USA

goedicke@selway.umt.edu

Photo Credit: Michael Gallacher

HOLE

If this be corpse
 
or grave.  If this be tooth or cavity
or dry lake bed. Or spewed
 
vomit of self pity or how, no tongue left
to speak with.  If there be the same
 
killing fields from the start:
the gallows in the playpen
 
glares up at us like a black
graffiti covered
 
stone the day after
 
the execution.  Birds like heavy cigars, coffins
wheeling overhead.
 
If there be cracked eggshell
and no egg.  Neither yolk nor white
 
nor whole-Baby-live-forever.  Hah!
 
If there be no kernel.  No core
to the applehead.  If there be love
 
when love is dead.
 
If the outer firmament be arched
skin only.  If the noose embrace nothing
 
but cold ore and bowels,
 
where is the high famed convexity
of which this is the concave?
 
For this is not a private.  Not a personal
crack in a sealed container.
 
No, this is not a single
 
lost shoe:  on the nation's highways the owner
is long gone.
 
But whether this be outer
or inner rot, murderous
 
aimed or innocent kick, here
 
is an end to it, a hollow
depression which has no bottom
 
and no top.
 

HOLE, which was first published in "The Beloit Poetry Journal, was awarded the 2002 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.

THE TONGUES WE SPEAK

 I have arrived here after taking many steps
Over the kitchen floors of friends and through their lives.
 
The dun-colored hills have been good to me
And the gold rivers.
 
I have loved chrysanthemums, and children:
I have been grandmother to some.
 
In one pocket I have hidden chocolates from you
And knives.
 
Speaking my real thoughts to no one
 
In bars and at lecterns I have told the truth
Fairly often, but hardly ever to myself.
 
I have not cried out against the crimes of my country
 
But I have protected myself, I have watched from a safe corner
The rape of mountains, the eagle's reckless plunge.
 
 
 
Ever since high school I have waved goodbye the history:
 
I have assisted you to grow
In all ways that were convenient to me.
 
What is a block vote against steam shovels?
 
My current events teacher was a fine man
But his moral precepts where a put-up job and I followed them.
 
Well-dressed, in my new Adidas
At very gathering I investigated my psyche with friends
 
And they investigated theirs with me.
 
 
 
But whenever Trouble came in the front door I ran out the back
And fell into the pit of my bones.
 
Escaped from these burning buildings, the past,
What balance can any of us hope for?
 
I was comparing lipsticks
The day Nagasaki vanished.
 
The day Solzhenitsyn disappeared into the Gulag
I was attending a cocktail party.
 
 
 
Perhaps there are only ashes in my handbag.
 
A man at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Second Street
Tried to sweep me into a trash barrel and I almost agreed.
 
Already the dried blood was sifting along my wrists.
 
Already my own hands 
Were tightening around my throat
 
 
 
But Sorrow saved me, Sorrow gave me an image
Of bombs like human tears watering the world's gardens.
 
How could I not answer?
 
Since then I have been planting words
In every windowbox, poking them to grow up.
 
What's God, that he should be mindful of me?
 
Sometimes I feel like wood
Waiting for someone to peel me.
 
 
 
Indeed I have been lukewarm
At heart, which is all that matters.
 
But I am afraid of disappearing
Into the wheat fields of a future
 
Of tiny bread-colored atoms,
Equal fragments equally dispersed
 
That love each other and are never hungry.
 
What have I ever ignited
That warmed anyone?
 
I have not followed the rivers.
 
Dangerous as a pine needle
Packed in among others, in the dense multitudes
 
And dry timbers of the West
 
I am afraid of greed,
The rich taste of it, the anger
 
Hidden in my pockets.
 
 
 
Columns of smoke on the horizon,
Pillars of green fire.
 
But I have arrived here somehow,
Neither have I stopped talking.
 
Numberless are the kitchens I have sat in,
Chewing my fingers, trying to say something,
 
Anything, so that the daughters of men should see
As many sides of themselves as possible.
 
