THE KNOPF POETRY SERIES

i Robert Mazzocco, Trader

2 Cynthia Macdonald, (W)holes

3 Thomas Rabbitt, The Booth Interstate

4 Edward Hirsch, For the Sleepwalkers

5 Marie Ponsot, Admit Impediment

6 Brad Leithauser, Hundreds of Fireflies

7 Katha Pollitt, Antarctic Traveller

8 Nicholas Christopher, On Tour with Rita

9 Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher io Alan Williamson, Presence

11 Stephen Sandy, Riding to Greylock

12 Pamela White Hadas, Beside Herself

13 Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living

14 Peter Klappert, The Idiot Princess of the Last

15 Mary Jo Salter, Henry Pur cell in Japan

16 Norman Williams, The Unlovely Child

17 Marilyn Hacker, Assumptions

Also by Marilyn Hacker

PRESENTATION PIECE SEPARATIONS TAKING NOTICE

ASSUMPTIONS

Marilyn Hacker

ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 1985

I I

miA 198S

Potomac Library 10101 Glenolden Dr. Potomac, Md. 20854

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

"Letters from the Alpes Maritimes," "Fourteen," and "Days of 1959" were originally published in Feminist Studies. "Two Young Women" first appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. "A Chaplet for Judith Landry" and "Gerda in the Eyrie" were first published in Poetry.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to the editors of the following periodicals, in which other poems in this volume first appeared: Ambit, Bananas, Chelsea, Conditions, The London Magazine, The Missouri Review, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, No Apologies, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Sinister Wisdom, and Thirteenth Moon.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hacker, Marilyn

Assumptions.

(Knopf poetry series ; 17)

I. Title. PS3558.A28A9 1985 811'. 54 84-48537

ISBN O-394-54229-O

ISBN 0-394-72826-2 (pbk.)

Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST EDITION

With sincere thanks to the MacDowell Colony, the Michael Karolyi Memorial Foundation, the Ossabaw Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the New York State Creative Artists Public Service Grants, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, for providing the space and the time in which much of this book was written.

CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE ALPES-MARITIMES I

INHERITANCES 9

Towards Autumn 11

Two Young Women 13

Almost Aubade 14

Fourteen 15

Mother 16

Days of 1959 17

Fifteen to Eighteen 18

1973 19

Mother II 20

Autumn 1980 22

Part of a True Story 25

A Chaplet for Judith Landry 29

Sword 32

Inheritances 33

Joint Custody 35

OPEN WINDOWS 37

GRAFFITI FROM THE GARE SAINT-MANQUE 53

THE SNOW QUEEN 63

The Witch's Garden 65

What the Tame Crow Sang to Gerda 67

Gerda in the Eyrie 68

The Robber Woman 73

The Little Robber Girl Considers the Wide World 76

Rune of the Finland Woman 78

The Little Robber Girl Gets On in the Wide World 80

The Little Robber Girl Considers Some Options 85

BALLAD OF LADIES LOST AND FOUND

LETTER FROM THE ALPES-MARITIMES

l.M. James A. Wright

Carissima Joannissima, ave,

from a deceptively apolitical

solitude. (Must I be auto-critical,

having exchanged upper-Manhattan Soave

for Cotes de Provence?)

In this cottage with light on four sides I shared for a conjugal fortnight three years ago, I play the housewife-hermit, putter. I know the pots, the plates, the water-heater. My third midsummer in Vence

whose suburban villas fructify the hills

out the kitchen window, my perimeter

marked by an ivy-cloaked oak. Out the French door,

yellow exclamations of broom in scrub-wild

haphazard descent

down ancient rock-terraces to the ravine

where a cold brook sings, loud as the nightingale's

liquid vespers. When you go down the woods trail

to the water, it's a surprise to find

such small source for song.

I watch the sky instead of television.

Weather comes south over the mountains: that's news.

Today the Col de Vence was crystalline. Blues

stratospheric and Mediterranean

in the direction

of Nice. From Tourrettes, I could see Corsica. Sometimes I take myself out to dinner. I write between courses, in a garden, where twilight softens the traffic beyond the begonias, and my pichet, vin

ordinaire, but better than ordinary,

loosens my pen instead of tongue; not my guard.

I like eating alone; custom makes it hard

to be perceived content though solitary.

A woman alone

must know how to be cautious when she gets drunk. I can't go rambling in night fields of horses, apostrophizing my wine to their apples, heaving an empty with a resounding thunk in someone's garden.

Nor are, yet, establishments for grape and grain the frequent settings for our lucky meetings. I think of you, near other mountains, eating breakfast, or warming the car up in the rain to do your errands.

Both of us are happy in marketplaces.

In your letter, bargains at J. C Penney's.

I'm in the town square early. Crowded Friday's

cheese-sellers and used-clothes vendors know my face's

regular seasons.

Djuna Barnes and the Equal Rights Amendment died in the same month. Though there's a party Sunday, why should I celebrate the Fourth of July? Independence? No celebration without Representation.

The exotic novel Barnes could have written continues here: the old Countess and her child, further than ever from being reconciled, warily, formally, circle the old bone: an inheritance.

Between mother and daughter I'd be a bone, too. I cultivate pleasant neutrality, reassuring each of them she can trust my discretion, though I think they both know my own clear preferences.

I gave the mother a blood-red gloxinia. Hothouse perennial herself at ninety, terrible on the roads (Countess Bathory is rumored to be a direct ancestor), a war monument's

long bones, selective eyes, a burnished ruin in white jeans, along the lines of Katharine Hepburn around the cheekbones and vulpine chin, her style half-diplomacy, half-flirtation: she gets what she wants;

which is what her daughter has never gotten: bad marriage, penury, a retarded son, father's sublime indifference and mother's scorn. She's sixty-two now, and accused of plotting "under influence

of a bad woman." That they are two old dears goes without saying, and that daughter loves her friend, but, avec amour, her wicked mother. Add that one of them was a French officer, one an ambulance

driver in the War, and that the property where I live is the object of contention, and that the penniless daughter is as handsome as the mother who'd will her patrimony to the state of France.

I'm thirty-nine and thin again, hair thinning too, helas, as when, in London, twenty-nine, I paid a trichologist, wore long skirts, pined in a Park Road bed-sit, and read, through waning light, anti-romance

by Ivy Compton-Burnett, hoping to lose (my American soul?) San Francisco-style expectations, though the Sixties were a while over. I didn't know I could change and choose another ambiance.

Better celibate than a back-street girlfriend. (I called myself that, ironic in self-scorn, waiting for evasive letters across town.) I know I'll never have to do that again. At least two women

at least a while loved me reciprocally. That I knew I could love them, I owe to you. I see tomorrow's weather from the window. I've found my spot—the kitchen, naturally. I've put basil plants

in an orange juice jar to root. Though I said I went wistfully under the flowering May boughs in Central Park, single, while pairs of my friends blissed out in rut, I don't think that I need antidepressants!

I don't think I'm even frequently depressed without the old objective correlative. Perhaps I am as skinless and sensitive —"sensitive" 's necessary—as you suggest. Long-sleeved elephant's

hide coveralls I metaphorically wore that month of committees, trysting visitors, arrivals, entertainments and departures. I can write poetry now, if I don't bore the constituents

who never read it, though they all want to Write Something. In all fairness, I'm not being fair. Hendecasyllabics, Joannissima, could ramble on for forty-three days and nights until I leave France.

I'll stop, hoping to see you in October face to face, with help from universities. (Here, a wordplay on "tenure" and "liberty.") "Long bones," recalls you, too, once almost my lover, happily my friend.

TOWARDS AUTUMN

Mid-September, and I miss my daughter. I sit out on the terrace with my friend, talking, with morning tea, coffee, and bread, about another woman, and her mother, who survived heroism; her lover who will have to. I surprise myself

with language; lacking it, don't like myself

much. I owe a letter to my daughter.

Thinking of her's like thinking of a lover

I hope will someday grow to be a friend.

I missed the words to make friends with my mother.

I pull the long knife through the mound of bread,

spoon my slice with cherry preserves, the bread chewy as meat beneath, remind myself I've errands for our ancient patron, mother of dramas, hard mother to a daughter twenty years my senior, who is my friend, who lives in exile with a woman lover

also my friend, three miles from here. A lover

of good bread, my (present) friend leaves this bread

and marmalades biscottes. To have a friend

a generation older than myself

is sometimes like a letter for my daughter

to read, when she can read: What your mother

left undone, women who are not your mother may do. Women who are not your lover love you. (That's to myself, and my daughter.) We take coffee- and tea-pot, mugs, jam jars, bread inside, wash up. I've work, hours by myself. Beyond the kitchen, in her room, my friend

writes, overlooking the same hills. Befriend

yourself: I couldn't have known to tell my mother

that, unless I'd learned it for myself.

Until I do. Friendship is earned. A lover

leaps into faith. Earthbound women share bread;

make; do. Cherry compote would please my daughter.

My daughter was born hero to her mother; found, like a lover, flawed; found, like a friend, faithful as bread I'd learn to make myself.

I 2

TWO YOUNG WOMEN

Vence: forenoon bells for the fifteenth of August;

sunlight; circular tin cafe table.

They are quarreling about their mothers.

They have been to Mass: the Assumption

of Mary moves certain unbelievers.

Pedantic sermon in pedantic French,

but they exchanged the kiss of peace with

elderly Frenchwomen on either side.

Aquatic lightfall through Matisse stained glass

was beautiful. They are beautiful

with morning catching in their clean short hair,

but one could stay here with her friend forever

(imagines it: she has a job, a child);

one misses her loft, her other lover;

(in fact, they both are gluttonous for letters)

so they are quarreling about their mothers:

ought they condemn, forgive, their own, each other's

mother (never met) for delivering

them, fragile and untrusting, to each other?

i 3

ALMOST AUBADE

The little hours: two lovers herd upstairs two children, one of whom is one of theirs. Past them, two of the other sex lope down, dressed for mid-winter cruising bars in brown bomber-jackets—their lives as uncluttered as their pink shaven cheeks, one of us muttered, fumbling with keys. Yes, they did look alike. Hooking their scarves and parkas on the bike, the seven-year-old women shuck a heap of velvet jeans and Mary Janes. They sleep diagonal, instantly, across the top bunk, while their exhausted elders drop, not to the bliss breasts melt to against breasts yet, but to kitchen chairs. One interests herself in omelets, listening anyhow. It's certain that fine women pick at food. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou shalt piecemeal total both, gripped in that mood whose hunger makes a contrapuntal stutter across connectives. Unwrap cheese, find butter, dip bread crusts in a bowl of pasta sauce saved from the children's supper. Tired because of all we should stay up to say, we keep awake together often as we sleep together. I'll clear the plates. Leave your cup. Lie in my arms until the kids get up.

