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POETRY By: Sandra M. Gilbert,
Rose Romano, Kathy Freeperson, Jennifer Lagier, Phyllis Capello, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Kathleen Ossip, Daniela Gioseffi, and Tina De Rosa Uncle barney Half a
century in the madhouse: how did the
seasons go? You were a
boy when they put you there— “brilliant”
and frantic. You
“thought” you were “a girl,” my mother said. She was
fifteen. Sicilian. Had to
interpret your craziness for American
doctors. Brooklyn
lowered its gray stone guts over your
head. You got on
the subway. City College
would help. And Virgil. Uncle Joe
the pharmacist chanted Virgil. You were
nineteen. The windows quivered. Flashing
membranes. What was on
the other side? “He put his
fist through the pane,” my mother said. She wanted
to think you were dead. Outside the
high glass of the Long Island sick house leaves fell
and swelled and fell. Crumbling
orange, popping green. Colors
bursting over and over like glass
slowly shattering, then faster,
faster. Probably the
television was on for the last
quarter of a century. You started
with Ozzie and Harriet. Then Star Trek. Spock. Leaves
flamed and bubbled. Archaic
shades of Palermo, where you were four when Uncle
Joe made his fevered speech and the
family had to flee. White
corridors unwound. Your
adolescent notebooks were gone. You loved a
nurse named—what?— who
sometimes helped you pee. Your
bathrobe fell open. Your knees
ached. The screen
glimmered like a window. Wars and
soap operas. Jello. When I was
fifteen my mother told me about you. In decorous
Queens, I read your college notebooks. The El still
rampaged past the Williamsburg brownstone from which
they took you, shattering
windows, dusting tomato plants. Now I think: “There’s no
elegy for you, your
language, your madness.” A quarter of
a century ago I was
watching I Love Lucy amid the
bricks and windows of Queens. I hope you
loved Lucy too. I hope you
chatted in Sicilian with Sulu. I hope when
your bathrobe opened some fierce
bird of Palermo now and then
rose from the folds of your body and spoke
Latin phrases I will never know. letter to
yue an Slit
straight across the top, your
empty envelope appeared
in my mailbox three days ago, and
after a minute of rage at the US PO my
blood, as the saying goes, ran cold: Tienanmin
Square, censors, informers— all
I know of your return address, PRC,
boldly spelled out in English characters, seemed
to speak of doom. My
friend the retired foreign correspondent thought
so too: the slit, the
emptiness, he
shook his head, sardonic, grim. But
here are your poems, tossed naked
into the mailbag, lost and
found again, along with your mild courteous
letter: “what
has made me delightful is
that all the courses taught by you suit
me perfectly.” You’re
somewhere in Xinjiang, China, in
the Foreign Languages Teaching Office, and
it’s April 6, 1990, as you write in
a neat clear hand: “I
am very pleased to know you from
my friend Han Bin who
is now studying in the Davis campus, University
of California. . . .” You
send poems called “Homestead,” “The
Myth of the Final Century,” and
“Don’t Save me.” You
tell me you’ve read Frost and Williams, Ginsberg,
Plath and Wright. I
want to reply that once I studied Li
Po, that I know how to dream dramas
of the Silk Road, of Lao-Tzu
and of the sacred monkeys. But
I really don’t, and anyway now your
quotidian is mine. You
say so yourself in a single stanza: “Getting
up in the morning you
won’t feel unfamiliar with
dressing, bed-making, brushing washing
and combing. . . .” Does
this mean that, as Auden once declared, poetry
makes nothing happen so
the censors let your letter through? I
won’t believe that and
I don’t think you do either. Please
write again soon and let me know what
this month has been like in Xinjiang, where
your rooms are and how many students
you teach at the Engineering Institute. In
one line you call yourself “Yue
An, an extremely weary guy.” Perhaps
that’s why your poems “suit
me perfectly.” I
won’t save you, if you don’t save me. And
I want to agree that the “final century” is
just a myth. the dolls hid
in the toy box, stuffed
with the mysterious kapok that
she said was making me sick: Heidi,
round-faced, kinky haired; Clara,
her giant ragged friend; daddy’s
Genovese sailor lad; and
those odd pals, the bride and
Carmen Miranda and
the black-masked carnival panda. . . . All
banished to the foyer closet, secreted
with lock and key from
friends and “crooks” and me! “A
rag and a clothespin,” she said, “should
be enough for any kid.” And
she should know, she added, mother
and teacher for all those years! The
blue walls of the bedroom shed no tears, the
rabbit knitted into the tattered rug was silent the
way the little girl was silent when she went into
the witch’s house and
understood she was as tiny as a mouse and
the witch knew exactly what to do with
the heavy key to the oven and the torn-up bodies
meant for the Sunday stew. The
little girl was silent and sad and sorry that
the dolls were going so far away, and
only the dolls refused to worry because
