Forensics Readings The Poetry Selection Vol 1
Poetry Foundation
The Sick Rose: William Blake The Chimney Sweeper: William Blake Unholy Women: Chris Abani She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways: William Wordsworth Still I Rise: Maya Angelou Phenomenal Woman: Maya Angelou Crying in Front of a Man: Kate Gale Gender Bender: Jennifer Michael Hecht Women: May Swenson More Females of the Species: Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman The Housewife: Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman First Kiss: Kim Addonizio “What Do Women Want?”: Kim Addonizio I am the Woman: William Vaughn Moody
Cate Marvin Unwelcome Visitations: On Writing ‘Dead Girl Gang Bang’ Dead Girl Gang Bang All my wives Landscape Without You On Being No One
The Sick Rose BY
WILLIAM BLAKE
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.
The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young BY
WILLIAM BLAKE
When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black; And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Unholy Women BY
CHRIS ABANI
But of course these poems are about men, which we become by defining how we are not women and so becoming a shadow devouring the light to find the limits which is what Richard Pryor would have told Joan of Arc in a joke funnier for being sexist “It’s a man thang.” And of course there is God and its problematic relationship to light not to mention the question of permission Who builds the box, the shape? It makes sense that Jesus, the new man 2,000 years ago was a carpenter. You need that craft, the precision of measurement angles of angels who incidentally are never women. Just ask the Romans, who called them Angelo, Angelus never Angela—
that lie was coined by a dissident nun hiding her feminism under the cover of rapture but is it enough to announce yourself? To beat your chest in contrition calling Mea culpa! Mea culpa? Guilt can never be enough Mere intent—where is its purpose? Yet there are no answers there are only lines that disappear into horizons that girder us with safety just as there is no way to end this poem.
Chris Abani, “Unholy Women” from Dog Woman. Copyright © 2004 by Chris Abani. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press. Source: Dog Woman (Red Hen Press, 2004)
She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways BY
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!
Still I Rise BY
MAYA ANGELOU
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise. Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems. Copyright Š 1978 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994)
Phenomenal Woman BY
MAYA ANGELOU
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. I walk into a room Just as cool as you please, And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees. Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees. I say, It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Men themselves have wondered What they see in me. They try so much But they can’t touch My inner mystery. When I try to show them, They say they still can’t see. I say, It’s in the arch of my back, The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts, The grace of my style. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Now you understand Just why my head’s not bowed. I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud. When you see me passing, It ought to make you proud. I say, It’s in the click of my heels, The bend of my hair, the palm of my hand, The need for my care. ’Cause I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal Woman” from And Still I Rise. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House Inc., 1994)
Crying in Front of a Man BY
KATE GALE
To my first love, I wept profusely. These tears confused the boy, and he would act. Generally, he took me out to eat. I grew fat, sobbing my way into some of the best restaurants in Richmond. My first husband ignored the initial shattering of tears. But if I went on grovelling, wailing long enough he’d collect me from the floor give me a bit more grocery money, wipe my eyes tell me it would be okay by and by. My second husband despised my tears. He’d seen women crawl and shake enough, said the vipers can enter a trance at will and let their best sobs heave ho to twist a man and bend him into shape. I trouble not this third man with my tears. Have in fact forgotten how to cry and in forgetting have grown steel eyes, a molten core like mad Vesuvius, am held in check by nothing but the weather and the whims of fate. Kate Gale, “Crying in Front of a Man” from Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press. Source: Mating Season (Tupelo Press, 2004)
Mating Season.
Copyright © 2004 by Kate Gale.
Gender Bender BY
JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT
Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. One is that some of the girls like cute boys and some like ugly older men and sometimes women. The difference between them is the ones who like older men were felt up
by their fathers or uncles or older brothers, or if he didn't touch you, still you lived in his cauldron of curses and urges which could be just as worse. They grow already old, angry, and wise, they get rich, get mean, get theirs.
The untouched/uncursed others are happy never needing to do much, and never do much more than good. They envy their mean, rich, talented, drunk sisters. Good girls drink milk and make milk and know they've missed out and know they're
better off. They might dance and design but won't rip out lungs for a flag. Bad ones write books and slash red paint on canvas; they've rage to vent, they've fault lines and will rip a toga off a Caesar and stab a goat for the ether. It's as simple as that.
