(“Every true woman feels——”—Speech of almost any Congressman.)

I am old-fashioned, and I think it right
   That man should know, by Nature’s laws eternal,
The proper way to rule, to earn, to fight,
   And exercise those functions called paternal;
But even I a little bit rebel
At finding that he knows my job as well.

At least he’s always ready to expound it,
   Especially in legislative hall,
The joys, the cares, the halos that surround it,
   “How women feel”—he knows that best of all.
In fact his thesis is that no one can
Know what is womanly except a man.

I am old-fashioned, and I am content
   When he explains the world of art and science
And government—to him divinely sent—
   I drink it in with ladylike compliance.
But cannot listen—no, I’m only human—
While he instructs me how to be a woman.

(“Our laws have not yet reached the point of holding that property which is the result of the husband’s earnings and the wife’s savings becomes their joint property….In this most important of all partnerships there is no partnership property.”—Recent decision of the New York Supreme Court.)

Lady, share the praise I obtain
            Now and again;
Though I’m shy, it doesn’t matter,
I will tell you how they flatter:
Every compliment I’ll share
            Fair and square.

Lady, I my toil will divide
            At your side;
I outside the home, you within;
You shall wash and cook and spin,
I’ll provide the flax and food,
            If you’re good.

Partners, lady, we shall be,
            You and me,
Partners in the highest sense
Looking for no recompense,
For, the savings that we make,
            I shall take. 

With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley.

(“The result of taking second place to girls at school is that the boy feels a sense of inferiority that he is never afterward able to entirely shake off.”—Editorial in London Globe against co-education.)

There, little girl, don’t read,
You’re fond of your books, I know,
But Brother might mope
If he had no hope
Of getting ahead of you.
It’s dull for a boy who cannot lead.
There, little girl, don’t read.

    That in 1869 Miss Jex-Blake and four other women entered for a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh?
    That the president of the College of Physicians refused to give the women the prizes they had won?
    That the undergraduates insulted any professor who allowed women to compete for prizes?
    That the women were stoned in the streets, and finally excluded from the medical school?
    That in 1877 the British Medical Association declared women ineligible for membership?
    That in 1881 the International Medical Congress excluded women from all but its “social and ceremonial meetings”?
    That the Obstetrical Society refused to allow a woman’s name to appear on the title page of a pamphlet which she had written with her husband?
    That according to a recent dispatch from London, many hospitals, since the outbreak of hostilities, have asked women to become resident physicians, and public authorities are daily endeavoring to obtain women as assistant medical officers and as school doctors?

Men are very brave, you know,
That was settled long ago;
Ask, however, if you doubt it,
Any man you meet about it;
He will say, I think, like me,
Men are brave as they can be.

Women think they’re brave, you say?
Do they really? Well, they may,
But such biased attestation
Is not worth consideration,
For a legal judgment shelves
What they say about themselves.

(“I hate a woman who is not a mystery to herself, as well as to me.”—The Phoenix.)

If you want a receipt for that popular mystery
            Known to the world as a Woman of Charm,
Take all the conspicuous ladies of history,
            Mix them all up without doing them harm.
The beauty of Helen, the warmth of Cleopatra,
            Salome’s notorious skill in the dance,
The dusky allure of the belles of Sumatra
            The fashion and finish of ladies from France.
The youth of Susanna, beloved by an elder,
            The wit of a Chambers’ incomparable minx,
The conjugal views of the patient Griselda,
            The fire of Sappho, the calm of the Sphinx,
The eyes of La Vallière, the voice of Cordelia,
The musical gifts of the sainted Cecelia,
Trillby and Carmen and Ruth and Ophelia,
Madame de Staël and the matron Cornelia,
Iseult, Hypatia and naughty Nell Gwynn,
Una, Titania and Elinor Glyn.
            Take of these elements all that is fusible,
            Melt ‘em all down in a pipkin or crucible,
            Set ‘em to simmer and take off the scum,
            And a Woman of Charm is the residuum!
                        (Slightly adapted from W.S. Gilbert.)

(“My wife is against suffrage, and that settles me.”—Vice-President Marshall.)

I.

