AMERICAN DRIVING Looked up yesterday, saw I was the only woman around, Strapped in my maroon Volvo Station, drifting down At fifty-five miles per hour. Earth's landscape braced, spun, Myself headed to interior, Slowly round a wintry sun. Today, in caucasian countryside, I race trees like heads bristling With beauty's subtle shadowed light, Topple hilly faces. Still, In Aladdin's garden weightless hemlocks and rosy tone, I float on my magic wagon. want to pull, dizzily, ito a break-down lane, to stop nd look at life. The car keeps moving, snarls in its own top rmd. My mother's hand is reaching From fat autumn clouds. "Where Are you going? Who are you?" She moans through windowed glare. But I drive on, going too Fast. If I don't make an error Or turn to a dead-end narrow Road, I drive forever. Or, at least, until tomorrow.	IN LEARNING WE SUFFER DEATH In learning we suffer death: the old man, Rising hobbling from pit to crossroads, Defies all signs of pure intention. "Nothing can save you!~' he cries, and we Pull from his influence. It was no dream For young giris, but I was twenty-four. Mornings I woke to the light of meaning, Sprinted across railroad tracks, shortcut To the glassy campus, brittle, gifted By Usden, Schwartz, Goldberg, and Neumann, Old men tottering in high places; Saw narrow faces, mean November slits Festering among tangerine maples, Acid browns and spots in ashy birches Pulling away in zero weather. My old teacher cried, "Before life, death!" And I read the books, enduring 'The mundane madness," drift of a 'ontinent toward green-berried winter.
AN IMMIGRANT LOOKS AT  WHITMAN Something wonderful and different Might turn to memorialize The wide water of his death. Second death. There are earthquakes Daily. Bombs go off and little -Known shop-girls are blown away, Chin off, legs off at the knee. The m~or prophets gazing upwards Saw celestial maze, dark redoubts, Not the saw-whet owl or long Purples deep in marshes. But, for you, bring golden pheasant, Goldenrod, my Asia, my America. I flsh in the Great Lakes inwards, Forsaking gods for leeches and wild pansy.	WALDEN Dead-tired. mid-week, four a.m., I remember the funny man Saluting the dawn at Walden. Power of awakening, he saw It in leaf pushing out of wood, Light exhaling vapour, Bird-note, squirrel-hoard, Hunch, aH purposive rhythms, New England house. Not meaning geography -Signifying the round liquid Experience, unmiraculous -Thoreau awaking in Walden.
FAT EVE AT THE CIRCUS Avoiding school-children's eyes They surge continentally. Desire's Overpowered, struck them dumb As deer, So pacing, more pufl>d than SUn) Of custards. they swell, open mouths Drenched in sherberts. South, Their bellies rise in ranges, cattle Fattening before frost and settled For winter's ruminating feed. These fat women do not bleed. Their skins are creamy with hunger. Hold in memories - wheat, butter, Breasts heaped with heliotrope Veins, nipples like pulsars roped, Wheeling, skulls chilled warehouses Loaded with pies and pizzas. They offer thighs to spectators, Not to be filled with cornucopia. We put them in circuses For pinching, to extend our neuroses. We have bought nudity pressed As ripe apple branches. But where gentleness Creases cheeks, neither bird nor Horse, this flesh is pure as moist snow. In their breath oceans boom gorgeous excess. We would have to dream these goddesses, Freaks of American harvests: gestured Plenty to our own carnival nature.	SLOW DRIVING The small grey car was slowing traffic -A careful soul with conserving tread Clocking the winding road at dead Forty miles per hour. Behind, quick On the roar, the line of metal Selves shifted, pressed close as cattle In slow stampeding. And I moved Further down the route, going somewhere Impatiently in quiescent air, Watching a little car, like love, Cautious and thrifty, check impulse To race time and green trees. Stranded hulls Of autos rusted by the narrow road. We were all stuck behind the one slow Moving mile by mile up the low Incline, while everywhere the broad Slopes opened beside. Till, the lane widening, Out of tangled wood we saw blue wing Whirled into light, a sudden glimmering Above smoking engines of slow driving.
