Conference turris::womannotes-v2

    UNFINISHED WORK



We sit in the afternoon,
exchanging dreams.

Last night on a museum's stairs
I saw a strangled statue of a woman,
inside the light sang a choir of white,
like your studio today
shimmering unfinished canvases.

When you were born
I wanted to found a country
where women did not speak
the cut-throat language of pain,
where we wore our anger on our arms
like diamond bracelets,
where "love" unraveled
from the tangled skeins we inherited.

You catch my sadness
on the fine points of your eyes,
we are sisters
you hand me a painting of birches,
you hand me a bright wool comforter.
You say you dreamed
you raised a garden of waterlilies in the flood,
while you knead the clay,
under your fertile hands
wild horses raise their powerful backs.

	-- Joan K. Whaley, from "Sing Heavenly Muse," no. 2, fall 1978

   THE MEETING


I find
women can slip
from the pages of a book
just like pressed flowers
they drop singly or in sprays
transparency of queen anne's lace
orange tiger lily tough

and once I found
blooming at the center of a page
flickering through the medieval dampness
the odd exquisite
sophonisba anguissola
who painted portraits
who taught men how to paint
when she herself was blind

for a moment
I touch hyacinths   I feel
the brush stroke of petals
on my cheek


	 --  Mary Winfrey, from a recent collection of women's poetry

	  THE RAKU POTTER



All that healing contact you make
every day with the earth, handful by handful,
throwing clumps on the wheel
spinning between your legs -- mothering
each pot from its muddy glob
into a whirling vessel with shape
and a mouth. I envy you that.
In the library of our bodies,
the largest, sunniest room
is given over to what our hands know,
have always known. Hands go way back.
Before there was a word for knowledge
our Mothers welcomed us, one by one,
wet and dropping into their hands.
No one told them how to do this --
hands knew.
Now, in North Carolina, the sun
on your bare arms, your strong hands
shaping the rich Piedmont clay.
After childbirth, this is the oldest art form -- 
but I know you don't care
so long as you get your pots
to look like they fell from the moon
3,000 years ago, their azure glaze
hot-dipped in the Aegean Sea. Icarus pots!
Winged blue with melted gold,
weather-pocked like the face of the moon.
Ancient and extravagant, irregular and wild!
The mouths on these vases are so passionate
they might displace flowers with their cries -- 
so we gather baby's breath and columbine
then arrange them gently, stem by stem
with our hands.

		-- Tom Absher, from his book The Calling (1987)

	 SLEEPING IN THE FOREST



          I thought the earth
         remembered me, she
 took me back so tenderly, arranging
     her dark skirts, her pockets
   full of lichens and seeds. I slept
       as never before, a stone
      on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
   but my thoughts, and they floated
  light as moths among the branches
     of the perfect trees. All night
 I heard the small kingdoms breathing
  around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
 I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
   with a luminous doom. By morning
  I had vanished at least a dozen times
         into something better.

		-- Mary Oliver, from her book Twelve Moons

                    

    Since love began 'till love is done
    My mood with hers is tightly bound.
    We share our happiness, as one.
    When she is sad, then sad I will be found.

    A smile over breakfast tea
    Leaves rainbows in my head.
    A melancholy word to me
    Brings storm clouds full of dread.

    It may be wrong to be so tied
    To her. What can I do?
    Love never asks. Love just abides.
    And love is not yet through.

    This love (or is it foolishness?) lives on in every breath
    (It may be both.) It binds my soul from now until my death.  

    Bruce Sloane
    Unpublished poem

    
    
    .5
    
    What a lovely poem.  
    
    Deborah
    

    In womannotes version one, topic 25 is devoted to womens poetry
    
    I posted a poem about women in this file, note 249.11
    
    -Jody
    

      She walks in beauty, like the night
        Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
      And all that's best of dark and bright
        Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
      Thus mellowed to that tender light
	Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

      I'm too lazy to type in the rest so you'll have to pick up a book
      to get the next 2 verses. liesl 

    	HYPATIA


(Hypatia was an Alexandrian 
mathematician and philosopher. 
In 415 A.D. she was brutally 
murdered by a group of monks.)



They flensed my body clean
as bone. Who can blame them?
After all, I stood for
reason in an age of
piety so great,
the sky still glowed
from the library's burning.
I read Plato and pondered
the distances of stars,
my mathematics intricate
as lace. Double offense:
a woman with a mind.

You understand, I was doomed.
When I saw the monks thronging
toward me, I knew my fate.
If any of them faltered
before he dipped his shell --
honed edge gleaming --
beneath my white robe
to gouge my flesh away,
it was only a moment
until his vision claimed him
once more: centuries
of darkness, with intellect
shorn thin as ribs
singing only of God, His Word
against mine.      

    	-- Dorian B. Kottler, pub. in "Lake Street Review," 1983
    
    

    Something To Look Forward To
    
                       by Marge Piercy
                       from Available Light
    
    
    Menopause-word used as an insult:
    a menopausal woman, mind or poem
    as if not to leak regularly or on the caprice
    of the moon, the collision of egg and sperm,
    were the curse we first learned to call that blood.
    
    I have twisted myself to praise that bright splash.
    When my womb opens its lips on the full
    or dark of the moon, that connection
    aligns me as it does the sea.  I quiver,
    a compass needle thrilling with magnetism.
    
    Yet for every celebration there's the time
    it starts on a jet with the seatbelt sign on.
    Consider the trail of red amoebae
    crawling onto hostess' sheets to signal
    my body's disregard of calendar, clock.
    
    How often halfway up the side of a mountain,
    during a demonstration with the tactical police
    force drawn up in tanks between me and a toilet;
    during an endless wind machine panel with four males
    I the token woman and they with iron bladders,
    
    I have felt that wetness and wanted to strangle
    my womb like a mouse.  Sometimes it feels cosmic
    and sometimes it feels like mud.  Yes, I have prayed
    to my blood on my knees in toilet stalls
    simply to show its rainbow of deliverance.
    
    My friend Penny at twelve, being handed a napkin
    the size of an ironing board cover, cried out
    Do I have to do this from now till I die?
    No, said her mother, it stops in middle age.
    Good, said Penny, there's something to look forward to.
    
    Today supine, groaning with demon crab claws
    gouging my belly, I tell you I will secretly dance
    and pour out a cup of wine on the earth
    when time stops that leak permanently;
    I will burn my last tampons as votive candles.
    
    

    Loving The Crone
              by Marge Piercy
              from Available Light
    
    
    Two sisters, seventy and seventy-two, jogging
    one morning, are followed two blocks
    by a carload of boys hooting and mocking
    because they found it ludicrous
    that women should age and yet live.
    
    Two useful lives, union organizers,
    lovers and friends abounding, still avid
    to argue the day's paper at breakfast.
    The picket lines they marched in
    would parade from iced pole to pole.
    
    Almost everyone sitting before me imagines
    if you are clever, if you exercise to pain,
    follow fashion, consume the right products,
    you will never get old.  Fourteen forever!
    The ultimate ambition of our time.
    
    Rich old men run the world, crunching the pliant
    bones of teenagers for celery hors d'oeuvres.
    Children are broken on the rampant pricks
    of men who hate women.  The ultimate desire:
    a child who can't reach orgasm.
    
    Consequence exists like the bones in your hand.
    One used woman: we are hourly told
    that living makes us stupid.  The more
    we have done, the less we have to say.
    Old woman, hag, bag, crone, witch:
    
    in contempt for the mother's body it begins.
    In blood it ends.  If use makes us less,
    then we long to be androids, perfect
    as convertibles in the showroom, programmed
    to satisfy everyone but ourselves.
    
    If living makes women crazy, then living
    is crazy.  We are throwing away too much,
    family heirlooms lining the westward trail.
    Whenever we weep, if we understand
    we may grow like a stalactite longer, stronger.
    
    If we do not honor wisdom, we are doomed
    to stupidity, pea brains in our dinosaur tails
    ready to run ten miles around and around,
    a gerbil in a cage, or a blinded
    workhorse turning some owner's mill.
    
    
    

    Joy Road and Livernois
                   by Marge Piercy
                   from Available Light
    
    
    My name was Pat.  We used to read Poe in bed
    till we heard blood dripping in the closet.
    I fell in love with a woman who could ring
    all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.
    But she in her cape and her Caddy
    had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,
    a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets
    to strut my meek ass.  To quiet my wailing
    she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,
    the white thunder rolling over till nothing
    hurt but coming down.  One day I didn't.
    I was fifteen.  My face gleamed in the casket.
    
    My name was Evie.  We used to shoplift,
    my giggling, wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;
    we picked up boys together on the corners.
    The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,
    sent me up for prostitution because I weren't
    no virgin.  I met my boyfriend in the courts.
    Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn't
    sell us whiskey.  I liked to tote a gun.
    It was the cleanest thing I ever held.
    It was the only power I ever had.
    I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.
    A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.
    
    My name was Peggy.  Across the street from the gas-
    works, my mom raised nine kids.  My brother-
    in-law porked me while my sister gave birth
    choking me with the pillow when I screamed.
    I got used to it.  My third boyfriend knocked me up.
    Now I've been pregnant for twenty years,
    always a belly bigger than me to push around
    like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill
    on the blacktop.  Now it's my last one,
    a tumor big as a baby when they found it.
    When I look in the mirror I see my mom.
    Remember how we braided each other's hair,
    mine red, yours black.  Now I'm bald
    as an egg and nearly boiled through.
    
    I was Teresa.  I used to carry a long clasp
    knife I stole from my uncle.  Running nights
    through the twitching streets, I'd finger it.
    It made me feel as mean as any man.
    My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.
    All those hot nights riding around and around
    when we had noplace to go but back.
    Those hot nights we raced out on the highway
    faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat
    like shaken soda.  It shot in an arc
    when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,
    the knife I showed you how to use, still
    on its leather thong between my breasts
    where it didn't save me from being cut in two.
    
    I was Gladys.  Like you, I stayed in school.
    I did not lay down in back seats with boys.
    I became a nurse, married, had three sons.
    My ankles swelled.  I worked the night hours
    among the dying and accident cases.  My husband
    left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,
    a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.
    My oldest came home in a body bag.  My youngest
    ran off.  The middle one drinks beer and watches
    the soaps since the Kelsey-Hayes plant closed.
    Then my boy began to call me from the alley.
    Every night he was out there calling, Mama,
    help me!  It hurts, Mama!  Take me home.
    This is the locked ward and the drugs
    eat out my head like busy worms.
    
    With each of them I lay down, my twelve-
    year-old scrawny tough body like weathered
    wood pressed to their pain, and we taught
    each other love and pleasure and ourselves.
    We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,
    the little names.  At twelve I was violent
    in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,
    a starving weasel, all teeth and speed
    except for the sore fruit of my new breasts
    pushing out.  What did I learn?  To value
    my pleasure and how little the love of women
    can shield against the acid city rain.
    
    You surge among my many ghosts.  I never think
    I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-
    working, attractive.  Evie was brave.
    Gladys and Teresa were smart.  Peggy worked
    sixteen hours.  Pat gleamed like olivewood
    polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.
    I wriggled through an opening left just big enough
    for one.  There is no virtue in survival
    only luck, and a streak of indifference
    that I could take off and keep going.
    
    I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air
    eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs
    dangle and you jump and jump, where there are
    more drugs than books, more ways to die
    than ways to live, because I ran fast,
    ran hard, and never stopped looking back.
    It is not looking back that turned me
    to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines
    under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.
    Girls who lacked everything except trouble,
    contempt and rough times, girls
    used like urinals, you are the salt
    keeps me from rotting as the years swell.
    I am the fast train you are traveling in
    to a world of a different color, and the love
    we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch
    rages and drives onward, an engine of light.
    
    

                                                                   
    
			"comes the dawn"                
    
        after a while you learn the subtle difference
    	between holding a hand and chaining a soul
    	and you learn that love does not mean leaning
    	and company does not mean security,
    	and you begin to learn that kisses do not mean contracts
    	and presents aren't promises,
    	and you begin to accept defeats
    	with your head up and your eyes open
    	with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
    	and you learn to build all your roads on today
    	because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans
    	and futures have a way of falling down in mid flight.
    
    	after a while you learn
    	that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
    	so you plant your own garden and decorate your soul,
    	instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
    	and you learn that you really can endure,
    	that you really are strong,
    	and that you really do have worth.
    	and you learn and learn...
    
    		anonymous

    The Kitchen Window
              by Jan Clausen
              from Cameos, 12 Small Press Women Poets
    
    
    1.
    
    in Bohack
    a woman my age,
    kids in a stroller,
    is buying mayonnaise
    and chocolate bars
    
    another woman,
    maybe sixty,
    talks and talks
    as she waits
    at an empty counter
    
    "it's a secret.
    no one's saying
    a goddamned thing.
    what's your number?
    where can i go
    to get some service?"
    
    the checker
    checks
    
    2.
    
    i don't know anything 
    about the pain
    
    labor
    
    years/afternoons
    raising kids
    
    old hits
    on the radio
    dishes, diapers, mopping
    
    the trash-filled yard
    beneath the kitchen window
    where trees
    are going to
    get rich quick and 
    bloom
    
    i can't guess
    the checker's
    peculiar weariness,
    which muscle
    aches the most
    with all that standing
    
    i read Tillie Olsen
    on the thirties
    
    over and over
    i try to imagine
    my mother
    
    3.
    
    you show me the ring,
    the date incised in gold,
    the curled-up snapshots,
    clothes to be given away:
    high heels in a closet,
    garter belt in a drawer
    
    "transcendentalist periodicals,"
    "shakespeare's morphology,"
    your grad school papers
    
    the child
    now learning to read
    came out of your body
    
    4.
    
    "when you and me and mommy
    live together,"
    Anna tells me, "you
    can be the daddy,
    because when you play house
    you need a mommy
    and a daddy."
    
    5.
    
    and what will we do
    together
    in this place
    with its tile,
    its acqua kitchen,
    back yard
    concreted over
    
    the suburbs
    yawn in my genes
    like inherited cancer
    
    i'm left
    with a love for/
    horror of
    formica
    
    6.
    
    we pioneer
    this life.  like
    pulling teeth.
    
    weeks when
    sleep recedes,
    spring, everything
    healing or green,
    
    the river under
    thirty feet of rock.
    
    there's no 
    outwitting pain.
    
    mother,
    anaesthetized
    when i was born,
    
    was there something,
    once, you
    passionately wanted?
    
    is that
    the secret?
    
    7.
    
    Anna, fierce
    in her will
    to control the kittens:
    
    I want them to eat
    and
    now I want them to sleep
    
    my mother
    holed up in her
    crazy '50's faith
    
    that raising children's
    some sort of
    sculptural art
    
    a lifetime, whispering
    white
    is the color
    of culture
    
    but weeds split
    the pavement
    
    the world
    cannot be saved
    
    the whites
    will be driven
    at last
    from Africa
    
    8.
    
    no words, you say
    
    we slip
    through the nets
    of speech
    
    mother, lover, friend
    
    9.
    
    rain on the roof
    
    i stroke the shape of your head
    the soft hair snags
    it tears my cold-cracked fingers
    
    beneath, the living roots
    
    all night you hold me
    on and on we fly
    into the storm
    
    10.
    
    how is it possible
    
    space
    around a life
    
    for poems
    for cats
    for children
    
    Hiroshima
    five years before my birth
    
    i'm baking bread
    it's twelve degrees outside
    
    green plant on the washer
    sun through the kitchen window
    
    

		SPRING



In April the Morgan was bred. I was chased away.
I heard the cries of the horses where I waited,
And the laughter of the men.

Later the farmer who owned the stallion
Found me and said, "She's done.
You tell your daddy he owes me fifty dollars."

I rode her home at her leisure
And let her, wherever she wanted,
Tear with her huge teeth, roughly,

Blades from the fields of spring.

	-- Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons

   FLOWER MOON -- HOW SHE TRAVELS



She moves only by night and on a south wind.
The wild ducks are her envoys,

flying ahead,
scouting the ponds, summoning

turtles and dragonflies out of the beds
of roots and mud.

The wagon she hauls with her
is full of new leaves

which she sprinkles over the trees as she passes, crying out
the words necessary to birth;

and small fish
she shakes into ditches and streams;

and once I saw her
lift from her wagon the Flower Moon,

round and full and milk-white
as a woman's breast,

and she kissed it,
she sang to it,

she tossed it high above the trees, then gave
another to the shining river.

	-- Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons

SOLITARY OBSERVATION
BROUGHT BACK FROM A
SOJOURN IN HELL


 At midnight, tears
 Run into your ears.

	-- Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries

	ZOE'S GIFT


After the ceremony in Sorrento
Zoe, friend of the groom and trapeze artist,
performed above the lawn
overlooking Frenchman's Bay,
the day perfect and everyone decked out
in summer whites.

Bizarre in sequined tights
against sky and the Maine woods,
the woman pumped higher and higher
only to lift off, turn and catch
the falling bar without a net.
She worked the swing easy as a child
then fell away -- hooked at the knees
upside down and smiling.
The bride's father had to look away
as she hung by two hands, now one,
somersaulting in a shiny wheel
above our heads. Finally,
a rope around one ankle, her torso
thrust forward like the figure
on the prow of a ship,
she swept the air in a deep pendulum
until coming to rest.

For days I couldn't stop thinking of her
and her impact on the wedding party -- 
guests now feeling small for gifts
of flatware, an appliance,
the bride and groom altered
in their delicate balance
after Zoe, spirit-like,
added to their marriage
fruits of a daring solitude.

	-- Tom Absher, The Calling, 1987

      A verse from the poem Beppo

      She was not old or young,nor at the years
      Which certain people call a "certain age",
      Which yet the most uncertain age appears,
      Because I never heard, nor could engage
      A person yet by by prayers, or bribes, or tears,
      To name, define by speech, or write on page,
      The period meant precisely by that word,-
      Which surely is exceedingly absurd.

	MISCARRIAGE



Shadow never to be,
the apple tree you will not climb
sheds its white blossoms.

I had for you a roomful of animals
all able to speak and understand;
I made for you
a willow harp.

I meant to show you, along the brook
balsams drenched with morning,
and underfoot
snail-track,
shy newt.

At night you would have roped the moon
and galloped bareback
over meadows of stars,
sure of your own way
in the stirrups of the wind.

Now the years without you
strew this house, leaf-still.
I sew them in a white pillow
and hide my sorrow beneath it
like a lost tooth.

I will never even know your name.

I braid these lines into your long hair.

		-- Dorian B. Kottler, A Pause in the Light, 1980

    Lot's Wife
          by Anna Akhmatova
          from The Penguin Book of Women Poets
          (Translated from Russian by Richard Wilbur)
    
    
    The just man followed then his angel guide
    Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright,
    But a wild grief in his wife's bosom cried,
    Look back, it is not too late for a last sight
    
    Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square
    Where once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,
    And the tall house with empty windows where
    You loved your husband and your babes were born.
    
    She turned, and looking on the bitter view
    Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;
    Into transparent salt her body grew,
    And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.
    
    Who would waste tears upon her?  Is she not
    The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?
    Yet in my heart she will not be forgot
    Who, for a single glance, gave up her life.
    

    <-- re:  Lot's Wife
    
    Wonderful poem... thank you, Lorna

    Burial
        by Alice Walker
        from Revolutionary Petunias
    
    1
    
    They have fenced in the dirt road
    that once led to Wards Chapel
    A.M.E. church,
    and cows graze
    among the stones that
    mark my family's graves.
    The massive oak is gone
    from out the church yard,
    but the giant space is left
    unfilled;
    despite the two-lane blacktop
    that slides across
    the old, unalterable
    roots.
    