My wife dislikes the income tax,
   And so I cannot pay it;
She thinks that golf all interest lacks,
   So now I never play it;
She is opposed to tolls repeal
   (Though why I cannot say),
But woman’s duty is to feel,
   And man’s is to obey.

II.

I’m in a hard position for a perfect gentleman,
   I want to please the ladies, but I don’t see how I can,
My present wife’s a suffragist, and counts on my support,
   But my mother is an anti, of a rather biting sort;
One grandmother is on the fence, the other much opposed,
   And my sister lives in Oregon, she thinks the question’s closed;
Each one is counting on my vote to represent her view.
   Now what should you think proper for a gentleman to do?

Lovely Antiques, breathing in every line
The perfume of an age long passed away,
Wafting us back to 1829,
Museum pieces of a by-gone day,
You should not languish in the public press
Where modern thought might reach and do you harm,
And vulgar youth insult your hoariness,
Missing the flavor of your old world charm;
You should be locked, where rust cannot corrode
In some old rosewood cabinet, dimmed by age,
With silver-lustre, tortoise shell and Spode;
And all would cry, who read your yellowing page:
            “Yes, that’s the sort of thing that men believed
            Before the First Reform Bill was conceived!”

An Essay

A friend asks, "What was at stake for you in the Eighties?" She's trying to figure out Bay Area Poetry. There was Reagan's New Morning for America. Garfield dolls stuck to the backs of windshields with suction cups. At the beginning of the Eighties I was married & at the end i was not. The Civil Rights Movement became kind of quiet. Feminism became kind of quiet. An editor told a woman he couldn't read her poems because it said she was a mother in her bio. Many thought about word materials. Environmentalism got kind of quiet. The earth spirits were not quiet. Buildup of arms. Iran-Contra. Savings & Loan scandal. Tax cuts gave way to library closings. The Challenger went down with the first woman astronaut aboard. People read letters to her on TV. Mini-golf places with purple castles opened on Highway 80 in the Eighties. Chernobyl exploded & the media announced it as a setback for nuclear energy. People ate out more because of tax cuts. i fell in love with a poet. Earth dropped its dark clock. A few wrote outside the margins. Mergers & Acquisitions. The Bay continued to shrink. Many got child-support checks. Many came out. Deconstruction found the moving circle. A few read Lacan. Guns 'n Roses Sweet Child o' Mine. Our daughter drew pictures of trucks with colored fur. She had 24 ear infections in one year so why were you not supposed to write mother in your bio. Many wrote the lyric with word materials. The Soviet Union began to free prisoners. America freed fewer prisoners. Superconductivity. Gorbachev became president instead of something else. One son went to college. We cried. There was no e-mail. Art pierced the image. Blue-rimmed clouds hurried past outside & in. Some wrote about childhood; some wrote about states of mind; some wrote word materials instead of about. Symbolist poetry, by then 120 years old, pushed the dream nature of the world. Hypnotherapy. i began the trance method. In the Eighties, Mt. Tam stayed the same. Mt. Diablo stayed almost the same. Many species died & would not return. At stake. One son started a punk band; he had a one-foot-high purple Mohawk. i listened to the tape with another mother trying to make out the words. Oliver North held up his right hand. Reagan turned off his hearing aid. Sentences fell apart but they had always been a part. Yeltsin. Walesa. Wall comes down. Romania. El Salvador. Noriega. Some elderly folk lived on dog-food when their pensions collapsed. People worried about children, lovers, ex-husbands, jobs. Consciousness stayed alive. Interest rates leapt through the vault of the sky. We cried & cried. We made food & quit smoking. We learned the names of wildflowers & forgot them & relearned them. This was only the beginning. There's so much more to be said in answer to your question.

       “For what avail or plough, or sail,
        Or land, or life, if freedom fail?”

We have been sleeping—dreaming.    Now,
   Thank God! we are awake!
Awake, and ready with a will
   The nobler part to take!
No more shall a pretended Peace
   Our souls from duty several
We dedicate our lives to God
   And Liberty—forever!

We, who have looked with anguished eyes
   On things no eye should see,
Beholding all that may be wrought
   By ruthless Tyranny,
Join hands with you, devoted Lands
   A liberated Nation
That wills to share your sacrifice,
   That knows your exaltation!

