Sunday Afternoon as Oil Pours into the Gulf
A very large man
riding a large tractor mower,
attached bin so that grass clippings
won’t have to be raked,
across his small suburban lawn
while his young son plays happily
driving his toy electric
Hummer SUV
up and down the driveway
while I watch, my large ass
planted in chair in an
air-conditioned house,
scanning the internet
for photos of the horror,
feeling sick
as I view them.
another Emily-inspired poem. Read her text here. Singer/songwriter Carla Bruni performs a setting of the poem on her album No Promises. You can sample that here.
____________________
I felt my life with both my hands
I felt my life with both my hands
though it had been—years
How civilized it was, though warm—
the glacier—booming—as it cracked.
Silent—I’d thought—for listening’d
stopped. My ear—now—to my
own chest—the humming
one thousand acres clover—
a bee on every bud.
With Practice, Drowning Gets Easier
With practice, drowning gets easier.
At first you welcome the unconsciousness
that protects you from the moment when
the water expulses the breath from your lungs.
With practice, you can stay awake
to know what happens next, how your
body, heavy now with two hydrogens
for every oxygen, begins to sink.
How your mind is aware, how you could
describe how this felt, as guillotined heads
could talk for up to twenty seconds,
if only you were not alone.
With practice, you ride the wave
of air as it leaves your mouth, rest
on a rock, observe how your arms
keep reaching for the closing surface,
how your legs, straight-jacketed by
your skirt and slips, despise you now
for being born a woman, how the beat
of your heart sends circles of ripples
that hours too late will lead him to
the body now floppy as the doll never made
for the child who will never be born.
Your little one! You reach back to yourself
knowing she could yet breathe, so float
and be found, if you could get her out,
but the only rocks are too dull to cut,
and the faint bruise you leave on your belly
will be dismissed as evidence of nothing.
Knowing she may only now
be gasping her first surprised gasp,
you flee downstream on a trout. The sea
when you arrive is deeper than death,
and pulls you apart, thought by thought,
until each bit of sorrow is
smaller than salt in the finest spray.
You learn to condense and direct the drops,
follow him and fall as warm rain.
All he plants will thrive even as
he goes on shriveling in the drought of your loss.
with deep thanks to Janet Aalfs for an amazing writing/movement workshop.
The Third Thing
1.2
There is fear and there is freedom
there’s the fear
and there’s the freedom
There’s the fear
and here’s the freedom
Here’s the fear
and there’s the freedom
And somewhere stands
the third thing
There is power and there is shame
There, power and here, shame
Here shame, there shame,
everywhere shame shame
And power is always there
there’s power over there
And shame is always here, hiding
from the third thing
Freedom cannot live where fear rules
WRONG
As you learn to embrace your power your shame
will fade and disappear
WRONG
The third thing is both things,
neither thing, anything
outside of easy answers
The third thing stands
at the junction of all other things
The third thing
isn’t compromise, may be
in the middle, but only
of another place altogether
There’s the fear and there’s the freedom
but here there is the freedom to fear
and still find freedom and fear here
There is power and there is shame
and then there is the third thing—
learning not to be ashamed
of power, not to be ashamed
of shame
There is this and there is that
Here I am—third thing
Pick or choose, win or lose
Deep breath in—third thing
On the one hand, on the other
Palms together—third thing
One step forward, one step back
Waiting, still—the third thing
Still rough, more fragmented narrative than poem, all explanation and no music. The struggle continues. Long live the struggle!
Flashback
for Sue and for so long
version 1 draft 3
1.
She straddled my chest, heavy, dripping water—
earliest memory, this dream still vivid, her
long hair hanging down to my face—
I do not remember so much—so much is lost,
nearly all lost, but I feel my toddler legs kicking the bunk
above me in which my big brother slept, smell the
dank of her, hear his mattress rustle, how even
in his sleep my panic stirred him, how he chased her
away again and again, how he held my hand, how he
never went to get our parents.
Somehow that the seven year old boy, kicked awake
every night by his three year old sister, had already
learned that protecting her was his job alone.
I remember how rarely he said
no when I wanted his jacket, his hat, my chunky
arms lost in the echo of his, and how he
did all he could, little one guarding littler one, and how in 1968,
in the hospital, he climbed two chairs and a shelf,
agile as our pet squirrel, to reclaim Brownie Bear, kidnapped by
nurses who said I was too allergic.
2.
Straddling my chest nights after nights,
earning her way into indelible memory. She looked
like my cousin Rhonda—
incomplete recall of cousins tangling to the floor?
Not at three or four—more likely a blurring of Mortica
Adams and Maleficent.