FOURTEEN

We shopped for dresses which were always wrong: sweatshop approximations of the lean-lined girls' wear I studied in Seventeen. The armholes pinched, the belt didn't belong, the skirt drooped forward (I'd be told at school). Our odd-lot bargains deformed the image, but she and I loved Saturday rummage. One day she listed outside Loehmann's. Drool wet her chin. Stumbling, she screamed at me. Dropping our parcels on the pavement, she fell in what looked like a fit. I guessed: Insulin. The cop said, "Drunk," and called an ambulance while she cursed me and slapped away my hands. When I need a mother, I still go shopping.

i 5

MOTHER

I was born when she was thirty-eight. Pleated secrets sunlit on a skirt spread over rocks, dark curls, sharp nose, alert shopgirl's cautious mouth-curve. She had to wait between high school and college, married late —thirty-one—motherless teen-aged, serving father, time black-frocked at Macy's, deserving Jewish daughter. Patience: her great longings encysted with it, burst. I'll be thirty-eight in November. In her head whir words she learned, memorized, accented impeccably out of the Bronx. In the Bronx she rages, shrunken, pillow-propped, in a rank room. I invent freedom at the bank.

I invent stories she will never tell. I was fatherless; she was motherless. I thought that I was motherless as well. Harridan, pincurled in a washed-out housedress, she scrubbed the tiny kitchen on all fours and sniped. I bolted. I told dog-walkers, as I chipped bark flakes from the sycamore out front, such stories! I do not know hers. The mother says, "When I was twenty, I ..." The daughter, "I was ... I never thought you ..." "My best friend .. ." "I was afraid. Tell me why ... "... I was afraid." Twined down the long wind go fictions, afternoon lies the nurse tells to a furious old woman, who will die.

DAYS OF 1959

He had devirginated my friend Nan. Nuyorican, gorgeous, all parts made small, he was married to a round-shouldered, tall-er-than-he-was WASP science-fiction fan, a saccharine-frosted Lauren Bacall who filed while "Le Theatre du Vingtieme Siecle" caused my proximity to him. I knew enough to be a know-it-all maiden adulteress with diaphragm in their East Third St. bed before midterm. "Starbright, I hope I have someone like you to love me when Fm fifty." He didn't mean me; he meant, some girl under eighteen. Somewhere or other, he is fifty now.

He's fifty somewhere now; perhaps he has; unless the dope that he commenced to do at twenty-five did him. Sartre and jazz played into idiot opiates, right out of that South Bronx he never talked about. He left his wife, but she was shooting too, by then. Once his initiate in grass, I was a has-been hanger-on, ignored uptown in all-night diners while he scored, then "A" down, West Bronx "D" back home, lone Jewess on the milk train; south to class next day, badly prepared except to doubt practically anything anyone knew. I snorted once; was, by some blessing, bored.

I 7

FIFTEEN TO EIGHTEEN

I'd almost know, the nights I snuck in late,

at two, at three, as soon as I had tucked

into myself tucked in, to masturbate

and make happen what hadn't when I fucked,

there'd be the gargled cry, always "God damn

you to hell," to start with, from the other

bedroom: she was in shock again. I swam

to my surface to take care of my mother.

That meant, run for a glass of orange juice,

clamp her shoulders with one arm, try to pour

it down her throat while she screamed, "No, God damn

you!" She is stronger than I am

when this happens. If she rolls off on the floor,

I can't / she won't let me / lift her up. Fructose

solution, a shot and she'd come around.

At half-past-two, what doctor could I call?

Sometimes I had to call the hospital.

More often, enough orange juice got down,

splashed on us both.

"What are you doing here? Where were you? Why is my bed in this mess? How did you get those scratches on your face? What were you doing, out until this hour?"

i 8

1973

'Tm pregnant," I wrote to her in delight from London, thirty, married, in print. A foolscap sheet scrawled slantwise with one minuscule sentence came back. "I hope your child is white." I couldn't tear the pieces small enough. I hoped she'd be black as the ace of spades, though hybrid beige heredity had made that as unlikely as the spun-gold stuff sprouted after her neo-natal fur. I grudgingly acknowledged her "good hair," which wasn't, very, from my point of view. "No tar-brush left," her father's mother said. "She's Jewish and she's white," from her cranked bed mine smugly snapped.

She's Black. She is a Jew.

i 9

MOTHER II

No one is "Woman" to another woman, except her mother. Her breasts were unmysterious naked: limp, small. But I thought pus must ooze from them: her underwear like bandages. Blood came from where I came from, stanched with pads between her legs, under the girdle, seen through gaping bathroom doors. Around her waist, all sorts of rubber. Bound to stop the milk, my milk, her breasts stayed flat. I watched my round self, guessed a future where I'd droop and leak. But dry and cool against her cheek I'd lean my cheek. I stroked the lace and serge she sheathed her carapace with: straight skirts, close cuffs, full sleeves; was, wordless, catechized; believed: nude, she was gaunt; dressed, she was slim; nude, she was flabby; dressed, her firm body matched her brisk, precise mid-continental teacher's voice, which she had molded, dry, perfected from a swamp of dialect. Naked or clad, for me, she wore her gender, perpetual chador,

2 O

her individual complex history curtained off by sex. Child, I determined that I would not be subsumed in womanhood. Whatever she was, I was not. Whoever she was, I forgot to ask, and she forgot to tell, muffled in costumes she as well rejected as a girl, resumed —on my account? Are women doomed, beasts that repeat ourselves, to rage in youth against our own old age, in age to circumscribe our youth with self-despisal dressed as truth? Am I "Woman" to my water-dwelling brown loquacious daughter, corporeal exemplar of her thirst for what she would not love?

AUTUMN 1980

for Judith McDaniel

I spent the night after my mother died

in a farmhouse north of Saratoga Springs

belonging to a thirty-nine-year-old

professor with long, silvered wiry hair,

a lively girl's flushed cheeks and gemstone eyes.

I didn't know that she had died.

Two big bitches and a varying

heap of cats snoozed near a black wood stove

on a rag rug, while, on the spring-shot couch

we talked late over slow glasses of wine.

In the spare room near Saratoga Springs

was a high box bed. My mother died

that morning, of heart failure, finally.

Insulin shocks burned out her memory.

On the bed, a blue early-century

Texas Star, in a room white and blue

as my flannel pajamas. I'd have worn

the same, but smaller, ten years old at home.

Home was the Bronx, on Eastburn Avenue,

miles south of the hermetic not-quite-new

block where they'd sent this morning's ambulance.

Her nurse had telephoned. My coat was on,

my book-stuffed bag already on my back.

She said, "Your mother had another shock.

We'll be taking her to the hospital."

I asked if I should stay. She said, "It's all

right." I named the upstate college where

2 2

I'd speak that night. This had happened before.

I knew / I didn't know: it's not the same.

November cold was in that corner room

upstairs, with a frame window over land

the woman and another woman owned

—who was away. I thought of her alone

in her wide old bed, me in mine. I turned

the covers back. I didn't know she had died.

The tan dog chased cats; she had to be tied

in the front yard while I went along

on morning errands until, back in town,

I'd catch my bus. November hills were raw

fall after celebratory fall

foliage, reunions, festival.

I blew warmth on my hands in a dark barn

where two shaggy mares whuffled in straw,

dipped steaming velvet muzzles to the pail

of feed. We'd left the pickup's heater on.

It smelled like kapok when we climbed inside.

We both unzipped our parkas for the ride

back to the Saratoga bus station.

I blamed the wind if I felt something wrong.

A shrunken-souled old woman whom I saw

once a month lay on a hospital

slab in the Bronx. Mean or not, that soul

in its cortege of history was gone.

I didn't know that I could never know,

now, the daughtering magic to recall across two coffee-mugs the clever Young Socialist whose views would coincide with mine. I didn't know that she had died. Not talking much, while weighted sky pressed down, we climbed the back road's bosom to the all-night diner doubling as a bus depot. I brushed my new friend's cool cheek with my own, and caught the southbound bus from Montreal. I counted boarded-up racetrack motel after motel. I couldn't read. I tried to sleep. I didn't know that she had died. Hours later, outside Port Authority, rained on, I zipped and hooded an obscure ache from my right temple down my shoulder. Anonymous in the mid-afternoon crowds, I'd walk, to stretch, I thought, downtown. I rode on the female wave, typically into Macy's (where forty-five years past, qualified by her new M.A. in Chemistry, she'd sold Fine Lingerie), to browse in Fall Sale bargains for my child, aged six, size eight, hung brilliantly or piled like autumn foliage I'd missed somehow, and knew what I officially didn't know and put the bright thing down, scalded with tears.

PART OF A TRUE STORY

for Margaret Delany

"We dress up!"—Ntozake Shange

My dear Mrs. Bloomer:

The exigencies of my life demand rational costume. I noticed recently upon perusal of a number of your interesting journal, The Lily, that your radical bifurcate garment for gentlewomen is beyond suggestion; not to mince words, for sale.

My people, Mrs. Bloomer, are as well, south of the District, and until the last and least of us no longer is chattel, this woman must be radical to be rational. A woman of color is gentle as yourself, until provoked. I have been, since the age of six.

When I, aged twenty-some, returned to the scene of my truncated childhood, with the goal —which I achieved—of bringing forth my mother and my father from bondage, as I had my brothers, many of my sisters and brothers, I was obliged, for my safety and theirs, to come to them in male attire. (Does attire have gender?) I cannot pass as other than I am in one respect;

2 5

nor would I wish to. It was curious

passing that other way, where I had passed

before: "This gal can haul as heavy a

load as three men or a mule," et cetera.

A black man is only marginally

more anonymous on a Southern road

than a black woman. Dare I confess, I

liked that marginal anonymity?

Crop-headed in a neutral suit of clothes,

I sat, a stranger at my mother's table,

bearing good news she could not bear to hear

who bore me, till I bared myself as well,

scarred as I was, to loving scrutiny.

Later, I also bore the scrutiny

of the spouse whom I had reluctantly

left; who, free, had forbidden me to go

to freedom. Newly wived, he did not know

me at all, either as woman, or as

myself. It's a peculiar thing: to pass

easily, anonymously, from one

life, or mode of life, to another: done

with a forked suit? Night, starvation, a gun

to scare stragglers to courage, sleep in snow

or straw or not at all are what I know

as passage-rites. I do what I can,

but I do not wish to be thought a man

again.

Tonight, four hundred human souls, still embodied, disembondaged, lie wakeful

or sleep in this rough but hospitable

hospice, this time, taken across water

to free land. You know the name I am called.

The straits do not. We cross them nonetheless.

I have another name now: General;

a task I had first as a nursling: Nurse.

We intend to bring out four hundred more.

I wish to be there. It is efficacious

that I be there. I must be recognized

though: black, female, and old, or nearly old.

