Is This New or Old?

I do not remember whether
in my childhood I once felt
a despair as keen and bright as
that which overwhelms me now,

for it seems to me that always
when I sat alone and sad,
I was numb and I was silent,
and I did not feel this ache,

but in childhood, I did not know
to feel pain. I did not think
to use speech. I wanted shadows
and to only be alone.

There were books, and there were notebooks;
there were flowing gowns and dew.
It was cold. I needed no one,
and I shivered. It was good.

It is too far gone to known now
whether childhood's heart-pangs struck
any blows as sharp and heavy
as the ones that wound today.

Woman

What a disgusting creature is Woman!
I can hardly imagine a more ill-formed, degraded thing.

Woman is an infant who never learns to walk,
a bird of carrion that hovers over the shoulders of the predator,
a shadow puppeteer,
a king who turns tail when the battle comes to him.

She simpers and whimpers,
she fawns and she fondles,
she panders, she nags,
she snivels, she squeals.
Nothing is too far beneath her dignity.

She prides herself in her ability to lie,
to cheat, to steal,
to manipulate with her sneaking, skulking tricks--
and she laughs at her victims,
like a spider, like a cat.

She cannot see beyond the end of her own table;
she cannot wander beyond the limits of her own gate.
She feels no moral obligation to those who are not under her care;
her own children are angels, and anyone else's may die.
She trusts no one, she fears everything,
and she goes nowhere alone.

She thinks only of money and of food--
she has no concept of art, of faith, of human goodness.
She cannot be an idealist.
She makes and breaks promises. She compromises.
That is to say, she is a liar.
She is an animal who can count.
Rather, let us teach our dogs to balance checkbooks.

Why would we entrust the raising of a child
to such a monster as a Woman?
Is this how we want our sons and daughters to learn?
Do we want them to be petty and calculating,
lacking the most noble of human virtues:
selfless generosity, pure-hearted innocence,
discriminating taste, incorruptible virtue?
Can any of these be found in Woman?

I wonder how I can be one of those things
and not pass away from revulsion and shame.

3

True genius, Schenker says, is the ability to comprehend overarching form.
I think--more than most people, anyway--I can.
Only--to admit to thinking oneself of true worth is The Sin of femininity.
Even Schenker puts us off with his unapologetic conceit--
and he is a man!

2

Tiny parasites crawl across my eyes.
I can see them.
I wonder, am I frightened?
and I examine my frozen heart with thin, metallic fingers.
I find nothing,
and my hands ache from the cold.

1

The clouds are moving faster than I've ever seen them move
across a sky as pristine as cold, clear glass,
and the sharp delineation between them
is, in its own way, significant.
Every vein in every leaf is its own symphony.

Ballade

Misery might forever me enthrall—
Ever unchanged, I thought it would be there.
He is more pure, more virtuous than all;
What I desire is good beyond compare.
His kindness is, beyond all measure, rare.

I hardly dare his mercy to recall.
I am unwise and thus did not foresee—
I was enchained by fear his face would fall.
In the release of secrets, I am free.


Granted me word of favor he has not,
But who am I to hope for a reply?
In every way my virtue he has taught.
It is enough to know he is nearby.
Suffering on in breathless, wordless cry—

Can even bliss be better than my lot?
Even if loved by Pheme I would flee,
Even if by Orfeo I were sought.
In the release of secrets, I am free.

For More

Hunger, vague and dull, settles in my life,
and if there were more to eat,
I would eat again.

I have not the will to reach out my hands
for more.
I have not the will to decide
to reach out my hands.

I am empty inside, and I want to be full.
I want to be dull; I want to be sated.

The more I consume, the less I am satisfied.
The more desperately I search,
the less pleasurable the finding.

It is the same, to eat or to starve.
It is the same, to sit or to stand,
to speak or to be silent,
to sleep or to live.

I can neither reach out my hands
nor withdraw them.

Cold Shoulder

Silence,
if it is peaceful,
I do not mind.
But this silence
is an uneasy punishment,
a wary dance of fear with anger.
Sidle left,
swift turn right,
around each other carefully.
I am all fear.
And the Silence,
heavy and dim,
sticking so thickly to our atmosphere
inescapable
Why do you call it down?
It is your one weapon,
your servant to inspire my fear.
It is hard to love you
when you do this.

Composition

So many secrets,
so many metaphors--
a quest to hide the immediate meaning
of one's words.
For, like Sylvia Plath's neighbors and relatives,
everyone fears that I write of him,
demanding to see, to hear,
things that are not yet finished.

