain could have foretold
that the planetary nights are growing cold for those
on the same journey who want to touch
one creature traveler clear to the end
that without tenderness we are in hell

XI.
Every peak is a crater This is the law of volcanoes
making them eternally and visibly female
No height without depth without a burning core
though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava
I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain
smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod
I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path
to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp
never failing to note the small jewel like flower
unfamiliar to us nameless till we rename her
that clings to the slowly altering rock
that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves
was here before us knew we would come and sees beyond us

XII.
Sleeping turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow
a touch is enough to let us know
we are not alone in the universe even in sleep
the dream ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost towns almost address each other
I have wakened to your muttered words
spoken light or dark years away
as if my own voice had spoken
But we have different voices even in sleep
and our bodies so alike are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language different meanings
though in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender
we were two women of one generation

XIII.
The rules break like a thermometer
quicksilver spills across the charted systems
we are out in a country that has no language
no laws we are chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years we are driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear
neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung
but a womens voice singing old songs
with new words with a quiet bass a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law

XIV.
It was your vision of the pilot
confirmed my vision of you you said He keeps
on steering headlong into the waves on purpose
while we crouched in the open hatchway
vomiting into plastic bags
for three hours between St Pierre and Miquelon
I never felt closer to you
In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples
huddled in each others laps and arms
I put my hand on your thigh
to comfort both of us your hand came over mine
we stayed that way suffering together
in our bodies as if all suffering
were physical we touched so in the presence
of strangers who knew nothing and cared less
vomiting their private pain
as if all suffering were physical
(The Floating Poem Unnumbered)
Whatever happens with us your body
will haunt mine tender delicate
your lovemaking like the half curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun Your traveled generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there
the live insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth
your touch on me firm protective searching
me out your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose wet cave whatever happens this is

XV.
If I lay on that beach with you
white empty pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream
and lying on that beach we could not stay
because the wind drove fine sand against us
as if it were against us
if we tried to withstand it and we failed
if we drove to another place
to sleep in each others arms
and the beds were narrow like prisoners cots
and we were tired and did not sleep together
and this was what we found so this is what we did
was the failure ours
If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible Only she who says
she did not choose is the loser in the end

XVI.
Across a city from you I am with you
just as an August night
moony inlet warm seabathed I watched you sleep
the scrubbed sheenless wood of the dressing table
cluttered with our brushes books vials in the moonlight
or a salt mist orchard lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin
G minor Mozart on the tape recorder
falling asleep to the music of the sea
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us and narrow
I can hear your breath tonight I know how your face
lies upturned the half light tracing
your generous delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together

XVII.
No one is fated or doomed to love anyone
The accidents happen we are not heroines
they happen in our lives like car crashes
books that change us neighborhoods
we move into and come to love
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story
women at least should know the difference
between love and death No poison cup
no penance Merely a notion that the tape recorder
should have caught some ghost of us that tape recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us
and could instruct those after us
this we were this is how we tried to love
and these are the forces they had ranged against us
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us against us and within us

XVIII.
Rain on the West Side Highway
red light at Riverside
the more I live the more I think
two people together is a miracle
You are telling the story of your life
for once a tremor breaks the surface of your words
The story of our lives becomes our lives
Now you are in fugue across what some I am sure
Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea
Those are the words that come to mind
I feel estrangement yes As I have felt dawn
pushing toward daybreak Something a cleft of light
Close between grief and anger a space opens
where I am Adrienne alone And growing colder

XIX.
Can it be growing colder when I begin
to touch myself again adhesions pull away
When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward
and looks into the present
the eye of winter city anger poverty and death
and the lips part and say I mean to go on living
Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream
or in this poem There are no miracles
(I told you from the first I wanted daily life
this island of Manhattan was island enough for me)
If I could let you know
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness
the slow picked halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
look at the faces of those who have chosen it

XX.
That conversation we were always on the edge
of having runs on in my head
at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light
polluted water yet reflecting even
sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved drowning in secrets fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair And this is she
with whom I tried to speak whose hurt expressive head
turning aside from pain is dragged down deeper
where it cannot hear me
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul

XXI.
The dark lintels the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising from beneath
the horizon when I said “a cleft of light”
I meant this And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude
shared could be chosen without loneliness
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle the heavy shadows the great light
I choose to be a figure in that light
half blotting by darkness something moving
across that space the color of stone
greeting the moon yet more than stone
a woman I choose to walk here And to draw this circle
(1974 1976)

III. NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE BUT HERE

Not Somewhere Else but Here

Upper Broadway

The leafbud straggles forth
toward the frigid light of the airshaft this is faith
this pale extension of a day
when looking up you know something is changing
winter has turned though the wind is colder
Three streets away a roof collapses onto people
who thought they still had time Time out of mind
I have written so many words
wanting to live inside you
to be of use to you
Now I must write for myself for this blind
woman scratching the pavement with her wand of thought
this slippered crone inching on icy streets
reaching into wire trash baskets pulling out
what was thrown away and infinitely precious
I look at my hands and see they are still unfinished
I look at the vine and see the leafbud
inching towards life
I look at my face in the glass and see
a half born woman
(1975)

PAULA BECKER TO CLARA WESTHOFF

Paula Becker 1876 1907
Clara Westhoff 1878 1954
became friends at Worpswede an artists colony near
Bremen Germany summer 1899 In January 1900 spent
a half year together in Paris where Paula painted and Clara
studied sculpture with Rodin In August they returned to
Worpswede and spent the next winter together in Berlin
In 1901 Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke soon
after Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn She died
in a hemorrhage after childbirth murmuring What a pity
The autumn feels slowed down
summer still holds on here even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I am using it to the thin edge
The moon rolls in the air I didnt want this child
You are the only one I have told
I want a child maybe someday but not now
Otto has a calm complacent way
of following me with his eyes as if to say
Soon you will have your hands full
And yes I will this child will be mine
not his the failures if I fail
will be all mine We are not good Clara
at learning to prevent these things
and once we have a child it is ours
But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone
I know now the kind of work I have to do
It takes such energy I have the feeling I am
moving somewhere patiently impatiently
in my loneliness I am looking everywhere in nature
for new forms old forms in new places
the planes of an antique mouth let us say among the leaves
I know and do not know
what I am searching for
Remember those months in the studio together
you up to your strong forearms in wet clay
I trying to make something of the strange impressions
assailing me the Japanese
flowers and birds on silk the drunks
sheltering in the Louvre that river light
those faces … Did we know exactly
why we were there Paris unnerved you
you found it too much yet you went on
with your work … and later we met there again
both married then and I thought you and Rilke
both seemed unnerved I felt a kind of joylessness
between you Of course he and I
have had our difficulties Maybe I was jealous
of him to begin with taking you from me
maybe I married Otto to fill up
my loneliness for you
Rainer of course knows more than Otto knows
he believes in women But he feeds on us
like all of them His whole life his art
is protected by women Which of us could say that
Which of us Clara has not had to take that leap
out beyond our being women
to save our work or is it to save ourselves
Marriage is lonelier than solitude
Do you know I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child
I could not paint or speak or even move
My child I think survived me But what was funny
in the dream was Rainer had written my requiem
a long beautiful poem and calling me his friend
I was your friend
but in the dream you didnt say a word
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently like a guest
who comes on the wrong day Clara why dont I dream of you
That photo of the two of us I have it still
you and I looking hard into each other
and my painting behind us How we used to work
side by side And how I have worked since then
trying to create according to our plan
that we would bring against all odds our full power
to every subject Hold back nothing
because we were women Clara our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about
how life and death take one anothers hands
the struggle for truth our old pledge against guilt
And now I feel dawn and the coming day
I love waking in my studio seeing my pictures
come alive in the light Sometimes I feel
it is myself that kicks inside me
myself I must give suck to love …
I wish we could have done this for each other
all our lives but we cant
They say a pregnant woman
dreams of her own death But life and death
take one anothers hands Clara I feel so full
of work the life I see ahead and love
for you who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say
(1975 1976)

NIGHTS AND DAYS

The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch what will we know
what will we say to each other
Pictures form and dissolve in my head
we are walking in a city
you fled came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back before I knew you
before I knew myself
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood
streets you have graven and erased in dreams
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past the places
none of us can explain to anyone
We are standing in the wind
on an empty beach the onslaught of the surf
tells me Point Reyes or maybe some northern
Pacific shoreline neither of us has seen
In its fine spectral mist our hair
is grey as the sea
someone who saw us far off would say we were two old women
Norns perhaps or sisters of the spray
but our breasts are beginning to sing together
your eyes are on my mouth
I wake early in the morning
in a bed we have shared for years
lie watching your innocent sacred sleep
as if for the first time
We have been together so many nights and days
this day is not unusual
I walk to an eastern window pull up the blinds
the city around us is still
on a clear October morning
wrapped in her indestructible light
The stars will come out over and over
the hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burn
and I ask myself and you which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch what will we know
what will we say to each other
(1976)

