We’re all huddled behind the gray desks,
where cubby walls are crumbling into dust.
I answer the phone,
lob complaints at my supervisor,
devour candy bars from the upstairs machine,
and type up magic beans for my employer
on which he dares to shimmy to the giant’s lair
and steal a golden goose.
All the while I dream.
The conscious mind never dreams.
It skims the surface of the day,
sliding across the work, the boss, the contracts,
like a ketch on blue water.
The unconscious mind dreams the underwater dreams of ducks.
Have you ever seen a duck go bobbing on the ocean
while the storm waves flail their mighty arms against a rocky shore?
Unconcerned, rising and falling,
a wave washes over him
and he disappears beneath the white sea foam.
You hold your breath counting, counting, waiting.
You study the sucking tide.
Your breath escapes with a whoosh and still the duck is under the water
and you think, this time the ocean’s got him for sure.
This time even our stout young duck has crossed the bar,
anchored his way down to death’s muddy bottom,
and just when you tire of squinting at the sea and nearly turn away,
there he is popping up to the surface.
That’s me.
My rubber ducky mind bobbing up and down all day,
and under the water I dream.
I woke up this morning before dawn—
dawn comes slowly in the golden autumn red—
and God was in my bed. He slid warm hands
along my belly and my hips
and smiled at me and said good morning.
In the kitchen by the yellow bulb over the sink,
which set the sudsy water glistening,
I could see the wood nymph piroutting in her swirly-skirt
the one from at the salvation army
because she hates the mall
because it makes her feel poor, which isn’t true,
and sweet Diana, goddess of the hunt,
checks her eyeliner in the mirror near the telephone
and young Apollo, his golden hair sticking out in all directions
leans into the refrigerator and wonders what to eat.
The interior glow from the refrigerator
spills out onto the kitchen floor.
The halo over the sink begins to fade with the dawn.
God yawns mightily and wanders in to another day.
I will throw
a rope ladder
out the window
in the dead of night,
while my children whisper to themselves in their beds
and my husband holds on to his pillow like a lifeboat
and the house sinks slowly into its green suburban swamp.
While a thousand stars glitter in the black field of sky
and new leaves make love to themselves
in the warm night breeze of spring,
I will climb down that ladder
thief and wild-eyed monster of their dreams
and steal their future.
The jewels which are their hearts
I will carry in a cloth bag tied around my waist
and later cash them in
for casual sex
and no interruptions.
Dropping down from heaven on me
like a rain of iron bars, my destiny, my stars,
my interruptions and my limitations.
They surrounding me like heaven’s guard
a battery of laughing children
take up their blazing swords.
It’s useless to attempt escape, and I, defeated constantly,
should know better than to struggle endlessly,
or look to the wanton, outstretched sky.
I do not see the breast of earth beneath my feet,
the man who waits for me, full of impatient heat,
the season’s raucous passing,
but only this prison and the blinding darkness
of my unholy night.
I crash against the bars of my demise
and let my life slip by in useless agony.
“Oh, Lord, let it happen unto me!”
if like the Virgin I could answer Him,
then when my own bland death comes down at last
although I still don’t understand
and have not one small victory to my name,
I’ll let it happen to me all the same.
The first night hush, when racing stars hold close
the dark and slanting sky
and all the children have at last turned out the light
and tossed the fervent blanket off,
I slowly lift my head, a lion waking from my dream
of yellow gore, and scent the air,
turned wild with the first black rush of night,
and rise and stretch and lick one paw,
to rend the hunt from soft the holy air.
My prey, beneath the restless caution of uncertain sleep,
betrays herself with warm and dusky breath,
while all around us deep the summer heat lays
bare forgotten skin, warm careless limbs
flung wide at midnight’s keep
and open to the hunter’s lusty teeth.
She turns to meet the sharp onrushing snare,
only to be crushed beneath her pain
till all her protest sinks into the air, and silence
climbs the old brown bed of earth again.
Then I partake of all her bitter fuel
and strengthen my own muscle with her sweet
bewildered blood,
return to brood again along the steep banks of the river within,
my own hell just an empty
stretch along the water’s edge.