Either, deep in the dark of your history, someone showed you that you could be used as a cash machine, as a popcorn popper, as a rocket launch, as a coin-slot jackpot spunker, or they didn't and you grew up unused and clueless. Either you got a clue
and spiked lunch or you got zilch but no punch. And you never knew. It's exactly not anyone's fault. If it happened and you don't like older men that's just because you like them so much you won't let yourself have one. If you did
everyone would see. Then they would know what happened a long time ago, with you and with that original him, whose eyes you've been avoiding for decades gone forgotten. That's why you date men smaller than you or not at all. Or maybe you've
turned into a man. It isn't anyone's fault, it is just human and it is what happens. Or doesn't happen. That's that. Any questions? If you see a girl dressed to say No one tells me what to do, you know someone once told her what to do. Jennifer Michael Hecht, "Gender Bender" from Who Said. Copyright Š 2013 by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Source: Who Said (Copper Canyon Press, 2013)
Women BY
MAY SWENSON
Women should be pedestals moving pedestals moving to the motions of men
Or they should be little horses those wooden sweet oldfashioned painted rocking horses
the gladdest things in the toyroom The pegs of their ears so familiar and dear to the trusting fists To be chafed
feelingly and then unfeelingly To be joyfully ridden rockingly ridden until the restored
egos dismount and the legs stride away Immobile sweetlipped sturdy and smiling women should always be waiting
willing to be set into motion Women should be pedestals to men
May Swenson, “Women” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. Reprinted with the permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. Source: New and Selected Things Taking Place (Little Brown and Company, 1978)
More Females of the Species BY
CHARLOTTE ANNA PERKINS GILMAN
(After Kipling) When the traveller in the pasture meets the he-bull in his pride, He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside; But the milch cow, thus accosted, pins the traveller to the rail -For the female of the species is deadlier than the male. When Nag, the raging stallion, meets a careless man on foot, He will sometimes not destroy him, even if the man don’t shoot; But the mare, if he should meet one, makes the bravest cowboy pale -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. When our first colonial settlers met the Hurons and Choctaws, They were burned and scalped and slaughtered by the fury-breathing squaws; ‘Twas the women, not the warriors, who in war-paint took the trail -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say As to women, lest in speaking he should give himself away; But when he meets a woman -- see him tremble and turn pale -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male Lay your money on the hen-fight! On the dog-fight fought by shes! On the gory Ladies Prize-fight -- there are none so fierce as these! See small girls each other pounding, while their peaceful brothers wail -For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. So in history they tell us how all China shrieked and ran Before the wholesale slaughter dealt by Mrs. Genghis Khan. And Attila, the Scourge of God, who made all Europe quail, Was a female of the species and more deadly than the male. Red war with all its million dead is due to female rage, The names of women murderers monopolize the page, The pranks of a Napoleon are nothing to the tale Of destruction wrought by females, far more deadly than the male. In the baleful female infant this ferocity we spy, It glares in bloodshot fury from the maiden’s dewy eye, But the really deadly female, when you see her at her best, Has two babies at her petticoat and a suckling at her breast. Yet hold! there is Another! A monster even worse! The Terror of Humanity! Creation’s direst curse! Before whom men in thousands must tremble, shrink and fail -A sanguinary Grandma -- more deadly than the male!
The Housewife BY
CHARLOTTE ANNA PERKINS GILMAN
Here is the House to hold me — cradle of all the race; Here is my lord and my love, here are my children dear — Here is the House enclosing, the dear-loved dwelling place; Why should I ever weary for aught that I find not here? Here for the hours of the day and the hours of the night; Bound with the bands of Duty, rivetted tight; Duty older than Adam — Duty that saw Acceptance utter and hopeless in the eyes of the serving squaw. Food and the serving of food — that is my daylong care; What and when we shall eat, what and how we shall wear; Soiling and cleaning of things — that is my task in the main — Soil them and clean them and soil them — soil them and clean them again. To work at my trade by the dozen and never a trade to know; To plan like a Chinese puzzle — fitting and changing so; To think of a thousand details, each in a thousand ways; For my own immediate people and a possible love and praise. My mind is trodden in circles, tiresome, narrow and hard, Useful, commonplace, private — simply a small back-yard; And I the Mother of Nations! — Blind their struggle and vain! — I cover the earth with my children — each with a housewife's brain.
