In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping

shower steam kept us invisible,

but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.

Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.

Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts

in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged

her ruler, and we printed the same confession

a hundred times, her shadow crossing

our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old

spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped

locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.

Heather gave birth so often she forgot,

she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost

in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye

in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.

Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,

how we strolled, arms linked, singing,

into the world of women where all deaths begin.

I’m sorry we missed each other, but that’s the story

two poets write. Your taxi screeched away

as I arrived, your numbered door swung open

to an empty room. I questioned the hotel clerk.

He gave me your envelope,

the box with the single pearl,

strung now with the rest, your gifts,

my abacus of love and hate.

I sat in the hotel bar placing each stone

with its occasion, my birthdays, your infidelities,

the boat trip to Japan where we bought

the Utamaro print that hung above the bed.

A woman diver perched on a slimy rock,

black rope of hair, knife in her teeth.

She’d been down deep, and you admired her.

Thank God for the bankrupt drunk with the gold

   American Express. He bought my gin.

He understood my thoughts, punched the saddest

   numbers on the jukebox.

His divorce will join the myths

   in my best Iliad.

And bless the maintenance man, that holy ghost,

   a blue-eyed vet who mops

the four corners of my world, a ring of keys

   that can open any door

singing from his belt. I feel locked up.

   I’m some rigmarole

they hired cheap. I know fine art, the alphabet.

   I don’t know why the screws

tighten in our lives, or how to move a single

    inch beyond myself.

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

When Quiet Woman comes,

she fills my ears

with morning glories.

Morning glories

grow out my ears –

big blue trumpets

in those soft canals.

My hearing is better

than a geezer’s,

but the dog howls

when the telephone rings.

I do not answer

with a flower in my ear.

I hear only wind

and the scuttle of trinkets

she tosses my way:

garters, crosses, scars,

glimmers and brass.

This little line got tongue-tied.

This little line is dumb.

This little line is cockeyed.

This… miracle! A blossom in the stream –

gibble gabble jaw jabber a priori blossom.

Weird how the word works.

BLOSSOM. Brainstem, blowsy,

two syllables, two lips oratorical.

Say Bloss some. Blah, blah, sum.

The blossom drums da Dum within the seed.

Hush, petal ear. Hear the earth’s ambition

creak – orchard to orchard.

Nova, Nova. It is a blooming universe.

Here is a line that opens like a starfish,

like a starfish eating sea blossoms,

embracing the blossoms and slowly,

deliciously, building the body of the world.

The street deserted. Nobody,

only you and one last

dirt colored robin,

fastened to its branch

against the wind. It seems

you have arrived

late, the city unfamiliar,

the address lost.

And you made such a serious effort –

pondered the obstacles deeply,

tried to be your own critic.

Yet no one came to listen.

Maybe they came, and then left.

After you traveled so far,

just to be there.

It was a failure, that is what they will say.

Drowsy with the rain

and late October sun, remember,

we stopped to read the names.

A mile across the valley

a little cloud of sheep

disappeared over a hill,

a little crowd of sleep--…

time to take a pill

and wake up,

and drive through the night.

Once I spoke your name,

but you slept on and on.

I make my way down the back stairs

in the dark. I know

it sounds crude to admit it,

but I like to piss in the back yard.

You can be alone for a minute

and look up at the stars,

and when you return

everyone is there.

You get drunker, and listen to records.

Everyone agrees.

The dead singers have the best voices.

At four o’clock in the morning

the dead singers have the best voices.

And I can hear them now,

as I climb the stairs

in the dark I know.

Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for

And flew out of the stream

It was not dreaming

It had no ambition but confusion

In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun

and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl

when it’s broiled

The Titanic is the one that got away.

Here’s a reason to mourn: letting the best man get

away, marrying a lesser, non-superlative groom. It

happens at every wedding. Mistakes

are any nation’s chief product. Apology

travels incognito, in the form of toothbrush, in

the form of maid, doing my dirty work for me, keeping

my hands clean, business as usual, elbows off the

table, grace before the meal in which teeth

could be innocent bystanders were they not gladiators.

All that I don’t doubt is the nature of a thing.

Should be a headline but it’s not

newsworthy, more ordinary than anchovies

gossipping olfactions of fishy scandal.

The Lady of the Harbor, Fatima rip-off

except she came first with a crown like

the one of thorns on another whose cause is

masses. Avant-garde refugee from 50’s horror

flick Attack of the 50-foot Woman, here turned

to stone fleeing Gomorrah, Gotham, some G (god-

damned) place. There she is, Miss America, your

ideal; there must be a mistake, Miss Liberty

should have won. Why was there a contest? And

what about that talent? Professional model, posed,

picture perfect. Mannequin displayed where the world

window shops. In case of emergency, break glass.

She lost her fire. Holds an ice-cream cone.

Maybe she’ll court Prometheus, this green old

paradoxical maid in Spinster Army uniform.

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question “Are women human?” with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it’s certainly not about trading personal liberty – abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression—for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It’s about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience. It’s about women consulting their own well-being and being judged as individuals rather than as members of a class with one personality, one social function, one road to happiness. It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, “the family,” men.

We should not be surprised that motherhood does not produce uniform beliefs and behaviors: It is, after all, not a job; it has no standard of admission, and almost nobody gets fired. Motherhood is open to any woman who can have a baby or adopt one. Not to be a mother is a decision; becoming one requires merely that a woman accede, perhaps only for as long as it takes to get pregnant, to thousands of years of cumulative social pressure. After that, she’s on her own; she can soothe her child’s nightmares or let him cry in the dark. Nothing intrinsic to child-raising will tell her what is the better choice for her child…

I had two longish talks with Ramon, punctuated by his calling out “Abortion is murder!” every few minutes as another woman brushed past him on her way into the building. They were not very satisfying conversations. For one thing, Ramon is evasive about facts: his last name, for instance, and his nationality. When I asked him if he had voted in the last election, he told me he was not a U.S. citizen but would not tell me which country he was from, except that it was in Latin America, and he pulled out a plastic rosary. “The Blessed Mother sent me here.” What did his parents think of what he was doing? “The Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ are my parents.”

There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

The worms are

working their way to his heart.

Every day there are more of them

inside him. They enter

his white arms and leave

their red tracks.

Their red tracks

scorch me when I go to hug him

and a black mouth ruptures

on my forehead. It

will not stop laughing.

I cannot find my hat.

Worms. Mouth. Scorch.

Now you stand accused

of wanting to die, of saying so

endlessly, with needles – and the speechless

track marks recording it all.

The evidence is

a red river, mounting.

It wants to carry you

away like an old chair

some fisherman forgot

to take home. And I want

to shout: Listen

            - this man

          is my father.

             I love him.

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.

There a shirtless dwarf tilts ten cauldrons

of liquid gold, and brass. Pours it

into trophy shapes and molds for metals.

Grungy wet he shines gray, like a catfish

surfacing. Later on he shines less:

cutting out squares of lambskin

from little carcasses, for diplomas.

He labors all night. One day a week

a deaf young man lugs off the junk

we will covet, our names emblazoned.

Why must achievements be made official?

In a bad sleep the dwarf grinds green molars.

By cloud people I mean elderly women

whose white hair poofs out: cumulocirrus.

Between the filaments blue ether flows.

It would be peaceful to lean my face in…

Why don’t I? After all, it’s okay to touch

a pregnant woman, an acquaintance, where she feels

the baby move; I feel it too. We love

the unborn because we love the ideal

of a safe place where even as adults

we can, as over a campfire, warm our hands.

But a cloud hairdo looks cool, cold

as a person’s last pillow. Oblivion we solo.