| Ruth L. Schwartz USA
Fetch Nothing is ever too hard for a dog, all big dumb happiness and effort. This one keeps swimming out into the icy water for a stick, he'd do it all day and all night if you'd throw it that long, he'd do it till it killed him, then he'd die dripping and shining, a black waterfall, the soggy broken stick still clenched in his doggy teeth, and watching him you want to cry for all the wanting you've forsworn, and how, when he hits deeper water, his body surges suddenly, as if to say Nothing could stop me now-- while you're still thinking everything you've ever loved meant giving up some other thing you loved, your hand, the stick stuck in the air, in the shining air. Important Thing I've always loved the way pelicans dive,
as if each silver fish they see
were the goddamned most important
thing they've ever wanted on this earth --
and just tonight I learned sometimes
they go blind doing it,
that straight-down dive like someone jumping
from a rooftop, only happier,
plummeting like Icarus, but more triumphant --
there is the undulating fish,
the gleaming sea,
there is the chance to taste again
the kind of joy which can be eaten whole,
and this is how they know to reach it,
head-first, high-speed, risking everything,
and some of the time they come back up
as if it were nothing, they bob on the water,
silver fish like stogies angled
rakishly in their wide beaks,
-- then the enormous
stretching of the throat,
then the slow unfolding
of the great wings,
as if it were nothing, sometimes they do this
a hundred times or more a day,
as long as they can see, they rise
back into the sky
to begin again --
and when they can't?
We know, of course, what happens,
they starve to death, not a metaphor, not a poem in it;
this goes on every day of our lives,
and the man whose melting wings
spatter like a hundred dripping candles
over everything,
and the suicide who glimpses, in the final
seconds of her fall,
all the other lives she might have lived.
The ending doesn't have to be happy.
The hunger itself is the thing.
In India Here's a man whose legs below the knee curl into smoky tendrils of flesh, who pedals his wheelchair bicycle with his hands; and here you are, with your excess of limbs, trying to fit yourself against the body of your lover. The sweat which coats your skins in bed is also the river destroying the road, willful helpless froth churning the land to ruin - while giving suck to crops, unrolling lush green tapestries: ravage and redemption in a single swell. Here's the problem of love, and its desolation; here are the leper's tiny scalloped palms - all of her fingers are gone - clasping together the coins you give her; and here's your lover, asleep now, with daylight splashed over her cheekbones, spreading to her forehead, stopped by tender hairs. Sometimes it seems wrong to love one person and not another - to love one instead of another, though you tell yourself it is all you can do; more light, beam polished like an apple, shines on her uncovered shoulder; her arms are defenseless in sleep, like a swimmer held still in the water; bare, nestled like just-born mammals; her mouth slightly open, her breath slowly keeping beat. As long as she sleeps your eyes wander the kingdom of her; we are always beautiful when we sleep, when what is hard or frightened in us - they are the same thing - reverts to unconscious grace. It is monsoon. It rains as if the world were only rain. When it stops, the streets are raw and clean, even the mud is clean in them; even the sky seems exhausted and grateful, its grief turned into such a flood you could strip off your clothes and bathe in it. The road is disappearing; its stones are being pried loose, hurtling downhill to land in other rivers; later they will be gathered, chopped by hand, lofted on womens' heads; brought somewhere else, to do some other work. 2. After your fine meal, you package up the food; in this country where people are hungry in the streets, you say, it is wrong to leave bread on the table - your waiter smiles indulgently at this. You carry the food out into the street, you mean to eat it later; when the girl in dirty rags, holding a baby in her arms, approaches you, points to the food, and then her mouth, her stomach, then her baby's mouth, you say No. Walk faster, make your body rigid, slide your eyes away. (In your heart there's an old leper whose fingers are gone, who holds up stumpy lumps of palm, whose pain is visible; in your heart there's one who sometimes gives to her - though never too much). Passing at night by rickshaw through the old city, where men sleep in their splintered carts, you see one, wearing only underpants, splashing his body - each perfect limb - in a common fountain. It isn't a lie to say he glistens with muscle and promise, with not-yet-vanquished possibility. No lie to say love still might save you, if anything can; nor to say you will turn away often; you will falter, fail. The rain will fall. The roads will vanish, stone by stone. Your heart will flood. Somewhere a field will grow. Touch The skin and the serious organs beneath it cannot help themselves; we rise to our own surfaces in small, daring, dazzled blips like the fat spring frogs which pause between the leaves of watercress and mint - then dive kicking deep again. What if we could transform like that? you ask, as even fatter tadpoles waddle, wiggle legless selves through the water's waiting skin. Or maybe we can, you answer yourself. Fervent as we are in this incarnation, in this ardent flesh.
© All Copyright, Ruth L.
Schwartz. |
