who gobbled through life, a little of this,
a little of that, a lot of what others left,
grasshoppers, a nice fat mouse, berries,
rotten apples to get drunk on, roots
we dug for, never efficiently. Not special-
ized to do anything particularly well.
Those middling animals, the small predators
like the feral cat always chasing dinner
and scrambling away from being eaten; the small
grey fox who picks grapes on the high dunes
and will steal a melon or a goose. Behold
my ancestral portraits: shambling field
apes smallish and chattering, with babies
hanging on their backs picking over the fruit
like my grandmother, my mother and like me.
The answer to all problems
We aren’t available, we can’t talk to you
right now, but you can talk to us, we say,
but think of the astonishment if machines
suddenly spoke truth: what do you want?
You’d best have a damned good reason for bothering
me, intruding on my silence. If you’re bored,
read a good book. Masturbate on your own time.
Call weather or your mother or a talk show.
If you’re a creditor, I’ve just been cremated.
If you’re my ex, I’m fucking a perfect body
in Acapulco. Hi, I’m too shy to answer.
I’m scared of obscene calls. I’m paranoid.
I’m sharing a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread
with my lover, our flesh smokes with desire,
our lips brush, our clothes uncoil hissing,
and you have a problem? Try prayer.
Hi obtuse one, it may be eleven on the West Coast
but it’s two a.m. here and as you listen
a pitch too high for you to hear is giving
you herpes and melting your elastic and Velcro.
Hi, this is the machine. My person is standing
two feet away to hear if you’re worth the effort.
Hi. If you hang up without leaving a message
your teeth will loosen overnight.
Hi, can my machine call your machine
and make an appointment? Can my machine
mate with yours and breed iPods?
Hi, my humans have been murdered and cannot come.
After the corn moon
Swallows thrown from a giant hand turn,
fleet motes, around each other hurtling
over the marsh and back. The young
grown, the flock assembles. On the wire
neat, formal, they turn sleek heads south.
Every rambling poison ivy vine burns
in a few scarlet leaves. Grass tawny
as lions, the salt meadow has fur now
rippling over bunched muscles in the wind,
leaner and raspier than last week,
hungrier for something to rub, something
to strip. The robins are drunk on rum
cherries. The garlic falls over. The rose
hips redden. Every day we peer at the grapes
watching them color, puckering sour.
The houses are all rented and the roads
jammed with people driving their tempers
flat out or boiling their brains dry
in traffic like percolators searing
good coffee to battery acid.
Soon they will go home and the ponds
will clean themselves of soapsuds and the piss
of psychiatrists’ children and the fried clam
shacks will put up their shutters and the air
will smell of salt and pine again.
This land is a room where a party has gone
on too long. Nothing is left whole to break.
As the blowzy embrace of heat slackens
I long for the feisty bite of cold mornings,
the bracing smack of the sea wind after
the first storm, walking the great beach alone.
The bed of summer needs changing to roughened
sheets that smell of the line. Fall seeps in
like energy quickening till it bursts out
spurting crimson from creeper and tree.
Even in this heat I walk farther and faster
hearing the sea’s rising mutter. The birds
seem all in a hurry. The season of death
and fruition is nearly upon us. Sometimes
the knife of frost is a blessing.
Perfect weather
On the six o’clock news, Ken poses in his three
piece blue suit beside the map of fronts.
Barbie pretends to slap at him. “Now Ken,
I hope you aren’t going to give us bad weather!”
“I’m giving you perfect 10 weather, Barbie,
not a cloud all weekend! Not a storm in sight
on our Super Weather Radar. Another
perfect week coming up.” “Oh, thank you, Ken!”
Gods in the box, they pop out grinning.
Next will come the announcements of water
shortages on the South Shore, crop
failure in the Pioneer Valley, a fire raging
through the pitch pines near Sandwich.
Turn on the faucet, Barbie. Think that’s
manufactured in some plant in Maine?
Shipped from Taiwan like your microphone?
It arrives in pellets called rain drops. That’s
what you call bad and mean it: nasty weather.
They want a permanent pasted on sun
to shine over the freeze dried face and the body
resembling exactly a mannequin in a shop
window sipping an empty glass on Astroturf.