SIBLING MYSTERIES

(FOR C R)

Remind me how we walked
trying the planetary rock
for foothold
testing the rims of canyons
fields of sheer
ice in the midnight sun
smelling the rains before they came
feeling the fullness of the moon
before moonrise
unbalanced by the life
moving in us then lightened
yet weighted still
by children on our backs
at our hips as we made fire
scooped clay lifted water
Remind me how the stream
wetted the clay between our palms
and how the flame
licked it to mineral colors
how we traced our signs by torchlight
in the deep chambers of the caves
and how we drew the quills
of porcupines between our teeth
to a keen thinness
and brushed the twisted raffia into velvet
and bled our lunar knowledge thirteen times
upon the furrows
I know by heart and still
I need to have you tell me
hold me remind me

Remind me how we loved our mothers body
our mouths drawing the first
thin sweetness from her nipples
our faces dreaming hour on hour
in the salt smell of her lap Remind me
how her touch melted child grief
how she floated great and tender in our dark
or stood guard over us
against our willing
and how we thought she loved
the strange male body first
that took that took whose taking seemed a law
and how she sent us weeping
into that law
how we remet her in our childbirth visions
erect enthroned above
a spiral stair
and crawled and panted toward her
I know I remember but
hold me remind me
of how her womens flesh was made taboo to us

And how beneath the veil
black gauze or white the dragging
bangles the amulets we dreamed And how beneath
the strange male bodies
we sank in terror or in resignation
and how we taught them tenderness
the holding back the play
the floating of a finger
the secrets of the nipple
And how we ate and drank
their leavings how we served them
in silence how we told
among ourselves our secrets wept and laughed
passed bark and root and berry
from hand to hand whispering each ones power
washing the bodies of the dead
making celebrations of doing laundry
piecing our lore in quilted galaxies
how we dwelt in two worlds
the daughters and the mothers
in the kingdom of the sons

Tell me again because I need to hear
how we bore our mother secrets
straight to the end
tied in unlawful rags
between our breasts
muttered in blood
in looks exchanged at the feast
where the fathers sucked the bones
and struck their bargains
in the open square when noon
battered our shaven heads
and the flames curled transparent in the sun
in boats of skin on the ice floe
the pregnant set to drift
too many mouths for feeding
how sister gazed at sister
reaching through mirrored pupils
back to the mother

C had a son on June 18th … I feel acutely that we are strangers my
sister and I we dont get through to each other or say what we really
feel This depressed me violently on that occasion when I wanted to
have only generous and simple feelings towards her of pleasure in
her joy affection for all that was hers But we are not really friends
and act the part of sisters I dont know what really gives her pain or
joy nor does she know how I am happy or how I suffer
There were years you and I
hardly spoke to each other
then one whole night
our father dying upstairs
we burned our childhood reams of paper
talking till the birds sang
(1963)
Your face across a table now dark
with illumination
This face I have watched changing
for forty years
has watched me changing
this mind has wrenched my thought
I feel the separateness
of cells in us split second choice
of one ovum for one sperm
We have seized different weapons
our hair has fallen long
or short at different times
words flash from you I never thought of
we are translations into different dialects
of a text still being written
in the original
yet our eyes drink from each other

We have returned so far
that house of childhood seems absurd
its secrets a fallen hair a grain of dust
on the photographic plate
we are eternally exposing to the universe
I call you from another planet
to tell a dream
Light years away you weep with me
The daughters never were
true brides of the father
the daughters were to begin with
brides of the mother
then brides of each other
under a different law
Let me hold and tell you

(1976)

A WOMAN DEAD IN HER FORTIES

Your breasts sliced off The scars
dimmed as they would have to be
years later
All the women I grew up with are sitting
half naked on rocks in sun
we look at each other and
are not ashamed
and you too have taken off your blouse
but this was not what you wanted
to show your scarred deleted torso
I barely glance at you
as if my look could scold you
though I am the one who loved you
I want to touch my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
You had not thought everyone
would look so perfect
unmutilated
you pull on
your blouse again
stern statement
There are things I will not share
with everyone

You send me back to share
my own scars first of all
with myself
What did I hide from her
what have I denied her
what losses suffered
how in this ignorant body
did she hide
waiting for her release
till uncontrollable light began to pour
from every wound and suture
and all the sacred openings

