WHINNY

Poems About Nature, Human and Otherwise

Barbara Marquardt

Instar Books

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Copyright 2008

This book is dedicated to Garrison Keillor, who doesnt know about it or know me and who bears no responsibility for any poem here. I dedicate it to him because I appreciate the daily inspiration of his website, The Writers Almanac and also the weekly entertainment of his radio program The Prairie Home Companion. Although I have an M.A. in creative writing, once I left the University environment I suffered the fate of many an English major and have been isolated from those who enjoy poetry. So Garrison Keillor, a complete stranger, has been my connection to that world where people love literature even though its an impractical field of study.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLES OF POEMS (printed in alphabetical order) A Hamster Named Magilicuddy A Wasted Place After An Absence, Hands After Dragging Ourselves, After Raking Eight Bagsful After Watching Etosha, a Dry Season Always Good To Get Home An Uneasy Calm Before Color And Their Eggs Take Two Hours To Boil Another Helping Another Poisoned Cup Another Road Not Taken Anyway, Now I Am Sure Aspen Asymmetry At the National Cat Show At The Pancake House Autobiography Being Temporary Billy Graham Wants Swift Justice Born To Be Bait Bouncing Bet Budget Cruise In Chicago Bugway By B.M. Catalogs I And II CHEE-CAW-GO! Chicken Sexers City Snake In Spring Closet Dancer Coarse Frost Complements Of Science Coriolis Effect Criticism Dad Debating In Sleep Describing An Arc Different Folks, Different Strokes Disappointment Discoverys Scientist Of The Year, 1982 Divided Sky Dog-Walking Thoughts Doing the Time Step

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Dont Fool With Physics Dustball Ear Lyric Eating Its Way To Oblivion Either Way, Same Difference Ever the Underachiever Feeling Like Esther Williams Feminine Perspective Fiery July and Chicago Finally An Unused Image Fluorescent Lights Define Fragile Deterrent Free Style Gold At The Rainbows End Grand Unification Theory Grasshopper Life Grave Robbers Hal Harvey Haustellaty Have An Ice Day Homegrown Poisons How To Live Longer I Apologize For Using you, Paul Newman I Hope Theyre All Happy I Know Im Over My Latest I Read It In Time, 2/23/81 I Rely on Limestone I Will Ill Fated Relationships Immortality Today, No Waiting Inadequate Dandelions Inbound Train, 6:45 A.M. Insect Relaxation Inside the New Community College Is That You, Prince? It Takes Goosestepping It Takes Some Big Bees Its A Little Like Love Its Cuckoo January 4, 1986 Jive Turkey John Donne Long Dead Lap Swimming at the YWCA Laundromat Learning To Dive In Made It Making Whoopee In Baraboo Maybe Id Rather Not Go Mimics Mine Is Named Minnie

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Mulberries My Christmas Ornaments Never My Daughter On Christmas Eve My Phone Never Stops Ringing My Watchdog New Kingdoms Night Alone At Navy Pier No Fat Cats No Sugar Not For The Squeamish Not Much Fun Here Notes for The History of Milk November, And Now November Remnants Of Creeping Jenny Osage Oranges Paedogenesis Paper-White Narcissus Paradise Revised Parking Places Are Sacred Pick Whichever Plant Pornography Porifera Power Flow Prelude Radio Space Rent Roadkills Route 47 Saffron or Poppy Seeds Saving Up For The Psychiatrist Sisters, Consider The Aphid Ski Poles Sleeping Bag, Mountain, M-1949, Type 1 Some Call Me Sasquatch Some Cold Facts About Chicago Some Cultivated Thoughts Stilled Thaw The Air Danced The Man Who Didnt Know How To Eat Jello The Masseuse The Plumb-Bob Pigeon The Right Punishment For The Crime The Saw-Whet Owl The Second Singularity The Slugs They Did It Before Dinosaurs This Is The Deal Through Einsteinian Eyes To Edwin Way Teale

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To Gorillas To H2O To Lynn Margulis To Read Before X-C Skiing Tom, Who Teaches Preteens Twisted Wings Two Crow Trees Two Men Uncertainty Principle Walking The Cat Weddings Whales, Slugs, Toads, And Other Lovers What A Mayfly May Not Do When Its Snowing Cats And Dogs When Summer Seemed Distant As New Guinea Whinny Whirligig White Why I Am Tired Today Why One Never Hears Of Dilettante Mites Winston With An Iceman This Wouldnt Happen Worries Of A Feminist And Anti-War Activist

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A HAMSTER NAMED MAGILICUDDY runs nowhere on his wheel. Escapes his cage when he can. Plunges at a mate and humps frantically. Then fights until the pair must be separated to save their lives. Alone, mostly he dozes, tolerating human strokes. I, more civilized, roll into yoga poses, jump rope, leap on my trampoline, ride my exercise bike fast, try to achieve more than ever before. Before what? I believe Im getting somewhere, am thinner. Feeling slim and sexy, I aggressively tease my lover, who leans heavily over me to see the baseball game better. He falls asleep. We quarrel. He goes home. My cat rubs her muzzle against my cheek. I sneeze but need the touch.

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A WASTED PLACE On what some would call vacant land, my German shepherd used to chase woodchucks and incautious young rabbits. A trespasser, I gathered crabapple blossoms in spring and red velvet staghorn sumac berries in fall. I saw the rare little white or whorled milkweed progress to feathered seed. Each in their seasons came trillium, Solomons seal, spiderwort, evening lychnis, bladder campion, phlox and primrose and chicory, multitudes of others, and above them red-winged blackbirds trilled over cherries and mulberries. Summer grasses bloomed high as my eyes alongside fragrant white and yellow sweet clover, migrants brought to America by other migrants to make hay meadows. Far above hawks float and crows flap. When night again came early and goldfinches actively gathered thistle seeds, when migrating robins and flickers thickened the air over glowing masses of goldenrod and boneset, the lands owners began to make what they named improvements. They hired newer migrants, who worked cheap, keeping secrets as they mowed and hacked the land to flat shreds and splinters, then left their plastic trash and beer cans. On the prairie soil, said to be Earths most fertile, they followed orders, planting car dealerships and used car lots, advertised by flags. My meadow and woods had been useless, an anomoly in need of development and a cash crop of steel and glass. Americans say waste is a shame.

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AFTER AN ABSENCE, HANDS short circuit, blow fuses when our loosely wired fingers cling. Once the electricity is humming, we must switch on everything, quickly get what we can before the flickering to brownout, followed by blackout and silence. The biggest bill will be run up after the current is cut.

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AFTER DRAGGING OURSELVES, overclothed but still frozen, through slowmotion sub-zero weeks, the tease of warm breezes makes a muddy gray, turd- uncovering January day seem perfect, spring previewed. Children throw suddenly unbearable thick coats, mittens, hats anywhere and run unencumbered. Lovers stroll, dare to hold bared hands, ignore the damp chill rising behind the surprising mildness. Then its back to grim winter after this happy lapse into the fifties (temperatures this time, thank God, and not that sentimentalized decade), a dark day with snowclouds overhead. So what? So this: no matter that its a clich to say that midwestern weathers changeable; the variety excites, makes polite conversation possible, wakes us to face the latest variation on a theme of extremes. In Chicago we layer on and take off, high on surprise though we know that all thats constant here is contrast. Except in politics, where we are consistently windy.

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AFTER RAKING EIGHT BAGSFUL In infrared images, the kind computers can paint, raked leaves would shine like lightbulbs inside clear plastic yard bags. The eight bagsful I raked for my mother sat sedately close to the curb, no yellow glowing there, no hints of electricity within, eight dark vinyl turds, and no great artist eager to paint their heat portraits. My own yard remains unraked. One storm will end autumns glory, and leaf cremation taints the air, but today no breeze aids the lazy drift of flame-colored maple leaves over ash paddles and honey locust leaflets, yesterdays wind-blown gold. Pin oaks and copper Norway maples still fire the sky, trying to hold back their climax and the sadness afterwards. Im going to leave it all be, only gathering enough sidewalk sycamore to eat my fill from their painterly plates.