First Kiss BY
KIM ADDONIZIO
Afterwards you had that drunk, drugged look my daughter used to get, when she had let go of my nipple, her mouth gone slack and her eyes turned vague and filmy, as though behind them the milk was rising up to fill her whole head, that would loll on the small white stalk of her neck so I would have to hold her closer, amazed at the sheer power of satiety, which was nothing like the needing to be fed, the wild flailing and crying until she fastened herself to me and made the seal tight between us, and sucked, drawing the liquid down and out of my body; no, this was the crowning moment, this giving of herself, knowing she could show me how helpless she was—that’s what I saw, that night when you pulled your mouth from mine and leaned back against a chain-link fence, in front of a burned-out church: a man who was going to be that vulnerable, that easy and impossible to hurt. Kim Addonizio, “First Kiss” from What Is This Thing Called Love. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com. Source: What Is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2004)
“What Do Women Want?” BY
KIM ADDONIZIO
I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in. Kim Addonizio, “What Do Women Want?” from Tell Me. Copyright © 2000 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd, www.boaeditions.org. Source: Tell Me (BOA Editions Ltd., 2000)
I Am the Woman BY WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker, Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek, Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek, Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker, Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek, Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak. I am she that is terribly fashioned, the creature Wrought in God's perilous mood, in His unsafe hour. The morning star was mute, beholding my feature, Seeing the rapture I was, the shame, and the power, Scared at my manifold meaning; he heard me call "O fairest among ten thousand, acceptable brother!" And he answered not, for doubt; till he saw me crawl And whisper down to the secret worm, "O mother, Be not wroth in the ancient house; thy daughter forgets not at all!" I am the Woman, flĂŤer away, Soft withdrawer back from the maddened mate, Lurer inward and down to the gates of day And crier there in the gate, "What shall I give for thee, wild one, say! The long, slow rapture and patient anguish of life, Or art thou minded a swifter way? Ask if thou canst, the gold, but oh if thou must, Good is the shining dross, lovely the dust! Look at me, I am the Woman, harlot and heavenly wife; Tell me thy price, be unashamed; I will assuredly pay!" I am also the Mother: of two that I bore I comfort and feed the slayer, feed and comfort the slain. Did they number my daughters and sons? I am mother of more! Many a head they marked not, here in my bosom has lain, Babbling with unborn lips in a tongue to be, Far, incredible matters, all familiar to me. Still would the man come whispering, "Wife!" but many a time my breast Took him not as a husband: I soothed him and laid him to rest Even as the babe of my body, and knew him for such. My mouth is open to speak, that was dumb too much! I say to you I am the Mother; and under the sword Which flamed each way to harry us forth from the Lord, I saw Him young at the portal, weeping and staying the rod, And I, even I was His mother, and I yearned as the mother of God. I am also the Spirit. The Sisters laughed When I sat with them dumb in the portals, over my lamp, Half asleep in the doors: for my gown was raught Off at the shoulder to shield from the wind and the rain The wick I tended against the mysterious hour When the Silent City of Being should ring with song, As the Lord came in with Life to the marriage bower. "Look!" laughed the elder Sisters; and crimson with shame I hid my breast away from the rosy flame.
"Ah!" cried the leaning Sisters, pointing, doing me wrong, "Do you see?" laughed the wanton Sisters, "She will get her lover ere long!" And it was but a little while till unto my need He was given indeed, And we walked where waxing world after world went by; And I said to my lover, "Let us begone, "Oh, let us begone, and try "Which of them all the fairest to dwell in is, "Which is the place for us, our desirable clime!" But he said, "They are only the huts and the little villages, Pleasant to go and lodge in rudely over the vintage—time!" Scornfully spake he, being unwise, Being flushed at heart because of our walking together. But I was mute with passionate prophecies; My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather, While universe drifted by after still universe. Then I cried, "Alas, we must hasten and lodge therein, One after one, and in every star that they shed! A dark and a weary thing is come on our head— To search obedience out in the bosom of sin, To listen deep for love when thunders the curse; For O my love, behold where the Lord hath planted In every star in the midst His dangerous Tree! Still I must pluck thereof and bring unto thee, Saying, "The coolness for which all night we have panted; Taste of the goodly thing, I have tasted first!" Bringing us noway coolness, but burning thirst, Giving us noway peace, but implacable strife, Loosing upon us the wounding joy and the wasting sorrow of life! I am the Woman, ark of the Law and sacred arm to upbear it, Heathen trumpet to overthrow and idolatrous sword to shear it: Yea, she whose arm was round the neck of the morning star at song, Is she who kneeleth now in the dust and cries at the secret door, "Open to me, 0 sleeping mother! The gate is heavy and strong. "Open to me, I am come at last; be wroth with thy child no more. "Let me lie down with thee there in the dark, and be slothful with thee as before!"
