Tuesday Poem: previously published by Icarus Rising in 2001

painting by Sally Noble

Crow Woman

sits up black as humid earth,

rises out of a wallow of water

and humus, black and stake-burnt

for harboring knowledge,

for power enough say no,

witch woman, cinder saint,

shakes a tail feather loose

and delivers a baby,

footprints filling with ooze

in her wake, as she struts her

reek of passion, muck of sexuality,

stubborn blood that will not come out,

crow woman, shaven headed

intimate of trees and tinctures,

tarred and feathered adultress,

sticky baby you can’t let go of,

nodding earthward, flying, flying,

landing you in the brambles,

earth angel, flying the highways

commuting, commuting

the sentence, the sentence of night,

and you, and you with your sharp

crow eating night kill eyes,

dare you to follow,

dare you to try

to get rid of her.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.   

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality, ed. Marilyn Sewell 1987

Image from Apron Stringz blog by Calamity Jane

domestic poem

Nightfall I sink

into dishwash meditation :

steaming china prayer wheels

crystalline bells of a lost horizon

breathing slows

din and lull of running water from crockery mandalas

moist heat muscles soften

zen poems drip from silverware

air hums out a chanting

cleansing melody

washing the frantic stew of a day

down the drain along with the suds

those transient rainbow things

thin skin of the passing instant.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 2003

painting by Phil Wood

 Hunger Report # 117

It was when he stopped the car

and shouted that I could get out

and walk the rest of the way home,

there on Mohawk Street, which was miles away,

that I started craving cream cheese.

Cream cheese with bacon and tomato

to be exact He bought it a couple of days ago

to eat with the dozen bagels.

Cream cheese, smoke, and salt on Triscuits.

That’s how I wanted to eat it,

crunching them like bones between my teeth.

His, mine, the bones of our contention,

each slathered with  his love

to help me choke them down.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

 Sculpture by Paul Villinski

Death Called To My Mother

butterfly silent.

Butterflies she loved

and talked about:

their delicacy and color,

their brevity through golden air;

as if the blossoms themselves

had taken flight,

their pollen-rich leaps

from flower to flower,

their nectar-driven reveries.

It was death,

hovering in the garden,

she opened her heart to,

weary as she was of struggling,

and loss after loss, never getting

past the caterpillar's hunger,

over-filling her plate

as if searching for

herself in all that weight.

She didn't know

the word for soul, in Greek,

is the word for butterfly too.

She only knew,

in dreams, they covered her,

like a quilt of shivering wings:

Adonis Blue, Pearly Eye,

Swallowtail, Roadside Skipper.

Come, they whispered.

the chrysalis is waiting.

It’s finally time

for bliss.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by The Nerve: Writing Women of 1997 from Virago Press

 
Romare Bearden's "In The Garden"

Sunny in the Cotton Field

looking distant as she bends

to rest the heavy sack on the ground.

Why’s Sunny so dreamy today ?

Her look so far away: probably

back at the house where her baby

cries and nobody’s picking him up.

Sunny’s arms ache, her breasts gone dry

so baby can feed while she’s away.

What is Mama thinking?

Sitting out on the porch, dozing off

when she should be inside.

Sunny Dark Chocolate

Sweet, uh-huh. That’s what she says to herself

when a little white girl on the bus

points her finger, pale as a maggot, at Sunny,

says Look, Mama. Look. 
A lady made of chocolate!

Then the bus goes all 
shamed and silent,

for a heartbeat or two, 

but it’s enough to give

Sunny an ache in her neck, 

from holding her head up

as she lowers herself 

out the back door.

Sunny Tough Hands

from pulling that soft white stuff

out of claws that hold it tight.

Nothing white without a price.

Jim Crow’s told her that, in how many ways?

As soon as she had ears to hear and eyes to see.

Sunny Too Fat

made her brothers laugh,

say her butt quivers

like the skin that holds the river in.

Right, she said.

And if you don’t stop pinching

and brushing past me

I’ll throw myself in there,

and wash away for good!

Ssss, Sunny, come on, 
sit down with me

Mama putting the plates out, 

just two of them,

for biscuits and honey 

and chamomile tea.

Mama always so good at fixing things:

the miserable din of her brothers,

the dogs, the fields receding

in a hum of pleasure,

the two of them drunk like bees.

Sunny Like A Tree

breaks the blue horizon

stuck in the red dirt of this place,

and reaching up to heaven

with pleading limbs.

Well, not really.

She wouldn’t get very far doing that,

what with the bag dragging behind her,

that won’t go filling itself.

But once in a while she looks up

and that big old leafless thing

seems to be on fire as sun sinks into night.

She imagines it calling through God’s thin ether,

telling Him : Look here, Lord.

Is this all you made us for?

When will you put things right?

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Earth's Daughters in 1986, and by Fine China: Twenty Years of Earth's Daughters in 1993

1949 Pontiac

black and sleek.

My father rounds

his gleaming fastback

sparkle of chrome,

my mother already

tucked inside,

the vault-like

slam of the door 

still music

to his ears,

solid as a limo,

this dreamy Joe 

Dimaggio about 

to cruise away

with Marilyn.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

Aunt Aggie Closes Her Eyes

and her soul slips away

like a bolt of dotted Swiss on the breeze

flying higher and higher

toward a Magellanic Cloud.