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AFTER WATCHING ETOSHA, A DRY SEASON (an early National Geographic television special, made when such specials were something new, before familiarity had made them less astonishing) The lions wont leave my living room, lie languid near the African violets. To get away, I take my dog Jai for a walk, but the ballfield fades to veldt and the dogs legs lengthen stiffly until she pronks like a springbok, an angular version of the bouncing ball shes after. Canine again, Jai scratches in grass still green as the great bullfrogs in Etosha, whose icy slitted eyes, ochre as cold, dry winter grass, blinked in what seemed to be orgasms. Then, in a changed camera angle, eggs had squirted across my screen from a mother frogs bloated cloaca. Shots later, black tadpoles had swarmed in thick wriggling rivers. The frogs follow us back home, making me and Jai jumpy, and I am not sorry to remember how a lion cub crunched one and an electric blue bush snake had swallowed several until his swollen belly had dragged, ungainly. Before todays film I had rather fancied frogs, thought them not as ugly acting as some princes, innocently singing RIB-BIT or singing Its not easy being green. But its all over now, my love affair with frogs, since the camera caught them cannibalizing in the lean dry season,

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AFTER WATCHING ETOSHA (continued) a narrator stating flatly that some frogs know no other food than their brothers. Say its not so, Kermit! When I sleep, my dreams will seethe with these greedy frogs, stuffing their mouths with each other, amoral as mantises, not what I expected of animals with backbones. ALWAYS GOOD TO GET HOME Cicada-killer wasps cant carry their fat prey very well while they fly. Trying, they decline to the ground and reclimb, looking for landmarks and dragging supper up some trunk to jump once more. Again failing to soar, they land badly and must again crawl up and fall down, over and over until the repetition hits home and they can drop their prey packages and flop, weary shoppers who over-spent.

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AN UNEASY CALM BEFORE COLOR Some days in late winter when old layered snow is porous and black in DuPage County, or gradations of gray in Kane, and the dirty land seems an ashtray left unemptied by some chain-smoking slattern, a sly white blanket still lying on the treacherous Fox makes a bright tempting spread over its river bed, where rocks shift. Churning currents conceal the fact that one fine sunshiny day the river will boil up and crack its cover into jagged chunks, which it will suck like hard candy into its hungry swollen flow. And it will eat up land, spread beyond its bed and seep, stealing more than it can ever keep. Already the Fox has an appetite. Like the mammal who gave it name, its stomach can rumble, insatiable after a bitter winters deprivations. Yet these days the river seems safe. Mallards punctuate its surface. Mammal tracks make crazy dotted lines the thaw will not bother to cut on. Its shorelines are indecisive. Where no bridges give definition and no liquid gurgle can be heard, it masquerades as floodplain. But it is too smooth a liar. Plains are pricklier; their prairies wave, even on quiet iced days, tough grasses, herbs, and young shrubs.

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AN UNEASY CALM BEFORE COLOR (continued) Slick as varnish, thin and easy to tear as a sheet of cellophane, the Foxs snow-coated ice highlights our climates cold March monochrome. AND THEIR EGGS TAKE TWO HOURS TO BOIL What I like best about the ostrich is that if Im ever in its African habitat, I might find it without binoculars and not miss it while I fix the focus, as happens here with shorebirds, hawks, and those difficult perchers I crave to catch in my lens. But a herd of 600 tall ostriches with stem necks undulating in unison and feathered black lashes batting over eyes twice the weight of their brains, that even I might sight. And be sad that weve man- handled them badly, slit lifted throats in case their gizzards hid diamonds, made plumed hats of their coats, had dinner and bowl both from their heavyweight eggs, and still take for agriculture the plains where they flapped in frenzied mating dance, ran jackals off their hatchlings, and left the land as wildly green and grand as when their strange reptilian race of mammal-acting grounded avians began, back when man was afloat in the chromosome future of a primate capable of becoming avaricious.

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ANOTHER HELPING Many beasts inflate their waists (I heap roast beef and gravy on my plate) or blow whole bodies into globes (Ill take a hot fudge sundae later, thanks), frogs for instance, and puffer fish (yes, Ill have another dish), and no one acts as if theyre hogs (put lots of bacon on my salad) when they go roly poly (more butter for the fresh hot bread) to become fatly fearsome. Well- adapted to this defense mechanism (Yes, Ill have it with nuts and whipped cream), I havent yet identified the enemy its designed to scare, unless its my mirrored self or the trim man buying dinner.

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ANOTHER POISONED CUP Dusty, but never dry, ever edging toward forever dead, that uninhabited museum the Mediterranean floor floats up to coat with industrial scum Cousteaus divers of the modern rubberized Odyssey. Would Odysseus, like fish, suffocate in this great waste? This time saved by no Calypso, wretched, retching, regret the pores that drank green deeper than blue and flawed grayer with flecks than old-fashioned hemlock in another poisoned cup?

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ANOTHER ROAD NOT TAKEN but there was no mystery in it, just a miss bred of hesitation. It was a slick, twisting, downhill skid requiring quick decisions, the kind I can rarely make. With right ski thinking, this way, and left insisting that, I splatted smack at a tree ahead, direct as an arrow, both feet losers. The path meandered without me. Back in the parking lot I attracted the attention of the half dozen homosexuals waiting for whatever in trucks and cars. Not to worry. I was the wrong gender and a mess anyway. A scratch bled on my face. My skis and poles and ass were dragging behind. I remembered once carrying in two trips a disassembled double bed, its heavy metal frame and innersprings banging anything I passed, and me careening beneath. Add ice for sliding, and I felt like that. I know now I need gentle slopes and wide trails with space for decisions. But safety wont exhilarate like making it where before I failed, swerving skill- fully, leaning so body leads skis, feeling like a miracle of speed and balance. Me, chancing it. Or at least I dream that on brave days.

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ANYWAY, NOW I AM SURE Hurt when I said I wasnt yet sure of our future, you set an iced glass of wine on my unclothed stomach. It will be a cold world out there if were not together, you said, lifting the glass but not drinking to that. A graphic example, the kind we teachers struggle to find when we want an idea to stick forever. Every time I start to feel anger or even slight dissatisfaction with you, the memory of a cold glass on my abdomen reminds me what warmth I might lose. Chilled, I reconsider.

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ASPEN In Aspen, Colorado, do they know it is said that the tree whose name they take was hated in the Middle Ages? Its quaking then was no matter of lateral compression of long leaf petiole. No. Its shaking was for Christs sake, in shame that ancestral aspen planks had stood straight and accepted the immortal weight held by unholy nails. So in Shakespeares day country people would throw stones and clods, angry to see this guilty tree still green, its only punishment an eternal tremble. These days the tree has it easier, and need fear (but with clear conscience) only skiers, subdivision saws, pollutions awful fallout.

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ASYMMETRY Mighty rivers level flood plains or surf rounds sand and pebbles on smooth shorelines. Man also files at sharp edges, seeks peace in whats flat and regular, in the circles unchanging symmetry. Fear lies in the jagged surprise, the wavy snake. On this bulging globe that wobbles so elliptically, all that matters is uneven. Spun in a spiral galaxy, churning internally, Earth hurtles toward eternity. We bumpy beings spring from the double windings of helices in an evolution dependent on irregularities.

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AT THE NATIONAL CAT SHOW I expected magic, got laughs. A hall packed with cats and I had imagined that they would be posing, restrained as show dogs. Or on stools like fierce circus lions, ready at a snap of their masters wrists to parade their paces or demonstrate feline acrobatics. I was startled, then, to see the cats all caged, many curled in circles within litter boxes or acting like the alley brats I have befriended. Nappers and escape-attempters, observing spy types. Reedy, curly-haired breeds like clipped sheep, with kinky whiskers. Svelte and stylish Asians. But the fancy-tickling cats, pig-pug faces so smashed in Im amazed they take in air, were Persians, fat fur brushed in ruffs maintained by paper- plate collars. One such collapsed cat-face framed in white cardboard gave me giggles and dark, accusing looks from cat and alleged master. Guilty I was, they implied, of ignorant nose-chauvinism and insulting a blue-ribbon kisser.

