Hometown Waiting For You
All these decades we’ve been waiting here for you. Welcome!
You do look lonely.
No one knows you the way we know you.
And you know us.
Did you actually (once) tell yourself—I am better than this?
One day actually (once) tell yourself—I deserve better than this?
Fact is,you couldn’t escape us.
And we have been waiting for you. Welcome home!
Boasting how a scholarship bore you away
like a chariot of the gods except
where you are born, your soul remains.
We all die young here.
Not one of us outlived young here.
Check out obituaries
in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal.
Car crash,
overdose.
Gunshot, fire.
Cancers of breast,
ovaries, lung,
colon. Heart
attack, cirrhosis
of liver.
Assault, battery.
Stroke! And—
did I say over-
dose? Car
crash?
Filling up the cemeteries here.
Plastic trash here.
Unbiodegradable Styrofoam here.
Three-quarters of your seventh-
grade class now
in urns, ash and what remains
in red MAGA hats.
Those flashy cars
you’d have given your soul
to ride in,
just once, now
eyeless
rusting hulks
in tall grass.
Those eyes you’d
wished might crawl
upon you like ants,
in graveyards
of broken glass.
Atwater Park where
you’d wept
in obscure shame
and now whatever
his name who’d trampled
your heart, he’s
ash.
Proud as hell
of you though
(we admit)
never read a
goddamn word
you’ve written.
We never forgave you. We hate winners.
Still, it’s not too late.
Did I say overdose?
Why otherwise are you here?
Strawberries
It’s a neutral day.
No sky and no atmosphere.
No emotions and no oxygen.
And no memory. And no future
beyond the plane’s broad wing.
Yet: a scissor-flash of sun
and I’m seeing again sun
beating on the strawberry patch
of my grandfather’s lost farm
as a warning pulse beats
on the underside of an eye.
Here I am kneeling in sunshine. Sunshine beating
on my bare head. None of us wore hats. On my grand-
father’s farm picking strawberries. Filling quart
baskets. Up and down the rows filling quart baskets.
ten cents a quart. Thirteen years old. Quick, deft
motions of my stained fingers. Hypnotic. Dreamy.
In stained work-clothes kneeling. In sunshine kneeling.
You pick, you reach, you reach farther, an ache between
the shoulder blades like a nail entering flesh so you
know it’s time to shift your knees, to inch forward
smelling your heated body. Pulsebeat, pain. Pulse-
beat, pain. In the next row, Linda Birkenhead and
Ginny Dunston, two older girls, are picking. Jesus,
I hate strawberries! Could puke, strawberries! Linda’s
loud hoarse voice. We’re laughing, calling to one
another, you’d think our throats would be scratched
by now, shrieking with laughter, and it’s only 10 A.M.
and we started at 7 A.M. and we’re exhausted, we’re dead,
except noisy and giggling in the shimmering heat
of June in my grandfather’s strawberry patch where rows
go on forever no beginning no end. Pulsebeat,
pain. Yet I believe I will live forever.
True pain, like grief, is for solitude only.
Not picking strawberries, ten cents a quart,
with Linda and Ginny. Not picking strawberries,
row after row, no stems, no leaves, cobwebs sticky
on my fingers in shimmering heat in June these
endless rows on my grandfather’s farm.
Only last year, these girls tormented me.
At school, they teased and chased me.
Older boys twined their fingers in my hair, why?
Dirty fingers in my hair and when I cried,
they laughed, why? First the pulsebeat, then
the pain.
Heat-haze of summer, the world’s smiling.
Unless it’s weak eyes needing glasses.
That year I’d begun to wonder how do we come
to an accurate knowledge of ourselves
my question to bear through life, unanswered.
Picking strawberries, I’m the fastest, frantic
to finish a row careless as in a race, always
to be the first, and careless, bruising fruit,
picking stems, leaves, coming to abhor the touch
of strawberries, how seeds are stippled
in the flesh, rough as a cat’s tongue and some
of the strawberries are weirdly shaped, greeny-
white and never to ripen, other strawberries
are soft-rotted from the inside, female fruit
leaking watery-runny red juice. Within hours,
a box can go bad. My grandfather hated straw-
berries, so perishable, not like apples, pears,
quince, cherries, a strawberry ripening
is a strawberry close to rot.