Wartime We sit on warm
weathered softening grey boards
the ladder glimmers where you told me
the leeches swim
I smell the flame
of kerosene the pine
boards where we sleep side by side
in narrow cots
the night meadow exhaling
its darkness calling
child into woman
child into woman
woman

Most of our love from the age of nine
took the form of jokes and mute
loyalty you fought a girl
who said she would knock me down
we did each others homework
wrote letters kept in touch untouching
lied about our lives I wearing
the face of the proper marriage
you the face of the independent woman
We cleaved to each other across that space
fingering webs
of love and estrangement till the day
the gynecologist touched your breast
and found a palpable hardness

You played heroic necessary
games with death
since in your neo protestant tribe the void
was supposed not to exist
except as a fashionable concept
you had no traffic with
I wish you were here tonight I want
to yell at you
Dont accept
Dont give in
But would I be meaning your brave
irreproachable life you dean of women or
your unfair unfashionable unforgivable
womens death

You are every woman I ever loved
and disavowed
a bloody incandescent chord strung out
across years tracts of space
How can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty
your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms
how can I go on this mission
without you
you who might have told me
everything you feel is true

Time after time in dreams you rise
reproachful
once from a wheelchair pushed by your father
across a lethal expressway
Of all my dead it is you
who come to me unfinished
You left me amber beads
strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave
I wear them wondering
How am I true to you
I am half afraid to write poetry
for you who never read it much
and I am left laboring
with the secrets and the silence
In plain language I never told you how I loved you
we never talked at your deathbed of your death

One autumn evening in a train
catching the diamond flash of sunset
in puddles along the Hudson
I thought
I understand
life and death now the choices
I did not know your choice
or how by then you had no choice
how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells
Most of our love took the form
of mute loyalty
we never spoke at your deathbed of your death
but from here on
I want more crazy mourning more howl more keening
We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid
I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
(1974 1977)

MOTHER RIGHT

(FOR M H)

Woman and child running
in a field a man planted
on the horizon
Two hands one long slim one
small starlike clasped
in the razor wind
Her hair cut short for faster travel
the childs curls grazing his shoulders
the hawk winged cloud over their heads
The man is walking boundaries
measuring He believes in what is his
the grass the waters underneath the air
the air through which child and mother
are running the boy singing
the woman eyes sharpened in the light
heart stumbling making for the open
(1977)

NATURAL RESOURCES

The core of the strong hill not understood
the mulch heat of the underwood
where unforeseen the forest fire unfurls
the heat the privacy of the mines
the rainbow laboring to extend herself
where neither men nor cattle understand
arching her lusters over rut and stubble
purely to reach where she must go
the emerald lying against the silver vein
waiting for light to reach it breathing in pain

The miner is no metaphor She goes
into the cage like the rest is flung
downward by gravity like them must change
her body like the rest to fit a crevice
to work a lode
on her the pick hangs heavy the bad air
lies thick the mountain presses in on her
with boulder timber fog
slowly the mountains dust descends
into the fibers of her lungs

The cage drops into the dark
the routine of life goes on
a woman turns a doorknob but so slowly
so quietly that no one wakes
and it is she alone who gazes
into the dark of bedrooms ascertains
how they sleep who needs her touch
what window blows the ice of February
into the room and who must be protected
It is only she who sees who was trained to see

Could you imagine a world of women only
the interviewer asked Can you imagine
a world where women are absent
(He believed he was joking) Yet I have to imagine
at one and the same moment both
Because I live in both Can you imagine
the interviewer asked a world of men
(He thought he was joking) If so then
a world where men are absent
Absently wearily I answered Yes

the phantom of the man who would understand
the lost brother the twin
for him did we leave our mothers
deny our sisters over and over
did we invent him conjure him
over the charring log
nights late in the snowbound cabin
did we dream or scry his face
in the liquid embers
the man who would dare to know us

It was never the rapist
it was the brother lost
the comrade twin whose palm
would bear a lifeline like our own
decisive arrowy
forked lightning of insatiate desire
It was never the crude pestle the blind
ramrod we were after
merely a fellow creature
with natural resources equal to our own

Meanwhile another kind of being
was constructing itself blindly
a mutant some have said
the blood compelled exemplar
of a “botched civilization”
as one of them called it
children picking up guns
for that is what it means to be a man
We have lived with violence for seven years
It was not worth one single life
but the patriots fist is at her throat
her voice is in mortal danger
and that kind of being has lain in our beds
declaring itself our desire
requiring womens blood for life
a womens breast to lay its nightmare on