Still, I am of scant use immobilized.

I wish to be relieved of the woolen gown

whose waterlogged skirts and underskirts hold

me so, as well as the Confederate

Army would wish. I was nearly drowned.

Thus, Mrs. Bloomer, my request. Disguise

is not wished, or called for. Compromise,

though unaccustomed, is appropriate

on this occasion. So is the connection

of our aims. I entertain reflection

that, free and black, I am still disfranchised,

female; a condition I first realized

espoused: bondwoman and freedman, we

embodied it. I transcend limitation.

I am a black woman, whose education

was late and little: necessity

of adulthood vowed to emancipation

of my people; the larger limitation

imposed by childhood spent in servitude,

leave me comparatively unlettered. You will receive this missive, dictated by me to my adjutant, from her hand, to which I pray you will deliver the costume I desire.

Awaiting your kind reply, I remain,

Yours faithfully, Harriet Tubman United States Army Medical Division Port Royal Island

Port Royal Island was captured from the Confederacy by the Union Army in 1861, and became a haven for escaped slaves. Harriet Tubman, then aged about forty-one, and the most successful—and hunted—conductor on the Underground Railroad, was sent there by the governor of Massachusetts in 1862. She served as an Army scout, and as a nurse and herbal healer in the field hospital established for the freed slaves and wounded soldiers. In 1863 she led a detachment of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, a company composed of black soldiers under the command of Colonel James Montgomery, in a raid up the Combahee River, with the objectives of destroying the torpedoes with which the Confederate Army had mined the river, and of liberating as many slaves from the coastal farms as could be transported to Port Royal on the gunboats. More than eight hundred were freed. Harriet Tubman thus added the sobriquet "General" to the name of Moses, by which even her commanding officer addressed her.

Shortly afterwards, Tubman, who had never learned to read and write, dictated a letter to Boston, ordering a Bloomer suit, because long skirts were a handicap on such a campaign.

Amelia Bloomer, feminist, abolitionist, and originator of the costume which bore her name, was also editor of The Lily, a periodical advocating women's rights.

I'd like to express my gratitude to Ann Petry for her biography of Harriet Tubman; its concise information fueled my imagination.

A CHAPLET FOR JUDITH LANDRY

Dear Judith: In sincerest gratitude,

here is the bread-and-butter gift requested.

I wouldn't want our friendship to be tested

because I didn't sit down and get at it. "Rude

and slovenly, with a bad attitude,"

you'd say; although there might be worse things listed

against me if my offering consisted

of cliche justified by platitude.

I'm writing to you from an estuarial

island, where deer graze, pigs rampage, loons sing; land

marsh-bottomed, oyster-bedded, territorial

range of wild horses, freed pets' progeny.

But still I close my eyes and think of England:

where else could we dig into Kedgeree?

Where else could we dig into Kedgeree with a prolific writer who'd just been presented, after sherry, to the Queen? (Next time they meet, she'll be a C.B.E.) Two raw colonials, my girl and me quivered respectfully, thrilled to the bone. That's why we put on everything we owned, although it was a sultry fifty-three indoors. To sit by the electric fire, stroking enchanting Rock-cake, gone quite flat (sign of advanced achievement in a cat),

and sip Frascati—I could not desire

more! While our natterings didn't dislodge

from the kittens! the kittens! enraptured Squodge.

From the kittens! the kittens! enraptured Squodge could only be occasionally pried. (Say, if a Hamley's van pulled up outside, sent by the Queen, pour rendre ses hommages.) I'm sorry if we left a grubby hodgepodge of Lego, socks and tracts beside your easy-chair. We're sloppy, but we tried to be acceptably contained and sages. I liked the Oriental rugs beneath and upon the table where we ate, watching daffodils bloom in the teeth of London bluster beyond French windows. You liked loud Iva who resists repose. I liked tall Lurky who stays up too late.

I liked tall Lurky who stays up too late, although I missed the threatened saxophone rehearsal. Living, equals, with your grown daughter, you enlighten me and my eight-year-old, who've witnessed pairs wasting with hateful wrangling, while we hug and spar our own infatuation. You were kind to loan me your featherbed. Under its weight,

I slept like a ploughman with my socks on.

Mornings we drank hot coffee-milk from bowls.

The Saturday it rained, we vetoed Kew

and herded Iva, via the Number 2

to look, with Bonnard (recognition shocks) on

interiors domestic as our souls.

Interiors domestic as our souls,

salvaged like postcards of congenial places:

frayed armchairs framing animated faces,

the two-bar fire with fake electric coals.

The kamikaze boys'-club that controls

just the survival of the human race is

excluded temporarily. What grace is

implicit in our customary roles

—confidante, chatelaine, cook, hostess, mother—

when, our own women, we have latitude

to choose them and enact them for each other.

Our homes very infrequently are castles.

Having shared yours, we'll pledge ourselves your vassals,

dear Judith, in sincerest gratitude.

3 1

SWORD

for Toi Derricotte

This golden vengeance is one of those red

niggers like her grandfather who said

of me, "Her people are just off the boat."

He might have said, just off the cattle cars.

Here she is three, bangs her construction boot

against the van she's perched on. He is in lace,

held by a darker nurse, sixty-six years

earlier. Their twice-bright blade of face

astonishes, doubled, between imp ears

the same red-gold (his lock's glassed) curls around.

When she was born he was long darkened; dead

before he tried her honed red-gold, hybrid

of six million dead off the cattle cars,

just off the slave boats, fifteen million drowned.

INHERITANCES

Iva asks me for stories of her father's

family. I learned them second-hand

—not even a Christian, and not black.

I think of a reflective membrane: classes,

mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery.

The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's

barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman

(she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather

to shout, "Old man, you're free!" While slavery

had slipped, a wristlet from the writing-hand

of the bisque-beige girl enrolled in Classes

for Young Ladies, in Paris, where her black

mother was not. Ledgers were in the black; the permeated membrane not the man, else childless, who exercised three classes' prerogatives (landed, white, male) to father twice the child who, by his power in hand, was bred to, and released from, slavery.

Iva asks, "Were your parents for slavery? Were they slaves? I know they weren't black." She puts her suntanned hand against my hand,

3 3

compares. "Does 'manumit' mean, just a man could make slaves free?" I tell her, my father spoke German in his West Bronx first-grade classes;

my mother worked at Macy's, took night classes

at Hunter, read about Wage Slavery

and Profits in the kitchen, where her father

waited for her to make his breakfast. Black

dresses were required for work. A man

—Jewish, of course—would take her life in hand.

I don't wear any rings on my left hand.

Two copies of notes home from Iva's classes

are sent. Her father lives with a white man,

writes science-fiction novels: slavery

on far worlds, often, though the slaves aren't black.

She says, "Dad's roommate," or "My other father."

I wouldn't say to a black friend that class is (in its erasures) slavery. I hand down little to emancipate my father.

JOINT CUSTODY

Houston was unregenerately damp

—clouds scudded in, clouds scudded out with rain—

and quintessentially American

as neon reindeer in a trailer camp.

Nobody else was a pedestrian

on boulevards of monkey-puzzle trees.

Conventual in lodgings, with no forced

festival, we watched the landlady

unwrap things her grown son passed to her knees.

Like us, she was a teacher and divorced.

There was a story: he, now tranquilized

and nelly, stabbed her with a kitchen knife.

Latterly, a boyfriend and nightlife

helped. They both exhausted their surprised

exclamations at a magnetized

ceramic apple, a red calico

apple, a crystal apple ornament,

a box of apple-printed notecards, sent

by kindergarten mothers. I had no

proof of parental status for the Show

and Tell, but missed my child so much it hurt

—who held, swathed in yards of new organdy,

3 5

Christmas court for her father's family. Pushing aside an iced wedge of inert factory buns, I passed my spinsterly book-parcel across cushions in a lull, to be revealed, requited, by my dear friend, equally a displaced person here, compassionate, impeccable in wool challis, and (maybe) just as miserable.

This isn't about unrequited love

although I'm warmed by your proximity.

I don't yearn for you, wish you wanted me

a different way. I want you to approve

my life, my person: insecurity

hamstrings me without reassuring strokes.

Earned trust some careless clumsiness revokes,

some fervid overstatement nullifies:

that's happened. When I'm with you, something ties

me to your mood, should not. You're not my child.

I think of feeling absolutely free

outside the Gare Routiere, in a blue-tiled

cafe, alone in France, morning haze, mild

light in my brown hands, cupping it like a prize.

Tonight when I cup my hand beneath your breast

(fountain and pillow of felicity)

your womb shudders with possibility

suctioned from you, and your sigh is pain. Pressed

even gently against me, you ache; the best

choice, made, presses us both. How will it be

held between us, this complicity

in what we can't repeat? Silken, we nest

aloft, sleep curled. Reflected from the snow,

a dawn lamp glints up through your tall window.

Uptown, my child will wake, ask where's her mother.

Promised, I inhale you, descend from you, gather

scattered woolens, gather my wits to go

from one hard choice, love chosen, to the other.

for Sara Karig

On the back of a letter in French applying

for a place at a bilingual school for my daughter

I put words that will not contain the slaughter

of somebody's twenty-year-old. She is dying

under a modern airport where the roar

of takeoffs flattens screams and retching to blurred

industrial noise around the torturer.

Below the tiled floor is the dirt floor.

A woman is living whose name I say like a charm

because she acknowledged choice in the dulled eyes

of somebody's son, who, needled to recognize

a congruent soul in the law student or farm

child he is reducing to an integer

of shamed pain, would be stripped and killed with her.

While deathdrunk superannuated boys

tot up how often to blow up the world,

a white-locked pink sage with a toddler voice

recounts, purse clutched, how she was blued and curled.

I overhear her on the crosstown bus

I take at three to meet the second grade.

She smiles a smile someone called dangerous

once, and she boiled it down like marmalade.

I'm sheared, hands free, with keys, jackknife and ten

dollars deployed in worn corduroy pants.

A matrifocal world would comprehend

compassion, dignity and commonsense,

I sneer, aware of my accoutrements

as she is talking hairdos with her friend.

"You'll play with her, but you won't play with me!" my lover snapped, gathering up her beach-mat after her as she scuffed angrily back toward the car. She turned, we glowered at each other. Play with my child's part of my work: loved work, but work. I thought she understood, after our harried winter in New York, I'd need an afternoon of solitude precisely when that work was imminent. She's going to cry again. This isn't real! "I have' (icily) "other things to do than play. This is ridiculous! I've spent the last forty-eight hours alone with you!" I've made our idyll sound like an ordeal...