Source: Poetry (Poetry)
CATE MARVIN HTTP://WWW.CATEMARVIN.COM/ Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. In 2009, she co-founded the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts with poet Erin Belieu. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, her third book of poems, Oracle, was released from W.W. Norton & Co. in March 2015. She is currently a Visiting Professor in creative writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Unwelcome Visitations: On Writing ‘Dead Girl Gang Bang’ BY CATE MARVIN
Cate Marvin. Photo credit: Rex Lott. [Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Cate Marvin’s “Dead Girl Gang Bang” appears in the February 2015 issue.]
“Dead Girl Gang Bang” is the culminating poem in a series of “high school” poems that provide a shadow narrative for the many obsessions visited by the speaker of my third book, Oracle. I conceived of the initiating poem, “High School in Suzhou,” while squatting inside a bathroom stall in a girls’ room at one of the many high schools I visited in 2007 while on a “scholars’ tour” of China. I could not conceive of the fact that I entered into these buildings, in my adult life, in the role of “academic” as anything but ironic. As a high school student in the eighties, I spent much of my time hiding in the girls’ room, cutting class, poking my head out every so often in hopes I might manage to escape the hall monitor’s attention so as to leave the building without getting caught.
And so there was something about the dankness of that bathroom, the narrowness of the stall I’d locked myself into, that suddenly hit me as representative of one of the more sorrowful aspects of the human condition. In that moment, in a country as distant and strange to me as China, I could feel the moving minds of all the girls, the thousands of them, who had previously squatted in that very stall. This epiphany required no great stretch of the imagination, and yet it startled me. Have we not, all of us, been forced to endure the experience of high school? What would happen, I wondered, if one positioned “high school” as a metaphoric location, an idea even, for the psychic inscape of adolescence? One of the first figures to make an appearance in the “high school poems” was the Dead Girl. I should not have been surprised. In 2005, I’d received, seemingly out of nowhere, an ominous phone call from a high school friend who stated at the onset, I thought you should know . . . which was when I learned that my best friend from high school had already been dead for four years. She was only thirty when she shot herself in the head. I’d not spoken to her since 1988, the year we graduated. Oh, I saw her, once, a year or two later, in the checkout line at People’s Drug Store while home during a holiday, but I hid in the magazine aisle so as to avoid her. We’d had a falling out years before, due to a rather spectacular series of personal betrayals of the variety necessitated by the act of growing up. During the summer in which I completed Oracle, a friend spoke to me fiercely about the significance of this figure to the arc of the book, insisting that the Dead Girl needed to make a final appearance. This was a girl I’d loved greatly. She and I used to trudge up Tuckerman Lane together (we were too young to drive) in Potomac, MD, to arrive at Cabin John Shopping Center, where we’d convince various shady characters we’d met in the parking lot to walk into the liquor store with our wadded-up bills and re-emerge with jugs of cheap wine we’d then carry home in our backpacks. She alone ushered me into the world of teenage girlhood. Ours was a dangerous boredom. Were it not for her very appealing tendency to lure me into a number of lurid scenarios that would keep any parent awake at night, I might have spent the rest of high
school inside, reading. What I am trying to say is that she propped a door open to Life, through which I gratefully passed. And even though I’d not spoken to her for seventeen years, and although I regarded her influence somewhat warily, her death began to uncoil within me, growing more and more impossible to disregard. There was the fact that I missed her. There was the realization it could have just as likely been me. And was it the presence of the Dead Girl I felt when I squinted my eyes at the screen on which the image of my unborn child was presented during an amniocentesis? The nurse looked over and casually announced, “I think it’s a girl.” A wave of horror passed over me. This would not do! I’d somehow convinced myself I was having a son. On telling people about my initial response, I’m often met with confusion. But it was a very simple reaction. I couldn’t bear the thought that my child would be in any way likely to experience even the most basic initiations I had myself been subjected to as a teenage girl. When writing the final poem that would eventually become “Dead Girl Gang Bang,” I sat on my couch night after night, shuffling through memories that seemed bland enough in recollection. Then I recognized a particular memory I’d internalized to the extent that I had not allowed myself to see it for what it was. Was it just one of those things that happens to curious girls? Girls who, they say, should know better? Anyone familiar with fairy tales knows it’s the curious girls who meet the ugliest ends. Their shared fate seems predetermined, a most certain punishment that could have easily been avoided if they’d simply done as they were told. Last night, on sitting down to write this, I heard my daughter, now six, crying in her room. She is afraid of monsters. I tell her that monsters do not exist. I am lying.
