Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
My friend they don't care if you're an individualist a leftist a rightist a shithead or a snake They will try to exploit you absorb you confine you disconnect you isolate you
Back in the early fifties el Chonito and I were on the Way to the bote when we heard the following dialogue:
Police car radio:Pachuco rumble in progress in front of Lyceum Theatre. Sanger gang crossing tracks heading for Chinatown. Looks big this time. All available Westside units . . .
Cop to partner driving car: Take your time. Let ’em wipe each other out.
I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office.
I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility.
There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man.
I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly.
I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying?
I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions.
Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter.
I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children.
The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms the weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind
the engine-house, with engines, and a tank in which young alligators swam and stank, the bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell gonged of the fires in a tone from hell
Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing.
People getting divorced riding around with their clothes in the car and wondering what happened to everyone and everything including their other pair of shoes And if you spy one then who knows what happened
A few years back and they told me Black means a hole where other folks got brain/it was like the cells in the heads of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps Scientists called the phenomenon the Notorious Jensen Lapse, remember? Anyway I was thinking about how to devise
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear my head about this poem about why I can’t go out without changing my clothes my shoes my body posture my gender identity my age my status as a woman alone in the evening/ alone on the streets/alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong
the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s who is gifted with 3 balls but no heart, but you’ve got to understand when the bull goes down on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else, and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency for in a crap game you may be cutting down
1. At this precise moment of history With Goody-two-shoes running for Congress We are testing supersonic engines To keep God safe in the cherry tree. When I said so in this space last Thursday I meant what I said: power struggles.
2. You would never dream of such corn. The colonials in sandalwood like running wide open and available for protection. You can throw them away without a refund.
3. Dr. Hanfstaengel who was not called Putzi except by those who did not know him is taped in the national archives. J. Edgar Hoover he ought to know And does know.
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, 'The swifts are back!'
Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields. Swereee swereee. Another. And another. It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.
[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I
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