Becoming Light (8 page)

as yet         & then as you sidestep          into the 4th decade

beginning to crease the neck     (just slightly)

though the breasts below

especially

When they’re small (like mine) may stay high far

into the thirties

still the neck will give you away        & after that the chin

which        though you may snip it back & hike it up under

your earlobes will never quite love your bones as it once did

though

the belly may be kept firm through numerous pregnancies

by means of sit-ups        jogging          dancing          (think of Russian

ballerinas)

& the cunt

as far as I know is ageless        possibly immortal

becoming simply

more open        more quick to understand        more dry-eyed

than at 22

which

after all          is what you were dying for        (as you ravaged

islands of turtles        beehives        oysterbeds        the udders

of cows)

desperate to censor changes which you simply might have let play

over you         lying back         listening         opening yourself

letting the years make love the only way        (poor blunderers)

they know

for Grace

The skin of the sea

has nothing to tell me.

I see her diving down

into herself—

past the bell-shaped jellyfish

who toll for no one—

& meaning to come back.

♦

In London, in the damp

of a London morning,

I see her sitting,

folding & unfolding herself,

while the blood

hammers like rain

on her heart’s windows.

This is her own country—

the sea, the rain

& death half rhyming

with her father’s name.

Obscene monosyllable,

it lingers for a while

on the roof

of the mouth’s house.

I stand here

savoring the sound,

like salt.

♦

They thought your death

was your last poem:

a black book

with gold-tooled cover

& pages the color of ash.

But I thought different,

knowing how madness

doesn’t believe

in metaphor.

When you began to feel

the drift of continents

beneath your feet,

the sea’s suck,

& each

atom of the poisoned air,

you lost

the luxury of simile.

Gull calls, broken shells,

the quarried coast.

This is where America ends,

dropping off

to the depths.

Death comes

differently in California.

Marilyn stalled

in celluloid,

the frame stuck,

& the light

burning through.

Bronze to her platinum,

Ondine, Ariel,

finally no one,

what could we tell you

after you dove down into yourself

& were swallowed

by your poems?

The old poet

with his face full of lines,

with iambs jumping in his hair like fleas,

with all the revisions of his body

unsaying him,

walks to the podium.

He is about to tell us

how he came to this.

for my parents

Who are these small determined figures

with turbaned heads

coming

to doric temples

in

fifteenth-century galleons

with

medieval castles

in the background?

They speak

& gesture in the halflight,

bring

cattle, parcels

to the classic shore

below the gothic hill.

Sunlight moonlight twilight starlight

gleams across

a stagey sea.

Clouds toss. Sails fill.

Windlessly,

what banners wave?

Whose landscape

is this mind?

Whose bluish breasts became

these castled hills?

Whose darkness is

this winter afternoon?

Whose darkness is

this darkening gallery?

Turn softly mind, wind,

Claude Lorrain,

Turner’s making

light of Venice,

showing

his true

colors.

For Alexander Mitscherlich

Lumbering down

in the early morning clatter

from farms

where the earth was hard all winter,

the market women bear

grapes blue as the veins

of fair-skinned women,

cherries dark as blood,

roses strewn like carnage

on makeshift altars.

They come

in ancient rattling trucks

which sprout geraniums,

are stained

with strawberries.

Their fingers thick

& thorn-pricked,

their huge smock-pockets

jingling pennies,

they walk,

heavy goddesses,

while the market

blossoms into bleeding

all round them.

Currants which glitter

like Christmas ornaments

are staining

their wooden boxes.

Cherries, grapes—

everything

seems to be bleeding!

I think

how a sentimental

German poet

might have written

that the cut rose

mourns the garden

& the grapes

their Rhineland vineyard

(where the crooked vines

stretch out their arms

like dancers)

for this

is a sentimental country

& Germans

are passionate gardeners

who view with humanity

the blights of roses,

the adversities of vineyards.

But I am not fooled.

This bleeding is, no doubt,

in the beholder’s eye,

& if

to tend a garden

is to be civilized,

surely this country

of fat cabbages

& love-lavished geraniums

would please

an eighteenth-century

philosopher.

Two centuries, however,

buzz above my head

like hornets over fruit.

I stuff my mouth with cherries

as I watch

the thorn-pricked fingers

of the market women

lifting & weighing,

weighing, weighing.

Because she lost her father

in the First World War,

her husband in the Second,

we don’t dispute

“There’s no
Gemütlichkeit
in America.”

We’re winning her heart

with filter cigarettes.

Puffing, she says,

“You can’t judge a country

by just twelve years.”

Gray days,

the wind hobbling down sidestreets,

I’m walking in a thirties photograph,

the prehistoric age

before my birth.

This town was never bombed.

Old ladies still wear funny shoes,

long, seedy furs.

They smell of camphor and camomile,

old photographs.