Dead Girl Gang Bang BY
CATE MARVIN
Though I can’t recall your last name now, Howie, I’ve been penciling myself in to your way back then, way back when, in your gangbangland, she was loose and gone, struggling up on a limb to raise herself off from your bed, but lost, fell back, let the all of you in again. Said just trying to get out your room was no use since she’d got her own self in. Curbside-mind, I venture you are still alive. Wondering what she’d think of that, but, then, I don’t know, can a ghost think when its body’s shot itself in the head? Hell, just thinking about it makes me wish I were dead. Just some girl, you, then you letting your friends shovel their coal-selves up into her, just some person. I knew. Her mother’s now offering a twenty-percent discount for crystal healing therapy on her website. In high school, she was a calm mother, dull job as telephone operator, back in that town her dead daughter and I always swore we would leave, back in that town dead to me, and me, I marry a man who mocks me for crying. We-we-we, he calls out, snickering in the gloom. Yet still I wear the dead girl’s perfume. And I’ve got an accident to report. Because it was all our centers, uninvited, you rucked up inside, then bade your
friends park their reeking selves in the garage of her feminine. What did you call it back then? You balding fuck, you’ve forgot. Sloppy seconds. Forgot her slippage, eyes dead drunk spirals, face some fluid spilling down your sheets. I’ve been where she’s been, and I can be where you are now, switch my hips, sashay into your office to see you any day now, wearing her perfume. What pack animal would you choose to be in your next life?
Every day, the marsupial clouds grow hungrier for our reunion, the reunion I’ve been packing for all my life. There is a swing set and a girl in a dress who doesn’t know about this next. First, she’s pretty. Finally, she’s done for. So I took some pills to forget I knew you last as friend. Then I learned the ways of your wiles, how you did my girl who’s now dead in. Source: Poetry (February 2015)
From issue 31 , a poem by Cate Marvin. Be sure to check out her poems in the current issue of Tin House, which come from her third book, a work in progress that is forthcoming from Norton. all my wives When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird. Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist, not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,
an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries. It does my wives good to run errands, for it keeps them purposeful. I do not allow pockets on their shirts or skirts. Theirs are unforgiving interiors. A woman’s hands should always be in plain sight, preferably chafed from dishwater and cold. A woman’s hands should be kept raw from wind and sewing. When I want my wives to come out, I turn off the lights and crouch to listen as they compare me: Who do I smack more often? Whom shall I take for my queen? They think I take pleasure in belaboring this decision, yet to think of it is to imagine I might someday purchase a book I’ve never desired to read. When I snap the lights on, they scatter like roaches. Why read when there are so many worried brows upon which to set the delicate glass of my gaze down? One of my wives petitioned, once. One of them dared to cry. They’ve tried to make me sad with their eyes. Let them try. I would rather buy a hat, a walking stick, move alone within my chamber, pose before my mirror. I do not need a queen, I do not like tantrums. At times, I shudder, alone in my bed, when I consider how their desires must churn like the onset of inclement weather. They could be one, she could be one hundred. I just saw her shadow skulking down the walk. She’s
drunk, as usual. Her shakes, her heart murmurs, her general unease. Pity the creature. She has a disease. If it gets worse, I’ll be forced to consider treatment. All my wives have four legs each. What we call arms may as well be legs, so it seems to me as I kneel behind each, not knowing one from the other, only their asses’ moon-curves aglow in lamplight. With such anonymity, we are pleasured. It would not do for them to undo the tiny latches, the wire doors to their cages. It would not do to lift the lids of their terrariums. Something untoward might escape, roam the grounds. For then I should be afraid to walk alone at night, my new hat atop my clean head, walking stick in hand, as I move onward, staking out crevices, damp places that lock my eyes: the fragrant earth I move atop my inheritance, the herd of them breathing behind me in the dark. At the thrill of their whispers, I stick my stick into the ground, turn on my boot’s heel. My wife, on her four legs, waits quietly in the hay.
