Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

In This Egg

looking down into the water. What are they looking at? Now the police cars. What is going to happen? Now the ambulances. Someone was here and is gone. In Fear (2) M. comes and hits me, along the spine, top to bottom, karate-handed. I say, It hurts me! And she, her face the face of a person in Hell, compelled to unhappy action: “It hurts everyone.” In This Egg My mother as a child under her father’s sexual hand ticking over her like an electric train. The household scissors to her hair. Scissors cut paper Paper covers rock Rock crushes scissors Sticks and fluttering paper notes gravestones river stones scissors holocaust. 202 door in the mountain My mother and her father, in this blue egg. This egg, our young, gone before us: who will brood over them? Who will make a good roof over them. The Under Voice I saw streaming up out of the sidewalk the homeless women and men the East side of Broadway fruit and flowers and bourbon the homeless men like dull knives gray-lipped the homeless women connected to no one streaming no one to no one more like light than like people, blue neon, blue the most fugitive of all the colors Then I looked and saw our bodies not near but not far out, lying together, our whiteness And the under voice said, Stars you are mine, you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silver-blue stirrups, I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me? Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive. Come Akhmatova A homeless woman with harsh white hair stands outside my Chinese-red door the river at wolf 203 ...