When you had quite finished
dragging me across your bed
like a band of swaggering late-night removal men
dragging a piano
the size and shape of the United States of America
across a tent,
I left the room,
and slipped into the garden,
where I gulped down whole mouthfuls of delicious aeroplanes
that taxied down my throat
still wrapped in sky
with rows of naked women in their bellies
telling me to go,
and I went,
and that’s why I did it,
and everything told me so –
tracks that I knew the meaning of
like the tracks of a wolf
wolf-hunters know the exact colour of
by the tracks of the tracks alone.
You get a feeling for it.
You stand in the garden at night
with blood getting crisp on your thighs
and feel the stsrs spiralling right down
out of the sky into your ears
like drip-fed needles
saying Get Out, Now.
By ‘you’ I mean me.
One of us had to: I did.
The Quarrel
Diane DiPrima
You know I said to Mark I'm furious at you.
No he said are you bugged. He was drawing Brad who was asleep on the bed.
Yes I said I'm pretty god damned bugged. I sat down by the fire and stuck my feet out to warm them up.
Jesus I thought you think it's so easy. There you sit innocence personified. I didn't say anything else to him.
You know I thought I've got work to do too sometimes. In fact I probably have just as fucking much work to do as you. A piece of wood fell out of the fire and I poked it back in with my toe.
I am sick I said to the woodpile of doing dishes. I am just as lazy as you. Maybe lazier. The top of my shoe was scorched from the fire and I rubbed it where the suede was gone.
Just because I happen to be a chick I thought.
Mark finished one drawing and looked at it. Then he put it down and started another one.
It's damned arrogant of you I thought to assume that only you have things to do. Especially tonight.
And what a god damned concession it was for me to bother to tell you that I was bugged at all I said to the back of his neck. I didn't say it out loud.
I got up and went into the kitchen to do the dishes. And shit I thought I probably won't bother again. But I'll get bugged and not bother to tell you and after a while everything will be awful and I'll never say anything because it's so fucking uncool to talk about it. And that I thought will be that and what a shame.
Hey hon Mark yelled at me from the living room. It says here that Picasso produces fourteen hours a day.
Spring Evening on Blind Mountain
Louise Erdrich
I won’t drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don’t even have to write this down.