And that kind of being has other forms
a passivity we mistake
in the desperation of our search
for gentleness
But gentleness is active
gentleness swabs the crusted stump
invents more merciful instruments
to touch the wound beyond the wound
does not faint with disgust
will not be driven off
keeps bearing witness calmly
against the predator the parasite

I am tired of faintheartedness
their having to be exceptional
to do what an ordinary woman
does in the course of things
I am tired of women stooping to half our height
to bring the essential vein to light
tired of the waste of what we bear
with such cost such elation into sight
(for what becomes of what the miner probes
and carves from the mountains body in her pain)

This is what I am watching the spider
rebuild “patiently” they say
but I recognize in her
impatience my own
the passion to make and make again
where such unmaking reigns
the refusal to be a victim
we have lived with violence so long
Am I to go on saying
for myself for her
This is my body
take and destroy it

The enormity of the simplest things
in this cold barn tables are spread
with china saucers shoehorns
of german silver a gilt edged book
that opens into a picture frame
a biscuit tin of the thirties
Outside the north lies vast
with unshed snow everything is
at once remote and familiar
each house contains what it must
women simmer carcasses
of clean picked turkeys store away
the cleaned cutglass and soak the linen cloths
Dark rushes early at the panes

These things by women saved
are all we have of them
or of those dear to them
these ribboned letters snapshots
faithfully glued for years
onto the scrapbook page
these scraps turned into patchwork
doll gowns clean white rags
for stanching blood
the brides tea yellow handkerchief
the childs height penciled on the cellar door
In this cold barn we dream
a universe of humble things
and without these no memory
no faithfulness no purpose for the future
no honor to the past

There are words I cannot choose again
humanism androgyny
Such words have no shame in them no diffidence
before the raging stoic grandmothers
their glint is too shallow like a dye
that does not permeate
the fibers of actual life
as we live it now
this fraying blanket with its ancient stains
we pull across the sick childs shoulder
or wrap around the senseless legs
of the hero trained to kill
this weaving ragged because incomplete
we turn our hands to interrupted
over and over handed down
unfinished found in the drawer
of an old dresser in the barn
her vanished pride and care
still urging us urging on
our work to close the gap
in the Great Nebula
to help the earth deliver

The women who first knew themselves
miners are dead The rainbow flies
like a flying buttress from the walls
of cloud the silver and green vein
awaits the battering of the pick
the dark lode weeps for light
My heart is moved by all I cannot save
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age perversely
with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world

(1977)

TOWARD THE SOLSTICE

The thirtieth of November
Snow is starting to fall
A peculiar silence is spreading
over the fields the maple grove
It is the thirtieth of May
rain pours on ancient bushes runs
down the youngest blade of grass
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
all the parts of my life
A spring torrent races
on this old slanting roof
the slanted field below
thickens with winters first whiteness
Thistles dried to sticks in last years wind
stand nakedly in the green
stand sullenly in the slowly whitening
field
My brain glows
more violently more avidly
the quieter the thicker
the quilt of crystals settles
the louder more relentlessly
the torrent beats itself out
on the old boards and shingles
It is the thirtieth of May
the thirtieth of November
a beginning or an end
we are moving into the solstice
and there is so much here
I still do not understand
If I could make sense of how
my life is still tangled
with dead weeds thistles
enormous burdocks burdens
slowly shifting under
this first fall of snow
beaten by this early racking rain
calling all new life to declare itself strong
or die
if I could know
in what language to address
the spirits that claim a place
beneath these low and simple ceilings
tenants that neither speak nor stir
yet dwell in mute insistence
till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house
If history is a spider thread
spun over and over though brushed away
it seems I might some twilight
or dawn in the hushed country light
discern its greyness stretching
from molding or doorframe out
into the empty dooryard
and following it climb
the path into the pinewoods
tracing from tree to tree
in the failing light in the slowly
lucidifying day
its constant purposive trail
till I reach whatever cellar hole
filling with snowflakes or lichen
whatever fallen shack
or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
and there under the first or last
star trusting to instinct
the words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
year after year winter
after summer the right rune
to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past
If some rite of separation
is still unaccomplished
between myself and the long gone
tenants of this house
between myself and my childhood
and the childhood of my children
it is I who have neglected
to perform the needed acts
set water in corners light and eucalyptus
in front of mirrors
or merely pause and listen
to my own pulse vibrating
lightly as falling snow
relentlessly as the rainstorm
and hear what it has been saying
It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself
A decade of cutting away
dead flesh cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough
A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers
washing panes scrubbing
wood smoke from splitting paint
sweeping stairs brushing the thread
of the spider aside
and so much yet undone
a womens work the solstice nearing
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close

