To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives,
then of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch, to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry.
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Marge Piercy

The Resurrection

I'd dared her to go in, and we came on that dare
to the road above Rose Hill Cemetery, and sat for a moment in the cab of my truck,
quiet, not talking, looking down
at the valley of stones, the bone-white
testaments prickling the hills.
All the way out she talked of death, her desire
to be cremated, have her ashes scattered
over Lake Rabun. In the new life she'd return
as a swan or a dove. What did I say?
That I believed in the new life too,
the resurrection of the body, and though I knew
the Lord could mend us ash by ash
I wasn't the sort to put Him to the trouble.
So I wasn't afraid, we were as different
as East and West, and the night was still cool,
not quite the season to fall in love
with the wrong woman. And if she was afraid
of anything, she didn't show it, only took
the flashlight off the seat, zipped her parka.
A bright half-moon, white as marble, hung
over the river, and I followed her
in that light as she edged through the trees
down the hill toward the gardens,
toward the creek, the row of bricked vaults.
I'd dared her to go in. Not into the graveyard,
but into a grave I knew lay open in the side
of a ridge, an old haunt, reputed hangout
of a witches' coven. And I wasn't afraid
until I stopped where the rock garden
bridges the creek, and the wind off the river
seemed the breath of the dead, or whatever
inside me was dying. Let's go, she said,
and pointed up the ridge where I had pointed
to the grave, and we followed the creek
up the valley, past the wrought-iron fences
and chairs, the patios and bedrooms
of the dead, without talking, without touching
or ever having touched, until we came
to the end of the valley, the black mouth
gaping behind branches. She knelt then
by the tree and shined the light----
wine bottles, a sardine can, stubs of iron bars
jagging those jaws with rusty teeth----
and with only a slight shiver against the cold,
we crawled into that belly of earth.
And what had I really expected to find? A pit
of beer cans, a clay chamber of dry roots?
Or that stir in the sudden falling of dark,
like the brush of a cobweb against an ear,
like the silky crawl of the first hungry worm,
the gentlest touch,
that first delicate laying on of hands?


David Bottoms

Working Copies

A misreading implies
a proper reading.
At five AM it is still dark
and I hear no wind,
and the only light in the room comes from the red analog of the clock.
"It smells like rain."
She curls her head over my shoulder
and makes a space for the statement.
I think she's being poetic
and doze back off.
When the alarm goes off at six
it is pouring.
I reach for her to pull her back to that place of clairovoyance--
I want to know sports scores, lotto numbers, chicken or egg
but she just asks
"Can't you smell the weather?"
and pushes her back to me.
Nine minutes later the alarm is going off again.
And the pillow next to me bears long dark strands of thick black hair
in no discernible pattern.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later,
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Rita Dove

THE LANGUAGE OF THE BRAG

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to acheive something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

SHARON OLDS

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I.

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II.

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV.

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI.

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII.

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII.

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX.

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X.

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out shraply.

XI.

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII.

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII.

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

WALLACE STEVENS

TRANSIT

A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house-door
At just that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.

What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?

Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
As a whip maps the countries of the air.

Richard Wilbur