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AT THE PANCAKE HOUSE Did you have to tell the cashier you call me Babycakes? It doesnt really fit my image and aint nobodys business nohow. Nothing you love better than blushes and funny stuff, certainly not me I now know. Playing the adorable rascal, you sketched plans on the back of your placemat for a home where we might someday work and play together. Here, the vegetable garden; there, art studios to share. When was never mentioned, but the answer was already never, although one of us didnt know.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY No know-it-alls or smartass ancestors prepared my parents for me. Their Bookworm! made me squirm but not stop chomping. People who read too much go crazy, they claimed. The grandpa you favor went even without reading. You have his hair too. Huh? Speaking, I kept my face in the pages. Young lady, they raged, youd better not get smart! Impatient for payment now 24 years late, at 18 I mailed out a story and waited. Waited. Waited. Few knew I was a poet or painter or guitar-picker or something that wouldnt take tuition. Broke and fooled by folksongs into loving the common man, I didnt wait for the uncommon. Married just enough to make three babies, I played my parents game and did not ever get smart, not even later in college, trying science, my writing and art set aside, child clutter everywhere, no father anywhere, sleep and dreams just schemes for after graduation. Soon teaching children bewildered as my own, I brooded confused through chalky days in their ghetto, inky nights in mine, writing forgettable bitter lines or

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY (continued) playing an untuned piano. Stumbling within the womens movement, I fell into communal living, coarse language, and the arms of a communist, husband #2. His revolutionary collective at least outlived our contract. My daughters missed him and blamed me, then began their own collective revolution, culminating, after years of house-to-house combat, in the establishment of four separate states. Alone, I am still trying to get smart.

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BEING TEMPORARY Saying the ad agency is decorated like a whore house, I am not aiming to defame artists or writers commercialized there (nor me, not even creator, just receptionist). They may be okay, but I dont know them, am temporary, not fixed like the overwrought iron, not dusty carved gilt, not brass or breakable glass. Even the plants will outlast me here. The permanent gals who serve the creative are barely polite to fly-by-night help. Within their circle (but I am without, in a set that doesnt intersect, is in a different universe), they converse: furs, fashion, vacations, personalities. Since I am ever considered distant, I cannot say, but wish I could, if I would be faceless here even were I not a days replacement.

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BILLY GRAHAM WANTS SWIFT JUSTICE Not notified by God of the days surprise operation, Pope John blissfully risked infection, breakfasting well, mingling with His people. Now, in hospital sipping intravenous, but not, thank God, last, supper, he lies depressed, granting pardon not requested. Meanwhile, Mehmet Ali Agca, world terrorist before Turk, repents only the spectators and the failed attempt, refuses food, calmly chooses his own kind of holy mission. In Belfast another saint loses front-page coverage but keeps his stomach on strike, fast in the faith of eternal cause. Across town two mothers react, frightening their children. One, unpacking lunches, says, Stay home. Theyll be killing Protestants today. The Catholic mother agrees but weeps and sets her own crowd of children howling. Wiping their wet from her faded maternity dress, she wonders would a new pope let her stop. A Philippine mother, blessed by Pope John, would like time to cry and pray for him but is busy in Manila, selling her only marketable skill. Eleven children hunger; more will come. Quietly, not wanting to awaken the man, she fingers her rosary. Schoolchildren from Chicagos

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BILLY GRAHAM WANTS SWIFT JUSTICE (continued) Pilsen district beg Dios to save Juan Pablo, who came to see them and answers their letters. As in Mexico, they decorate, make florid images and feel better. Editorials bemoan the times and speak of messages from God, return to God, good will come of it, gun control, and an end to violence. When executioners are going all around the country executing people, Billy Graham wants swift justice.

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BORN TO BE BAIT Upper class pigeons are raised to be carriers. Others grow up on their own, a free-wheeling city breed, scavenging, cooing, doing what different city dudes used to call their thang. But its low as a pigeon can go, at least so it seems to me, to be raised as bait. Maybe for falcon training.

Or, worse, to be used by birders I observed, to be strapped into little jackets and attached to a rope someone in a hawk watch tower would hold, hoping that way to tally more sightings. Then to be jerked and suspended in air to attract hungry passing migrants.

A handler shrugged, said most pigeons outlasted many hawk swoops toward their action. I thought I heard a pigeon whisper, PETA needs to come picket this birder who loves ticking off life-list sightings more than birds. Competition may run evolution, but in man as in most species it has nothing to do with love or kindness and everything to do with winning.

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BOUNCING BET My train passes white- speckled stretches. You, bouncing bet, you blowsy cousin of evening lychnis and bladder campion

(who wear their petals daintily in delicate fringe on trim crocheted thimbles), you wantonly flop your

loose- lipped blossoms in the breeze, a flower able to look lack- adaisical. Yet were a famous scrublady in colonial days. Known as soapwort, for your decent and free detergent sap. A foaming natural. Bet, can you cleanse my mind as you do my sight? Let me lie in my mind alongside your soapwort groves and roll your stems to a lathery bath? And never again ride this line toward typing in a grimy city. And if I cant have that, at least teach me your secret of relaxing, being easy.

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BUDGET CRUISE IN CHICAGO Falling toward winter, I catch myself sun-dreaming, ennuied by the dark. Wishing on a Chevy Nova, I shoot over four hundred million years, cruise Silurian seas. On Kennedy, South- bound, crushed coral outcrops mark Logan Square Reef. Do archipelagos still pull me south? Stony Island lies south of Logan in old tropic Chicago. World before backbone, warm shallow womb, colonial combs sweetened life in meaty, floral Eden. Brachiopods, crinoids, gross cephalopods, trilobites, sponges, now limestone bed crumbs. Hard, these Niagaran beds where sleepers dream of lost soft polyps, prism shades in gray imprisoned.

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BUDGET CRUISE IN CHICAGO (continued) Glacial soils blanket, ten thousand years new, cold cover makes, black, opaque, for lucid turquoise dwellers. Gone, solar-heated high-rise paradise, exquisite food by spacious pool, modern in 4 x 108 B.C. Stone frozen shells tell stories full of sun to warn descendent smug Chicagoans: change comes.

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BUGWAY Last night, dragged from a dream cast with bad actors from my past, I felt six small legs and two antennae parting the thin blond grass of my left arm. Shuddering, I brushed the insect elsewhere. But it filled my bed with its somewhere and pushed me out. My robe and the light on, I stalked the ravines and meadows of my crazy quilt. Captured at last in Kleenex, consigned to the whirlpool, still he filled my emptied dream space. A migrant in my beds twin, I lay alert in sleep as air molecules crawled around the bugway of my body.

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BY B.M. Poor Porphyraspus tristis, the cocoa-palm insect, lives his sad life resting under a nest of his own feces, called by men, in embarrassment over excrement, frass or fecula. Which doesnt affect the fact that its shit or heighten its appeal. But beetles like it as is; potato and tortoise types throw it with their feciforks. Dung beetles roll it and feed it eggs, raise a family in its warmth. Butterflies, too vain to be ugly anywhere, shape theirs into jewels with Lepidopteran anal combs. Desert insects conserve all water, grudgingly release a dry powder and expect it to do. Bees keep their hives clean and swarm out into the snow to go, some nose-diving toward eternity in drifts too frigid for cold-blooded motors to overcome. No moral in these stories, only a lot of crap.

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CATALOGS I. I cannot handle catalogs without listing wishes, sparing no expense for orders never sent. CATALOGS II. Reading that at least since Ptolemy (years before Sears) there have been star catalogs, I prepare my order, twinkling to think of this chance (as good as any oil sheiks) to have: Betelgeuse super-giant, red-orange RV Tauri a variable shiner Cygnus X-1 double star, including possible black hole. To be safe, I place these hot items on galactic layaway.

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CHEE-CAW-GO! End of the line! The conductor doesnt lie. Midday, but night in the train shed west of the station. My commute slows, passing side-tracked Pullmans exposing themselves, open doored. Window film grays sheets on readied beds, left unwrinkled. I spy, I spy dried flower centerpieces on dining tables and imagine sunlight knives cutting thick slices of dust. Junk truncates tracks narrow as cross- country skis under a Pullmans feet. But in here it never snows and the touring is over.

