USA

Birthing Poem

My sons' wives have borne beautiful sons.
I hugged them close, I crooned.

But now my sleeping body opens wide again
as once pain made me know the earth-
 
quake. A daughter's blood swoons
the rose of life and all the moons reign.
 
1997
     

Credit: from Birds of Sorrow and Joy, 2003
Previously appeared in Word Thursdays Anthology II, 1999 .

Chicago


Here's where I want to write
the poem of the world, it's

giddy, like landing in Chicago for
a rendez-vous in 24 hours

all the buildings lit up
with bars at the top

where you'll climb alone and suddenly dazzle
the indivisible businessmen guzzling

double Manhattans in an off hour
before you are due to meet the Jungian juggler

the plane making a landing, bumpy,
your beautiful daughter all grown up

back at work where you left her in Middle
America happily married but not married

to a bassoonist who adores her and occasionally accepts
maternal advice, so that's settled and you're on the loose

again, your personal junket
involving an old hotel three kinds of transport

a bus-ride into unknown countryside and a prize
for a long poem you transcribed in a daze

years ago.  Now here it is Chicago, open
wide, your temporary destination

lit up, no immediate
appointments, clean sheets,

new make-up, an easy laugh, jitney from the airport
and only one of your children dead yet.

1991
                     

                 
Credit: from Birds of Sorrow and Joy, 2003
First appeared in Marlboro Review, 1999

                ESCAPADE
                after the folk tale

Every gingerbread man takes
the shadow shape of a featureless child and runs
as far as Eliza could go
as far as Kozinsky could go through the woods of The Painted Bird
as far as Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent
could go and call her children North to her
as far as the African names could run around Newark and New York
and the child of hot streets bear up under those long names
Shakkima, Al-Quan, Kahrriniyyah, Daeshaun, Gbasay, Zakiyyah
But the Fox is always coming up the path from below
the frame/ the page
with sharp teeth
with great scraggly belly
and the Latin sun
broils the skin of memory,
makes a desert of the mind

The mind may be seeking pathways back
to water, island dreams of sheltering trees
but words, the indispensable baggage, are lost en route

and every child knows what happens to the gingerbread man, that brave
cookie.

Coda:
But doesn't he get away, you ask.
Oh yes, he certainly gets away, and he becomes the child of those  
people who made him
what he was, that cut-out.



Credit: Appeared in RUNES, 2002

                On "Making Love"

On the way to talking about "making love" I stop. I can't bear to  
hear myself say it,  so of
course I  don't; but ohh when we make what we must, calling it  
love, only once in a while
getting around (I can't say "down") to doing it, I'm not.

Yes, I love you in that way a substitute loves the class that  
doesn't go wild, in the way a cat
loves the bay window seat when the sun streams in, in the way a  
pitcher loves a glove  and
crows pine trees and my dining room chairs love night noises,  
furnace and floor-boards.  I
love my house at night too, especially when I turn down the heat  
and ease into bed.  When
you're there I resent the way the covers rise and how you pull  
everything up to bolster your
sore foot and how your belly flops over above your raggedy  
underpants. I love your smooth
hands and the way your right arm warmly reaches alongside me or  
around my shoulders as I
love my soft old pillow, the down one I need as I need the sleep  
which slides over my soul
when my body is in the right frame, just ready. You try to be a  
comfort, but I refuse your
heavy leg, and as soon as the snore starts its engine in the back  
of your nose I am off, turned
to another (secret) satisfaction. Then I am Nobody you know wanting  
no body intruding.

I don't know why I am offended by the little hairs all over your  
broad back and the shaft of air
that slices between us when you shift, wrenching the covers, even  
though you are careful to
pull them only on your side, while you flop around like a beached  
creature.  I love your
warmth, yes, and the little jokes you tell while you are drifting.

I love you like cognac, waffles, a Hardy novel, downy blankets, a  
riddle.  But I don't like
the way you say hubba hubba and when we agree to do that thing we  
do on the rare nights that
my legs are in working order, my vagina is clear of chlamydia, and  
you're not already lumbering
off into the weariness of the early riser, old man, it's friendly.

We call it love-making, but it's not fucking the way I remember  
when there were cold stars
and cold fears and the freezing tenderness of desire.  Fucking  
(forbidden name, forbidden
presence, only the memory here)  was wheatfield, was want and  
feeding and impressionism,
all its colors. It was the rising song, it was in my fingers, his  
body, thick; the surging, tight
hold, even through his absences. And there were others, deep as  
Tuva song, the lowest
monks' chorus, the longing ringing in me, their amazing skin, their  
eyes. That fucking turned
me into a girl/a crone/a fastidious hunter, a found one, a beggar  
singing praise.

I laughed when I came and wanted resonance, wanted mornings of love  
like hard whisky,
brilliant coffee.  He raised a dazzled sky and lowered the long  
sweet night, fucking.  That was
love, there, waiting, nothing we had to arouse, nothing we made.  
It consumed us. We
disappeared.

