There is no moon tonight
and in the lilac dark,
hearts break.
There are no stars,
No air
for breathing, only scent
of honeysuckle sweet,
Too sweet to bear.
Here in quiet, again
the still time comes
when sadness pierces,
Seeking something it cannot explain:
A taste
of pomegranates in rough dark?
Perhaps.
It fades away,
And life grows shorter
by another day.
They want a wilderness with a map—
but how about errors that give a new start?—
or leaves that are edging into the light?—
or the many places a road can’t find?
Maybe there’s a land where you have to sing
to explain anything: you blow a little whistle
just right and the next tree you meet is itself.
(And many a tree is not there yet.)
Things come toward you when you walk.
You go along singing a song that says
where you are going becomes its own
because you start. You blow a little whistle—
And a world begins under the map.
When they turn the sun
on again I’ll plant children
under it, I’ll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I’ll
take my bones and polish them, I’ll
vacuum up my stale hair, I’ll
pay all my neighbors’ bad debts, I’ll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I’ll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we’ll go on
won’t we?
After “Melbourne” by the Whitlams
If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two.
The other? Perhaps that life over there
at Starbucks, sitting alone, writing – a memoir,
maybe a novel or this poem. No kids, probably,
a small apartment with a view of the river,
and books – lots of books, and time to read.
Friends to laugh with, and a man sometimes,
for a weekend, to remember what skin feels like
when it’s alive. I’d be thinner in that life, vegan,
practice yoga. I’d go to art films, farmers markets,
drink martinis in swingy skirts and big jewelry.
I’d vacation on the Maine coast and wear a flannel shirt
weekend guy left behind, loving the smell of sweat
and aftershave more than I did him. I’d walk the beach
at sunrise, find perfect shell spirals and study pockmarks
water makes in sand. And I’d wonder sometimes
if I’d ever find you.
People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long–
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
it is hard to be angry with you while levitating
five inches from the floor I have achieved
something I am two days old a cat I don’t
look like anything yet some skin it is
impossible for you to be angry with me I hope
if its September you go to fetch apples and I
am not matching leaves in a tree levitating five
inches off the tree it’s redundant but that never
stopped the clouds I’m napping on the television
two days old and already I have seen nothing
through the window I am not interested in how
one thing changes another for example you are
feeding me and also you keep feeding me so in
one or two ways I am bigger
you are a horse running alone, feral
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change, didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier, more quiet
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
strange and beautiful
something not everyone
knows how to love.
Plant your feet like roots
next to mine.
Bloom alongside me.
Like leaf and vine,
our tangled bodies
will always chase the sun.
I’m going out and get something.
I don’t know what.
I don’t care.
Whatever’s out there, I’m going to get it.
Look in those shop windows at boxes
and boxes of Reeboks and Nikes
to make me fly through the air
like Michael Jordan
like Magic.
While I’m up there, I see Spike Lee.
Looks like he’s flying too
straight through the glass
that separates me
from the virtual reality
I watch everyday on TV.
I know the difference between
what it is and what it isn’t.
Just because I can’t touch it
doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
All I have to do is smash the screen,
reach in and take what I want.
Break out of prison.
South Central homey newly risen
from the night of living dead,
but this time he lives,
he gets to give the zombies
a taste of their own medicine.
Open wide and let me in,
or else I’ll set your world on fire,
but you pretend that you don’t hear.
You haven’t heard the word is coming down
like the hammer of the gun
of this black son, locked out of the big house,
while massa looks out the window and sees only smoke.
Massa doesn’t see anything else,
not because he can’t,
but because he won’t.
He’d rather hear me talking about mo’ money,
mo’ honeys and gold chains
and see me carrying my favourite things
from looted stores
than admit that underneath my Raider’s cap,
the aftermath is staring back
unblinking through the camera’s lens,
courtesy of CNN,
my arms loaded with boxes of shoes
that I will sell at the swap meet
to make a few cents on the declining dollar.
And if I destroy myself
and my neighbourhood
“ain’t nobody’s business if I do,”
but the police are knocking hard
at my door
and before I can open it,
they break it down
and drag me in the yard.
They take me in to be processed and charged,
to await trial,
while Americans forget
the day the wealth finally trickled down
to the rest of us.
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before.
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
Translation by Shirley Lee
She was desolate.
