The Mirror

I look through my dead friend's eyes at the house of love: plaster scabs from lath, windows break out in toothy gapes, doors stagger from their pins. See what a feast this is, my love, my love, our shelves of mouse turds, dusts, and dirty damps! I try this vison on like the wrong glasses and every straightness quivers to a blur, and every surface whorls to drink me in. Well then, this is a world for twisted eyes. Or if my eye offend me I'll pluck it out. And still be chanceled in our breathing bed, the dusk behind the taper and the cup, as I was once—a holy man, though I lost my holy ghost, my terror, and my sin when I had got my own death down by heart. And there's no nonsense like it. If I forgive that death, I lose my last prayer. Let us live. [From: Ciardi, J. (1955) As If; poems new and Selected . New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, p10]

                                                                                                     Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin                                                                                                      Author of                                                                                                       A Vindication                                                                                                      Of the Rights of Woman:                                                                                                      Born 27 April, 1759:                                                                                                      Died 10 September, 1797                                                                                                           — MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S                                                                                                                                     

                              1  The men and beasts of the zodiac Have marched over us once more Green wine bottles and red lobster shells, Both emptied, litter the table. 'Should auld acquaintance be forgot?' Each Sits listening to his own thoughts, And the sound of cars starting outside. The birds in the eaves are restless, Because of the noise and light. Soon now in the winter dawn I will face My fortieth year. Borne headlong Towards the long shadows of sunset By the headstrong, stubborn moments, Life whirls past like drunken wildfire                               2 Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts. Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing To myself. Ragged mist settles In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries In the coiling wind. The wineglass Is spilled. The bottle is empty. The fire has gone out in the stove. Everywhere men speak in whispers.  I brood on the uselessness of letters.                               3 A hawk

to gerard s. belart pale boy of the north with the dark spanish eyes and hebrew mind who crossed my path thru poetry i ching talking of superconscious telepathic coincidental changes of the eternal now hitching thru paradoxical zen circuits of englightenment  malm ö — hydra helsinki — ibiza speaking the passwords karma oracle paranoia hexagram connections finland is white and you had need of moving into blue of summer's southern gold to find the way to cross the bridge what bridge ? the bridge you always come to where you stop and turning back must ask the question where and everyone you meet is really you — another you on wavelengths without separation no frontier between selves or lands — all you's and me's we sit up half a night the lamp burns low the kittens race in the garden scratch at the cottage door as donkeys sob their animal heats beneath the window in the rubbish dumps outside you screamed your poems i

Stand and face me, dear; release That fineness in your irises. May you bed down, Head to breast, upon The flesh Of a plush Companion.

Walls were painted blue so long ago, you think of old sky you thought lovely turned as it did, in your lifetime, dirty. Six crude wood tables and the pregnant cat seem permanent on the pockmarked concrete floor. The owner gives too much away, too much free wine and from his eyes too much grief. His facial lines amplify in light the too small windows and the opaque door glass flatten out. To enter you should be poor by consent. You and the world that hurts you should agree you don't deserve a penny. Nor a clear tongue to beg sympathy from wine dark as your life and rich as your dream you are still nothing in. And you should agree to cross your throat and weep when the casket passes. You should kneel when wind crosses the olive grove in waves of stuttering coin. At nine the light goes down. You weave home to homes you'll never own. Only men in broken rags come back to drink black wine under the painting Moonlight on Sea a drunk thought lovely— turned as it

I can stay awake all night, if need be— Cold as an eel, without eyelids. Like a dead lake the dark envelops me, Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit. No air bubbles start from my heart. I am lungless And ugly, my belly a silk stocking Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose. Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices— The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment Like the white lines on a blueprint. Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic Guts bag would clack like a child's rattle, Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth. But what so you know about that My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall? Some things of this world are indigestible. You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist Fug of teh Small Mammal House. The armadillo dozed in his sandbin Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead Out of s

in the night in my half hour negro dreams i hear voices knocking at the door i see walls dripping screams up and down the halls                                won't someone open the door for me? won't some one schedule my sleep and don't ask no questions? noise.           like when he took me too his home away from home place and i died the long sought after death he'd planned for me. Yeah, bessie he put in the bacon and it overflowed the pot. and two days later when i was talking i started to grin. as everyone knows i am still grinning.

Children we have not borne bedevil us by becoming themselves painfully sharp and unavoidable like a needle in our flesh. Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting of minds committed like murder or suicide to their own private struggle a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain slumps down beside me begging to be ridden asleep for the price of a midnight train free from desire. Little girl on the nod if we are measured by the dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons. My corrupt concern will not replace what you once needed but I am locked into my own addictions and offer you my help, one eye out for my own station. Roused and deprived your costly dream explodes into a terrible technicoloured laughter at my failure up and down across the aisle women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became usel