Symbols

Symbols are inescapable.
There is a fiddle in me,
and it fiddles recklessly
for the world, for the devil,
for the end of all things.
Over and over, this
vain contest, this
disheartening charade--
We get in too deep, too soon,
and then, there is no rescue.
There is no power we have
that cannot be taken.

Soirée

The heat swelters,
but that might be only
inside my own self.
I feel bothered—
perhaps to an unreasonable degree—
by the gray haze that hovers between me and the sky.
I strain to see the stars.
Above us,
the Dipper looms large and low,
clouded by the smoke and unheeded
by the revelers.
Thousands upon thousands, they come,
with red-round faces
and sweating hands.
By the light of a hundred smoky torches,
they drink and get drunk.
The noise of their squalid laughter
spreads over the hillsides like a milk-filled ocean,
pulsing with the drumbeats
that sway and steady and change tempo without notice.
Dancers are faint by the firelight—
I think, perhaps, that they dance for their own pleasure alone,
but the eyes of many are on the half-naked, writhing bodies
and their indistinct shadow-forms.
My shadow is the longest,
for I stand farthest from the fire,
burning from the inside
and swaying slightly with my empty cup.
A thousand strangers and a throbbing drum—
if I had a cool place to sit in the dark corners,
and I could see the yellow stars,
I might—just possibly—
fall asleep peacefully.

Sudden Episode

It began with that story
The Place Promised in Our Early Days
and it kept going into that song
It got into me and it's in me now
and somehow together they turned on
It's like a switch flipped on inside my body
I saw the tiny piece of metal on the floor
and I picked it up
and held it in my hand
Then I slipped off my slippers
How could I go outside unless my feet were free
to feel the world through their soles?
I could barely articulate
I mumbled
a reason why I had to go
out
and I felt the prickles of the rubber welcome mat
and the tiny pieces of sand on the cement
Every single piece of sand!
The moon was there,
large and full and veiled by wispy clouds
There was no one
Emptiness surrounded me
The moon was reflected in a puddle, and I watched
and I blew the white seeds of a dandelion into it
and when they would not blow off, I tore them off with my fingers
and tossed them into the air,
but alas! there was no wind to carry them
and suddenly I was left
with a corpse in my hands,
and I could feel the cold, wet life of it on the skin of my fingertips
and a shudder ran through me
I died!
almost
Everything in the world
is driving me toward this one point
where I will die
My body is restless, driven in some direction
but I do not know which direction that may be
And suddenly I realize
there is no one that I care about
and nothing that I must do
All that is important is this feeling
I ran
Then there was glass in my feet
I cried out
I could feel the pendant hanging between my breasts
and I wanted to nurse the world
I stopped and could no longer look at the moon
How is it that the world does not realize
that which is extraordinary in it?
How can it be that we are not
worthy of the extraordinary in us?

When I came inside
I chose not to hide it
For the first time, when someone asked
I answered truthfully
I took her outside to show her
the moon, and the emptiness, and how there was no one else in the world
And she did not feel it with me
but she knows how it feels
to walk down a road
and wish that it led out of town,
to know that if you could just change that one thing that's holding you back,
you could run and run and get there!
She left soon after,
but not with any cruelty in her heart and I knew
that it was good that I had told her
and that she was not frightened very much

I am looking, searching
and there are too many directions for me to go
I can feel everything here
and typing is a distraction
as the soft plastic of the keyboard
caresses my skin and teases my body
but I must go on because
there is someone out there
whom I must find.

Again

This
unbearable sadness
and I don't know why
and
all I want is relief
from the way
my body aches
and
I can't allow
myself
to
think
I fear
the force behind
that I'm holding
back
I long for
cessation
and I want to
hide
but I
mustn't.

To Four Tempting Children

To Ingemar

I want you, child, for my own.
You are fascinating to me.
I want to listen to your nonsensical speech
and encourage you in it.

I want to talk to you and know
that we are two of one kind,
that the things we say to each other
are understood by us and nobody else.
I want to show you the mysteries that haunt me
and ask your opinion.
I want to share with you the music I have found
and know your mind.
We speak the same language.

The kind of person we are
is obvious from even a very young age.
We are rare,
and we are lonely,
and we are happier in our equivalence
than we would ever be in any romance.

I love you more and understand you better
than do your parents.
Therefore,
you ought to be mine.

To a Girl with an Unreasonable Mother

You did nothing wrong!
I want to tell you,
although it isn't true--
you disobeyed your mother.
But the greater wrong was hers.

I would be a better mother than is your mother.
I can be reasonable, and
I am always just.