Nothing much happened here.

A few jewelry shops changed hands.

A brewery. Banks.

The university put up a swastika, took it down.

The students now chant HO CHI MINH & hate Americans

on principle.

Daddy wears a flyer’s cap

& never grew old.

He’s on the table with the teacakes.

Mother & grandma are widows.

They take care of things.

It rains nearly every day;

every day, they wash the windows.

They cultivate jungles in the front parlors,

lush tropics

framed by lacy white curtains.

They coax the earth with plant food, scrub the leaves.

Each plant shines like a fat child.

They hope for the sun,

living in a Jewless world without men.

(
Heidelberg, 1969
)

After the teach-in

we smeared the walls with

our solidarity,

looked left, & saw

Marx among the angels,

singing the blues.

The students march,

I (spectator)

follow.

Here (as everywhere)

the
Polizei

are clean, are clean.

In Frankfurt,

the whores lean out

their windows, screaming:

“Get a job—you dirty

hippies!” Or words

(auf Deutsch) to that effect.

I’m also waiting

for the Revolution,

friends.

Surely, my poems

will get better.

Surely, I’ll no longer

fear my dreams.

Surely I won’t murder

my capitalist father

each night

just to inherit

his love.

I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy. O that was me, said the madman.

—Nicholas Moore

1

“I bite into an apple & then get bored

before the second bite,” you said.

You were also Samson. I had cut

your hair & locked you up.

Besides, your room was bugged.

A former inmate left his muse

spread-eagled on the picture window.

In the glinting late-day sun

we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear

diamond-etched

against the slums of Harlem.

You tongued your pills & cursed the residents.

You called me Judas.

You forgot I was a girl.

2

Your hands weren’t birds. To call

them birds would be too easy.

They drew circles around your ideas

& your ideas were sometimes parabolas.

That sudden Sunday you awoke

& found yourself behind the looking glass,

your hands perched on the breakfast table

waiting for a sign.

I had nothing to tell them.

They conversed with the eggs.

3

We walked.

Your automatic umbrella snapped

into place above your head

like a black halo.

We thought of climbing down rain puddles

as if they were manholes.

You said the reflected buildings

led to hell.

Trees danced for us,

cut-out people turned sideways

& disappeared into their voices.

The cities in our glasses took us in.

You stood on a scale, heard the penny drop—

but the needle was standing still!

It proved that you were God.

4

The elevator opens & reveals me

holding African violets.

An hour later I vanish

into a chasm whose dimensions

are 23 hours.

Tranquilized, brittle,

you strut the corridors

among the dapper young psychiatrists,

the girls who weave rugs all day,

unravel them all night,

the obesity cases lost in themselves.

You hum. You say you hate me.

I would like to shake you.

Remember how it happened?

You were standing at the window

speaking about flying.

Your hands flew to my throat.

When they came they found

our arms strewn around the floor

like broken toys.

We both were crying.

5

You stick. Somewhere in a cellar of my mind,

you stick. Fruit spoke to you

before it spoke to me. Apples cried

when you peeled them.

Tangerines jabbered in Japanese.

You stared into an oyster

sucked out God.

You were the hollow man,

with Milton entering your left foot.

6

My first husband!—God—

you’ve become an abstraction,

a kind of idea. I can’t even hear

your voice anymore. Only the black hair

curled on your belly makes you real—

I draw black curls on all the men I write.

I don’t even look anymore.

7

I thought of you in Istanbul.

Your Byzantine face,

thin lips & hollow cheeks,

the fanatical melting brown eyes.

In Hagia Sophia they’re stripping down

the moslem plaster

to find mosaics underneath.

The pieces fit in place.

You’d have been a Saint.

8

I’m good at interiors.

Gossip, sharpening edges, kitchen poems—

& have no luck at all with maps.

It’s because of being a woman

& having everything inside.

I decorated the cave,

hung it with animal skins & woolens,

such soft floors,

that when you fell

you thought you fell on me.

You had a perfect sense of bearings

to the end,

were always pointing North.

9

Flying you home—

good Christ—flying you home,

you were terrified.

You held my hand, I held

my father’s hand & he

filched pills from the psychiatrist

who’d come along for you.

The psychiatrist was 26 & scared.

He hoped I’d keep you calm.

& so we flew.

Hand in hand in hand in hand we flew.

The universe (which others call the library)…

—Jorge Luis Borges

Books which are stitched up the center with coarse white thread

Books on the beach with sunglass-colored pages

Books about food with pictures of weeping grapefruits

Books about baking bread with browned corners

Books about long-haired Frenchmen with uncut pages

Books of erotic engravings with pages that stick

Books about inns whose stars have sputtered out

Books of illuminations surrounded by darkness

Books with blank pages & printed margins

Books with fanatical footnotes in no-point type

Books with book lice