A lofty voice has spoken words
   That bring the world relief;
Our Land has joined the league of Right,
   Led onward by her Chief—
Her Chief who large has writ his name
   With Lincoln’s in the story
Of that dear land which still may call
   The flag she loves, “Old Glory!”

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;—
He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As ’mid the virgin train she stayed,
Nor knew her beauty’s best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;—
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, ‘I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:’—
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;—
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Earth took of earth earth with ill;
Earth other earth gave earth with a will.
Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still:
Then earth in earth had of earth its fill.



Erthe Toc of Erthe

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh,
erthe other erthe to the earthe droh,
erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh,
tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

   Under the harvest moon, 
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker, 
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

   Under the summer roses 
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories, 
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

October's bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle's fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.

                —walking along a ridge of white sand—
                                                      it’s cooler below the surface—

                we stop and, gazing at an expanse
                             of dunes to the west,
                                         watch a yellow yolk of sun drop to the                                                        mountains—

                an hour earlier, we rolled down a dune,
                                                         white sand flecked your eyelids                                                                    and hair—

                a claret cup cactus blooms,
                                          and soaptree yuccas
                                                                      move as a dune moves—

                so many years later, on a coast, waves rolling to shore,
                                          wave after wave,

                I see how our lives have unfolded,
                                          a sheen of
                                                        wave after whitening wave—

                and we are stepping barefoot,
                              rolling down a dune, white flecks on our lips,

                on our eyelids: we are lying in a warm dune
                                                         as a full moon 
                                                                                  lifts against an                                                                                                  ocean of sky—

Without commas in her gaze,
the little girl dribbles colons with each breath
and swears an exclamation mark
is a lollipop:

“Is growing up for real or make-believe?”
Dot dot dot, I gasped.
A question mark is a fisherman’s hook.

I’d taken the bait of uncertainty, 
when she offered me as consolation,
wrapped in quotation marks, a single Smartie.

His priestly gestures, consecrating the broken eggs,
hands moving over the stove, slabs of meat

skittering in grease, drop biscuits big as a cat’s
head, threaded with cheese.

Him, making the fountain, making lantana, acanthus,
making bloom and ripple, song, making the birds.

My husband, the blue room, the bright room, best china,
best silver lifted from a box in the closet,

its red beds of best silver, put back later for later.
My husband who is not my husband who is still mine.

See him, crying in the Dublin airport—
he doesn’t want you to see. Can you see

the eucomis, its waxy leaves, its stalk blossoming
in the hot sun, pushing up among the marigolds?

Scars from this or that on shin or back, wrist or hand,
the way the garden loves him, the bees.

Him among the lilies, his hands lilies, his mouth
a twist of quince, his scent.

My husband among the lilies.

My husband, sauntering down the aisles. Him, sauntering
down the aisles at the flea market, dust settling

on everything, his small flashlight, his blue eyes,
his sound of geese, a train. Look,

something glitters and is gone. My husband, the gold
in the trees, falling, and him, a coverlet of mulch

across the beds, or asleep, the heat of him,
the hot water bottle of him, the cat purring at our feet.

My husband who is not my husband who is still mine.
The blue walls say so, the orchid deciding to bloom again.

Black snake’s a thick
cursive on the road,
sliding yardward.
Dad’s smoking in his chair,
says grab the shovel.
I do as I’m told,
chop its neck
against the gravel
as it flashes white
and bites the air.

Days before,
a grass snake like
a thin vine tendrilled
the shovel handle
on the porch,
green and slow.
The cat ignored it,
I let it go.

The psychotherapist has a sad dove 
dying in his eye. He looks at the light
like wood holding fire in it
reflected in small caves 
and tells me there is a window where love weeps
over what it cannot know. The dove's

trembling, flickering like a sun alone
in the dark nest of his face, and the psychotherapist 
is saying, there is nothing like losing your Self
for a Demon. We walk in to each other 
as into a museum, and our portraits gleam. This sounds
like he's saying our deaths are old, they
may not even belong to us. In the end, our meeting
is just the fantasy

we've been looking for all along. Yes,
Yes, I say, I've come here to burn for you 
all my illusions. Yes, I say, I can see
you for who you are like I can see
the mother huddling her chicks in the sea cliff
in your inkblot, before she pecks their eyes large 
as blood grapes and eats them 
alive, the storm 

clouds rupturing that purple 
slag of lightning. What I want is to hold you
like a bell holds space 
between the hours. What I want is to get back
one with the other, self 
with dove, desire with the storm

inside that destroys
absence like a murderous blood. What I want
is a therapy like a first love—merciless 
fascination—my eyes looking in 
like the crazed bells of silence
to startle the mortal 
coil. This 
romance of self

you can't escape, and you don't want to.