‘I am Selling My Daughter for 100 Won.’
With that placard on her neck
with her daughter by her side
the woman standing in the market place –
she was mute.
People looked at the daughter being sold
and the mother who was selling.
The people cast their curses at them
but keeping her eyes downcast
she was tearless.
Even when the daughter
wrapped herself
in her mother’s skirt
shouting, screaming
that her mother was dying
the woman kept her lips
tight and trembled –
she did not know how to be grateful.
‘I’m not buying the daughter
I want to buy her motherly love.’
That soldier came by
with a 100 won note in his hand.
The woman who ran off with the money,
she was a mother.
With the money
she got for her daughter
she bought a loaf of bread
and put a chunk of bread
in her daughter’s mouth
as they said goodbye.
‘Forgive me,’ she cried.
She was desolate.
noun
man of strength.
synonyms: brave, champion, man of courage,
great man, star, lion, favourite, darling.
Pull up a seat.
An uncomfortable seat.
We ask that you focus.
Please switch off your mobile phones.
In the film with the hero, the hero is beautiful.
Darling, the beautiful hero is saving the world.
In the film with the hero, the villain has scars.
The skin-mapped villain is killing for fun.
In these films with their heroes, their lions, their stars,
the world nurtures itself, darling.
The world understands blame.
‘I think, you see,’ the director explains.
‘That there is nothing wrong…
with the body…with it being used to show…
you know? … The audience needs to know.
…We need to tell them…
This is a world where we feel at home.’
Look here, darling.
Try not to stare.
We watch.
They watch.
He, she, it watches.
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth, –
The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
I have several children, all perfect, with tongues made of soap and PVA glue running through their veins. My boys and girls benefit from eating the rainbow. I iron children twice daily. Creases are the devil’s hoof-print. I am constructed from sticky-back tape, pipe cleaners and clothes pegs. There are instructions for making me. Look at the appropriate shelves in reputable stores. I am fascinated by bunkbeds, headlice and cupcakes. You will only leave the table when I have given you clear instructions. So far I have not. The school-run is my red carpet. Yes, you’re right, how do I manage it? Though, I didn’t ask you. Dreaming is permitted from 7:40 to 8:20 am on Saturdays and Bank Holidays. My children’s reward charts are full of glittery stars. I am the Milky Way. Crying is dirty. One housepoint! Two if you eat up all your peas. I always go off half an hour before my alarm. In the morning I speak a language of bleeps and bell tones. Chew with your mouth closed. No. Don’t chew at all. Admire the presentation. Underneath my ribs is a complex weather system of sunshine and showers. Heat rises from me and blows across the gulf stream of my carefully controlled temper.
Sometimes I am mist.
This being the America
of condominiums, gravel, and pocket-handkerchief lawns,
I bought potting soil, peat moss, sand, bone meal,
and a clay pot with a rim
rolled into a fat curve.
One pot wasn’t enough.
Soon I had a village of pots.
Soon, in the obliging summer air,
lobelia and nasturtium spilled electric colours,
rosemary grew with gnarled grace,
and a lime, a lemon and a cumquat pooled white light
on river-green leaves.
I am absorbed by this small excuse for a garden
as if it were a first child
and tend where there is nothing to tend,
admire where there is nothing to admire.
It is true my garden lacks the sweep of masculine vision.
Its scale is apologetic.
Men still make the big gardens,
scheme the big schemes.
Soon I shall take to painting my garden
in watercolours so artless and innocent as to be a lie.
Young men, having no real joy in life and no hope in the future
how can they commit the indecency of begetting children
without first begetting a new hope for the children to grow up to?
But then, you need only look at the modern perambulator
to see that a child, as soon as it is born,
is put by its parents into its coffin.
rubbed on me. My shoulder
shoulders the brief weight
of the attendant’s hips,
all the men’s packages a cock undiesel
down the aisle, walkers lean right
and this is not political.
The ones by the window,
the ones in the middle,
apologize for their bladders,
ask to be freed from the row–
I’m startled by their perfected womanhood.
That obedience to being small when filled to capacity–
passive polite to remove me from this C,
and I open like a door: in single-ladies file,
the mother of two and woman two-nips-turvy,
shuffle on tiptoes, sucking in their butts and cups.
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
What could my father do?