    11
    
    Today I bring my own child here;
    to this place where my father's
    grandmother rests undisturbed
    beneath the Georgia sun,
    above her the neatstepping hooves
    of cattle.
    Here the graves soon grow back into the land.
    Have been known to sink.  To drop open without
    warning.  To cover themselves with wild ivy,
    blackberries.  Bittersweet and sage.
    No one knows why.  No one asks.
    When Burning Off Day comes, as it does
    some years,
    the graves are haphazardly cleared and snakes
    hacked to death and burned sizzling
    in the brush. . .  The odor of smoke, oak
    leaves, honeysuckle.
    Forgetful of geographic resolutions as birds,
    the farflung young fly South to bury
    the old dead.
    
    111
    
    The old women move quietly up
    and touch Sis Rachel's face.
    "Tell Jesus I'm coming," they say.
    "Tell Him I ain't goin' to be
    long."
    
    My grandfather turns his creaking head
    away from the lavender box.
    He does not cry.  But looks afraid.
    For years he called her "Woman";
    shortened over the decades to
    "'Oman."
    On the cut stone for "Oman's" grave
    he did not notice
    they had misspelled her name.
    (The stone reads Racher Walker - not "Rachel" -
    Loving Wife, Devoted Mother.)
    
    iv
    
    As a young woman, who had known her?  Tripping
    eagerly, "loving wife," to my grandfather's
    bed.  Not pretty, but serviceable.  A hard
    worker, with rough, moist hands.  Her own two
    babies dead before she came.
    Came to seven children.
    To aprons and sweat.
    Came to quiltmaking.
    Came to canning and vegetable gardens
    big as fields.
    Came to fields to plow.
    Cotton to chop.
    Potatoes to dig.
    Came to multiple measles, chickenpox,
    and croup.
    Came to water from springs.
    Came to leaning houses one story high.
    Came to rivalries.  Saturday night battles.
    Came to straightened hair, Noxzema, and
    feet washing at the Hardshell Baptist church.
    Came to zinnias around the woodpile.
    Came to grandchildren not of her blood
    whom she taught to dip snuff without
    sneezing.
    
    Came to death blank, forgetful of it all.
    
    When he called her "Oman" she no longer
    listened. Or heard, or knew, or felt.
    
    v
    
    It is not until I see my first grade teacher
    review her body that I cry.
    Not for the dead, but for the gray in my
    first grade teacher's hair.  For memories
    of before I was born, when teacher and
    grandmother loved each other; and later
    above the ducks made of soap and the orange-
    legged chicks Miss Reynolds drew over
    my own small hand
    on paper with wide blue lines.
    
    vi
    
    Not for the dead, but for memories.  None of
    them sad.  But seen from the angle of her
    death.
    

    ON A PHOTOGRAPH BY EMMET GOWIN



Camera-blurred in the corner an old woman
sits, not attending. A young woman,
angry because she is tired, perhaps,
of sudden photographer's orders ("let's see
those tits"), or angrily proud, taunting
Age and Death, yanks open her sweater
-- or is she trying to cover against
the lewdness of the lens? -- displaying
her breast, the milk-yielding
human breast.

Proud or shy or petulant,
her anger says that God is male,
and male the lens, and male the thought
that stills her, steals this much of her,
and loves her by consumption.

		-- Barry Spacks, from his book Teaching the Penguins to Fly

      I had no time to hate. because
      The grave would hinder me,
      And life was not so ample I
      Could finish enmity.

      Nor had I time to love; but since
      Some industry must be,
      The little toil of love, I thought,
      Was large enough for me.
      

      We never know how high we are
	Till we are called to rise;
      And then, if we are true to plan,
	Our Statures touch the skies.

      ------------------------------

      When I hoped I feared,
      Since I hoped I dared;

    from the Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley
    
    
    The Old Philanthropist
    
    
    His millions make museums bright;
      Harvard anticipates his will;
    While his young typist weeps at night
      Over a druggist's bill.
    
    
    

          STRAWBERRY MOON


		1.

My great-aunt Elizabeth Fortune
stood under the honey locust trees,
the white moon over her and a young man near.
The blossoms fell down like white feathers,
the grass was warm as a bed, and the young man
full of promises, and the face of the moon
a white fire.

Later,
when the young man went away and came back with a bride,
Elizabeth
climbed into the attic.


		2.

Three women came in the night
to wash the blood away,
and burn the sheets,
and take away the child.

Was it a boy or girl?
No one remembers.


		3.

Elizabeth Fortune was not seen again
for forty years.

Meals were sent up,
laundry exchanged.

It was considered a solution
more proper than shame
showing itself to the village.


		4.

Finally, name by name, the downstairs died
or moved away,
and she had to come down,
so she did.

At sixty-one, she took in boarders,

washed their dishes,
made their beds,
spoke whatever had to be spoken,
and no more.


		5.

I asked my mother:
what happened to the man? She answered:

Nothing.
They had three children.
He worked in the boatyard.

I asked my mother: did they ever meet again?
No, she said,
thought sometimes he would come
to the house to visit.
Elizabeth, of course, stayed upstairs.


		6.

Now the women are gathering
in smoke-filled rooms,
rough as politicians,
scrappy as club fighters.
And should anyone be surprised

if sometimes, when the white moon rises,
women want to lash out
with a cutting edge?

	--Mary Oliver, from Twelve Moons

      I, being born woman and distressed
      By all the needs and notions of my kind,
      Am urged by your propinquity to find
      Your person fair,and feel a certain zest
      To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
      So subtly is the fume of life life designed,
      To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
      And leave me once again undone,possesed.
      Think not for this,however,the poor treason
      Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
      I shall remember you with love,or season
      My scorn with pity,-let me make it plain:
      I find this frenzy insuffcient reason
      For conversation when we meet again.

	Please Hear What I'm Not Saying

Don't be fooled by me.
Don't be fooled by the face I wear.
For I wear a mask, a thousand masks,
masks that I'm afraid to take off,
and none of them is me.
Pretending is an art that's second nature with me,
but don't be fooled.
For God's sake don't be fooled.
I give you the impression that I'm secure,
that all is sunnay and unruffled with me, within as well
  as without,
that confidence is my name and coolness my game,
that the water's calm and I'm in command,
and that I need no one.
But don't believe me.
My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask,
ever-varying and ever-concealing.
Beneath lies no complacence.
Beneath lies confusion and fear and aloneness.
But I hide this. I don't want anybody to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear
   being exposed.
That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind,
a nonchalant sophisticated facade,
to help me pretend,
to shield me from the glance that knows.
But such a glance is precisely my salvation.
   My only hope and I know it.
That is, if it's followed by acceptance,
if it's followed by love.
It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself,
from my own self-build prison walls,
from the barriers I so painstakingly erect.
It's the only thing that will assure me of what I can't
   assure myself,
that I'm really worth something.
But I don't tell you this. I don't dare. I'm afraid to.
I'm afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance,
will not be followed by love.
I'm afraid you'll think less of me, that you'll laugh,
and your laugh would kill me.
I'm afraid that deep-down I'm nothing, that I'm just
   no good,
and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game,
with a facade of assureance without
and a trembling child within.
So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks,
and my life becomes a front.
I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk.
I tell you everything that's really nothing,
and nothing of what's everything,
of what's crying within me.
So when I'm going through my routine,
do not be fooled by what I'm saying.
Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying,
what I'd like to be able to say,
what for survival I need to say,
but what I can't say.

I don't like to hide.
I don't like to play superficial phony games.
I want to stop playing them.
I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me,
but you've got to help me.
You've got to hold out your hand
even when that's the last thtng I seem to want.
Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the
   breathing dead.
Only you can call me into aliveness.
Each time you're kind and gentle and encouraging,
each time you try to understand because you really care,
my heart begins to grow wings,
very small wings,
very feeble wings,
but wings!
With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.

I want you to know how important you are to me,
how you can be a creator -- a honest-to-God creator --
of the person that is me
if you choose too.
You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble,
you alone can remove my mask,
you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panice
   and uncertainty, from my lonely prison,
if you choose to.
Please choose to. Do not pass me by.
It will not be easy for you.

A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.
The nearer you approach to me
the blinder I may strike back.
It's irrational, but despite what the books say about man,
often I am irrational.
I fight against the very thing that I cry out for.
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls,
and in this lies my hope.
Please try to beat down those walls
with firm hands
but with gentle hands
for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well.
For I am every mand you meet
and I am every woman you meet.

      What my lips have kissed,and where, and why,
      I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
      Under my head till morning; but the rain
      Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
      Upon the glass and listen for reply,
      And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
      For unremembered lads that not again
      Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
      Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
      Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
      Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
      I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
      I only know that summer sang in me
      A little while, that in me sings no more.

                                          by Marge Piercy
                                          (from To Be of Use)
    
    Burying Blues for Janis
    
    
    Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone
    of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy
    that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases
    until I could, partially, break free.
    How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?
    Your voice would grate right on the marrow-filled bone
    that cooks up that rich stew of masochism where we swim,
    that woman is born to suffer, mistreated and cheated.
    We are trained to that hothouse of ripe pain.
    Never do we feel so alive, so in character
    as when we're walking the floor with the all-night blues.
    When some man not being there who's better gone
    becomes a lack that swells up to a gaseous balloon
    and flattens from us all thinking and sensing and purpose.
    
    Oh, the downtrodden juicy longdrawn female blues:
    you throbbed up there with your face slightly swollen
    and your barbed hair flying energized and poured it out,
    the blast of a furnace of which the whole life is the fuel.
    You embodied that good done-in mama who gives and gives
    like a fountain of boozy chicken soup to a rat race of men.
    You embodied the pain hugged to the breasts like a baby.
    You embodied the beautiful blowzy gum of passivity,
    woman on her back to the world endlessly hopelessly raggedly
    offering a brave front to be fucked.
    That willingness to hang on the meathook and call it love,
    that need for loving like a screaming hollow in the soul,
    that's the drug that hangs us and drags us down
    deadly as the icy sheet of skag that froze your blood.
    

                                            by Alice Walker
                                          (from Goodnight, Willie Lee,
                                           I'll See You In The Morning)
    
    At First
    
    At first I did not fight it.
    I loved the suffering.
    It was being alive!
    I felt my heart pump the blood
    that splashed my insides
    with red flowers;
    I savored my grief
    like chilled wine.
    
    I did not know my life
    was being shredded
    by an expert.
    
    It was my friend Gloria
    who saved me.  Whose glance said "Really,
    you've got to be kidding.  Other
    women have already done this
    sort of suffering for you,
    or so I thought."
    

                                        by Susan North
                                        (from Cameos, 12 Small Press
                                          Women Poets)
    
    
    Farmers' Almanac, Or A Guide To Loving
    
    
    do it carefully
    when you choose
    the fiction to feed your life
    keep in mind   resistance to drought
    susceptibility to disease
    above all check this label
       can withstand
       long periods of neglect
    
    prepare the earth
    memorize the predictions
    of waxing and waning
    
    do not expect anything
    what the rain brings to others
    may never be yours
    
    for lightning observe the standard precautions
       when your hair stands on end
       fall to your knees
       you may pray but touch nothing metal
    
    when you come to the friable days
    rebuild your fences rekindle the rust
    never invest more 
    than you can afford to lose
    
    

      None ever was in love with me but grief.
	    She wooed me from the day that I was born;
      She stole my playthings first, the jealous thief,
	    And left me there forlorn.

      The birds that in my garden would have sung,
	    She scared away with her unending moan;
      She slew my lovers too when I was young,
	    And left me there alone.

      Grief, I have cursed thee often - now at last
	    To hate thy name I am no longer free;
      Caught in thy bony arms and prisoned fast,
	    I love no one but thee.

    
    Only as high
      as I reach can I grow,
    Only as far as I seek can I go,
      Only as deep as I look can I see,
    Only as much as I dream can I be.
    
    			Karen Ravn
    

                                       by Marge Piercy
                                       (from Living In The Open)
    
    Looking At Quilts
    
    
    Who decided what is useful in its beauty
    means less than what has no function besides beauty
    (except its weight in money)?
    Art without frames: it held parched corn,
    it covered the table where soup misted savor,
    it covered the bed where the body knit
    to self and other and the
    dark wool of dreams.
    
    The love of the ordinary blazes out: the backyard
    miracle: Ohio Sunflower,
                            Snail's Track,
                                          Sweet Gum Leaf,
               Moon over the Mountain.
    
    In the pattern Tulip and Peony the sense
    of design masters the essence of what sprawled
    in the afternoon: called conventionalized
    to render out the choice, the graphic wit.
    
    Some have a wistful faded posy yearning:
                                          Star of the Four Winds,
                Star of the West,
                             Queen Charlotte's Crown.
    In a crabbed humor as far from pompous
    as a rolling pin, you can trace wrinkles
    from smiling under a scorching grasshopper sun:
                 Monkey Wrench,
                             The Drunkard's Path,
                                                 Fool's Puzzle,
                             Puss in the Corner,
                                      Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,
    and the deflating
                                Hearts and Gizzards.
    
    Pieced quilts, patchwork from best gowns,
    winter woolens, linens, blankets, worked jigsaw
    of the memories of braided lives, precious
    scraps: women were buried but their clothing wore on.
    
    Out of death from childbirth at sixteen, hard
    work at forty, out of love for the trumpet vine
    and the melon, they issue to us:
                                    Rocky Road to Kansas,
                       Job's Troubles,
                                Crazy Ann,
                                          The Double Irish Chain,
                       The Tree of Life:
                                        this quilt might be
    the only perfect artifact a woman
    would ever see, yet she did not doubt
    what we had forgotten, that out of her
    potatoes and colic, sawdust and blood
    she could create; together, alone,
    she seized her time and made new.
    

      It's such a little thing to weep,
	    So short a thing to sigh;
      And yet by trades the size of these
	    We men and women die!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      Success is counted sweetest
      By those who ne'er succeed.
      To comprehend a nectar
      Requires sorest need.

      Not one of all the purple host
      Who took the flag to-day
      Can tell the definition,
      So clear, of victory,

      As he, defeated dying,
      On whose forbidden ear
      The distant strains of triumph
      Break, agonized and clear.

    
    		Success
    
    To laugh often and much;
    To win the respect of intelligent people and affection
    	of children;
    To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the
    	betrayal of false friends;
    To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
    To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,
    	a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
    To know even one life hs breathed easier because you have lived.
    This is to have succeeded.
    
    	

    
    Occupation: Spinster
                by Olga Cabral
                from We Become New, Poems by Contemporary American Women
    
    
    Lawyer Dickinson's spinsterly daughter
    was mad the neighbors said: she
    hid inside a snowflake
    there being nowhere else to go.
    Fallen lightyears
    from fields of star-hooved Taurus
    into puritan body/Sapphic brain
    she the lost Pleiad
    mourned for the company of her blinding Sisters.
    
              (They come before us, the Victorian women
              prisoners of muslin caged in taffeta
              with their dim hair and drowning eyes:
              women of genius warm and womanly
              who burned in that dry spare air to their
              crystal bones.)
    
    In Amherst Emily lived on
    though the world forgot
    moving with calm coiled hair through tidy days.
    Her face shrank to a locket.  She explored
    miniaturized worlds known only to moths and angels
    walked to the far side of a raindrop-
    trespassed
    on Infinity.
    
                     (How many Emilies
                     coughed and stitched
                     in silent bell jars
                     died too young in furnished attics
                     while the Universe boiled over in its
                     starry Pail?)
    

    	What are years?
	What is our innocence,
	What is our guilt?  All are
	naked, none is safe.  And whence
	is courage: the unanswered question,
	the resolute doubt, -
	dumbly calling, deafly listening - that
	in misfortune, even death,
	encourages others
	and in its defeat, stirs

	the soul to be strong?  He
	sees deep and is glad, who
	accedes to mortality
	And in his imprisonment rises
	upon himself as
	the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
	free and unable to be,
	in its surrenduring
	find its continuing.
	
	So he who strongly feels,
	behaves.  The very bird
	grown taller as he sings, steels
	his form straight up.  Though he is captive,
	he says, satisfaction is a lovely
	thing, how pure a thing is joy,
	This is mortality,
	This is eternity.
	
			Marianne Moore

    
is an enchanted thing
	like the glaze on a
katydid wing
		subdivide by sun
		till the nettings are legion.

Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti;
like the apteryx-awl
	as a beak, or the
kiwi's rain-shawl
		of haired feathers, the mind
		feeling its way as though blind,
walks along with its eyes on the ground.

It has memory's ear
	that can hear without
having to hear.
		Like the gyroscope's fall
		truly unequivocal
because trued by regnant certainty,

it is a power of
	strong enchantment.  It
is like the dove -
		neck animated by
		sun; it is memory's eye;
it's conscientious inconsistency.

It tears off the vail; tears
	the temptation, the
mist the heart wears,
		from its eyes, - if the heart
		has a face; it takes apart
dejection.  It's fire in the doveneck's

iridescence; in the
	inconsistencies
of Scarlatti.
		Unconfusion submits
		its confusion to proof; it's
not a Herod's oath that cannot change.


		Marianne Moore

      my naked lady framed
      in twilight is an accident

      whose niceness betters easily the intent
      of genius-
		  painting wholly feels ashamed
      before this music, and poetry cannot
      go near because perfectly fearful.

      meanwhile these speak her wonderful
      But i (having in my arms caught

      the picture) hurry it slowly

      to my mouth, taste the accurate demure
      ferocious
	    rhythm of
			precise
      laziness. Eat the price

      of an imaginable gesture

      exact warm unholy

	It is not what they intend,
	But we are light-struck,
	Blinded by their presence,
	When all they want is to *see* us.

	We have to turn away,
	Cannot look at the huge, deep Unknown
	That speaks through their eyes.
	They strip us down to the infant gaze
	Still deep in the sky,
	Still rooted somewhere we cannot remember.
	
	Angel, look away.
	I cannot afford to yield the last defence,
	To go back --
	
	"Not back, but deeper,"
	Said the angel, folding his wings
	To wait.


		May Sarton

	It is still you who
	Nourish the root of sorrow
	Are green in the bough
	Of my secret joy:
	I lie in the shadow
	Lovely and intricate
	Of your many leaves
	Where the gloom weaves
	Wind through the sunlight
	Within a tree of light,
	Splendor of green and fire
	That shelters poetry
	In the hour of desire
	But in the wintry hour
	Covers the fire with snow
	Under an icy bough.
	
	Surely will come the hour
	Beyond all presence,
	Far beyond time or sense,
	Green at the heart of fire,
	Fire at the heart of snow,
	Rose at the heart of pain
	When I'll find you again,
	Strange, subtle power.
	

		May Sarton

	At the bottom of the green field she lies,
	Abandoned foreground to the rooted trees,
	To the house and children; in her open eyes
	The birds' wings flash; there is a hum of bees
	In the air overhead, in the flowers of the lime.
	She is a plant.  Without words, she speaks;
	Without moving, grows; lives without time.
	Has she been there for days, perhaps for weeks?

	At the bottom of the green field she lies,
	Without moving, moves.  She becomes a stream.
	Clouds pass in and out of her open eyes
	And no one knows the content of this dream.
	She has become a source, mysterious flow
	That is forever rooted and forever passes,
	The ripple of silence, infinitely slow.
	She lies as if asleep down in the grasses.
	
