This is the last, and it's another long poem.
And it's an attempt to deal both with the personal
and the historical, which I feel is one--
and also with the historical as the history yet to be made.
It's called "From an Old House in America."
Deliberately, long ago the carcasses of old bugs
crumbled into the rut of the window,
and we started sleeping here.
Fresh June bugs batter this June screens--
June-lightning batters the spiderweb.
I sweep the wood dust from the wood-box.
The snout of the vacuum cleaner sucks the past away.
Other lives were lived here--
mostly un-articulate.
Yet someone left her creamy signature
and the trail of rusticated Narcissus straggling up
through meadow grass and vetch.
Families breathed close, boxed-in from the cold--
hard times, short growing season.
The old rainwater cistern hulks in the cellar.
Like turning through the contents of a drawer--
these rusted screws, this empty vial--
useless.
This box of watercolor paints dried to insolubility--
but this-- this pack of cards with no card missing still
playable and three good fuses.
And this toy-- a little truck scarred red,
yet all its wheels still turn.
The humble tenacity of things waiting for people,
waiting for months, for years.
And this begins with a line from a poem by Emily Bronte--
often, rebuked yet always back returning.
I place my hand on the hand of the dead--
invisible palm-print on the doorframe,
spiked with daylilies, green leaves
catching in the screen door.
Or I read the backs of old postcards curling from
thumbtacks, winter and summer fading through cobweb-tinted
panes--
white church in Norway, Dutch hyacinths
bleeding azure, red beach on Corsica,
set pieces of the world stuck to this house of plank.
I flash on wife and husband embattled,
in the years that dried, dim ink was wet--
those signatures.
If they call me man-hater, you would have known it for a lie.
But the you I want to speak to has become your death.
If I dream of you these days, I know my dreams are mine and not
of you.
Yet something hangs between us older
and stranger than ourselves like a translucent curtain--
a sheet of water, a dusty window--
the irreducible incomplete connection
between the dead and living or between man and woman in this
savagely fathered and unmothered world.
The other side of a translucent curtain--
a sheet of water, a dusty window--
Non-being utters its flat tones.
The speech of an actor learning his lines phonetically--
the final autistic statement of the self-destroyer.
All my energy reaches out tonight
to comprehend a miracle beyond raising the dead--
the undead to watch back on the road of birth.
I am an American woman--
I turned that over like a leaf pressed in a book
I stop and look up from into the coals of the stove
or the black square of the window.
Foot-slogging through the Bering Strait--
jumping from the Arbella to my death.
Chained to the corpse beside me, I feel my pains begin.
I am washed up on this continent-- shipped here
to be fruitful, my body a hollow ship
bearing sons to the wilderness-- sons who ride away
on horseback, daughters whose juices drain
like mine into the arroyo of stillbirths, massacres.
Hanged as witches, sold as breeding-wenches,
my sisters leave me, I am not the wheatfield
nor the virgin forest.
I never chose this place, yet I am of it now,
in my decent collar--
in the daguerreotype-- I pierce its legend with my look.
My hands wring the necks of prairie chickens.
I am used to blood.
When the men hit the hobo track I stay on with the children.
My power is brief and local, but I know my power.
I have lived in isolation from other women, so much
in the mining camps, the first cities,
the Great Plains winters.
Most of the time, in my sex, I was alone.
Tonight in this Northeast Kingdom
striated iris stand in a jar with daisies.
The porcupine gnaws in the shed.
Fireflies beat and simmer.
Caterpillars begin again their long, innocent climb--
the length of leaves of burdock or webbing of a garden chair.
Plain and ordinary things speak softly.
The light square on old wallpaper
where a poster has fallen down--
Robert Indiana's LOVE leftover of a decade.
I do not want to simplify.
Or-- I would simplify by naming the complexity.
It was made over-simple all along--
the separation of powers, the allotment of sufferings,
her spine cracking in labor, his plow driving
across the Indian graves.
Her hand unconscious on the cradle,
her mind with the wild geese, his mother-hatred driving him
into exile from the earth.
The refugee couple with their cardboard luggage standing
on the ramshackle landing-stage--
he was fingers frozen around his Law, she with her down quilt
sewn through iron nights--
the weight of the old world, plucked
drags after them, a random feather-bed.
And there are three different voices in the next one.
Her children dead of diphtheria, she set herself on fire
with kerosene.
O Lord I was unworthy-- thou didst find me out.
She left the kitchen scrubbed down
to the marrow of its boards.
"The penalty for barrenness is emptiness.
My punishment is my crime.
What I have failed to do, is me."
Another month without a show and this the seventh year--
O Father let this thing pass out of me.
I swear to you, I will live for the others, asking nothing.
I will ask nothing, ever, for myself.
Out back of this old house datura aura
tangles with a gentler weed, its spiked pods smelling
of bad dreams and death.
I reached through the dark, groping
past spines of nightmare to brush the leaves of sensuality.
A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history.
I cannot now lie down with a man who fears my power or reaches
for me as for death or with a lover who imagines we are not
in danger.
If it was lost that had defined us--
their lust and fear of our deep places--
we have done our time as faceless torsos licked by fire.
We are in the open, on our way--
our counterparts the pinyon jay, the small gilt-winged insect.
The Cessna throbbing level, the raven
floating in the gorge, the rose and violet vulva of the earth
filling with darkness.
Yet deep within a single sparkle of red, a human fire, and near
and yet above the western planet calmly biding her time.
They were the distractions, lust and fear,
but are themselves a key.
Everything that can be used, will be--
the fathers in their ceremonies, the genital contests,
the cleansing of blood from pubic hair.
The placenta buried in guarded, their terror
of blinding by the look of her who bore them.
If you do not believe that fear and hatred,
read the lesson again in the old dialect.
But can't you see me as a human being, he said.
What is a human being, she said.
I try to understand, he said.
What will you undertake, she said.
Will you punish me for history, he said.
What will you undertake, she said.
Do you believe in collective guilt, he said.
Let me look in your eyes, she said.
Who is here.
The Erinyes.
One to sit in judgment.
One to speak tenderness.
One to inscribe the verdict on the canyon wall.
If you have not confessed the damage--
if you have not recognized the Mother of reparations--
if you have not come to terms with the women in the mirror.
If you have not come to terms with the inscription--
the terms of the ordeal--
the discipline, the verdict--
if still you are on your way, still she awaits your coming.
"Such women are dangerous to the order of things."
And yes, we will be dangerous to ourselves,
groping through spines of nightmare--
datura tangling with a simpler herb.
Because the line dividing lucidity from darkness
is yet to be marked out.
Isolation, the dream of the frontier woman
leveling her rifle along the homestead fence
still snares our pride--
a suicidal leaf laid under the burning-glass in the sun's eye.
Any woman's death diminishes me.
[APPLAUSE]