Mother Love

Poems
by Rita Dove
II
Baby, baby, if he hears you
As he gallops past the house,
Limb from limb at once hell tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.
And hell beat you, beat you, beat you,
And hell beat you all to pap,
And hell eat you, eat you, eat you,
Every morsel snap, snap, snap.
-

Mother Goose

Persephone Falling
One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.
(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Dont answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

Protection
Are you having a good time?
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Are you having a time at all?

Everywhere in the garden I see the slim vine
of your neck, the stubborn baby curls
I know Im not saying this right.
Good hair has no body
in this country; like trained ivy,
it hangs and shines. Mine comes out
in clusters. Is there such
a thing as a warning? The Hawaiian
mulberry is turning to ash
and the snail has lost his home.
Are you really all over with? How done
is gone?

Persephone Abducted
She cried out for Mama, who did not
hear. She left with a wild eye thrown back,
she left with curses, rage
that withered her features to a hags.
No one can tell a mother how to act:
there are no laws when laws are broken, no names
to call upon. Some say theres nourishment for pain,
and call it Philosophy.
Thats for the birds, vulture and hawk,
the large ones who praise
the miracle of flight because
they use it so diligently.
She left us singing in the field, oblivious
to all but the ache of our own bent backs.

Mother Love
Who can forget the attitude of mothering?
Toss me a baby and without bothering
to blink Ill catch her, sling him on a hip.
Any woman knows the remedy for grief
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is being needed: duty bugles and well

climb out of exhaustion every time,
bare the nipple or tuck in the sheet,
heat milk and hum at bedside until
they can dress themselves and rise, primed
for Love or Glory those one-way mirrors
girls peep into as their fledgling heroes slip
through, storming the smoky battlefield.
So when this kind woman approached at the urging
of her bouquet of daughters,
(one for each of the worlds corners,
one for each of the winds to scatter!)
and offered up her only male child for nursing
(a smattering of flesh, noisy and ordinary),
I put aside the lavish trousseau of the mourner
for the daintier comfort of pity:
I decided to save him. Each night
I laid him on the smoldering embers,
sealing his juices in slowly so he might
be cured to perfection. Oh, I know it
looked damning: at the hearth a muttering crone
bent over a baby sizzling on a spit
as neat as a Virginia ham. Poor human
to scream like that, to make me remember.

Grief: The Council

I told her: enough is enough.
Get a hold on yourself, take a lover,
Help some other unfortunate child.
to abdicate
to let the garden go to seed
Yes its a tragedy, a low-down shame,
but you still got your own life to live. Meanwhile,
aint nothing we can do but be discreet
and wait. She brightened up a bit, then.
I thought of those blurred snapshots framed
on milk cartons, a new pair each week.
soot drifting up from hell
dusting the kales
green tresses, the corns green sleeve
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It was pathetic. I bet she aint took in

a word I said except that last, like
a dog with a chicken bone too greedy to care
if it stick in his gullet and choke him sure.
and no design
I say we gotta see her through.
I say she cant be left too long in that
drafty old house alone.
no end-of-day delight
at the creak of the gate
Sister Jeffries, you could drop in
tomorrow morning, take one
of your mason jars, something
sweetish, tomatoes or bell peppers.
no tender cheek nor ripening grape
destined for wine
Miz Earl can fetch her later to the movies
A complicated plot should distract her,
Something with a car chase through Manhattan,
Loud horns melting to a strings-and-sax ending
The last frail tendril snapped free
(though the roots still strain toward her)
And your basic sunshine pouring through
the clouds. Aint this crazy weather?
Feels like winter coming on.
at last the earth cleared to the sea
at last composure

V
Tighten the sails of night as far as you can,
For the daylight cannot carry me.
KADIA MOLODOWSKY
White Night

Sonnet in Primary Colors

This is for the woman with one black wing
perched over her eyes: lovely Frida, erect
among parrots, in the stern petticoats of the peasant,
who painted herself a present
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wildflowers entwining the plaster corset

her spine resides in, that flaming pillar
this priestess in the romance of mirrors.
Each night she lay down in pain and rose
to the celluloid butterflies of her Beloved Dead,
Lenin and Marx and Stalin arrayed at the footstead.
And rose to her easel, the hundred dogs panting
like children along the graveled walks of the garden, Diegos
love a skull in the circular window
of the thumbprint searing her immutable brow.