	When will the diviner be sent for to strike
	The hidden source with his wand and the wand
	Leap out of his hands as the waters wake,
	She wake from her dreams, alive and stunned,
	The heart shape transparent in her breast,
	And listen to its voice, buried so deep
	She does not hear, nor know how far from sleep,
	How far this intense growth is from rest.
	
	At the bottom of the green field she lies
	Deep in the spring, lost in its mysteries.
	
			May Sarton

	I think I must begin again to grow
	And very humbly, for I see how long
	And difficult the process has become,
	What thirsty seasons every plant must know,
	as well as storm, petals beaten by hail,
	Above all the long patient empty days
	Before the flower can bring itself to go
	Lightly and naturally as if in praise
	Of the small knotted seed, the secret will
	Which must destroy in order to fulfill.
	
	
			May Sarton

    
    Talking To My Grandmother
    Who Died Poor
    (while hearing Richard Nixon declare
     "I am not a crook.")
                               by Alice Walker
                               from "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See
                                     You In The Morning"

    no doubt i will end my life as poor as you
    without the wide veranda of your dream
    on which to sit and fan myself slowly
    without the tall drinks to cool my bored
    unthirsty throat.
    you will think: Oh, my granddaughter failed
    to make something of herself
    in the White Man's World!
    
    but i really am not a crook
    i am not descended from crooks
    my father was not president of anything
    and only secretary to the masons
    where his dues were a quarter a week
    which he did not shirk to pay.
    
    that buys me a new dream
    though i may stray
    and lust after jewelry
    and a small house by the sea:
    yet i could give up even lust
    in proper times
    and open my doors to strangers
    or live in one room.
    that is the new dream.
    
    in the meantime i hang on
    fighting addiction
    to the old dream
    knowing i must train myself to want
    not one bit more
    than what i need to keep me alive
    working
    and recognizing beauty
    in your
            so nearly
    undefeated face.
    

    Facing The Way
               by Alice Walker
               from "Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You In The Morning"
    
    the fundamental question about revolution
    as lorraine hansberry was not afraid to know
    is not simply whether i am willing to give up my life
    but if i am prepared to give up my comfort:
    clean sheets on my bed
    the speed of the dishwasher
    and my gas stove
    gadgetless
    but still preferable to cooking out of doors
    over a fire of smouldering roots
    my eyes raking the skies for planes
    the hills for army tanks.
    paintings i have revered stick against my walls
    as unconcerned as saints
    their perfection alone sufficient for their defense.
    yet not one lifeline thrown by the artist
    beyond the frame
    reaches the boy whose eyes were target
    for a soldier's careless aim
    or the small girl whose body napalm
    a hot bath after mass rape
    transformed
    or the old women who starve on muscatel
    nightly
    on the streets of New York.
    
    it is shameful how hard it is for me to give
    them up!
    to cease this cowardly addiction
    to art that transcends time
    beauty that nourishes a ravenous spirit
    but drags on the mind whose sale would patch
    a roof
    heat the cold rooms of children. replace an eye.
    feed a life.
    
    it does not comfort me now to hear
    thepoorweshallhavewithusalways
    (Christ should never have said this:
    it makes it harder than ever to change)
    just as it failed to comfort me
    when i was poor.
    
    

    Morning Poem
            by Mary Oliver
            from Dream Work
    
    Every morning
    the world
    is created.
    Under the orange
    
    sticks of the sun
    the heaped 
    ashes of the night
    turn into leaves again
    
    and fasten themselves to the high branches -
    and the ponds appear
    like black cloth
    on which are painted islands
    
    of summer lilies.
    If it is your nature
    to be happy
    you will swim away along the soft trails
    
    for hours, your imagination
    alighting everywhere.
    And if your spirit
    carries within it
    
    the thorn
    that is heavier than lead -
    if it's all you can do
    to keep on trudging -
    
    there is still
    somewhere deep within you
    a beast shouting that the earth
    is exactly what it wanted -
    
    each pond with its blazing lilies
    is a prayer heard and answered
    lavishly,
    every morning,
    
    whether or not
    you have ever dared to be happy,
    whether or not
    you have ever dared to pray.
    

    Unlearning To Not Speak
                    by Marge Piercy
                    from To Be Of Use
    
    Blizzards of paper
    in slow motion
    sift through her.
    In nightmares she suddenly recalls
    a class she signed up for
    but forgot to attend.
    Now it is too late.
    Now it is time for finals:
    losers will be shot.
    Phrases of men who lectured her
    drift and rustle in piles:
    Why don't you speak up?
    Why are you shouting?
    You have the wrong answer,
    wrong line, wrong face.
    They tell her she is womb-man,
    babymachine, mirror image, toy,
    earth mother and penis-poor,
    a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream
    rapidly melting.
    She grunts to a halt.
    She must learn again to speak
    starting with I
    starting with We
    starting as the infant does
    with her own true hunger
    and pleasure
    and rage.
    

    Wild Geese
           by Mary Oliver
           from Dream Work
    
    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.
    

    Prayer for My Daughter
    	by Marilyn Hacker
    
    You'll be
    coming home alone on the AA
    local from Canal St., 1 A.M.
    Two black girls, sixteen, bushy
    in plaid wool jackets, fiddle
    with a huge transistor radio.
    A stout bespectacled white woman reads
    NOVY MIR
    poking at a gray braid.
    A thin blue blonde dozes on shopping bags.
    Tobacco-colored, hatchet-faced and square,
    another mumbles in her leather collar.
    Three sharp Latinas jive round the center post,
    	bouncing
    a pigtailed baby, tiny sparkling
    earrings, tiny work-overalls.
    A scrubbed corduroy girl wearing a slide-rule
    	eyes
    a Broadway redhead wearing green fingernails.
    A huge-breasted drunk, vines
    splaying on cheeks, inventively
    slangs the bored black
    woman in a cop suit, strolling.
    You'll get out at 81st St. (Planetarium)
    and lope upstairs, traveling light-years.
    The war is over!

    		Copyright � 1978
        	from _Millenial_Women_
	        edited by Virginia Kidd

    She Proves the Inconsistency of the Desires
    and Criticism of Men Who Accuse Women
    of What They Themselves Cause
                          by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
                          (1648-1695 Mexico)
                          Translated from Spanish by Aliki Barnstone
                          (from A Book of Women Poets From Antiquity
                                To Now)
    Foolish men who accuse
    women unreasonably,
    you blame yet never see
    you cause what you abuse.
    
    You crawl before her, sad,
    begging for a quick cure;
    why ask her to be pure
    when you have made her bad?
    
    You combat her resistance
    and then with gravity,
    you call frivolity
    the fruit of your intents.
    
    In one heroic breath
    your reason fails, like a wild
    bogeyman made up by a child
    who then is scared to death.
    
    With idiotic pride
    you hope to find your prize:
    a regal whore like Thais
    and Lucretia for a bride.
    
    Has anyone ever seen
    a stranger moral fervor:
    you who dirty the mirror
    regret it is not clean?
    
    You treat favor and disdain
    with the same shallow mock-
    ing voice: love you and you squawk,
    demur and you complain.
    
    No answer at her door
    will be a proper part:
    say no - she has no heart,
    say yes - and she's a whore.
    
    Two levels to your game
    in which you are the fool:
    one you blame as cruel,
    one who yields, you shame.
    
    How can one not be bad
    the way your love pretends
    to be? Say no and she offends.
    Consent and you are mad.
    
    With all the fury and pain
    your whims cause her, it's good
    for her who has withstood
    you.  Now go and complain!
    
    You let her grief take flight
    and free her with new wings.
    Then after sordid things
    you say she's not upright.
    
    Who is at fault in all
    this errant passion? She
    who falls for his pleas, or he
    who pleads for her to fall?
    
    Whose guilt is greater in
    this raw erotic play?
    The girl who sins for pay
    or man who pays for sin?
    
    So why be shocked or taunt
    her for the steps you take?
    Care for her as you make
    her, or shape her as you want,
    
    but do not come with pleas
    and later throw them in
    her face, screaming of sin
    when you were at her knees.
    
    You fight us from our birth
    with weapons of arrogance.
    Between promise and pleading stance,
    you are devil, flesh and earth.
    
    

    Eves Apologie
            by Emilia Lanier
            (1569-1645 England)
             from A Book of Women Poets From Antiquity To Now
    
    Till now your indiscretion sets us free
    And makes our former fault much less appeare;
    Our Mother Eve, who tasted of the Tree,
    Giving to Adam what shee held most deare,
    Was simply good, and had no powre to see,
    The after-comming harme did not appeare:
        The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide,
        Before our fall so sure a plot had laide.
    
    That undiscerning Ignorance perceav'd
    No guile, or craft that was by him intended;
    For had she knowne, of what we were bereav'd,
    To his request she had not condiscended.
    But she (poor soule) by cunning was deceav'd,
    No hurt therein her harmelesse Heart intended:
         For she alleadg'd Gods word, which he denies,
         That they should die, but even as Gods, be wise.
    
    But surely Adam can not be excusde,
    Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame;
    What Weaknesse offered, Strength migh have refusde,
    Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame:
    Although the Serpents craft had her abusde,
    Gods holy word ought all his actions frame,
          For he was Lord and King of all the earth,
          Before poore Eve had either life or breath.
    
    Who being fram'd by Gods eternall hand,
    The perfect'st man that ever breath'd on earth;
    And from Gods mouth receiv'd that strait command,
    The breach whereof he knew was present death:
    Yea having powre to rule both Sea and Land,
    Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath
          Which God had breathed in his beauteous face,
          Bringing us all in danger and disgrace.
    
    And then to lay the fault on Patience backe,
    That we (poore women) must endure it all;
    We know right well he did discretion lacke,
    Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all;
    If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
    The fruit being faire perswaded him to fall:
          No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
          If he would eate it, who powre to stay him?
    
    Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love,
    Which made her give this present to her Deare,
    That what shee tasted, he likewise might prove,
    Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
    He never sought her weakenesse to reprove,
    With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare:
           Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
           From Eves fair hand, as from a learned Booke.
    
    If an Evill did in her remaine,
    Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all;
    If one of many Worlds could lay a staine
    Upon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall
    To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine;
    What will so fowle a fault amongst you all?
           Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay,
           But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
    
    Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
    Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit:
    All mortal sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
    Are not to be compared unto it:
    If many worlds would altogether trie,
    By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get;
            This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
            as doth the Sunne, another little starre.
    
    Then let us have our Libertie againe,
    And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie;
    You came not in the world without our paine,
    Make that a barre against your crueltie;
    Your fault being greater, why should you disdaine
    Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
             If one weake woman simply did offend,
             This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.
    

    Seventeen Warnings in Search of a
            Feminist Poem
                      by Erica Jong
    
    1 Beware of the man who denounces ambition;
             his fingers itch under his gloves.
    
    2 Beware of the man who denounces war
             through clenched teeth.
    
    3 Beware of the man who denounces women writers;
             his penis is tiny & cannot spell.
    
    4 Beware of the man who wants to protect you;
             he will protect you from everything but
               himself.
    
    5 Beware of the man who loves to cook;
             he will fill your kitchen with greasy pots.
    
    6 Beware of the man who loves your soul;
             he is a bullshitter.
    
    7 Beware of the man who denounces his mother;
             he is a son of a bitch.
    
    8 Beware of the man who spells son of a bitch as one
      word;
             he is a hack.
    
    9 Beware of the man who loves death too well;
             he is taking out insurance.
    
    10 Beware of the man who loves life too well;
             he is a fool.
    
    11 Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists;
             he is afraid.
    
    12 Beware of the man who trusts psychiatrists;
             he is in hock.
    
    13 Beware of the man who picks your dresses;
             he wants to wear them.
    
    14 Beware of the man you think is harmless;
             he will surprise you.
    
    15 Beware of the man who cares for nothing but
       books;
             he will run like a trickle of ink.
    
    16 Beware of the man who writes flowery love letters;
             he is preparing for years of silence.
    
    17 Beware of the man who praises liberated women;
             he is planning to quit his job.
    

	IN THE HOSPITAL



When they came at me with sharp knives
I put perfume under my nose,

When they knocked me out on the operating table
I dreamed I was flying

When they asked me embarrassing questions
I remembered the clouds in the sky, 

When they were about to drown me
I floated

On their inquisitive glances I drifted
Like a leaf becalmed in a pool. 

When they laid harsh hands on me
I thought of fireworks I had seen with you, 

When they told me I was sick and might die
I left them and went away with you to where I live,

When they took off my right breast
I gave it to them.

		-- Patricia Goedicke, from Her Soul Beneath the Bone:
				      Women's Poetry on Breast Cancer,
				      University of Illinois Press,
				      1988

	ONE MORE TIME



Next morning, at the Medical Center
Though the X-ray Room swallows me whole,

Though cold crackles in the corridors
I brace myself against it and then relax.

Lying there on the polished steel table
I step right out of my body,

Suspended in icy silence
I look at myself from far off
Calmly, I feel free

Even though I'm not, now
Or ever:

The metal teeth of Death bite
But spit me out

One more time:

When the technician says breathe
I breathe.

		-- Patricia Goedicke, from Her Soul Beneath the Bone:
				      Women's Poetry on Breast Cancer,
				      University of Illinois Press,
				      1988

		radical



fear-trembling, fire-dry, in pill-sheathed
darkness, wrenching me from sleep to bargain, one last time,
with those dwarf anarchists beneath my breast.
testing positive, this time tomorrow, I will lie lopsided,
pruned of those cells winking in my flesh
like hot, demented diamonds.

black-stitched, waiting for my husband's hand,
I shall be chastely sponged,
with one less secret, as we simulate our passion,
as we both pretend night hides my plundered heaviness,
this map of battle.

		-- Gayle Ellen Harvey, from Her Soul Beneath the Bone:
		   		       Women's Poetry on Breast Cancer,
				       University of Illinois Press,
				       1988

    Divorce 3
         by Tove Ditlevsen
         from The Other Voice, Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in
                               Translation
         (translated from Danish by Ann Freeman)
    
    It is not easy
    to be alone
    other people
    have impatient
    waiting-room eyes.
    The floor pulls
    your steps away
    underneath you.
    You move
    hand over hand
    from hour to hour
    A vocabulary
    of around
    a hundred words
    was not included
    in the division of the household.
    
    The craving for something annoying
    the lack of strong smells.
    Cold smoke in the curtains.
    
    The bed is
    too wide now.
    Women friends leave
    at potato-boiling time.
    
    Freedom
    comes first
    with the next train
    an unknown
    traveler
    who doesn't
    like children.
    The dog is
    uneasy
    sniffs at
    the wrong pants legs
    is soon
    in heat.
    
    You read
    books
    watch television
    take in
    nothing
    are suddenly
    very happy
    in the morning
    and in despair
    before evening.
    
    It's a transition
    girlfriends say
    something you have 
    to go through.
    Weightless as an
    astronaut
    you float around
    in empty rooms
    and wait
    for the freedom
    to do
    what you
    no longer
    want to do.
    

    I Have The Right
           by Ana Blandiana
           from The Other Voice
           (translated from Romanian by Laura Schiff)
    
    Do I have the right to end
    The line started at the world's beginning
    Or maybe earlier
    From the amoeba-God
    Torn in two,
    Beamed through fishes, flown through birds
    Reaching my ancestors?
    Do I have the right to answer suddenly
    No
    To the long line of suffering through which
    I've been killed from parent to parent
    To myself?
    Can I return
    In death among them
    And tell them
    That I left no one in my place?
    Oh, yes,
    How could I thank them
    Any other way
    For the stillness that awaits me
    Than by bringing them the final stillness
    By telling them: "It's over,
    My parents, my guardians
    Nothing binds you
    To life,
    You are free!"
    And with the gentle gesture with
    Which children pet their parents
    I'd tie this death halo around their forehead
    And move them smiling among saints.
    

    The Enemy's Testament
                  by Etel Adnan (Lebanon b. 1925)
                  from Another Voice, Twentieth Century Women's Poetry
                                      in Translation
    
    
    1
    With no other identity than the
          letters of V.C.
    which sounds like venereal disease:
    
    I have been softened up,
    my backbone as soft as my belly,
    
    I have been gassed,
    my eyes as blind as a worm's,
    
    I have been brainwashed,
    told of freedom until light
            passed out of my brain,
    
    I have been shot,
    more bullet holes in my flesh
            than holes in a target.
    
    
    2
    They got me out of my lair
    for I was infesting my own land,
    and they, the foreigners, came to
    liberate me,
             liberate me of my share.
    
    
    3
    So now I have this will to make:
    
    I send my brain to your center of research
    so they could see what made me fight,
    I send my eyes to your President
    so they can look him in the face,
    
            they only knew the darkness of tunnels...
    
    I send my teeth to your generals,
    they bit more rifle than bread,
    
            for hunger was my companion...
    
    I send my tongue to your cardinals,
    it will tell them what Jesus said,
    
            about the sword...
    
    My body, I leave to the Mekong River.
    

    Great Man
          by B.S. Johnson
    
    What was it like to
    live then? we asked him,
    who had lived through it.
    
    Bad, he said, it was
    not good.  I envy
    you missing it all.
    
    He seemed bored by our
    questions, interested
    more in our women.
         ---
    
        For Anne
              by Leonard Cohen
    
    With Annie gone
    Whose eyes to compare
    With the morning sun?
    
    Not that I did compare,
    But I do compare
    Now that she's gone.
          ---
    
      Slim Cunning Hands
                by Walter de la Mare
    
    Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes -
    Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;
    How false she was, no granite could declare;
       Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.
           ---
    
       For Anne Gregory
               by William Butler Yeats
    
    'Never shall a young man,
     Thrown into despair
     By those great honey-coloured
     Ramparts at your ear,
     Love you for yourself alone
     And not your yellow hair.'
    
    'But I can get a hair-dye
     And set such colour there,
     Brown, or black, or carrot,
     That young men in despair
     May love me for myself alone
     And not my yellow hair.'
    
    'I heard an old religious man
     But yesterday declare
     That he had found a text to prove
     That only God, my dear,
     Could love you for yourself alone
     And not your yellow hair.'
             ----
    
        Thou Art Like A Flower
                by Carl Sandburg
    
    "Thou art like a flower,"
    Ran an old song line.
    What flower did he mean?
    She might have been a quiet blue flower.
    She wore crimson carnations perhaps.
    She may have planted tall sunflowers
    Stooping with hollyhocks around a kitchen doorstep.
    They may have picked bluebells together
    Or talked about wild arbutus they found.
    Perhaps she knew what he meant by telling her:
    "Thou art like a flower."
            ------
    
    Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same
                          by Robert Frost
    
    He would declare and could himself believe
    That the birds there in all the garden round
    From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
    Had added to their own an oversound,
    Her tone of meaning but without the words.
    Admittedly an eloquence so soft
    Could only have had an influence upon birds
    When call or laughter carried it aloft.
    Be that as may be, she was in their song.
    Moreover, her voice upon their voices crossed
    Had now persisted in the woods so long
    That probably it never would be lost.
    Never again would birds' song be the same.
    
    And to do that to birds was why she came.
    

    Unfortunately, I can't remember, or find, the poem these lines
    are from:
    
    	God be praised for woman
    	Who gives up all her mind.
    	A man will find in no man
    	A friendship of her kind.
	Who covers all tht he has brought
    	As with her flesh and bone,
    	Nor quarrels with a thought
    	Because it is not her own.
    
    Eileen
    

      While I was fearing it, it came,
	    But came with less of fear,
      Because that fearing it so long
	    Had almost made it dear.
      There is fitting a dismay,
	    A fitting a despair.

