The cat's clean careful mouth

by Carolyn Kizer

The Intruder

My mother -- preferring the strange to the tame:

Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,

Frog's belly distended with finny young,

Leave-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool.

Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves,

Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all

Wild and natural! -- flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she

Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,

And held the little horror to the mirror, where

He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off.

Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing

Came clattering down like a small black shutter.

Still tranquil, she began, "It's rather sweet . . . ."
The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint

In the caught eyes. Then we saw,

And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow,

Nested within the wing-pits, cosily sucked and snoozed.

The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,

Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth

Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor

Remained, of all my mother's tender, wounding passion

For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life

Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,

Whose denizens can turn upon the world

With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,

To sting or soil benevolence, alien

As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.

She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,

She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

Summer near the River

I have carried my pillow to the windowsill

And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it, 

But no breeze stirs the tepid morning.

Only I stir. . . . Come, tease me a little!

With such cold passion, so little teasing play,

How long can we endure our life together?

No use.  I put on your long dressing-gown;

The untied sash trails over the dusty floor/

I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror

And pluck my eyebrows.

I don't care if the robe slides open

Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh.

I can accuse that non-existent breeze. . . .   

I am as monogamous as the North Star,

But I don't want you to know it.  You'd only take advantage.

While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.

All right. Sleep! The cat means more to you than I.

I can rouse you, but then you swagger out.

I glimpse you from the window, striding towards the river.

When you return, reeking of fish and beer,

There is salt dew in your hair.  Where have you been?

Your clothes weren't that wrinkled hours ago, when you left.

You couldn't have loved someone else, after loving me!

I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window.

Later, when you hold me in your arms

It seems, for a moments, the river ceases flowing.

                                                                                     Themes from the Tzu Yeh Songs and  

                                                                                     the Mo-ch'ou Songs.

  

From Carolyn Kizer, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984). 

The Moose

by Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats 
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts.  The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies 
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering.  Gone.
The Tantramar marshes 
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles 
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in 
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night.  Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter 
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores.  Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative.  "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked 
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of 
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

Counting the red stars

          by Sylvia Plath

The Colossus

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, blued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull plates and clear

The balc, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.

Sow

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed

His great sow:

Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way

He kept the sow -- impounded from public stare,

Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commende dus to a tour

Through his lantern-lit maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling

With a penny slot

For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,

About to be

Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;

Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,

Mire-smirched, blowxy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise --

Bloar tun of milk

On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk

To halt for a swig at the pink teats.  No.  This vast

Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,

Fat-rutted eyes

Dream-filmed.  What a vision of ancient hoghood must

Thus wholly engross

The great grandam! -- our marvel blazoned a knight,

Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat

By a grisly-bristled

Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat

But our farmer whistled,

then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,

And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,

Slowly, grunt

On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument

Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want

Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,

Proceeded to swill

The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.

From Sylvia Plath, The Colossus (1957). 

  

 

Mrs. Dalloway

                                                         by Virginia Woolf.

         The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside he, began snoring.  In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of thos e spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods make of sky and branches.  The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

        By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation.  Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women.  But if he can conceive of her, then in some sort she exists, he things, and advancing down the path with he eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them with womanhood; sees with amazement how grave they become' how majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension, absolution, and then flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect with a wild carouse.

         Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the     solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or rise to the survace like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

          Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution.  So he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest.

         Such are the visions.  The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world.  So, as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, know to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihilation.

          Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to embrace.  She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.

           "There is nothing more to-night, sir?"

           But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?

Harcourt edition, pp. 56 - 58.