soul.
Buddha-like
you sat before a Buddha;
& the audience
craned its neck
to take you in.
Freak show—
visiting poet.
You sat clothed
in your thick
imperious flesh.
I wanted to comfort you
& not to stare.
Our words knew each other.
That was enough.
♦
Now you are dead
of fascism & cancer—
your books scattered,
the oil cruet on the floor.
The sea surges through your house
at Isla Negra,
& the jackboots
walk on water.
♦
Poet of cats & grapefruits,
of elephant saints;
poet of broken dishes
& Machu Picchu;
poet of panthers
& pantheresses;
poet of lemons,
poet of lemony light.
The flies swarm
thicker than print on a page,
& poetry blackens
like overripe bananas.
The fascists you hated,
the communists you loved,
obscure the light, the lemons
with their buzzing.
We were together
on the side of light.
We walked together
though we never met.
The eyes are not political,
nor the tastebuds,
& the flesh tastes salty always
like the sea;
& the sea
turns back the flies.
Dear Colette
Dear Colette,
I want to write to you
about being a woman
for that is what you write to me.
I want to tell you how your face
enduring after thirty, forty, fifty…
hangs above my desk
like my own muse.
I want to tell you how your hands
reach out from your books
& seize my heart.
I want to tell you how your hair
electrifies my thoughts
like my own halo.
I want to tell you how your eyes
penetrate my fear
& make it melt.
I want to tell you
simply that I love you—
though you are “dead”
& I am still “alive.”
♦
Suicides & spinsters—
all our kind!
Even decorous Jane Austen
never marrying,
& Sappho leaping,
& Sylvia in the oven,
& Anna Wickham, Tsvetaeva, Sara Teasdale,
& pale Virginia floating like Ophelia,
& Emily alone, alone, alone….
But you endure & marry,
go on writing,
lose a husband, gain a husband,
go on writing,
sing & tap dance
& you go on writing,
have a child & still
you go on writing,
love a woman, love a man
& go on writing.
You endure your writing
& your life.
♦
Dear Colette,
I only want to thank you:
for your eyes ringed
with bluest paint like bruises,
for your hair gathering sparks
like brush fire,
for your hands which never willingly
let go,
for your years, your child, your lovers,
all your books…
Dear Colette,
you hold me
to this life.
Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
author of
A Vindication
Of the Rights of Woman:
Born 27 April, 1759:
Died 10 September, 1797
— MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S
GRAVESTONE, PLACED BY
WILLIAM GODWIN, 1798
I was lonesome as a Crusoe .
— MARY SHELLEY
It is all over,
little one, the flipping
and overleaping, the watery
somersaulting alone in the oneness
under the hill, under
the old, lonely bellybutton…
— GALWAY KINNELL
What terrified me will terrify others …
— MARY SHELLEY
1 / Needlepoint
Mothers & daughters…
something sharp
catches in my throat
as I watch my mother
nervous before flight,
do needlepoint—
blue irises & yellow daffodils
against a stippled woolen sky.
She pushes the needle
in & out
as she once pushed me:
sharp needle to the canvas of her life—
embroidering her faults
in prose & poetry,
writing the fiction
of my bitterness,
the poems of my need.
“You hate me,” she accuses,
needle poised,
“why not admit it?”
I shake my head.
The air is thick
with love gone bad,
the odor of old blood.
If I were small enough
I would suck your breast …
but I say nothing,
big mouth,
filled with poems.
Whatever love is made of—
wool, blood, Sunday lamb,
books of verse
with violets crushed
between the pages,
tea with herbs,
lemon juice for hair,
portraits sketched of me asleep
at nine months old—
this twisted skein
of multicolored wool,
this dappled canvas
or this page of print
joins us
like the twisted purple cord
through which we first pulsed poems.
Mother, what I feel for
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley