Becoming Light (4 page)

of another.

I dream of you

as the condemned witch

dreams of her end

at the stake,

when, lashed to the burning pole,

she will offer up her flesh

to become smoke,

her hair to become ash,

her soul to be carried away

on the wings of the air,

marrying, marrying, marrying

the final fire.

In my cauldron

under the full moon

thinking of poppets:

who shall I choose

to join

my life with?

The man of muslin

with the peppermint

heart, bleeding

through his pocket

underneath

the felt-tipped pens?

The man of plastic

listening to jazz

in his blue room?

The sexual robot

with his swiveling

indefatigable cock?

The yearning poet

who would rather yearn

than anything?

The businessman

who thinks poetry

has a bottom line?

The absent daddy

who will only come home

when the flesh

is falling off his bones?

I would

make a poppet, Muse,

but I do not know

how to mark it.

Which astrological sign,

which profession,

which color of hair,

which size and shape of cock?

Witch-woman that I am,

I am baffled

by choices.

Therefore I turn it over

to you,

and your lunar wisdom,

while I wait

in my cauldron

bubbling

under a pregnant

moon.

I sit at my desk alone

as I did on many Sunday

afternoons when you came

back to me,

your arms aching for me,

though they smelled

of other women

and your sweet head bowed

for me to rub

and your heart bursting

with things to tell me,

and your hair

and your eyes

wild.

We would embrace

on the carpet

and leave

the imprint of our bodies

on the floor.

My back is still sore

where you pressed me

into the rug,

a sweet soreness I would never

lose.

I think of you always

on Sunday afternoons,

and I try to conjure you

with these words—

as if you might

come back to me

at twilight—

but you are never coming back—

never.

The truth is

you no longer exist.

Oh you walk the world

sturdily enough:

one foot in front

of the other.

But the lover you were,

the tender shoot

springing within me,

trusting me with your dreams,

has hardened

into fear and cynicism.

Betrayal does that—

betrays the betrayer.

I want to hate you

and I cannot.

But I cannot

love you either.

It is our old love

I love,

as one loves

certain images

from childhood—

shards

shining in

the street

in the shit.

Shards of light

in the darkness.

All the endings in my life

rise up against me

like that sea of troubles

Shakespeare mixed

with metaphors;

like Vikings in their boats

singing Wagner,

like witches

burning at

the stake—

I submit

to my fate.

I know beginnings,

their sweetnesses,

and endings,

their bitternesses—

but I do not know

continuance—

I do not know

the sweet demi-boredom

of life as it lingers,

of man and wife

regarding each other

across a table of shared witnesses,

of the hand-in-hand dreams

of those who have slept

a half-century together

in a bed so used and familiar

it is rutted

with love.

I would know that

before this life closes,

a soulmate to share my roses—

I would make a spell

with long grey beard hairs

and powdered rosemary and rue,

with the jacket of a tux

for a tall man

with broad shoulders,

who loves to dance;

with one blue contact lens

for his bluest eyes;

with honey in a jar

for his love of me;

with salt in a dish

for his love of sex and skin;

with crushed rose petals

for our bed;

with tubes of cerulean blue

and vermilion and rose madder

for his artist’s-eye;

with a dented Land-Rover fender

for his love of travel;

with a poem by Blake

for his love of innocence

revealed by experience;

with soft rain

and a bare head;

with hand-in-hand dreams on Mondays

and the land of fuck

on Sundays;

with mangoes, papayas

and limes,

and a house towering

above the sea.

Muse, I surrender

to thee.

Thy will be done,

not mine.

If this love spell

pleases you,

send me this lover,

this husband,

this dancing partner

for my empty bed

and let him fill me

from now

until I die.

I offer my bones,

my poems,

my luck with roses,

and the secret garden

I have found

walled in my center,

and the sunflower

who raises her head

despite her heavy seeds.

I am ready now, Muse,

to serve you faithfully

even with

a graceful dancing partner—

for I have learned

to stand alone.

Give me your blessing.

Let the next

epithalamion I write

be my own.

And let it last

more than the years

of my life—

and without the least

strain—

two lovers bareheaded

in a summer rain.

I was sick of being a woman,

sick of the pain,

the irrelevant detail of sex,

my own concavity

uselessly hungering

and emptier whenever it was filled,

and filled finally

by its own emptiness,

seeking the garden of solitude

instead of men.

The white bed

in the green garden—

I looked forward

to sleeping alone

the way some long

for a lover.

Even when you arrived,

I tried to beat you

away with my sadness,

my cynical seductions,

and my trick of

turning a slave

into a master.