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CHICKEN SEXERS, SAYS SCIENCE DIGEST, 2/82 inspect the anal vents (at 1000 per hour and $30,000 per year) of debeaked chicks who will be crowded in troughs until they have enough thick, yellow fat to be hung upside down and conveyed through killing and bleeding rooms. Not so tasty in these days of antibiotics and assembly line aging, chickens have no privacy, little dignity. Now a man named Joe has patented an elastic- strapped chicken bra to save tender breast- meat from bruising. Id like to know what happened to the little red rooster and the pecking order, the hand-wrung hen-neck and bloody headless run from the pot after an ordinary chicken life, to old MacDonald and the sanctified self- sustaining family farm. EE-EYE, EE-EYE, OH-OH.

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CITY SNAKE IN SPRING On his way to be independent squatting on Emersons land, Thoreau saw near Walden Pond snakes in frosty mornings... with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On my own way to independence, renting in a no-womans land, I met near Chicagos lake one frosty spring morning a special snake in jeans and down jacket with heart numb to me and inflexible, whatever the weather, unwilling that I might thaw it. Snakes cannot will against nature. Nor could I. And who knows why one cold and prevaricating city snake stayed or then slithered away, but, if Im not mistaken, the blame was natures too, one way or another.

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CLOSET DANCER Nobody knows the me who lowers shades and goes to lost decades, back to Motown. No kids still home to inhibit the new old me, graying and flabby, I get down,

boogie, do the very dirty dog with long gone Otis Redding, let Temptations shake me. Dont care that its aerobic, abandon is what Im after. Born to be wild like Steppenwolf, I gyrate, letting it allno small thing hang out.

But in place. From the ankles up. With the sound low. Not to vibrate my landlord, who lives down below and keeps busy with easy listening. Someday maybe Ill go all the friggin way. Throw off my dowdy rags, let my stereos bass thunder to the street, where I might even show every move I know. A free spirit. Not Alone. Carried away.

And not at all resembling forty years earlier when my menopausal mother made us girls turn our heads and snicker to see her knees clap as she danced the Charleston, her hands criss-crossing fast, a proud smile widening her lips.

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COARSE FROST like ferns carved on translucent quartz, frost like a madmans distorted macrame. Like unevenly crocheted snowflakes. Like spilled salt. Like fake glass ice crystals for Christmas display, coarse frost is pasted on my kitchen window. Through a breath-steamed, clear place, I survey the gray sub-zero day. Dark starlings huddle, feathers fluffed for warmth, on the chimney next door. Crows at times do that too, but more often mass on branches of a single tree, turning sunny days gloomy where their funereal tree looms over its own dark shadow. Though starlings, like crows, are loquacious, these have beaks closed against the cold. I shiver, thinking of the bitter weather still ahead, of the snow now starting to fall already slyly hiding the icy places on the path. Then a cardinal flashes red, perches with the starlings, vibrant against their darkness and making the snow glow whiter. From my feeder below come two more crimson males and all three fluff and hunch. Their red foreshadows Valentines and the crimson tulips already blooming a month or two to the south, to be followed soon by ripe, sweet, plump strawberries.

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COMPLEMENTS OF SCIENCE I think now not of opposites which in cybernetic systems act and react to bring to equilibrium Earths complex processes, not only of negative feedback nor homeostasis. I think rather of non-opposites whose sum is more than steady state: body and spirit, the Yin and Yang of unity, DNA chains that crave entangling one another, ideas of light or the atom that are exclusive yet both used to know the whole. I think of the poetry in seeking what mysteries mean, the creative dare-devil within the methodical saint of scientific research.

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CORIOLIS EFFECT All that goes straight aims awry to allow for drift over this rotating planet. To the south the Third World heels inexorably leftward. Northerly we turn toward the right. Playing with figures in 19th century France, Coriolis taught modern bomber pilots to sight a gauche or a droite of targets arching toward demolition. Before math, clouds had a way to wheel the weather, and birds sensed that, while the Earth reels, the shortest distance between two points is a curved line.

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CRITICISM If I could link the Chain Rule of calculus to literary theories of Meaning? Significance? Interpretation? and bind to a TEXT derivatives of func- tions of derivatives of BLAH BLAH BLAH, Id make a name making names no- one understands for whats innately known when fun follows function.

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DAD I. Over and over Mother rehearses that last afternoon, the vanilla ice cream cone Dad had only an hour before he fell, how well he had eaten and even slept, the game played with their pet (Good boy, Harvey, roll over, get the toy were his next-to-last words), how like himself he had been at dinner, except for the extraordinary number of times hed said to her again that he loved her. After fifty years together, the familiar words still surprised his wife. She cannot forget this better memory than the swift convulsion and stiffening stroke, his slumped position, Harvey whimpering, her own hysteria. She tells it still after a year, always ending the same way: Well, seventy years is a mans full span.

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DAD II. Not long after Grandpa, depressed by gambling debts, drank battery acid in his basement, Dad (who till then had only the average adolescents share of anguish) found him and his own premature responsibilities as child- man of the family. He left school, but what he went through in heart or head we never knew, he never said, just showed his distain for chance-taking and any man who wouldnt do his damnedest to take care of his family. He gave Grandma all he could, and provided my mother his wife with ample pension in a paid-for home full of his careful handiwork. If he had seemed a stingy spender to us kids, I now think it was because he couldnt risk leaving Mom as impoverished as his own mother and with (I admit it) three so-improvident daughters.

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DAD III. When Moms hair lay in marcelled flapper waves, she played teasing games with a handsome black- haired teen whose curls and thick-fringed gray eyes attracted Norfolk, Nebraska, girls. Mom scribbled her name, Nellie, for him to find on snow-skinned flivvers, got one fellow a nose- punch (in that romantic Valentino era) just for asking her to dance (when shed acted like she would). Bareback, daredevil Ed out-pranced a Sheik of Araby, but he had practical assets as well, had graduated from business classes and could take shorthand, back when secretary was a sexless term. After they married, Nell quit candling eggs at the factory. A bare year later, well-behaved baby June was born, when they could still afford her. Eventually, the Great Depression sent them penniless east to Chicago, far from farms and small-town houses with chickens and privies in shady backyards, to dark and verminous furnished rooms where the young mother was frequently sick, had operations and problems with cysts and had me, intended to be the last little sisterLinda, eight years later, was unanticipated in this

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DAD III. (continued) family of hand-me-downs, canned beans, catsup bread, and head-throbbing worries. But it could have been worse. IV. I cant say I had a great relationship with Dad. We were barely acquainted. Conservative, a strike- breaker, he hated reds (whereas I married one) and never forgave Roosevelt for what? I never understood. A Nebraska Republican, a lifetime full-time rail- road man and part-time job scrambler, handy at home repairs and making wood cabinets and chairs, so neat he hated even his hairs unruly curl, how must he have seen me, an untidy girl who wrote poetry and over- read, a leftist who stopped going to church, who shirked both office and housework to write or paint or play a guitar or work against a war. To find the father in that man, I have to go back to girlhood, walk balanced back and forth on a low log fence, while I watch for him coming home for dinner, taste again the candy

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DAD IV. (continued) bars he carried back late at night from some newsstand, sit with him at softball games or like on lakeside grass and watch cloud shapes pass on August nights. Make him read me funnies and Lifeboy B.O. soap ads. At twelve I shamed him at a spelling bee, missing maintenance although he worked at the railroads maintenance branch, not that I had a way to know that. Then in my teens things went bad. I sassed him and all that. Had hard words, at 18 left home. Later I half-redeemed myself, when I made him a granddad.

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DAD V. Dad was a two-pack-a-day young man in knickerbocker pants back on the Nebraska prairies. And in railroad yards or in office back rooms, cigarettes sprouted from his Lucky-Strike-stained hands. He hacked and choked every morning of my childhood, predictable as my bowlful of cold cereal and milk. After a doctor shocked Mom into banning his butts at home, he sneaked smokes at work, an aging kid back in the woodshed. He quit too late, stayed too long at the ashtray, laughed and talked about coffin nails while he burned a decade, maybe of life away. A family example, yet at nineteen my girl Eileen already hacks as badly as once her grandpa did, plans to cut back to one pack someday, maybe, after she loses weight. And at fifty my sister June begins and end and in- betweens everything by lighting up. She cant say why shes suicidal.