Word after word my footprints
Have stumbled across deserts.
 
How should I escape them?
They keep following after me.
 
A little wind stirs itself,
Whisks across my eyelids,
 
And I know what it is before I say it:
 
What if the world really articulates itself
In the socket of a human knee?
 
 
 
God save me
From the swamps of hubris but it may be, it may be.
 
Before the idea, the impulse.
 
I feel it moving in me, it is there
Arthritic but still pwerful, a seizure
 
Delicate as grasshoppers, a light
Gathering in the skull.
 
Between thumb and forefinger
And the ballbearing joints of the tongue
 
In soft, glottal convulsions
Out of no alien skies
 
But out of the mind's muscle
The hieroglyph figures rise.
 
 
 
The little histories of words
Cannot be eaten.
 
I know, it, youknow it,
And the children.....
 
But the images we make are our own.
 
In the cool caves of the intellect
The twisted roots of them lead us
 
Backwards and then forwards.
 
 
If we only we could understand
What's in our pockets is for everyone!
 
I have a dictionary in one hand, a mirror.
 
Strangers look at themselves in it,
Tracing the expressions they use
 
From one family to the next
they comfort themselves, murmuring
 
The tongues we speak are a blizzard
Of words like warm wool flying:
 
In the shy conjugal rites
Of verb, consonant, vowel,
 
In the dark mucosal flesh lining
The prismed underside of the skin
 
Each one is a spark sheared
From the veined fleece of the spirit
 
Of the looking-glass body we live in.
 
It is the one I have been cherishing,
The one all of us speak from,
 
For the world as we know it moves
Necessarily, by steps.
 
 
 
Breath, pulse beat, ten digital stops.
 
At the foot of the mountains I look up.  Does God
Lift up His hand to cover them?
 
Blinded by tears like rain
My bones turn granite, the spine of the hills congeals them.
 
 
 
Where is the eye of the storm,
Or where is the center of my seeing?
 
The wind of my breath is a hurricane:
I am locked inside myself.
 
Painfully, up the bald stepladder I climb, 
 
But sometimes the light in my head goes on
More like the sun than a match.
 
Just as they said in Arabia
 
There's a huge pantalooned angel swelling
Inside the body's glass jar.
 
The while-haired thread of stem
From the teakettle on the range whistles
 
And sharpens itself into a voice
 
Bodiless as history, invisible
But still whispering in ears
 
That keep trying to hear it.
 
 
 
It is as if midgets were bellowing their names
Down sets of cardboard cylinders.
 
But we have not disappeared
Yet.
 
My friends, we have said many things to each other
 
In new combinations, seed upon seed exploding
And blossoming in kitchen gardens.
 
I confess I am ashamed of myself:
 
I have not tried hard enough to understand
Or listen to you speak.
 
 
But the Word is mindful of itself
And always has been.
 
Littering every street
 
In the sly eyes of tin cans,
Drops of water in the gutter
 
The world looks back at us
 
 
 
From every known language:
Yoruba, Hebrew, chinese,
 
Arrogant English the subject
Subjecting all to its desires,
 
Even the softer tongues, romantic
 
Self-reflexive, done to
As we would be done by,
 
Whatever life we cultivate
Out of the animal moans of childhood
 
It is all wheat fields, all grass
Growing and being grown.
 
With poisoned bread in my pockets, or gumdrops,
Or armies like Myrmidons rising
 
What I say is true
For a time only, thank God,
 
If I have arrived anywhere it is to look
Carefully, at all I thought I knew.
 
 
 
In living rivers of speech
The reflections I make are my own
 
And yet not:
 
Though the old growth rings are hidden from us
And the echoing tomorrows of the acorn,
 
The warm currents of the senses
Are a two-way street, my friends:
 
The palms of our hands are crisscrossed
With as many intersections as a leaf.