There is no rest.
When the bright moon sails, I will rise and hunt again,
until the night I tear my own heart from my breast
to satisfy this unremitting lust.
Oh, Potent moon, vagabond prince of the night,
again you pace the black sky-road, out of my reach.
Petulant moon, night chameleon,
your face beckons to me and I long to come.
Let your fingers dance over my soft skin
and I will rise up to meet you.
Every night you steal through my windows and enchant me,
casting shadows on the bed. I dream of you.
I dream that somewhere, over the dunes,
a warm and salty ocean rises, and I ride the rolling swells.
You pull me toward you with long arms of tide
and press me, breathless, against the wide sky,
kiss me and torment me among the far-flung stars,
moon-whisper hotly in my ear until my wild blood answers.
You are what drives the women from their beds.
I am the ragged tide, the damp and twisted sheets.
Oh, handsome moonlight, lapping at the shore:
waves of longing, windswept beach am I.
Take this wetness which is all I have.
You must reach down to me. I am earthbound.
Sun tumbles down on the white soldiers of the roadside.
They stand without a word in the summer afternoon,
while insects whine and drone along the fields
that stretch away on every hand beside the road.
The soft, damp earth steams life into the crops
and in the shimmering august silent afternoon
I stand alone
and read one granite stone.
Here lyeth Prudence, first wife of Thomas, unadorned.
Then rising from the grave beneath my feet
the musty odor of a wooden room
where lilac petals boiling in the pot
cannot contain the crying of the women there,
or cover up the heavy bunch of sweat and grunt
that lingers in the air.
Young Prudence on her bed has fallen still.
The blood she shared pooled on the coverlet.
The baby, strangely mangled, breathing yet.
In my own memory she dances unseen in the yard,
and we are hanging out the clothes on sagging ropes.
I moan with her through nights of hands and tongues
then turn with her away to face the wall.
We count the diapers into lavendered oak drawers
and eat with delicate white fingers cold beef
from the pantry shelf.
And then the gates of life scream open through us both
and two reluctant souls are thrust in the world.
The nurses are disgusted with my sweating and my screaming.
The midwife leans heavily on her belly, forcing the babe to birth.
Machines hum softly, but I am screaming
and I cry out to her across these hundred years,
Hold on! Hold on!
We both cling fiercely to the bedrail,
but the floorboards fall away.
She splits apart,
the walls give way,
the stone foundation crumbles,
the inner rooms collapse upon themselves.
The gurney wails down
the bleached hallways.
Her eyes bite into mine, dark eyes,
above a blue mask and a knife
slices into willing flesh,
mine and not hers,
and they lift a baby out, pink and screeching,
and she dies and I live
and come to leave these wrenching tears
on this, her grave, first wife of Thomas, and her son,
who struggled on for one more week alone.
She had given up on another letter
when it suddenly arrived in the box.
Then she busied herself with making tea
as if for an uninvited guest,
putting sugar cubes in a delicate glass bowl,
and milk in a mismatched creamer
painted with Georgia peaches.
When she’d poured herself a cup of tea at last
she took the letter, reluctantly,
for she had considered this a closed book,
a sewn tear,
and was not certain she had the strength
to rip it open once again.
The words poured out like silver coins
into her hand,
and the tea sat in its teacup growing cold,
while she collected all the treasure stored up
in her heart
and sat at the kitchen table late into the night
spinning straw to gold.
She wakes to naked darkness and the restless tossing of the trees
on their bed of night and the car parked by the side of the road.
The highway stretches out languorously in front of her,
open, wet, willing to lead her away and over the yearning cliff.
Who has the wheel? And when the tires caress the slick road
along its sensuous curves, what danger in the headlights’ glare
rises up to meet her?
Who reads the map? Who navigates between the lost and empty
silences of night she fills with whispering engine throb?
Rain pours down the windows and the blades slap at the glass.
The fog embraces and lets go, and she demands that
brutal bend of steel to break the limitations on her flesh.
