Poetry Magazine, , Diane Wakowski, Winter 2006

Poetry Magazine

Diane Wakoski

USA

Diane Wakoski, who was born in Southern California and educated at UC Berkeley, lived and began her poetry career in New York City from 1960-1973. She has earned her living as a book store clerk, a junior high school teacher in Manhattan, a library story- teller, a Visiting Writer and, for ten years on-the-road, by giving poetry readings on college campuses. Since 1975, she has been Poet In Residence at Michigan State University, where she continues to teach as a University Distinguished Professor.
Her work has been published in more than twenty collections and many slim volumes of poetry since her first book, COINS & COFFINS, was published by Hawk's Well Press in 1962. Her selected poems, EMERALD ICE, won the William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. In recent years, she completed a series of poems about her West, using the Medea myth and simple allusions to the ideas posed by quantum theory, called THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MOVIES AND BOOKS, of which four volumes have now been published. Currently she is working on a three volume selected poems/memoir called NOIR.

Hummingbirds Dazzling In From The California Desert
for Craig Cotter and WCW

And the apple, like a Ruby Throat, was there,
so tempting, round and perfect as
the number zero, one of those slightly
tart, sweet-taffeta flavored beauties
from New Zealand, which crack against
your tongue, a fountain of glittering
snapshots.

Hummingbirds dazzling in from the California desert
mimic the quick motions that drive you
playing basketball, one on one, the fast dunk of your thoughts
about religion and sex, about chocolate words and Beatles' lyrics.
But you and I disagree on what men
owe women, on the possibilities of either
sex or celibacy.
I want the longed-for
to be fulfilled
but more, I want it to be sustained. All the troubadours
I admire so much, including you -
I want them to love me more than any
other woman, but not to try to come
too close. I want to be touched with language
and the something even more insidious - the mind,
which keeps its contents secret, celibate, untouched and pure.

Who eats the apple
is looking for a way not to have to consume it, just as
what rises from the dead is still living. These are paradoxes,
which means they are truths. The
way I know that love cannot exist without sexual touch,
yet it does. The way I know that romantic
silliness in movies, novels, and our teenage lives
is everything and nothing; it is not love
but makes love possible. Love, invisible,
or is it just quick? -- the way the hummingbird
is all quick airy motion - is nothing.

Love, love, why invent this word
if it is all zeros?

published JASON THE SAILOR, Black Sparrow Press, 1993

The Argonaut Rose, Fleeing With The Sailors, Leaving
The Body of Her Brother Behind

“She [Circe] longed to hear
the voice of the maiden, her kinswoman
[Medea], as soon as she saw
that she had raised her eyes from the
ground. For all those of the
race of Helios were plain to discern,
since by the far flashing of
their eyes they shot in front of them a gleam
as of gold.”

Love Letter Postmarked Von Beethoven

for a man I love
more than I should,
intemperance being something
a poet cannot afford

I am too angry to sleep beside you tonight,
you big loud symphony who fell asleep drunk;
I try to count sheep and instead
find myself counting the times I would like to shoot you
in the back,
your large body
with its mustaches that substitute for love
and its knowledge of motorcycle mechanics that substitutes
for loving me;
why aren't you interested in
my beautiful little engine?
It need a tune-up tonight, dirty with the sludge of
anger, resentment,
and the pistons all sticky, the valves
afraid of the lapping you might do,
the way you would clean me out of your life.

I count the times your shoulders writhe
and you topple over
after I've shot you with my Thompson Contender
(using the .38-caliber barrel
or else the one they recommend for shooting rattlesnakes).
I shoot you each time in that wide dumb back,
insensitive to me,
glad for the mild recoil of the gun
that relieves a little of my repressed anger
each time I discharge a bullet into you;
one for my father who deserted me and whom you masquerade as,
every night, when you don't come home
or even telephone to give me an idea of when to expect you;
the anguish of expectation in one's life
and the hours when the mind won't work, waiting
for the sound of footsteps on the stairs,
the key turning in the lock;
another bullet for my first lover,
a boy of 18,
(but that was when I was 18 too)
who betrayed me and would not marry me.
You too, betrayer,
you who will not give me your name as even a token
of affection:
another bullet,
and of course each time
the heavy sound of your body falling over in work boots,
a lumber jacket, and a notebook in which you write down
everything
but reality;
another bullet for those men
who said they loved me
and followed other women into their silky bedrooms
and kissed them behind curtains,
who offered toasts to other women,
making me feel ugly, undesirable;
anger, fury, the desire to cry or to shake you back
to the way you used to love me,
even wanted to,
knowing that I have no recourse,
that if I air my grievances you'll only punish me more
or tell me to leave,
and yet knowing that silent grievances
will erode my brain,
make pieces of my ability to love
fall off,
like fingers from a leprosied hand;
and I shoot another bullet into your back,
trying to get to sleep,
only wanting you to touch me with some gesture of affection;
this bullet for the bad husband who would drink late in bars
and not take me with him,
talking and flirting with other women
and who would come home, without a friendly work, and sleep
celibate next to my hungry body;
a bullet for the hypocrites;
a bullet for my brother who could not love me without guilt;
a bullet for the man I love who never listens to me;
a bullet for the men who run my country without consulting me;
a bullet for the man who says I am a fool to expect anyone to
listen to me;
a bullet for the man who wrote a love poem to me
and a year later threw it away, saying it was a bad poem.
If I were Beethoven, by now I'd have tried every
dissonant chord;
were I a good marksman, being paid to test this new Thompson
Contender, I'd have several dozen dead rattlesnakes lying
along the path already;
instead, I am ashamed of my anger
at you
whom I love
whom I ask for so much more than you want to give.
A string quartet would be too difficult right now.
Let us have the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
I will try counting the notes
instead of sheep.

published THE MOTORCYCLE BETRAYAL POEMS,
SIMON & SCHUSTER, 1972

Hummingbirds Dazzling In From The California Desert
for Craig Cotter and WCW