Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine - tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come - the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there - the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth - your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.
XV
If I lay on that beach with you white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream and lying on that beach we could not stay because the wind drove fine sand against us as if it were against us if we tried to withstand it and we failed - if we drove to another place to sleep in each other’s arms and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots and we were tired and did not sleep together and this was what we found, so this is what we did - was the failure ours? If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.
“Things fall apart,” Tide not turning. Melting away profoundly In darkness The sun.
And I, Like every other day A global world-sized wreck Glaring white, A hollowed art Flattened pastures, Facing an abandoned cave Where a tear is The only water Spilled into Emptiness.
And I Said to be a big star Whom night made sunset Believe in So what? A mere light gleam Where fate Grins its last laugh?
And I What if I had not been, My parents’ sculpture And was expecting my shadow To change its direction Running over my euphony Eclipsing me Partially Wholly And what if l jump over obstacles In the eclipsed noon
Into darkened sea waves To see terror in your Blindfolded eyes And what if, Oh trembling ones, I, Coming out In mid-eclipse, Purified my soul of you?
The land is theirs Where my sky ascends And descends Over the size of my head only Images retreat Behind my sky The blood is leeched from them And leaves me Like night lilies Mined The smell of their soil Leaves me And my sky is over my head only
A soldier waved our bus into a detour. We didn’t pass by Parliament Square that day. I’d hoped to go to a pastry shop, coins I saved for a week. Southern winds, sun shrouded in dirty clouds, red tongues of dust on windowpanes. There’d been a hanging on the square.
Sixteen years later I eat lunch at home, afternoon light, the gloss of olive oil on lettuce leaves. On the radio, whistle and boom of mortar shells, one landing on a soccer field, forty boys dead. And I’m trying to remember who wrote “to die in mid-sentence was to triumph over the dark.”
When I was seven I spent days hiding among the bean stalks. I heard my name called and felt indifferent to being wanted, unassured that the world I lived in would undo my foolish malcontent.
It’s not as dramatic now. I look out the window, people in their rooms, reading or thinking, or watching TV as if the world had stopped calling, as if we had emerged from the whirlpool of its demands with a wild mixture cowardice and courage to say unto others “I wish you did not exist.”
On the day of the hanging, my father drove home, a poster of the President on the hood of his car. He tried to explain. Over and over he said “survive.”
Once I believed forgetfulness was a gift from the gods, not an erosion of the soul. Now I know enough to say this has happened before, and even crueler things— the bombardment of the ghetto as the republic ate its lunch in the park, held its toddlers, napped on lawns, smoke-sharp air fevered with the hiss of a flute.
Don’t ask. I too find myself listening to gurus who abhor coherence, who tell us language is a bucket of slop and we can only grunt and squeal. I wonder if they say this to silence the wretched who have found no words, who wave their torn limbs at us.
This too has happened before: My brother and I snuck to the car the night of the hangings. We intended to tear the President’s poster. But something held us, not a policeman’s shadow or the neighborhood spy. Not even my father who hours before had gone to sleep.
Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (June Jordan)
Dedicated to the 60,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador and when that wasn’t true they said so what They said you shelled their northern villages and when U.N. forces reported that was not true because your side of the cease-fire was holding since more than a year before they said so what They said they wanted simply to carve a 25 mile buffer zone and then they ravaged your water supplies your electricity your hospitals your schools your highways and byways all the way north to Beirut because they said this was their quest for peace They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys whose bodies swelled purple and black into twice the original size and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby and then they said this was brilliant military accomplishment and this was done they said in the name of self-defense they said that is the noblest concept of mankind isn’t that obvious? They said something about never again and then they made close to one million human beings homeless in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed 40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were Arabs. They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla strongholds. They called the screaming devastation that they created the rubble. Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped from their hotshot fighter jets? They told you to go. One hundred and thirty-five thousand Palestinians in Beirut and why didn’t you take the hint? Go! There was the Mediterranean: You could walk into the water and stay there. What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person The people of my country aren’t so bad
You can expect but so much from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch American TV
The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems, we’re out in a country that has no language no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren through gorges unexplored since dawn whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years … we’re driving through the desert wondering if the water will hold out the hallucinations turn to simple villages the music on the radio comes clear - neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung but a woman’s voice singing old songs with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute plucked and fingered by women outside the law.
XIV
It was your vision of the pilot confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose while we crouched in the open hatchway vomiting into plastic bags for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon. I never felt closer to you. In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples huddled in each other’s laps and arms I put my hand on your thigh to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine, we stayed that way, suffering together in our bodies, as if all suffering were physical, we touched so in the presence of strangers who knew nothing and cared less vomiting their private pain as if all suffering were physical.
Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, making them eternally and visibly female. No height without depth, without a burning core, though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava. I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain smoking within like the sibyl stooped over his tripod, I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path, to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp, never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her, that clings to the slowly altering rock - that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves, was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.
XII
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep: the dream-ghosts of two worlds walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other. I’ve wakened to your muttered words spoken light- or dark-years away as if my own voice had spoken. But we have different voices, even in sleep, and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different and the past echoing through our bloodstreams is freighted with different language, different meanings - though in any chronicle of the world we share it could be written with new meaning we were two lovers of one gender, we were two women of one generation.