ORDER OF MUSIC Au things left alone tend to disorder: Entropy. Only music, gathering, swells To round, specific in the hearer. By edge of woods and water, wells Of clouded light, the harmony of days Rises, sinks. Confirm this as you tread on Ground, watching the breezes turn. Gaze Centres sound, brings gravely through the lawn Motion and stir. Where grasses flower, Bees bunow in blossom, words, fallen As wind-seeds, bear sunwards in order Of music, untended, mutely born.	PORTRAIT OFA HLM-MAKER (Found in a Fellini interview with Yevgeny Yevtushenko)   The ideal place is an empty studio. I would like to have been born Many years ago, to work with clowns And acrobats. One needs constantly To be ready to change direction. One must know how to devote oneself Totally to the thing being born. No one remembers where the entrance Or exit is. I do not deceive; I do not act complacent. The temptation Is strong to say the future is over.
FOUR HAIKU Fresh pines in early Spring, shadows liqujescent where paired mourning doves brood. Giant bamboos shift. A green and yellow moment snags on thorny weight. Knitting needles click, clack. White knuckles ravel wool, tug and fray, all slack. Ice creaks on water. Wrenched by flurries, cold burns sharp as any weather.	RESOLUTION I stole it from a stranger in a West Side kitchen, broke it from another's potted translucence. We were meeting musicians crashing for the night, French horn, harpsichordist, hovering acquaintances. The jewel-bearing bush was not theirs yet I hid the theft, torn leaf, in a ragged winter pocket. I didn't hold my breath that it would thrive. What a life it's had -fungied, sickly. At forty I'm divesting myself of guilt. I'm giving away straggly wandering jew, ivied swede, spiders behind drawn curtains, all for which there isn't enough of me to care, all needs without reason. A poor woman must live in her poverty, not share it with a shrivelled family. I'm through with measuring water, cup after cup, vinegar and salt, for unlovingness. Finally abandoning it is the past we must come to meet. iade I shall keep for the tough surprise of memory from strangers.
ANNA'S FAITH   A foot of fresh snow arrived today, a foot of white with no grey or yellow in it. You would have been eighty today. Other birthdays rejoice this morning. Some years brought blue crocus, fisted hyacinths, narcissi early forming. Today brought snow you would have murmured at. Your home was musty, clean, smelling of soap chips. like you after years of rinsing. Cathohc, bent small and propped on pillows, a baby labouring for breath. you viewed the park's grey lichen without a shadow of irony. pressing your childless palm. light as a page. on my sleeve. One would want to pretend for you more love than one had; to be good outside one's self, condescension at your pliant faith in weak tea and crochet squares muted through your dying to something else, perhaps. better; for once, late in the evening, kissing the papery cheek goodbye. true.	THE STRONG Outside new snow covers old ice. Freeze, thaw, freeze. An afternoon sun is helpless against cyclical power. A rhododendron shines in its casing of water dripping petals flowering overnight to return to earth. Metamorphic morning. Cold changes our step, sharpens our mstinct for tragedy, so we smell out meaning in the frostbitten night like those winking scattered stars pinned to a mythos, white against black, fire against numbness; self-forgetting for the moment freeze, thaw, freeze. Warm earth under dead snow waits for a further fall, the rest which will not stay for a single night.
