(b. 1923)
Our Bodies
Our bodies, still young under
the engraved anxiety of our
faces, and innocently
more expressive than faces:
nipples, navel, and pubic hair
make anyway a
sort of face: or taking
the rounded shadows at
breast, buttock, balls,
the plump of my belly, the
hollow of your
groin, as a constellation,
how it leans from earth to
dawn in a gesture of
play and
wise compassion—
nothing like this
comes to pass
in eyes or wistful
mouths.
I have
a line or groove I love
runs down
my body from breastbone
to waist. It speaks of
eagerness, of
distance.
Your long back,
the sand color and
how the bones show, say
what sky after sunset
almost white
over a deep woods to which
rooks are homing, says.
§
Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway
to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,
are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue
but meant for music?
Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?
Perhaps both.
Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,
knows it’s a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they’d pass her in silence:
so it’s not only to say she’s
a warm hole. It’s a word
in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down
in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can’t,
it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors
spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly
had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding
keeps on translating:
‘Life after life after life goes by
without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.’
§