(First published in THE WIND OF OUR GOING (Copper Canyon Press, 1985);
then in THE TONGUES WE SPEAK, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 
(Milkweed Editions, 1989)

IN THE HOSPITAL

When they came at me with sharp knives
I put perfume under my nose.
 
When they knocked me out on the operating table
I dreamed I was flying
 
When they asked me embarrassing questions
I remembered the clouds in the sky,
 
When they were about to drown me
I floated
 
On their inquisitive glances I drifted
Like a leaf becalmed in a pool.
 
When they laid harsh hands on me
I thought of fireworks I had seen with you,
 
When they told me I was sick and might die
I left them and went away with you to where I live,
 
When they took off my right breast
I gave it to them.

(First published in FOR THE FOUR CORNERS,
(Ithaca House, 1976;
reprinted in THE TONGUES WE SPEAK, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS,
(Milkweed Editions, 1989)

AS EARTH BEGINS TO END

I reach out my hand and it sinks through you
like soft fruit.
 
O tree to which I have attached my banner
 
I know you're leaving me
as you must; in the hospital you say my name
 
but I'm deaf, I can't hear you,
 
as the plane slides from the gate
which one of us is on it
 
and which left behind, I've never been able to tell
where we end and earth begins beyond us.
 
On raised pillows your face
 
like a book brought too close,
like the midnight sun blazing
 
out of all others looms before my eyes
 
until I can scan it no longer:
as loose cords slip along the tarmac,
 
I always knew this would happen,
 
but gluttonous for your body,
for your shoulder to lean on
 
and not fail, I plastered myself against you
like wet newspapers, like leaves
 
that think they will never fall:
 
even as all your arteries
and rivers emptied and filled, filled and emptied
 
I begged you to stay:  O you
whom I have loved like oceans
 
though the harbor of your smile was generous
 
as the first wheatfields in Nebraska, clear
as the springs of the Mississippi used to be,
 
still I could not be stopped,
 
I kept on taking and taking,
I  grabbed handfuls of you and ate them
 
and why not?   Even in the bleak orchards
of some hospitals, some summers end
 
only to begin again, fruit slumped into brown mush
revives, plumps itself into blossom...
 
But not forever.  With these pages
 
about to be ripped apart among apples
that will never grow again, seas choked with oil,
 
with no furnace, not even an armchair to sit in,
 
the crust is thinner; even as I pull you close
in earth's threadbare jacket
 
slowly the harsh gorge rises,
tall column of salt growing inside me
 
like a skeleton, riven sword
of lamentation everyone must swallow
 
and can't; can't bind up the halves
of the split planet's blood orange
 
or button the body's last, unbuttonable coat.
 
 
 (First published in AS EARTH BEGINS TO END, (Copper Canyon Press, 2000)

MAHLER IN THE LIVING ROOM

Low to the ground, the windows are full of lake water.
Leaden, the pure slabs rise straight up into the air
 
From the summerhouse, where we sit watching them,
Shivering on the threshold of late fall
 
As the bronze hills in their shabby coats
Arch themselves like hands over a cold radiator --
 
And Mahler in the living room like an earthquake.  Behind the eyes
Sorrow heaves upward, the heavy planks of it gigantic
 
As armies at a distance, as oak trees, as the tar surface
Of a road giving way to frost, buckling under and over
 
To the white forces of winter; the underground tears bent
Like ribs cracking, hundreds of paralyzed veins
 
That are now, suddenly, released, in great silver floods
Powerful as oceans our whole lives rise up
 
Into a sky full of planets tumbling and shooting,
First lavender, then apricot, then plum-colored:
 
Hissing like skyrockets they streak
Over the slumberous oars in the depths voluptuously rowing
 
Velvet as elephants, whose liquid footsteps wallow
About to submerge everything:  dock, landing place, lawn...
 