      'Tis harder knowing it is due,
	    Than knowing it ishere.
      The trying on the utmost,
	    The morning it is new,
      Is terribler than wearing it
	    A whole existence through.

    	An island is land and sea meeting each other 
    	in calm and in storm.  

    	So, in marriage both members of a couple move 
    	like waves on the currents of their individual lives.  

    	Each will know some brokeness and must come 
    	to terms somehow with the resistance of the other.

    	Neither of them can retreat indefinitely but
    	must come up flowing toward the other. 

    	Like sea and rock, a marriage is running forward, 
    	falling back, standing fast and giving in.  

    	It is holding and embracing.


    			Star Island
    			August 28, 1982
    			Barbara Hollerorth
    

    

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Tears of Loving	(reprinted without permission) by Phyllis Haynes


"Oh, did you know Bob or Denis or Al or ...
I went to his wake the other day."
A litany of past names run again through my head...
Why do we open ourselves to this...
The pain, the despair, the tears?
Why not close yourself in,
Put up a wall, protect yourself?
Why not?
Because then you'd miss the love,
The laughter, the memories...

Another day, another name you dread to hear...
"Oh, didn't you know?"
the moment of heavy silence following,
And then your reply,
"No, I hadn't heard.  When did he die?"
Is there anything to lessen the pain?
Yes...I could put up an emotional fence, a barrier.
I could say by action and deed,
"Don't come to mean anything to me."
Then I won't hurt, then I won't cry.
Then I won't have to say,
"Why God, why?"
I could say, "Don't become important to me."

Yes, I could say and do all this.
It would be easier, so comfortable.
Then I wouldn't get that early morning call,
"Phyllis, Denis died this morning."
And hurt so bad.
Then I wouldn't worry when someone said,
"Frank's in the hospital again."
Then it wouldn't wrench my heart out
To hear someone I've come to care for
Vomiting their guts out when I call to say, "Hi!"
Or when they cry out from an injection.
Where there is no cushion of flesh.
Yes...the pain, the hurt, the tears.
Then they'd be gone.

But gone too would be the love I've gotten
From these friends now gone,
Still present now, and yet to come.
The memories would be dimmer and fade faster.
My life, my growth as a human being
Would be diminished.
Because loving sometimes means you'll hurt.
Loving means worrying when you don't see someone
For a week, two weeks, a month.
Or the operator says, "This line has been disconnected."
It sometimes means you'll pray,
"Please, God, take his pain away.
Don't let him hurt so bad."
Loving is also memories of good times
That overshadow the bad..
Shared laughter and gossip
Planning future happenings for the future
That may not come...
At least not in the way you've planned.
Your life, his life, her life, their lives, our lives
Would be so different.

Stop the pain, the hurt, the tears?
No...emphatically NO!
Because they could very well be
The tears, the pain, the hurt
Of laughter,
Of living,
Of loving...
And THIS I cannot stop.  We cannot stop.
Living, caring, giving of yourself,
Are all important things.
Loving is the all important thing.
    

    
    Now let no charitable hope
    Confuse my mind with images
    Of eagle and antelope
    I am in nature none of these

    I was, being human, born alone
    I am, being woman, sore beset
    I live by squeezing from a stone
    The little nourishment I get

    In masks outrageous and austere
    The years go by in single file
    But none has merited my fear
    And none has quite escaped my smile

    			- Elinor Wylie

(This is not a poem; however, I've reached that point in my life where
 a "whole lotta shakin's goin' on" inside, and these musings are just
    part of the overall introspection.  -Barb)
    
Silence--a word that paraphrased, means "absence of sound or noise,"
has been quite noticeable in my life lately, and I've discovered that
"silence" is actually a "quality" of absence of sound.

There is a silence that instills a sense of peace, like that of "feeling"
a forest or mountain-top--that overwhelming sense of well being that says,
"THIS is what life is all about!"

There is a silence that has "menace" to it. It instills fear and brings
ripples of nervousness to play up and down one's spine, a sense of 
"unknowingness" to each breath, and a start when noise suddenly interjects
itself.

There is a silence that is restful, as when a household settles in to sleep.

There is a silence filled with "holy" wonder, as that found in a cathedral.
A silence that indicates "higher" things go on here.

There is a silence that speaks of comfort and companionship--like the quiet
moments spent in the company of a husband or close friend.  It is the silence
of communion.  It is also the silence of understanding that says, "It's okay.
I'm here for you if you need me."  It is the silence of acceptance.

There is a silence of rejection.  One that says, "This is not for me.  You
are not for me."  It is often a silence that reflects criticism, hurt, or
guilt.  It leaves a sense of unworthiness behind.

There is the momentary gasp of silence between not knowing and knowing--like
the split second's silence as a child finally makes it's entry into the world,
or the prize is awarded, or a loved one passes on, or a verdict is rendered.
It is a silence rich in emotion and is over in a breath.

There is the silence of minds at work, of creativity at play, of the genius
of creation.  It is the silence of hope--a silence of anticipation that THIS
time, things will work!  It may be seen in the eyes of students when 
knowledge is finally comprehended, or in the eyes of a seamstress as she
puts the final stitch in a new gown.  It's a glow of satisfaction in the
eyes of a professor when she finally "gets through" to the students.

There is a silence of happiness when all is well, and there is calm knowledge
that this is so.  There is a silence of sadness, of feeling totally alone and
isolated.  There is a silence of pain endured, and a silence that is full
of excitement.

Yes, "silence" has qualities never noticed before these past few days.  Now
I find myself wondering, what other things I have missed in my quest for life?

-Barbara Haslam 6/21/89

    The Roses
          by Mary Oliver
          from American Primitive
    
    One day in summer
    when everything
    has already been more than enough
    the wild beds start
    exploding open along the berm
    of the sea; day after day
    you sit near them; day after day
    the honey keeps on coming
    in the red cups and the bees
    like amber drops roll
    in the petals: there is no end,
    believe me! to the inventions of summer,
    to the happiness your body
    is willing to bear.
    

    John Chapman
            by Mary Oliver
            from American Primitive
    
    He wore a tin pot for a hat, in which
    he cooked his supper
    toward evening
    in the Ohio forests.  He wore
    a sackcloth shirt and walked
    barefoot on feet crooked as roots.  And everywhere he went
    the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely
    as young girls.
    
    No Indian or settler or wild beast
    ever harmed him, and he for his part honored
    everything, all God's creatures!  thought little,
    on a rainy night,
    of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching
    flesh with any creatures there: snakes,
    raccoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.
    
    Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,
    at whose parents' house he sometimes lingered,
    recalled: he spoke
    only once of women and his gray eyes
    brittled into ice.  "Some
    are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt
    the pain of it, remembered it
    into her old age.
    
    Well, the trees he planted or gave away
    prospered, and he became
    the good legend, you do
    what you can if you can; whatever
    
    the secret, and the pain,
    
    there's a decision: to die,
    or to live, to go on
    caring about something.  In spring, in Ohio,
    in the forests that are left you can still find
    sign of him: patches
    of cold white fire.
    

    Trip to Bountiful
             by Michael Blumenthal
             from Against Romance
    
    It is good to have someone to sit beside
    late at night, at the movies
    when the lights have dimmed
    and the previews are over
    and you have pigged out over a large order of popcorn,
    and the old woman who has lived unhappily
    for twenty-one years with her failed son
    and her miserable daughter-in-law takes off
    to return to that beautiful small town
    where she has always remembered herself
    as perfectly happy, only to find
    that her one friend, the town's last citizen,
    has died that very morning, and that when she returns
    to the beautiful house that has remained unaltered
    in the scrapbook of her wishfulness,
    it is a mere ghost of what it once was,
    the curtains rotted against the sashes,
    the wood frame sagging like an old scarecrow,
    the neighbors' houses all abandoned
    by death, ice storms, the vicissitudes
    of profit; yes, it is good not to be alone
    at times like these, when the woman
    sitting beside you (who this very morning
    seemed merely a burden) sends small sobs
    wafting like pollen into the theater
    and squeezes your hand, and says "It's
    so sad, this movie," and you agree, yes,
    it is very sad, this movie, and this life
    in which so much we imagine as inalterable
    will be taken from us, in which
    there are so many towns where someone
    will die, this very day, alone and unclaimed
    by any of their loved ones (who have all left
    to marry in another country or find their fortunes
    in some greed-stricken Houston)
    which is why it is good to be here,
    even just tonight, in the dimly lit theater,
    with a good woman and the scent of popcorn
    and a wide bed you can climb into again together,
    as if it were the town you originally came from
    and you could always go back to it,
    as if no one could ever die in the dark alone,
    not even you.
    

          by Edna St.Vincent Millay
    
    Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
    Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
    Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
    And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
    Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
    Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
    Yet many a man is making friends with death
    Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
    It well may be that in a difficult hour,
    Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
    Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
    I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
    Or trade the memory of this night for food.
    It well may be.  I do not think I would.
    

    To a Friend Estranged from Me
                 by Edna St.Vincent Millay
    
    Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun
    That will not rise again.
    Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the
      sea,
    Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity
    That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.
    
    That this could be!
    That I should live to see
    Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,
    So fitted out with purple robe and crown
    To stand among his betters!  Face to face
    With outraged me in this once holy place,
    Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and hunted
        Truth was harboured out of danger,
    He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable
        stranger!
    
    I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:
    The hills may shift, the waters may decline,
    Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,
    But never your love from me, your hand from mine.
    
    Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.
    Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!
    You, too, farewell, - but fare not well enough to 
          dream
    You have done wisely to invite the night before the
          darkness came.
    

    Re: last 2
    
    I was just about to go searching this topic for one of my favorite
    poets to see if she was represented. .73 and .29 contain two of my
    favorites.
    
    Here's another:
    
    I shall go back again to the bleak shore
    And build a little shanty on the sand,
    In such a way that the extremest band
    Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
    But by a yard or two; and nevermore
    Shall I return to take you by the hand;
    I shall be gone to what I understand,
    And happier than I ever was before.
    The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
    The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
    Are one with all that in a moment dies,
    A little under-said and over-sung.
    But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies,
    Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

		LOVE SONG

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
  And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
  And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled--
  Oh, a gerl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world--
  And I wish I'd never met him.

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
  And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
  And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
  As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams--
  And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
  And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping regadoon
  In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,
  Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart--
  And I wish somebody'd shoot him.



			MEN

They hail you as their morning star
Because you are teh way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They'll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They'd make of you anohter person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They'd alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.




	GENERAL REVIEW OF THE SEX SITUATION

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

    
    	Though my five children
    	starve, soon I shall bear a sixth
    	in the name of Life.

    Lines to Accompany Flowers for Eve
    
    who took heroin, then sleeping pills
    and who lies in a New York hospital
    
                        by Carolyn Kizer
    
    The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea;
    White in either case, for you are pale
    As they are, "blooming early and profusely"
    Though the azalea grows in sandier soil
    Needing less care; while cyclamen's fleshy tubers
    Are adored, yes, rooted out by some.
    One flourishes in aridness, while the other
    Feeds the love which devours.
    
    But what has flung you here for salvaging
    From a city's dereliction, this New York?
    A world against whose finger-and-breath marked windows
    These weak flares may be set.
    Our only bulwark is the frailest cover:
    Lovers touch from terror of being alone.
    The urban surface: tough and granular,
    Poor ground for the affections to take root.
    
    Left to our own devices, we devise
    Such curious deaths, comas or mutilations!
    You may buy peace, white, in sugary tincture,
    No way of knowing its strength, or your own,
    Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs
    In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters
    Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signalling
    Self-amazed, its willingness to endure.
    
    The thing to cling to is the sense of expectation.
    Who knows what may occur in the next breath?
    In the pallor of another morning we neither
    Anticipated or wanted! Eve, waken to flowers
    Unforeseen, from someone you don't even know.
    Azalea or cyclamen...we live in wonder,
    Blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension
    Though once we lay and waited for death.
    

    from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
         When the Rainbow Is Enuf
                                     by Ntozake Shange
    
    at 4:30 AM
    she rose
    movin the arms & legs that trapped her
    she sighed affirmin the sculptured man
    & made herself a bath
    of dark musk oil egyptian crystals
    & florida water to remove his smell
    to wash away the glitter
    to watch the butterflies melt into
    suds & the rhinestones fall beneath
    her buttocks like smooth pebbles
    in a missouri creek
    layin in water
    she became herself
    ordinary
    brown braided woman
    with big legs & full lips
    reglar
    seriously intendin to finish her
    night's work
    she quickly walked to her guest
    straddled on her pillows & began
                    'you'll have to go now/i've
                    a lot of work to do/& i can't
                    with a man around/here are yr pants/
                    there's coffee on the stove/its been
                    very nice/but i cant see you again/
                    you got what you came for/didnt you'
    & she smiled
    he wd either mumble curses bout crazy bitches
    or sit dumbfounded
    while she repeated
                    'i cdnt possibly wake up/with
                    a strange man in my bed/why
                    dont you go home'
    she cda been slapped upside the head
    or verbally challenged
    but she never waz
    & the ones who fell prey to the
    dazzle of hips painted with
    orange blossoms & magnolia scented wrists
    had wanted no more
    than to lay between her sparklin thighs
    & had planned on leavin before dawn
    & she had been so divine
    devastatingly bizarre the way
    her mouth fit round
    & now she stood a
    reglar colored girl
    fulla the same malice
    livid indifference as a sistah
    worn from supportin a wd be hornplayer
    or waitin by the window
                      & they knew
                      & left in a hurry
    she wd gather her tinsel &
    jewels from the tub
    & laugh gayly or vengeful
    she stored her silk roses by her bed
    & when she finished writin
    the account of her exploit in a diary
    embroidered with lilies & moonstones
    she placed the rose behind her ear
    & cried herself to sleep.
    
    

    If He Let Us Go Now
              by Shirley Williams
    
                       let me strap
    the baby in the seat, just don't say
    nothing all that while...
    
                       I move round to
    the driver side of the car.  The air
    warm and dry here.  Lawd know what it be
    in L.A.  He open the door for me
    and I slide behind the wheel.  Baby
    facin me lookin without even
    blinkin his eye.  I wonder if he
    know I'm his mamma that I love him
    that that his daddy by the door (and
    he won't let us go; he still got time
    to say wait.)  Baby blink once but
    he only five week old and whatever
    he know don't show.
    
                       His daddy call
    may name and I turn to him and wait.
    It be cold in the Grapevine at night
    this time of year.  Wind come whistlin down
    through them mountains almost blow this old
    VW off the road.  I'll be in
    touch he say.  Say, take care; say, write if
    you need somethin.
    
                       I *will* him to touch
    us now, to take care us, to know what
    we need is him and his name.  He slap
    the car door, say, drive careful and turn
    to go.  If he let us go now...how
    we gon ever take him back?  I ease
    out on the clutch, mash in on the gas.
    The only answer I get is his back.
    

    One Flesh
         by Eizabeth Jennings
    
    Lying apart now, each in a separate bed,
    He with a book, keeping the light on late,
    She like a girl dreaming of childhood,
    All men elsewhere - it is as if they wait
    Some new event: the book he holds unread,
    Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead.
    
    Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion,
    How cool they lie.  They hardly ever touch,
    Or if they do it is like a confession
    Of having little feeling - or too much.
    Chastity faces them, a destination
    For which their whole lives were a preparation.
    
    Strangely apart, yet strangely together,
    Silence between them like a thread to hold
    And not wind in.  And time itself's a feather
    Touching them gently.  Do they know they're old,
    These two who are my father and my mother
    Whose fire, from which I came, has now grown cold?
    

    "She was born and raised in rural Puerto Rico, participated on and
    off in labour struggles, and wrote for a labour periodical.  She
    suffered greatly from alcoholism and was in and out of hospitals
    all her life.  She died anonymously on a street in New York City.
     She received little recognition during her lifetime but is now
    considered a major figure in Puerto Rican poetry." (from The Penguin
    Book of Women Poets)
    
    To Julia De Burgos
            by Julia De Burgos (translated from Spanish by Grace Shulman)
    
    The people are saying that I am your enemy,
      That in poetry I give you to the world.
    
      They lie, Julia de Burgos.  They lie, Julia de Burgos.
    The voice that rises in my verses is not your voice: it is my voice;
    For you are the clothing and I am the essence;
    Between us lies the deepest abyss.
    
      You are the bloodless doll of social lies
    And I the virile spark of human truth;
    
      You are the honey of courtly hypocrisy; not I -
    I bare my heart in all my poems.
    
      You, like your world, are selfish; not I -
    I gamble everything to be what I am.
    
      You are only the serious lady.  Senora.  Dona Julia.
    Not I.  I am life.  I am strength.  I am woman.
    
      You belong to your husband, your master.  Not I:
    I belong to nobody or to all, for to all, to all
    I give myself in my pure feelings and thoughts.
    
      You curl your hair and paint your face.  Not I:
    I am curled by the wind, painted by the sun.
    
    You are the lady of the house, resigned, submissive,
    Tied to the bigotry of men.  Not I:
    I am Rocinante, bolting free, wildly
    Snuffling the horizons of the justice of God.
    

    Anniversary
          by Erica Jong
    
    Every night for five years
    he chewed on her
    until her fingers were red & haggard
    until blue veins hung out of her legs
    until the children tumbled
    like baby kangaroos
    out of raw crimson pouches
    in her stomach.
    
    Now she was done.
    She had once been a woman.
    She had once sprinkled perfume
    from the split ends of her hair.
    She had once left a silver trail of sequins
    in the moonlight
    & slipped between the clouds.
    She had once sucked
    on inky fingers at school
    & drawn a perfect india ink man.
    She had once prayed to movie stars & poets.
    She had once cried into the Rubaiyat.
    She had once worshipped swizzle sticks from Birdland
    & dreamed of a man with perfect teeth
    & a wedding in a carved block of ice.
    

    She rose to his requirement, dropped
    The playthings of her life
    To take the honorable work
    Of woman and of wife.
    
    If aught she missed in her new day
    Of amplitude, or awe,
    Or first prospective, or the gold
    In using wore away,
    
    It lay unmentioned, as the sea
    Develops pearl and weed,
    But only to himself is known
    The fathoms they abide.
    

    from Prologue/The Evidence
                by Erica Jong
    
    
    & if it wasn't love,
    if you called me now
    across the old echo chamber of the ocean
    & said:
    "Look, I never loved you,"
    I would feel 
    a little like a fool perhaps,
    & yet it wouldn't matter.
    
    My business is to always feel
    a little like a fool
    & speak of it.
    
    & I am sure
    that when we love
    we are better than ourselves
    & when we hate,
    worse.
    
    & even if we call it madness later
    & scrawl four-letter words
    across those outhouse walls
    we call our skulls - 
    we stand revealed
    by those sudden moments
    when we come together.
    

    Paranoia
        by Janet Charman
        from Yellow Pencils, Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women
    
    med students
    (girl doctors
    dont seem so remote)
    across the candlelight
    then in the smoke
    he hands me
    i see the cunning
    little roach clip
    is
    an artery forcep
    no
    nurse
    goes off
    duty
    till
    the instrument count
    is right
    

    Here It Is
         by Rachel McAlpine
         from Yellow Pencils, Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women
    
    Well to get to the nitty-gritty,
    here it is:
    I was suddenly sick of praying
    to men, for men.
    That was the beginning,
    the middle and the end.
    
    Ritual: remind myself I am guilty,
    wrong, and light in the head.
    
