LIVING WITH BEARS

LIVING WITH BEARS

We are all immigrants and what sustains us 

is the failure of desire and need.

Each question you resurrect from the debris of childhood

I want to believe in, but I come from a long line

of bear worshippers who survived the potato famine.

I don't eat red meat. Icons in dark niches, guttered candles, 

a menorah, and the ritual of our bodies—

there's always an ocean, a continent, or a lover in the way.

One of the wounded, you're trapped in the dark heat of the city

instead of feasting on onion domes in the Red Square with me.

I taste your words as if they were ripe

huckleberries pale with bloom in late August.

But I'm omnivorous. Did our tongues really find the faith?

We could spend a lifetime looking at the ground, or love.

The phone rings, your exlover reminds me

with silence, of what we have in common.

Kiev celebrates a millennia of civilization.

Sasha says in Russian, There is no verb to be in the present. 

It is understood. We do not live with white bears, 

tovarishchi, are you all capitalists, then?

We are the same people. We are breaking the images.

He says, Afghanistan is Russian for Vietnam,

pulling on a cigarette with his good hand.

An idea called napalm has melted his face.

An American vet trembling like a lover, offers a light, 

and touches his hand, the half-formed word brother on his lips.

The steppes have no natural boundaries.

No more bison, cossacks or mongols sweeping the open plains.

I am lost on the limitless horizon. Mnogaya leta.

Voices sing with the quality of wind on the land.

The future is no more uncertain than the past.

And yes, the failures between us are what we know best.

But even at fifty below, the arctic pools, the polinii

don't freeze over, where in winter the bears come to feed.

Within the earth, wood grows upward without haste & without rest.

Sometimes I hear it in your voice —

vulnerability slips in and we find sum totals

have nothing to do with tenderness or faith.

A brittle sheet of gold foil tremors 

the geography of who we are.

7/28/89

EQUINOX

EQUINOX
       When but to think is to be full of sorrow.
      —Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
               
All this week I should have known the green tremor
in the air was more than planets aligning
their sights on spring. Lent. You, banished from memory —
your letter breaking vows of silence we took
when ones more sacred were profaned.
So you toss a $1,000 peso Sor Juana coin
to ask if we'd resurrect friendship.
It comes up heads & you give the coin
to a woman who restrings your horoscope.
Did the planets halt their carnivorous circling,
are the days any less profound than those of your birth?
The brotherhood of priests
   didn't like Sor Juana Inez de la Crúz
writing poetry. They said it was a sin against God.
    A calculated risk.
So, in the convent kitchen where God couldn't find her
between passion & reason,
   she practiced a more dangerous art—
spinning dredels in flour to measure the pattern
   of rotation & axis—
hunting the stars at night,
   writing verse by day. Inquisition.
Her body does not survive the suicide of the soul.
Let life be ashamed of lasting so long for me, she cried.
Did I tell you the river rose again encircling each tree,
claiming small vertical kingdoms? After heavy rain,
silence. Then the drains of the world emptied.
La Llorona, Malinche's first mestizo son,
   with odd bits of sky for eyes —
you were born in the alien corn. Huitzilpochtli
has decapitated his sister, the moon & his 400 brothers,
the stars because they didn't want him born.
Do you remember the thrumming insects who threatened
to overtake us in the jungle & what of the small
fish inside me eclipsed by your hand?
I am not yet middle-aged & can't help but think of you,
a traitor, sleeping with someone's young daughter.
Does the bird sing any less shrilly at dawn than at dusk?
I'm still half in love with the idea of easeful death,
so days and nights repeat automatically like bullets
& when Alberto wrote in the sand, I want to cry,
the sea will do it for me,
   he stood there until the waves erased it.
No one told the girls whose papa drowned in Chiapas,
We are made of the ocean, so when we cry
we are giving the sea back her due.
Night's pale vision. The Pleiades are restless.
Orion's belt loosened from the horizon.
In the desert you unroll constellations
favoring star charts & foreign coins
to the celestial bodies themselves.
The lights we see have long since died
& we continue to call them stars.
What tomb are you opening now?
I am not waiting like Lazarus,
for we're better off in unmarked graves
with nothing to resurrect,
save ourselves.

3/20/89
1990 National Writers' Union, Finalist