4 3

Like a middle-aged runner out of practice,

already apprehensive, short of wind

before she leaves the quarter-mark behind,

this aging writer cleaning up her act is

dubious she'll make the finish. Fact is

(though soaking in the sun she's disinclined

to pessimism) sparse in an untrained mind

which seethes on itself, unplanted, brackish

swamp-marsh. Still, there's enough clay mud

to mound with broken oyster-shells and sand

for a path between palm-swamp and marshland.

Sweaty and second-winded now, she jogs

over a creek bridged by uncertain logs.

Thud! leaving steady ooze-filled tread-marks, Thud!

"How come, here, you see so many black

people working in other people's houses?"

Does she notice, every other friend of ours is

ambiguous two generations back?

Like Bedouin for sand, or Eskimo

for snow, mixed races swell the lexicon,

peach-cream through copper to obsidian:

preta, negrinho, mulata, moreno.

Her cafe-au-lait father, olive mother

made her rubia, gold on lion-gold

like the naked sungilt three-year-old

who, crouched near a bloat sewer, ferreted

his hillside of the disinherited

looking enough like her to be her brother.

for Nelida Virion

"How come," she says, "if you were what she is,

County Attorney, and someone did what

you thought they had a reason for, you've got

to say they're guilty? If you have the same ideas?

That boy—how could somebody say he is

going to learn anything in jail? He shot

the father 'cause he hurt his sister, not

to kill him!" Our polyglot host, child-free, is

charmed by such eloquence so late at night.

Iva waits, in Portuguese, to get

her lasagna. "It doesn't taste right."

The waiter brings a more familiar heap.

Stretching her four-foot-six on the banquette,

swiftly and righteously she falls asleep.

for Eleanor Bender

Out on the Dyckman Street platform because

there's no one else to fetch the magazine

mail from its distant post-box, something between

bag-lady, mountaineer, and Santa Claus,

I snort cold damp air, stamp to shift the weight

of twenty dozen women's manuscripts.

Twelve will, if merely literate, eclipse

the dismal two-hundred-and-twenty-eight

I'll read later—if the local arrives.

This is part of the world's work, I guess:

canceled subscriptions, invoices, housewives'

painstakingly misspelled longhand cliches.

(My cynicism is rebuked always.)

"Please send" (no stamps) "feedback to this address."

Now that she reads in bed till two A.M. she does by dim pillow-lamps of hotel-rooms in old towns whose names she cannot spell, with walls around, churches centering them. She won't go in museums, but will scale any Romanesque or Gothic pile, racing term-end outings of French schoolchildren sharing stretched possibles: a real duke's birdcage dungeon straddling the south tower, the sacristan's moquette beyond the bell of vineyards, dollhouse fortress on a hill, shadowed by pensive monsters who aspire to the Lady's intercessive smile as boats head slowly elsewhere up-canal.

She marched away, tagged "Unaccompanied Minor,"

and idiotically I felt like weeping,

although I didn't get any work done for

two weeks, except mornings when she was sleeping

late, her round brown face through dirty hair

clear as a Kore's, and for once not talking.

I tried to scribble at the town pool where

she swam, fair days or foul. Incessant walking

up steep hills to the back streets firmed up my

calves, lengthened my wind, and kept my blood-pressure

down. I needn't eat only where pizza

is served, or stockpile Limonade and Treets—a

small recompense. French kids on holiday

will hog the pool, and already I miss her.

for Nadja Tesich

Arching in heat, tabbies from the Mairie wail contrapuntal to the Tramontane on a high wall under a chestnut tree. The named wind swept the twilight sky of rain-clouds and scoured fog from the valley-bowl. Above tiled roofs, schooled swallows bank and glide on her apron-strings. Women inside steep houses bar the shutters. On a knoll knotty with sage and bramble, above vine-rich fields, catching her breath, the seventy-year-old hiker tears a garlicked roll, re-caps her bottle and looks up the line of hills as intimate as family with whom she'll break more bread after nightfall.

The afternoon ahead of us seemed long.

I almost wished that it was dinnertime

(whenever I'm horny, I first think I'm

hungry) in prandial silence till, headstrong,

I'd interrupt the respirating wine

and, as I raised my glass, venture to raise

my eyes to her unsentimental gaze.

"—Let's see 'The Women Futurists'; that's fine."

A billboard in the Avenue de Maine

warned midnight as we wandered off the meal.

The night ahead of us was almost over

when, sweaty, she pulled me, sweaty, down to cover

her white-flagged brown chest on much-washed chenille.

She has a mother's coarsened breasts, like mine.

5 i

GRAFFITI FROM THE GARE SAINT-MANQUE

GRAFFITI FROM THE GARE SAINT-MANQUE

for Zed Bee

Outside the vineyard is a caravan

of Germans taking pictures in the rain.

The local cheese is Brillat-Savarin.

The best white wine is Savigny-les-Beaune.

We learn Burgundies while we have the chance

and lie down under cabbage-rose wallpaper.

It's too much wine and brandy, but I'll taper

off later. Who is watering my plants?

I may go home as wide as Gertrude Stein

—another Jewish Lesbian in France.

Around the sculptured Dukes of Burgundy,

androgynous monastics, faces cowled,

thrust bellies out in marble ecstasy

like child swimmers having their pigtails toweled.

Kids sang last night. A frieze of celebrants

circles the tomb, though students are in school,

while May rain drizzles on the beautiful

headlines confirming Francois Mitterand's

election. We have Reagan. Why not be

another Jewish Lesbian in France?

Aspiring Heads of State are literate

here, have favorite poets, can explain

the way structuralists obliterate

a text. They read at night. They're still all men.

Now poppy-studded meadows of Provence

5 5

blazon beyond our red sardine-can car. We hope chairpersons never ask: why are unblushing deviants abroad on grants? My project budget listed: Entertain another Jewish Lesbian in France.

I meant my pithy British village neighbor

who misses old days when sorority

members could always know each other: they wore

short-back-and-sides and a collar and tk.

She did, too. Slavic eyes, all romance

beneath an Eton crop with brilliantined

finger-waves, photographed at seventeen

in a dark blazer and a four-in-hand:

a glimpse of salad days that made the day for

another Jewish Lesbian in France.

Then we went on to peanuts and Campari, she and her friend, my friend and I, and then somehow it was nine-thirty and a hurry to car and carte and a carafe of wine, Lapin Saute or Truite Meuniere in Vence. Convivial quartet of friends and lovers: had anyone here dreaded any other's tears, dawn recriminations and demands? Emphatically not. That must have been another Jewish Lesbian in France.

It's hard to be almost invisible.

You think you must be almost perfect too.

When your community's not sizeable,

it's often a community of two,

and a dissent between communicants

is a commuter pass to the abyss.

Authorities who claim you don't exist

would sometimes find you easy to convince.

(It helps if you can talk about it to

another Jewish Lesbian in France.)

A decorated she-Academician

opines we were thought up by horny males.

No woman of equivalent position

has yet taken the wind out of her sails.

(How would her "lifelong companion" have thanked her?)

Man loving Man's her subject, without mention

if what they do is due to her invention

—and if I'd been her mother, I'd have spanked her.

(Perhaps in a suppressed draft Hadrians

another Jewish Lesbian in France.)

Then the advocates of Feminitude —with dashes as their only punctuation— explain that Reason is to be eschewed: In the Female Subconscious lies salvation. Suspiciously like Girlish Ignorance,

it seems a rather watery solution. If I can't dance, it's not my revolution. If I can't think about it, I won't dance. So let the ranks of Psych et Po include another Jewish Lesbian in France.

I wish I had been packed off to the nuns

to learn good manners, Attic Greek, and Latin.

(No public Bronx Junior High School fit all that in.)

My angsts could have been casuistic ones.

It's not my feminist inheritance

to eat roots, drink leaf broth, live in a cave,

and not even know how to misbehave

with just one vowel and five consonants.

This patchwork autodidact Anglophone's

another Jewish Lesbian in France,

following Natalie Barney, Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, generous Bryher, Romaine Brooks, Sylvia Beach, H.D., Tamara de Lempicka, Janet Flanner. They made the best use of the circumstance that blood and stockings often both were bluish; (they all were white, and only Alice Jewish) wicked sept / oct / nonagenarians. Would it have saved Simone Weil's life to be another Jewish Lesbian in France?

It isn't sex I mean. Sex doesn't save anyone, except, sometimes, from boredom (and the underpaid under-class of whoredom is often bored at work). I have a grave suspicion ridicule of Continence or Chastity is one way to disparage a woman's choice of any job but marriage. Most of us understand what we renounce. (This was a lunchtime peptalk I once gave another Jewish Lesbian in France

depressed by temporary solitude

but thinking coupled bliss was dubious.)

I mean: one way to love a body viewed

as soiled and soiling existential dross

is knowing through your own experience

a like body embodying a soul

to be admirable and loveable.

That is a source that merits nourishment.

Last night despair dressed as self-loathing wooed

another Jewish Lesbian in France.

The sheet was too soft. Unwashed for three weeks, it smelled like both of us. The sin we are beset by is despair. I rubbed my cheeks against the cotton, thought, I wouldn't care if it were just my funk. Despair expands

to fill... I willed my arm: extend; hand: stroke that sullen shoulder. In the time it took synapse to realize abstract commands, the shoulder's owner fell asleep. Still there another Jewish Lesbian in France

stared at the sickle moon above the skylight, brooding, equally sullen, that alone is better after all. As close as my right foot, even my bed stops being my own. Could I go downstairs quietly, make plans for myself, not wake her? Who didn't undress, slept on the couch bundled with loneliness rather than brave that nuptial expanse five weeks before. Another contradiction another Jewish Lesbian in France

may reconcile more gracefully than I.

We're ill-equipped to be obliging wives.

The post office and travel agency

are significant others in our lives.

Last summer I left flowers at Saint Anne's

shrine. She had daughters. One who, legends tell,

adrift, woman-companioned, shored (is still

revered) in the Camargue, her holy band's

navigatrix, Mary, calming the sea

—another Jewish Lesbian in France?

It says they lived together forty years,

Mary and Mary and Sarah (who was black).

Unsaintly ordinary female queers,

we packed up and went separately back.

We'd shared the road with Gypsy sleeper vans

to join Sarah's procession to the shore.

Our own month-end anabasis was more

ambiguous. Among Americans

my polyglot persona disappears,

another Jewish Lesbian in France.

Coeur mis a nu in sunlight, khaki pants

I've rolled up in a beach towel so ants

and crickets from the leafage won't invade

their sweaty legs: in a loaned hermit-glade

pine-redolent of New Hampshire, not France,

I disentangle from the snares I laid.

Liver-lobed mushrooms thicken in the shade,

shrubs unwrap, pinelings thrust through mulch. Noon slants

across my book, my chest, its lemonade

rays sticky as a seven-year-old's hands.

