WEBVTT

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This is the last, and
it's another long poem.

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And it's an attempt to
deal both with the personal

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and the historical,
which I feel is one--

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and also with the historical
as the history yet to be made.

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It's called "From an
Old House in America."

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Deliberately, long ago
the carcasses of old bugs

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crumbled into the
rut of the window,

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and we started sleeping here.

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Fresh June bugs batter
this June screens--

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June-lightning
batters the spiderweb.

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I sweep the wood dust
from the wood-box.

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The snout of the vacuum
cleaner sucks the past away.

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Other lives were lived here--

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mostly un-articulate.

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Yet someone left
her creamy signature

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and the trail of rusticated
Narcissus straggling up

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through meadow grass and vetch.

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Families breathed close,
boxed-in from the cold--

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hard times, short
growing season.

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The old rainwater cistern
hulks in the cellar.

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Like turning through the
contents of a drawer--

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these rusted screws,
this empty vial--

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useless.

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This box of watercolor paints
dried to insolubility--

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but this-- this pack of cards
with no card missing still

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playable and three good fuses.

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And this toy-- a little
truck scarred red,

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yet all its wheels still turn.

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The humble tenacity of
things waiting for people,

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waiting for months, for years.

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And this begins with a line
from a poem by Emily Bronte--

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often, rebuked yet
always back returning.

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I place my hand on
the hand of the dead--

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invisible palm-print
on the doorframe,

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spiked with daylilies,
green leaves

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catching in the screen door.

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Or I read the backs of
old postcards curling from

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thumbtacks, winter and summer
fading through cobweb-tinted

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panes--

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white church in
Norway, Dutch hyacinths

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bleeding azure, red
beach on Corsica,

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set pieces of the world
stuck to this house of plank.

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I flash on wife and
husband embattled,

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in the years that
dried, dim ink was wet--

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those signatures.

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If they call me man-hater, you
would have known it for a lie.

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But the you I want to speak
to has become your death.

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If I dream of you these days, I
know my dreams are mine and not

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of you.

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Yet something hangs
between us older

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and stranger than ourselves
like a translucent curtain--

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a sheet of water,
a dusty window--

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the irreducible
incomplete connection

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between the dead and living or
between man and woman in this

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savagely fathered
and unmothered world.

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The other side of a
translucent curtain--

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a sheet of water,
a dusty window--

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Non-being utters its flat tones.

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The speech of an actor learning
his lines phonetically--

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the final autistic statement
of the self-destroyer.

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All my energy
reaches out tonight

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to comprehend a miracle
beyond raising the dead--

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the undead to watch back
on the road of birth.

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I am an American woman--

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I turned that over like
a leaf pressed in a book

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I stop and look up from
into the coals of the stove

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or the black square
of the window.

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Foot-slogging through
the Bering Strait--

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jumping from the
Arbella to my death.

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Chained to the corpse beside
me, I feel my pains begin.

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I am washed up on this
continent-- shipped here

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to be fruitful, my
body a hollow ship

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bearing sons to the
wilderness-- sons who ride away

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on horseback, daughters
whose juices drain

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like mine into the arroyo
of stillbirths, massacres.

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Hanged as witches, sold
as breeding-wenches,

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my sisters leave me, I
am not the wheatfield

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nor the virgin forest.

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I never chose this place,
yet I am of it now,

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in my decent collar--

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in the daguerreotype-- I
pierce its legend with my look.

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My hands wring the necks
of prairie chickens.

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I am used to blood.

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When the men hit the hobo track
I stay on with the children.

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My power is brief and
local, but I know my power.

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I have lived in isolation
from other women, so much

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in the mining camps,
the first cities,

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the Great Plains winters.

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Most of the time, in
my sex, I was alone.

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Tonight in this
Northeast Kingdom

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striated iris stand
in a jar with daisies.

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The porcupine gnaws in the shed.

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Fireflies beat and simmer.

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Caterpillars begin again
their long, innocent climb--

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the length of leaves of burdock
or webbing of a garden chair.

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Plain and ordinary
things speak softly.

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The light square
on old wallpaper

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where a poster has fallen down--

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Robert Indiana's LOVE
leftover of a decade.

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I do not want to simplify.

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Or-- I would simplify by
naming the complexity.