Good-bye, I say.

Hope you don’t mind

that I conjured up such flimsy stuff.

It’s just that you were gossamer

compared to our workman’s

poplin and kitchen oilcloth.

I see her circling the moon with my father,

Aunt Mary trailing behind them, and Uncle Joe.

She offers a wispy hand to my mother,

pours some tea and sympathy

like she always did,

then whirls, a dizzy mist

toward the grim

outline of her parents,

the thin familiar

arms of Uncle Allen.

 I wave. Thanks, I shout,

especially for your knock-knock jokes,

and for not taking sides when things fell apart.

For serving us your too small Sunday roasts,

so we had to stop for burgers

on the way home, my parents joking

and laughing instead of fighting.

You never added salt to anything.

You gave me my first Pop Tart,

and taught me how to face death

with a heart so full of love

there’s no room left for fear.

I’ll  always remember.

She giggles and shakes her head,

then flies off to ride the Milky Way,

glad to be as passé as Christmas tinsel.

Thus the heavy basket

I’ve carried all my life

becomes a little bit lighter.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version was published by The Church And The Artist Anthology in 1987

 

What If Giacometti Were 

God In One Of His Dreams?

Tossing and turning in a Heaven

clotted with plaster dust,

while what He’d been so sure of,

shrinks to almost nothing as He works it,

or crumbles in His hands

as He grabs at His pounding heart.

He keeps what’s left of them

in his shirt pocket:

little specks of dust: fit a 
hundred inside a matchbox.

How they shock Him 

whenever He opens it, and sets 
them out on the firmament.

How the clouds cradling His

slumber roar and shake
as he studies their hunger,

their heads, too heavy to hold up
on delicate bowing spines.

How sad and spent they seem --

like matches past their light,

or saplings with shallow roots,

wan and vulnerable

on ludicrous big feet.

Plant them and the faintest wind

will flatten them, send them

to rot and mire, until the earth gets

fed up enough to spit them out.

He’ll never get them right.

God in a sweat, while down below,

Picasso can do no wrong. Picasso

with his horny incandescence.

What joke is eternal night 

playing on Him now? Thus He 
cries out and wakes Himself.

The Garden at present looks peaceful,

the man busy at his naming, the woman

strolling brightly beneath the trees,

though He sees the whole thing heading for a fall.

Surely, there’s something to be learned here.
Let new modes of being commence! 
Besides, He quite enjoys the suspense.

Tuesday Poem: An earlier version appeared in Footwork in1987

Confessions

Bless me Father for I have sinned

1.

Sister Catherine tells us stories

about martyrs every Wednesday,

how little children in China

are being tortured for loving Jesus.

The Communists are giving them all

free passes to Heaven on the ends of bayonets.

This made me think about how little

I suffer, so when I go to light a candle,

I say a prayer and then I dip my

fingers into the holy wax,

and offer up the burning as a sacrifice.

It’s like I’m sending tiny pulses,

over a telegraph wire directly to God’s door.

It really hurts, but I purse my lips

and blow as hard as I can

until the wax clings to my fingers

like a pure white second skin.

It tastes like honey crayons, or

those fake lips you

buy at the candy store,

when I peel it off, and chew it.

Something I’d never do with Communion.

I thought maybe suffering

ahead of time might help me later on

when I get to committing mortal sins,

though I will always try to do everything right,

like a savings bond you can cash

in when times are tight.

2.

On Good Friday

I sat in silence for three hours,

in front of the glass display case

where  the ladies laid His body out,

pretending I was Veronica,

the closest thing Jesus had

to a girlfriend. After all, He left her

a pin-up picture of His face.

I knew that Jesus was naked

except for the white cloth

that covered His holy parts.

Those pews are so hard,

and I tried my best not to

think about what was under there.

3.

One day I was saying penance,

and Marty who owns the store

went into the confessional,

and talked so loud

I heard every one of his sins.

Every one.

I’m not crazy about Marty’s

wife. She hollers at me

for the way I read the comics

without buying them.

But I have to do that most of the time

so I don’t see the National Enquirer:

Headlines like Chinese Lady Ate

Her Baby really make me sick.

Marty’s sins made me feel sick too.

I don’t think he should have

done what he did to his wife.

I thought he was nice cause he lets us

call him Marty, but I was wrong,

and if I tell, I know that

I’m a sinner too. That’s what

Sister Mary said after my brother

laughed when Mrs. DeCarlo

let a loud one go on the way

up to the altar rail.

 4.

I am mad and I said bad words about Sister Joanne. 

I am sick of her Littlest Angels Club.

She says it's for girls with vocations

but when I told her I have a vocation,

she laughed and said I’d never 

get accepted to be a sister the way I dress.

Where is the belt to my uniform? And why 

doesn’t your mother braid your hair?

The girls all get to have 
cupcakes that look like angels.

I think maybe I'd be a good missionary,

since neatness might not count so much for that.

Or maybe I’ll grow up and get to clean the church;

become one of those ladies who dress 
the Infant of Prague. He's so cute -- 
Tiny Tears with kissable cheeks.

I wonder if He's sad that no one ever holds Him.

Maybe someday I'll be the one to hold Him.