[Editors’ Note: An edited version of the following poem was published in chapbook form by Casa de Cinca Press. It is reprinted with permission here.]
i. Prologue
Lithuania, country of my grandmother’s body
unfolding in the cave-like cotton motion
of her sleeping gown our dreaming feet
entwined toward rest there where
I had never been but for her body
of startling lakes and pine trees
pitched from the edge
of the Baltic Sea
dripping amber through
centuries once a valued
currency, even the language
at least as old as Sanskrit
singing itself through
each siege of history
pushing her here shipped
for matrimony without
reading and writing
she who did sing held me through
each night stricken without
a mother near enough
taught me to read eventually
mystery with my own body
to sing through even my loss of her
when I was nine and alone
when I left my body in exile
I ran to the river then
its little fish and murmurs
become the missed caresses,
standing in a field of sour rhubarb
while the sky runs through me its
wide saber mysterious and cold
ii. In Exile
Antarctica, vast whiteness of the mother
before memory lost to us
Exiled in my language waiting
on the nameless jutting island stone
Seals surfacing smooth as stones
black as obsidian icy lava
How to find what is possible?
How to find ourselves each other?
To become so little I could walk inside this poem
or make the poem so big you could walk in too
I want to write myself back into my body
back to someone I call you
iii. Discovery Hour of Desire
Seals smoothing water back recess
its quiet black volume
until consciousness reports letters,
words, ablated at the glassy surface
rolling off to mountains floated
from the original world return
as elements of the periodic table,
contrapuntal pairs of infinitesimal charges
composing this
voluble world,
this ocean island
chair this
memory of you seated
in a high school biology class
that sat me down beside you
before a light microscope,
to unravel the orbed onion,
attuned my sight to elegant details
of another life, of a universe
in a cell
on glass, colloid liquid life,
colonies urgent with equilibrium,
parallel wills lining up
no longer sitting alone
I gorged my senses in the sense of her
swept into her view as if I’d found
heaven too near
Gorge of her supine throat
flaring into steep cheekbones
riveting each blue winter eye
in place, where they, in turn steer
the rest of the face an assembly imperial
IV. Skipping School
Sigma Chi smiles stare
in hallways near our lockers
deciding finally not to pledge us.
We were finding something else –
wonder in ourselves
Drunk on our only experience
of power trading sex like coupons
for scotch whiskey from older men,
stealing back from them our desire
the way Prometheus stole fire and
was condemned seeking a way
to each other no flight manual
for this
Shakespeare’s witches instead
stirring warnings that survival
depends on disguise glamour,
competition, seduction lies
that the only way
to hold on to self
was through an insistence of pain,
sometimes the only thing that seemed
real the clarity of it of feeling
beyond emotion beneath the glossy
array of images which eventually
collide us into overnight jail terms
on Morgan Street
Eyes glinting along edges of dark roads
try to find each other encouraged
by almost everything to turn away
V. In Captivity
Crundge went the dungeon door
our tiger eyes met glared behind those bars,
refused release on our own cognizance
our families would be coming freedom conquerors
our eyes brown and blue eggs
running in the snow
they were breaking and entering
our lives our lives
somehow that sounded strange
Lives already sliced into by shame
feelings wasting like garbage
Looking always about my shoulders
pleading with the fast asleep stars to guide us
back to each other, longing for a foreign place
she sent postcards from Maine
“love, Cordelia” I told no one
barely myself.
VI. In the City Breakdown
Outbreak came at sixteen. Social Security
processed our numbers. We could be
waitresses, typists, solicitors. Selling
Life to immigrants over the telephone.
From a reservoir causeway
the ground view of big sky
flares off the grand pines
standing in the distances
light of brightness
light of darkness
we expand with the ever enlarging water
for hours in the presence of steady trees,
the Canada geese, who are ready to climb
and watch them climb and fly
and not fail
We knew all we did not want
sinking beneath menial jobs
in the private land of hell
Indigo, indigo
her father established order.
Marks on her arms her face shine indigo
until the bloat of my rage
matches each blow of his fist
on her cheek and cries out
in the din indigo
He said I was to blame.
He said, “Separate them”.
vii. Solos
Four seasons passed like four planets
in four difficult orbits spinning slowness
careening by each other our
massive precise spherical silence
I heard from strangers that
winter Cordelia was hospitalized will meet
someone older, so ample we spread out and in
to each other from two o’clock morning walks
to Arthur’s Drugstore for cigarettes
slow conversation-holding-hands in
the silent snowy night time city streets, to
espresso in the Village, finding more — Simone, Dylan,
Ginsberg, Hinduism, Shelley, Coltrane, Beatles, Blake
Two women together without rules
in this new world of selves,
tenderness growing us
in some kind of singing school
Her breath rasped on the lung machine,
plastic hands probing valves of her heart,
they tore apart her chest and patched and
patched and still could not
Vocal chords abraded by surgical tubes
intone Lithuanian refrains. Ilgiausių metų, Cordelia.
