POEMS:
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26-7-2000
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POEMS: |
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Leda and Her Swan
You have red toenails, chestnut hair on your calves, oh let me love you, the fathers are lingering in the background nodding assent.
I dream of you shedding calico from slow-motion breasts, I dream of you leaving with skinny women, I dream you know.
The fathers are nodding like overdosed lechers, the fathers approve with authority: Persian emperors, ordering that the sun shall rise every dawn, set each dusk, I dream.
White bathroom surfaces rounded basins you stand among loosening hair, arms, my senses.
The fathers are Dresden figurines vestigial, anecdotal small sculptures shaped by the hands of nuns. Yours crimson tipped, take not part in that crude abnegation, Scarlet liturgies shake our room, amaryllis blooms in your upper thighs, water lilly on mine, fervent delta
the bed afloat, sheer linen blowing on the wind: Nile, Amazon, Mississippi. |
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The Charm
The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites to the little death. Bites
till she comes to nothing. Bites on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting.
The Anticipation
They tell me a woman waits, motionless till she’s wooed. I wait
spiderlike, effortless as they weave even my web for me, tying the cord in knots
with their courting hands. Such power over them. And the spell
their own. Who could release them? Who would untie the cord
with a cloven hoof?
The Bite
What I wear in the morning pleases me: green shirt, skirt of wine. I am wrapped
in myself as the smell of night wraps round my sleep when I sleep
outside. By the time I get to the corner
bar, corner store, corner construction site, I become divine. I turn
men into swine. Leave them behind me whistling, grunting, wild. |
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Hell has no
fury like women's fury. Scorned |
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for those islands in the Aegean whose harbors are too small for commercial lines our muffled phone & the through- town train, tonight i fuse them in sleep as their rumble fades, rhythmically, & another's sound echoes, a ship's stack, hooting desultorily past small hulled islands, each port a knothole lapped shut o the water is tender, green, curls softly innocent, a lazy noose in the sunlight i loved you, i know now, water swells wood, lungs, i loved you, i go past shallows to sashaying algae to prowling kelp, remote inaccessible as the harbor, no phone or faith o love orbits us, all night long, your cock is an instrument in my palm to gauge by, at breakfast you pour the coffee, i hold my tongue, what I keep from you keeps me from you, the ship is fading, like sunlit frost, silver gleams on our table, mugs shine red as cranberries, blue as frostbite, i want to hold on, not back brave morning's fierce tangibility- tell you o still, by the dry light, i grow edgy, bristle defenses, a pine- cone in fire if i were a man, or you a woman, anything would be easier than this: one man you, me one woman, lost in the shrinking summer our breakfast done |
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... the sound of one hand clapping I.
lying by her, one on each side. I am the Jester, the smallest one, I roll round the bed at Manita's feet, the floor tangled with cast-off garments. I flick my sharp tongue at Love. I adore Manita the Queen at the foot of the bed, each hand so deep in Love's collapsible caves. Manita kneeling in the midst of Love. Manita talking with God. II. Manita talking with God. God appears among us, elusive, the extra hand none of us - Love, Love, Jester, Queen - can quite locate, fix, or escape. Extra hand, extra pleasure. A hand with the glide of a tongue, a hand precise as an eyelid, a hand with a sense of smell, a hand that will dance to its liquid moan. God's hand Loose on the four of us like a wind on the grassy hills of the South. III. I take my Love to Manita. Swift-boned, green- eyed, dressed in her dark skin and hair, I take my Love on fire. Manita moans. Manita's hands flow delicate as insects, agile as fish, cool as the shifting water, the night- quiet lake. I take my Love to her hands on fire. She takes my Love. IV. She takes my Love to her passions, sweet bruises on her dark skin, her nipples sucked up like pears, the small hand of God inventing itself again, wind on Manita's hair. Neither Love moves. Queen and the Jester the merging shadows on wall and ceiling, the candle thick as a young tree, bright with green fire. Manita's Love opens herself to me, my sharp Jester's tongue, my cartwheels of pleasure. The Queen's own pearl at my fingertips, and Manita pealing my Jester's bells on our four small steeples, as Sunday downs clear in February, and God claps and claps her one hand.
