On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you

You whom I hoped to reach by writ… you beyond the multicolored tangle of telephone wires, you with your white paper soul trampled in transit,

Ash falls on the roof of my house. I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems & between them,

The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams

Narrowing life because of the fear… narrowing it between the dust mote… narrowing the pink baby between the green-limbed monsters, & the drooling idiots,

I am the Sphinx. I am the woman buried in sand up to her chin. I am waiting for an archaeologist to unearth me,

You-the purest pleasure of my life, the split pit that proves the ripeness of the fruit,

After the teach-in we smeared the walls with our solidarity, looked left, & saw Marx among the angels,

Knowing our lives a drowse towards death (attended by dogs & children) how can it not matter

I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life

Love, death, sleeping with somebody else’s husband or wife-this is what poetry is about-Eskimo, Aztec,

The women he has had are all faces without eyes. He has entered them blind as a cut worm. He has swum their oceans

(a flip through BRIDE’s) The silver spoons were warbling their absurd musical names when, drawing back

She leaps into the alien heart of the passerby, the drunk, the girl who spouts Freudian talk over Szechuan food. She is part herself,

On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you