I realized when I was still small
that he couldn’t build of fix anything,
and later it occurred to me
that he had no original thoughts.
He could tell jokes that made people laugh,
keep track of money, mainly other people’s,
and serve on committees.
Not what a boy could care much about.
And another thing: he went to funerals.
Often in the evening, after the commute
into the city and back from the city,
he went out again, mildly against his will,
to the lodge or some church committee,
and often enough it was a funeral he attended.
It was a decency he had. I knew that,
maybe. But I would not have thought
he tended any mystery.
I have learned, only lately,
that when you sit in the front row
in the eternal weather of the funeral parlor,
it is surprising, and a relief,
to see the faces that appear before you
and pass by, not far from where he lies.
It is a mystery. Maybe
the decency itself is a mystery,
or maybe we cross from the one to the other
only on a bridge of grief.
My father’s father died
when my father was twenty-three.
My father was a man who held the cables.
And I have begun to go to funerals.
Plant your feet like roots
next to mine.
Bloom alongside me.
Like leaf and vine,
our tangled bodies
will always chase the sun.
On Sundays we sing.
Ghost birds. You lead us
to the southern cliffs
with our Girl Guide tents.
The sun is ours.
We have verses to prove it,
tucked in the hems of our
midwinter pockets.
We are snow globes.
Along the rows of
whitewashed caravans
young boys peer
out and whistle if
their mums aren’t home.
Everything is seen through
murky glass. The sea lurches.
Someone should save
the soul of her. Lukewarm
and watered down,
holding all the girls
in bathing suits.
We stretch out our
carol sheets
and hum like bees.
She peels cod fillets off the slab,
dips them in batter, drops them
one by one into the storm of hot fat.
I watch her scrubbed hands,
elegant at the work,
and think of the hands of the midwife
stroking wet hair from my face as I sobbed and cursed,
calling me sweetheart and wheeling in more gas,
hauling out at last my slippery fish of a son.
He was all silence and milky blue. She took him away
and brought him back breathing,
wrapped in a white sheet. By then
I loved her like my own mother.
I stand here speechless in the steam and banter,
as she makes hospital corners of my hot paper parcel.
There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
‘It’s me or the dog,’ she laughed,
though by ‘dog’ she meant ‘void’
and by ‘laughed’ I mean ‘sobbed’
and by ‘me’ she meant ‘us’
and by ‘she’ I mean ‘you’
and by ‘or’ she meant ‘and.’
‘It’s us and the void,’ you sobbed.
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail;
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
Mother,
I’ve spent hours now
searching for myself
in the symmetry of your skin
in the blues and greens of your depths.
I watch the sand dance to your tides,
And see the tannins,
like tea
tessellate upon your earthy limbs.
I find my feet in the foot holes
of our people,
long gone now
and I know
that this
is where I belong.
for Aunty Nancy Bamaga
rising sea
takes and
breaks into backyards
to trouble families
we cannot live
with the seas in our bellies
we cannot rest
with the sea at our legs
the tide
is coming
to stroke
our dead
we want to know
who unplugged
our island
of childhood
island
of love and tradition
let them see
what has gone under
After Jaan Kaplinski
If possibility is possible
then we could live a little beyond today
but not too far; a year is best, the General said,
avoid middle distances.In ultimatums and deadlines
lie disappointments. If possibility is possible
so is new weather, banana loaf,
another episode of the soap opera.
We may not sit blindfold on this rock
holding two crossed swords aloft,
but swim with gentle strokes
beyond the stone arms of the harbour
to where the car ferries and bulk carriers
glint static on the horizon
and follow the trail of the sun
like people who have remembered
they were once possible too.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Death is here, and death is there
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death — and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,
First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears — and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust — and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot —
Love itself would, did they not.
Cursing and stabbing, a murder of crows
high up in the black cage of trees.
A cab draws up. I get in; a sick, old dog,
a Grimm foundling, wrapped in a rug.
At the vet’s, I harden my heart. Difficult.
Then a text from an Ex wanting to meet. Delete.
*
I walk home dazed; ashes signed for and paid.
Next thing I know, I’m back, my own shade.
By the breadboard, three grains of black rice.
Hours later, I divine their meaning. Mice.
There are deadlines, so work seems best.
Stare at the stumped garden; sit at the desk.
