Tuesday Poem: previously published by Caprice in 1996

 Genesis (The Real Story)

In the beginning there was violence.

The two of them struggling for dominance.

His rage a black hole

sucking the two of them

out of time and back again,

Her defiance lacerating Him:

the sharp edges of a nebula skirting too close.

It takes two to tango,

my mother always said,

and it came from her knowledge of this:

The First Tango,

when the tension between Them

caused what scientists call 'The Big Bang';

what actually was the first and last separation.

She shook Him, you see.

Wake up you son of nothing!

So He tackled Her,

just to restrain Her, mind you,

but then She maneuvered 

and bit His celestial finger.

Suddenly, it was Wham!

A huge fist square to Her chest.

How dare you hit me in the breast!

You stinking Red Giant!

You White Dwarf!

She flung planets in His face

so He pushed Her hard until 

She thudded against this one,

knocking the wind out of her 

and all the fire too.

That's when She wept for emptiness,

the wounding of the two of them

stretched thin across eternity's indifference.

 She wept for loneliness, for having no one else,

and as She wept She tore at the planet's sides,

until there were great holes to fill with tears.

She wept for thousands of years.

You know the rest.

When the place came alive Her mood changed.

She began to try to find a way to love again,

for the two of them, some tangible alternative.

She kept messing around with water and dust, 

remaking Herself over and over in miniature,

until She got it right. And then She made Him 

as She wished Him to be, over and over 

until She got it right. She made their bodies 

fit together. She made them willing

to reach across the night.

She gave them more to work with, 

you might say, flawed though they were.

Let there be a light spawned out of darkness,

She said. And She saw that the light was good.

It was the outcome of a fight,

the end of a cosmic honeymoon,
a bubble that suddenly burst: Blake's 
mystical spheres torn apart.

Of course His story is altogether different.

He dreamed Himself moving 

over the face of the waters,

Gardener of the Firmament,

benign, and of course, betrayed

by the slither of woman's 

dissatisfaction, her hunger 

to know it all.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in the anthology: Women.Period in 2008

                                                                                     Painting by William Blake  
Sleeping Beauty

Like a frog out of the water,

like a big clumsy fly caught in a screen,

I entered womanhood

flailing my long legs.

Jumping Double Dutch in sneakered feet,

pounding a Morse Code of denial into the sidewalk,

so it echoed throughout the neighborhood:

not me, it said, not me,

I'll play with dolls forever,

I'll be a boy

if I want to,

I'll go off and play

by the railroad tracks.

Or spinning crazy like a top

in the grass of the backyard,

almost mowing mother's roses down with my arms,

then swooning beneath our peach tree

heavy with ripening fruit.

Dizzy it always made me dizzy,

and sleepy too, this newly tilting

pigeon thrumming inside me.

Thought I'd never want

a prince bending over me,

his face so much like a brother's

with its teasing wheedling eyes,

and mouth that kisses too hard.

 

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Embers in 1987

To The Great Grandmothers

How did you take that first step

through the doorway of prosperity

into teeming gray Manhattan ?

From small villages,

and homely neighborhoods,

you voyaged to the gates of Babylon,

stepped outside of history, sailed away

from bustling Holland waterways

lined with leaning narrow houses,

turned your back on windmills

turning in slow motion,

Left the grit and bustle of Glasgow,

the smoky Staffordshire potteries,

lyric Dublin with its bicycles and pub signs,

windows full of curtain lace

reflecting narrow cobbled streets.

You made a clean break,

hearts beating a new cadence,

you marched into an adventure,

bearing talismans from home

full of prayers and promise.

And you were immortal saying goodbye –

like a bride made light by eagerness, and bravery,

ready to be swept across the threshold of mystery.

Then it must have been with sober feet

that you first planted yourselves

on United States firmament,

cast your lot in with all the rest,

tossed over in great waves,

as you were by the cold Atlantic.

