The Mirror

You thought we didn't know. But we knew once, children know these things. Don't turn away now—           we inhabited a lie to appease you. I remember sunlight of early spring, embankments netted with dark vinca. I remember lying in a field, touching my brother's body. Don't turn away now; we denied memory to console you. We mimicked you, reciting the terms of our punishment. I remember some of it, not all of it: deceit begins as forgetting. I remember small things, flowers growing under the hawthorn tree, bells of the wild scilla. Not all, but enough to know you exist: who else had reason to create mistrust between a brother and sister but the one who profited, to whom we turned in solitude? Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth but heaven we were losing? [From: Glück, L. (1992) The Wild Iris . Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, p44]

I reflect on this desperate note while waiting in the children's hospital. The desperate cry my son left cold as ice in his closed eyes after poison. Benches of blood. This is a wooden tragedy. Joyce & I walked home under the huge night thru a grand sweep and around midnight I scribble a letter to my sister, who is dying five minutes at a time:             You are the flower of confusion             coming up in the morning             of my love and             going tightly shut in the afternoon of             anger. Anger & bitterness.                                          I look forward to your resurrection....

While the carrots sang arias into the holy earth and the snowmen turned into bronze weathervanes, I underwent a removal, tearing my skin off me, plucking out the eyes like Ping-Pong balls, squashing the shriek of my heart like a phone off the hook — and as these phenomena occurred, a fool walked straight into         me. He was named Mr. Rabbit. My own voice spoke to people, anyone, friends, strangers on the street, saying, "I am Mr. Rabbit."  The flesh itself had become mad and at three mirrors this was confirmed. Next it was bad Friday and they nailed me up like a scarecrow and many gathered eating popcorn, carrying hymnals or balloons. They were three of us there, though they appeared normal. My ears, so pink like powder, were nailed. My paws, sweet as baby mittens, were nailed. And my two fuzzy ankles.  I said, "Pay no attention. I am        crazy." But some giggled and some knelt. My oxygen became tiny and blood...

i say i am conscious i am discreet i like the feel of his breast hair i like the smells of sex of sweat of skin i write the word 'blood' i imagine a meal meat in its crumbs veal beaten flat sour cream onions i get off the bus prosperous comfortable London taking by hazard is part of the pleasure an unfairness of secretaries nurses an impersonal poison it was part of his intention to rob words of their power to grow big if you insist on going to bed with history a period is something i forget seven of my family mother father most of my friends communists for days i have had to deal with a bad smell a remnant refugees in strange countries i pack myself with cotton wool i dream a great deal the history of Europe a grand piano a notebook a doll i take six earthenware pots i am giving pleasure an exterior orgasm a vaginal orgasm oh boy oh boy oh boy [From: Antin, D. (1968) Code of flag behavior . Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press. p57.]

iii. Our heads ached. we were slightly sick with the smell of blood to a woman to women to the enemy i suppose we could say that they name us we feel safe with them we are on some kind of frontier we are frightened  trying to create men have i hurt you that i dreamed the dream was a telephone conversation these words moved me but i sat in a kind of cold fog i am the evil vase yet they were all used to it they had been living inside it for years it was not strange to them only to me a man about fifty a bachelor or perhaps a married man a man and a woman married or perhaps in a long relationship an American man and an English woman man and a woman both sexually proud two rakes male and female together this time the woman a wandering man a woman artist a man and a woman in a love affair a woman who has fallen in love against her will a healthy woman in love with a man a man using g...

Sleep     horns of a snail                                           protruding, retracting What we choose to know                                            or not know                                                                  all these years sleepwalking                         next to death I  This snail could have been eaten  This snail could have been crushed This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet This snail could have driven fast at night putting up graffiti with a spray-gu...

Three-days rain and, Right in the middle of town This small farmhouse.                                    I could have Dressed, rushed out, come back In five minutes with a wild Armful of wet apples Or one warm egg For a love gift.                         Freud Was out in the barn Munching hay with Marx, And Darwin dozed in the loft. We were alone for miles With honest coffee And a few words. You said: I'd sure hate to live in town. I said: This farming— It won't pay. [From: Nathan, L. (1975) Returning Your Call . Princeton: Princeton University Press.]