Demeter Mourning
Nothing can console me. You may bring silk
to make skin sigh, dispense yellow roses
in the manner of ripened dignitaries.
You can tell me repeatedly
I am unbearable (and I know this):
still, nothing turns the gold to corn,
nothing is sweet to the tooth crushing in.
Ill not ask for the impossible;
one learns to walk by walking.
In time Ill forget this empty brimming,
I may laugh again at a bird, perhaps, chucking the nest
but it will not be happiness,
for I have known that.

Exit
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Just when hope withers, a reprieve is granted.

The door opens onto a street like in the movies,
clean of people, cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. Reprieve has been granted,
provisionally fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here its gray; the door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the worlds open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush,
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.

Afield
Out where crows dip their kill
under the clouds languid white oars
she wanders, hands pocketed, hair combed tight
so she wont feel the breeze quickening
as if she were trying to get back at him,
find the breach in the green
that would let her slip through,
then tug meadow over the wound like a sheet.
Ive walked there, too: he cant give
you up, so you give in until you cant live
without him. Like these white sores
burst upon earths ignorant flesh, at first sight
Everything is innocence
then its itch scratch, putrescence.

Lost Brilliance
I miss that corridor drenched in shadow,
sweat of centuries steeped into stone.
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After the plunge, after my shrieks

diminished and his oars sighed
up to the smoking shore,
the bulwarks gray pallor soothed me.
Even the columns seemed kind, their murky sheen
Like the lustrous skin of a roving eye.
I used to stand at the top of the stair
where the carpet flung down
its extravagant heart. Flames
teased the lake into glimmering licks.
I could pretend to be above the earth
rather than underground: a Venetian
palazzo or misty chalet tucked into
an Alp, that mixture of comfort
and gloom nothing was simpler
to imagine. But it was more difficult
each evening to descend: all that marble
flayed with red plush of privilege
I traveled on, slow nautilus
unwinding in terrified splendor
to where he knew to meet me
my consort, my match,
though much older and sadder.
In time, I lost the capacity
for resolve. It was as if
I had been travelling all these years
without a body,
until his found me
and then there was just
the two of us forever:
one who wounded,
one who served.

VI
Now for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
The fragments join in me with their own music.
- MURIEL RUKEYSER
The Poem as Mask

Demeter, Waiting
No. Who can bear it. Only someone
who hates herself, who believes
to pull a hand back from a daughters cheek
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is to put love into her pocket

like one of those ashen Christian
philosophers, or a war-bound soldier.
She is gone again and I will not bear
It, I will drag myself through a winter
of my own making and refuse
any meadow that recycles itself into
hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor
flash, finicky butterflies! I will wail and thrash
until the whole goddamned golden panorama freezes
over. Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes.

Lamentations
Throw open the shutters
to your darkened residences:
can you hear the pipes playing,
their hunger shaking the olive branches?
To hear them sighing and not answer
is to deny this world, descend rung
by rung into no loss and no desire.
Listen: empty yet full, silken
air and brute tongue,
they are saying:
To refuse to be born is one thing
but once you are here,
youd do well to stop crying
and suck the good milk in.

Teotihuacn
The Indian guide explains to the groups of poets
how the Aztec slaves found parasites in cocoons
spun like snowdrifts around the spinules
of a cactus pad (his aide scrapes some free with a stick)
and ground them to a fine red paste.
Next, an unassuming stalk which, chewed,
produced a shadowy green (a younger stalk
made yellow) and these they used
to decorate the Temple of the Sun.
Plumed serpent who reared his head in the east,
His watery body everywhere: Quetzalcoatl
was a white man, blond hair and tall.
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It took millions of these bugs to stain a single wall.

The poets scribble in assorted notebooks. The guide moves on.

Used
The conspiracys to make us thin. Size threes
Are all the rage, and skirts ballooning above twinkling knees
Are every man-childs preadolescent dream.
Tabula rasa. No slates that clean
weve earned the navels sunk in grief
when the last child emptied us of their brief
interior light. Our muscles say We have been used.
Have you ever tried silk sheets? I did,
persuaded by postnatal dread
and a Macys clerk to bargain for more zip.
We couldnt hang on, slipped
to the floor and by morning the quilts
had slid off too. Enough of guilt
Its hard work staying cool.

Demeters Prayer to Hades

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire has an edge,
To know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
I see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth
of flowers.
There are no curses only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead see where it gets you.
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