Sliding down across the glistening pavement,
down along the embankment,
down over the brush, now black and green, down
until the rhythmic and persistent fingers of the night
insist on her surrender to the road and all is lost.
She slams on the brakes. Her head smashes through the windshield.
Sirens carry her to morning, but the sun never rises.
If only my mother could have been a bird
with her long neck thrust forward
and the sun glinting off her wings.
Commanding the seasons, she would fly around winter,
and die of old age.
Have you ever tripped on acid?
I ask because your face cools suddenly
when I toss you a word that trips the old trip.
Then your eyes glaze over like a pond on a February afternoon
when the temperature suddenly plummets after a thaw.
I thought perhaps you’d seen the other side of the tiny orange barrel,
the sunshine hit, the sugar cube,
because you’re sensitive and jump at little sounds,
and it appears that something stuck its foot
between the doorjamb and the door-between-the-worlds,
forcing it open when you’d rather it stay closed.
I don’t intend to pry. I ask because I need validation.
I’m open to the consideration
that the acid was incidental to my current experiences.
In other words, maybe I’m just like this.
When I was only five I could see the lizards
that swim around the sun on August mornings.
Do you know if every five year old can see them?
Do the children just forget them
when they begin in school to have their lessons in forgetting,
their instructions in the slamming of doors?
I never forgot. Floating on the lazy backyard summer sky of five
and tripping when I was seventeen and ever since,
I see those tiny creatures still,
and not just the sky lizards, but the cloud dragons,
the great wheels rotating lazily across green suburban lawns,
the thousand peering eyes of a red beech tree,
the evil trickle downward of the human race
and the way that people’s faces are always moving and changing.
I thought that you might understand,
since your eyes sometimes toss me a word
or glaze over with the slamming of doors.
You might notice how the people’s faces
are like windy, brief November days.
What bothers me is that those faces still crawl,
even now, even decades after my last trip.
Some faces are darkened by perpetual shadow,
and a black ooze silently twists anger through channels
just under the surface of the skin.
Some faces are bright with shifting color and Mayan labyrinths,
snake goddesses, painted pottery.
Some faces turn shades of blue and green, like the surface of the sea,
and the face of my beloved shifts ever so slightly as we talk,
a filmy curtain riffled by the evening breeze
in a cottage window on the Irish coast.
I can handle the rest of it, but the faces are bedeviling me.
I’m just an ordinary woman, living in two worlds,
ordinary, trying not to laugh when your face blooms suddenly
into peonies, like triumphant days in June,
or to cry out when the man in front of me in the supermarket checkout
line
is dripping the blood on his hands through tiny clefts in his cheeks.
He smiles at me, his features cracking,
and I turn away, afraid.
Love knocks endlessly at the gate, you wrote
in a letter from a long time ago, years ago,
while you knocked
and I threw myself against the latch
and flew north.
Underneath it all (you went on)
the secret flywheels turn
in the vast basements of the mind machine
grinding our hearts to powder
in an industry of security.
Sure, grinding is familiar.
Sure, I feel like a bombed out room, sure.
But you wrote to me after all,
you kept knocking.
Meanwhile, I was down the street at a different address
ringing the doorbell to set your teeth on edge.
Grinding sounds echoed from the basment and
you slipped out the backdoor over and over again
like a film noire running backwards and forwards and . . .
Look, he’s going out
he’s backing out, he’s going in, he’s running out,
while love knocks endlessly at the gate.
Oh, Creamy Liqour Smooth,
that down the liquid curve of throat beguiles me,
with one sweet sobbing swallow all hope is restored.
My ghosts depart. My confidence returns.
Thou art what numbs the tongue and stings the lips
where lately bitter words caught and were flung back.
So now I slowly lift the glass and deeply drink,
that I may stand apart my demons for a while
just long enough, I pray, just long enough
(Oh, Tender Goddess of Strong Drink)
to rest and gather courage for the day to come.
Now in these wretched times of violence and black greed
even the natural magick that the Goddess grants
her plants and grains and seeds
is abused and taken to destructive ends.
but we dishonor these enchanting allies
of the mind and heart.