The activity she forbade you
is one that all children do,
and it's normal, and it's safe,
and it's the sort of unhealthy that will make you grow up strong.
And she oughtn't to have scolded you so.

I could see the pain in your face,
although you did not cry.
See? You are already strong.

To an Amish Child

Beautiful quiet girl,
what wonders have your large brown eyes not seen?
Let it be that I may take you
all the places I have loved.

When the whispering evil creeps in among the good,
I will protect you
as well as anyone can.
But evil lurks in every place,
and you must learn to face it on your own.

To a Beaming Toddler

You laughed,
and the world was renewed.
Your cheeks and hair and teeth
are all perfect.
There is no just or semi-just reason
why you should be mine,
except that I want you.

I want all beautiful things.
I want to fill my castle with them,
so I can delight in them whenever I desire--
the voices of the boy sopranos echoing in the stone corridors,
the grinning, smudged faces of the stable boys,
and you,
little terror, little princess.

It may be that you will grow up
to be the most brutal, vulgar evil that the world has known,
but I do not care because
now you are beautiful.

ERDE

A moment ago it fell upon me--
a single word that means,
for this moment,
the Eternity, the All.

And I have thrust it into me and spoken its name,
and through me, it resounds in heavy low reverberations.

Erde.

Inside my body, I can hear it ring
in strong Wagnerian tetrachords,
but out of my mouth, when it comes,
it is weak and shallow.

"Erde!"

I cry out again and again,
trying to capture the depth of it.
No, I am not capable--
and I may never be.

Why am I given to know, to perceive,
that which I cannot recreate?

Planning

Planning is the best part.
It reminds you that you have control.

No thing is as wonderful as your imagination suggested,
so if you must suffer through the hours of disappointment,
why not take the pleasure of the Plan?

The boredom of a party is the price you pay
For the hours of playful freedom you spend with the menu.

The humiliation of a wedding is worth more—
at least six months of monograms and plane tickets.

A baby isn’t half the fun its name is;
the same principle applies to travel, to husbands, to careers.

You know it doesn’t really matter if you follow the Plan—
the Plan exists only for the joy of its creation—
Stay home from the wedding and make more Plans.

And since you’ve planned every event in your life,
why not plan your death?

Lay it out in inky rows
on the clean white paper.
Tie up all the strings that dangle
around the neat brown package.

You know… you have no obligation to follow the Plan…

Thanks

I was saved

by the gray-brown bark
the flowing water on the rock,
and the face-warming sunlight.

And though I sit now with frozen, clumsy hands,
and read and understand the words of Sylvia Plath,
I am not in danger,

for you are with me.

And though I had it planned in detail that would please the most noble eye
and said no word and thought of nothing else that morning,
by afternoon I was saved.

May this holy remedy never lose its potency for me.

I have sampled it again
and it has gone a good way toward healing

A pleasant warmth!

I wish to thank
the sun, the moon,
and the Prime Mover.

Incompletion

I cannot finish anything,
So it does not matter if my beginnings are good.
I must finish something before I die,
Or my life, which had so much potential, will be meaningless.
The tremors in my body make me fear
That such a time may come very soon.
The future is indistinct and colorless—
Nothing is there.
I want to cry out with frustration,
But I have no strength.

I fear to wait,
But perhaps tomorrow...

Summer Afternoon

It is the first day of summer.
The sun is a heavy, thick quilt
That lies over the world to keep out the morning’s noise.
Tiny violets peek unassumingly out from the ivy.
The branches of the trees are free;
They laugh again as they stretch toward the sky.
People have come out to sit on the quickened, vibrant grass,
And the wind is a gentle lady.

Why can I think only
Of my own death?

Warmth

I stand outside, and it is warm,
And I feel power moving through
The sturdy weapons—strong—my hands.
I have completed all my chores,
And it feels good to start anew.
The sunshine’s brilliance of demands
Into my eyelids fiercely pours.
I look toward it, take the pain:
Its warmth is floating, and it lands
Upon my face and draws outdoors
The secrets that we all contain.
And I feel power moving in
My sturdy arms, as strong as wars
That scrape the earth with each campaign.
I have completed all within,
And it feels good to be fulfilled.
The air is warm as sugarcane.
I want to follow and begin
To be outside and then to build.
I look toward the sun and feel
The pain that signals mortal sin.
Inside, my warden, hushed and stilled,
Pulls closed the curtains to conceal
The outside power rushing by.
No one knows what is instilled
By nature in my heartless mind.
There is not one who fathoms why.
Then something stirs inside my frame,
And I feel earth all intertwined,
And I feel power moving by
My sturdy back, my steady name.
Forever I desire that warmth.