My mother said this to me
long before Beyoncé lifted the lyrics
from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

and what my mother meant by
Don’t stray was that she knew
all about it—the way it feels to need

someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live

because so many of mine
have not, and further, live on top of
those of ours who don’t.

I’ll say, say, say,
I’ll say, say, say,
What is the United States if not a clot

of clouds? If not spilled milk? Or blood?
If not the place we once were
in the millions? America is Maps—

Maps are ghosts: white and 
layered with people and places I see through.
My mother has always known best,

knew that I’d been begging for them,
to lay my face against their white
laps, to be held in something more

than the loud light of their projectors
of themselves they flicker—sepia
or blue—all over my body.

All this time,
I thought my mother said, Wait,
as in, Give them a little more time

to know your worth,
when really, she said, Weight,
meaning heft, preparing me

for the yoke of myself,
the beast of my country’s burdens,
which is less worse than

my country’s plow. Yes,
when my mother said,
They don’t love you like I love you,

she meant,
Natalie, that doesn’t mean
you aren’t good.

*The italicized words, with the exception of the final stanza, come from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Maps.”

I knew what I was about
stroking your lovely
neck in the perilously
brief
interval at the intersection of
desire, the real, and feminist
derring-do.

And if the intersection is three
or four points of variance,
divergence, diversion,
aversion, and hapless brief
interval
larger than the grid,
in dread of a walled corner,
a piano stool, a
contraband .38,
and that flip of an
eye eros,
oh, throat

I don’t do well with
expectation. Come up
here if it’s too cool a
story below with your
windows cracked.
Higher is warmer
in this last,
fast
phantasmic
interval.

The shine of many city streets
Confuses any countryman;
It flickers here and flashes there,
It goes as soon as it began,
It beckons many ways at once
For him to follow if he can.

Under the lamp a woman stands,
The lamps are shining equal well,
But in her eyes are other lights,
And lights plus other lights will tell:
He loves the brightness of that street
Which is the shining street to hell.

There’s light enough, and strong enough,
To lighten every pleasant park;
I’m sorry lights are held so cheap,
I’d rather there were not a spark
Than choose those shining ways for joy
And have them lead me into dark.

He feigned a fine indifference
To be so prodigal of light,
Knowing his piteous twisted things
Would lose the crooked marks of spite
When only moonbeams lit the dusk
And made his wicked world seem right.

But we forget so soon the shame,
Conceiving sweetness if we can,
Heaven the citadel itself
Illumined on the lunar plan;
And I the chief of sinners, I
The middlemost Victorian!

Now I shall ride the misty lake
With my own love, and speak so low
That not a fishy thing shall hear
The secrets passing to and fro
Amid the moonlight poetries.
O moonshine, how unman us so?

There are days I believe there ain' nothing to fear
I perk up for green lights, my engine on call
But it could be the zombies are already near

That sleep that we feed every day of the year
What's up with your friends when they circle the mall?
There are nights when I think I have no one to fear

My Mom watches Oprah to brighten the drear
You can keep your eyes open, see nothing at all
But it might be the zombies are already near

You think life is s'posed to be lived in this gear?
I been askin' that question till my brain has gone raw
Certain days I believed I had nothing to fear

I have dreams that I'm driving with no way to steer
You can growl like a cello; you can chat like a doll
Don't it seem like the zombies are already here?

I think fear itself is a whole lot to fear
I have watched CNN till it made my skin crawl
I might be a zombie that's already here

I been pounding this door but don' nobody hear
You can drink till you think that you're seven feet tall
There were midnights I danced without nothin' to fear

You can fly through your days until time is a smear
Maybe blaze up the bong   or blog out a blog

There'll be days when it feels like there's nothing to fear
But you could be a zombie    that's already here.