I have simplified my life down to the bone:
One exceedingly tall stemmed vase with yellow flowers,
Chrysanthemums, feathered like the firs,
A few dark clothes,
Nothingness.
The imagined soughing of the pines:
The wind lifts, waves, rides the undulating branches,
Fresh blowing rain, and the lake,
Mossy roofs, dark windows,
Emptiness.
Behind the thick-paned windows in warmth:
Reading about Cambodia, I nurse a heart of despair,
I can eat what I wish, go where I please,
Wear dark clothes, court
Nothingness.
Imagine the monstrosity of the world:
In silence is the puzzlement, the pain, the unendurable,
The rain, death by starvation,
Decapitation by mines
Emptiness.
THE BEGINNING OF WINTER
11-13-00
The terror grips my soul
As if I were a Cambodian
Running before
Polpot
I belong no place
All the places I have been
The lives I
have lived
The people I have loved
All have been destroyed
By
time and disaffection
The failing of my senses
The loss of my hands'
grip
The failure of my ability to love
The need to find
comfort
To find peace of mind
To find solitude
To find silence
My soul is dead and I linger on
Why?
So willing to go
God does
not choose me.
My flesh calls
My skin itches
No longer
smooth
Splotched
Excrescencies
Stings and pains
Tiredness when
I fold a sheet
Effort when I climb the stairs
I think it is true
We live for others
And if there are no
others
Why live for me?
It would be so much more
Comfortable dead.
TWO DAYS
11-19-00
Well, this is the first day that
I feel alive enough to write.
I write from Chautauqua, out of the snow,
the winter of my heart, the heart of despair.
I read about
Cambodia, I have spent days doing so,
now drifting into weeks. At
last,
in The Gates of Ivory, I have found someone,
a novel
character, who thinks as I do,
that, somehow, an alteration in our
society
was called for, was due, was a good
idea. No matter how
grotesquely wrong it's gone, at the heart
was a protest against the
horror of the ways things
are, and continue to be. Where not even
one five billionth of the world's population
enjoys the spoils
of it all. The rest are slaughtered daily
in spirit, and in body, by
greed, by crudity
of aspiration, by hacking away of the
environment,
by the nothingness to hope, the keeping busy-ness to
life
so that one might not live to or think about the second day.
BENEATH THE SNOWS OF WINTER
11-19-00
I am in
prison, the prison of my own life.
I am serving time, my sentence, my
doom
Surely, I can be as gallant, as motivated,
as courageous as
any political prisoner.
The food is terrible --
the awful
food.
I eat and eat.
My sleep is disturbed.
I sleep and
sleep.
My anguish is unrelenting.
I circumscribed my
character,
cultivated opinions,
adopted stances,
loved
and lost,
loved and won.
Others died.
Desires, plans
eliminated themselves.
I built the walls high and dense with
stone.
I am serving time, my sentence, my doom.
I am in the prison
of my own life
beneath the snows of winter.
SNOW
11-19-00
The skittering, the ticking
the
electrical air,
the softness,
the whiteness of night,
it couldn't
be rain...
Lights came on.
She couldn't sleep.
She squinted her
eyes,
peered into the dark.
She turned off the light
She sat by
the great window,
overlooking the great lake,
grey in the
night,
alone,
watching the drift of
what could have been
ash,
but it went on and on
until the whole bright world was
white.
LIKE DEHISCENT MILKWEED
11-19-00
As the milkweed
sheds its seed beneath the blizzard
White fluff in the window, white
fluff upon the snow
Small brown seeds, oval rimmed, difficult to
identify
On the light brown rug beneath the window turning
Black
into the night -- so is my trace upon the world
-- floating, feathered,
misty milkweed as snowflakes
In the black, headlighted sky, against a
blue-bowled
Daylight, a white cotton curtained cerulean
daylight
Light as ash, amazing as the cottonwood producing
Cotton so
far above the earth, so close to the eaves
Roofing the everlasting sky
watched through square
Windows, glass-paned, glossy, shimmering, a
shield
Boldly forced against the evanescent, enduring pain
Of
insubstantiality tattooed by a billion multi-pointed
Traceries verging
on meltdowns or mounting toward
Avalanche upon mounds of silky-seeding
milkweed,
Icy, indifferent to the preservation-mania of
humans.
RENEWAL
11-20-00
The day has come awake.
The
sickness has passed.
The snow is still falling.
The icicles are
three feet
long, possibly four
The computer hums louder
than the
drift of the ticking
snow. Every once-in-a-while,
overhead, a
giant stamps
his boot, the snow falls
a sonic boom from one
roof
to the other, like the thud
of a heart-beat,
terror-struck.
Blow your nose in the morning,
get rid of the
scabs of heat from
the night. We have trained ourselves
to different
discomforts than jumping
squirrels dislodging snow from the hemlock,
exploring the eaves in the night.
I, too, eat nuts in the winter,
harvested from the Safeway.
I'll walk a mile in my
boots
today, and back with toilet paper, coffee,
milk and meat to
keep the blood
red, the courage high as I face the winter
alone in
Chautauqua, accompanied
by puzzled thought of the
merciless
Khmer, already a quarter century
moldering, their skull
piles almost as high as
Tamberlaine's, their necessity, like the
Old
Testament, to murder every man, woman, child
and cow
after
their bombardment by Democratic America.
The will of the people
where the hardest worker
earns the least, and the greediest schemer
wins the world.
Winning the world, apparently, breeds genocide.
Not
winning the world breeds servitude.
Your choice.
Where does becoming
a monster begin?
In hope?
The day has come awake.
The
sickness has passed.
The snow is still falling.
The icicles are
three feet
long, possibly four
The computer hums louder
than the
drifts of
ticking snow.
SCARLET DEER
11-21-00
The drift of pure white snow, blistering heels, gutted carcasses of slain
deer...
scarlet-red, alizarin crimson, maroon, ruby, cherry,
cochineal, the redder reds,
the reddest red reds in a universe of
living blood are the gashed bellies in which
guts had pulsed, beat,
breathed beneath the living flesh of the fresh-killed deer.
There were thirteen of them stacked, not quite one on top of another,
random,
hollowed, one's tongue lolled out pink. One hung stretched down
from a very
high hook. Between turned-up nose and bent-down hoofs it
was nine feet tall,
naked -- many blood-bespattered pelts were
stacked to one side -- it hung as
mauves and pinks and bluish purples, pale poppy-reds of "meat" covered
with
fat, sinew, musculature, bone. I glimpsed the bones of the
spindly legs hidden
by the flaking rosy flush of the exposed suet. A
huge deer. Nobly racked, pale
in the shed-- certainly bigger than any
of the other fragile, without-their-guts,
scarlet-bellied young bucks lying flattened, one atop another. It was the
day of
the worst snowstorm Buffalo, the city, had ever known --
twenty-five inches in
twenty-four hours. Nothing moved. Traffic was
forbidden. Supermarkets, schools
libraries, etc. were identified
as public buildings. After my walk, I sat by the radio
needlepointing, thinking about the deer, wondering if children, adults,
ushered
into grocery stores could pick food and eat. I wondered if
slaughtered, gutted
deer whose spilling-scarlet, opened abdomens
flashing beauty, terror might yet
inflame or diminish the appetites of
those waiting icy, inprisoned by the snow.