Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

The Butcher’s Wife

1

Once, my braids swung heavy as ropes.

Men feared them like the gallows.

Night fell

When I combed them out.

No one could see me in the dark.

Then I stood still

Too long and the braids took root.

I wept, so helpless.

The braids tapped deep and flourished.

A man came by with an ox on his shoulders.

He yoked it to my apron

And pulled me from the ground.

From that time on I wound the braids around my head

So that my arms would be free to tend him.

2

He could lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth.

In a contest, he’d press a whole hog, a side of beef.

He loved his highballs, his herring, and the attentions of women.

He died pounding his chest with no last word for anyone.

The gin vessels in his face broke and darkened. I traced them

Far from that room into Bremen on the Sea.

The narrow streets twisted down to the piers.

And far off, in the black, rocking water, the lights of trawlers

Beckoned, like the heart’s uncertain signals,

Faint, and final.

3

Of course I planted a great, full bush of roses on his grave.

Who else would give the butcher roses but his wife?

Each summer, I am reminded of the heart surging from his vest,

Mocking all the high stern angels

By pounding for their spread skirts.

The flowers unfurl, offering themselves,

And I hear his heart pound on the earth like a great fist,

Demanding another round of the best wine in the house.

Another round, he cries, and another round all summer long,

Until the whole damn world reels toward winter drunk.

The Carmelites

They’re women, not like me but like the sun

burning cold on a winter afternoon,

audacious brilliance from a severe height,

living in the center as the town revolves

around them in a mess. Of course

we want to know what gives behind their fence,

behind the shades, the yellow brick

convent huge in the black green pines.

We pass it, every one of us, on rounds

we make our living at. There’s one

I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,

her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,

and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.

I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,

scarred like the moon in her observance,

shaved and bound and bandaged

in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,

muttering for courage at the very hour

cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto

turns to me with urgency and power.

Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue

smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,

and the buried structure shows,

the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,

freeze to acid in the strange heart.

The Death of Potchikoo

Once there were three stones sitting in a patch of soft slough mud. Each of these stones had the smooth round shape of a woman’s breast, but no one had ever noticed this — that is, not until Old Man Potchikoo walked through the woods. He was the type who always noticed this kind of thing. As soon as he saw the three stones, Potchikoo sat down on a small bank of grass to enjoy what he saw.

He was not really much of a connoisseur, the old man. He just knew what he liked when he saw it. The three stones were light brown in color, delicately veined, and so smooth that they almost looked slippery. Old Man Potchikoo began to wonder if they really were slippery, and then he thought of touching them.

They were in the middle of the soft slough mud, so the old man took his boots and socks off. Then he thought of his wife Josette and what she would say if he came home with mud on his clothes. He took off his shirt and pants. He never wore undershorts. Wading toward those stones, he was as naked as them.

He had to kneel in the mud to touch the stones, and when he did this he sank to his thighs. But oh, when he touched the stones, he found that they were bigger than they looked from the shore and so shiny, so slippery. His hands polished them, and polished them some more, and before he knew it, that Potchikoo was making love to the slough.

Years passed by. The Potchikoos got older and more frail. One day Josette went into town, and as he always did as soon as she was out of sight, Potchikoo sat down on his front steps to do nothing.

As he sat there, he saw three women walk very slowly out of the woods. They walked across the field and then walked slowly toward him. As they drew near, Potchikoo saw that they were just his kind of women. They were large, their hair was black and very long, and because they wore low-cut blouses, he could see that their breasts were beautiful — light brown, delicately veined, and so smooth they looked slippery.

“We are your daughters,” they said, standing before him. “We are from the slough.”

A faint memory stirred in Potchikoo as he looked at their breasts, and he smiled.

“Oh my daughters,” he said to them. “Yes I remember you. Come sit on your daddy’s lap and get acquainted.”

The daughters moved slowly toward Potchikoo. As he saw their skin up close, he marveled at how fine it was, smooth as polished stone. The first daughter sank upon his knee and clasped her arms around him. She was so heavy that the old man couldn’t move. Then the others sank upon him, blocking away the sun with their massive bodies. The old man’s head began to swim and yellow stars turned in his skull. He hardly knew it when all three daughters laid their heads dreamily against his chest. They were cold, and so heavy that his ribs snapped apart like little dry twigs.

The Fence

Then one day the gray rags vanish

and the sweet wind rattles her sash.

Her secrets bloom hot. I’m wild for everything.

My body is a golden armor around my unborn child’s body,

and I’ll die happy, here on the ground.

I bend to the mixture of dirt, chopped hay,

grindings of coffee from our dark winter breakfasts.

I spoon the rich substance around the acid-loving shrubs.

I tear down last year’s drunken vines,

pull the black rug off the bed of asparagus

and lie there, knowing by June I’ll push the baby out

as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon.

I see the first leaf already, the veined tongue

rigid between the thighs of the runner beans.

I know how the shoot will complicate itself

as roots fill the trench.

Here is the link fence, the stem doubling toward it,

and something I’ve never witnessed.

One moment the young plant trembles on its stalk.

The next, it has already gripped the wire.

Now it will continue to climb, dragging rude blossoms

to the other side

until in summer fruit like green scimitars,

the frieze of vines, and then the small body

spread before me in need

drinking light from the shifting wall of my body,

and the fingers, tiny stems wavering to mine,

flexing for the ascent.

The Lefavor Girls

All autumn, black plums

split and dropped from the boughs.

We gathered the sweetness

and sealed it in jars,

loading the cupboards and cellar.

At night we went under the bedclothes, laden

beyond what the arms were meant to carry alone,

and we dreamed that with our shirts off

in the quarry, the cool water

came under to bear us away.

That season our sleep grew around us

as if from the walls

a dense snow fell and formed

other bodies, and the voices

of men who melted into us,

and children who drifted, lost, looking for home.

After the long rains, the land gone bare,

we walked out again to the windbreaks.

White crown of the plum trees

were filling the purple throats of the iris.

We lay in the grass,

the bees drinking in tongues,

and already the brittle hum of the locust

in the red wheat, growing.

Again, the year come full circle, the men

came knocking in the fields,

headfuls of blackened seeds,

and the husking, scorched mountains of sunflowers.

We went closed, still golden, among the harvesters.

Shifting the load from arm to arm,

they drove us into town.

We shook out our dresses and hair, oh then

There was abundance come down

in the face of the coming year.

We held ourselves into

the wind, our bodies

broke open, and the snow began falling.

It fell until the world was filled up, and filled again,

until it rose past all the limits we could have known.