scrapofpaper | woman ain't been born who can make him stay; woman, get away while you can

"But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare."
--Audre Lorde

"My Letter of Introduction to God"
I'm 33, Christ’s age; you remember Christ.
I was lucky enough to be born in New Jersey,
so believe I am entitled to a few things: I’d like
a stone house floating on a lake, for the stones
to shimmy and fall into water, to salvage them,
so I could learn masonry. I always wanted
to be a stone mason, so elegant, so strong.
I'd like a house in Mexico and a day for me
to wake, pomegranates growing in my yard.
I'd like a cast iron tub, lavender and sage,
for my wife, Isabelle, to soak in. I'd like a wife
named Isabelle and a few children who look
a little like me, okay, a lot, but better than me,
small enough to run beneath the belly of a horse.
I'd like a horse for my excessively beautiful
children and, if she would agree, for my wife,
my excessively beautiful wife, Isabelle, to ride
through the streets, though no one would
possess her, not even me, who'd try to.
I'd like the streets to be empty, empty of want,
empty streets, except for the horse, his odd
fondness for staring into troughs, and dogs,
a pack who would remind me of people
I have loved and failed to love well enough,
the way they roam back into my life, ones
that would tend not to stray beyond my voice,
and if so, would turn gentle, more caring,
like the horse the children feed pomegranates.
--James Hoch

"Songs to Survive the Summer"
It's funny, isn't it, Karamazov,
all this grief and pancakes afterwards...

These are the dog days,
unvaried
except by accident,

mist rising from soaked lawns,
gone world, everything
rises and dissolves in air,

whatever it is would
clear the air
dissolves in air and the knot

of day unties
invisibly like a shoelace.
The gray-eyed child

who said to my child: "Let's play
in my yard. It's OK,
my mother's dead."

*

Under the loquat tree.
It's almost a song,
the echo of a song:

on the bat's back I fly
merrily toward summer
or at high noon

in the outfield clover
guzzling Orange Crush,
time endless, examining

a wooden coin I'd carried
all through summer
without knowing it.

The coin was grandpa's joke,
carved from live oak,
Indian side and buffalo side.

His eyes lustered with a mirth
so deep and rich he never
laughed, as if it were a cosmic

secret that we shared.
I never understood; it married
in my mind with summer. Don't

take any wooden nickels,
kid, and gave me one
under the loquat tree.

*

The squalor of mind
is formlessness,
informis,

the Romans said of ugliness,
it has no form,
a man's misery, bleached skies,

the war between desire
and dailiness. I thought
this morning of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work
and of a morning two Julys ago
on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

down the hill when one
rusty elm leaf, earth-
skin peeling, wafted

by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall
and preternaturally

a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard
the ruffle of the wings

three hundred yards below me
rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty

and that clean-shaven man
smelling of lotion,
lint-free, walking

toward his work, a
pure exclusive music
in his mind.

*

The mother of the neighbor
child was thirty-one,
died, at Sunday breakfast,

of a swelling in the throat.
On a toy loom
she taught my daughter

how to weave. My daughter
was her friend
and now she cannot sleep

for nighttime sirens,
sure that every wail
is someone dead.

Should I whisper in her ear,
death is the mother
of beauty? Wooden

nickels, kid? It's all in
shapeliness, give your
fears a shape?

*

In fact, we hide together
in her books.
Prairie farms, the heron

knows the way, old
country songs, herbal magic,
recipes for soup,

tales of spindly orphan
girls who find
the golden key, the
darkness at the center
of the leafy wood.
And when she finally sleeps

I try out Chekhov's
tenderness to see
what it can save.

*

Maryushka the beekeeper's
window,
though three years mad,

writes daily letters
to her son. Semyon tran-
scribes them. The pages

are smudged by his hands,
stained with
the dregs of tea:

"My dearest Vanushka,
Sofia Agrippina's ill
again. The master

asks for you. Wood
is dear. The cold
is early. Poor

Sofia Agrippina!
The foreign doctor
gave her salts

but Semyon says her icon
candle guttered
St. John's Eve. I am afraid,

Vanya. When she's ill,
the master likes to have
your sister flogged.

She means no harm.
The rye is gray
this time of year.

When it is bad, Vanya,
I go into the night
and the night eats me."

*

The haiku comes
in threes
with the virtues of brevity:

What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath plum blossoms.

The black-headed
Stellar's jay is squawking
in our plum.

Thief! Thief!
A hard, indifferent bird,
he'd snatch your life.

*

The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them

a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and

feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,

time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.