That body will never thicken or that face
admit it liked to smile or frown: wiped memory.
A permanent now called lobotomy
under a sunlamp sky, a neon moon, life as a golf
course unrolled from a truck and every day
you can play. Everyone you meet has just
your skin color and income level; the dys-
functional are removed immediately to storage.
Service personnel speak another language.
Death comes as a power failure.
Ken, how’s supper? Did you know bluefish
swim? Kiwi grow on trees made of bad weather
juice? Perrier actually bubbles out of rock?
Under the carpet under the cracking cement
below the power lines and the toxic waste stored
in old mines is molten rock, the hot liquid heart
of the earth beating, about to erupt
blowing the clots out of its ancient veins.
We don’t own the earth, not even the way
you buy a condo, Ken. We don’t time-share
here, but live on it as hair grows
on the scalp, from inside; we are part
of earth, not visitors using the facilities.
If the plumbing breaks down, we can’t move out
to a bigger house. Rain is earth’s blood
and ours while we swim and life swims in us.
Pray for rain. Go out on the earth barefoot
and dance for rain. Take a small
ceremonial knife and slash your arms
so the thick red water inside trickles out.
Piss in the dust. Spit into the wind.
Go climb a mountain without a canteen to learn
how the swollen tongue sticks to the palate.
Then tell us what good weather you’re providing.
Moon of the mother turtle
I am the busybody who interferes.
All through turtle mating season
I am hauling the females out of the road
and setting them where I presume
it is safe to lay their
eggs.
Who appointed me guardian of turtles?
Yet when I see their bodies broken
like rotten pumpkins on the blacktop
I get so angry I have no choice but
to go on dragging them to sandbanks.
My least favorite duty is the two weeks
of snapping turtles. Occasionally I grasp
a weighty female and haul her out
of the way of cars before she can react.
Other times it’s a wrestling match,
me with a stick and she with her beak,
neither of us prepared to back down,
a tug-of-war, wrestling, snarling
in the ruts of the old railroad right-of-way.
She must, she must. The eggs press
on her to be born. She is half mad.
Her eyes glitter dully as sun
glimpsed through muddy water. She is
an ancient ancestor raging with the urge
to dig and lay, dig and lay more.
I am a yelping dog circling, just as mad
to get her out of the roadway. She
hisses like a mother cat. Her great
beak clacks. She stinks like muck
from the basement of the fish maker’s shop.
When finally I get her onto the bank, she
goes to it at once, sighing. A train
could pass two feet away as it used to
and she would lay on. I am forgotten
as I haul two ties to build her a rampart.
Then we go our separate ways, me toward
the bay to complete my four-mile walk,
she back to Bound Brook, dragging her
massive belly, each under our compulsions
like moons with the same and different faces.
Baboons in the perennial bed
Even after common sense whittles ambition
I always order too many seeds, bulbs, corms.
What’s the lure? Why am I torn between
cutting the lily for my bedside and savoring
it daily on its pedestal of crisp leaves?
They rouse and sate the senses, touch,
sight, scent, the wild shagginess and precise
sculpted lines, the shadings of color from clang
to sigh. Yet I think what moves underneath
is pleased envy at their flagrancy.
They wave their sexual organs in the air,
the plants, colored far more freely than the hind-
quarters of baboons. We who are raised to shame
for the moist orchid between our thighs
must wish we were as certain of our beauty.
Something to look forward to
Menopause: word used as an insult,
a menopausal woman, mind or poem
as if not to leak regularly or on the caprice
of the moon, the collision of egg and sperm,
were the curse we first learned to call that blood.
I have twisted myself to praise that bright splash.
When my womb opens its lips on the full
or dark of the moon, that connection
aligns me as it does the sea. I quiver,
a compass needle thrilling with magnetism.
Yet for every celebration there’s the time
it starts on a jet with the seatbelt sign on.
Consider the trail of red amoebae
crawling onto hostess’ sheets to signal
my body’s disregard of calendar, clock.