*
The sky changes hue; goose, heron.
Only a robin has colour; its hurt burn
in the empty grate of the hedge, small
as pauper’s found coal.
And no sound; stillness bearing the sky’s freight;
gloom thumbed from charcoal, fraught.
*
Whose bad idea was language? It is a veil
over the face of God; does not reveal.
But I persist, making connections. A frail moth
dies on the windowsill. Virginia Woolf.
Scarce seven hours, the short day bleeds out:
the robin empties the song from its throat.
Go willingly
into the solitude,
into the darkness
and the light
at the end
into the space
between,
laden with breath
and limbs outstretched,
reaching new truths
hear the echo
of heartbeat
like sonar
at this unchartered depth
trace the poems
in veins and fascia
back to hands
that wrote them
bow your head
to the atoms
that utter
original ideas
shake the shadows
that followed you —
detach your doubts,
there is no longer love
for them here.
As they were leaving the garden
one of the angels bent down to them and whispered
I am to give you this
as you are leaving the garden
I do not know what it is
or what it is for
what you will do with it
you will not be able to keep it
but you will not be able
to keep anything
yet they both reached at once
for the present
and when their hands met
they laughed
Commitment is a happy blinding:
we have bound each other, not
for all time but all now, in the love
that is here enough to be real, real
enough to be here, we swim in it, as if
it will never run out.
Our hope and threat the future, its silk tent
filled with all our powerless promises, waiting to billow
away to itself in the smallest wind.
How do the limbs of lovers stride
gigantic past their own future failings?
I will us not to change, to love and have loved, a circle
around us as tight as our arms, a prospect
stingless, as lovely as, oh, right now, and ours.
Whatever you become, the stretch of your body
Here for eternity, as if,
and all loss lost, unwanted ending.
Peace was yours, Australian man,
with tribal laws you made,
Till white Colonials stole your peace
with rape and murder raid;
They shot and poisoned and enslaved
until, a scattered few,
Only a remnant now remain,
and the heart dies in you.
The white man claimed your hunting grounds
and you could not remain,
They made you work as menials
for greedy private gain;
Your tribes are broken vagrants now
Wherever whites abide,
And justice of the white man
means justice to you denied.
They brought you Bibles and disease,
the liquor and the gun:
With Christian culture such as these
the white command was won.
A dying race you linger on,
Degraded and oppressed,
Outcasts in your own native land,
you are the dispossessed.
When Churches mean a way of life,
as Christians proudly claim,
And when hypocrisy is scorned
and hate is counted shame,
Then only shall intolerance die
and old injustice cease,
And white and dark as brothers find
equality and peace.
But oh, so long the wait has been,
so slow the justice due,
Courage decays for want of hope,
and the heart dies in you.
And now that I kneel
At the edge of my years
Let me fall through the mirror of love
And the things that I know
Let then drift like snow
Let me dwell in the light that’s above
In the radiant light
Where there’s day and there’s night
And truth is the widest embrace
That includes what is lost
Includes what is found
What you write and what you erase
And when will my heart break open
When will my love be born
In this scheme of unspeakable suffering
Where even the blueprint is torn
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired – thought all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.
Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on – in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
My brother, in his small white bed,
held one end.
I tugged the other
to signal I was still awake.
We could have spoken,
could have sung
to one another,
we were in the same room
for five years,
but the soft cord
with its little frayed ends
connected us
in the dark,
gave comfort
even if we had been bickering
all day.
When he fell asleep first
and his end of the cord
dropped to the floor,
I missed him terribly,
though I could hear his even breath
and we had such long and separate lives
ahead.
When he falls asleep over his book in the Adirondack chair out on the deck he
loses control of his neck his head tilts back his mouth gapes his hands like slack
he has gone somewhere else he is not here he is profoundly blank and he draws
his breath slowly pause slowly and then nothing and then again he breathes out
I spot him through the window passing from the washing machine to the letterbox
I freeze like the proverbial deer in the forest who has heard a twig crack underfoot
he is not here this is what it will be like when he is gone for good when his breath
stops the tender hearted scrupulous man with long slim hands will have flown he
will be gone his dark compelling scent will linger on the pillowcase until I strip
the bed and do a load and all his books a widow me viewing the shelves and shelves
of books he wakes up his book snugs his glasses up and reads head on a tilt.