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VI. When Dad first began asking again and again questions just answered, we were impatient, and Mom laughed, embarrassed at her mans mistakes. Later, shame and distrust of what must have seemed to him a puzzling reason for blame silenced his inquiries, and God knows what might have transpired inside that brain that became every more unreliable. At family gatherings he sat quiet, trying not to look confused. On his good days my mother amazed him with tales hed been told over and over, tried to bring him up to date. he recoiled from the recent events he never remembered, sat contemplating a past as detailed as happenings of the last few days and future were murky, unsure.

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VII. Dad retired after that first heart attack, bought himself a brand new Cadillac, paid hard cash. Between his pre-Depression Model-T (Oh, the fun of broad running-boards) and the sad-looking old Nash he made his in nineteen fifty-six, he paid on kids instead of cars, a passenger and pedestrian who never held a steering wheel. Parading with Mom in that Caddy proclaimed that hed made it now, and not too late after all. Like the guys whod gone to college, (or high school, for that matter), hed ride with his wife to see fall colors and suburban shopping malls, delight in buying her hamburgers or frequenting the finer restaurantsthey, who had never dined out while we kids lived at homeas if it were habitual and not an old-age innovation. So when the accidents began, and he couldnt pass even an easy written drivers exam, when he had to hand over his car keys and freedom, he acted like it was life itself given up, which it was, within months.

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VIII. In intensive care, Dad worried about tipping the nurses who brought and took away his un- touched lunch trays, insisted that his visitors order a bite and kept waiting for the cab he thought hed called to take him away from this one-star restaurant. Heretofore shy and private about his parts, he now kept picking up his flimsy flowered hospital skirt to let anyone study (till my mother covered him) the hairless white legs thin as parsnips in bad earth, the male organ itself pricked with a disturbing tube. When his incessantly plucking fingers interfered with unit routine (he would not leave his needles alone, wanted to get up and use the phone), they tied him to his bed. He hallucinated, told us his schnauzer Harvey was referee of a baseball game. We stared. These dreams scared us, interspersed as they were with scenes in which he seemed his old sensible, lucid self. The nurses said he was worse, made us hire private care,

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DAD VIII. (continued) never left him alone. He disliked these spies, talked only of going home, always asked if we had a pocket knife to cut his bindings. DAD IX. The last two months of his life, back at home, my fathers nights were wild with searches through bureau drawers (What did he think he had stored in those piles of out-of-style ties and nylon sox?) and quarrels with the parade of nurses (babysitters, he preferred to call them, maybe in those days hurt more by euphemisms) who hushed and humbled him as much as the splashing catheter expanding and draining against his leg, plastic parody of the strained inflation and rasping exhalation of his used-up lungs. My mother below, not-sleeping alone in the basement family room, heard him hurrying around as if he could outrun suffocation, was like him afraid that once he lay down there would be no waking. She waited, sure that later the nurse would come and say he was making another

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DAD IX. (continued) absurd demand, wanting to leave and meet on some corner his mother dead twenty-five years. Or asking to telephone folks gone to Lutheran heaven ten years before the Great Depression. Couldnt he wait, stay with her while in this world? DAD X. Dad never meant it, Mom said, when hed suggested she remarry. In afterlife reunion a trio would look terrible. In life septuagenarian sex with anyone but her Ed seemed an obscenity. Hed wanted her again at the end, said, Nell, its been a long time since we made love, and had begged her to lie by him. His catheter had disappeared for him along with fifty years. Love was young, hungry.

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DAD XI. Emphysema, that slow boa constrictor, squeezed when my dad breathed out, hugged hard around his lungs, and jealous of its place there, left no space for breath, until even the oxygen he sucked through nasal straws from stainless steel tanks flowed in streams too shallow to reach the deep reasoning regions of a brain for- getting even to breathe.

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DAD XII. That plaster queen in pancake makeup and too much rouge for a tart, that mannequin clasping hands in a casket cannot be even the remains of the man I called Dad. My sisters and I would shut the lid or shut our eyes and seek behind their inner lids the father who would in life not have been caught dead in lipstick. Mom combed his hair, set glasses on the nose that had never loomed so long, said he had looked that way before we were born. What? Like a harlot? We daughters said little but secretly agreed that before we would be mortified by an embalmer we wanted all coffins closed. Never, this sanctimonious and garish taxidermy.

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DAD XIII. The minister who had hardly known Dad knew how glad he had to be now that suffering was past and heaven present. I sincerely wished this slick sympathizer would switch places and find out firsthand just how grand eternal rest might be. But at least his speech was brief, the drive to the grave and prayers there fast, just lasting long enough to satisfy my mother, crying, incapable anyway of fault- finding. The coffin lay on a kind of stage that would later be lowered by some cranking of its pulleyed chains. Mom had paid enough to make the casket impenetrable by insects and annelids. We left. The cemetery staff would set him down when we were out of sight, into the discreetly draped gape in the earth, warmer, Im sure, than this service, a thirty-minute Protestant marvel, hurrying mourners from pastoral murmurings to parking lot. The bereaved... Gods will...accept...Amen.

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DAD XIV. I suppose Ill never know if Dad was at all satisfied with his life, was gladafter all his complainingsthat he had passed most of his days in a railroads offices (when he really liked carpentry and outdoor labor) and so many grim nights in the middle of his life fighting with my mother, mostly over drinking (which I still think he did moderately) and his low-life saloon friends (which he gave up, leaving him with none) or money troubles (in marriage my mother never worked; it wouldnt have occurred to either of them), in spite of his long nights at second jobs. He didnt get a son, and if we daughters meant anything to him, he never said. I doubt if Mom herself knew what was in his head, even before forgetfulness set in. I wish she had laughed less at his senile helplessness, but he accepted it. For all I know, might have shown the same insensitivity in her place. What I would have asked, had he not stayed a stranger, was: Personally, was it all worth it?

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DAD XV. We never know what we dont know about our parents until one of them says something so opposed to what weve believed that reassessment has to start. We enjoyed sex, my mother said, setting spinning my vision that they slept together about every seven years, the exact gap between us girls. He lay slantwise and was so lanky we had separate beds, Mom went on, but he had visiting privileges. I scanned the past, recalled asking (and getting no good answer) about a prophylactic package Id seen on the sink. Another time, a little tipsy, hed grabbed at her crotch and been slapped. That was the most I had ever been shown. Knowing I might recall room-vibrating fights, and even a few flying plates, Mom adds, Oh, we had our bad times when we were raising you three. I guess I missed all the kissing years.

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DEBATING IN SLEEP with an irritating colleague. He: articulate, convincing, winning. I: incoherent, uneasy, as if speaking from a sleep thick as cold oatmeal. I heat and stir. Up like fat raisins float the right words. An instant before victory I wake, never to say... what? on the subject of what? and how named, that man to whom the sly night gave the last word? To re-enter a gentle dream is easy as falling up. Yet irresistible as a tornados suck, a nightmare can come back and lift an unwilling sleeper, whirl him within its perilous funnel. But this dream is done. Deep within the organism, padded with fat, embraced by bone, one-way as artery blood pumped by heart muscles. Wide-eyed, in my mind I compose a perfect 3 a.m. poem about my need to complete the teasing dream. Satisfied, I sleep. Morning. The poem? As lost as the dream, and I equally nowhere.

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DESCRIBING AN ARC Ill take the sale sausage, I said, side-stepping blindly toward the place where its rolls were attractively displayed within the butchers glass case. My feet were stopped by an unseen case of canned stock, but my head, like a pencil on a compass, described a 90 degree arc. The butcher peered over the counter at me, my live human meat in disarray on the floor, not attractively displayed like his neat and clean and stationery protein. Ill take two pounds sliced, I continued, rising unsurprised. I am known for clumsiness and fall too often. OO-EE, one of my students used to titter, she be falling all the time. I would walk to the blackboard, step on something slick, and one high-heeled shoe would shoot up and the other crumple under until my knee bounced down. All this on board floors, never mind talking about how I can flip over roots or slip on rolling rocks or ice or trip on the unseen. These are easy fall whose blacks and blues and elastic ankle bands I stand well enough between tumbles. The balance I would pray for, if God existed and were not the kind of trickster to stick out a heavenly foot, is simply this: the stability to stay at a rigidly unromantic right angle to the earth, soberly above loves supine, to fall no more for the prone and groaning lovers easy lies.