They may be good medicines, or counselors true,
or some small boat to row us across the lake of pain
and then, perhaps, to sail us back again.
But I, for one, am not taken in by fanatics
or the politics of fear.
I am a witch, fallen on my demons though I be,
and I will use her magick as I will
and never let my lonely hours spill here
on the kitchen floor of my distress.
This nest and glass in which I rest
does justice to the aching in my heart.
Then I would beg of thee,
sweet Diety of Alcoholic Brew, a boon:
that you would bring to me the clarity of mind I seek
and not abandon me to my destructive heart
nor all the ravages of my unsubtle and circuitous life,
but gather me up in your strong arms again
and carry me across the dead of night
and set my soul to peace, my house to right,
my future to the realm of possiblility,
my strength and my ability to light.
Thanks to Thee and Blessed Be
Goddess of Intoxicating Nature.
L’chaim and Amen.
The first image is of standing in a hole in the ground, like a grave,
looking up and dirt is being thrown onto my head
by a funeral home guy in a navy blue suit.
I see that I am turning into dirt, being transformed into dirt.
I feel myself become dirt, and also worms,
also pebbles, also mud. Entering into dirt,
I turn away from my life as Lilly,
but I’m afraid thinking how I don’t want to lose myself .
I want to just transform right away into another human animal,
immediately and as soon as possible.
Then some part of me laughed at myself
for holding on so tight to this particular life
holding on like a vine to the tree,
and told me laughing that I was not this human animal Lilly.
I was Soul.
Then I understand what I had read many times, but never understood
before:
The self may transform, but Soul remains.
I couldn’t quite hold on to that thought, so my laughing self created
another vision.
I saw that Soul exists everliving, with integrity and true to itself
however it is constantly changing from one consciousness into another.
Of all these various ways of consciousness,
one is not better or more evolved than another.
They are simply different. They are form.
Not merely form, but Great and Beloved Form.
Form evolves. Soul evolves.
I watched (more vision)
And Soul can live intact no matter what consciouness it is temporarily
living through.
The soul lives through the consciousness/the being/the material stuff
But it is none of those things and all of those things.
And then I thought that if we transform from one consciousness/being
to another,
eventually we would transform into a consciousness very like this one,
perhaps another human animal.
Rocks long to be rocks and trees long to be trees.
People want only to remain forever in the embrace of human flesh.
The Earth, Herself, longs only for Herself.
This is Soul’s longing for incarnation.
Spirit and matter desire each other as men and women do,
reaching out to enter the bodies of each other
and in so doing, perpetuating life,
the yin and the yang, eternally mating.
So then I thought that it would take such a long time to return to the
human self,
I should get quite lonely for myself, wishing I was not dirt.
The laughing part of me . . .
And then I saw that this was not true.
Soul exists fully and completely no matter what her lover:
rock self or cow self or tree self, monkey, seal, or Lilly human animal
self.
And I saw another vision, in which the soul of myself moved from this
form Lilly into dirt, disolving and being tranformed a thousand times before
turning into dirt and another thousand times before becoming daisy, before
becoming, fish or bird or beast before becoming me again. A thousand thousand
lifetimes in the wink of an eye and I become the babe born from my
daughter’s womb and I am again with my self, beloved human animal self
on whom I shower such attention, whose body I long to inhabit.
And I saw my lover changing, too, his soul intact, searching me out under the ground, down the rushing Amazon, up through the trunks of silvered oak trees and into his human animal self for whom my soul thirsts.
And then I saw the Earth her Gracious and Holy Self, alive with soul,
soul the animating force, moving, living in all things, moving diving dancing
swimming every material cell and atom and as small as the scientists can
see, as huge as the whole, earth breathing with life, rising and falling
with life, constantly transforming,
but more than that: alive with soul!
The strange thing about this whole vision is that other people have had the same vision, they know, understand that this is true.
However just like who I was yesterday, most of the poeple who read these words don’t actually know, see understand the truth of it.
We’ve been taught otherwise by the society we live in so another reality
has become the reality we live as if and therefore, actually live. So then
I think, will I live this reality because I know it to be true? And then
I realize that if I can ask that question, already the reality of my vision
is fading, it implies that I don’t really think that’s what happens.