How often halfway up the side of a mountain,
during a demonstration with the tactical police
force drawn up in tanks between me and a toilet;
during an endless wind machine panel with four males
I the token woman and they with iron bladders,
I have felt that wetness and wanted to strangle
my womb like a mouse. Sometimes it feels cosmic
and sometimes it feels like mud. Yes, I have prayed
to my blood on my knees in toilet stalls
simply to show its rainbow of deliverance.
My friend Penny at twelve, being handed a napkin
the size of an ironing board cover, cried out
I have to do this from now till I die?
No, said her mother, it stops in middle age.
Good, said Penny, there’s something to look forward to.
Today supine, groaning with demon crab claws
gouging my belly, I tell you I will secretly dance
and pour out a cup of wine on the earth
when time stops that leak permanently;
I will burn my last tampons as votive candles.
Litter
I am always forgetting something.
The kettle boils dry and stinks.
The tiny green-shouldered tomato plants
while I’m writing a poem die of thirst
scorched under the glass of the hotbed.
I forget birthdays, I forget to call.
I forget the book I promised to bring.
I forget where I put my purse, my keys,
my wallet, my lenses, my love.
I lose my way in night’s black pocket.
I can’t think of the name of the goddess
who stands at the gate blinking her one
great eye through the fog and the snarling
wind, sweeping her warning glance across
where the waves smash themselves kneeling.
I forget the way my mother laughed.
I forget her cake, the taste of the uncooked
dough, the just proportions of cinnamon and sugar.
I lose the touch of her fingers, stone
washed smooth by water and laid in the sun.
I lose the bread smell of my old cat’s fur;
I lose the name and face of a man just out
of prison who crawled in my body to hide;
I lose the addresses of urgent people to whom
I promised much in towns I have forgotten.
What happened to my burnt orange shawl?
My bones are slowly dissolving in salt water.
It all falls away like feathers, like leaves,
like sand blowing. In the end I will say,
I was somebody maybe a woman I forget.
All the lost words and things and tasks
I have littered behind me are drifting on winds
round and up as if gravity had forgotten
to drop them, and sometimes in the night
I wake and the name comes to me and I shout
to the ceiling, Appomattox, rue de Sentier,
Emily Hannah, 8325 American Avenue,
metasomatism, two thirds to one,
and then lilacs, the scent of my mother’s
white lilacs, thickens the air till I weep.
The bottom line
That white withered angel cancer
steals into a house through cracks,
lurks in the foundation, the walls,
litters down its infinitesimal dandruff
from school ceilings into children’s lungs.
That invisible fungus hides in processed food,
in the cereal, the salami, the cake.
Welcomed into the body like a friend
it proceeds to eat you from inside,
parasitic wasp in a tomato worm.
Out of what caprice quenched in a moment’s
pleasure does the poison seep?
We come to mistrust the body
a slave to be starved to submission,
an other that can like a rabid dog
turn on and bite a separate me.
But the galloping horse of the thighs,
the giraffe of the spine are innocent
browsing their green. We die of decisions
made at 3:15 in boardrooms.
We die of the bottom line. We die
of stockholders’ dividends and a big bonus
; for top executives and more perks. Cancer
is the white radioactive shadow of profit
falling across, withering the dumb flesh.
Morning love song
I am filled with love like a melon
with seeds, I am ripe and dripping sweet juices.
If you knock gently on my belly
it will thrum ripe, ripe.
It is high green summer with the strawberries
just ending and the blueberries coloring,
with the roses tumbling like fat Persian
kittens, the gold horns of the squash blowing.
The day after a storm the leaves gleam.
The world is clear as a just washed picture window.
The air whips its fine silk through the hands.
Every last bird has an idea to insist on.
I am trying to work and instead
I drip love for you like a honeycomb.
I am devoid of fantasies clean as rainwater
waiting to flow all over your skin.
Implications of one plus one
Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.
Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed’s
airy silk, wingtip’s feathery caresses,
our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering
like fog over warm water, thickening to rain.
Sometimes we go to it heartily, digging,
burrowing, grunting, tossing up covers
like loose earth, nosing into the other’s
flesh with hot nozzles and wallowing there.
Sometimes we are kids making out, silly
in the quilt, tickling the xylophone spine,