During a body work session, a meditation
intended to draw out the root of my
asthma, I cast her once as metaphor,
nothing more than a child’s mind putting
shape to what it could not comprehend. An
explanation for the memory of her adult body
lodged across my own, the heft of her, how
I felt my lungs compressed like balloons squeezed
nearly to popping, sternum and collar bones splintering—
asthma is a euphemism for
drowning in air, gasping
in and wheezing out—
asthma is the world entire made
narrow as my bronchial tubes.
4.
Sense what that story silences? Water,
everywhere, her clothes and hair saturated,
leaving wet thigh prints on my ribs, damp puddled
in palms restrained by her knees, water in where I had no words, a
nauseating instinct that water could reclaim me, that I was
about to lose the crust that kept me human.
Denial is too easy an answer.
I’ve tried to cast the dream
as suppression—Freudian bed-wetting shame—but that
neglects the choking and my
surety that I knew her, at an age when
everybody I knew or might have known
lived in one of three houses on two streets
in one small town. As sure as I knew my own
name, I was sure she was not
a person who dwelt in my
daytime world. And I knew that
I knew her. She was not
alien, she was terrifying, she was
not new. She was not
separate from me. What sense could I make of that?
Even though I’ve remembered the dream, though it
lingered hours after, though it lingers yet,
it is always only
neurological puzzle, a knowing that I do not know.
A bit of gristle, as Scrooge said, a piece of meat that didn’t
digest. A gallery with a name but empty walls,
installation still in progress. Like lightening seen from far away,
a comprise of silence and thunder. An expectant
null. A crime scene photo, all blood, no face.
5.
She says she knew, from our first date, August
eleventh, that she had loved me all her
lives. She says that this is crazy; there
is no way that she should have felt her
nervous system convulsing when she,
awkwardly, first touched my face.
Sections marked in [ ] are waiting for the right words or phrases to fall into place. That happens – either you stop writing to look for the right word and lose the next four ideas, or you leave it bare and come back later. Still writing, of course, which is why it breaks off on the second line of the fourth section.
Flashback
for Sue and for so long
1.
She straddled my chest, heavy, pressing, dripping water—
earliest memory, this dream still vivid, her
long hair hanging over my face
I was so scared, each time she arrived. I do
not remember so much, so much lost, nearly
all lost, but I can feel the mattress under me, be clutched again by the
dread, feel my toddler legs kicking the bunk bed above me
in which slept my big brother, hear his sudden shift as he
awoke, climbed down to me, chased her away again and again. He
never went to get our parents.
2.
Surprised that the seven year old boy, kicked awake
every night by his three year old sister, had already
learned that protecting her was his job alone?
I remember, clear as smog, how rarely he said
no when I wanted his jacket, his hat, my chunky
arms lost in the shape of his, and how he
did all he could, little one guarding littler one, and how once
in the hospital, he climbed two chairs and a shelf,
agile as our pet squirrel, to reclaim my bear Brownie the
nurses had taken from me as I was allergic.
3.
She straddled my chest so many nights,
enough to be indelible memory. She
looked like my cousin Rhonda, so
I tried to remember her as a child’s
inaccurate memory, or maybe a
[ ] of Morticia Adams or [ ], those long
afternoons in the heyday of Dark Shadows.
During a body work session once, in my guided
intention to focus on the root of my
asthma, I understood her as a metaphor,
nothing more than how a child’s mind gave
4.
shape to what it could not comprehend. An
elegant explanation.
from Contradictions: Tracking Poems by Adrienne Rich
Final Notations
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simpleit will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simpleYou are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our livesit will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will
to hear me reading this poem at the Drew 2010 Winter Residency, click
to read much earlier drafts of this work, go to here
The Bull Sea Lion
Ocean-skinned in neoprene, bug-faced,
web-footed, descending, cold, searching,
gasping at my sudden shadow,
all looming black lithe ton of him.
Every nerve screams flee in the face
of his face, of his mass, but mammal flesh
draws mammal flesh. Yearning, a fear unfelt—
I reach my human hand to him.
What he could do he does not. He considers
me, rolls belly up, leans into me rumbling
I knew your mother once, surges muscle
and dives. His bulk becomes
a churn of bubbles, each an egg sac bursting
empty, each my selkie child unconceived.
Ambulance
Gentleness had come a great distance to be there,
I thought, as paramedics stanched the warm blood,
signaling one another with their eyes.
I was not as I was, and I didn’t know why,
so I was aware of a shattering, of an unbidden,
moving under the influence of a restoring force.
Like a Japanese fan folding, my spirit seem possessed
of such a simple existence, the sexual principle
no longer at its center, nor memory.
I felt like the personification of an abstraction,
like mercy. My hands were red and swollen.
A great chain, the twitch of my life, dragged against decay.
Then I heard shouts. Far off, a horse whinnied.
I blinked back tears as I was lifted forth.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Translated by Renata Gorczynski
This Frenzy 