THE WITCH'S GARDEN

'For the old woman was a witch, but not a wicked witch. She only used magic for her own pleasure, and right now she very much wanted Gerda to stay with her." H. C. Andersen: The Snow Queen

It is lucky for me she's

easy as a cat to please:

Have her morning cup in place.

Keep my hair out of my face.

Pick strawberries, save her some.

I can make myself at home.

If I do what she wants, and do it lovingly, she'll love me. Who it is I was or want or blunder after she has dug in under dung-ripe rows of mounded loam. I can make myself at home.

It is heavy summer. I'm cruel to remind her time passes when she wants to stay

6₅

with me in the sun all day.

Berries swell, blooms droop, bees hum.

I can make myself at home.

If I cross her, she will cry. She was lonelier than I was, impatient while emphatic April rain hammered the attic. She is happy now I've come. I can make myself at home.

Hugs and kisses, featherbed blanket-stitched hard-candy red. Nightlong windy leaves unravel seams of roads I meant to travel. Dressing table, mirror, comb: I can make myself at home.

Some accretive secret grows in the cave of what she knows, like a rotting leaf-heap I burn and scatter ash to scry where to go when I have gone. I can make myself at home.

WHAT THE TAME CROW SANG TO GERDA

for Judith de Karolyi

The Snow Queen had a daughter She calls them and ignores them They live in different countries Her icy courtship drove them

la la

or two but now out.

She names her selfish reasons Jeweled, she kept them dumb and hungry. Housekeepers, they can scry words scratched on In steamy bulwarks they survive her

Reason. Good food. season.

Old and spry, they both are almost Ringed with hot stones, terrified of Tears scalded her dream-ice from their Each smashed a glass, forgot a sister's

wise, waste. eyes. face.

They watch her frozen spires with yearning, With daughter-lust. Lost girl, you'll have your

burn turn.

GERDA IN THE EYRIE

"Then the robber girl put her arm round Gerda's neck and slept. But Gerda was much too afraid to close her eyes!' H. C. Andersen: The Snow Queen

I almost love you. I've wanted to be you

all my life. You are asleep in the straw

with my story, your arm thrown across

my neck. Under your weight, I'm awake,

prickly-bladdered, listening to rooks

in the eaves. Your breath rasps,

fresher than the straw, across my face.

The texture of your skin is strange because

it's familiar. I felt vertigo,

nausea, when you touched my mouth with your

mouth, smelling of peat-smoke, then

vertigo took direction. I could have dived

into your dark.

Do you have a story? I imagine you always here, growing with trees, testing your daily strength, not exemplary, necessary. Corded shoulders protect your brown new breasts when you take off your stained embroidered shirt. You wrapped yourself for sleep in the soft shawl I had unknotted. Your breasts asked, like eyes. A girl looks at another girl's breasts covertly, thinking, we should be alike,

we are the same kind. But we are not.

Fear tethers me to the fire. I was raised afraid

of strange men, sudden noises, groups of men

in the square, isolate men on the road.

Alone in the woods, I never was alone

before. A drunk, a tinker, a bear

that meant a man, somebody's runaway

father or brother or son, would find me

expendable landscape. I'm following

a woman, now, alone. The trees

are simply trees and let me look at them.

What would a witch do to me, or a captious

princess? What a man does to a man;

nothing to make me cringe around the trees

again. The witch knew something I should know,

but I was in a hurry.

Listen: worst of all was, all along, I didn't mind. I said I was the sinewy small girl with tucked-up skirts, who was the general, who made a boy eat dirt, who kept one doll dressed as a pirate. Well, I had six beribboned china ladies with real hair. I asked for a new one each year. I pricked flowers on cloth where someone else had drawn them, with my back to the sun. I like doing it, it made space in my mind smooth as cream. I used diminutives, collected miniatures. A tiny world

was what I played at, bottle-fed and tame. You aren't listening. You're asleep in your adventure, which I probably won't know, maybe take part in. I won't know what part. And this is in my head, where I talk like a grown-up.

Grandma's little girl talked like a grown-up: Wait and see; wait and see. He was my twin self, my better brother. That was my story, that I told myself as puberty relentlessly divided the tomboys from the boys. First we dress dolls, then, confine cats, then, children are handed over to caged children who, every day, deck and affirm the cage. When he laughed at me, I expected it. When he dragged his sled to the boys' pond, I watched, behind a tree. I could have asked to go too. I was indulged. A girl would be safe, playing with a band of boys, from men. But I was happy where I was. I listened to him whistling down the hill. I thought about my hassock near the fire to whose round seat my first embroidery, maroon ground, daisies and a fleur-de-lys, was tacked, sits still. I went in. I sat still. So it was Kay the stranger lured away. The woman stranger. If I find them, when I find her, will she seize me like you did, with grubby

7 o

paws: "Nobody touch her, she's mine!"

A girl said that—you did—about a girl

—me. I guess you saved my life. Because

a girl said it, the danger couldn't be real.

That was what made me giggle. But it was.

I thought of something I heard from the witch.

You shut out images of what you fear:

your pupils pinhole; dilate when you're shown

what you desire. A picture of a gun

dilates men's eyes. Women's shrink. (From a niche

of crumbling mortar, you plucked your honed knife

and showed it to me shyly, like a jewel

saved for betrothal. Close to your curled hand

in warm straw, now it glistens as it sleeps.)

The image of a man—if women's eyes

contract; if they widen, shown a woman;

and men's do, too; would you have been surprised?

That means some of us fear what we desire,

and don't look at it with our entire

vision. I don't think I'm afraid of you,

though I should be, but I can't sleep, here.

I don't want to get up. What do you fear?

What do you want? Are they ever the same?

I want you to wake up and talk to me.

You're here, but you aren't really here.

Your elbow's getting heavy, like a stone

or a dead branch across my collarbone,

except it smells like you. The tiniest

shove, would you wake up? I know a game

7 i

we could play, or I could tell you a story.

You could tell one. If I turn on my side

with my back to you, your arm is around

me more lightly, a hug, and I can ride

to sleep on your lap, knees bent on your knees,

my arm over your arm under my breasts,

while your wild pets make early morning sounds.

7 2

THE ROBBER WOMAN

"Listen" said the Robber Girl to Gerda, "you see that all the robbers are gone. Only my mother is left and she will soon jail asleep. Then I shall do something for you." H. C. Andersen: The Snow Queen

I cuffed you into shape. I molded you in my swelling matrix, pushed you out into the world. I push you into the world daily, and the labor is the same: very like pain, unless I work at it.

As long as I sleep among thieves you are safe in the upper air.

You kicked me from the inside long enough when I bulged with you. I put my elbows on what must have been your pointed butt and watched your bony angles flying out. I picked my load up when I'd caught my breath.

As long as I sleep among thieves you are safe in the upper air.

I hug you and I slap you. I kiss you

and I curse you. I get your booted foot

on my scarred shins. I can still throw you down

7 3

and pick you up. Most of the time, it's play.

You knocked my knife-hand and my breath out today.

As long as I sleep among thieves you are safe in the upper air.

You cheered when your head reached my belt-buckle.

Now I can't peer into your matted hair.

You lean against me. I can rest my chin

on your head, smelling unwashed child, while you

play-punch my breasts the way you always did.

As long as I sleep among thieves you are safe in the upper air.

I always feel you in my hands, like clay. You're oven-ready now. When you are baked in the kiln of the world, my hands could break what they made as accidentally as easily as anybody's hands.

As long as I sleep among thieves you are safe in the upper air.

You've started. I've scrubbed away your first blood. My breasts are hard as when we nursed. I'm due. You chose your friend; you took her for yourself

7 4

up into that cat-hideout where you sleep. I hardly wonder what you talk about.

You are safe in the upper air to believe what a child believes: no blow that you receive will ever leave a scar but the impatient careless clout your mother gives; certain that if you live another hundred years you never will forgive a grain of malice there. No harm ascends the stairs unless your mother leaves the bedroom door ajar. The heavy step that weaves its twist of fear in reveries of empowered love is—do you doubt it—hers. The clean wind strips the eaves. You stretch to what you will dare. No one will know what you are as long as I sleep among thieves.

7 5

THE LITTLE ROBBER GIRL CONSIDERS THE WIDE WORLD

Far from the steamy parlors of the north, aspiring rooftrees soar above the hearth. Although they splay like courtiers' coolers, swards of undergrowth clank in the wind like swords,

like that cloisonne fencing-master's skewer mounted to proffer towels near the shower. Whatever I can do, I'm going to do it, with no one to forbid it or allow it.

I washed myself and washed myself. Blue tile speculated on the ring I stole while mispronouncing toasts with the entire retinue of a People's Ambassador

who pinched my arm and reeled out such a line! It's harder work than huddling in the cold. I'm tired of eating all my meals alone, glimpsing myself in silver like a child.

I can salvage without being foolish: whatever tales her scraggly carrion birds hear from my mother as she rocks and broods, only my ankles and my wrists are girlish.

They said I'd bake to blazes, but they lied. I think I never will be warm enough. The noon sun satisfies my lizard blood. I wish I hadn't given her my knife

because she didn't cry though I could bruise her with my thumb. She doesn't know I loathe her drool about an ice boy and a rose. It was like stroking a blacksnake: too smooth.

She'd tell me better secrets if I pried. Sooner or later, I'd get tired of bossing her around. If I could tweak and prod her to right back, that would be appetizing—

except she went away early this morning, saddle-strapped like a piglet on a spit. (I can't ride horses well yet, but I'm learning.) Beyond the egret's marsh, I found a spot. . .

Oh, I can't even make up a good story. I stomp around the footpath, getting bitten by gnats and kicking rocks and feeling rotten. I'm bored, is all: it isn't so mysterious. It's hours and hours and hours till dinner. I wish I had my knife. I bet she'll drop it and lose it, or give it to that drip and never use it for herself. Piss on her!

RUNE OF THE FINLAND WOMAN

for Sara Karig

"You are so wise," the reindeer said, "you can bind the winds of the world in a single strand." H. C. Andersen: The Snow Queen

She could bind the world's winds in a single strand. She could find the world's words in a singing wind. She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand. She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind.

She could wend the wild woods on a saddled hind. She could sound a well-spring with a rowan wand. She could bind the wolf's wounds in a swaddling-band. She could bind a banned book in a silken skin.

She could spend a world war on invaded land. She could pound the dry roots to a kind of bread. She could feed a road gang on invented food. She could find the spare parts of the severed dead.

She could find the stone limbs in a waste of sand. She could stand the pit cold with a withered lung. She could handle bad puns in the slang she learned. She could dandle foundlings in their mother tongue.

She could plait a child's hair with a fishbone comb. She could tend a coal fire in the Arctic wind.

She could mend an engine with a sewing-pin. She could warm the dark feet of a dying man.

She could drink the stone soup from a doubtful well. She could breathe the green stink of a trench latrine. She could drink a queen's share of important wine. She could think a few things she would never tell.