they were sure how they meant to live in the closet, they
knew they’d never forget the
glittering Alps that had long ago glazed their button eyes, the
oranges that winked on magic islands, the
swaggering Mediterranean on which they once had gazed, the
midnight bedroom’s gates of ivory and horn, and
O yes, the door inside the blue wall, the secret door that
might at any minute open onto
the terrible tundra where
their fur was born. Native
Language Conversation: Intermediate
I I tried to explain I can’t speak the language without a dictionary so many times I said sì because I didn’t know how to say no I tried to explain I can write with a dictionary so many times I said nothing because I didn’t know how to say anything else ho cercato di spiegare everyday I worked on my explanation in my kitchen alone with my dictionary polishing perfecting practicing l’americana è una poetessa scrive scrive sempre scrive scrivendo una spiegazione breve that I could say a poco a poco I perfected my explanation un po’ più raffinata everyday I practiced saying it writing it rewriting it I was ossessionata with the need to say
this dopo un po’ I had become an expert in talking about not being able to talk ho cercato di spiegare non posso parlare without a dictionary ero divenuta un’esperta nel parlare del non potere parlare and I couldn’t say qualcos’ altro e meglio riuscivo a spiegare meno ero convincente c’è un inferno più adatto? A Little
Spaghetti You’d think a kitchen sink in Italy would have a drain that can take a little spaghetti. When I was thirteen years old back in Brooklyn and I had to buy kotex I’d write it on a slip of paper and hand it, folded, to the old man behind the counter at the corner drugstore, who would open it up and yell, “Kotex? You want a box of kotex? What size kotex would you like? You want the big box of kotex or the small box of kotex?” And I would hide my face and think real hard at the other customers: They’re for my mother. They’re for my mother. So I write on a slip of paper l’idraulico liquido just in case I forget between now and when I get to the super- market, where I can get it myself off the shelf, unless it turns out they don’t sell it there and I have to buy it in a place where I’ll have to ask for it and I don’t speak Italian too well. But they’ve got it at the supermarket and, as long as I’m here, I guess I’ll get some coffee, three new shapes of pasta, a bag of something Italians probably think is cheese doodles, a couple of cans of ceci soup, and a box of tampax. One of the first things you notice here in Alcamo, a small town in Sicily, is that all women between the ages of 40 and 75 have short auburn hair. So here I am with my 43-year-old face and my 76-year-old hair. The man at the register runs my stuff over the scanner. Coffee and he pushes it to the end of the counter. Pasta, pasta, pasta and he pushes them to the end of the counter. Cheese things to the end of the counter. Ceci soup, ceci soup to the end of the counter. Tampax and he looks up at my long gray hair, back at my tampax, up at my long gray hair, shrugs, and runs my tampax over the scanner. And I’m standing there thinking: How do you say in Italian— They’re for my daughter. They’re for my daughter. I know I’m getting old. I figure I’ve got
maybe half a dozen eggs left. I’m pausing as fast as I can. And when I get home, I take out my dictionary and my grammar, and I write the following on a little slip of paper. Quando ero bambina, indovinavo l’età delle persone da come parlavano l’italiano. Le persone che parlavano molto bene l’italiano erano le più anziane e avevano i capelli più grigi. I don’t know what that means but I think it might mean something to people with a christopher columbus sense of direction. And that guy at the drugstore in Brooklyn is probably dead by now. ODE TO
GARLIC Garlic rolls at Leonardo’s restaurant like doughboy buttocks it sweats the chunky plant of miracles that swears and curses under its breath the surge of chopped topped food used in the wars when antiseptic ran out garlic tastes strong in swimming lessons in melted butter as chunkfuls come over like a friendly neighbor and cleans your blood for you lowers your blood pressure witches who were healers buried it under
the four corners of the dwelling to protect
you while using herbal medicine one clove peeled very carefully and put
inside cures infections bad gall bladders don’t like it otherwise it hangs out in the kitchen in gangs wearing white crinkle coats all holding on to the same rope until cloves separate and one sneaks out, checks out, before paying the hotel bill the knife falls, the garlic presses Oh Garlic, Oh Garlic the sneaky thief of fresh breath, in the
sneaky pool cleaner’s outfit sweeping toxins out of the streams inside
veins. PARMESIAN
MEMORIES (or trying to be italian in the south) I went low on Parmesian memories yellow sheets wrinkling the bed fresh on my shoulders with small teethy bites as if eating pizza Chicago style deep dish pan love one remembers, sees dried after the tomatoes were canned and harvested from plump fatful work of the sweet-smelling, bowing vines sucking out seeds juice stuffing sausage seasoned casings the sauce bubbles like a low street rumble For no good reason you left me. An Italian deserted before dessert is unheard of. On a small moto guizze a man who does not barter not batter but does like men better but not because he thinks them better grew up with Italians he said thin legs where once he held an Italian who thought she was a princess but was not spoiled intelligent composed of the same name his and hers doing calm sweet yawns like a cat stretches and struts nine stitches from crashes on a motorcycle life moves too fast for the Italian sometimes. NATIVE TONGUE in knowing what bracchioll tastes like but not being able to speak Italian I sigh the native tongue died in recipes with gramma and ma and
grandpa making ravioli with a pasta machine no one cares in inculturating into America the melting pot made me hot all my culture sizzled away into steam Now I am a white people’s dream. A Matter of
Conscience for Maria Corralejo First I see the women cannery workers on strike whose only bargaining tools consisted of eight days of prayer and self-imposed hunger. Today, Sureño gang members carrying management-provided weapons patrol the concertina wire corridors between busloads of scabs and picket-line labor. My friend, the tenth child of immigrant field hands, describes 400 women and children falling to their knees, dragging themselves slowly in protest toward a church down the Watsonville highway. Sometimes, she tells me, there is nothing left to place between greed and the poor except our own bodies. Guest of
Honor Over seventy and curious about my mother and her laughing sister, Roseanne, he travels from Lake Como, across an ocean and half a continent to revisit the California P.O.W. camp where he lived behind wire and obeyed armed American guards. On weekends, my grandmother signed them out to milk cows, prune her fruit trees, work in the
vineyards, young Italians captured in Africa who spoke her dialect, came from her village. Fifty years past the fact of their youthful adventures, he tells of Uncle Jimmie slicing through the fence with his strong wire cutters, late nights drinking wine, dancing with Stockton farmers’ hot Sicilian daughters. At the cemetery, he genuflects and says a prayer before Nona’s
headstone, remembers the woman who spoke broken
English and braved small town persecution to support the prisoners of war who could have been brothers. Above Lake
Maggiore Here acreage is so precious it is sold by the inch. My ancestors’ bones are dug from their beds to make room for new homes on expensive Swiss soil. The family comes to read headstones but finds skeletons bundled like kindling within a stone cottage. Grey skulls with empty eye holes shells of dead relatives peer back through steel bars at the children of their children’s expatriate children who stand above Lake Maggiore staring into open rock windows. Blue glaciers roll from hard skies down Alpine valleys to quiet cobblestones, the silver spread of high altitude lakes. My grandfather’s name is carved upon the rugged wooden door where our bloodline began and distant cousins remain, in a house four centuries old with mountain slate for a roof, ancient walls a foot thick. CARELESS
LOVE HOW WOMEN
GET TO HELL With some it is circumstantial; familiar terrain reconfigures, one misstep, and lives disassemble; illness manifests, husbands vanish, children spin wildly off into darkness. The certainty of loss is bitter on their tongues as they descend. Others march there, fancied up, lusty enough to kiss the devil; the gate swings open; destiny turns the key. Some marry the devil, spend lifetimes exchanging immense effort for small affection, terrified silence for perilous calm. They enter meekly, bereft of thought, empty of notions. But the young ones, because they are blind, or blithe or beautiful, seem to find the path no matter which way they turn; that slippery, golden path, which takes them, smiling and unsuspecting, to the brink; where they stand, pretty toes pointing down, ready for the push. DEMETER’S
UNDOING Persephone
was abducted, taken from the
light, but some daughters go
willingly; renaming the darkness love, they
step down. He bought her with trinkets, an ounce or
two of affection; her heart fluttered; she
did not recognize the serpent’s twist in his
smile. The night he told her disobedient girls were buried in the mountains she dreamed
their bones glowed in the dark earth like weak lanterns,
that their peasant fathers cried out to the
Madonna and crossed themselves as they floated
by. So when the devil bent to unlace her
shoes, she did not object, and went two days
barefoot. The morning he returned, parcel of new
clothes in one hand, vanished shoes in the other, she put aside her dreams and lay with
him. Shivering, she rose to dress; this time he bent to lace her shoes. They drove through the village; the
mothers hurried their daughters away; everyone
knew: he was the wicked prince in the golden