I wrote hard up against the sea,
which was having none of it;
more trying to name a new cloud
than looking at the verb-mad waves,
when the sea
conjured a dolphin.
There was no one to tell;
only my lonely shout
to pitch all I held of delight, or grief,
as the dolphin leapt in staves
over the water.
Oh Oh Oh.
The world will shake us off for what we have done
and the sea have the last word.
I’ve left blue letters
on the windowsill
for you
since I were a child.
Inked notes
on bottle caps
and pegs
and ribbons,
to remind you
that we were lovers once,
a lifetime ago.
My offerings for your
wild cobalt nest
to have you know that
Bower boy,
I love you still.
Whenever I hear
The edgeless sound
In the deep night
O Mother!
I find you again.
Whenever I stand
Beneath the light
Of the seamless sky
O Father!
I bow my head.
The sun goes down
Our shadows dissolve
The pine trees darken
O Darling!
We must go home.
No coats today. Buds bulge on chestnut trees,
and on the doorstep of a big, old house
a young man stands and plays his flute.
I watch the silver notes fly up
and circle in blue sky above the traffic,
travelling where they will.
And suddenly this paving-stone
midway between my front door and the bus stop
is a starting-point.
From here I can go anywhere I choose.
Let the sad terrestrials remember me,
recognize me and salute: the thistle and the tall nettle,
and the childhood enemy, belladonna.
-O. V. DE L. MILOSZ, “Les Terrains Vagues”
The thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and belladonna
Have a future. Theirs are wastelands
And rusty railroad tracks, the sky, silence.
Who shall I be for men many generations later?
When, after the clamor of tongues, the award goes to silence?
I was to be redeemed by the gift of arranging words
But must be prepared for an earth without grammar,
For the thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and the belladonna,
And a small wind above them, a sleepy cloud, silence.
They say I’m a beast.
And feast on it. When all along
I thought that’s what a woman was.
They say I’m a bitch.
Or witch. I’ve claimed
the same and never winced.
They say I’m a macha, hell on wheels,
viva-la-vulva, fire and brimstone,
man-hating, devastating,
boogey-woman lesbian.
Not necessarily,
but I like the compliment.
The mob arrives with stones and sticks
to maim and lame and do me in.
All the same, when I open my mouth,
they wobble like gin.
Diamonds and pearls
tumble from my tongue.
Or toads and serpents.
Depending on the mood I”m in.
I like the itch I provoke.
The rustle of rumor
like crinoline.
I am the woman of myth and bullshit.
(True. I authored some of it.)
I built my little house of ill repute.
Brick by brick. Labored,
loved and masoned it.
I live like so.
Heart as sail, ballast, rudder, bow.
Rowdy. Indulgent to excess.
My sin and success –
I think of me to gluttony.
By all accounts I am
a danger to society.
I’m Pancha Villa.
I break laws,
upset the natural order,
Anguish the Pope and make fathers cry.
I am beyond the jaw of law.
I’m la desperada, most-wanted public enemy.
My happy picture grinning from the wall.
I stroke terror among the men.
I can’t be bothered what they think.
¡Que se vayan a la ching chang chong!
For this, the cross, the calvary.
In other words, I’m anarchy.
I’m an aim-well,
shoot-sharp,
sharp-tongued,
fast-speaking,
foot-loose,
loose-tongued,
let-loose,
woman-on-the-loose
loose woman.
Beware, honey.
I’m Bitch. Beast. Macha.
¡Wáchale!
Ping! Ping! Ping!
I break things.
This is not what you would call a love poem.
No, it’s more of a tangle of boots by the back door poem
a cup of tea and crossword poem
once the kids have caught the bus for school.
An ‘I saw a golden whistler in the garden this morning’ poem
and the rose that you transplanted out of season,
well it’s finally in bloom.’ That’s the sort of poem this is.
It’s not a ‘let’s have sex swinging from the chandelier
drenched in sweat and French champagne
at three in the morning with the stars falling
like diamonds through a casement window
and the waves breaking rhythmically on the shore
below us like a cosmic—yes, yes, yes!‘
sort of poem: we don’t have a chandelier.
But that reminds me the electrician called,
the power will be off until tomorrow around noon.
I’ll buy candles on the way home:
It’s that sort of poem.