    Orthodox theology and common sense:
    yes our Father is sexless,
    God is being, God is love,
    yes the Holy Spirit is spirit
    and Jesus being a Jew
    simply had to be male
    and he was kind to girls.
    Yes I could alter pronouns privately,
    yes I am married to God
    and have no right to divorce.
    Yes Man is metaphor for Woman,
    yes I could work within,
    yes I could wait a century
    yes it is just as silly
    to think of God as Woman -
    
    yet things are right for me
    when flesh and spirit agree:
    I do not feel included.
    
    One truth is that God the Father
    calls mostly to men except
    when he wants a cup of tea.
    
    

	    Let us have winter loving that the heart
	    May be in peace and ready to partake
	    Of the slow pleasure spring would wish to hurry
	    Or that in summer harshly would awake,
	    And let us fall apart, O gladly weary,
	    The white skin shaken like a white snowflake.

			MIRAGE

      The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
	    Was but a dream; and now I wake,
      Exceeding confortless, and worn, and old,
	    For a dream's sake.

      I hang my harp upon a tree,
	    A weeping willow in a lake;
      I hang my silenced harp there, wrung and snapt
	    For a dream's sake.

      Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
	    My silent heart, lie still and break:
      Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
	    For a dream's sake.

      CHINATOWN, 1873



On the night avenue
I am a brag
in my red dress:  I dare you.
My small feet, pointed breasts.
The look in men's eyes.
Coin blossoms in their palms.
Under their touch
I am stone, I refuse
to bloom.

For this I was stolen
from sleep a girl
sold away from all flowers.
My mother cried, my father
counted money.

The sky dark.
In my sleep the stars
gutter down.
Lotus flowers
on a pond, wax petals.
My face
floats on the water
where it has fallen.
 
	-- Mary Fell, from her book 
	   The Persistence of Memory, 1984

      HUNGER

    

When you come home
there's supper waiting,
beans, cornbread
nothing else.
You could cut 
the bitterness between us,
plenty of that to go around.

I never thought it would
come to this, you
had a way with a girl,
I liked your body
against me, print
of your mouth on my breast.
Never thought about

two hungry kids, each fall
two pair of shoes to buy,
how there's no stopping
children growing even when
crops won't grow at all.
Don't look at me that way,
I know you do your best.

Think I like sleeping
alone, only a bare wall
to warm my back?
You say I'm cold, I'm
just getting older,
asking who pays
for every taste you get.

	-- Mary Fell, 
    	   The Persistence of Memory

    The Wives of Mafiosi
              by Erica Jong
    
    Thinking to take on the power
            of a dark suit lined with lead
            of a man with a platinum mouth & knuckles of brass
            of a bullet the color of a Ferrari
    
    the wives of Mafiosi stay home
    decanting the Chianti
    like transparent blood.
    
    They crochet spiders for the furniture.
    They go to Confession.
    They fill the ears of the priests
    with mozzarella & nougat candy.
    
    We too stay home
    & dream of power.
            We sacrifice the steakblood to the dishwasher.
            We bring clear offerings of water to the plants.
            We pray before the baby pictures.
    
    We dream of swallowing bullets
    & coupling with money.
            We dream of transparent armor.
            We imagine we want peace.
            We imagine we are different
            from the wives of the Mafiosi.
    
    

    Latter Day Lysistrata
            by Lauris Edmond
            (from Yellow Pencils, Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand
             Women)
    
    It is late in the day of the world
    and the evening paper tells of developed
    ways of dying; five years ago we would not
    have believed it.  Now I sit on the grass
    in fading afternoon light crumpling pages
    and guessing at limits of shock, the point
    of repudiation; my woman's mind, taught
    to sustain, to support, staggers at this
    vast reversal.  I can think only of
    the little plump finches that come
    trustingly into the garden, moving
    to mysterious rhythms of seeds and
    seasons; I have no way to conceive
    the dark maelstrom where men may spin
    in savage currents of power - is it
    power? - and turn to stone, to steel,
    no longer able to hear such small throats'
    hopeful chirping nor see these tiny
    domestic posturings, the pert shivering
    of feathers.  They know only the fire
    in the mind that carries them down
    and down in a wild and wrathful wind.
    
    I do not know how else
    the dream of any man on earth can be
    'destroy all life, leaving
    buildings whole...'
    
    Let us weep for these men, for
    ourselves, let us cry out as they bend
    over their illustrious equations; let us
    tell them the cruel truth of bodies,
    skin's velvet bloom, the scarlet of
    bleeding.  Let us show them the vulnerable
    earth, the transparent light that slips
    through slender birches falling over
    small birds that sense in the miniscule
    threads of their veins the pulses of
    every creature - let these men breathe
    the green fragrance of the leaves, here
    in this gentle darkness let them convince me,
    here explain their preposterous imaginings.
    
    

    Eden Cultivated
            by Lauris Edmond
            (from Yellow Pencils, Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand
             Women)
    
    Think of her coming in from the garden,
    her hair blowing and the green breath
    of summer drifting across the verandah
    - the long grass, and the smell of apples -
    behind her a blazing February sky,
    the first thistledowns, and the haze;
    see her drag out the old capacious
    preserving pan from the darkened pantry
    smelling of spices and orange peel,
    and notice the small lines round her eyes,
    the bones of her bending shoulders...
    and wait - for how do you know, this time,
    if she will offer you one apple
    or many, or possibly none at all?
    

    
    It is an illusion to think
    that more comfort means
    more happiness.
    Happiness comes of the
    capacity to feel deeply,
    to enjoy simply, to think
    freely, to be needed.
    
    - Storm Jameson
    

      I have spent nights with matches and knives,
      leaning over ledges, only two flights up.
      Cutting my heart, burning my soul,
      Nothing left to hold,
      Nothing left but, blood and fire.
      
      You have spent nights, thinking of me,
      Missing my arms, but you needed to leave.
      Leaving my cuts, leaving my burns,
      hoping I'd learn.
      
      Chorus:
      Blood and Fire
      are too much for these restless arms to hold.
      And my nights of desire are calling me,
      back to your fold.
      And I am calling you, calling you from 10,000 miles away
      Won't you wet my fire with your love, babe?
      
      I am looking for someone, who can take as much as I give,
      Give back as much as I need,
      And still have the will to live.
      I am intense, I am in need,
      I am in pain, I am in love,
      I feel forsaken, like the things I gave away.
      
      Chorus.
      
      I am intense, I am in need, I am in pain, I am in love,
      I am intense, I am in need, I am in pain, I am in love,
      I am intense, I am in need, I am in pain, I am in love,
      
      Amy Ray, from INDIGO GIRLS (see =wn= 206.297)

During the time of which I speak it was hard to turn the other cheek
To the blows of insecurity
Feeding the cancer of my intellect the blood of love soon neglected
Lay dying in the strength of its impurity
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
They've all gone and left each other in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
to the slim chance of love's recovery.
There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
to the slim chance of love's recovery.
Rain soaked and voice choked like silent screaming in a dream
I search for our absolute distinction
Not content to bow and bend
To the whims of culture that swoop like vultures
Eating us away, eating us away
Eating us away to our extinction
Oh how I wish I were a trinity, so if I lost a part of me
I'd still have two of the same to live.
But nobody gets a lifetime rehearsal, as specks of dust we're universal
To let this love survive would be the greatest gift that we could give
Tell all the friends who think they're so together
That these are ghosts and mirages, these thoughts of fairer weather
Though it's storming out I feel safe within the arms of love's discovery.

Emily Saliers, from INDIGO GIRLS (see =wn= 206.297)

      Pain from pearls--hey little girl--
      how much have you grown?
      Pain from pearls--hey little girl--
      flower for the ones you've known.
      
      Chorus:
      Are you on fire,
      from the years?
      What would you give for your
      kid fears?
      
      Secret staircase, running high,
      you had a hiding place.
      Secret staircase, running low,
      but they all know, now you're inside.
      
      Chorus.
      
      Skipping stones, we know the price now,
      any sin will do.
      How much further, if you can spin,
      How much further, if you are smooth.
      
      Chorus. 
      (musical Bridge.)
      
      Replace the rent with the stars above.
      Replace the need with love.
      
      Replace the anger with the tide.
      Replace the ones, the ones, the ones, that you love.
      
      Chorus.

      Amy Ray, from INDIGO GIRLS (see =wn= 206.297)

    My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
    I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
    I don't know when I noticed life was life at my expense
    The words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence
    The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve
    I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave
    But there was a time I asked my father for a dollar
    And he gave it a ten dollar raise
    When I needed my mother and I called her
    She stayed with me for days
    And now someone's on the telephone, desperate in his pain
    Someone's on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine
    Someone's got his finger on the button in some room
    No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom
    But I tried to make this place my place
    I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face
    But I'll tell you
    My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
    I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
    My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
      (By grace, my sight grows stronger and I will not
       be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer)
    Maybe there's no haven in this world for tender age
    My heart beat like the wings of wild birds in a cage
    My greatest hope my greatest cause to grieve
    And my heart flew from its cage and it bled upon my sleeve
    The cries of passion were like wounds that needed healing
    I couldn't hear them for the thunder
    I was half the naked distance between hell and heaven's ceiling
    And he almost pulled me under
    Now someone's on the telephone desperate in his pain
    Someone's on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine
    Someone's got his finger on the button in some room
    No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom
    I tried to make this place my place
    I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face
    But I'll tell you
    My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
    I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
    My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
      (By grace my sight grows stronger, grows stronger)
    I do not feel the romance I do not catch the spark
      (And I will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness any longer)
    
    Emily Saliers, from INDIGO girls (see =wn= 206.297)

[And thanks to Kathy Gallo who entered this in Friends note 61.1227.]

        Since the topic is covering lyrics, I thought I'd share these.

    DAMN, wish I was a man - cindy lee berryhill
    --------------------------------------------

    DAMN, wish I was a man
    like heroes in books I'd go a travelin'
    LORD, If I was a man
    could take a box car out if I wanted

    DAMN, wish I was a man
    I'd play the field for nothing but fun
    LORD, If I was a man
    they'd say she'd gone bad and I'd have a good reputation

    DAMN, wish I was a man
    I'd be a Southern California high school freshman
    LORD, If I was a man
    I'd call guys wimps by calling them a woman

    DAMN, wish I was a man
    I'd look naturally important at my office desk
    LORD, If I was a man
    they'd never mistake me as a receptionist

    DAMN, wish I was a man
    I'd be sexy with a belly like Jack Nicholson
    LORD, If I was a man
    It'd say no fat chicks on the bumper of my Lincoln

    ASP

    Re .64, Eileen, that verse by W.B. Yeats is the first verse of a
    poem called "On Woman."  The rest of the poem is not as good, IMO,
    so I won't enter it here.  However, Yeats is, of course, probably
    the most critically acclaimed poet, writing in English, of this
    century, and he wrote a lot of beautiful stuff.   I like the following
    poem, except for the last three verses which seem sexist to me now.
     (What's wrong with an opinionated woman?)  But, considering Yeats
    was a man writing in 1919 I guess he didn't do too badly.
    
    A Prayer For My Daughter
             by William Butler Yeats
    
    Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
    Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
    My child sleeps on.  There is no obstacle
    But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
    Whereby the haystack-and-roof-levelling wind,
    Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
    And for an hour I have walked and prayed
    Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
    
    I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
    And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
    And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
    In the elms above the flooded stream;
    Imagining in excited reverie
    That the future years had come,
    Dancing to a frenzied drum,
    Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
    
    May she be granted beauty and yet not
    Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
    Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
    Being made beautiful overmuch,
    Consider beauty a sufficient end,
    Lose natural kindness and maybe
    The heart-revealing intimacy
    That chooses right, and never find a friend.
    
    Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
    And later had much trouble from a fool,
    While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
    Being fatherless could have her way
    Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
    It's certain that fine women eat
    A crazy salad with their meat
    Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.
    
    In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
    Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
    By those that are not entirely beautiful;
    Yet many, that have played the fool
    For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
    And many a poor man that has roved,
    Loved and thought himself beloved,
    From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
    
    May she become a flourishing hidden tree
    That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
    And have no business but dispensing round
    Their magnanimities of sound,
    Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
    Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
    O may she live like some green laurel
    Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
    
    My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
    The sort of beauty that I have approved,
    Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
    Yet knows that to be choked with hate
    May well be of all evil chances chief.
    If there's no hatred in a mind
    Assault and battery of the wind
    Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
    
    An intellectual hatred is the worst,
    So let her think opinions ae accursed.
    Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
    Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
    Because of her opinionated mind
    Barter that horn and every good
    By quiet natures understood
    For an old bellows full of angry wind?
    
    Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
    The soul recovers radical innocence
    And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
    Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
    And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
    She can, though every face should scowl
    And every windy quarter howl
    Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
    
    And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
    Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
    For arrogance and hatred are the wares
    Peddled in the thoroughfares.
    How but in custom and in ceremony
    Are innocence and beauty born?
    Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
    And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
    
    
    
    

	After a while you learn the subtle difference
	between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
	and you learn that love does not mean leaning
	and company does not mean security,
	and you begin to learn that kisses do not mean contracts
	and presents aren't promises.
	And you begin to accept defeats
	with your head up and your eyes open
	with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
	and you learn to build all your roads on today
	because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans,
	and futures have a way of falling down in mid flight.


    	After a while you learn
	that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
	So you plant your own garden and decorate your soul,
	instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
	And you learn that you really can endure....
    		that you really are strong ....
    			and that you really do have worth .....
    				and you learn and learn.......

                                              anonymous
    

    
	shall we piece them
	together?
	the mosaic beckons.
	so we
	add shared shards of our experience
	raw and sharp and shining.

	shall we weave
	our tales?
	seated in a circle
	speaking softly
	souls bared and bold and human.

	shall we seek
	our common ground?
	for I sometimes wandered
	with no voice
	but my own
	afraid and awed and angry.

	shall we find
	the watershed?
	where our dreams
	do not live and die unsung.
	where the wellspring
	we share
	forms a pool
	so still, so clear
	we can see one another in it...

		jb - 9/5/89

        SEDUCED GIRL

    With wine and words of love and every vow
	He lulled me into bed and closed my eyes,
    A sleepy, stupid innocent...So now
	I dedicate the spoils of my surprize:
    The silk that bound my breasts, my virgin zone,
	The cherished purity I could not keep.
    Goddess, remember we were all alone,
	And he was strong - and I was half asleep.


    Translated from the Greek by Peter Whigham

        A Dedication to His Wife

	To whom I owe the leaping delight
	That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
	And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
	    The breathing in unison

	Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
	Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
	And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

	No peevish winter wind shall chill
	No sullen tropic sun shall wither
	The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

	But this dedication is for others to read:
	These are private words addressed to you in public.

	THE FAWN



Sunday morning and mellow as precious metal
the church bells rang, but I went
to the woods instead.

A fawn, too new
for fear, rose from the grass
and stood with its spots blazing,
and knowing no way but words,
no trick but music,
I sang to him.

He listened.
His small hooves struck the grass.
Oh what is holiness?

The fawn came closer,
walked to my hands, to my knees.

I did not touch him.
I only sang, and when the doe came back
calling out to him dolefully
and he turned and followed her into the trees,
still I sang,
not knowing how to end such a joyful text,

until far off the bells once more tipped and tumbled
  and rang through the morning, announcing
the going forth of the blessed.

		-- Mary Oliver, from her book Twelve Moons

		DEPRESSION



...a mote. A little world. Dusty. Dusty.
The universe is dust. Who can bear it?
Christ comes. The women feed him, bathe his feet
with tears, bring spices, find the empty tomb,
burst out to tell the men, are not believed...

		-- Jane Kenyon, from her book
		The Boat of Quiet Hours

COMING HOME AT TWILIGHT IN LATE SUMMER



We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done -- the unpacking, the mail
and papers...the grass needed mowing...
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

		-- Jane Kenyon, from her book
		The Boat of Quiet Hours

    Photographs of Pioneer Women
                 by Ruth Dallas
    
    
    You can see from their faces
    Life was not funny,
    The streets, when there were streets,
    Tugging at axles,
    The settlement ramshackle as a stack of cards.
    And where there were no streets, and no houses,
    Save their own roof of calico or thatch,
    The cows coming morning and afternoon
    From the end-of-world swamp,
    Udders cemented with mud.
    
    There is nothing to equal pioneering labour
    For wrenching a woman out of shape,
    Like an old willow, uprooted, thickening.
    See their strong arms, their shoulders broadened
    By the rhythmical swing of the axe, or humped
    Under loads they donkeyed on their backs.
    Some of them found time to be photographed,
    With bearded husband, and twelve or thirteen children,
    Looking shocked, but relentless,
    After first starching the frills in their caps.
    

        I many times thought peace had come,
	When peace was far away;
	As wrecked men deem they sight the land
	At centre of the sea.

	And struggle slacker, but to prove,
	As hopelessly as I,
	How many the fictitious shores
	Before the harbor lie.

    A short love poem, by a man, but I really like it:
    
    A Drinking Song
         by W.B. Yeats
    
    Wine comes in at the mouth
    And love comes in at the eye;
    That's all we shall know for truth
    Before we grow old and die.
    I lift my glass to my mouth,
    I look at you, and I sigh.
    

I found this in the WGBH program guide (that's the Boston PBS station), in an
article about the new series "Moyers: The Power of the Word". (The series is
about poetry, and its first channel 2 airing is at 9 tonight.) 

The following poem is by Lucille Clifton, taken from "Good Woman: Poems and a
Memoir 1969-1980":


		homage to my hips

		these hips are big hips
		they need space to
		move around in.
		they don't fit into little
		petty places. these hips
		are free hips.
		they don't like to be held back.
		these hips have never been enslaved,
		they go where they want to go
		they do what they want to do.
		these hips are mighty hips.
		these hips are magic hips.
		i have known them
		to put a spell on a man and
		spin him like a top!

    	    this little bride & groom are
	    standing) in a kind
	    of crown he dressed
	    in black candy she

	    veiled with candy white
	    carrying a bouquet of
	    pretend flowers this
	    candy crown with this candy

	    little bride & little
	    groom in it kind of stands on
	    a thin ring which stands on a much
	    less thin very much more

	    big & kinder of ring & which
	    kinder of stands on a
	    much more than very much
	    biggest & thickest & kindest

	    of ring & all one two three rings
	    are cake & everything is protected by
	    cellophane against anything (because
	    nothing really exists

    "Now wrinkled cheeks, and thin
    wild lashes; nests of red
    string fill the eyes that used
    to look and laugh men dead.
    How nature has abused
    me. Wrinkles plough across
    th brow, the lips are skin,
    my ears hang down like moss.

    "This is how beauty dies:
    humped shoulders, barrenness
    of mind; I've lost my hips,
    vagina, and my lips.
    My breasts? They're a retreat!
    Short breath - how I repeat
    my silly list! My thighs
    are blotched like sausages.

    "This is how we discuss
    ourselves, and nurse desire
    here as we gab about
    the past, boneless as wool
    dolls by a greenwood fire -
    soon lit, and soon put out.
    Once I was beautiful...
    That's how it goes with us."

			    translated from French

Last night I heard Mary Oliver read in Cambridge. She was superb. A tallish 
woman of perhaps fifty-something with short brown hair and glasses and the 
biggest grin I ever saw, she was totally unpretentious, dressed in baggy 
salmon-colored sweater and faded jeans. She's a magnificent reader; she
read her own and other poets' works in a strong, clear, rather dramatic
voice. Between poems she was very engaging, giving much of herself with
candor and humor. Seemed to be very generous about promoting other poets 
and encouraging students. One of her poems that she read is in this string, 
"Strawberry Moon," about her aunt's experiences after giving birth to an 
illegitimate child.