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DIFFERENT FOLKS, DIFFERENT STROKES

A male spider, lacking a penis, packsin fact, gift wrapsin spermatophores what he seems to deliver by hand. Except that he has no hands, only swollen palp tips like boxing gloves that he uses to scoop semen into the female. Knowing no better, she accepts what she gets and does not even always kill this mate unable to copulate. At least this female cannot be called castrating.

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DISAPPOINTMENT is the universal Christmas gift. We all get and give it, and no one can use it. Some years, its everything there is, when the one we love gives nothing or coldly removes his own presence. Other years, its hidden in the present we wrapped and gave so happily to someone who, we discovered, didnt want, need, or fit it. When my children were little enough to show enthusiasm, or at least not bitch too ungratefully about what was missing in their plunder, or about my taste in clothes or toys, I decorated and enjoyed the charade, baked and caroled and read stories. Yet, even then, was, like the kids, sad that I couldnt give or get what we all missed most: a daddy to say Give me a kiss, or Sit on my lap.

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DISCOVERYS SCIENTIST OF THE YEAR, 1982 Here comes Robert Weinberg with new terms for me to learn, new ways to worry about carcinogens, to understand how I may someday have cancer. Oncogenes. Proto-oncogenes. An insidious shifting of T for G, an off-base switching triggered by some environmental sin, and then, from deep within a cells spiraling center, a nucleotide decides someones future. At MIT, Weinbergs on the case, after what crazily changes first cell growth patterns, then a victims fate. Snapped at home with wife Amy, the scientists gentle look belies the fierce general in our anti-cancer army. But who can do enough in a world that shrugs to hear of this weeks latest carcinogen? That believes only in growth, bloat, takeover, explosion?

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DIVIDED SKY Driving home in a black rain I am halfway back to myself after eight hours play-acting automated office girl, a game that barely pays. The late afternoon traffic crawls past factories and K-Mart malls, past subdivisions named for what they replaced: Flowerfield, Streamwood. My wipers whine, rewriting the same two blurred curves back and forth, back and forth, going nowhere. Behind them and ahead brightness from a sky divided above the double yellow highway line into gray cloudbank on the left and blue in the future to the right, rain and rays side by side. Faster now, hitting sixty, past forest preserve lands with the sheen after rain of green cellophane, tamed and shaved for family picnics and softball games, their prairie pasts long gone. No remnants. But green at least and able to eat sunshine. I try a bite and revive. At Walgreens I buy beer.

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DOG-WALKING THOUGHTS Like my police dog, I often squint my eyes and sniff intently, pursing lips, searching for the figurative must-be- here-somewhere stick or ball or bone, more literally for me just maybe a misplaced phone number or lost thought, and am often blind to the desired objective right under my eyes. The dog pulls me on, anxious at this place; an eastern cottontail often crouches where the ground at the base of a Norway maple is hollowed to fit a bunny butt. But we pass the rabbit, casual and unblinking in its camouflage coat. My dog looks but does not see the shiny-eyed bundle less than three feet away. Like the rabbit, at times I sit silent, secure, unmoving, observing but not worrying much about real dangers, sure that they will not be unleashed toward me. I am safe, watching television news of military buildups, dictatorships and genocides, pollutions new repercussions, crimes and fires, natural disasters, inflation, you name it. A remote control is all it takes to make these troubles pass me by.

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DOING THE TIME STEP Gene Kelly screwed me up, always falling in love at first glance (this shaped my adolescence, betrayed me into oh-so-many one-way romances) with someone lovely and no chance (dont laugh) to win her unless he moved fast, before Brigadoon disappeared, before his day On the Town ran down, before Leslie Caron didnt marry An American in Paris. I should have listened to his cynical side- kicks, Van Johnson or Oscar Levant, learned that one-day loves, however good looking, in real life as opposed to reel usually are not so hot, dissolve into a choking smoke. But the fifties were too soon to see, sexist was not a word yet when Kelly asked rich and supposedly bitchy Nina Foch if she got her money from her daddy or her hubby. Her initiative was hell on Kelly, made him grab his balls, save them for a passive little lass.

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DONT FOOL WITH PHYSICS Finding my quirks opposed by anti-quirks, my gravy burned to anti-gravy, myself unable to balance die Mutter in me with die anti-Mutter, I self-annihilate with a nondescript Big Bump. DUSTBALL Hot weather doesnt scare my watchdog, except for its July 4th firecrackers, wind-whipped electrical storms, and suspicious strangers sitting out after dark. A good watchdog, she barks and jumps hard against my butt before streaking for home and a hideout too dark to see danger. But, as I say, shes brave about heat, and on this scorcher stayed cool inside our dry bathtub, keeping anything scary from coming up the drain. At least until the pipes gurgled. Anyway, it got cool then when a thunderstorm blew through, cool enough to be under the bed where dustballs tremble, one quite large and strong.

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EAR LYRIC Lining waxy shore of s-curved ear canal, hairs clap, wild for more. at sax-drum-bass waves funneled float toward inner seaways note by note. Drummers solo raps tympanic cavity, as hammers anvil taps on stirrup, drumskin, middle ear. My own percussion I would hear. Labyrinth within and spiraled lymphy ducts, acoustic nerves begin synaptic rhythms passed from band. Brain mails message: Tap your hand.

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EATING ITS WAY TO OBLIVION That natty little snout- nosed beetle, Apion griseum, tweed-suited for survival, white-haired on satin black, hiding inside false-indigo pods (Baptisia leucaphaea look for it in sandy spaces near the great lakes), has what it takes to make it, a voracious appetite and safe eating place, a hard-shelled shelter. But what will it do if it is too successful, when it has infested every false-indigo plant so that pods seeds are all eaten? False indigo is rare as prairies, its areas taken, paved or degraded into shaved lawns. Will Apion foresee its future needs and fast or not clean its plate, leaving seeds free to grow? Will it choose substitute foods? Few humans will know or care if it chooses to eat itself into extinction, except maybe to say, Good. Too many beetles anyway.

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EITHER WAY, SAME DIFFERENCE Printing the same etched plate, I get an unmatched set of ten, not an edition. Silk-screening, I find that color number two, a deep blue-green, refuses to stay in the same rectangle as lemon-yellow, number one. Similar registration problems blur my lithographs and block- prints, make shades overlap as in bad television reception. Out of line, unable to do any print the same way twice, I find that art imitates life, or maybe life is the copy, though naturally not precise.

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EVER THE UNDERACHIEVER When it comes to getting money, todaydespite or because of an M.A. and years of teaching I am again financially embarrassed. Am mindlessly typing figures for a very low sum. Temporarily. My incentives to continue decline nearly as fast as my finances. But decline deceives, implies some former height, some previous non-existent peak. Me, Ive always been waiting for payday. Have unknown poets syndrome and find it anti-romantic. The engineers I am working for find me quietly polite, preoccupied, perhaps odd, as I tidy their scribbles for print. Internally, I whine and worry, which causes mistakes. My favorite error is typing numbers with upper case key depressed, revealing with traditional symbols my real feelings:

)$*&@#$!( Im lucky, Im told, to sit near one of the two windows in this factory box. The engineers bunch near its glass and my desk after lunch and make sluggish comments. They are, like me, surprised, I hear, to see a little crab tree outside flowering bravely and mistakenly in October. Late and barren, it flaunts beauty unfruitful but never wasted.

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FEMININE PERSPECTIVE Orchids resemble female genitals. Of humans, in some cases, both in clitoral suggestion and in petals shaped like strangely painted floral labia minor and major. Darwin, quite the orchid voyeur, wrote scandalous plant pornography about this, shocking Victorians in more ways than one. Some of the smaller flowers remind male insects of the hind ends of females of their own species, which leads the poor dupes to make fools of themselves, frantically humping plants that can never make insect babies and are only using these stupid spasmodic mis-matings to transport pollen, to fertilize another chuckling fake. Hoping such behavior too devious to be female in origin, I feel relieved to read that the Greek root of terms like orchid or orchis is also their word for testicle, which some orchid roots do resemble. Stretching this idea makes their deception unconceivably male. If Greeks can be trusted when it comes to sex more than when they come bearing gifts.