 
But there are jagged slashes too,
Impertinent brass flourishes, horns that bite air
 
And bray at each other like gold rifles
 
Over the little pebbles, the quaint Chinese sparrows
Of the piccolos humorously yammering, trying not to listen
 
To the huge hesitation waltz beneath them,
The passionate kettledrums rolling
 
In the throbbing cradle of the gut
Sighing over and over Let Go,
 
Abandon yourself to the pain, the wild love of it that surges,
Resistless, through everyone's secret bowels
 
Till the walls almost collapse, our clothes fall from us like leaves
Trembling, helplessly tossed
 
In an uncontrollable windstorm, the branches weave and sob
As if they would never stop, unbearable the sky,
 
Unbearable the weight of it, the loss, solitude, suffering,
The hills staring at us blindly,
 
The house nothing but a shell, the bare floors
Relentless, our eyes welling over with such pain
 
It is all absolutely uncontainable, in a few minutes
Surely everything will dissolve...
 
 
When the first duck of a new movement appears
 
In the middle distance, the bottlegreen oboe bobs
Blue-ringed, graceful, under the little rowboat;
 
The invisible red feet sturdily paddle
Like webbed spoons in the chill soup of the water
 
That turns into a flatness now,
The agonized surface lies down
 
In the glass eyes of the windows,
Those solid transparencies
 
We orchestrate ourselves
To keep the world framed, at bay
 
As the great lake of the symphony sways
Far down, far down
 
The violent sun sets,
Over the wet shingles, the shining flanks of the house
 
The threadbare arm of the hills sinks,
The wave of feeling rests.
 
 
(First published in "The New Yorker", then in THE WIND OF OUR GOING
(Copper Canyon Press, 1985);
then in THE TONGUES WE SPEAK, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS,
(Milkweed Press, 1989.)

IN THESE BURNING STABLES

And yet you can't catch them.  Even peering inside
as hard as you can, stumbling around in this hodgepodge
 
of jolts, shivers.  Enzymes digesting themselves, muscles
relaxed or jerking,
 
head keeping time, noticing and not noticing
each whirr of the clock
 
especially when it stops.
But whenever you try to look for them
 
it's like mayflies swarming; in the thronged
 
brief hustle of the mind what are these transparent
puffs of air, ideas forming out of nowhere?
 
Battalions of tiny hooves.  In thin sheets trmpling,
sweeping across the cortex.  Like leaves whipped by the wind
 
they keep disappearing, like the deep cherrywood sound
of the piano you heard last night. Or the vanishing
 
muffled oranges of sunset, the color
of peaches inside a refrigerator, the wash of choclaty gray
 
silks no one has ever seen, none of them touchable.
 
The neurosurgeon can't know what you're thinking 
until you tell him, but already it's too late,
 
the long faces of thought slide
into each other like layers of purple and brown oil
 
in a portrait by Rembrandt, muffled
dim highlights drift
 
like berries in the woods, pieces of cottonwood fluff.
 
With no warning, suddenly
you come upon them in clusters,
 
little gusts leap up
like grasshoppers, all around you
 
from second to second changing, but watching over it,
who knows when, exactly, water will decide to boil
 
or wood finally ignite, or how,
precisely, ideas take shape, materialize, open the gates?
 
Whiff of stallion on the air.
 
The hair on the back of your neck bristles
where you can't see it, fire
 
where there's no fire but the taste of it,
 
ozone sizzling in the mouth
like a memory but what is that?
 
Invisible horses churn
like roiled smoke in the corral.
 
You try to lead them out
with the halter of the word like,
 
but even with the tiniest stitches, the most delicate
intracerebral loops
 
there's no lassooing them; in these burning stables
silhouetted against the flames
 
with calm eyes, with magnificent
tall shoulders, shadowy
 
gigantic haunches pass
and repass each other in the dark.
 
 
(First published in  "The Beloit Poetry Journal";
then in INVISIBLE  HORSES (Milkweed Editions, 1996)

© All Copyright, Patricia Goedicke.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.