For brief, brilliant moments I am as the sages, as the Buddha. I see
it and I preach it to my blue screen. But will I forget tomorrow?
How will this vision affect me?
Simply to give a bit of peace.
Gotta write about being an oddball, because that explains a lot, and also why I haven’t gotten so far til now, that I reallyu didn’t think that I knew anything worth shariong, I thought I couldn’t do it. I believed that .. .. .. . hmmh
Entering Nirvana
even for a short while
is a lot of work
I entered a higher state of consciousness,
but only after a making of love
which turned the trees to red and gold,
after long walks along the country road,
carrying a stick so that the dogs would stay away,
and carrying my teddy bear,
who loves me even though I have turned forty four.
After all of that I entered this location
heaven’s heartland, fields of divine grain.
Sometimes, like when the telephone rings,
I realize I am not in the Ordinary anymore,
not looking down exactly, but seeing as through walls
the world we live in revealed (laid bare), multidimensional,
multi-valent, stratified,
and each layer more interconnected
than we have been led to believe.
I entered this state only after years of listening
to the pulsing of distant drums,
and years of bearing the ponderous world on my shoulders
until shugging it finally off, I see: this world doesn’t burden me.
I create this world. It rests lightly in the palm of my hand.
I entered this state after decorating my room,
a budding fourteen, with hippie beads
and then staring into the muzzles of machine guns
in Washington
and after walking through pot smoking space,
which is like an autumn woods
and through the place of alcohol,
which is walking through a fog
and through the place of self hate, a great swamp, which leads straight
down to hell’s kitchen
and through the bearing of children,
bright shining place of pain
and the thousand tiny lines around my eyes.
The way here was a lot longer without a stop at the Ashram Motel.
Lots longer now that Metropolitan areas
and movie screens block the view.
The way here is a road
paved with the bodies of loved ones I thought I’d left behind.
Here they are, the paving stones.
I never intended their sacrifice.
And all along the roads the jeering crowds, the hateful stares,
and moments of great bliss.
In the end, it was you who brought me to the gates and you who waved
me on,
smiling, even though you had to stay behind.
And now I find myself pushing through
like a chicken pecking open his shell,
and all the sparkling thousand veils like curtains wave aside
and all the doors stand open, I have nothing left to do.
Life slams me up against the wall and here I am again,
clutching onto your shirtfront with both hands,
sobbing and gloomy as any March
that ever slammed the rain against the bricks.
You gotta hold me babe
because I’m going down.
I can see behind the walls, I’m telling you. I can see.
And what I see, it’s driving me down.
I can peer right through the clapboard,
and through the curtains-drawn windows of the eyes
into the soul’s living room.
I got the weird, blue, x-ray-vision curse, babe.
I can hear underneath the conversations
to the rippling of the air between the people’s mouths,
and it’s what they’re saying that’s making me cry.
I can hear it all the way down from the basement,
all the sores and passions howling.
The wretchedness and trash
roar like a dysentery freight train through my insides.
It feels like being stampeded by a herd of rabid buffalo
like being stung by a thousand spiders.
I’ve been violated, ravaged, raped and tossed aside
by the unwitting and the unaware,
tortured by every petty, who-me? thief of spirit
that ever stalked a downtown street.
Easy prey, that’s me. An open vault.
I was driving down the street just now, see,
and all I could see was the strange, cruel world that we created
out of the sneering shadow-mind,
and we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Now, isn’t that a scream?
We’re cruel to our children
cruel to the earth and clay,
savage to the Gods who love us tenderly,
ruthless to each other and ourselves,
repressive to the spirit,
and sadistic to our bodies.
(We destroy the soft and fragile flesh
all wrapped up nice in delicate pink shells.)
Cutting instead of loving,
slashing and
burning instead,
bludgeoning, murdering, stabbing and bleeding and dying
all over the goddamned streets
instead of remembering who we really are.
The horror of it catches up with me once in a while.
It would follow me across the ocean on a stealthy, demon ship
straight into the harbor of sleep
if it wasn’t for you.
