This Summer

To think that she was a she deer all along, who lay in the grass

To think that Bernard's cat lies next to a rolling sprinkler watching water

To think that Bernard's cat loves water

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think that

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think that Bernard died and came back the same week that Katharine Hepburn died and did not come back

To think that she did not

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think this again and again

To eat too many organic chocolate squares the week that Bernard died and came back

To watch the cat watching water that week

To save the newspaper article about Katharine Hepburn but to not read it

To take this article to Bernard in the hospital, who saved it for me

To still not read it

To have organic chocolate squares become the bulk of my diet

To not be able to write

To not be able to write

To think Bernard died and came back

To want to save Bernard

To wonder what his experience was like

To stroke his head and feet

To try to make Bernard come back

To feel imbued with power to make him come back

To feel fatigue with such power

To wonder where the heart center is in the feet

To think that maybe I could make Bernard come back, if I knew where the heart center was in the feet

To search for the heart center in the feet instead of the chest

To feel this is silly but to do it anyway

To learn that no one knows where the heart center is, really, in the feet

To learn this from a massage therapist who told me I would give up writing for love

To feel depressed over that statement

To feel depressed over statements

To eat too many squares of organic chocolate

To not be able to write

To understand that statements state nothing and are themselves depressed statements

To feel that if one loves another enough, one can make another come back

To feel fatigued with the power to make another come back

To wonder what his experience is like, to have died and come back

To feel I could make Bernard come back, as if he was another

To feel guilty about depressed statements that state nothing

To be depressed about the guilt

To write about that, for lack of writing

To know this occurred: that I had the power to bring another back

To feel shrunken such power

To be told too many times that I have responsibility

To feel fatigued, shrunken

To feel I am a void, the week Bernard died and came back

To forget about Katharine Hepburn, except that I did not read the article

To want to go away, but nowhere

To feel oneself rolled up and down and shrunken, no image,

To feel only surfaces of interior

To feel oneself showing void, as if a picture

To feel no crisis in the void or picture

To feel the void gives an image that is nothing

To not be able to write

To feel that myths are nothing but writing, giving no picture

To watch the cat watch water

To have that become a picture

To watch the sky

To watch the cat walk into the garden and roll over the catnip

To watch the cat destroy the catnip

To feel a little sad about that

To feel that the myth of Sisyphus might have given Bernard a heart attack

To know that that is not "really" "reality" but to feel the guilt

To realize that the heart is "really" not writing

To know that what is "really" is perceived through pictures

To make myths about pictures that are graphs of the heart that is not "reality" "really"

To think what "really" is, is a misnomer for an image

To think we think it's "really" "reality" when we see charts and graphs of the heart

To see Bernard's graph of the heart in the hospital's "reality"

To know the heart is a muscle, not unlike the triceps that work the garden

To be disturbed about the fate of the catnip, because I planted it from tiny seeds

To know I planted the seeds to grow into catnip for the pleasure of cats

To watch my cat roll on top of the catnip with pleasure and trepidation

To watch my cat slink away in euphoria and grief

To feel euphoria and grief

To eat my own garden this year like a cannibal

To eat puny stalks of red chard that survived the deer and Sisyphus's great rolling rock

To pick a Tiny Tom tomato and know that may be all this summer

To settle for small returns this summer

To wonder if Sisyphus will pull out of his shell of experience like a rock

To know my experience and that of Sisyphus is different

To feel hurt by that difference and yet interested

To see the she deer lying in the green grass with her spotted baby

To realize I am no different from the newswriter from Texas in the Santa Fe basement a quarter of a century ago who thought I was a fat girl pasting proofs in the newsroom when I was eight months pregnant

To know I was not pregnant with a foal but with Paul

To know that identification is a tricky process but to enjoy it anyway

To know that identification with either animal or human creature is sentimental and unnatural

To know it is natural at the same time and to not feel this as contradiction

To not be interested in ideas about the difference between animal or human creatures

To not be interested in ideas but in something else, neither animal nor creature

To want to spend a night in a tent

To feel clipped of my intent, this summer

(Kate Simpkins writes)

By virtue of hour hands, I move.
Isn't that enough?
May you see what I see, and release such a song from your body:

At the base near the mouth of the ocean,
the delphenium blooms in her airy complaint,
"The sun is too strong," she says.
I answer, "My lover is not strong enough."

And the Iris makes her daily prediction
in the tongue; you want to speak,
"He will leave you, pass from the skin of air
to the muscle of earth, and you will long
for the precipice again."

While you talk about wanting to talk,
a language rolls through me.

-- The Rock Rolls Through Me

(Aliki Barnstone writes)

How humid it is today, the sparrows darting
in and out of tall trees.
Why can't I love you as I love what we made?

The heaviness of hands, the lightness of hands.

I overlook the garden I shared creating.
Oriental lilies, ferns, cosmos and daisies revel in moisture;
hostas spread wide wings over black earth;
vegetables wait for harvest.

The cardinal's whistle sears the sky.

But heat and wetness, so beneficial to plants,
are restraining hands on my head.
Heavy hands, light hands.

Herbs and roses scent the air.

I love you is a spell cast by poems, TV, radio songs,
by summer and its trance of bounty: long days of light
and sleeplessness,

the spreading verdure of the land,
the sky glazing green before unleashing storm,
tornadoes, rivers flooding their banks,

agistated dreams, desire.

The heaviness of hands, the lightness of hands.

