Poems

But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

—Genesis 19:26

Still the blue heron lifts long legs over early morning.
Still the blue green boulders filled with barnacles.
Still the green ropes of sea.
Still rivulets in the sand, remnants of the night.
Still I believe in the power of lust,
the full shake and tremor of living
on a moving planet that revolves around a ball of fire.
Still the crabs small and white like moons in need
like promises unspoken
or promises spoken and unfulfilled.
Still I wish to be swallowed whole by the sea.
Still the sea, the spume and crash of the sea.
Still the salt rich water coating my skin.
Still my porous skin.

that makes the infinite
bearable, water in the desert,
lovely
and fleeting,
as is so much.

Who is alone and afraid?

All will fall in the sand—oarlocks, scavengers,
the ripped bird’s wing.

Mandela says,
Your playing small does not serve the world.

When the heat-soaked banks
with their ogre-arms
hurl stone silence at you,
know my name.

The pot, having been useful
in the way objects with one job and not another can be useful,
which is to say melting golden onions, a low hum of spices,
waits to be washed. If I heft it
once more from stove to sink, I’ll be done in,
failure of planning and prioritization, i.e.
weightlifting is supposed to happen every T, TH, 10 a.m.
but doesn’t. The pot’s not a real Le Creuset. Those cost
more than I’m willing to spend. But the job gets done.

I didn’t say I didn’t have a job.
For three minutes today, I tutored
a midwifery student on prepositions
in an evidence-based practice. Because it involves
getting up at 4 a.m. which would wound our days,
the biting comments to our kids, the compensating calories,
my sister tells my mom we can’t drive her to the airport
at 5 in the morning. When the sponge slides
inside the white of the Dutch oven, first
the warm bubbles snuggling then the scrub down
the red deep smooth sides of the empty supper pot, it’s like
a lesson in perception. Know your colors. Reconcile yourself.

The house smells like candles. “It’s my birthday!” I say.
It’s not. My birthday over, nothing left to celebrate, I rinse the pot, heave it
back on the stove, sweet mint lingers in the corner of my mouth,
water swirls clear of the drain. I hold close the damp dish cloth.
I’m not a sign language interpreter for the UN, which Grandma Adele
suggested over lunch at Neiman’s was better than teaching
community college crazies. I have never hosted a B’Nai Brith luncheon for fifty or flown to Timbuktu.

Every childhood morning my mother
scrubbed burnt oatmeal off the bottom of the pan.
At work she slipped her hand in a puppet, hid behind a felt curtain,
made the crocodile cackle.

He dusts my nipples
as though they are piano keys.
As though he has never heard
Rachmaninoff’s Prelude
Opus 23, No. 5
in G minor.
Hard notes. Marcato.
Poco meno mosso.
Harder.

In the crack
I exist. You’ve seen me.
You know I am a fist.
When I refuse to be naked,
I will be put up against the wall.

If I roll the word shit
around in my mouth if I suck
on it, chew on it, I will at least not care
it’s killing me. I wish
I could disappear into the black
marks that become the frame
of faces that maybe if I could
keep pushing back far enough
become human. My body the only truth
my body the only way to tag
I have lived with love.
I am plummeting.

Twenty Years Ago in Winslow Homer’s The New Novel

Book in hand, this young woman
reclines on her side.

For all we know, right now
she walks the deck
of a fighting ship, love’s
swashbuckler; dances all night
in liquid candlelight — the waltz!
the waltz decadent!; spits elegant
retorts from overstuffed chintz.

Oh, I know. I ran away and lived
on My Side of the Mountain,
with a carved fishhook; transformed myself
into a witch, with all the spells
of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth;
made my first love Forever.

Just like the women reading
The New Novel, I go to books
when I lose like the 5th grade spelling bee
out on except, accept,
back at my desk, cheeks burning.
I ride books every plane trip locked
and bored, constricted on all sides.
I fall into them every night.

It’s the way one leg bends,
the reader’s white bow loose,
her red dress looser.
the way her face angles
to the open page. Oh, peace.

My Daughter Reads Books

on the ugly white couch with the half-slipped cushions
when she is supposed to be setting the table
as she walks from kitchen to dining room,
blue plastic plate in one hand, paperback in the other.