*

But I have seen it twice.
In the Palo Alto marsh
sea birds rose in early light

and took me with them.
Another time, dreaming,
river birds lifted me,

swans, small angelic terns,
and an old woman in a shawl
dying by a dying lake

whose life raised men
from the dead
in another country.

*

Thick nights, and nothing
lets us rest. In the heat
of mid-July our lust

is nothing. We swell
and thicken. Slippery,
purgatorial, our sexes

will not give us up.
Exhausted after hours
and not undone,

we crave cold marrow
from the tiny bones that
moonlight scatters

on our skin. Always
morning arrives,
the stunned days,

faceless, droning
in the juice of rotten quince,
the flies, the heat.

*

Tears, silence.
The edified generations
eat me, Maryushka.

I tell them
pain is form and
almost persuade

myself. They are not
listening. Why
should they? Who

cannot save me anymore
than I, weeping
over Great Russian Short

Stories in summer,
under the fattened figs,
saved you. Besides,

it is winter there.
They are trying out
a new recipe for onion soup.

*

Use a heavy-bottomed
three- or four-quart pan.
Thinly slice six large

yellow onions and sauté
in olive oil and butter
until limp. Pour in

beef broth. Simmer
thirty minutes,
add red port and bake

for half an hour. Then
sprinkle half a cup
of diced Gruyère and cover

with an even layer
of toasted bread and
shredded Samsoe. Dribble

melted butter on the top
and bake until the cheese
has bubbled gold.

Surround yourself with friends.
Huddle in a warm place.
Ladle. Eat.

*

Weave and cry.
Child, every other siren
is a death;

the rest are for speeding.
Look how comically the jay's
black head emerges

from a swath of copper leaves.
Half the terror
is the fact that,

in our time, speed saves us,
a whine we've traded
for the hopeless patience

of the village bell
which tolled in threes:
weave and cry and weave.

*

Wilhelm Steller, form's
hero, made
a healing broth.

He sailed with Bering
and the crew despised him,
a mean impatient man

born low enough
to hate the lower class.
For two years

he'd connived to join
the expedition and put
his name to all the beasts

and flowers of the north.
Now, Bering sick,
the crew half-mad with scurvy,

no one would let him
go ashore. Panic,
that can cure you,

I can save you all. He didn't
give a damn about them
and they knew it. For two years

he'd prepared. Bering listened.
Asleep in his bunk, he'd
seen death writing in the log.

On the island while
the sailors searched for water
Steller gathered herbs

and looking up
he saw the blue, black-crested
bird, shrilling in a pine.

His mind flipped to
Berlin, the library, a glimpse
he'd had at Audubon,

a blue-gray crested bird
exactly like the one
that squawked at him, a

Carolina jay, unlike
any European bird; he knew
then where they were,

America, we're saved.
No one believed him or,
sick for home, they didn't care

what wilderness
it was. They set sail
west. Bering died.

Steller's jay, by which
I found Alaska.
He wrote it in his book.

*

Saved no one. Still
walking in the redwoods
I hear the cry

thief, thief, and
think of Wilhelm Steller;
in my dream we

are all saved. Camping
on a clement shore
in early fall, a strange land.

We feast most delicately.
The swans are stuffed with grapes,
the turkey with walnut

and chestnut and wild plum.
The river is our music: unalaska
(to make bread from acorns

we leach the tannic acid out--
this music, child,
and more, much more!).

*

When I was just
your age, the war was over
and we moved.

An Okie family lived
next door to our new
country house. That summer

Quincy Phipps was saved.
The next his house became
an unoffical Pentecostal church.

Summer nights: hidden
in the garden I ate figs,
watched where the knobby limbs

rose up and flicked
against the windows where
they were. O Je-sus.

Kissed and put to bed,
I slipped from the window
to the eaves and nestled

by the loquat tree.
The fruit was yellow-brown
in daylight; under the moon

pale clusters hung
like other moons, O
Je-sus, and I picked them;

the fat juices
dribbling down my chin,
I sucked and listened.

Men groaned. The women
sobbed and moaned, a
long unsteady belly-deep

bewildering sound, half
pleasure and half pain
that ended sometimes

in a croon, a broken song:
O Je-sus,
Je-sus.

*

That is what I have
to give you, child, stories,
songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they
are the frailest stay against
our fears. Death

in the sweetness, in the bitter
and the sour, death
in the salt, your tears,

this summer ripe and overripe.
It is a taste in the mouth,
child. We are the song

death takes its own time
singing. It calls us
as I call you child

to calm myself. It is every
thing touched casually,
lovers, the images

of saviors, books, the coin
I carried in my pocket
till it shone, it is

all things lustered
by the steady thoughtlessness
of human use.
--Robert Hass