She could learn the hand code of the deaf-and-blind. She could earn the iron keys of the frozen queen. She could wander uphill with a drunken friend. She could bind the world's winds in a single strand.

7 9

THE LITTLE ROBBER GIRL GETS ON IN THE WIDE WORLD

for Julie Fay

She's in a room full of letters, dressed in white amidst proliferate papers, the exploded lace of sheets. Her hair froths white, her pale eyes chill, as when I first saw her. Under white trouser-legs, her long feet

are bare on the stone floor, swollen with heat. Summer follows summer since the first time I stood in her crepuscular bedroom awaiting acknowledgement. The dim chime

of a blue glass clock caught her attention. "I'm exhausted. Come at six tomorrow. Knock downstairs. 1*11 hear you. The heat makes me sick. Debarrass me of that ridiculous clock."

I put it in my pocket. I left the lock unlatched. Who knows what I thought I'd do? I watched from a huge-boled olive tree, her window a tall candle, while dusk deepened, blue

as my road clothes, and a blade of new

moon sharpened above the limestone bluffs.

"I knew where you were last night. I heard you laugh."

Her sight is dim, but her ears are sharp enough.

I thought, "Let her be captious, she's a tough old bird, and, say what you like, she deserves

a bit of courtesy. While I'm here, I won't starve. You're not a slave when you contract to serve."

I don't know when it was I lost my nerve.

I was delighted when she seemed to trust

me. I brought the right coins back, her birdscratch list

transformed to fill the larder. Late in the August

heat, shadowed by shutters, we discussed

my future and her past. Sometimes they blended

to one chivalric tale. I understand it

a little better now. She would make splendid

generous gestures in which I pretended

to believe. If it were hers to give,

she'd give it to me—what? her land, her glove

to carry, the bracelet under her sleeve?

Pretended? why? She didn't want me to leave; she told me so in several languages, while I continued to sleep under her trees, presenting myself mornings, neatly dressed

as I could manage. Each day was a new test.

She sent me out and always I came back

with packages, messages. "You bring me good luck."

I had good luck, I thought. I had a knack

for pleasing. The blue glass clock lived in my rucksack. Afternoons, I wrote letters, a diligent steward, weeded the moribund garden while it parched, stood barefoot on cool tiles while she descended

the tortuous stairway, her gnarled hand extended toward me. Did I say, she was beautiful, that youth, in her scintillant pallor, paled to decorative nursery pastel?

I felt large, rude and bland, all the more grateful, though my food and outdoor shelter were all my wages. Blackberry clumps weighted the brambly hedges. Sometimes I thought of winter hills' blank pages

scrawled with one bird-track. I forgot my real age—is that strange? and that once I was almost always cold. Brown rabbits and grey water-rats ran wild in the hedges. No animal should be killed

on her land, she said. My nights outdoors were filled with rustlings, scrabblings. I thought about rats and rolled down, shivering, into my blankets. "Womanish," she mocked, when I told her that.

I plunged my face into a fresh-washed sheet as I lifted it to hang. The odor of wet linen enveloped unthought-of tears. I never had done woman's work before

but now I did it daily, over and over. Sometimes I was insulted, as no servant who'd take her pay and leave would be. I didn't. Sometimes I was her twilight confidante,

gallant, or granddaughter, or sycophant. She liked me best when I was brusque and lewd. If I was timid, she would call me stupid, but she'd laugh and correct a misconstrued

sentence I almost halfway understood.

The sun set earlier, but we sat late. Around her

shoulders, I wrapped her black-barred cloak. She was fonder

of talk than fire. Meanwhile the magpies, sometimes the thunder,

meanwhile the footpath wound serpentine under the bushes, tucked in around limestone boulders above the river-sectioned slopes where wilder things wandered in the night as I got older,

and she, chameleon, stayed the same, I told her. Meanwhile the trail debouched on a small road that led—although I didn't know where it led— somewhere. From our hill, it was hidden by woods.

After a storm, mist marked the bluffs: it showed. Meanwhile I scrabbled weeds where no one reaped. Harvest was windfall. Greengages the wasps ate splattered tree-roots, or heaped

in their forks, a rats' feast while we slept. I Smashed yellow pears fermented in the grass the afternoon I thought I'd cut my losses. With a soiled shirt-sleeve, I rubbed the milk-glass

clock till my face glimmered back from its facets. I wrapped my four garments around it, rolled them in my blanket. I stripped her down-drowned bed of its champagne-silk crewelwork. I sold

that to a market-woman. Well, I thought of it, told myself I ought, might, was entitled to, as I tied up the rucksack. Do you know, that's probably what she expects of you?

So I turn, part hedges, shield my eyes. I go up to my haunches in persistent brambles. Nobody promised me it would be simple. Nobody's future passes out free samples.

Sunbeams stroked me at a farewell angle while the watchlight in my mind's eye sought her shadow smiting rock with an olive mitre: "You are a thief, and a thief's daughter!"

THE LITTLE ROBBER GIRL CONSIDERS SOME OPTIONS

Who wouldn't love the bad old ladies? I'd rather not go gaga in a nursing home, or be preserved in plastic slipcovers with a sullen home attendant paid by a despicable son-in-law. If I can't grow sinewy on a hillside with my twenty years' mostly companion, selling books, pots or rocks in a shop and sitting to three healthy courses on the precise stroke of nine, then I could be captious in a crooked castle, more courted a ruin than ever I was a rouee, avid for gossip and close with my favor. The third choice, only granted as a reward, is to pack the gold hero's medal and the ornamental sword in a battered briefcase with one drip-dry shirt, and set out, on the very eve of your triumphal fireworks, to char in the ice dame's half-dismantled mansion, to bind the enemy's atlas with your last silk ball-gown, to tell bedtime stories to the torturer who brings you cream teas, and to the orphans for whom you butchered a horse with the ceremonial epee. Then your digestion will rival your memory, your breasts will grow back while you learn Catalan, and your daughters slog across the icecap to get drunk with you.

BALLAD OF LADIES LOST AND FOUND

BALLAD OF LADIES LOST AND FOUND

for Julia Alvarez

Where are the women who, entre deux guerres,

came out on college-graduation trips,

came to New York on football scholarships,

came to town meeting in a decorous pair?

Where are the expatriate salonnieres,

the gym teacher, the math-department head?

Do nieces follow where their odd aunts led?

The elephants die off in Cagnes-sur-Mer.

H.D., whose "nature was bisexual,"

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Where are the single-combat champions: the Chevalier d'Eon with curled peruke, Big Sweet who ran with Zora in the jook, open-handed Winifred Ellerman, Colette, who hedged her bets and always won? Sojourner's sojourned where she need not pack decades of whitegirl conscience on her back. The spirit gave up Zora; she lay down under a weed-field miles from Eatonville, and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Where's Stevie, with her pleated schoolgirl dresses, and Rosa, with her permit to wear pants? Who snuffed Clara's mestiza flamboyance

and bled Frida onto her canvases?

Where are the Niggerati hostesses,

the kohl-eyed ivory poets with severe

chignons, the rebels who grew out their hair,

the bulldaggers with marcelled processes?

Conglomerates co-opted Sugar Hill,

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Anne Hutchinson, called witch, termagant, whore,

fell to the long knives, having tricked the noose.

Carolina Maria de Jesus'

tale from the slagheaps of the landless poor

ended on a straw mat on a dirt floor.

In action thirteen years after fifteen

in prison, Eleanor of Aquitaine

accomplished half of Europe and fourscore

anniversaries for good or ill,

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Has Ida B. persuaded Susan B. to pool resources for a joint campaign? (Two Harriets act a pageant by Lorraine, cheered by the butch drunk on the IRT who used to watch me watch her watching me; We've notes by Angelina Grimke Weld for choral settings drawn from the Compiled Poems of Angelina Weld Grimke.) There's no such tense as Past Conditional, and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Who was Sappho's protegee, and when did

we lose Hrotsvitha, dramaturge and nun?

What did bibulous Suzanne Valadon

think about Artemisia, who tended

to make a life-size murderess look splendid?

Where's Aphra, fond of dalliance and the pun?

Where's Jane, who didn't indulge in either one?

Whoever knows how Ende, Pintrix, ended

is not teaching Art History at Yale,

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Is Beruliah upstairs behind the curtain

debating Juana Ines de la Cruz?

Where's savante Anabella, Augusta-Goose,

Fanny, Maude, Lidian, Freda and Caitlin,

"without whom this could never have been written"?

Louisa who wrote, scrimped, saved, sewed, and nursed,

Malinche, who's, like all translators, cursed,

Bessie, whose voice was hemp and steel and satin,

outside a segregated hospital,

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Where's Amy, who kept Ada in cigars

and love, requited, both country and courtly,

although quinquagenarian and portly?

Where's Emily? It's very still upstairs.

Where's Billie, whose strange fruit ripened in bars?

Where's the street-scavenging Little Sparrow?

Too poor, too mean, too weird, too wide, too narrow:

9 i

Marie Curie, examining her scars,

was not particularly beautiful;

and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Who was the grandmother of Frankenstein? The Vindicatrix of the Rights of Woman. Madame de Sevigne said prayers to summon the postman just as eloquent as mine, though my Madame de Grignan's only nine. But Mary Wollstonecraft had never known that daughter, nor did Paula Modersohn. The three-day infants blinked in the sunshine. The mothers turned their faces to the wall; and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

Tomorrow night the harvest moon will wane that's floodlighting the silhouetted wood. Make your own footnotes; it will do you good. Emeritae have nothing to explain. She wasn't very old, or really plain— my age exactly, volumes incomplete. "The life, the life, will it never be sweet?" She wrote it once; I quote it once again midlife at midnight when the moon is full and I can almost hear the warning bell offshore, sounding through starlight like a stain on waves that heaved over what she began and truncated a woman's chronicle, and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Marilyn Hacker was born in the Bronx on Thanksgiving Day, 1942. Her first book, Presentation Piece■, received the National Book Award in 1975, and was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Separations (1976), and Taking Notice (1980), whose title sequence was also published as a chapbook by Out & Out Books. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980-81, and an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship for 1984-85.

She lives in Manhattan with her daughter, Iva, and is the editor of the feminist literary magazine 13th Moon.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book was set on the Linotype in a type face known as Garamond. The design is based on letter forms originally created by Claude Garamond (c.1480-1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and may have patterned his letter forms on Venetian models. To this day, the type face that bears his name is one of the most attractive used in book composition, and the intervening years have caused it to lose little of its freshness or beauty.

Composed by Heritage Printers, Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina. Printed and bound by Halliday Lithographers, Hanover, Massachusetts.