Summer in the earth and in the sky acts out its abundance
while I speak out scarcity:
I'll leave you with the hindsight
of the blankness on the other side of plenty,

vast blank fields of snow --

all the possibilities following this
blank page.

---"A Humid Summer Day," from Madly In Love

(The Wife of Sisyphus; or, When Women Are the Enigma Because Men Forgot to Write Them)

"A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwist my breasts"
-- Song of Songs

From the puff and air, she rose in him

That night, following instructions (for once),
she would not leave him
but dragged him to her sunny lair
where, shifty as Sisyphus, who hated him -- Hades, who, like her, demanded all of him, skin, teeth, and hair --
she abounded in him, his bodily
existence, kissed him
lips of thyme, rosemary, lavender spilling out
all over her hills, myrrh-drenched breasts

Her rival friend, Persephone,
had the nerve to have her hair done
that day she reportedly showed anyway
to dance at the neighborhood barbecue
because there was hot meat.
Rich folks spread like overfed cattle
over luxurious hills Matisse would paint
taunting the living who dread
to leave a tired man for dead!
Thanatos thriving, his investment stocks rising out of
Pluto's pit, writhing snakes, made of him such a beloved
drunk with strength and glory
his generous arms full of geraniums and chysthathemums
parachuting from stars
to fall even farther than
cars twisted along the roadside
a little accident
just because they broke a mirror
and drove for seven years
from the village of Pierre Feu all the way to Bormes
down where down was desert blending with kilometers of cicadas and plantain, the loud
wisp that can't
resist
flotation into space

it's the enigma that brings
blood
back
nerves
to your
hot
face

Following instructions (for once),
she refused to kill Sisyphus's slave woman.
She refused to rub his waxy white limbs, preferring bee-balm Coppertone to embalmment.
She refused to pay the priest for the great sung oration.
She even refused to freeze his dismembered head and send it UPS to the pre-paid tank.
She didn't believe in futures
so let his body rot
to love and feed on a high stretcher
on a ridge somewhere along the Great Divide
between Utah and Wyoming
or Nevada, a vista
they called it, the Great Basin, where she bathed him
in bright sand, brought him new slippers of crossed golden leather
to walk the sands, fed his fragile body
berries from the Blackberry Trail, of sand
from her own teeth

She would not leave him
nor let the vultures hem and peck

But she would leave herself

(A Language for Sisyphus )

How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
-- The Earth speaking to Prometheus
in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound"


For now we are at a distance
from the Earth we hear
but no one has a language
A language? a mirror -- Sisyphus, our head spins
you open your eyes
in fear of the wisp of this instant
so sensual it steals
blood, your naked collar bone
and chest of hair puckers -- the word is "pink"
I hear it from another
description of your passion
to hold no ambition -- to try to go
outside the place where language's disruption
forces no eruption exploding, no channel of excavation
sense, this pink mirror an afterthought
borrowed from the epistemological grid
you slid into fantasy like grammar
whose skeleton frame washes over
a metaphor that might link
joint by joint by tendon by
wired finger, hand -- such energetic hold
folded over the mold of
the trochees and dactyls of an older
order -- you let go. Arriving smoothly, I am jealous of your ripples
you who make this journey into the
wasteland of partials so dreamy
that this novel screen -- thus, we fly
losing the drama, a second half
the delimma of a memory of dashes
smashes your great spectacle
gone in the flash
that your eyelashes bat
back. "I am still here"

in the silence of Panthea and Ione at the feet of the blistering mountainside
in the soil of the Earth of the raging purple Midi
in the wave of the broken heart beat
in the craftiness of the yellow life raft
we joked about
floating in the wake

For what? -- an unfettered freedom?
to turn red flames into blue stones,
to turn your mainsail over the curve through the Straits of Gibraltar
and skate again across the Mediterranean, where your kin
make surfaces of shadows
wishing to be Plato being Damned
in the joy of the misunderstood
at the city gate

So we wait "among the flowery glades"
the baby hostas spears appear
in the year of the garden so late
this season of scorched delphiniums
and a rain that saturates
You, naked in "thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees"
I watch you cut them down and drag
sticks in dread of dialogue
with the dead

I am in dread of time which is tragedy
however I might be useful -- but such desire is not solace
everlasting

As if my shadow, too, is long and bold, that it will absorb me in its summer stretch and plume

As if there is little difference between light and day, black and white, enhancing, becoming, this new shadow play

As if Lamb's Ears in the garden soil hear special instruments of sound, so that they interpret grief as desire and desire as a folding blossom so urgently upon entering the earth

As if there is little difference between grief and desire and this love

As if the earth of desire could swallow Sisyphus, who so loved the earth's surfaces

As if a myth could make native a narrative for my lover Sisyphus, who enters earth's shadows only to return

As if the Mediterranean of an ancient universe slips new surface under feet, floods blue where there was rock, loose upon shadow, this love over ground, this life, bliss

(Walter Hess writes:)

A sun, mid morning high, my shadow long and sliding runs over ruts.
Over the dirt land, a warm slow amble home.

Against the hiss of sixteen wheelers on the highway
down below, the red bellied warble of a bird's song.

Against a stuttering motorcycle, the lilac odors
from a humming breeze.

Wind waves the long and bowed extensions
of the hemlock branches on the slope above to waltzing.

A slow loping caterpillar bumpted my shadow.
Black striped, it stopped at black.

I watched and let the bug, still loping, go to where it needed to,
but all the hungry birds seemed to be fed.