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

In the Public Library

1. Embryo Still mermaid inside her words only half gathered her head still floating listening listening to the Real Life The Women’s Prison The women in the prison are combing mannequins’ heads of hair for Beauty Care. It’s cold in there a prison necklace of noose and lies This bodily tool of governments the tooth pit the grave In the Public Library In the Public Library a woman is reading a factory story several people listening she gets to the fire the cradle of the real life 263 the noise to the locked doors the death room The librarian says she has to stop it’s time for him to close. He closes. Margaret, d. 1985 At the back of the church dressed like a bag lady, Margaret in dark torn clothes with her old woman smell with the red open wound on her forehead maggots in her wound . . . Third floor walkup on 112th she may have been there 85 years the steel door open to cat shit cat food human shit human food ghost dust ghost Margaret holding tight to her iron bed and to empty us of every illusion of separateness, on her forehead the maggots’ miner’s lamp . . . At the Conference on Women in the Academy The young scholar, her weeping finger the anger reality under the “social construction of reality” under the deaf blind TV filmed 264 door in the mountain ...