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It was made
over-simple all along--

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the separation of powers,
the allotment of sufferings,

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her spine cracking in
labor, his plow driving

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across the Indian graves.

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Her hand unconscious
on the cradle,

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her mind with the wild geese,
his mother-hatred driving him

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into exile from the earth.

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The refugee couple with their
cardboard luggage standing

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on the ramshackle
landing-stage--

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he was fingers frozen around
his Law, she with her down quilt

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sewn through iron nights--

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the weight of the
old world, plucked

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drags after them, a
random feather-bed.

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And there are three different
voices in the next one.

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Her children dead of diphtheria,
she set herself on fire

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with kerosene.

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O Lord I was unworthy--
thou didst find me out.

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She left the kitchen
scrubbed down

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to the marrow of its boards.

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"The penalty for
barrenness is emptiness.

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My punishment is my crime.

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What I have failed
to do, is me."

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Another month without a show
and this the seventh year--

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O Father let this
thing pass out of me.

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I swear to you, I will live
for the others, asking nothing.

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I will ask nothing,
ever, for myself.

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Out back of this old
house datura aura

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tangles with a gentler weed,
its spiked pods smelling

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of bad dreams and death.

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I reached through
the dark, groping

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past spines of nightmare to
brush the leaves of sensuality.

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A dream of tenderness wrestles
with all I know of history.

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I cannot now lie down with a man
who fears my power or reaches

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for me as for death or with a
lover who imagines we are not

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in danger.

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If it was lost that
had defined us--

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their lust and fear
of our deep places--

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we have done our time as
faceless torsos licked by fire.

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We are in the open, on our way--

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our counterparts the pinyon jay,
the small gilt-winged insect.

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The Cessna throbbing
level, the raven

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floating in the gorge, the rose
and violet vulva of the earth

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filling with darkness.

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Yet deep within a single sparkle
of red, a human fire, and near

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and yet above the western
planet calmly biding her time.

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They were the distractions,
lust and fear,

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but are themselves a key.

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Everything that can
be used, will be--

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the fathers in their ceremonies,
the genital contests,

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the cleansing of
blood from pubic hair.

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The placenta buried in
guarded, their terror

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of blinding by the look
of her who bore them.

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If you do not believe
that fear and hatred,

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read the lesson again
in the old dialect.

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But can't you see me as
a human being, he said.

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What is a human being, she said.

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I try to understand, he said.

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What will you
undertake, she said.

00:10:37.590 --> 00:10:41.640 align:middle line:84%
Will you punish me
for history, he said.

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What will you
undertake, she said.

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Do you believe in
collective guilt, he said.

00:10:49.290 --> 00:10:51.645 align:middle line:84%
Let me look in your
eyes, she said.

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Who is here.

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The Erinyes.

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One to sit in judgment.

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One to speak tenderness.

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One to inscribe the
verdict on the canyon wall.

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If you have not
confessed the damage--

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if you have not recognized
the Mother of reparations--

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if you have not come to terms
with the women in the mirror.

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If you have not come to
terms with the inscription--

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the terms of the ordeal--

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the discipline, the verdict--

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if still you are on your way,
still she awaits your coming.

00:11:32.195 --> 00:11:35.240 align:middle line:90%


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"Such women are dangerous
to the order of things."

00:11:39.470 --> 00:11:44.030 align:middle line:84%
And yes, we will be
dangerous to ourselves,

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groping through
spines of nightmare--

00:11:47.090 --> 00:11:50.960 align:middle line:84%
datura tangling
with a simpler herb.

00:11:50.960 --> 00:11:54.410 align:middle line:84%
Because the line dividing
lucidity from darkness

00:11:54.410 --> 00:11:57.770 align:middle line:90%
is yet to be marked out.

00:11:57.770 --> 00:12:01.820 align:middle line:84%
Isolation, the dream
of the frontier woman

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leveling her rifle along
the homestead fence

00:12:05.750 --> 00:12:08.690 align:middle line:90%
still snares our pride--

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a suicidal leaf laid under the
burning-glass in the sun's eye.

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Any woman's death diminishes me.

00:12:18.350 --> 00:12:22.850 align:middle line:90%


00:12:22.850 --> 00:12:25.900 align:middle line:90%
[APPLAUSE]

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