#Americans #Jews #Women
Parachuting down through clouds shaped like whales & sharks, dolphins & penguins, pelicans & gulls,
The first snow of the year & you lying between my breasts in my husband’s house & the snow gently rising in my… like guilt,
In the glass-bottomed boat of our lives, we putter along gazing at the other world under the sea– that world of flickering
All the boring tedious young men with dead eyes & dirty hair .… all the mad young men who hate the… all the squalling baby boys . . . have grown up
Your slit so like mine: the woman of it, the warm womanwide of thigh, & the comfort of it– knowing your nipples like mine,
This constant ache is my leg’s message to me. ‘Hello. Hello. Hello. You’re getting there,' it says, ‘step by step.’
Next birthday I am thirty-six, & formed (for all intents & purposes) in tooth & claw.
I am the Sphinx. I am the woman buried in sand up to her chin. I am waiting for an archaeologist to unearth me,
center The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. Not with a leather whip,
Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run
Cement up to the neck & my head packed with unsaid words. A gullet full of pebbles, a mouth
She leaps into the alien heart of the passerby, the drunk, the girl who spouts Freudian talk over Szechuan food. She is part herself,
Already six years past your age! The steps in Rome, the house near Hampstead Heath, & all your fears that you might cease to be
Because he dreams of seeding the w… his eyes bite She looks He looks away He is snow-blind from staring at her breasts
I want to understand the steep thi… that climbs ladders in your throat… I can’t make sense of you. Everywhere I look you’re there— a vast landmark, a volcano