Confinement and Release: New Poems

I'm going to try to post poems more regularly. Here are this week's:


She Assumed A Narrow Corridor, Then
Unfolded It

Nature offers up so many tongues
to untie, to let the ink and dyes
drip from their cuts.
What is wrong with us? Why
have we fallen from our dust?
Wool-colored sand, someone
said, the blown hem of the sea,
as if such saying were enough.
As if starting out we only
meant to be an art piece.
One more dulling day
in what it wasn’t.
Apples and sentences cracked
at your teeth, back before
you were lonely and used
to delineating. Then you flew
through the vowels, they lofted you
up over houses
with screen porches, little doormats
and you saw it all sorely
on your feet the long shift.
But now this rich sleep
is yellow and sickly, a yolk
over the eyes. I guess
we could intellectualize,
could invent a religion
or go on trying.
But sometimes in a hot bath
we remember fire that climbed
the bones’ scaffold, live air
singing, how it sang us.


*


Someday We Will Be Post-Gender

As a girl I was a little god,
a stripped stick, divining rod.

Then that hollow bone bled and I turned
to polled people, opinions instead.

What had I done with my speeches,
those names I’d wield for little ones

against bullies on buses. Justice
you abandoned me or I

abandoned you for a plum
ass and tight jeans. I wore

them rolling coils of clay,
strategically licking my waiting lips,

forgetting what it was I'd meant
to create. Love, love, love a pink

throb in the crotch and art
class bowl I thought little of.

I didn’t like myself enough
to like what I could make.

I was self-annihilating. That’s why
I was always in love. It was nothing specific

that wounded me, just humanity
and all the ways it entered

to eat. Mistakes of the inverted
world, the snake with its tail

in its teeth. Now it rings out
on a rhythm older than my words

which are old already and used.
The end in the beginning

and a stone in the gullet
of the end, etc.

I never woke
to see where I was,

unless seeing saw me leave
and leaving I could see it all so tenderly.

Now how do I stay, be-
come the one to cut

through this thicket, begin.


*

Apple


She was just doing her job
cracking into the skin
and bringing him in
to the world


***

"Apple" is about Eve, and springs from a feeling that I have sometimes--a sureness that all is right with the universe and always has been and always will be. In the story, Eve opened the sealed perfection of the apple, so that life, real life, could be tasted and lived. The imperfection became the perfection because it was alive.

This statement, "Someday We Will Be Post-Gender" is not just a wish. I know that day is coming soon, (and has arrived for many people already, if not the wider world.) And I also know that I have to wade through my own thicket of questions and passe habits and "issues" about gender to get to my freer being. When I do this I become even more a woman, more female because I am less concerned with what it means to be female. I see a freedom in my female students that I did not know at their age, and this excites me. They--and my daughter, I hope--will not have to wade through some of these thickets of doubt and foolishness that I have waded through. The first lines here refer, I think, to the dillemma of being a girl-becoming-woman in a culture that worships only male gods, and mostly male writers, and still asks girls to sell themselves through sex.

Also. . . in childhood we are all magical, connected to our superpowers. It's up to us, I think, to tell girls that they do not lose their powers of imagination and intuition when they hit puberty--those powers only deepen and change.

"She Assumed A Narrow Corridor, Then Unfolded It" is written to another friend of mine--a singer--and also to myself. Again, it comes from that dillemma of being tired, and afraid to soar and sing, but knowing that's what we are here for.

These are all unfinished, as am I. Just part of the process.

***

I've been angst-ridden all week, wondering why I am not able to be happy, which is self-perpetuating, an elaborate way of looking backward and blaming myself. So often, I am given a gift, I receive something that I have worked for or hoped for, and then I forget, I move through to what I want next. . .

This week I have spent a lot of time feeling some kind of blame. . .toward myself, other people, society, the literary world. . .

and it is all just a smoke screen. I am realizing that I fall into this pattern when I need to make a jump forward. I become afraid, look around for some situation to blame for my stasis and then usually create an elaborate plan for shooting myself in the foot and not taking the next step. I have spent years of my life on relationships, and while so much of this is good, deep learning, a lot of it is fantasy--thinking someone would solve my life for me, and then falling into blame and disappointment when that does not happen. When of course real change does not happen that way. It is not passive but creative.

I think being in love is just being in a spiritual-emotional dimension of rightness. And being out of it is awful.

Thank goodness for friends. . .who remind me of old patterns and who can help guide the way to clarity. Tonight I found the blog, http:findjoy.blogspot.com/ and was helped by the graceful wisdom there. I later realized that this was writen by a real, live friend of mine. What luck!

This is for you, KF, with love:


Bike Wheels


Purr of rubber on gravel
and the red pulse of a truck
backing up. Also the whipporwhill
trilling its wings into wind.
I like the way treelight falls
to eggs and chimes my hands
amid the chipping of another bird.
That jogger left his keys in his pocket
and they bell him in step.
Are you fucking joking me,
a girl says, walking by.
I have lost years of my life
talking worry, doubt
and shallow palaver.
But all those conversations
with you I've needed
to lead me back to this
living weave of skin
we breathe each other in.