coach, she, his expendable princess. Quick as gold spun from straw, heroin
hidden in shoes, has made him rich; but when
this senorita arrives (the airport dogs run, sniffing and yelping, at her heels) she
yields to the customs’ search. In the old story domination is a metaphor for passion. The long, narrow windows of the county
jail shimmer at night; cell by cell, each woman recalls her passage: the
politics of arousal, the consequence of
persuasion, the sad, seductive, foreplay of
submission. WORKING GIRL She stopped painting when age and illness shrank her world to seasons glimpsed through dirty panes. Propped on pillows, long legs crossed at slim ankles, she addressed visitors in an accent cultivated from the movies, her ringed hands punctuating the air like a queen’s. Slowly, in an offhand way, her story unraveled: unmarried, she’d borne a son, a tow-haired boy, blue-eyed, his face suffused with light. Among odd treasures (shells and chicken bones and little tins of buttons) we
found the photos of this hidden life; it was his drunken father drove the car that spiraled off the road that rainy
night. In her thirties, the world went to war; she became a draftsman; in a photo, posed at her desk, pen aloft, her sad
eyes are turned away from the lens. Unschooled, but brilliant, she bent to the task, outworked every man; of course, they paid her less. At night she woke to paint her demons: vibrant as stained glass she caught them writhing up from hell, screaming mouths, twisted forms, bug-eyed and taloned All her days she lived a life surrounded: hung, floor to ceiling, spilling from innumerable piles, devils danced before her eyes, filled up all her drawers, mocked her with their lies. The day before she died, she told the nurse of a son, how he was three years old and somehow left alone. After work today I’ll go uptown, fetch her ashes from the budget mortuary. Won’t we be a pair? She, dying in obscurity, work never shown, I , with my notebooks of scribbled poems, two working girls, taking the subway home. WOMAN IN THE
DARK I dream the waters beneath the earth rise up, that the rooms are flooded. Waves lap against the dresser legs, shoes swirl around in the current. A river splashes down the stairs to the entryway, where we come and go from our various days. But what stirs me is not the water’s
sound, it is these tears that wet my hands and sink my heart that wake me: half-dead of thirst, half-drowned. PERSEPHONE’S
MOUTH for L. Even in hell Persephone was a poet, could sense the strong tug of the world, the moon’s passage, the furious hoofbeats
of her mother’s passion; she’d been
instructed in the frailty of innocence, knew that beasts were ever-prowling, still, she went flower-gathering. He plucked her; she struggled, cried out to her companions; they tumbled down. Pounding her essence with his male self, commanding her to yield the world, he put his whirling darkness in her. When it was over she had to rethink herself, learn the unfamiliar mysteries of
darkness, invent the secret language of the self, envision the spinning dance of stars. To become the brute’s victor, she’d outsmart him; if he must try to reduce her, she would enlarge, wrench herself open, let the whole world rush in. I Dream of
my Grandmother and Great
Grandmother I
imagine them walking down rocky paths toward
me, strong Italian women returning at
dusk from fields where they worked all day on
farms built like steps up the sides of
steep mountains, graceful women carrying water in
terra-cotta jugs on their heads. What
I know of these women, whom I never met, I
know from my mother, a few pictures of
my grandmother, standing at the doorway of
the fieldstone house in Santo Mauro, the
stories my mother told of them, but
I know them most of all from watching my
mother, her strong arms lifting sheets out
of the cold water in the wringer washer, or
from the way she stepped back, wiping
her hands on her homemade floursack apron, and
admired her jars of canned peaches that
glowed like amber in the dim cellar light. I
see those women in my mother as
she worked, grinning and happy, in
her garden that spilled its bounty into her arms. She
gave away baskets of peppers, lettuce,
eggplant, gave away bowls of pasta, meatballs,
zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread. “It
was a miracle,” she said. “The
more I gave away, the more I had to give.” Now
I see her in my daughter, that
same unending energy, that
quick mind, that
hand, open and extended to the world. When
I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter, watch
her turn, laughing, I
remember my mother as she lay dying, how
she said of my daughter, “that Jennifer, she’s
all the treasure you’ll ever need.” I
turn now, as my daughter turns, and
see my mother walking toward us down
crooked mountain paths, behind
her, all those women dressed
in black. Aunt Mame There
were already two other Marys, so she became Mame. The
family never took my father’s brother’s wife seriously. They
ignored her Shirley Booth babble, changed her name, smirked
at her specious orange pincurls and cotton/poly housedresses.