The guy who introduced her made some good remarks about her stuff, her
craftsmanship, her affinity for the natural world and her way of connecting
the natural with the psychological, and the beauty and mystical quality of
her poetry. 

Oliver lives in Provincetown and writes a lot about life there, the
seasons, and animals, and American history. I like her because of the way
she celebrates things, nature, people, existence itself. She has a new book
coming out in the spring, House of Light. 

Dorian

    Softened by Time's consummate plush,
	How sleek the woe appears
    That threatened childhood's citadel
	And undermined the years!

    Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
	We envy the despair
    That devastated childhood's realm,
	So easy to repair.

    To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,-
    One clover, and a bee,
    And revery.
    The revery alone will do
    If bees are few.

    One Life
        by Adrienne Rich
        from "Time's Power"
    
    A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs
    recalls great bodily joys, much pain.
    Nothing in her is apt to say
    My heart aches, though she read those words
    in a battered college text, this morning
    as the sun rose.  It is all too
    mixed, the heart too mixed with laughter
    raucousing the grief, her life
    too mixed, she shakes her heavy
    silvered hair at all the fixed
    declarations of baggage.  I should be dead and I'm alive
    don't ask me how; I don't eat like I should
    and still I like how the drop of vodka
    hits the tongue.  I was a worker and a mother,
    that means a worker and a worker
    but for one you don't pay union dues
    or get a pension; for the other
    the men ran the union, we ran the home.
    It was terrible and good, we had more than half a life,
    I had four lives at least, one out of marriage
    when I kicked up all the dust I could
    before I knew what I was doing.
    One life with the girls on the line during the war,
    yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together
    one life with a husband, not the worst,
    one with your children, none of it just what you'd thought.
    None of it what it could have been, if we'd known.
    We took what we could.
    But even this is a life, I'm reading a lot of books
    I never read, my daughter brought home from school,
    plays where you can almost hear them talking,
    Romantic poets, Isaac Babel.  A lot of lives
    worse and better than what I knew.  I'm walking again.
    My heart doesn't ache; sometimes though it rages.
    

    This
      by Adrienne Rich
      from "Time's Power"
    
    Face flashing free   child-arms
    lifting the collie pup
    torn paper on the path
    Central Park  April '72
    behind you  minimal
    those benches and that shade
    that brilliant light in which
    you laughed longhaired
    and I'm the keeper of
    this little piece of paper
    this little piece of truth
    
    I wanted this from you -
    laughter  a child turning
    into a boy  at ease
    in the spring light  with friends
    I wanted this for you
    
    I could mutter  Give back
    that day  give me again
    that child  with the chance
    of making it all right
    I could yell  Give back that light
    on the dog's teeth  the child's hair
    but no rough drafts are granted
    - Do you think I don't remember?
    did you think I was all-powerful
    unimpaired  unappalled?
    yes  you needed that from me
    I wanted this from you
    

Change

This is where I yank out the old roots
from my chest, like the tomatoes 
we grow until December, stalks
thick as saplings.

This is the moment when the ancient fears
race like thoroughbreds, asking for more
and more rein.  And I, the driver,
for some reason they know nothing of
strain to hold them back.

Terror grips me like a virus
and I sweat, fevered,
trying to burn it out.

This feat is so invisible.  All you can see 
is a woman going about her ordinary day,
drinking tea, taking herself to the movies,
reading in bed.  If victorious
I will look exactly the same.

Yet I am hoisting a car from mud ruts
half a century deep.  I am hacking
a clearing through the fallen slash
of my heart.  Without laser precision,
with only the primitive knife of need, I cut
and splice the circuitry of my brain.
I change.

The Servant of Others

At Twilight
she is the Servant 
of Others, sweeping the stone 
hearth and picking cluttered
dishes off the table.
She puts the cat out,
straightens the chairs
in their slant-angles,
tops lamps.  Then she
makes bread, covering
the dough in the pans
with a damp cloth and
sets it on a shelf
over the big-clawed stove.
She goes out briefly, 
milks Bossie,
and brings the milk
inside, foaming in
buckets; she stirs
butter and cream.

And all the while
shw is rocking babies
and turning seams, sewing
the one missing button,
heating water for the 
bath and singing.  Daisies
and Queen Anne's Lace
vie in a jar on the kitchen
table, soapbubbles in the 
sink, and tomato relish,
jewelled in the pantry,
and on the windowsill,
veined pebbles of quartz
and blue glints, chips of
Sandwich glass.  She likes

small treasures, 
licking them pink
with a rough tongue,
laying out clean linens
and shirts, crisp in their
readiness for bodies.
She is not afraid
to wash anything;
sweet water steams in the
kettle, the flagstone floor
is scrubbd, the bed, its sheets
turned down and waiting.

Now the Servant of Others
sets down her broom and her 
sewing and carefully opens
the screen door, slinking out,
moaning gently as she grows
wild fur.  She visits
the cow barn, lapping a little milk
and tonguing rats, just playing
with them, in her paws.  And then
into the camomile and clover-
quilted fields, cat like.
They lie dark and passive
under the moon as she prowls,
arching her spine, tries out
scratching, flying,
picking up small helpless things
in her claws and carrying them away,
dropping them from great heights
until daybreak, pupils 
yellow-ringed and huge,
dilated, hair on end,
screech owl in the hollow
by the frog pond, howling.

    	    WHAT SHE SAID

    Before I laughed with him
	    nightly,

	    the slow waves beating
	    on his wide shores
	    and the palmyra
	    bringing forth heron-like flowers
	    near the waters,

    my eyes were like the lotus
    my arms had the grace of the bamboo
    my forehead was mistaken for the moon.

	    But now

			translated from the Tamil by
			A.K. Ramanujan

    	    THE RUINED MAID

    'O' Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
    Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
    And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?' -
    'O didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she.

    -'You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
    Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
    And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!' -
    'Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,' said she.

    -'At home in the barton you said "thee" and "thou,"
    And "thik oon," and "theas oon," and "t'other"; but now
    Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!'-
    'Some polish is gained with one's ruin,' said she.

    -'Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and
    bleak
    But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
    And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!'-
    'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she.

    -'You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
    And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
    To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!'-
    'True. Ones' pretty lively when ruined,' said she.

    -'I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
    And a delicate face, and could strut about town!'-
    'My dear - a raw country girl, such as you be,
    Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined,' said she.

	


        THE ONES WHO AREN'T HERE
        ------------------------


     I'm thinking about 
     the ones who aren't here
     And won't be coming in late
     
     Home all alone,
     and the family,
     and won't be coming out tonight.

     Wish I could know all the lovers and friends
     kept from gathering.
    
     I think of you now,
     the ways you could go,
     we're all of us
     refugees.

     Telling myself
     and the family,
     my friends and the 
     folks on the job
     
     One by one,
     and it's never been easy
     and me and everyone changed
     The hugs and the tears
     when they show you their hearts,
     but some never speak again.

     Every pot off the wheel
     can't bear the kiln,
     and every love can't bear the pain.

     So let's pass a kiss
     and a happy sad tear,
     and a hug the whole circle round
     For the ones who aren't here,
     for the hate and the fear,
     for laughter - for struggle - for life

     Let's have a song here
     for me and for you
     and the love that we cannot hide.

     And let's have a song
     for the ones who aren't here,
     and won't be coming out tonight.

  
                                       

    re: .124
    
    Yes, it is a fabulous song.  I would have to look at the credits off the 
    Carnegie Hall album to get the reference to the man who wrote this.
    
    Laura
             

    
    re.125  i *think* John Calvi wrote that song....my uncertainty caused
            me to leave out the original credit.

    Once more into my arid days like dew,
    Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
    Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
    A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
    Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
    Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
    Long since to be but just one other mound
    Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
    And once again, and wiser in no wise,
    I chase your coloured phantom on the air,
    And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
    And stumble pitifully on to where,
    Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,
    Once more I clasp,-and there is nothing there.

    There is no frigate like a book,
	To take us lands away,
    Nor any coursers like a page
	Of prancing poetry.

    This traverse may the poorest take
	Without oppress of toll;
    How frugal is the chariot
	That bears a human soul!

    The past is such a curious creature,
	To look her in the face
    A transport may reward us,
	Or a disgrace.

    Unarmed if any meet her,
	I charge him fly!
    Her rusty ammunition
	Might yet reply!

    I felt a cleavage in my mind
	As if my brain had split;
    I tried to match it, seam by seam,
	But could not make them fit.

    The thought behind I strove to join
	Unto the thought before,
    But sequence ravelled out of reach
	Like balls upon a floor.

    it may not always be so; and i say
    that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
    another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
    his heart, as mine in time not far away;
    if on another's face your sweet hair lay
    in such silence as i know, or such
    great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
    stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

    if this should be, i say if this should be-
    you of my heart, send me a little word;
    that i may go to unto him, and take his hands,
    saying, Accept all happiness from me.
    Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
    sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

    Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,
    And drag me at your chariot till I die,-
    Oh, heavy prince! Oh, panderer of hearts!-
    Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie
    Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,
    Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,
    Who still am free, unto no querulous care
    A fool, and in no temple worshiper!
    I, that have bared me to your quiver's fire,
    Lifted my face into it's puny rain,
    Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire
    As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!
    (Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,
    Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)

(From the singing of Priscilla Herdman on her album DARKNESS INTO LIGHT.)

    		AIN'T I A WOMAN
    
    	That man over there
    	Says that woman [sic] need to be helped into carriages,
    	And lifted over ditches
    	And to have the best place everywhere.
    
    	Well, nobody ever helps me into carriages
    	Or over mud puddles
    	Or gives me any best place--
    	And ain't I a Woman?
    
    	Look at me!
    	Look at my arm!
    
    	I have ploughed and planted
    	And gathered into barns
    	And no man could head me--
    	And ain't I a Woman?
    
    	I could work as much
    	And eat as much as a man,
    	When I could get it,
    	And bear the lash as well--
    	And ain't I a Woman?
    
    	I have born five children
    	And seen most all of them sold off into slavery,
    	And when I cried out with mother's grief
    	None but Jesus heard me--
    	None but Jesus heard me--
    	And ain't I a Woman?
    
    	And that man says
    	Women can't have as much rights as a man
    	'Cause Christ wasn't a woman.
    	Where did your Christ come from?
    	Where did your Christ come from?
    	From God and a woman.
    	Man had nothing to do with him.
    
    *****************************************************************
    
    From the liner notes:
    
    � In 1851, in Akron, Ohio, at a Woman's Rights Convention, a
    group of clergymen had just given their viewpoints on woman's
    rights. It was there that Sojourner Truth came forward to
    address them and made her moving "Ain't I a Woman" speech.
    Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Van Wagenan in 1797, in
    Hurley, New York, the town where this album was recorded. �
    
    --- jerry

    love u.s.a.
          by Kathleen Spivack
    
    love in the peaceful u.s.a.
    draw the shades down  draw
    our light limbs together
    
    and let us love gently
    as if
    that's still possible
    
    not heaving and struggling
    like
    in the movies
    
    with bosomy gasps as
    the man
    takes her over -
    
    I'll tame you my
    vixen  as
    he rips
    
    off her clothes:
    she sighs
    aaaahhhhh.  Not
    
    like young 
    revolutionaries
    shouting and fucking
    
    sweating out power
    more
    power in bed
    
    fighting the
    system by
    freeing your body
    
    till you are a 
    cipher in
    some weird class struggle.  No   love
    me   lie down and
    close out the country
    and close out
    
    tradition
    and turn off the
    tv
    
    and let the newspapers
    pile up on
    the doorstep
    
    and kick in the
    radio  see how the
    rhetoric dribbles away
    
    and for once let's be
    lyrical
    like in the
    
    poems
    let's 
    pretend.
    

    Adam's Complaint
         by Denise Levertov
    
    Some people,
    no matter what you give them,
    still want the moon.
    
    The bread,
    the salt,
    white meat and dark,
    still hungry.
    
    The marriage bed
    and the cradle,
    still empty arms.
    
    You give them land,
    their own earth under their feet,
    still they take to the roads.
    
    And water: dig them the deepest well,
    still it's not deep enough
    to drink the moon from.
    

    For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin
               by Wu Tsao
               (19th century China -
                considered China's major Lesbian poet,
                translated by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung)
    
    
    On your slender body
    Your jade and coral girdle ornaments chime
    Like those of a celestial companion
    Come from the Green Jade City of Heaven.
    One smile from you when we meet,
    And I become speechless and forget every word.
    For too long you have gathered flowers,
    And leaned against the bamboos,
    Your green sleeves growing cold,
    In your deserted valley:
    I can visualize you all alone,
    A girl harboring her cryptic thoughts.
    
    You glow like a perfumed lamp
    In the gathering shadows.
    We play wine games
    And recite each other's poems.
    
    Then you sing, "Remembering South of the River"
    With it's heartbreaking verses.  Then
    We paint each other's beautiful eyebrows.
    I want to possess you completely -
    Your jade body
    And your promised heart.
    It is Spring.
    Vast mists cover the Five Lakes.
    My dear, let me buy a red painted boat
    And carry you away.
    

    Men
    (after a poem called "Women" by Nicanor Parra)
        by Erica Jong
    
    The impossible man
    The man with the ebony penis ten feet tall
    The man of pentelikon marble
    The man with the veined bronze figleaf which comes unhinged
    
    The man who's afraid to get pregnant
    The man who screws in his socks
    The man who screws in his glasses
    The man who screws in his sunglasses
    The man who gets married a virgin
    The man who marries a virgin
    The man who wilts out of guilt
    The man who adores his mother
    The man who makes it with fruit
    The husband who never has time
    The husband who'd rather have power
    The poet who'd rather have boys
    The conductor who loves his baton
    The analyst who writes "poems"
    All these Adonises
    All these respectable gents
    Those descended
    & those undescended
    will drive me out of my skull sooner or later
    

    To a Woman Passing By

    The deafening road around me roared.
    Tall,slim, in deep mourning, making majestic grief,
    A woman passed, lifting and swinging
    With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment.

    Swift and noble, with statuesque limb.
    As for me, I drank, twitching like an old roue',
    From her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born,
    The softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.

    A gleam...then night! O fleeting beauty,
    Your glance has given me sudden rebirth,
    Shall I see you again only in eternity?

    Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
    For I do not know where you flee, nor you where I am going,
    O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

    translated from French

    To a Creole lady

    In that perfumed country caressed by the sun,
    I have known, under a canopy of purple trees
    And palms raining idleness upon the eyes,
    A creole lady of private beauty.

    Her shade is pale and warm; this brown enchanyress
    Has gracefully mannered airs in her neck;
    Large and sinuous, walking like a huntress,
    Her smile is silent and her eyes secure.

    If you should go, Madam, to the true country of glory,
    On the banks of the Seine or of the green Loire,
    Fair lady fit to decorate ancient mansions.

    In some shady and secluded refuge, you would awake
    A thousand sonnets in the hearts of poets,
    Whom your great eyes would make more subject than
    your Blacks.

    translated from French

    
    The heart once broken is a heart no more,
    And is absolved from all a heart must be;
    All that it signed or chartered heretofore
    Is canceled now, the bankrupt heart is free;
    So much of duty as you may require
    Of shards and dust, this and no more of pain,
    This and no more of hope, remorse, desire,
    The heart once broken need support again.
    How simple 'tis, and what a little sound
    It makes in breaking, let the world attest:
    It struggles, and it fails; the world goes round,
    And the moon follows it. Heart in my breast,
    'Tis half a year now since you broke in two;
    The world's forgotten well, if the world knew.

        Call it a good marriage

    Call it a good marriage -
    For no one ever questioned
    Her warmth, his masculinity,
    Their interlocking views;
    Except one stray graphologist
    Who frowned in speculation
    At her h's and her s's,
    His p's and w's.

    Though few would still subscribe
    To the monogamic axiom
    That strife below the hip-bones
    Need not estrange the heart,
    Call it a good marriage:
    More drew those two together,
    Despite a lack of children,
    Than pulled them apart.

    Call it a good mariage:
    They never fought in public,
    They acted circumspectly
    And faced the world with pride;
    Thus the hazards of their love-bed
    Were none of our damned business -
    Till as jurymen we sat on
    Two deaths by suicide.

 Take my hand- come walk with me
  Along life's winding way
 Take my hand- come stand with me
  Together we will say:

 It's you that I have chosen
  It's you with whom I'll stay
 It's you with whom I'll share my life
  I want no other way

 I want you always by my side
  Through laughter and through tears
 The good- the bad- we'll share it all
  Through all the coming years

 Because I want this union
  To continue to be blessed
 I pray we both will care enough
  To always give our best

 I know that if we do our best
  Then when our journey ends
 We'll find that we've come through it all
  Still lovers... ever friends

 Dick Johnson

    The Perpetual Migration
              by Marge Piercy
    
    How do we know where we are going?
    How do we know where we are headed
    till we in fact or hope or hunch
    arrive?  You can only criticize,
    the comfortable say, you don't know
    what you want.  Ah, but we do.
    
    We have swung in the green verandas
    of the jungle trees.  We have squatted
    on cloud-grey granite hillsides where
    every leaf drips.  We have crossed
    badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.
    We have paddled into the tall dark sea
    in canoes.  We always knew.
    
    Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
    of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
    and not too much Monday morning,
    a chance to choose, a chance to grow,
    the power to say no and yes, pretties
    and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.
    
    The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows
    like a computer, like a violinist, like
    a bloodhound, like a frog.  We remember
    backwards a little and sometimes forwards,
    but mostly we think in the ebbing circles
    a rock makes on the water.
    
    The salmon hurtling upstream seeks
    the taste of the waters of its birth
    but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile
    trek follows charts mapped on its genes.
    The brightness, the angle, the sighting
    of the stars shines in the brain luring
    till inner constellation matches outer.
    
    The stark black rocks, the island beaches
    of waveworn pebbles where it will winter
    look right to it.  Months after it set
    forth it says, home at last, and settles.
    Even the pigeon beating its short whistling
    wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.
    
    In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips
    and the moon pulls blood from my womb.
    Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown
    off course yet if I turn back it feels
    wrong.  Navigating by chart and chance
    and passion I will know the shape
    of the mountains of freedom, I will know.
    

    It Breaks
         by Marge Piercy
    
    
    You hand me a cup of water;
    I drink it and thank you pretending
    what I take into me so calmly
    could not kill me.  We take food
    from strangers, from restaurants
    behind whose swinging doors flies
    swarm and settle, from estranged
    lovers who dream over the salad plates
    of breaking the bones of our backs
    with a sledgehammer.
    
    Trust flits through the apple
    blossoms, a tiny spring warbler
    in bright mating plumage.  Trust
    relies on learned pattern
    and signal to let us walk down
    stairs without thinking each
    step, without stumbling.
    
    I breathe smog and pollen
    and perfume.  I take parts
    of your body inside me.  I give you
    the flimsy black lace and sweat
    stained sleaze of my secrets.
    I lay my sleeping body naked
    at your side.  Jump, you shout.
    I do and you catch me.
    
    In love we open wide as a house
    in a summer afternoon, every shade up
    and window cranked open and doors
    flung back to the probing breeze.
    If we love for long, we stand like row
    houses with no outer walls
    on the companionable side.
    
    Suddenly we are naked,
    abandoned.  The plaster of bedrooms
    hangs exposed to the street, wall
    paper, pink and beige skins of broken
    intimacy torn and flapping.
    
