Winter Trees

It is a terrible thing To be so open: it is as if my heart Put on a face and walked into the world.

Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness. I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, Neither woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack. I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well. And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue. The body is resourceful.

I am the center of an atrocity.

Gee baby, you are rare.

It is the exception that interests the devil.

Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary. O colour of distance and forgetfulness!

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ, And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare. I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural. I have tried to be blind in love, like other women, Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one, Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another. I did not look. But still the face was there.

Again, this is a death. Is it the air, The particles of destruction I suck up? Am I a pulse That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel? Is this my lover then? This death, this death?

O vase of acid, It is love you are full of.

O You who eat People like light rays, leave This one Mirror safe, unredeemed By the dove's annihilation, The glory The power, the glory.

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history. Full of wings, otherworldliness. In this, they are Ledas. O mother of leaves and sweetness Who are these pietas? The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but chasing nothing.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know. There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness. I am so vulnerable suddenly. I am a wound walking out of hospital. I am a wound they are letting go. I leave my health behind. I leave someone Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go. (Three Women)

I do not will him to be exceptional. It is the exception that interests the devil.

I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat! There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it, That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, Endlessly proceed—and the cold angels, the abstractions. I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels, And the man I work for laughed: 'Have you seen something awful? You are so white, suddenly.' And I said nothing.