"I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy.  O that was me, said the madman."   — Nicholas Moore  1 "I bite into an apple & then get bored before the second bite," you said. You were also Samson. I had cut your hair & locked you up. Besides, your room was bugged.  A former inmate left his muse  spread-eagled on the picture window.  In the glinting late-day sun we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear diamond-etched against the slums of Harlem. You tongued your pills & cursed the residents. You called me Judas. You forgot I was a girl. 2 Your hands weren't birds. To call them birds would be too easy They drew circles around your ideas & your ideas were sometimes parabolas. That sudden Sunday you awoke & found yourself behind the looking glass your hands perched on the breakfast table waiting for a sign. I had nothing to tell them. They conversed with the eggs. ...

                                                   Ma faim, Anne, Anne,                                                     Fuis sut ton  â . . . Rimbaud Because there was no other place to flee to, I came back to the scene of the disordered senses, came back last night at midnight, arriving in the thick June night without luggage or defences, giving up my car keys and my cash, keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes the way a child holds on to a toy. I signed myself in where a stranger puts the inked-in X's — for this is a mental hospital, not a child's game.  Today an interne knocks my knees, testing for reflexes. Once I would have winked and begged for dope. Today I am ter...

In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. "It's the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you," Anna explained. "They always do, you know."       Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, the rearranging them in apple-pie order. "Two crows," the voice seemed to say, "were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away."       "Yes . . . and then ?" I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up serval flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. "This is my friend Hans," Anna said by way of introduc- tion. No one paid much attention and severa...

In sealed box cars travel names across the land, and how far they will travel so, and will they ever get out, don't ask, I won't say, I don't know. The name Nathan strikes fist against wall, the name Isaac, demented, signs, the name Sarah calls out for water for the name Aaron that's dying of thrist. Don't jump while it's moving, name David. You're a name that dooms to defeat, given to no one, and homeless, too heavy to bear in this land. Let your son have a Slavic name, for here they count hairs on the head, for here they tell good from evil by names and by eyelids' shape. Don't jump while it's moving. Your son will be Lech. Don't jump while it's moving. Not time yet. Don't jump. The night echoes like laughter mocking clatter of wheels upon tracks. A cloud made of people moved over the land, a big cloud gives a small rain, one tear, a small rain—one tear, a dry season. Tracks lead off into black forest. ...

Remember that night, after the card game We went bumping down the road drunk insulting each other. You said things so vicious the next day you apologized. But I could not recall a one of them. I was robbed. Yours for that most momentous of words: "Vindication"— it is the labyrinthine word. All hail to Mighty Æschylus. Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the devil, Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the... (Hear the train Drive steadily on Towards nowhere) [From: Burke, K. (1968) Collected poems, 1915-1967 . Berkeley: University of Caliornia Press. p30]

I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you, majestic Shade, You whom I read so well so many years ago, did I read your lesson right? did I see through your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell did I enquire properly into? For years then I forgot you, I put you down, ingratitude is the necessary curse of making things new: I brought my family to see me through, I brought my homage & my soft remorse, I brought a book or two only, including in the end your last strange poems made under the shadow of death Your high figures float again across my mind and all your past fills my walled garden with your honey breath wherein I move, a mote. [From: Berryman, J. (1972) Selected Poems, 1983-1968 . London: Faber and Faber Ltd, p143.]

About resititution, say this, the money is nice. Buys schöne Aussicht, Schlagrahm, Rosenthal and Rucksack (my bitter, modest Wermut) O lovely handy twenty years later. Neither mangled, crippled nor marks, nor bruises on it. Honest cash money healthy as when last seen, separated, kissed goodbye— (Besides, I was hardly born, no more than Horst Eichmann; it was my father's business) Why where have you been my darling and how long I thought you one with dentures, gold teeth, babies' bones, the glue pots of the world had had you— (And why should they get fat on it? They're getting more than enough) Let's know ourselves my treasure. Come Bundesbahn together.                       Ashes Ashes                       fall down, all, fall down [From: Halley, Anne. (1...

Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evi...