The Way We Write Letters

We must lie long in the weeds
In places like Palo Alto or Perugia,
Get lost to find ourselves, get going soon.
But none of the old Heart & Home;
Be a Logan or Creeley, all arrowheads
And .22 cartridges studded and strewn inside,
Find new places to rest and nest. Get looser;
Get back to (you said) daytime drinking, music
of Telemann, Schutz, Buxtehude.
Don't keep your house in order.
If you have any further suggestions for
Improving chaos, please write or wire.

We should lie long in the woods, full of light.
Old friends get published again, though losing
Their moon & vinegar. Write me soon (I said)
Meanwhile, find a new place too,
Where air, not character is cool.
Not Sausalito. San Gimignano?
There, despite psychiatry, towers simply are
In a piercing, lyric, prodigal confusion,
Regulated. Well, remember Heller in Paradise.
Madness & you (we both said). Stay sane and annoyed,
Drunk in the daytime. Call your book, Home for the Night.
But don't go home tomorrow. Write me instead
From the meadow. Turn on the poem & the light.




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Through A Glass Eye, Lightly

In the laboratory waiting room
containing
one television actor with a teary face
trying a contact lens;
two muscular victims of industrial accidents;
several vain women--I was one of them--
came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye.

It was a long day:
Deborah waiting for the blood-vessels
painted
on her iris to dry.
Her mother said that, holding Deborah
when she was born,
"First I inspected her, from toes to navel,
then stopped at her head..........."
We wondered why
the inspection hadn't gone the other way.
"looking into her eye
was like looking into a volcano:
"Her vacant pupil
when whirling down, down to foundation
of the world.......................
When she was three months ole they took it out.
She giggled when she went under
the an aesthetic.
Forty-five minutes later she came back
happy!............................
The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face
(you know, it never bled?),
stayed happy, even when I went to pieces.
She's five, in June.

"Deborah, you get right down
from there, or I'll have to slap!"
Laughing, Deborah climbed into the slap
of one vain lady, who
had been discontented with her own beauty.
Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily
in the empty eye.
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The Copulating Gods

Brushing back the curls from your famous brow,
Lingering over the prominent temple vein
Purple as Aegean columns in the dawn,
Calm now, I ponder how self-consciously
The Gods must fornicate.
It is that sense of unseen witness:
Those mortals with whom we couple or have coupled,
Clinging to our swan-suits, our bull-skins,
Our masquerades in coin and shrubbery.


We were their religion before they were born.
The spectacle of our carnality
Confused them into spiritual lust.
The headboard of our bed became their altar,
Rare nectar, shared, a common sacrament.
The wet drapery of our sheets, moulded
The noble thighs, is made the basis
For a whole new aesthetic:
God a revealed as the first genius.

Men continue to invent our histories,
Deny our equal pleasure in each other.
Club-foot, nymphomaniac, they dub us,
Then fabricate the net that God will cast
Over our raptures: we, trussed up like goats,
Paraded past the searchlights of the sky
By God himself, the ringmaster and cuckold,
Amidst a thunderous laughter and applause.

Tracing again the bones of your famous face,
I know we are not their history but our myth.
Heaven prevents time; and our astral raptures
Float bouyant in the universe. Come, kiss!
Come, swoon again, we who invented dying
And the whole alchemy of resurrection.
They will concoct a scripture explaining this.
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Summer Near the River by Carolyn Kizer

I have carried my pillow to the windowsill
And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it,
But no breeze stirs the tepid morning.
Only I stir.......Come, tease me a little!
With such cold passion, so little teasing play,
How long can we endure our life together?

No use. I put your long dressing-gown;
The untied sash trails over the dusty floor.
I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror
And pluck my eyebrows.
I don't care if the robe slides open
Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh.
I can accuse that non-existent breeze....

I am as monogamous as the North Star,
But I don't want you to know it. You'd only take advantage.
While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.
All right, sleep! The cat means more to you than I.
I can rouse, but then you swagger out.
I glimpse you from the window, striding towards the river.

When you return, reeking of fish and beer,
There is salt dew in your hair. Where have you been?
Your clothes weren't that wrinkled hours ago, when you left.
You couldn't have loved someone else, after loving me!
I sulk and sight, dawdling by the window.
Later, when you hold me in your arms
It seems, for a moment, the river ceases flowing.

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What Was In A Name by Carolyn Kizer

Thomas Love Peacock! Thomas Love Peacock!
I used to croon, sitting on the pot,
My sympatethic magic, at age three.
These elements in balance captured me:
Love in the middle, on his right hand a saint
And doubter. Gentle a Kempis, Thomas the Rhymer,
Wyatt, Campion, Traherne, came later.

One Love's left hand, the coarse essentials:
Skimp them, and Love, denying, slides away
Into pure Thomas, etiolated sainthood.
Before cock, the satisfying sound of liquid
Which, as it strikes against the enamel basin,
Proclaims a bodily creativity.
Then Love springs eternal; then cock comes

Demonstrating Love. The surname is complete:
Its barbed crest, its thousand eyes, its harsh cries.
Thomas Love Peacock! Thomas Love Peacock!
The person unsung, the person ritually sung.
But that was thirty years ago; a child's loving
Of God, the body, flesh of poetry.
I hail the three-in-one, the one-in-three.

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Singing Aloud by Carolyn Kizer

We all have our faults. Mine is trying to write poems.
New scenery, someone I like, anything sets me off!
I hear my own voice going on, like a god or an oracle,
That cello-tone, intuition. That bell-note of wisdom!

And I can't get rid of the tempting tic pentameter,
Of the urge to impose a form on what I don't understand,
Or that which I have to transform because it's too grim as it is.
But age is improving me: Now, when I finish a poem

I no longer rush out to impose it on friendly colleagues.
I climb through the park to the reservoir, peer down at my own reflection,
Shake a blossoming branch so I am covered with petals,
Each petal a metaphor................

By the time we reach middle life, we've all been deserted and robbed.
But flowers and grass and animals keep me warm.
And I remind myself to become philosophic:
We are meant to be stripped down, to prepare us for something better.

And, often, I sing aloud. As I goes older.
I give way to innocent folly more and more often.
The squirrels and rabbits chime in with inaudible voices.
I feel sure that the birds make an effort to be antiphonal.

When I go to the zoo, the primates and I, in communion,
Hoot at each other, or signal with earthy gestures.
We must move further out of town, we musical birds and animals,
Or they'll lock us up like the apes, and control us forever.

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The Dying Goddess by Carolyn Kizer

The love goddess, alas, grows failer,
She still has her devootes
But their hearts are not whole.
They follow young boys
From the corners of their eyes.
They become embarrassed
By their residual myths.
Odd cults crop up, involving midgets,
Partial castration, dismemberment of children
The goddess wrings her hands; they think it vanity
And it is, partly.

Sometimes, in her precincts
Young men bow curly heads.
She sends them packing
Indulgently, with blown kisses.
There are those who pray endlessly,
Stretched full-length with their eyes slut,
Imploring her, "Mother!"
She taps her toe at these. A wise goddess
Knows her own children.

On occasion, her head raises
Almost expectantly: a man steps forward.
She takes one step forward,
They exchange wistful glances.
He is only passing.
When he comes to the place
Of no destination
He takes glass after glass
In her own mirror the image wavers.
She turns her face from the smokeless brazier.

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