And all because

you made

my fingertips ache

and my eyes cross

in passion

that did not know its own name.

Bear, beast, lover

of the book of my body,

you turned my pages

and discovered

what was there

to be written

on the other side.

And now

I am blank

for you,

a
tabula rasa

ready to be printed

with letters

in an undiscovered language

by the great press

of our love.

—Vermont, August 5, 1989

Erica to Ken

The red and black biplane

swoops down

on the green hills

of Vermont.

A little airstrip

between two mountain ranges,

and people coming

with balloons and streamers,

kites, gliders

and winged wishes.

The bride climbs out

trailing wildflowers,

parachutes, kisses,

and the groom, big beast

with soft eyes that gleam

like butter,

grins, a horny boyscout,

and scoops her

in his arms.

Fearful, I have walked this world

not daring to hope

for the cut half

severed from me

in my last life
.

Defiant, I have flown

above my fears, flaunted them

like you, scattering jokes

to drown the sound

of my heart cracking

like winter ice,

and to still

the heckling

of the gallery.

And now you come

to tell me

you know the child

behind the wanton smile

and that you love her

as I know the boy

inside the rough beast

and I can lead him

home.

They marry in a field

of wildflowers

near a pond

whose least ripple

betrays the spirit within.

Intermediate

between earth and sky,

this palimpsest

for the mind of God

has caught the clouds

within its brimming bowl.

Butterflies and hummingbirds

hover nearby.

Deer tiptoe unafraid

on delicate hooves,

and crickets and bullfrogs

chorus.

The red and black biplane

takes off,

banks, turns and flies through

a green notch

in the mountains.

It soars into the blue,

seeming to disappear

into a cloud.

In a little while

it will come back to earth.

Perhaps that is the whole point.

For David Karetsky (April 14, 1940–March 12, 1991), killed in an avalanche

Putting the skis down

in the white snow,

the wind singing,

the blizzard of time

going past your eyes,

it is a little

like being snowed in

in the Connecticut house

on a day when the world

goes away

and only the white dog

follows you out

to make fresh tracks

in the long blue shadow

of the mountain.

We are all halfway there,

preferring not

to think about it.

You went down the mountain

first,

in a blaze of light,

reminding us

to seize our lives,

to live with the wind

whistling in our ears,

and the light bedazzling

the tips of our skis

and the people we love

waiting in the lodge below

scribbling lines

on paper the color

of snow,

knowing there is no

holding on

but only the wind singing

and these lines of light

shining

in the fresh snow.

The great bed of the world

arching over graves

over Babi Yar

with its multitudes of bones,

with battalions of screams

frozen in a concrete glacier,

with pillows of earth

and comforters of green grass

covering all that dead flesh.

Dead flesh shall live again—

a dream in god’s endless night—

rise green out of the earth

as grass, as trees, as tomato stalks

bearing a bright red fruit

and the feuds of man- and womankind

shall be fed again from the same seeds:

the tomato, the mythic pomegranate, the

biblical apple

all rising from the grass that springs

out of the screams of stopped mouths.

Sometimes I dream

that my bed is built over a ravine,

the ravine of Babi Yar, any ravine

where thousands died

and I moan in pleasure to propitiate the earth,

to make fruit ripen

and trees wave green leaves like banners

all because love can touch me still.

It is never enough to create.

The beast must feed its meat teeth too.

Out of the screaming mouth of earth

we feed the grass that covers

all our beds.

I wish I did not know all that I know.

Galaxies spin, grass grows, and people kill.

We are the only race to murder for our dreams—

and not for hunger,

hungering for dreams.

With his head full of Shakespearean

tempests

and old notions of poetic justice,

he was ready with his elegies

the day the ocean sailed into the square.

“The sea,” he wrote, “is a forgiving element,

and history only the old odor of blood.

She will come to rest on the soft floor

of the world, barnacled like a great pirate

ship,

and blind fish—mouthing like girls before a

glass—

will bump, perhaps, San Marco’s brittle

bones.”

Pleased with these images, he paused

and conjured visions of a wet apocalypse:

the blown church bobbing like a monstrous

water toy,

Doge Dandolo’s bronze horses from

Byzantium

pawing me black waves, incredulous

pigeons

hovering like gulls over the drowning

square,

mosaic saints floating gently to pieces.

Then he waited as the wind rose, as

gondoliers

were rocking in the long furrows of their

boats

and small waves licked the marble lions’

eyes.

But still this most improbable of cities

hung on, lewdly enjoying her own smell.

Learning later how Florence, with her brown