HARDWOOD Enormities when you've lived long enough with them shrink to banal. Oh then beware before you believe that wrong is the way things go, big terrors are small events, and faithless and alone are sun and soil. The plant that grows there will flourish green, thick. It will be unbending, not blighted or weedy. Hardwood, ancient, under its heavy shade the ground will be bare. Inedible fruits drop from its branches. We are meant to be sheltered domestic orchards for human habitation, our flesh should be pounded, our hearts eaten. We should not know horror or strength but nourish each other like vines from a mother root. We should want cultivation, not flourish unattended, ironwood, wild.	BESIDE A small miracle: whirlwinds of leaves gusting in sprays beside aluminium -sided Victorians. Approaching closer I see a leaffilower in precise configurations combing the green November lawn. What has this man's bliss, raising the wind, grooming his life, beside a foreign death? Row accountable small luxuries, white painted porch beside the ceaseless highway of sleekly possessed autos? The dying form a shopping list, Manila, El Salvador, Ethiopia. Their names repulse music. In another life they may have been resorts for satyrs. How does a leafriower raising its minor miracle account for fly-gorged corpses or rattle of bones held in skins? The answer stinks as I gun past the sputtering machine, haze of monoxide like haze in mind. This is why my stuffed sofa mocks me in its foreign language, that I reside, plenty.swollen, beside the rising tide.
AT FORTY the door behind beckons more than the country ahead the idea of bed is as pleasing as bed itself it's become a habit to say no to suffering we ve given it a bad name and don't worry we may be missing the point of life we've entertained so many points a certain boredom sets in we can't see the point of making a point anything will suffice if it is all we have reduced to that that will also seem sufficient after the dazed twenties rush through thirties forty is plain sensible steady driving before fatigue sets in and tremors of homecoming thrum on the wheel.	THE WINDSCREEN'S SPECKLED VIEW It is the usual once again. We have rehearsed it a dozen times or more. Still we are never prepared for the real thing, for the real mother to really die, for some real figure in our real lives no matter how far, how lost, how never ours, to slip away before we'd known we'd never known them. Reflections of losses: twice absences. A mute violence with no mark unless we cut ourselves, no hurt except in our shamefaced frenzy: echo of a cry never made: grief for a woman who was once our mother. II Fifteen year later, l am returning to watch you die. Now I am the woman wailing for your event, coming with only what I can afford - snaps of your grandson, my sharp unhappy face to share the air at point zero. No missionary, I offer no after-life - bare fact of family being your only blessing. Only the mind's rich ironies persist in relevance, through betrayals, non sequitors, repeated nothings. So, cradled in Business' blue-checked upholstery, sun-dashed American jagged land below, I feel my life driven on these unnatural winds, and feel my time powered to the pitch in this flight from life to death, from your dying to my release on the borders of my mortality. III Drawing nearer to you, rounding the figure, yet I am losing the race. You are receding into fiction so fast: a blurry snap of a fidgety child, a succession of multiple distortions. Is reallty the vibrations between wings, past action and present being, the woman there and this woman here? I imagine you breathing still, pallor of suspension between resisted life, resisted death while, uplifted on metal struts, I fly in the face of your transfiguration. IV Soon to be a ghost you tilt, dragging oxygen mask i-v wires, on the para-zone. Great clanging, tumults charge into my eyes. I have never loved you enough, resenting your life's mistakes -weedy self4ove, blooming late, rotting into religion, faked salvation; suspecting you have left them all to me. Opened, unblinking, these brain scans lull, scarcely hover, like wings beaten before settling. You are changing into the sign of your defeat, while I am amazed by tears, ungrateful even for this gift. V The windscreen's speckled view -black, oily water quivering soundlessly under dull october clouds; a wide low roof, faintly Japanese. No one in sight at 3 p.m. Workmen, joggers, mothers and children, lovers vanished from the slippery surface into which chewing gum wads, candy wrappers, cigarette butts have disappeared. From the left open window green-headed mallards kick greedily in rich brown splashes. Last winter's black stray sniffs the garbage pails. No flies swarm in this mild air. Yellow face in sideview mirror looks at herself between deaths - oil of fatigue smeared clumsily on a face of blown autumn: one would think she is bored of the company she keeps -turgid nineteenth century characters so long unburied they have dried in the creases of her eyelids. But a puff of crematorium smoke arouses her, oily, brief in the noon tropics: mother, smoking, in final blaze. And only her charred fragments -large shards of skull, long leg bones - were identifiable. These asiatic reveries disturb some wavering sense: not like those vigorous ducks paddling for dear life, but as apparitions, crossing between unwashed windscreen and some suburban park.