    To fear you is fearing my left
    hand cut off, a monstrous crab
    scaling the slippery steps of night.
    The body, the lineaments of old 
    desire remain, but the gestures
    are new and harsh.  Words unheard
    before are spat out grating
    with the rush of loosed anger.
    
    Friends bear back to me banner
    headlines of your rewriting of our
    common past.  You explain me away,
    a dentist drilling a tooth.
    I wonder at my own trust, how absolute
    it was, mortal but part of me
    like the bones of my pelvis.
    You were the true center of my
    cycles, the magnetic north
    I used to plot my wanderings.
    
    It is not that I will not love
    again or give myself into partnership
    or lie naked sweating secrets
    like nectar, but I will never
    share a joint checking account
    and when some lover tells me, Always,
    baby, I'll be thinking, sure,
    until this one too meets an heiress
    and ships out.  After a bone breaks
    you can see in X rays
    the healing and the damage.
    

    Postcard From Flamingo
               by Mary Oliver from "American Primitive"
    
    At midnight, in Flamingo,
    the dark palms are clicking in the wind,
    an unabashed autoeroticism.
    
    Far off in the red mangroves
    an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass
    and lies there, studying his poems.
    
    Consider the sins, all seven, all deadly!
    Ah, the difficulty of my life so far!
    This afternoon, in the velvet waters, hundreds
      of white birds!
    What a holy and sensual splashing!
    
    Soon the driven sea will come lashing around the blue
    islands of the sunrise.  If you were here,
    If I could touch you,
    my hands would begin to sing.
    

       HER ANGER

 "Paralyzed by anger."



At first it's a woman's
banner of freedom,
her lost self
her history
torn but blazing
against clear sky,
though men hurl 
sabers of scorn
to tear it down.

But sometimes anger
unrolls like gauze,
winding around her
body and mind
tighter and tighter
till finally it 
cripples her
for life,

so then she's back to taking
those little mincing steps
that please men. 

    
        I know I am but summer to your heart,
	And not the full four seasons of the year;
	And you must welcome from another part
	Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
	No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
	Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing:
	And I have loved you all too long and well
	To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
	Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
	I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
	That you may hail anew the bird and rose
	When I come back to you, as summer comes.
	Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
	Even your summer in another clime.

    	When Death was young and bleaching bones were few,
	A moving hill against the risen day
	The dinosaur at morning made his way,
	And dropped his dung upon the blazing dew;
	Trees with no name that now are agate grew
	Lushly beside him in the steamy clay;
	He woke and hungered, rose and stalked his prey,
	And slept contented, in a world he knew.
	In punctual season, with the race in mind,
	His consort held aside her heavy tail,
	And took the seed; and heard the seed confined
	Roar in her womb; and made a nest to hold
	A hatched-out conqueror...but to no avail:
	The veined and fertile eggs are long since cold.

    Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit
    (in memoriam Marina Tsvetayeva,
    Anna Wickham, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare's sister, etc., etc.)
                        by Erica Jong
    
    
    The best slave
    does not need to be beaten.
    She beats herself.
    
    Not with a leather whip,
    or with sticks or twigs,
    not with a blackjack
    or a billyclub,
    but with the fine whip
    of her own tongue
    & the subtle beating
    of her mind
    against her mind.
    
    For who can hate her half so well
    as she hates herself?
    & who can match the finesse
    of her self-abuse?
    
    Years of training
    are required for this.
    Twenty years
    of subtle self-indulgence,
    self-denial;
    until the subject
    thinks herself a queen
    & yet a beggar -
    both at the same time.
    She must doubt herself
    in everything but love.
    
    She must choose passionately
    and badly.
    She must feel lost as a dog
    without her master.
    She must refer all moral questions
    to her mirror.
    She must fall in love with a cossack
    or a poet.
    
    She must never go out of the house
    unless veiled in paint.
    She must wear tight shoes
    so she always remembers her bondage.
    She must never forget 
    She is rooted in the ground.
    
    Though she is quick to learn
    & admittedly clever,
    her natural doubt of herself
    should make her so weak
    that she dabbles brilliantly
    in half a dozen talents
    & thus embellishes
    but does not change
    our life.
    
    If she's an artist
    & comes close to genius,
    the very fact of her gift
    should cause her such pain
    that she will take her own life
    rather than best us.
    
    & after she dies, we will cry
    & make her a saint.
    

    
    	An original of mine...
    
    			A DECADE OF CHANGE
    
    	 	I came into this decade a child
    		Budding into adolescence;
    		Like a newborn calf on unsteady legs
    		Unsure of what lay ahead of me
    		And unsure of myself,
    		Shy, reserved and fearful.
    		But deep down inside I wanted to be more;
    		And would be.
    		As time passed by I yearned to be free.
    		I was rebellious.
    		But still unsure, unsure of what I was rebelling for,
    			or against.
    		I slowly matured and entered into the last four years
    			of what I would soon realize
    		Were the easiest years of my life.
    		Then, before I knew it, my school years were over
    			and real life stepped in.
    		I came out of my shell
    		Ready to face the world
    		Set new goals,
    		Sailed toward new horizons;
    		Becoming the person I wanted to be.
    		Sure of herself, accepted and loved by many.
    		Proud of who I was and where I came from.
    		Not trying so hard to prove myself;
    		Which had sometimes caused me to lose 'me', 
    		Becoming someone I wasn't.
    
    		Now as this decade comes to an end
    		I know who I am and who I will be in years to come.
    		Strong and determined
    		Yet sensitive and caring.
    		With values passed on to me by the parents who
    			love and raised me.
    		What the next ten years will bring
    		One can't know.
    		But from what I've learned and how I've changed,
    		I know I will achieve my goals and have happiness.
    
    						J. Morrissey
    						December '89
    
    

            Morning Song

    Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
    The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
    Took it's place among the elements.

    Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
    In a drafty museum, your nakedness
    Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

    I'm no more your mother
    Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
    Effacement at the winds's hand.

    All night your moth-breath
    Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
    A far sea moves in my ear.

    One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
    In my Victorian nightgown.
    Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

    Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
    Your handful of notes;
    The clear vowels rise like balloons.

    From the book ARIEL by Sylvia Plath
    Harper & Row, NY, NY 1961-1965
    copyright by Ted Hughs

	     HIS SMILE

 In Memoriam: the Women Killed in Montreal



I keep thinking about his smile
and whether the women saw it
when he entered the classroom

	Genevieve   Helene   Nathalie   Barbara   Anne-Marie


When he ordered the men to leave
and lifted his rifle
did the women think,
Well he's smiling so maybe he really
means no harm

	Maud   Barbara   Maryse   Maryse   Anne-Marie


Then with each quick shot
like exploding roses,
did he smile some more
Was he that little boy charmer
knocking over the dolls
stealing the candy

	Sonia   Michele   Annie   Annie   (The woman he missed)


And at the end
when he tossed his life away
after theirs,
did his smile die too
or does it still hang in the empty classroom
near the chalk dust and the erasers
like a curve with no equation
like a mathematical expression
for love

		copyright 1989 Dorian B. Kottler

the sourcebook for this is unknown, as someone sent it to me off the
net.  If anyone knows of a source please post it....
    ----------------------------------
    
	Poem for People Who Are
	Understandably Too Busy to
	Read Poetry
 
	Relax.  This won't last long.
	Or if it does, or if the lines
	make you sleepy or bored,
	give in to sleep, turn on 
	the T.V., deal the cards.
	This poem is built to withstand
	such things.  Its feelings
	cannot be hurt.  They exist
	somewhere in the poet,
	and I am far away.
	Pick it up any time.  Start it
	in the middle if you wish.
	It is as approachable as melodrama,
	and can offer you violence
	if it is violence you like.  Look,
	*there's a man on a sidewalk;*
	*the way his leg is quivering*
	*he'll never be the same again.*
	This is your poem
	and I know you're busy at the office
	or the kids are into your last good nerve.
	Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.
	Well, *they lie together*
	*like the party's unbuttoned coats,*
	*slumped on the bed*
	*waiting for drunken arms to move them.*
	I don't think you want me to go on;
	everyone has his expectations, but this
	is a poem for the entire family.
	Right now, Budweiser
	is dripping from a waterfall,
	deodorants are hissing into armpits
	of people you resemble,
	and *the two lovers are dressing now,*
	*saying farewell.*
	I don't know what music this poem
	can come up with, but clearly
	it's needed.  For it's apparent
	*they will never see each other again*
	and we need music for this
	because there was never music when he or she
	left *you* standing on that corner.
	You see, I want this poem to be nicer
	than life.  I want you to look at it
	when anxiety zigzags your stomach
	and the last tranquilizer is gone
	and you need someone to tell you
	*I'll be here when you want me*
	*like the sound inside a shell.*
	The poem is saying that to you now.
	But don't give up anything for this poem.
	It doesn't expect much.  It will never say more
	than listening can explain.
	Just keep it in your attache case
	or in your house.  And if you're not asleep
	by now, or bored beyond sense,
	the poem wants you to laugh.  Laugh at
	yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
	Come on:
 
	Good.  Now here's what poetry can do.
	Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
	*There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,*
	*you're beautiful for as long as you live.*
 
					- Stephen Dunn
 

    Oh,oh, you will be sorry for that word!
    Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
    Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
    "What a big book for such a little head!"
    Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
    And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
    Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
    I never again shall tell you what I think.
    I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
    You will not catch me reading any more:
    I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
    And some day when you knock and push the door,
    Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
    I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

    From Collected Sonnets
    Harper & Row, NY,NY 1988
    copyright by the estate of Norma Millay Ellis

    To fight aloud is very brave,
    But gallanter, I know,
    Who charge within the bosom,
    The cavalry of woe.

    Who wins, and nations do not see,
    Who fall, and none observe.
    Whose dying eyes no country
    Regards with patriot love.

    We trust, in plumed procession,
    For such the angels go,
    Rank after rank, with even feet
    And uniforms of snow.

    From "Selected Poems & Letters of Emily Dickinson"
    edited by Robert Norton

	     THE HELPERS



	While my baby sleeps,
	the earth, unaware,
	helps me to finish him.
	The grass makes his hair,
	the date-palm his fingers,
	and the beeswax his nails.
	The seashells give him hearing,
	the red strawberry his tongue,
	the rivulet brings him smiles,
	and the mountain sends him patience.

	(I left my baby unfinished
	and I am confused and ashamed:
	scarcely a brow, scarcely a voice,
	scarcely a size you can see.)

	They carry things, go and come,
	enter and leave the door,
	bringing tiny chipmunk ears,
	teeth of mother-of-pearl.

	In three Christmases he will be another,
	changed from head to toe.
	Tall as a reed he will stand,
	straight as the pine tree on the slope.

	Then, like a crazy woman,
	I will proclaim him through the town
	with a shouting clearly heard
	by the hills and meadows around.

		-- Gabriela Mistral
		   Trans. by Doris Dana

		(Mistral was a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for
		Literature in 1945.)
	

	      FINAL TREE



	This solitary fretwork
	they gave me at birth
	that goes from side
	to fiery side,

	that runs from my forehead
	to my hot feet,
	this island of my blood,
	this minuteness of kingdom,

	I return it fulfilled.
	With arms outstretched I give it
	to the last of my trees,
	to tamarinth or cedar.

	In case in the second life
	they will not give again what has been given
	and I should miss this solace
	of freshness and silence,

	and if I should pass through the world
	in dream, running or flying,
	instead of thresholds of houses
	I shall want a tree to rest under.

	I bequeath it all I had
	of ash and firmament,
	my flank of speech,
	my flank of silence.

	Loneliness I gave myself,
	loneliness they gave me,
	the small tithe I paid the lightning
	of my God, sweet and tremendous.

	My play of give and take
	with clouds and with the winds
	and what I knew, trembling,
	of secret springs.

	Ay! Tremulous shelter
	of my true Archangel,
	ahead of every road
	with branch and balsam.

	Perhaps it is already born
	and I lack the grace to know it,
	or it was that nameless tree
	I carried like a blind son.

	At times a dampness falls
	around my shoulders, a soft breeze,
	and I see bout me
	the girdle of my tree.

	Perhaps its foliage
	already clothes my dream
	and in death I sing beneath it
	without knowing.

		-- Gabriela Mistral
		   Trans. by Doris Dana

        Sewing a dress
    
    
    The need
    these closed-in days
    
    to move before you
    smooth-draped
    and color-elated
    
    in a favorable wind
    
    
    	-----
    
    
    I married
    
    in the world's black night
    for warmth
    		if not repose.
    		At the close --
    someone.
    
    I hid with him
    from the long range guns.
    		We lay leg
    		in the cupboard, head
    in closet.
    
    A slit of light
    at no bird dawn --
    		Untaught
    		I thought
    he drank
    
    
    too much.
    I say
    		I married
    		and lived unburied.
    I thought --
    

I am the First and the Last,
I am the Whore and the Holy One.
I am She whose wedding is great
yet I have never taken a husband.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the silence whose manifestation is multiple.
I am She who cries out.
Why have you hated me in your counsels?
I am the one whom you have despised,
yet you reflect on me.
I am the one from whom you have hidden,
yet you appear to me.
Whenever you hide yourselves,
I myself will appear.
I am the knowledge of my inquiry.
I am the utterance of my name.

	-- "Thunder, Perfect Mind," VI 13, 1-21, 32, from the Nag
	   Hammadi Gnostic texts, quoted in Robin Morgan's book
	   The Demon Lover

    
    
    I want to live to be
    an outrageous old woman
    who is never accused of being
    and old lady
    
    I want to live to have ten thousand lovers
    in one love
    one 7-year-long-loving-love
    
    There are at least 
    two of me
    
    I want to get leaner and meaner
    sharp edged
    color of the ground
    till I discorporate
    from sheer joy.
    

    I lost her awhile ago.
    The young one.
    The actress.
    The dreamer
    The good witch.
    
    The little girl that snuggle in her bed with her books about magic and
    fantasy...
    
    I once lived underground beneath the tree.
    I lived there with the other little people.
    The gnomes and elfs.
    It was safe and warm.... magical
    
    Today I've seen a glimpse of her. 
    There was a certain smile she always had and that laugh was pure 
    innocent.
    She touch me like no other has with her caring for another.
    
    Remember that child that you heard crying and remember reaching out
    wanting to take care of her.
    
    Well, the voice faded and the image went away.........
    
    Will I regain the magic... can she,  will she...
    
    Look over your shoulder    Around the corner      Upstairs in the bedroom
    
    there she goes running -- catch me if you can -- 
    
    she's there. I see her, ah what a pretty young lass. such spirit  newness
    to her life..    she's there........
    
    not lost, just under a magical sleeping spell   she's there............
    
    the actress
    the dreamer
    the good witch
    
    she's there.......... hi it's me let's play
    
    she's there...............
    
             
    

	   ABORTION



	When one woman
	cradles another
	in understanding,
	the harsh light softens.

	When one woman
	soothes another's brow,
	words give way
	to an ancient silence.

	And when one woman
	cleanses another
	of a heightened moment
	gone wrong,

	each defines her life
	clear as morning sun
	on a morning rose.
           
  		-- copyright 1989 Dorian Brooks Kottler

    WHERE NOTHING GROWS
    
    Off into the desert you march
    feeling the hot wind of your anger
    blow through the bones of promises.
    You know no other enemy but me
    who loved too long.
    
    Whether I like it or not
    I am free to hike off although
    I do not choose stones and arid
    spikes of cactus.  I know
    the desert blooms in spring
    rain, and that occasional miracle
    can addict.  Didn't it capture me?
    
    I follow the line of the water
    course, I follow the birds
    to the willow fringe, the scent
    of foliage breathing, the hum
    of insects in the grass.
    Like water I seek my own level
    and like any social beast I look
    for my kind in the twilight.
    
    But you, you have gone to the rocks
    cursing the water that is your birth
    and your blood too.
    
     
    
                   Marge Piercy
                    from _Stone, Paper, Knife_

    That I did always love,
    I bring thee proof:
    That till I loved
    I did not love enough.

    That I shall love alway,
    I offer thee
    That love is life,
    And life hath immortality.

    This, dost thou doubt, sweet?
    Then have I
    Nothing to show
    But Calvary.

    From "Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson"
    edited by Robert Linscott

    I SHALL NOT CARE
    
    When I am dead and over me bright April
    Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
    Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
    I shall not care.
    
    I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
    When rain bends down the bough,
    And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
    Than you are now.

    DESERT POOLS
    
    I love too much; I am a river
    Surging with spring that seeks the sea,
    I am too generous a giver,
    Love will not stoop to drink from me.
    
    His feet will turn to desert places
    Shadowless, reft of rain and dew,
    Where stars stare down with sharpened faces
    From heavens pitilessly blue.
    
    And there at midnight sick with faring,
    He will stoop down in his desire
    To slake the thirst grown past all bearing
    In stagnant water keen as fire.

    FAULTS
    
    They came to tell your faults to me. 
    They named them one by one;
    I laughed aloud when they were done,
    I knew them all so well before, 
    Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
    Your faults had made me love you more.

    SPRING NIGHT
    
    The park is filled with night and fog,
    The veils are drawn about the world,
    The drowsy lights along the paths
    Are dim and pearled.
    
    Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
    Gold and gleaming the misty lake,
    The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
    Glimmer and shake.
    
    Oh, is it not enough to be
    Here with this beauty over me?
    My throat should ache with praise, and I
    Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
    O, beauty are you not enough?
    Why am I crying after love,
    With youth, a singing voice and eyes
    To take earth's wonder with surprise?
    Why have I put off my pride,
    Why am I unsatisfied, - 
    I for whom the pensive night
    Binds her cloudy hair with light, - 
    I for whom all beauty burns
    Like incense in a million urns?
    O, beauty, are you not enough?
    Why am I crying after love?
    

    Don't Laugh, It's Serious, She Says
                           by Ellie Mamber
                           (from Women and Aging, Published by Calyx
                            Books)
    
    At 55, I'm trying to meet men.
    But though I look my best
  (beautiful say some
    of my friends) & am spirited
    & very interesting (you can
    tell this, can't you?)
    most men look at me with blank eyes,
    no part of them flickering.
    At parties they talk around me
    as though I weren't there,
    choose less attractive
    partners to dance or talk with.
    Such a puzzle! I try
    so hard not to let them know
    that I am smarter, more
    talented, classier & more
    interesting than they. Nicer, too.
    I cover this so well
    with a friendly smile
    & a cheerful word
    that they could never tell
    I want them to pursue me
    so I can reject them.
    Bug off, you bastards,
    balding middle-aged men with paunches
    hanging around with women 20 years
    younger, who the hell
    do you think you are?
    You'd better hurry up
    and adore me or
    it will be too late.
    

    I Want
    (ancient history, or a poem archaic in the story of my life)
              by Rosemary Daniell
                 (from We Become New, published by Bantum Books)
    
    no more  no more   to be
    this marsh   this piece of liver
    this suction  this rubber cup
    this leech to your breast,
    always sucking too hard...
    
    
    No.  I want to go to Saks,
    be clothed in silk & sleek;
    have cheeks by Mary Quant,
    hair done by Mad Dog John,
    my lashes stuck in place
    by lacquered fingertips.
    I want to lunch with women
    in some place dark, expensive -
    
    walk into sunlight
    pass the construction hives;
    the yellow-hooded guys
    to buzz  to ache  tonight
    to jerk off or recall me,
    fucking their bovine wives...
    
    I want to come home.
    I want some other man
    to call me on the phone-
    to go out to dinner
    with friends who are not yours.
    