Kneeling in sunshine. Sunshine beating
on my bare head. And my friends Linda nd Ginny.
Who’d been so cruel. They’d hated me at school,
maybe I was too fast with my answers, maybe
too smart, and too young, now I’m like the others
dumb and suntanned and my small breasts hard
as green pears and my fingers groping quick
in the strawberry plants blinking away pain,
swallowing down nausea, no I wasn’t going to think
of how they’d tormented me, chased me, jeering
pelted me with horse chestnuts, clumps of mud,
chased me through cornfields on the Tonawanda Creek
but I’d outrun them so it was a game,
yes probably it was a game, laughing, shouting,
maybe a sign of crude liking so reasonably I might
tell myself They don’t mean harm. Not like, poking
me with an elbow in the eye, they’d mean to gouge
out the eye. For there’d come, unexpected, that day
last September, returning to school and the oldest
Birkenhead girl Linda stared at me, and smiled, and
later there was Ginny Dunston and her brother, and
others, so suddenly it was O.K. Why, don’t ask,
if the world’s suddenly O.K. don’t ask, don’t inquire
into motives for there are no motives ofr maybe
it was somthing simple: I’d grown over the summer,
I was lanky, funny, tall and suntanned and tough
and fast as ever except now it was O.K. which is why
kneeling in sunshine picking strawberries for ten cents
a quart I’m happy. I love my friends, that’s all
you want at thirteen but it’s a gift you don’t
always get. The sky is a great mirror
mirroring all-time-to-come.
Always I’ll remember how suddenly meanness
turned sweet. What ripened, and wasn’t rot.
How grateful, and how quick to smile, laugh-
ing like the others in the shimmering heat
of June, happy. Those summers of no beginnings
and no ends and one day a biographer will note
below a photograph Oates lived on her grandfather’s
farm until the age of 18. She believed she was happy.
Harlow’s Monkeys
Assume that we are not monsters for we mean well.
— Harry Harlow (1905-1981)
1.
To be a Monkey
is to be funny
If funny
you don’t hurt
& if you don’t hurt
you don’t cry
& if you don’t cry
the noise you make is funny
& if it is funny
people can laugh
for it is all right
for people to laugh
at a Monkey
& people are happy
if people laugh
& the one thing they agree
is a monkey is funny
2.
Oh! it is not funny
to hear a Monkey
scream for a Monkey
scream is identical
to a human scream
& a human scream is
not funny
So in the Monkey Lab
to maintain calm
Dr. Harlow had
no choice but
to “surgically remove”
Monkey vocal chords
so if there is a (Monkey) scream
not heard
how is it a scream?
3.
We were Harlow’s Monkeys
& Dr.Harlow was our Daddy
in the famous lab
at Madison, Wisconsin
from which you did not leave
alive
hairless bawling infants
taken from our mothers
at birth to dwell
in Harlow’s hell
“social isolation”
“maternal deprivation”
to be a Monkey
is funny
nursing the dugs
of a bare-wire doll
clinging to
a towel
draped over
a bare-wire doll
seeking milk, love
where there’s none
yet: seeking milk,
love where
there’s none.
yet: seeking
How could a Monkey
be sad, could a Monkey
spell the word—”sad”—?
In the bottom
of the Monkey cage
listless & broken
when the wire doll too
is taken away
“learned helplessness”
“pit of despair”
You laugh, for you
would never so despair
mistaking a wire doll
for a Mother
or a devil
for a Daddy
4.
(Look: in any lab
you had
to be cruel
to publish
& succeed.
As Israel, Harry
changed his name
to Harlow, Harry
to publish
& succeed.
Just had
to be cruel
the way today
a baby calf
in its cage
grows
slowly
to veal.)
Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die
Occult
An Age of Miracles