(1977)

TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE

(FOR MICHELLE CLIFF)

This August evening I have been driving
over backroads fringed with queen annes lace
my car startling young deer in meadows one
gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all
four fawns sprang after her
into the dark maples
Three months from today theyll be fair game
for the hit and run hunters glorying
in a weekends destructive power
triggers fingered by drunken gunmen sometimes
so inept as to leave the shattered animal
stunned in her blood
But this evening deep in summer
the deer are still alive and free
nibbling apples from early laden boughs
so weighted so englobed
with already yellowing fruit
they seem eternal Hesperidean
in the clear tuned cricket throbbing air
Later I stood in the dooryard
my nerves singing the immense
fragility of all this sweetness
this green world already sentimentalized photographed
advertised to death
Yet it persists
stubbornly beyond the fake Vermont
of antique barnboards glazed into discotheques
artificial snow the sick Vermont of children
conceived in apathy grown to winters
of rotgut violence
poverty gnashing its teeth like a blind cat at their lives
Still it persists Turning off onto a dirt road
from the raw cuts bulldozed through a quiet village
for the tourist run to Canada
I have sat on a stone fence above a great soft sloping field
of musing heifers a farmstead
slanting its planes calmly in the calm light
a dead elm raising bleached arms
above a green so dense with life
minute momentary life slugs moles pheasants gnats
spiders moths hummingbirds groundhogs butterflies
a lifetime is too narrow
to understand it all beginning with the huge
rockshelves that underlie all that life
No one ever told us we had to study our lives
make of our lives a study as if learning natural history
or music that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue
At most we are allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a womens voice singing a child
against her heart Everything else is too soon
too sudden the wrenching apart that womens heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance
the loss of that ground note echoing
whenever we are happy or in despair
Everything else seems beyond us
we arent ready for it nothing that was said
is true for us caught naked in the argument
the counterpoint trying to sightread
what our fingers cant keep up with learn by heart
what we cant even read And yet
it is this we were born to We arent virtuosi
or child prodigies there are no prodigies
in this realm only a half blind stubborn
cleaving to the timbre the tones of what we are
even when all the texts describe it differently
And we are not performers like Liszt competing
against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79 year old pianist said when I asked her
What makes a virtuoso Competitiveness)
The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality the false glamour cast
by performance the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting open of our lives
The woman who sits watching listening
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body hearing out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words a few chords from the stage
a tale only she can tell
But there come times perhaps this is one of them
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die
when we have to pull back from the incantations
rhythms we have moved to thoughtlessly
and disenthrall ourselves bestow
ourselves to silence or a severer listening cleansed
of oratory formulas choruses laments static
crowding the wires
we cut the wires
find ourselves in free fall as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes the rift
in the Great Nebula
No one who survives to speak
new language has avoided this
the cutting away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed weightless her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come
But in fact we were always like this
rootless dismembered knowing it makes the difference
Birth stripped our birthright from us
tore us from a woman from women from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges told us nothing nothing
of origins nothing we needed
to know nothing that could re member us
Only that it is unnatural
the homesickness for a woman for ourselves
for that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms
cast on a wall her heavy or slender
thighs on which we lay flesh against flesh
eyes steady on the face of love smell of her milk her sweat
terror of her disappearance all fused in this hunger
for the element they have called most dangerous to be
lifted breathtaken on her breast to rock within her
even if beaten back stranded again to apprehend
in a sudden brine clear thought
trembling like the tiny orbed endangered
egg sac of a new world
This is what she was to me and this is
how I can love myself
as only a woman can love me
Homesick for myself for her as after the heatwave
breaks the clear tones of the world
manifest cloud bough wall insect the very soul of light
homesick as the fluted vault of desire
articulates itself I am the lover and the loved
home and wanderer she who splits
firewood and she who knocks a stranger
in the storm two women eye to eye
measuring each others spirit each others
limitless desire a whole new poetry beginning here
Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen began turning in her lap
bits of yarn calico and velvet scraps
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight with small rainbow colored shells
sent in cotton wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk the finest findings
and the dark blue petal of the petunia
and the dry dark brown lace of seaweed
not forgotten either the shed silver
whisker of the cat
the spiral of paper wasp nest curling
beside the finchs yellow feather
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity
the striving for greatness brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright silk against roughness
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery
only care for the many lived unending
forms in which she finds herself
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner dangerous
to flesh now the plentiful soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger soothes the wound
and now the stone foundation rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows

(1977)