	THE KNOPF POETRY SERIES i Robert Mazzocco, Trader 2 Cynthia Macdonald, (W)holes 3 Thomas Rabbitt, The Booth Interstate 4 Edward Hirsch, For the Sleepwalkers 5 Marie Ponsot, Admit Impediment 6 Brad Leithauser, Hundreds of Fireflies 7 Katha Pollitt, Antarctic Traveller 8 Nicholas Christopher, On Tour with Rita 9 Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher io Alan Williamson, Presence 11 Stephen Sandy, Riding to Greylock 12 Pamela White Hadas, Beside Herself 13 Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living 14 Peter Klappert, The Idiot Princess of the Last 15 Mary Jo Salter, Henry Pur cell in Japan 16 Norman Williams, The Unlovely Child 17 Marilyn Hacker, Assumptions



	Also by Marilyn Hacker PRESENTATION PIECE SEPARATIONS TAKING NOTICE



	I I

	miA 198S Potomac Library 10101 Glenolden Dr. Potomac, Md. 20854

	THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Copyright © 1985 by Marilyn Hacker All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. "Letters from the Alpes Maritimes," "Fourteen," and "Days of 1959" were originally published in Feminist Studies. "Two Young Women" first appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. "A Chaplet for Judith Landry" and "Gerda in the Eyrie" were first published in Poetry. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the editors of the following periodicals, in which other poems in this volume first appeared: Ambit, Bananas, Chelsea, Conditions, The London Magazine, The Missouri Review, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, No Apologies, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Sinister Wisdom, and Thirteenth Moon. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hacker, Marilyn Assumptions. (Knopf poetry series ; 17) I. Title. PS3558.A28A9 1985 811'. 54 84-48537 ISBN O-394-54229-O ISBN 0-394-72826-2 (pbk.) Manufactured in the United States of America FIRST EDITION



	CONTENTS

	LETTER FROM THE ALPES-MARITIMES I INHERITANCES 9 Towards Autumn 11 Two Young Women 13 Almost Aubade 14 Fourteen 15 Mother 16 Days of 1959 17 Fifteen to Eighteen 18 1973 19 Mother II 20 Autumn 1980 22 Part of a True Story 25 A Chaplet for Judith Landry 29 Sword 32 Inheritances 33 Joint Custody 35 OPEN WINDOWS 37 GRAFFITI FROM THE GARE SAINT-MANQUE 53 THE SNOW QUEEN 63 The Witch's Garden 65 What the Tame Crow Sang to Gerda 67 Gerda in the Eyrie 68



	The Robber Woman 73 The Little Robber Girl Considers the Wide World 76 Rune of the Finland Woman 78 The Little Robber Girl Gets On in the Wide World 80 The Little Robber Girl Considers Some Options 85

	BALLAD OF LADIES LOST AND FOUND	87



	LETTER FROM THE ALPES-MARITIMES l.M. James A. Wright

	Carissima Joannissima, ave, from a deceptively apolitical solitude. (Must I be auto-critical, having exchanged upper-Manhattan Soave for Cotes de Provence?) In this cottage with light on four sides I shared for a conjugal fortnight three years ago, I play the housewife-hermit, putter. I know the pots, the plates, the water-heater. My third midsummer in Vence whose suburban villas fructify the hills out the kitchen window, my perimeter marked by an ivy-cloaked oak. Out the French door, yellow exclamations of broom in scrub-wild haphazard descent down ancient rock-terraces to the ravine where a cold brook sings, loud as the nightingale's liquid vespers. When you go down the woods trail to the water, it's a surprise to find such small source for song. I watch the sky instead of television. Weather comes south over the mountains: that's news. Today the Col de Vence was crystalline. Blues stratospheric and Mediterranean in the direction 3



	a generation older than myself is sometimes like a letter for my daughter to read, when she can read: What your mother left undone, women who are not your mother may do. Women who are not your lover love you. (That's to myself, and my daughter.) We take coffee- and tea-pot, mugs, jam jars, bread inside, wash up. I've work, hours by myself. Beyond the kitchen, in her room, my friend writes, overlooking the same hills. Befriend yourself: I couldn't have known to tell my mother that, unless I'd learned it for myself. Until I do. Friendship is earned. A lover leaps into faith. Earthbound women share bread; make; do. Cherry compote would please my daughter. My daughter was born hero to her mother; found, like a lover, flawed; found, like a friend, faithful as bread I'd learn to make myself.

	I 2



	AUTUMN 1980 for Judith McDaniel

	I spent the night after my mother died in a farmhouse north of Saratoga Springs belonging to a thirty-nine-year-old professor with long, silvered wiry hair, a lively girl's flushed cheeks and gemstone eyes. I didn't know that she had died. Two big bitches and a varying heap of cats snoozed near a black wood stove on a rag rug, while, on the spring-shot couch we talked late over slow glasses of wine. In the spare room near Saratoga Springs was a high box bed. My mother died that morning, of heart failure, finally. Insulin shocks burned out her memory. On the bed, a blue early-century Texas Star, in a room white and blue as my flannel pajamas. I'd have worn the same, but smaller, ten years old at home. Home was the Bronx, on Eastburn Avenue, miles south of the hermetic not-quite-new block where they'd sent this morning's ambulance. Her nurse had telephoned. My coat was on, my book-stuffed bag already on my back. She said, "Your mother had another shock. We'll be taking her to the hospital." I asked if I should stay. She said, "It's all right." I named the upstate college where

	2 2



	PART OF A TRUE STORY for Margaret Delany

	"We dress up!"—Ntozake Shange My dear Mrs. Bloomer: The exigencies of my life demand rational costume. I noticed recently upon perusal of a number of your interesting journal, The Lily, that your radical bifurcate garment for gentlewomen is beyond suggestion; not to mince words, for sale. My people, Mrs. Bloomer, are as well, south of the District, and until the last and least of us no longer is chattel, this woman must be radical to be rational. A woman of color is gentle as yourself, until provoked. I have been, since the age of six. When I, aged twenty-some, returned to the scene of my truncated childhood, with the goal —which I achieved—of bringing forth my mother and my father from bondage, as I had my brothers, many of my sisters and brothers, I was obliged, for my safety and theirs, to come to them in male attire. (Does attire have gender?) I cannot pass as other than I am in one respect; 2 5



	nor would I wish to. It was curious passing that other way, where I had passed before: "This gal can haul as heavy a load as three men or a mule," et cetera. A black man is only marginally more anonymous on a Southern road than a black woman. Dare I confess, I liked that marginal anonymity? Crop-headed in a neutral suit of clothes, I sat, a stranger at my mother's table, bearing good news she could not bear to hear who bore me, till I bared myself as well, scarred as I was, to loving scrutiny. Later, I also bore the scrutiny of the spouse whom I had reluctantly left; who, free, had forbidden me to go to freedom. Newly wived, he did not know me at all, either as woman, or as myself. It's a peculiar thing: to pass easily, anonymously, from one life, or mode of life, to another: done with a forked suit? Night, starvation, a gun to scare stragglers to courage, sleep in snow or straw or not at all are what I know as passage-rites. I do what I can, but I do not wish to be thought a man again. Tonight, four hundred human souls, still embodied, disembondaged, lie wakeful

	26



	or sleep in this rough but hospitable hospice, this time, taken across water to free land. You know the name I am called. The straits do not. We cross them nonetheless. I have another name now: General; a task I had first as a nursling: Nurse. We intend to bring out four hundred more. I wish to be there. It is efficacious that I be there. I must be recognized though: black, female, and old, or nearly old. Still, I am of scant use immobilized. I wish to be relieved of the woolen gown whose waterlogged skirts and underskirts hold me so, as well as the Confederate Army would wish. I was nearly drowned. Thus, Mrs. Bloomer, my request. Disguise is not wished, or called for. Compromise, though unaccustomed, is appropriate on this occasion. So is the connection of our aims. I entertain reflection that, free and black, I am still disfranchised, female; a condition I first realized espoused: bondwoman and freedman, we embodied it. I transcend limitation. I am a black woman, whose education was late and little: necessity of adulthood vowed to emancipation of my people; the larger limitation imposed by childhood spent in servitude,

	27



	A CHAPLET FOR JUDITH LANDRY

	Dear Judith: In sincerest gratitude, here is the bread-and-butter gift requested. I wouldn't want our friendship to be tested because I didn't sit down and get at it. "Rude and slovenly, with a bad attitude," you'd say; although there might be worse things listed against me if my offering consisted of cliche justified by platitude. I'm writing to you from an estuarial island, where deer graze, pigs rampage, loons sing; land marsh-bottomed, oyster-bedded, territorial range of wild horses, freed pets' progeny. But still I close my eyes and think of England: where else could we dig into Kedgeree? Where else could we dig into Kedgeree with a prolific writer who'd just been presented, after sherry, to the Queen? (Next time they meet, she'll be a C.B.E.) Two raw colonials, my girl and me quivered respectfully, thrilled to the bone. That's why we put on everything we owned, although it was a sultry fifty-three indoors. To sit by the electric fire, stroking enchanting Rock-cake, gone quite flat (sign of advanced achievement in a cat),

	29



	and sip Frascati—I could not desire more! While our natterings didn't dislodge from the kittens! the kittens! enraptured Squodge. From the kittens! the kittens! enraptured Squodge could only be occasionally pried. (Say, if a Hamley's van pulled up outside, sent by the Queen, pour rendre ses hommages.) I'm sorry if we left a grubby hodgepodge of Lego, socks and tracts beside your easy-chair. We're sloppy, but we tried to be acceptably contained and sages. I liked the Oriental rugs beneath and upon the table where we ate, watching daffodils bloom in the teeth of London bluster beyond French windows. You liked loud Iva who resists repose. I liked tall Lurky who stays up too late. I liked tall Lurky who stays up too late, although I missed the threatened saxophone rehearsal. Living, equals, with your grown daughter, you enlighten me and my eight-year-old, who've witnessed pairs wasting with hateful wrangling, while we hug and spar our own infatuation. You were kind to loan me your featherbed. Under its weight,

	30



	SWORD for Toi Derricotte

	This golden vengeance is one of those red niggers like her grandfather who said of me, "Her people are just off the boat." He might have said, just off the cattle cars. Here she is three, bangs her construction boot against the van she's perched on. He is in lace, held by a darker nurse, sixty-six years earlier. Their twice-bright blade of face astonishes, doubled, between imp ears the same red-gold (his lock's glassed) curls around. When she was born he was long darkened; dead before he tried her honed red-gold, hybrid of six million dead off the cattle cars, just off the slave boats, fifteen million drowned.