And in the streets moving through

fields of faces, their patterns

intricate as Delft ware,

Royal Dalton, Limerick lace,

listening hard for a quiet space,

a familiar word in the din,

every inch of the air

and turf of the place

raucous with activity.

I wonder how your hearts

endured it: the dragon

and the labyrinth of New York,

whether poems or nightmares

danced inside your heads.

I picture your faces a little gray

from the shock of it all,

frozen, still as a photograph,

caught in a flash of insight:

in this enormous marketplace,

you would never be more than small change.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Poetpourri in 1992

The Hunger Angels

first came to her when they were fighting.

Their whispers made her feel 

like she’d put her ear to a seashell.

They told her her father swallowed his anger.

They danced like little fireflies around him,

swirled inside his undertow of loneliness,

swam in his beer, made fun of the white heron

poses, he learned as a boy, in a kitchen

where there was never enough to eat.

She watched them hover like hummingbirds

as they buzzed her mother's fork,

oozed out of her sandwiches, as she took her 

giant bites. When Mommy sat quiet, they gathered 

in her hair, stirring up the racket of memory,

with its abuses, desertions, hard work that made her

disappear into cooking pots, and gourmet magazines.

The little girl watched the two of them

tangle with one another in despair.

The angels multiplied then, their faces

becoming her parents' faces in miniature.

Put us in your hope chest, they said

when she was eight years old.

Someday you'll open it,

and we'll have grown like dumplings,

or steamy loaves of bread.

No head of a pin for us, babe.

We’ll keep you fidgety company.

Just  fire up those cravings.

In her innocence she welcomed them,

glad to be included, not knowing

how else the story might have gone.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

One Summer I Read 

A Biography of Emily Bronte

And suddenly I noticed

the ornamental cabbages

penned up too close

to the houses, their ferocious

color, their variegated heads

crenellating gorgeously

despite their captivity.

The fences around them are

just a little too high,

so that they have to

stretch on precarious stems

to be seen, or to see out.

Their leaves show such largesse,

reaching out to one another,
trying to hold hands across the mulchy
darkness, as if it threatened to

swallow them whole.

And they take the frost,

like troopers, holding firm to

that ethereal companionship

as long as they can, 

despite the worms

living inside them,

the slow hollowing
that leaves them feeling
like shells caught in their longing

for the ocean, a whisper

that echoes a roar.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by The National Library of Poetry in 1992

The Biggest Apple

grew far from Eden,

the tree that bore it

stunted from too many prunings.

No one watered or fed the soil around it

and yet this one fruit ballooned out

big as a baby's head

and tenacious enough

to cling to its stem through a hurricane.

The tree held it out like a lantern,

this single ridiculous pippin

brilliant as Einstein.

The tree said, Here,

here are all my dreams

enclosed in one glowing skin.

May this opus that no one

expected from me

light your way.

Forgive me if it’s not sweet enough.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by The Nerve: a Writing Women Anthology, in 1997

During His Lectures He Notices

that her back is a straight garden 

wall from which the breasts

cascade like clusters of heavy blossoms.

He imagines God's head resting 

there on the startling blue of her dress,

God's hand that sweats

and wrinkles what covers her thighs.

His eyes follow her pencil.

How lightly she holds it, how she resists

putting his gray interpretations across

the white expanse of her notebook.

White. White moons in her nails. 

White sliding down a sheer stockinged leg.

Her shoe like a narrow 

black canoe with a bow:

he will take her across 

the lake of his desire some day soon.

He will begin to plead with her on paper:

Without you, he will write,

I am the soul of a rat, 

a crimson abnegation.

Without you -- nothing 

but a hammer

striking the Pieta, shit

on the head of the Buddha.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in 1997 by Poetry London Newsletter, and The Nerve: A Writing Women's Poetry Anthology

Vincent Loves Lucy

It would've gone this way:

him taking her to his little room at Arles,

after ditching Ricky in Paris,

the Cuban left scratching his head at the station,

trying to figure out which train his dizzy 

wife had boarded by mistake.