Landscape Without You
BY
CATE MARVIN
Roofers scrape the scaly lid of an auto shop beside the house where I live. Where I live shirtless men tear at the black scabs of a roof's old flesh, toss scraps into the back of a truck parked in the lot next to a house where I live. Where I live a tarp rattles at night, plastic rustles, and trash is kicked along pavement by wind. Roofers curse and shell the tire shop's peeling lid beside the house where I live. Where I live a tarp shakes all night; cans land on pavement, tossed from windows of cars that blur by where I live. Where I live windows are ladled red with light your sun leaves me with. Repairs are made to roofs which will never cover me. As I read the road between us, tire tracks unscroll their tawdry calligraphy. Any day now you shall arrive, roar into my eye with your mountainside. Where I live when I live where landscape cannot survive you. Cate Marvin, "Landscape Without You" from World’s Tallest Disaster. Copyright Š 2001 by Cate Marvin. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books, Inc., www.sarabandebooks.org. Source: World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001)
On Being No One Cate Marvin HOW I WOULD LOVE to be the speaker of my poems! For then I should know such liberation. No one can arrest me for smashing windows in a poem. I can make cop cars crash while turning sharp corners in a poem. I can banish anything (object, person, animal) I find tedious or merely unpleasant. If, in some alternate reality, I could actually be my speaker, I would be a god. No one much likes a god in daily life, however. In “real life” my speaker would be unbearable. I’ll be the first to admit I wouldn’t want to be stuck in line behind her at Starbucks. (Last I heard, she no longer breathes oxygen, but rather lives off whiskey vapors and those ardent fumes that pour off the smokestacks just across the Goethals Bridge, having recently taken lodging in an abandoned shopping center where she cares for her pet toad.) To insist on imposing an author’s lived life onto his or her work is an act of anti-reading, a demonstrated refusal to authentically engage with the thing itself that’s been built out of language. Furthermore, such an approach diminishes the intellectual pleasures that are so fully available to the perceptive reader. My advice: don’t try to find the author’s life in a piece; rather, look for your own. Many bad readers are bad writers. They have yet to form a sense of what they need to provide to their own readers. In short, they are poor listeners. Incapable of understanding what it means to be an audience, they serve no audience. Conversely, bad writers are bad readers. Unwilling to meet the text on its own terms, they pin their difficulties on the writer. They may as well have not even read the text. They want the author to pleasure them while they insist on doing nothing. Handjob. I am prepared to argue that we have spoiled the brilliant work of the confessional poets by mucking about in their private lives to the extent that we can no longer read their poems with imagination. And I will go further. A piece of literature, once produced, has very little to do with its author. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The best writing not only anticipates the author’s death, it assumes the author is already dead. Because that’s what it means to write toward pasts in which you’ve never lived, and futures in which you can never hope to live. I’ve long harbored the suspicion that readers who want to graft autobiography onto literature are deeply afraid of creation. But poems don’t truck in that business. Poets make them whether the frightened reader, the deeply disengaged reader, the selfish reader, likes it or not. I’ve been holding fast to a fantasy of a new New Criticism. An approach by which the reader puts the cultural, Marxist, and psychoanalytic paradigms to good use without pulling the author’s socalled life into the equation, because I like to think my poems will outstrip my life, if I’ve served them well. That they will enter into that conversation upon which my faith as a human being resides: reader and writer as lovers and most intimate friends. A connection over and outside of time, as faithful as the constellations upon which we rely for symbol and direction. If you could see me now, Reader, stepping outside the room in which I’ve been writing this, a basement “television room” in my retired parents’ condo, in order to smoke a cigarette while propped on the lawn chair I’ve stationed inside their garage, you would see that I’m no one. I’m no one. I just make things.