In Winslow Homer’s time,
just a hundred or so years before my daughter,
the good reverends let us know
novels burn the heart, dwarf
the mind, pervert life’s duties until
we slither in the hoofprints of Satan.
My daughter slithers through books,
a very hungry caterpillar.

My daughter reads books
surrounded by corn muffin crumbs,
dripped syrup when she is supposed to be
clearing the table. She reads in the rocking chair
when she is supposed to be clearing the table.

In 1860 women read the Good Book,
a couple psalms, raised,
as we were, to useless
lives as Victorian gentlewoman.
Florence Nightingale
screamed in drawing rooms, burst
into flames.

My daughter reads books
in the bathroom when she is supposed to be,
I said now, clearing the table.

It wasn’t all judge a girl’s character
by the books she reads. We got books
as prizes, books as bonds, books
our women teachers gave us
from their own small stocked
polished shelves. They gave us
solace and laughter, they gave us ourselves.

My daughter reads books
waiting at the passport office,
in the car on the way to synagogue when she is mad at me,
in the car on the way home from synagogue no longer mad.

But then there’s 1886 homeschooling pioneer
Charlotte Mason who made sure women heard
a woman reading a novel
takes a knife to her innards,
a woman’s brain’s not
constituted like a man’s, reading sabotages
her vital metabolic economy.

My daughter reads books
in bed,
in bed past bedtime,
while picking the icing off her donuts at breakfast,
while picking her nails.

The girl who sits for hours, poring over a novel
to the damage of her eyes, her brain, and her
general nervous system, is guilty
of a lesser fault of the nature of suicide.

My daughter reads books
while I try to cut her nails,
when the phone rings with a friend.
when the doorbell rings.

She will stun her heart, break her ovaries,
bring on menstruation, masturbation, insanity.
Pernicious, she draws away
the blood for babies.
I had babies. I read to them
day and night.

My daughter reads books
on the couch when she is supposed to be
clearing the books off the couch,
in the bathtub with me reading my book.

They Are Always Calling Our Girls Sluts

She has secret passions While her intense
She doesn’t need him
engagement in the book excludes
the reader from her gaze,
Homer needs her vulnerable,
titillating. Lying on the same plane
as those who are drawn in,
succubus. The buttons of her dress
invite undressing, judgment.
Bold red locks fallen
from the grace of God. Red lips,
red dress Personal pleasure
supersedes social duty.
Fiction stirs a provocative
promiscuous siren.

The New Novel Today

This time I see that she is all flames;
the fire laces her as she lies
in front of the abyss. That she is not afraid
while she sinks in, does not believe
wolves will sleek out of the forest.

I am afraid of the train stuck
in the mud, sliding off track,
traveling back while the 19th century
reverends wipe their brows with white cloths,
books struck from my daughter’s hands,
of everyone I love
losing their minds.

She looks cozy my daughter says
As we stand in front of The New Novel,
I wonder if she’s reading All-of-a-Kind Family,
the part where the sisters hunt buttons.

This woman has no part in her hair, her ear lit
by sunlight, buttons meander
down her front like stepping stones across
a river, her dress shifts and folds
the breeze, the forest seems lighter today.

I want someone to greet me. I think
there is an old love letter I should reread.

This time I see how young she is.
Fire flows over her hips, the woods
pant with desire, the painter too close.
I am more aware
of her power now, how she is bigger
than anything else in the world.

We all had lice back then
in our unwashed jacket pockets,
crawling along the stained seams
of our handsewn shirts and basted
buttonholes as we lectured
on combinatorics at the University of Lviv
before it was shut down by Nazis.

The Nazis hired Dr. Weigle.
Dr. Weigle hired us who used to sit
quiet, pencils scratching in the Polish coffee shops
(now closed or filled with Nazis)
to sit in his lab, caged lice on our legs.

If you didn’t scratch, you wouldn’t die,
that day. Mathematicians, we would
sink deep into the fourth dimension,
the one without hunger or fear, our daughters
still in pirouette. We would do what

we have always done since
Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes—
find a lever big enough,
prepare to move the world.

 

The Heroin Addict on 77th and Aurora with the Cardboard Sign

She asks for peace.
Peace, $, junk. She lays out
her whole kit,
a small mirror, lipstick.

