in seashell ear
Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:
“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.
Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.
I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.
And, finding, be what no one else can be.
I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,
For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair
No country far enough to hide your loss.
I circumnavigate each cell in you
Your merest molecule is right and true.
Look there for destinies indelible and fine
And rare.
Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;
Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.
In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew
Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.
No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide
The self that you will be if faith abide.
What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.
Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”
Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.
What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.
I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives
Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;
I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.
I keep their old loves here, I am the friend
Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.
Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep
In touch with me, they telephone to weep
On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.
Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.
I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;
Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.
What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands
The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?
Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,
Why say hello to those young bags of bones?
Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead
Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—
Why should I dine this mortuary gang,
Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?
Because, because, well now, again because—
Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,
And tend to see my face in these I dine
To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.
Oh, women often cry they were sore used
But these boy/men were much the same abused;
If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile
Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.
What do these lovers hope to gain from me?
An echo of her flesh now found at tea,
The sounding of her voice but dimly heard
Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd
In maze of old genetics yet there kept,
Some wakening of love that now is slept?
An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,
A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?
They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,
But something in my laugh now gives them cause
To order more and more and deeply drink,
Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.
Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,
And if the echo pleases them, what blame?
Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,
And round about his smile I saw the fey
Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year
Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.
So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,
Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,
A girl before her time waits to commence—
Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!
So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;
But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!
Thrown out of Eden
Now we headlong humans
Sinners sinned against
Return.
Tossed from the central sun
We with our own concentric fires
Blaze and burn.
Once at the hub of wakening
And vast starwheel,
For centuries long-lost, and made to feel
Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,
Driven forth to grassless gardens,
Dead and desert sea,
We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler
Galileo Galilei
Whose short-sight probing light-years
Upped and said:
The Hub’s not here!
So shot man through the head
And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,
Snugged shut our souls,
Chopped short our reach,
Entombed our living heart.
But now we bastard sons of time
Pronounce ourselves anew
And strike fire-hammer blows
To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.
Our rocket selfhood grows
To give dull facts a shake, break data down
To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;
But more! reach up and strike
And claim from Heaven
The Garden we were shunted from,
For now, space-driven
We fit, fix, force and fuse,
Re-hub the systems vast
Respoke starwheel