    Midnight, I want to strip
    my Dior slip, pull down
    the new silk hose, the ones
    bought only for myself-
    
    I want you to see & need.
    I want to say, "No, baby
    not tonight."  I want
    to turn my perfect back
    as you did yesterday.
       

They say she is veiled
and a mystery.  That is
one way of looking.
Another
is that she is where
she always has been,
exactly in place,
and it is we,
we who are mystified,
we who are veiled
and without faces.

		-- Judy Grahn

Mary Oliver:

Trim Hall, Babson College, Babson Park, Wellesley. Telephone 239-4573. 
Feb. 12, 7:30 p.m. Free. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.


Valentine's Day Reading:

Sanders Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge. Telephone 495-2454. 
Feb. 14, 8-10 p.m. $10, students $5. Reading of poetry and prose by Seamus 
Heaney, Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Philips, Sharon Olds, Gerald Stern. 
Proceeds to Associated Writing Program, nonprofit organization that fosters 
literary talent and achievement at college level.

    You All Know The Story of the Other Woman
                         by Anne Sexton
                         from Love Poems
    
    It's a little Walden.
    She is private in her breathbed
    as his body takes off and flies,
    flies straight as an arrow.
    But it's a bad translation.
    Daylight is nobody's friend.
    God comes in like a landlord
    and flashes on his brassy lamp.
    Now she is just so-so.
    He puts his bones back on,
    turning the clock back an hour.
    She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
    the unbound limbs, the boards,
    the roof, the removable roof.
    She is his selection, part time.
    You know the story too!  Look,
    when it is over he places her,
    like a phone, back on the hook.
    

The Afternoon
-------------

the dance of a corpse
pretending to be alive
desecration of flesh
the ebb of a tide
I've walked a long leg
on this journey o' mine
the sky sometimes grey
the night sometimes shy
betrayal of passion
don't give me no high
I've always known
tough girls don't cry


- Carla Blazek
  2.May 1989

    
        POPPIES IN JULY

    Little poppies, little hell flames,
    Do you do no harm?

    You flicker. I cannot touch you.
    I put my hands amoung the flames. Nothing burns.

    And it exhausts me to watch you
    Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a
    mouth.

    A mouth just bloodied.
    Little bloody skirts!

    There are fumes that I cannot touch.
    Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

    If I could bleed, or sleep!----
    If my mouth could marry hurt like that!

    Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
    Dulling and stilling.

    But colourless. Colourless.

	        From "Ariel" by Sylvia Plath
	        copywrite Ted Huges, Harper and Row 1961
    

         I turned to her, one in whom I'd had great conflicts. She
         turned as if simultaneously and stared back in my cold grey
         eyes. I knew that I could come to her and I knew that she
         could help. She's always been there when I needed her and I
         love her so very much.  She knew what was the matter, I
         didn't have to speak.  She told me to stop being someone I'm
         not and to get my life out of the darkness.  I shook my heard
         yes and she returned the gesture.  I reached my hand out in
         friendship:  we touched just to find my fingertips hit the
         mirror.


	 

morning traffic
and the concrete jungle of civilisation
waging war against a woman's spirit
acrid exhaust
and a screaming song on the radio
attempting to drown out the impending day

as I slip into a parking space
a powerful glimpse of reality appears
in the delicate form
of long-stemmed green grass
in perfect and abundant alignment
topped with magestic crowns of moist dew
standing proudly like peaceful sentinels
whose mission
is to remind me
who I am
and why I am alive


-- clb
   15.March 1990

          The Law of the Land
    
    (Written on the occasion of the July 4, 1989 
     Supreme Court Decision restricting 
     a woman's right to abortion)
    
   by  Rosaire Karij  reprinted from the Ithaca Times, 12-28-89
   ************************************************************
    We hold these truths to be self evident
    that all women 
    are under the law, under the law, under the law
    under the law is the word
    the same word made flesh
    flesh that she shaped
    and sent out into the world
    where it learned to forget
    the body that held it
    forget in time even who it was
    and so invented stories
    about who had made it.
    One of those stories was god.
    
    Shaper, maker, holder
    woman.
    Hold that woman
    under the law
    make her body and instrument
    tell her it's love
    tell her to come back tomorrow
    the world is closed,
    tell her the mountain
    is mightier than the cave,
    open the cave with the flood of the law
    watch her head go under
    hold back the oar
    take her life
    wring it out, hang it out
    like a loaf of washed bread
    tell her she asked for it.
    Even love has a price.
    
    And the price of a woman is cheap
    a bargain, a two-fer
    get her pregnant
    kill the woman, keep the child
    teach the child the power of the word
    tell him he was delivered
    in the beak of a bird.
    Once he believes that
    he'll swallow anything ---
    dope, pride, yesterday's headline
    that the measure of a man
    is his distance from woman
    
    from the blood of the earth
    from the flesh of the mother
    from the spell of the body
    holding the memory of she who
    was remembering
    was spoken
    was knowledge
    before it was taken
    and given a distorted sound.
    This is the way
    the truth
    of the law.
    

        
    Tonight (March 19), 8:15, Blacksmith House, Cambridge
    
    Ira Sadoff (a good poet - it's a publication reading for his third
    book of poems). It costs $2.

    I heard this on NPR's All Things Considered, this evening while 
    driving home.  I was so taken with what I'd heard, I tried to call 
    the station to ask for the name of the author, in the hopes that
    I could find some of her work, translated, in print here.  Then I 
    remembered that (much of?) ATC is repeated on the station -- it 
    comes on once at 5 then again at 6, so by then I was home and was 
    able to set up the tape recorder.  I've guessed at the spellings 
    of the names.  Here it is:



    Prayer for a Night Poster, translated by Andre Codresciu
    
    By Leonida Lahrry, Moldavian Nationalist member of the
                       Soviet Parliament.

    I don't have the power to break people in two,
    but I pray that what happened to us will happen to you.
    With a bit of bitter bread in your sack, 
    among innumerable laws and rules, 
    may you too wander from century to century, 
    looking for a thin wedge of justice.  

    And when attacked in your own house, 
    and chased from your own place, 
    may you forget all about class struggle
    and dream of simple liberty instead.
    When beaten and crowded by strangers, 
    you lose your place by your own hearth.  
    May you beg for the Russian language 
    the way we have been made to beg for ours.  
    And when your customs and your soul 
    have been stolen, 
    may you too have to wander 
    lost between commissions and tribunals.  
    May you also go through fire, hell, 
    and flood to save the sparkle 
    of your sickle and your hammer.

    And may you be told a simple truth -- 
    that you are good, like those Turks in our past 
    who chained us to their carts.  Remember?  
    You've chained us to your food wagons 
    and scattered us in 1940, 
    and then removed from our graves the bodies 
    of our dead and put your dead in there, 
    instead.

    I don't have the power to break people in two,
    but I pray that what happened to us will happen to you.
    And when you've suffered as we have, 
    I pray that you be cured forever 
    of your lust for liberating others.

    It was intense listening to her recite it, with the intontations
    hitting certain phrases for emphasis.  It was also depressing, since
    there's a definite undercurrent of "revenge for past deeds."  No wonder
    the region has so much ethnic strife ... wrongs done centuries ago are
    still being paid back.  And returned.  And so on.

    (not that we don't have similar things happen in the U.S., though)

 Thank you for entering this.  I heard it last night on the way home and 
found it both moving _and_ relevant.

    <posted with the author's permission - ~r>
    
 
The silent scream 
Is not the cry
Of the unborn child
It is the cry
Of the child 
Born
And raped
It is the cry
Of the mother
Raped
It is the cry
Of the daughter
Raped
The silent scream
Is the cry unheard
Because they do not
Listen
They do not
Hear
They do not
Believe
And because
We silence ourselves
 
The men are afraid
We will kill
Their babies
So we make babies
For them
To hurt
To rape
To kill
 
The silent scream is NOT
The scream of a fetus
Being denied life
NO!
 
It is the scream of 
Ten million Witches
Ten million women 
Raped
Killed
For being 
ALIVE!
 
It is the scream of
Every man woman and child
Once a baby
Hurt
Raped
Killed
For being
ALIVE
 
It is the scream 
Of a child
Crying
NO!
NO!
To her father
NO!
Don't hurt me
Don't kill me
 
It is the scream
Of the silenced victim
 
It is not the scream
Of an unborn fetus
We do not scream
Before we breathe
First
We breathe the polluted air
Our fathers have made for us
AND THEN WE SCREAM!
 
I want to live
And breathe
And die
And fuck
And make babies
And love
On whole green living
Mother Earth
 
But the silent scream 
Is the scream of the earth
As she is HURT
And RAPED
And KILLED
 
And I scream
NO!  NO!  NO!
STOP!
 
But THIS
Is the silent scream
Because
YOU DO NOT HEAR ME!
 
--erica  12-3-89  [brigid]
 

Can You Hear Me Call Your Name
	Michael Dunford / Betty Thatcher /Jon Camp
	from "Novella" by Renaissance

Morning people take the news
A paper window on a world
They live on undisturbed.
Thoughts may fly like lonely birds
And lost behind the silent words
Voices are unheard.
Put it down to city life
Oh if I understood.
Passing by so easily
I'd reach you if I could.
Can you hear me?

Evening people see the day
A silhouette on every face
A shadow on their eyes.
I take my place within the crowd
We walk the dusty streets around
Encompassing our lives.
Put it down to city times
Oh if I understood.
Passing by so casually
I'd reach you if I could.
Can you hear me?

Fly like a song, fly while you're singing
A song without you is a bird without winging
Some city flights leave in the morning
Some city nights end without warning
Can you hear me call?

Night time people find it hard
To hear themselves above the noise
The music holds its own.
I recognised a place I'd known
I turned to find it carved in stone
A mirrored smile alone.
Put it down to city nights
Oh if I understood.
Passing by so far from me
I'd reach you if I could.
Can you hear me?

Calling to the sky
The thunder drowns my voice within the rain
And I know you're near me.
And I call thoughout the storm
I know that you don't hear me.
I call your name
Can you hear me call your name?

	From that muddy old
	rain-ditch, what celestial
	choir do I hear?
    
    

    To A Daughter at Fourteen
      Forsaking the Violin
    
    All year, Mozart went under
    the sea of rock punk reggae
    that crashed into your room every
     night and wouldn't recede however
    I sandbagged our shore
    and swore to keep the house dry.
    Your first violin, that halfsize
    rented model, slipped out of tune
    as you played Bach by ear
    Suzuki method with forty other virtuosos
    who couldn't tie their shoes.
    Then such progress: your own
    fiddle, the trellised notes you read,
    recitals where I sat on hard chairs.
    Your playing made me the kid.
    If I had those fingers!...
    Five of yours grasped my pinky,
    the world before you grew teeth.
    O.K. They're your fingers.
    To paint the nails of, put rings on,
    hold cigarettes in, make obscene
    gestures or farewells with.
    
    (from "The Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry")
    

    Re .191, by Carole Oles, from "The Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary
    Poetry" published by University Press of New ENgland.
    

Someone has asked me if this poem is from a book, or a member of the enet, or
what. It's been around for ages. Can anyone help me?
	Mez

                     Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
    
                               by Portia Nelson
    
        
                                      I
    
                   I walk, down the street.
                           There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
                           I fall in
                           I am lost ... I am helpless
                                         It isn't my fault.
                   It takes forever to find a way out
    
    
                                      II
    
                   I walk down the same street.
                           There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
                           I pretend I don't see it.
                           I fall in again.
                   I can't believe I am in the same place.
                                         but it isn't my fault.
                   It still takes a long time to get out.
    
    
                                     III
    
                   I walk down the same street
                            There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
                            I see it there.
                            I still fall in ... it's a habit
                                                my eyes are open.
                                                I know where I am.
                            It is my fault.
                            I get out immediately.
    
    
                                      IV
                   I walk down the same street.
                            There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
                            I walk around it.
    
    
                                      V
    
                   I walk down another street.

    
Je suis comme je suis			I am the way I am

Je suis comme je suis			I am the way I am
Je suis faite comme ca			That's the way I am made
Quand j'ai envie de rire		When I feel like laughing
Oui je ris aux eclats			Yes I break out laughing
J'aime celui qui m'aime			I love he who loves me
Est-ce ma faute a moi			Is it my fault
Si ce n'est pas le meme			If it's not the same guy
Que j'aime chaque fois			I love every time
Je suis comme je suis			I am the way I am
Je suis faite comme ca			That's the way I am made
Que voulez-vous de plus			What more do you want
Que voulez-vous de moi			What do you want of me

Je suis faite pour plaire		I am made to please
Et n'y puis rien changer		And I can't change that
Mes talons sont trop hauts		My heels are too high
Ma taille trop cambree			My waist too curved
Mes seins beaucoup trop durs		My breasts much too hard
Et mes yeux trop cernes			And my eyes too shadowed
Et puis apres				And so what

Qu'est-ce que ca peut vous faire 	What do you care
Ce qui m'est arrive			What happened to me
Oui j'ai aime quelqu'un			Yes I loved somebody
Oui quelque'un m'aimee			Yes somebody loved me
Comme les enfants qui s'aiment		Like the children who love
Simplement savent aimer			Know how to love simply
Aimer aimer...				Love love...
Pourquoi me questionner			Why ask questions
Je suis la pour vous plaire		I am here to please you
Et n'y puis rien changer		And I can't change that

Jacques Prevert  "Paroles"
Copyright Les Editions du Point du Jour, Paris 1947
    
Entered and translated without permission, 
but Prevert has been dead some time ..
I made the translation myself, and will gratefully accept - by mail, please -
any suggestion to ameliorate the translation. If applicable, I will then re-
enter the poem after correction!

			I AM A WOMAN

	I am a woman, a human being of extraordinary strength, 
	wisdom, and grace.

	My woman's body was created in the body of a woman. I am
	daughter, sister, mother in thousands of generations of women,
	women whose skills created peaceful and bountiful civilizations,
	women who preserved remnants of our knowledge when the
	civilizations passed.

	I am a woman.  In me lives the knowledge and experience of all
	beings.  I can use that knowledge and experience to create a
	loving, spontaneous world.

	I am a woman.  I'm learning anew the basic women's skills;
	healer, planter, nurturer, mystic, protector, defender, builder,
	poet, musician, festival-maker, storyteller, connection with the
	source of life and knowing.

	I am a woman.  A part of and the whole of the first circle, the
	circle that transcends space and time, the circle of women
	joined.

	I am a woman.  A human being of extraordinary strength, wisdom,
	and grace.

	And this is true.

	Sarah Bimhak

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple...

 With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
  And I shall spend my pension on brandy
   and summer gloves and satin sandals,
    and say we've no money for butter.

 I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired.
  And gobble up samples in shops and press
   alarm bells and run my stick along the
    public railings, and make up for
     the sobriety of my youth.

 I shall go out in my slippers in the rain,
  And pick the flowers in other people's
   gardens and learn to spit.

    But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
     So people who know me are 
      not too shocked and surprised
	When suddenly I am old
	  and start to wear purple.

		unknown	 

The Day of the Dreamer
	Michael Dunford / Jon Camp
	from "A Song for all Seasons" by Renaissance

Falling around me, parts of my life
I'm leaving them all behind
We leave with the night
Living in strange ways
Has cast me aside
I cry in another world - now,
I must search for all my days gone by.

Voices that call to me, lay silent to hide
Soon I will hold them close
With words from my eyes
Living in hope of you
Loving you now
You are my waking thoughts - I,
Lay with you in my sleeping hours.

Dreamer lead me ever closer
Here is where I belong
Inside my own existance
I have been for so long.

To stand and gaze upon your smile,
A deep reflection,
Held in my soul as a child
To grow within the warmth of love,
Long forgotten,
Tears flood your eyes in a moment
Each time I become as one within you
to lose you far away.

I stay inside your heaven now,
No longer lonely,
Once more I'm safe in your arms
To feel your touch across my mind
Fills me only,
Full of desire for my being
Found here, really all that needs a meaning
To feel us fade away.

    A Poem for Emily
          by Miller Williams
          from The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry
    
    
    
    Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
    a hand's width and two generations away,
    in this still present I am fifty three.
    You are not yet a full day.
    
    When I am sixty three, when you are ten,
    and you are neither closer nor as far,
    your arms will fill with what you know by then,
    the arithmetic and love we do and are.
    
    When I by blood and luck am eighty six
    and you are some place else and thirty three
    believing in sex and god and politics
    with children who look not at all like me,
    
    some time I know you will have read them this
    so they will know I love them and say so
    and love their mother.  Child, whatever is
    is always or never was.  Long ago,
    
    a day I watched a while beside your bed,
    I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
    a while, to tell you what I would have said
    when you were who knows what and I was dead
    which is I stood and loved you while you slept.
    
    

    
    You begin this way:
    this is your hand.
    this is your eye.
    that is a fish, blue and flat
    on the paper, almost
    the shape of an eye.
    This is your mouth, this is an O
    or a moon, whichever
    you like. This is yellow.
    
    Outside the window
    is the rain, green
    because it is summer, and beyond that
    the trees and then the world,
    which is round and has only
    the colors of these nine crayons.
    
    This is the world, which is fuller
    and more difficult to learn than I have said.
    You are right to smudge it that way
    with the red and then
    the orange: the world burns.
    
    Once you have learned these words
    you will learn that there are more
    words than you can ever learn.
    The word *hand* floats above your hand
    like a small cloud over a lake.
    The word *hand* anchors
    your hand to this table,
    your hand is a warm stone
    I hold between two words.
    
    This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world.
    Which is round but not flat and has more colors
    than we can see.
    It begins, it has an end,
    this is what you will
    come back to, this is your hand.
    
    	-Margaret Atwood
    

    
    Today I would recede into the forest
    Receive the rain's blessing
    Sheeted, jewel-like, beaded brilliants
    From softly shuttled clouds
    Looming forth on bright gray skies
    
    Today I would sit, cross-legged
    By a lake reflecting inward
    Watching rain consumed, accepted
    Water becoming one
    
    Today I would think without speaking
    Unsurprised at the outcome
    Receiving the blessing of inner storms
    Consumed, accepted by myself
    Amidst soft winds of change
    
    And skyswept clouds of fortune
    Would weave my vaporous horizons
    As I would sit, nodding gently
    Knowing the rightness
    Welcoming and embracing
    Whethering and wondering
    Wordless with delight
    
    
    	jb
    

                       A Creed to Live By

Don't undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others.
It is because we are different that each of us is special.
Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.
Only you know what is best for you.
Don't take for granted the things closest to your heart.
Cling to them as you would your life, for without
   them life is meaningless.
Don't let your life slip through your fingers by
   living in the past or for the future.
By living your life one day at a time, you live all
   the days of your life.
Don't give up when you still have something to give.
Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
Don't be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect.
It is this fragile thread that binds us to each other.
Don't be afraid to encounter risks.
It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.
Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find.
The quickest way to receive love is to give love,
  the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly,
   and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Don't dismiss your dreams.
To be without dreams is to be without hope;
to be without hope is to be without purpose.
Don't run through life so fast that you forget not only where you've been
  but also where you're going.
Life is not a race,
but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

        I'm wife; I've finished that,
	That other state;
	I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
	It's safer so.

	How odd the girl's life looks
	Behind this soft eclipse!
	I think that earth seems so
	To those in heaven now.

	This being comfort, then
	That other kind was pain;
	But why compare?
	I'm wife! Stop there!

    Adrienne Rich
    April 26, 7:30 pm
    MIT Media Lab
    20 Ames St., Cambridge
    Bartos Theater (Wiesner Building)