She knows to worry
about that house. They hang
their clothes in the front yard,
leave them in the rain. They smile
at kids near their drenched
long underwear, blackberry thorns.
They have four carved pumpkins on their front porch,
a dead mouse on the stairs.

She misses the way bodies can fit together, the heat
as a lover spoons her. She misses
the smell of her daughter’s scalp as the girl nestles
her head to her breasts.

She has a second bra, a washcloth, herbal soap
that takes her to a day at Talapus Lake,
where evergreens would never stoop
to be fenceposts, broken at that.
But she’s not there. She’s here.

In hell they pass out plastic cups
of creamsicle with no spoon just a half-sized
wooden tongue depressor and you stand
in a deserted school hallway to eat while you wait
for the pick-up that will never come and even
in your agony,
the terror and betrayal, part of you thinks,
this tastes good.

1. For me grief

has been a pudding pop. The first bite
made me think there might be something
there,

but by the second, the third,

just empty

calories. After awhile, I didn’t even notice
I was no longer at the table.

You, my darling, you’ve got the Sachertorte of grief,
every bite an explosion to the senses,
every bite calling
for more.

You must sit at this table
with the limp balloons, the brief flashes of fire
and eat and eat alone.

 

2. I know nothing about grieving, but I read a romance novel

set in the cowboy west and the grieving widow
had to wear a year of black.
I can see the point of that.

But, I must admit, the widow in this book
wasn’t actually grieving her abusive husband
(who keeled over at the whorehouse
in flagrante delicto.) She was grieving
how bad her life had been and then a former student
(I know, I know, kinky) came to town
riding a bad reputation, and you can guess
where they wound up. I can loan you the book.

 

3. What would Donald Hall do?

Screw.

After Jane Kenyon kicked it, he went for
meaningless sex.
How do I know? He told us so
at the public reading on Second. Perhaps,
even then, he was trawling for prospects.
Everyone wants to comfort.
You could take out an ad:

Needs to be fucked senseless.
Has own room.
Ignore screaming.

 

4. I’m thinking you should eat your baby.

He is what’s left of her.
Maybe ingesting a finger at a time
would calm that craving.
Of course, the problem–
after a month of parceling out thighs and rump,
of slowly chewing down cartilage,
he’d be gone. Kids on the plastic yellow slide,
kids at the Stop-n-Shop, kids almost asleep
in their strollers while their mothers hum
lullabies your lover did not two a.m. hum,
would not suffice.

 

5. I know you don’t drink, but

Grief might like a pint.
Self-cutting? Leeches?
I’m just brainstorming now.
I think I saw a barbershop,

up a couple streets

and to the left.

 

6. May I offer a swift kick to the head?

The DMS-IV has classified deep grief
six months after the instigating incident
as pathological.

(See Adjustment Disorders 309-309.9).

So, you’ve got to stop wallowing,
or they’ll drug you
and pull your kid.

 

7. Let’s play pick a cliché
Step right up! Step right up! Spin the wheel! Take your chances!

Everything happens for the best.
An apple a day.         Time heals all wounds.
One day at a time.                     Tomorrow is another day.
Just like riding a bicycle.                               A stitch in time saves nine.
You can’t always                                                                         get what you want.
Keep on keeping on.                                   Give it the old college try.
Let’s get the show                                             on the road.
Absence makes             the heart grow fonder.
Better to have loved and lost.

The carny has pegged you for a rube.

8. I remember your love’s bright blue frames

Do you remember the witch who offered
to pluck a day from your overburdened brain?
Sure no one wants to give up
the hike with fifteen switchbacks,
kissing at every corner. But what about
stuck in the airport when the kid
throws himself on the floor and howls
and your love turns her shoulder
but not before you see the scowl.
Chemo day. Chemo day after day.
The witch offered to wipe away a day,
to take every color, every sound,
to take the pain.

You refrained.

My mother has signed
the forms. I have bent over
and signed as well.
I have sworn

to guard the curtain
between her and the hereafter,
to pin the curtain aside.

When I was a child, I would hide
under department store carousels,
press my cheek against
the hems of grown-up dresses
the soft cotton anchor stitch.

I felt so safe in the shadows
out of time
while I could always
pull the curtain aside and find
the dressing rooms, the mirrors,
mother after mother after
beautiful swirling mother.