So I’m crying, see, and struggling to keep afloat,
just me on a tiny you-boat,
awash on a garbage sea.
1
True Love we have,
the kind of love that transforms the Beast
and wakes the sleeping spirit,
that carries a singing woman on it’s broad back
East of the sun and West of the moon
and past the borders of the country of her birth
in order to weave a shirt of granite and white milk.
2
In the house we have created together, the house of love, my senses reach out for you day and night. I scent the air for you like a dog would scent the air. And when I feel you near my heart opens up a thousand hands.
I feel like an anemone, with tendrils curling in the wild sea, waving helplessly about, seeking food. You are my food. When I cannot find you I am bereft. I miss you, in other words, and you are far away tonight.
The closer our physical bodies exist in space, the stronger the current that runs between us. Ours is not an ethereal love. It is a gravity, the slamming of atoms toward each other across vast reaches of outer space. Energy explodes between us and we burn brighter, clearer, tense as the stars, hurtling ourselves together as the universe itself spins outward.
Animal friend, beloved beast, furry fleshy pulsing dripping skin and bones love, if we are joined, it’s not because of anything we think or feel. Our love is not separated from our bodies. It is a biological demand. Our blood sings the same hymn in our veins.
I drift alone on the huge bed in the hotel in a distant city. I remember you. I study the laughing lines of your face in my mind, the sculpture of your jaw, the soft parting of your lips. And sighing, I can even catch your scent, warm breath, male scent breath, muscled scent, shoulders flexing and your hands, sliding over skin and wetness, and the touch of your breath everywhere, even on the flower petal insides of my thighs. Your breath, your warm scent and the flexing of your shoulders and your red head bursting like the sun between my legs.
I remember entering the chamber of love with you a long time ago. The
air shifted and burned around us, sending shafts of light against the walls.
This place I am speaking of magically appears whenever we make love and
there we have gone to live at last. We live now in our house of love all
the time, as if we are living in two dimensions at once. This house, our
separate reality, overlaps the ordinary world like the realm of fairy does,
existing at once together and distinct. I see two, three, ten thousand
ten realities, each one overlaid. This one is ours, my love. This place
is ours.
3
Life overwhelms me again. I cry against your chest.
I flounder in the smoky crowded ordinary life.
I sink against the wall.
I can see behind the costumes and the masks.
I can hear behind the conversations
to the rippling of the air between the people’s mouths.
I lean over my belly, sick with the sickness of the crowd.
I am sick with the thoughts of others.
The emotions of others enter me like a virus, stealing my strength,
collapsing my lungs, cheating my heart of rest.
I am stung by ten thousand bees wherever I go.
I am violated, ravaged, raped and tossed aside by the unwitting and
the unaware, the who-me robbers of the spirit.
Easy prey, that’s me. An open vault.
I see the future overlaid and overlaid again with possibility
and I am immobilized.
I hover on the brink of understanding,
on the precipice of action,
constantly alert, breathing hard,
ready for the final shove from some disdainful hand
to send me over.
I can feel that future and
I can feel my body crushed on the rocks below
and I lose track of all the other possibilities.
I see as I drive down the street
this strange cruel world we have created
out of the sneering shadows of the human mind.
We are cruel to our children
cruel to the earth and clay,
savage to the Gods who love us tenderly,
ruthless to each other and ourselves,
repressive to the spirit,
sadistic to our bodies,
ignoring the soft and fragile flesh wrapped in thin
and delicate pink shells.
Cutting instead,
slashing and burning instead,
bludgeoning murdering stabbing and bleeding
and dying all over the goddamned streets
instead of remembering who we really are.
The horror of it torments me.
It follows me on whispering feet into the realms of sleep.
I struggle to keep afloat on it,
like a tiny boat on a garbage sea, me and my children-
more than anything I want to save my children.
And you, sweet friend,
you have wrapped me in your arms and in your love like a harbor
and what you haven’t understood you have accepted.
You have accepted me.
4
You are the kid who shared his stolen pennies with me
out behind the football field one August afternoon.