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FIERY JULY AND CHICAGO, that gashole of the Midwest, coils its brown ozone anti- glow around inhabitants, rancid themselves after eight days of heat wave suffocation, packed close, like meat gone bad back in Sinclair/Sandburg days. I choke and burrow through this soiled styrofoam air that makes my head ache at the Michigan Avenue work- place where I mostly warm space. I am another painted woman but luring no one (where have all the innocent farm boys gone?) under fluorescent lamps. I find no city of big shoulders, only the dismal blowfly life, at least in this weather and job, in this grit-thickened city.

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FINALLY AN UNUSED IMAGE To heal the hurt of divorce, lovers are disgustingly effective, (stop reading here, if squeamish) like maggots applied by surgeons, before they discovered sulfa, to nib- nib- nibble off dead flesh and cleanse infected wounds until, fat and featureless, their service delivered, they reached vermiform satiation and fell off, leaving, when theyd disappeared, a clean scar.

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FLUORESCENT LIGHTS DEFINE what confinement looks like. Like the box in which I wait to type. Windowless and stale high in the Motorola tower. Like the style of his letters: In reply to your memo of the 5th I find... I find that the stainless steel package racks in the ladies bathroom are too low for even the smallest secretaries to hang themselves. Just as well. But they are not dissatisfied as I am, who as only temporary help, am told to read the phone books to keep busy. It is so interesting, the receptionist says, to know we have so many international branches. Dont you find that exciting? I do like branches, and study those of the box elders where yellowthroat warblers sing witchity witchity along Poplar Creek. Today, no more a pale Motorolan, I sun myself, wear tinted windows and boots wet from wall-to-wall creek water. Another day I will again fold and enclose myself flat as the wallet I pack and resign myself to temporary life.

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FRAGILE DETERRENT A pane of glass is all that separates goldfinch and goldfinch assassin. Minnie, my black cat, is at the window, inches, split by glass, from a finch feeder full of niger thistle seed. Finches circle nearby, vying for filled perch positions. Unwilling to miss this meal, they whistle thinly, wings aflutter, aware of cats paw thudding against glass. Flitting and feeding like finches, neither oblivious nor disinterested, unwilling to sacrifice or switch, people just hope the glass wont crack as they tease catastrophes with many names, names like Environmental, Chemical, Atomic, or even, closer to home, Romantic.

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FREE STYLE Six kicks from the hips. Breathe in and then blow. Rotary motion, not neglecting left side. Going where I thought I never could go, where azures up and aguas below. Duck and up, stroke and glide, rhythmic as tide. Into deep waters I fearlessly flow. GOLD AT THE RAINBOWS END Look, how in this rubbled street of crusted rubbish under- foot and sewers over- run, rain-pools still reflect heavens, show cirrus clouds clear as in any hygienic pool. But here the mirror is improved, not spoiled, by its oil rainbows. Surprised by a bike, I misstep, squish, slide, and find the iridescent puddles, within whose outlines rain-gray pigeons fly, do not by themselves wash ochre excrement from boot soles. It takes patient scraping with a crumbling bit of brick or nail- pricked, jagged, city stick.

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GRAND UNIFICATION THEORY, a title cut to a mere GUT, is the quest for the god FORCE, with trinity of Father Electromagnetic, Son Nucleic, and Radioactive Holy Ghost. Adding gravity will give physicists super-GUT. Watching protons decay, these Fausts might say they could make Mephistopheles put his soul on sale for secrets of the new universe. GRASSHOPPER LIFE Incomplete metamorphosis pleases grasshopper nymphs. Miniature moms from the morn of birth, munching and jumping to prove their worth, mandibles twitching by chitinized lips, springing legs rising from muscular hips, skipping the larval and pupal trips, egg to adult, all is dinner.

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GRAVE ROBBERS Buried alongside my marriage deep within the pyramid: Seeds. You ask to see. I break through aging bricks, creep thieflike down and around through labyrinthine corridors, invade the unholy sacrificial center. I barely glance at my mummified marriage, encased in painted wood, exactly as in life. From its side I take but one seed, not wanting you to squander what I may need some other spring. Up in the sunlight you admire my seeds shape and polish, promise to nurture it forever into no thin-stemmed annual but an evergreen for all seasons, thick-trunked and sun-touching. I have a vision: a 2-inch seedling, dry as papyrus sits untended and in shadow.

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HAL Just when I was wishing I had my hands on a man, the phone rang and a baritone answered my hello with hi. Barely giving me time to get glad, he ran on, Im Hal, your tele-computer... Click. Im sick as it is of substitutes for men and sex, and Im damned if Ill discuss anything whatsoever with a machine. Later I thought just maybe Id been too hasty. At least Hal had a deep voice. Why not give a guy a chance?

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HARVEY The other day my mothers fat schnauzer Harvey passed away. He is now, my sister told her, in heaven with my dad. Im glad I didnt hear her say that. Harveys not in the ground (unlike Mitzi, before him, buried with her toys in a suitcase back of the garage) but cremated and wherever ashes go. The ladies at his beauty parlor sent flowers and shocked condolences (He had been so happy at his last appointment, such a good boy). Even my daughter, who had recently and very rudely told her grandma that Harvey looked like a little pig, sent a sympathy card. Harvey was put to sleep after two heart attacks and brain damage; his lungs were fluid, his kidneys bad. The afternoon of his last collapse he snuggled in my mothers lap, playedjust once, and feebly thathis favorite game. But, off his feed, refused roast beef. He lived a short but full dogs life, full of chicken and chops and steak, the choicest cuts my mother cooked. His quiet life required no exercise but digestion. Hes had his heaven.

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HAUSTELLATY Insects that sip their victims make me sickest. Haustellate, theyre named, and hostile they are, those whose piercing beaks permit two tubes to access into someone elses cells. Squirting saliva through one straw, through the other sucking up whats digested, they never chew their food. The vegetarians I accept, except in garden or groceries. But giant water bugs disgust, sipping insides of 3-inch fish. And, balance of nature aside, who can say anything nice about mosquitoes and flies, fleas and lice, those historical horrors who still inject more ills than doctors can eject.

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HAVE AN ICE DAY An ice storm blew me a glass forest my first time on cross-country skis. Nicolet National, its boughs bent in old beauty, its fat transparent over evergreen bone, peers in the grounds mirror. A squirrel skates across the snow; the collie that follows falls through, scratched by the cracked surface plate, and, five feet under, must be excavated. On skis I stand still and slide sideways anyway, until, with neat counterclockwise twirl, I raise skis and poles skyward, playing dead dog. My barks are muffled. Glitterless undersnow fits like a featherbed. At ease, I wait to be hauled.

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HOMEGROWN POISONS I. POTATOES, like related tomatoes, share a family taint. They are nightshades, and can be dangerous even when not fore- named black or deadly. Its a wild tribe. Consider nettles itchy prickle or reeking narcotic jimsonweed, alias devils trumpet, stinkweed, thorn apple. In the familys snooty branch, we find purple eggplant, also known as madapple. (Love apple was an old French name for tomato, which careful English were afraid to taste.) But back to that potato, so innocent mashed or fried or hashed or baked and laid fat with sour cream, or its butter or gravy running over our plates. That very potato, I say, can act in insidious nightshade ways. Did they know back when the higher classes despised new world tubers that solanine in potato greens and berries is just as fine a poison as that of fatal nightshades. Belladonna of course is more notorious.

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HOMEGROWN POISONS, I. POTATOES (continued) Sprouting in a pantry cabinet or half-submerged in a water glass and pushing up shoots, a potato takes care of business in my kitchen. Idly I fantasize about likely victims. Just kidding... HOMEGROWN POISONS, II. LETTUCE Plant right after the last thaw softens your plot, but before oak leaves unfold and the trees-of heaven begin their unholy reeking. (What insect prefers that noxious odor of rot?) Your backyard garden will thicken with rows of, say, Bibb or Black-Seeded Simpson. Youll never finish or give all those greens away. So let what stays bolt, that is to say, send up central stems and little dandelion-like flowers. Let it grow through those leaf-scorching afternoons of June when colds an incredible memory. Then imagine an enemy, maybe some tyrannical dictator (my pick would be those who disappeared so many thousands of South Americans) you would like to feed these narcotic old lettuce leaves until he falls in green coma.