Women singing through each others’ mouths as one
viii. The Frame of Windows
University meeting new people every fourth month
lectures gliding through French doors onto Spring
lawns coffee house music poetry open books –
their gaze on me thumbing through blue exam
booklets in love with my own mind but as if it were
some one else’s
Then Eugene McCarthy’s radical challenge of self-
determination Vietnam Poverty Civil Rights
fire in the lake of the heart
burning the church on Birmingham Sunday
burning Tet Nhat, Newark, Watts
burning Thomas Merton, John and
Robert Kennedy, Medger Evers, Malcolm X,
George Wallace, Buddhist monks, even
Martin Luther King, Jr.
learning Gandhi’s truthforce ahima
nonviolent protest marches moratoriums
Berkeley Free Speech Movement SDS
Angela Davis Black Panthers New Haven on fire
Americans For Democratic Action Weathermen
Kent State Watergate Stonewall Rebellion
lesbians incarcerated in Niantic taking the Fifth
the Second Wave of Feminism
Nuclear Freeze Earth Day
o mercy mercy me, the ecology
you had to resist to expand consciousness
we were the walrus
ix. Framed, Extra Lucid
a window
opens, the political
a window
closes, the personal
semi-permeable membrane
frame of windows
closing
and opening, each cell
osmotic, dependent
on the degree of presence
or absence of sea
in the watery window
it is said
Atlantis did
send out ships
of poets and physicians,
into the realm
of not knowing
x. In the Icy Mirror
Cordelia dreams
walking into
blue becoming ice
tremors bolt through
her ears she stabs
at her fear
but does not scream
peeling back thicknesses
layers to the heart
discloses a hidden chamber
and witnesses love
crawling there
in the guise of puppets
grinning and twitching
they claw they cloy at her
hungry again
how long
will the shark
continue
to eat its own skin?
xi. Chiaroscuro
She will find me six years later, will
arrive when woods pass ripening as
fog seized with rain moves in
ducks threading narrow trails
pulling water on their way
tree shadows wave on the waves of geese
I hear a molecular pounding
That’s me with Cordelia
talking through a dinner I will never
remember, of studies in Ohio
finished, as well as marriage
to a Cuban man gone American from
his native soil, how she became the cockatoo
he would not be and crooned, fanned
her resplendent plumes, shook off
feelings as they stiffened into hardware
we sat through a movie
on her sister’s living room couch
drinking too much wine, laughing ourselves
so close the affectionate terrier I called Sheba
found not room enough between us
became instead our only witness
this first time we ever kissed, and kissed
one an–other into sleep in my bed
love splashing from our breath
xii. October
She untied my knotted fingers
persuading these hands
to scars in her chest
the curving lines of her breasts
unfinished circles of
holding off, holding back
so much wanting
we touch for the first time
the other
every where
every way
Each push of her swollen lips on me
bursts into crimson fish and gold
streaming beneath her
Our skin choosing a foreign place
where we rise and come
to waylessness
xiii. China Blue Sea
Reeling
in a vein blue ribbon
of rest being drenched
in the floating
bluest eye of a heaven
burnished by gold breath,
mystical tiles of ivory
prayers worn
from an endless rubbing
How apricot underpants clash
with the fire red rug how dust
rolls around this room like trouble
I am alone the first time I ever
saw her not seeing me comes back –
smoking urgently she marshalls meanings:
to be seen by the father and that this
means more than it should, of Juan
walking around suicide, pushing his arm
away folds up her income disdaining
just sex now flies to Senegal and another
man who drinks too much while she walks
the crumbling sea wall wells eventually
dry up and her passport stamped for Chicago
my name stumbles from her throat
She could teach archery
to a Chinese child and make the bow blue
into a fanciful sea encircling us three.
No. I am a bone that was sawed in two
during her heart surgery
xiv. Paris, France by Gertrude Stein
When you wish
upon a star
makes no
difference
who you are . . .
your dreams
come true
But some stars
be red
and some
be blue
I go back to the causeway for some sense
of how I offered myself to her, I want to say
you. When you flinched at some gap in your
own courage that could have helped us at least
as women. As my face hovers over the severed
fate of itself, rushing at the face of clear water,
trapped into the endless smoothness
of my loss of you
up above the world so high,
like a diamond in the sky
xv. This Mineral World
Placing carefully
each foot, each foot within
frozen mud prints
of others’ steps, trying
to fit into anyone else’s life,
feeling instead every instant
sharpness of you
angles, imprints
still left
Stumbling between
two shifting slabs of water
freezing on each side of the causeway,
remember autumn sunlight splintered
into death’s gold dust as it sifts
effortlessly downward
through the quiet
depth of lake
leaves drawn to the bottom
by their own weight and compressed
in the shape of silence
Then the recoil of twenty Springtimes
hurtling through false bottoms
beyond mistaken depths
and all light gone.
Shelves, cinder blocks,
temporary housing,
a way to live beyond collapse,
in whose house on what terms and
in what land?
vi. Epilogue
Snow fall frozen
into a geography of its own
even moonlight
stacked in shivering columns of air
presses the last thin leaves
out of November
Spiritual savage
living on scraps,
no ancient gods
to mother you but sparrows
flown through their own shadow
crossing a causeway now broken in two
I broke myself
over you
the way water breaks
over rock
we who are
each other
without resistance
spilling
over each dark gash,
breathe in
silence
where feeling
opens voice.
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