I remember steam was rising from the grass.
You are my dear comrade-in-arms
and we fought together back to back on the blundering field
until my blood flowed red and I turned my face against your shoulder.
You are the midwife and the mother to my soul and I am your sister. I mend your sails.
You are even the sweet pungent odor of burning wood carried across snowy
crystalline fields,
even the soft cloud of sand under my feet on the beach at Tulum
and the sun sparkling on the azure water.
All these things you are to me and more.
I do not mean this simply as a metaphor.
You really are the scent the snow the sand the azure sea.
You carried me in your arms, I remember clear as day,
while the war drums beat across the savage landscape.
I remember more. Ask me.
Stories from a thousand years together.
Love has opened my eyes and I see that you are everything.
I have seen God enter you in the moment that you pause,
wide-eyed, before you plunge yourself inside of me.
I open to you, Beloved Everything.
I am earth, material world,
and you are the spirit that moves through me.
When we make love all the walls crack in all the houses
up and down the street.
Rain floods the creeks and lakes.
Seeds rise up and heave themselves
against the breast of earth,
and the earth opens herself that life may pour in and out of her.
Then you see that I am everything also,
even to the furthest reaches of black space and burning stars.
We are the universe, my love. We are all there is.
We encompass everything. We are God,
Enveloping Being, making love to itself over and over again.
Everywhere you look
(clouds make love to sky
winter ravishes summer)
you and I are the passionate God.
We make love over and over.
Everywhere you look we are making love,
just yesterday for instance, in the bed upstairs, tangled in a rowdy
pile of blankets.
You are sitting at a cracked and broken kitchen table
writing lousy poetry.
Don’t you remember how to write?
Could survival have stolen your voice?
Your heart is sore. Write slowly at first.
“I gave you beautiful children,” you write.
Why are you writing to him? Do you think that he can hear you?
Try this. Tell him: You carve misery into sculpture.
You are the artist of misery.
So go ahead and write to him.
But tell him this for me:
Out of the fire of history
Out of the careless evil of the ages
Out of the steel blade and the crackling flames at the foot of the
wooden post and the napalm and the gas
Out of the machine gun fire and your own uncles
lined up against the barn wall, out of these were you born.
These things are your mother.
Tell him:
Out of the desert trek and forty years
and the Pharaoh’s granite blocks,
and out of the poisoned arrows of the Roman soldiers
piercing the scholar’s heart, you came.
Out of the Russian horses crushing young girls under their hooves.
Out of generations of stoic women,
their raven hair never warmed by the summer sun
and out of the men in black coats you came.
From 5000 years of torment and one moment of glory you came,
a pinprick of glory, shimmering, jewel of the ages enticing still,
turning every Jewish heart toward the chimera,
snake of time, Jerusalem,
From the piles of charred bodies and unspeakable sorrow,
caught up in the tide of fear and out of the womb of misery,
from the last skeletons desperately wishing to die, you were born.
But this did not prevent you from becoming a tormenter.
Suffering makes a soil rich in evil weeds.
And weren’t you so lucky to find me,
a loving victim,
trained to please.
Look at yourself. Don’t you recognize the face?
Your obedience didn’t stand up for Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Your competence was put on trial at Nueremburg.
And not knowing is no excuse.
We decided that, the survivors decided.
A bad childhood is no excuse.
I do not acquit you because your parents suffered.
and I will not pardon you because you didn’t read the books,
because your mother was depressed,
because your father was cold and critical,
because they were tattooed.
Do you think you can avoid the fire?
You coward! You possess a grand inheritence of courage
and kindness in the face of evil
and you have fallen short,
still hiding in the bunker while your own children burn
and you blandly tell me “life is suffering.”
You dishonor your dead,
and now your children think that they were born to take care of you,
to make amends.
Write to him! Write to him!
I gave you the best years of my life, you tell him that,
and my smooth skin and my innocence,
three beautiful children,
and the purest and most attentive kind of love
and then you leave me here to cry.
And then you ask if I will come back to you.
What possible reason could I have?
You tell him that.
Tell him.
I survived.