Here, when I get around to holding your dangly pear-shaped scrotum  
as gently as I would
hold our spirits, hope folds around me like a new eiderdown.  I  
erase my smoldering ties to
great loves, seize on your little moans as gifts, your rising heat  
as proof, this ease between us
rating higher finally than late night TV.  You click it off and  
with slow moves go over my
nipples, a tease, an old mechanical habit. I ripen and pitch, even  
my toes curl, you quick-trip
my signals on, heighten my heart-rate, make me wise to the chart of  
my body and

I lose most of the past.  I love you then, and although not the  
weight, the fulfilling, not your
large tongue but your understanding, the pitch (not a rip tide  
trip), the disappearance of
everything but rising to your considerate pace until we both come  
laughing and the entire
area fills with warm air breathing, our pear-sweet smells, our  
willing sleep. Surprising how
without wanting your tongue I could taste that cherishing, how  
without climbing your body
like a sweet mountain I could come to this: how without swimming in  
a forbidden city
I could live here.

But sometimes the brazen body retracts and surveys the unravaged  
settlement, declares
in favor of flame.  Hopes drop. Then the mind tears up that plot,  
the clitoris at rest forgets the
old itch in favor of the moment's ease. Heart goes along, takes the  
cue as a sire takes wise
counsel: we've  made  love do. This is how we live and accept loss.  
But something backs off,
hunkers down in the cave, on guard, refusing to die.

   2001



Credit: Appeared in The Marlboro Review, 2003    

Atheist's Prayer
September 26, 2001


I will eat a boiled egg.
I will stand by the window of the twisting philodendron
and slice a Delicious apple and cut out the core
and scrape away the seeds that made a star
and slice chunks of Jarlsburg cheese and, on
one foot and another, eat
looking at sun rays coming through the weeping cherry tree
looking at the tall cosmos, their thin stems bending
bright fuchsia pinwheel petals over the silver fence.

I will shower and dress and go to Kol Nidre
with my friend Fran
who sings in the choir
who made her own baby, who is now 13
who will have a bar mitzvah
whose grandfather was a survivor with a number on his arm.
I will hear this Kol Nidre after 19 years of not listening
since the time of the bombing in Lebanon
the attacks on Sabre and Shatilah ("they" said it was the Jews,
it was not the Jews, what did the Jews do?
oh my people).  I will stand up.
I will leave my chair and my window
and my grilled steak and my coffee
and my cosmos and my exercise ball and my warm shower and go there.

I do not believe in God, but I believe in Them.
I will stand and sit and stand and sit
among Them. I do not believe in the "efficacy of prayer,"
as my father and mother did not
and their parents before them.
I will listen to the crying/singing and the chanting,
the voices.  I will attend the call and the responses,
I will not respond, I will be thinking.

I do not believe in the Almighty God,
I believe in Them, frail and beautiful like the stalky cosmos,
ugly and powerful, on-going and full of hope without proof.

I believe in the ones who walk quietly to the synagogue,
the ones who suffered torture, the ones who lead children in
velvet dresses and little neckties, the ones who get bored,
the ones who crowd in Eldorados,
the ones who were crowded in cruel cars
the ones with expressive dark eyes
like the eyes of the little girls behind heavy veils
in the Afghanistan village where in their own yard
by their own door their mother was murdered
and they were...what they will not say to the cameras.        
I believe in their pain and my pain and in them, "the ones in
the towers, on every floor" the bond salesmen and
the waiters, the insurance clerks, the janitors,
the pregnant woman and the brokers,
the Windows on the World cooks and the elevator men,
the "temps" and the tourists.  I'd believe in them even if
I never saw their faces on walls and poles all around the Armory.
I believe in the ones on the planes too, in seats and in cockpits,
and I believe in the pit cut deep in Pennsylvania where
they were hurled like stones and they must have screamed
for life and over failure. I believe in the Inferno and in the rocks
of Gaza and the bombs of London. I believe in Françoise who
wrote from Semur and Anna who called from Oxford and
Nonie from Surrey and worried friends on cell phones all over the world
calling each other.  I believe in some of what I read on e-mail
and what some of them say on Charlie Rose.  I believe in bread
and mallards and swans at the Boat Pond and the people who
came down to throw bread to wash away "sins" not the "great
sins," my young grandson explained, only "regular sins"
with babies in strollers and fathers in yarmulkas and young men
handing out flyers.  I believe in scaring away pigeons
so we can feed the sparrows and the mallard with the broken bill.
I believe in Imagine,  the word at the center of the mosaic on the walk
in Strawberry Fields,  and in candles and in Lennon singing.
I do not believe in God as Spirit or God as Father or
God as body or God in the trees.  I believe in the trees
and all the processions of wounded, light skinned and dark skinned,
and the terrified children. I believe in the frightened children of the Crusades
and the children in Soweto and the children of Warsaw photographed running
hands raised vaguely, the hopeless arms; and the children of Vietnam
photographed running   naked   to nowhere.   Amen.

I believe in the orphans of Afghanistan and the orphans of Columbia  
and the orphans of Lodz
and the orphans of Newark and Hebron and the children who could not run for dear life.
I believe in my family and in the insanity and in the necessary  
divorce and in the unnecessary accident and in the love affairs and  
in the living alone. And I believe in congregation.
I believe in a town and a park and a Harvest Festival and a meeting  
place. Cafés. All this.
I do not believe in any God They pray to, but I have to believe
in Them, and I love to listen to the music.
 
 
     
Credit: Appeared in U.S. 1, 2003
Performed in “Poetry Alive,” Ritz Theater, Haddon Township, NJ, 2004

© All Copyright, Madeline Tiger.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.