	32



	INHERITANCES

	Iva asks me for stories of her father's family. I learned them second-hand —not even a Christian, and not black. I think of a reflective membrane: classes, mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery. The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman (she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather to shout, "Old man, you're free!" While slavery had slipped, a wristlet from the writing-hand of the bisque-beige girl enrolled in Classes for Young Ladies, in Paris, where her black mother was not. Ledgers were in the black; the permeated membrane not the man, else childless, who exercised three classes' prerogatives (landed, white, male) to father twice the child who, by his power in hand, was bred to, and released from, slavery. Iva asks, "Were your parents for slavery? Were they slaves? I know they weren't black." She puts her suntanned hand against my hand,

	3 3



	JOINT CUSTODY

	Houston was unregenerately damp —clouds scudded in, clouds scudded out with rain— and quintessentially American as neon reindeer in a trailer camp. Nobody else was a pedestrian on boulevards of monkey-puzzle trees. Conventual in lodgings, with no forced festival, we watched the landlady unwrap things her grown son passed to her knees. Like us, she was a teacher and divorced. There was a story: he, now tranquilized and nelly, stabbed her with a kitchen knife. Latterly, a boyfriend and nightlife helped. They both exhausted their surprised exclamations at a magnetized ceramic apple, a red calico apple, a crystal apple ornament, a box of apple-printed notecards, sent by kindergarten mothers. I had no proof of parental status for the Show and Tell, but missed my child so much it hurt —who held, swathed in yards of new organdy,

	3 5



	1

	This isn't about unrequited love although I'm warmed by your proximity. I don't yearn for you, wish you wanted me a different way. I want you to approve my life, my person: insecurity hamstrings me without reassuring strokes. Earned trust some careless clumsiness revokes, some fervid overstatement nullifies: that's happened. When I'm with you, something ties me to your mood, should not. You're not my child. I think of feeling absolutely free outside the Gare Routiere, in a blue-tiled cafe, alone in France, morning haze, mild light in my brown hands, cupping it like a prize.

	39



	3 for Sara Karig

	On the back of a letter in French applying for a place at a bilingual school for my daughter I put words that will not contain the slaughter of somebody's twenty-year-old. She is dying under a modern airport where the roar of takeoffs flattens screams and retching to blurred industrial noise around the torturer. Below the tiled floor is the dirt floor. A woman is living whose name I say like a charm because she acknowledged choice in the dulled eyes of somebody's son, who, needled to recognize a congruent soul in the law student or farm child he is reducing to an integer of shamed pain, would be stripped and killed with her.

	41



	4

	While deathdrunk superannuated boys tot up how often to blow up the world, a white-locked pink sage with a toddler voice recounts, purse clutched, how she was blued and curled. I overhear her on the crosstown bus I take at three to meet the second grade. She smiles a smile someone called dangerous once, and she boiled it down like marmalade. I'm sheared, hands free, with keys, jackknife and ten dollars deployed in worn corduroy pants. A matrifocal world would comprehend compassion, dignity and commonsense, I sneer, aware of my accoutrements as she is talking hairdos with her friend.

	42



	7

	"How come, here, you see so many black people working in other people's houses?" Does she notice, every other friend of ours is ambiguous two generations back? Like Bedouin for sand, or Eskimo for snow, mixed races swell the lexicon, peach-cream through copper to obsidian: preta, negrinho, mulata, moreno. Her cafe-au-lait father, olive mother made her rubia, gold on lion-gold like the naked sungilt three-year-old who, crouched near a bloat sewer, ferreted his hillside of the disinherited looking enough like her to be her brother.

	45



	9 for Eleanor Bender

	Out on the Dyckman Street platform because there's no one else to fetch the magazine mail from its distant post-box, something between bag-lady, mountaineer, and Santa Claus, I snort cold damp air, stamp to shift the weight of twenty dozen women's manuscripts. Twelve will, if merely literate, eclipse the dismal two-hundred-and-twenty-eight I'll read later—if the local arrives. This is part of the world's work, I guess: canceled subscriptions, invoices, housewives' painstakingly misspelled longhand cliches. (My cynicism is rebuked always.) "Please send" (no stamps) "feedback to this address."

	47



	12 for Nadja Tesich

	Arching in heat, tabbies from the Mairie wail contrapuntal to the Tramontane on a high wall under a chestnut tree. The named wind swept the twilight sky of rain-clouds and scoured fog from the valley-bowl. Above tiled roofs, schooled swallows bank and glide on her apron-strings. Women inside steep houses bar the shutters. On a knoll knotty with sage and bramble, above vine-rich fields, catching her breath, the seventy-year-old hiker tears a garlicked roll, re-caps her bottle and looks up the line of hills as intimate as family with whom she'll break more bread after nightfall.

	50



	13

	The afternoon ahead of us seemed long. I almost wished that it was dinnertime (whenever I'm horny, I first think I'm hungry) in prandial silence till, headstrong, I'd interrupt the respirating wine and, as I raised my glass, venture to raise my eyes to her unsentimental gaze. "—Let's see 'The Women Futurists'; that's fine." A billboard in the Avenue de Maine warned midnight as we wandered off the meal. The night ahead of us was almost over when, sweaty, she pulled me, sweaty, down to cover her white-flagged brown chest on much-washed chenille. She has a mother's coarsened breasts, like mine.

	5 i



	GRAFFITI FROM THE GARE SAINT-MANQUE for Zed Bee

	Outside the vineyard is a caravan of Germans taking pictures in the rain. The local cheese is Brillat-Savarin. The best white wine is Savigny-les-Beaune. We learn Burgundies while we have the chance and lie down under cabbage-rose wallpaper. It's too much wine and brandy, but I'll taper off later. Who is watering my plants? I may go home as wide as Gertrude Stein —another Jewish Lesbian in France. Around the sculptured Dukes of Burgundy, androgynous monastics, faces cowled, thrust bellies out in marble ecstasy like child swimmers having their pigtails toweled. Kids sang last night. A frieze of celebrants circles the tomb, though students are in school, while May rain drizzles on the beautiful headlines confirming Francois Mitterand's election. We have Reagan. Why not be another Jewish Lesbian in France? Aspiring Heads of State are literate here, have favorite poets, can explain the way structuralists obliterate a text. They read at night. They're still all men. Now poppy-studded meadows of Provence

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	It's hard to be almost invisible. You think you must be almost perfect too. When your community's not sizeable, it's often a community of two, and a dissent between communicants is a commuter pass to the abyss. Authorities who claim you don't exist would sometimes find you easy to convince. (It helps if you can talk about it to another Jewish Lesbian in France.) A decorated she-Academician opines we were thought up by horny males. No woman of equivalent position has yet taken the wind out of her sails. (How would her "lifelong companion" have thanked her?) Man loving Man's her subject, without mention if what they do is due to her invention —and if I'd been her mother, I'd have spanked her. (Perhaps in a suppressed draft Hadrians another Jewish Lesbian in France.) Then the advocates of Feminitude —with dashes as their only punctuation— explain that Reason is to be eschewed: In the Female Subconscious lies salvation. Suspiciously like Girlish Ignorance,

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	with me in the sun all day. Berries swell, blooms droop, bees hum. I can make myself at home. If I cross her, she will cry. She was lonelier than I was, impatient while emphatic April rain hammered the attic. She is happy now I've come. I can make myself at home. Hugs and kisses, featherbed blanket-stitched hard-candy red. Nightlong windy leaves unravel seams of roads I meant to travel. Dressing table, mirror, comb: I can make myself at home. Some accretive secret grows in the cave of what she knows, like a rotting leaf-heap I burn and scatter ash to scry where to go when I have gone. I can make myself at home.

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WHAT THE TAME CROW SANG TO GERDA for Judith de Karolyi

The Snow Queen had a daughter She calls them and ignores them They live in different countries Her icy courtship drove them	la la	or two but now out.

She names her selfish reasons Jeweled, she kept them dumb and hungry. Housekeepers, they can scry words scratched on In steamy bulwarks they survive her		Reason. Good food. season.

Old and spry, they both are almost Ringed with hot stones, terrified of Tears scalded her dream-ice from their Each smashed a glass, forgot a sister's		wise, waste. eyes. face.

They watch her frozen spires with yearning, With daughter-lust. Lost girl, you'll have your		burn turn.

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	we are the same kind. But we are not. Fear tethers me to the fire. I was raised afraid of strange men, sudden noises, groups of men in the square, isolate men on the road. Alone in the woods, I never was alone before. A drunk, a tinker, a bear that meant a man, somebody's runaway father or brother or son, would find me expendable landscape. I'm following a woman, now, alone. The trees are simply trees and let me look at them. What would a witch do to me, or a captious princess? What a man does to a man; nothing to make me cringe around the trees again. The witch knew something I should know, but I was in a hurry. Listen: worst of all was, all along, I didn't mind. I said I was the sinewy small girl with tucked-up skirts, who was the general, who made a boy eat dirt, who kept one doll dressed as a pirate. Well, I had six beribboned china ladies with real hair. I asked for a new one each year. I pricked flowers on cloth where someone else had drawn them, with my back to the sun. I like doing it, it made space in my mind smooth as cream. I used diminutives, collected miniatures. A tiny world

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	paws: "Nobody touch her, she's mine!" A girl said that—you did—about a girl —me. I guess you saved my life. Because a girl said it, the danger couldn't be real. That was what made me giggle. But it was. I thought of something I heard from the witch. You shut out images of what you fear: your pupils pinhole; dilate when you're shown what you desire. A picture of a gun dilates men's eyes. Women's shrink. (From a niche of crumbling mortar, you plucked your honed knife and showed it to me shyly, like a jewel saved for betrothal. Close to your curled hand in warm straw, now it glistens as it sleeps.) The image of a man—if women's eyes contract; if they widen, shown a woman; and men's do, too; would you have been surprised? That means some of us fear what we desire, and don't look at it with our entire vision. I don't think I'm afraid of you, though I should be, but I can't sleep, here. I don't want to get up. What do you fear? What do you want? Are they ever the same? I want you to wake up and talk to me. You're here, but you aren't really here. Your elbow's getting heavy, like a stone or a dead branch across my collarbone, except it smells like you. The tiniest shove, would you wake up? I know a game 7 i



	RUNE OF THE FINLAND WOMAN for Sara Karig

	"You are so wise," the reindeer said, "you can bind the winds of the world in a single strand." H. C. Andersen: The Snow Queen She could bind the world's winds in a single strand. She could find the world's words in a singing wind. She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand. She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind. She could wend the wild woods on a saddled hind. She could sound a well-spring with a rowan wand. She could bind the wolf's wounds in a swaddling-band. She could bind a banned book in a silken skin. She could spend a world war on invaded land. She could pound the dry roots to a kind of bread. She could feed a road gang on invented food. She could find the spare parts of the severed dead. She could find the stone limbs in a waste of sand. She could stand the pit cold with a withered lung. She could handle bad puns in the slang she learned. She could dandle foundlings in their mother tongue. She could plait a child's hair with a fishbone comb. She could tend a coal fire in the Arctic wind.

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