tuckova

then

Because I remember what it was
to wake with your arm over me
your breath in my hair
and know that we had fallen asleep
whispering secrets into each others' eyes

Because I remember what it meant
to climb the narrow stairs
fingers linked for balance
and not need to look at you to know
how your face looked or why

Because I remember how it felt
when you touched me,
a lick of electricity
and for once I didn't ask if you felt that
and we never talked about it with words

Because I remember these things
I don't need to see you again
or even know if they really happened.
But because I remember I wish.

cracking variations

Crack of dawn is when we get up and the clouds are still pink, which means sailors take warning; my grandparents had a thermometer in the hall that was supposed to predict all kinds of sailor's moods ("Its colors turn to pink you'll see for rain and high humidity"), and sailors aside I am  standing at the tram stop shivering for the coat I was right to leave behind because it will get hot later. Crack must have been smoked to make me leave the house this early; I am a morning person but a girl ought to know her limits. Which is four. In the a.m. A crack team was assembled to go on a mission, or not really so much a mission as just a regular trip to the cottage. Cracks are what we saw on the train, though there are so many ankle-length dresses everywhere, even at 5 in the morning with backpacks the Czech ladies go in style so there are these modesty dresses and also these low slung jeans, with more summer in the city cleavage than even I like to see so early in the day, and I feel old. When we get where we're going I sleep for five hours straight, or more like jagged, with moments of pulling up from the marshy water of dreams to crack my eyes open and wave faintly and then I was dragged back under. It's been a difficult week. Crack is the sound of the whip I put to my own back and said get up, do something, nobody likes you when you're lazy. Crack all ten knuckles and then chop some wood, carry some water, try to be less useless. Crack is what must be done to the code of language, of what did you mean when you said that, of when we discussed this for an hour last night what did you think we were talking about, of responsibility and neglect. Or not neglect but more like not caring. Or not not caring but like, momentarily being distracted by something else more important than anything I have to say. I'm not saying the birds aren't adorable, I'm saying... well, never mind. Cracked is what happened to the eggs and then yesterday the babies flew away. Cracked is the safe that was my heart. On the plus side, sometimes you crack me up. There's always a plus side, and you can get there by traveling carefully lightly watching your step. Between the cracks.

Women at Forty, a revision

MWomen at Forty

by Donald Justice

M Women at forty
Learn to close slam softly loudly
The doors to rooms they will not be 
Coming back to.

At rest on Tearing past a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,   
Though the swell is gentle A perfect storm is brewing.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy girl as she practices tying  learns to hold anger
His father’s tie there  As her mother held, in secret,

And the face of that father mother,
Still warm soft with the mystery of lather lipstick.
They are more fathers women than sons daughters themselves now. 
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets a dog's bark, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope   
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Portrait d'Une Femme by Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

Great minds have sought you- lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:

Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,

Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.

last time

"As you can see, the fin de siècle..."
Eventually I slip away from the tour group
and wander out into the castle courtyard.
The grounds have not been tended for years -
Ninety minus forty-five years, exactly.

I take out a cigarette, because I am learning
to be European. A plume of smoke says,
"I have never been so lonely,"
but in fact I was much lonelier, once,
on the tenth floor and I did not jump then.

My heart is harder now; burned to brittle.
I have a great deal less to lose.
From the balcony above me a girl is crying
and her mother's clenched voice scolds,
"Stop this instant or I'll give you something to cry about."

Lay Down

pillows of arms, breasts, legs
to comfort

feathers of wings, warmth
to escape

white of sound
to silence

screams hidden in a white feather pillow
to be muffled.

November on Her Way to Winter

-by Deborah (Gottlieb) Garrison

Here we go again,
up the narrow stair
of fall, and I'm full of nerve,

have to have you, I'm looking for you
everywhere.  It's true
I like men too much, and when

I see one in the street
I used to know -- starting to be
bald, in a raincoat eight years old,

worry a lit fish swimming across
his face -- I could nearly wrap myself
around him, I'm all too ready....

But I'm sorry! It was for you
I meant to do these things, for you
to unbutton my blouse without a care--

Not so difficult, now the sun is tart,
the river the very color of cold,
November on her way to winter.

(I like this poem so much, and I had it posted once before on the old site, but I think it's worth looking at again.)

war, battle, skirmish: This is why we fight.

Listen, that I was never one to understand it
is part of the reason I never supported
waved, cheered, yellow-ribboned
the boys back home. There was too much
desperation, too much last option taken without
other options considered. But look: show me
a world without ghettos, show me
women lined up for their first vote, show me
something better after and I can understand then that
this is why we fight.

I am easily distracted by terms and thus my hate
for words like survivor and victim. Meanwhile,
nothing smells right in this room,
old copper onion stale sweet rot
everyone's lost something and everyone wants more,
one more moment of joy; she passes
the photo of a newborn baby and everyone touches
and weeps and orders another round of chemo
and I understand it goes beyond the self and that
this is why we fight.

It is more than I can summarize in ten lines because
it starts with the idea of stories, but yours
never goes beyond you, never counts the idea
of more than one narrative, never considers
who suffers, who could be saved,
who should be saved for, except if "who" is you.
It is more than missed birthdays that send me
reeling in tears from the room.
I can't explain, though I do understand that
this is why we fight.

North

Cary Grant was so perfect but his hands
look like someone else's as they embrace
the woman, the saint.
Maybe they were Leach's hands,
so out of place,
trying to be anywhere and never
belonging where he wanted to be.

There was the man he was born
and the man he was born to play.
Caterpillar and butterfly,
the one awkward and hungry
and the other too perfect to touch.

You wanted to put it behind you,
your own caterpillar days.
Emerging into a world you invented,
a world you control,
a world that will finally love your
iridescent scales and beauty.

You are the person you created,
the person you knew they wanted.
I'll tell you: I'm likely the only one left
who knows you're the same person.
And sometimes I'm tired of knowing it.

Sooner or later you will be tired, too.
Pretending you were never a caterpillar is hard.
He said they married Cary Grant and
they went home with Archibald Leach.

I am sure it is nice
to be loved for who you want to be.
But oh Archie, I miss you.
Put your hands where they want to go.
We can do this in one take.

poem

Freshman year in high school, poetry class, and I was reading through the book, and the teacher asked me a question and though I could normally answer a question without even one ear half-cocked ("It concerns man's inhumanity to man" was always good), the poem I had just read had so torn me that I couldn't speak. If I opened my mouth, I would start crying and I would never stop. I knew it. So I just shook my head at her, poor teacher of poetry to freshman girls, ever so many hormones and so much angst, and she blinked at me and I put my head down on the desk, where it stayed for the rest of the class.

I've thought about that poem a lot in the last couple decades. I can't describe it to anybody without crying afresh, and that makes it hard to track down. Anyway, via the magic of the series of tubes, I did manage to find it finally. And it is as good as I remember.

This story has three morals:

1. If you have created something, it meant something to somebody even if you never hear about it. Whether you draw pride from breaking a high school student's heart in a freshman poetry class or whether you have higher ambitions doesn't matter. What matters is: it mattered.
2. If you keep looking, you will find it.
3. If you are at your desk when you read this, it is okay to put your head down and cry (If it doesn't make you cry, I don't want to hear about it, because you are talking to 14-year-old me and you will break my heart AGAIN).