It would start out like a dream,

guileless as the gleaners in the fields:

Her speaking her cartoon French to make him laugh.

Him whispering that her rosebud mouth

was the keyhole to unlocking them both.

But it wouldn't take long for him 

to start throwing the knives,

for the two of them to reach 

combustion you might say,

what with all that flaming 

improbable hair.

Picture the two of them:

so fair, sailing over wheat 

colored grass, the lift of her 

parasol, him coaxing her up

like a kite in the wind,

onto the Langlois bridge's 

delicate scaffolding.

Then all of a sudden 

her skirt gets caught,

the stubborn tilt of her hat 

as she yanks and yanks,

the boats crowding in 

unable to go through

and Vincent making 

no move to help,

only trying to paint 

her refusal, only blotting out 

her reflection with thick blue strokes.

Of course she'd spill 

unwanted into every painting:

the orange doorways, the frantic 

slashes of sunlight, the crows

singing badly in the fields.

Alas, these brushes 

with immortality 

don't last, no matter

how well imagined.

The whole thing, 

for Lucy, too much

like being locked inside

a steamer trunk, for Vincent, 

a mouth overfull of chocolates.

Before you know it, there's a telegram 

waiting for Ricky at the Hotel desk.

Help stop, it says. 

I tried to buy a painting stop

But the guy misunderstood me stop

Can you and Fred and Ethel pick me up?

Tuesday Poem: Previously published in Footwork in 1987

Barn Fire

vomits flames and smoke into yellow day,

about a mile ahead down the Thruway,

leaves us breathless in the car,

searching through the trees

for a glimpse of the fire’s

hot mouth, as we draw near,

barn skeleton like a

child's drawing in black crayon

vibrating over a floor of solid flame,

walls gone; everything going to charcoal.

I think about hay –

how sweet it is, fresh from the fields,

how it chafes and generates

heat when it’s shut away,

sparks and goes asmolder in the dark.

I was sixteen when my father begged

Uncle Dick to put him in the hospital.

He was terrified, he told me,

that he’d kill himself.

Our mother and he were separated

a couple of years already,

but she drove the two hours it took

to get us up there, soon after he called.

The plastic bracelet hung on his wrist

as he asked me for a light, as we

sat in Rockland State Hospital’s ]
dayroom, a poisonous fog around us, as he

chain-smoked Pall Malls, letting them 
burn down to little cylinders of ash.

He coughed as he talked, a fire 
slowly rising in my chest as he ranted.

Did we know they took the mattresses

off the beds, forced him to pace

back and forth down the hall,

like a moving target?

His hands were shaking, his long 
tobacco fingers pinching the cigarettes 
flat, as his voice cut the air, my throat 
going so raw, I could barely swallow.

Did we know they were starving him?

His supper last night was a 
slice of bologna, and a handful of dry 
spaghetti, with a packet of ketchup.

He cried so hard at the thought of it, 
he couldn’t even choke it down.

We’d bought him another carton of Pall Malls, 
a Life Magazine, a Look. The blister around 
my heart was getting bigger; I could hardly breathe.

It’s only temporary, Tom, try to 
hold on, my mother said. Then she 
told us to say goodbye to him, it was 
time to get going. He asked us for hugs.

I remember my hands beating the air 
around his shoulders, like homeless swallows.

The closest I could come to any comfort.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by Writing Women in 1997

The Year of the Plum-Colored Bathing Suit

her breasts were blue-veined

porcelain and full of milk

for the baby.

She waited for him to notice

them spilling, a soft waterfall,

wished he would ask her

to put marmalade on them at tea-time.

All summer she offered him sweet rolls,

hoped he would cup her lightly

in long china fingers.

Instead he stayed out of the water, reading,

or changing the baby's diapers,

or teasing their oldest boy

unmercifully.