Only her bulk insisted on her presence. She was the kind of woman who could live
in a duplex downstairs from
her Neapolitan mother-in-law and never bitch. Visits to
Mame’s “flat” (she introduced me to
the word) were rare and
hoped for: pink plush carpet, mirrors
with gold driblets, bunches
of rubber grapes, K-Mart Venice in baroque frames,
cut-glass bowls of M & M’s and Cheez-its! She’d
serve nothing but Royal Crown cola; died years ago, survived
by a daughter (amateur calligrapher and beautician) and
her husband, with the suave little mustache, a garbageman. Sabine They did not commit this rape wantonly, but with a design
purely of forming alliance with their neighbors by the greatest and surest
bonds.—Plutarch Wake up, my friends said. Those who sleep here die. But I was dreaming. A man in gold epaulets, hair the color of baked clay. I molded every adorable feature on tiptoe, blue eyes, strong hands, lips unmoving or moving only to kiss me. I dreamed so hard I must have conjured him. When I woke he was there. His fine lips opened. My father buys me whores at
home. You I'll take for
nothing. . . . They were right. It is dangerous, a woman’s languor, when men dream of populations. So I try to conjure a face for her to wear. In this white
ward, faceless men have seized my sleep, they minister to me waving needles and fetishes. Days, I toy with names. I toy with vigilance, too late. I count in months. The pile of shirts and booties grows
tall. I will guard her crossed eyes and clawed hands with
all I have. EMERGENCY
CAESAREAN I walk on sand, sink deep into fire. Sharp knives cut the walls of my stomach crack open as glass. My moans are red jelly, a mass of shining splinters pokes out through my belly, you are born! You are not twins! You cry and are lifted high dangling red string. Numb lungs, living nerves, this amazing absence of air! I vomit gingerale into my just washed hair. Silver elves in chromium light poke with needles, bunch intestines back, sew flesh seams. Your screams are stitches taken in me. They shatter my glass belly again; more glass spinters fly up. No warning, no Ladies Home Journal story, just sudden blood and you are there and you are screaming into my matted hair. Therese The high white halls of silence, the sheer falls of light, with You at its center: Delicate. Perfect. The rose. I see You like the eyes of a deer, Your extremely thin face under its crown. So faint You are, and strong, Your head inclined towards the ground as though You smelled holiness. Your legs so stilled, ready in a moment to flee or stay. It is Your eyes I know best, their braced clarity. What is it You are listening for? I see You turn a corner, down the hall, far from me, lost like a simple shadow among my
sisters. They tell their beads in their hands. You slip in and out: the simplest light. Brief. Pure. Quick. I move through the pantry, putting this white bowl next to that, and
there You are placing Your hand over mine. My palm
bleeds. What is this hurried taste in my mouth
when I receive You? Time? Loneliness? Sudden endings. Mary of
Magdala The brightness of this light sears my eyes where I lie with my mouth in the ground, tasting death, tasting the dirt of Israel, waiting for my blood to spill and change
the ground. I know if I listened well enough, I could distinguish the words of the men who are about to kill me, I might even judge the weight of the stones in their hands. But I would rather taste the dirt and know that I have known Israel, know that I can say: This is Israel, as they lift their white stones against me. What is flesh that I will so quickly bleed? Tear me, and I break open. I offer no resistance. They caught me. Now only I am to be held accountable. Only I will bleed into the ground. They say nothing of Suzannah, of her beauty, of her fate. They have forgotten so easily her privacy brutally sundered. Her bath. The pure waters where they watched her as they watch me. None of that is mentioned. They say nothing of Tara or of Absalom, nothing of the mind of David splintering into anguish. I am here my face to the ground the hands of the man who caught me are wrapped around my neck like a cowl. Then I hear someone ask a question. 3 March 1996 For Miriam ah they call me a poet but do they know these drops of blood on paper that I call words? who knows the famous writer, this real lady, alone in her holy room with her crystal rosaries? and oh your face not here the quickness the fire the absolute singularity the light in your eyes I breathed once then gone. so without exception. exactly how good are you where you are not here in any of these
rooms? and oh, what shall I name you? loss or grief or something never known won’t do I can not say abandoned or refused misunderstood perhaps. I remove the lace gloves from my hands and the ring and the mirror and the child I will call her Miriam. I will always call her Miriam My hat walks down the street alone and I am under it. 12 April 1996 Jerome With my head bent like an old cow’s I consider these
skulls of words these tricky
balances. I move them like dice or like dominoes. I set them one
against the other. I run my hands along
the walls. Here. A membrane. I breathe. Angels spill like
grapeseeds into my cup. I drink, I write. |