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. . .the
joy that isn't shared
Apart from
my sisters, estranged
to the
royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
of the
chance to use it, even alone
as one
piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
for myself
in this prosperous house
I'll die
young |
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I grow old, old without you, Mother, landscape of my heart. No child, no daughter between my bones has moved, and passed out screaming, dressed in her mantle of blood
as I did once through your pelvic scaffold, stretching it like a wishbone, your tenderest skin strung on its bow and tightened against the pain. I slipped out like an arrow, but not before
the midwife plunged to her wrist and guided my baffled head to its first mark. High forceps might, in that one instant, have accomplished what you and that good woman failed in all these years to do: cramp me between the temples, hobble my baby feet. Dressed in my red hood, howling, I went –
evading the white clad doctor and his fancy claims: microscope, stethoscope, scalpel, all the better to see with, to hear, and to eat – straight from your hollowed basket into the midwife’s skirts. I grew up
good at evading, and when you said, “Stick to the road and forget the flowers, there’s wolves in those bushes, mind where you got to go, mind you get there”. I minded. I kept
to the road, kept the hood secret, kept what it sheathed more secret still. I opened it only at night, and with other women who might be walking the same road to their own grandma’s house, each with their basket of gifts, her small hood safe in the same part. I minded well. I have no daughter
to trace that road, back to your lap with my laden basket of love. I’m growing old, old without you. Mother, landscape of my heart, architect of my body, what other gesture can I conceive
to make with it that would reach you, alone in your house and waiting, across this improbable forest peopled with wolves and our lost, flower-gathering sisters they feed on.
A comment, here |
From Beginning with O - 1977 - Yale University Press
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There is a joke it goes in Greece that summer there was a futbol match and the husband had lost his lady. BITCH he shouted after her WHORE WOMAN HEY YOU BITCH. Greece is civilized the cop said call your wife by name. I can’t the man said. Call her name the cop said. Not allowed the man said. Call her name I said the cop said if you don’t the man said in the Greek futbol stadium he said ELEUTHERIAAAAAAAAA
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All day you stare at us who may not touch your weeping on your blood. HEATHER McHUGH
Kind, kind, milk in the mind, milk in the child, child in the blind
hormone of sleep, at night, supine anchored paralysand, flat as a star
soaked in the hopeful calcium all mammals like a prayer paging god lie down to weep out for our young, mild
soporific milk endure our cry issuing ineluctable and somewhat like a bird
in flight out of an oil spill, a black bird that had been white, a brother from the cratered tit, aureoled, blue, perennial,
in orbit in the buckled sky o soul on its invisible tether from the dippered water that was self, now
rise through the historical ocean-skin that divides the dreaming anchor from its days, each night a nipped rehearsal for the unrequited
vessel filling, filling in a child’s mind since the shock unfair took it by force, unfairly into concept,
and Justice, signal star, tore from its center to abide above the ferns and shelters where in dreams a life soars up to lick the fabled light from its inverted triangles, paired fairly in the sky, glowing from our perspective
a phosphor that might nightly heal the hole in the clay flowerpot and brim the unknown nourishment that balsemed
angel with open eyes, untarred and gleaming-feathered, lets our solace be your flight.
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Because I was whipped as a child frequently by a mother so bewildered by her passion her generous hunger she would freak as the swell of her even her love for me alone in the small house of our room by the Metropolis and fling me the frantic flap of her hand as if some power in me to say I want brought the unbearable also to the lips
and as it didn’t hurt nearly as much as her distress imagined it and set the set I grew up longing for consummation as she did beyond endurance tenderness acceptance of the large insatiable that grows so small and grateful if allowed its portion of sun
so that the images that led me down the spiral of forgetting self and listing like a phenomenon in the grip of its weather dazzling or threatening but free of civilization were the links whereby her terror made good its promise to annihilate my will her will I couldn’t tell the difference then as now when making love I can breathe in forever on that rise indefinite plateau whose briefness like an eye in unself-conscious and the sphere of the horizon its known line.
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deep prolonged entry with the strong pink cock the sit-ups is evokes from her, arms fast on the climbing invisible rope to the sky, clasping and unclasping the cosmic lorus *
Inside, the long breaths of lung and cunt swell the vocal cords and a rasp a song loud sudden overdrive into disintegrate, spinal melt, video hologram in the belly.
Her tits are luminous and sway to the rhythm and I grab them and exaggerate their orbs. Shoulders above like loaves of heaven, nutmeg-flecked, exuding light like violet diodes
closing circuit where the wall, its fuse box, so stolidly stood. No room for fantasy. We watch ourselves transform the past with such disinterested fascination,
the only attitude that does not stall the song by an outburst of consciousness and still lets consciousness, loved and incurable voyeur, peek in. I tap. I slap. I knee, thump, bellyroll.
Her song is hoarse and is taking me, incoherent familiar path to that self we are wall cortical cells of. Every o in her body beelines for her throat, locked on
a rising ski-lift up the mountain, no grass, no mountaintop, no snow. White belly folding, muscular as milk. Pas de deux, pas de chat, spotlight
on the key of G, clef du roman, tour de force letting, like the sunlight lets a sleeve worn against wind, go.
* umbilical cord.
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From the book “Perpetua”, in Olga Broumas, Poems 1975 – 1999, Copper Canyon Press, Port Towsend Washington 98368, 1999. ISBN 1-55659-126-8 |