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Only a bitter taste would give away that the salad was loaded. HOMEGROWN POISONS III. MONKSHOOD, now sown for beauty, in olden days was everymans own doorstop poison, known also as Wolfs Bane. Its poisonous aconitum was actually used against medieval wolves, some of whom might have been in sheeps clothing or possibly woven wool. Its holy name came from 10th century monks who wrote of its potency. This blue buttercup with helmet head may have wet the lips of the Medicis dead. Or flowered in Rappacinis bower. In times as civilized as mine, aconitums turned anodyne, a plain old painkiller in low doses. Folks now dont know they can grow their own poisons or that the good old days and herbal remedies were not necessarily safer.

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HOW TO LIVE LONGER Be big mammals, elephants or camels rather than rats or spaniels. Spread the mammalian allotment of breaths and heartbeats over longer, leisurely periods. Or be people and greedy, exceed by a factor of three the beats and breaths and lifetimes our size predicts. Then further extend the human span: geriatrics recommends exercise, pets, senior sex, and doing what you love. Medicine may suggest other extension methods, which may or may not be called living.

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I APOLOGIZE FOR USING YOU, PAUL NEWMAN After my nightmare slipped into sitcom, I lay smiling, semi- awake. I never reveal, rarely remember dreams. But this one I must submit, if only to help me not to forget it. I am chased by what I fear may be a rapist. He catches me and who should it be but Paul Newman. He needs some place to sleep. I invite him home and give him my bed, a foam mat on the floor. Politely I go lie on the couch. Now, I ask, why cant I get no satisfaction even in my fantasies? Tonight I will try to reverse the chase. This time, Paul, Im going all the way. Too bad, Joanne.

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I HOPE THEYRE ALL HAPPY My Lakeview alley at 6 a.m. crackles with glass and other greasy reflections of the night past. Straining at her chain, my dog Pie tabulates, then acts. I also add things up: blue plastic boots abandoned in mid- alley near fancy underpants; a charred-black, dog-splashed mattress; shards enough to give me a hangover, imagining antecedents. A third-floor tenant throws from her window trash that misses the cans below and hits a Monte Carol illegally parked. Seven pairs of mens shoes stumble from the garbage bag. Somewhere a crying woman shrills, I hope youre happy. Youve had your god damn meditation. Then, darkly despairing, adds, I dont know. I dont know. Nor do I but can surmise.

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I KNOW IM OVER MY LATEST man-needing period. Last night I dreamed I was eating dinner in a busy restaurant. The waitress placed a handsome man at my table. We flirted. I went to primp in the powder room. Returning, I found an empty table but felt no regret that the fellow left. Instead, I raged at the waitress, bereft not for missed love or sex but for the half steak lost forever on my prematurely cleared plate.

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I READ IT IN TIME (2/23/81) Washington. Secretary of State Haig refuses with exacerbating restraint to definitize a position, to saddle himself with a statistical fence. He speaks as always with careful caution. From his menu of Western assets, Nixonsand now Reagansman serves $5 million in guns and ammo (Viet Nam surplus) to help impede the intervention of third countries (other than us, I have to assume) in El Salvadors affairs. Since all else is subordinate, U.S. concern for a few murdered missionaries has been delinked from full support of the present government.

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I RELY ON LIMESTONE (for which photo- synthesizers mined carbon dioxide from archaic skies) to grow slowly dense enough, after a sludgy start, to sink and slide inside the Earth that spurts up in return ashy volcanic gases to fatten the atmosphere for todays plants. I rely on limestone to be beautiful in buildings whose great blocks are fossils locked in casts and molds. I rely on volcanoes to help metamorphose limestone into cool marble for sculptures so smooth and fluid my caressing hands marvel. I rely on Earth to survive mans attacks and keep moving through vibrant cycles, a cornucopia of plant and animal life, of landscapes shimmering with ever-recycling atoms, changing and evolving its forms and organisms in spite or because of us, to motivate our greatest art and to let us stay as more than a fossil record of the cause of mass extinctions.

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I WILL February, and the rime giving every twig luminescence through bright sunlight and rising fog puts to shame the laciest Valentine. No old curled oak leaf escapes a shining. The day crackles: Be mine. Be mine.

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IMMORTALITY TODAY, NO WAITING Would Melvilles skull smile less widely if his works had remained unread? Does Dreiser mind the snide assessments of his life and style? And what of Emily D? Can she blush to know, now that she is truly zero at the bone, how her life lies exposed? Is Sylvia Path pleased at last to be appreciated? And how about Van Gogh? And Gauguin? And Cezanne? Do they know? Does it matter what their works are worth now? Do eternal sleepers peep over heavens fleece (or peer up through hells steam) and care? Id rather have my irony while alive. My I-told-you-so goes out early to those editors whose regrets I now collect. And just in case my grave proves too opaque, Ill say straight away that I foreseefor now as in a dreamlibraries that carry my collected works (most yet in outline form), doctoral candidates dissertating on which of my works (yet to be finished) rates as truly great. Since waiting makes me melancholy, Ill take for granted posthumous prizes, play the famous author, maybe even write.

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INADEQUATE DANDELIONS on all the sprayed lawns and roadways of Illinois cannot make enough wine to dull my mind sufficiently to reminders on every side of our loves conclusion. Ray Bradburys book Dandelion Wine made me want to make it even without you on a May day when already you stayed away, disappointing our plans to gather blossoms, to use your recipe to brew gallons, enough to last till next Valentines Day. August, and the single gallon I made alone is almost gone. Acceptable, my own recipe. Flowerheads and lemons, water, raisins, oranges, sugar galore, yeast for two weeks bubbling. The bottle stood as untouched as I by you for seven weeks, its sediment drifting down. It must settle, you said by phone, till the wine is clear and yellow as bulls piss. An impeccable expert, you, on bull excretions. Come siphon my wine, I said hopefully to you in July. Your yes gave me hope. We swallowed some as we worked. When it was done, we put the good in a new bottle, got rid of the sludge. Sipped, but did not get intoxicated. Drinking alone today, I think it was a mistake to try to bottle

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INADEQUATE DANDELIONS (continued) sunshine. Or maybe the mistake was in saving the memory of a season and romance gone bad. Next time I love, generic wine will do, more suitable for lower expectations and with few romantic associations, only a slowing proportionate to alcohols flow.

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INBOUND TRAIN, 6:45 A.M. I see the insistent prongs of the Sears Tower still sticking it to the sky. Shoving my shiny bunions up the front of my high- heeled and tight shoes, I turn out the light on my novels characters, whose imaginings and shenanigans wait (patient after so many odd- hour command performances) under the blueberry yogurt in my purse. At work I become chameleon, may not look my genuine blue. And truly am no wiser than that lizard, who may not know either, after so many opportunistic switches, which complexion reflects true image and which the hue of deception. I think I play a role, but fear I actually am now the office automaton I portray, the version of me people see as useful and settled down, at last.

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INSECT RELAXATION You might think a dead collected insect as relaxed as limp can be, but no. A stiff, dried in deaths final twist, cannot be displayed if not shaped as for a wake. No martini or muscle massage relaxes, but moisture of entomologists embalming. Then, pinned and posted with death notice, mounted in its mausoleum, the hexapod may tense for all eternity.

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INSIDE THE NEW COMMUNITY COLLEGE where I pick up a few bucks, dark windows, or none, make all seasons seem winter. To create this place, slabs had been piled on a scoured site, stacked at right angles, thick stone skins on cavelike cubes filled with unfresh air. It was lit within by cold and flickering fluorescent fires, mans most recent replacement for sunshine. In rooms too planed to really be caves, desks define offices; blackboards and chairs and teachers table, the classrooms. In rooms used by all, nobody decorates the bare walls. Cheap and interchangeable part-time teachers like myself complete the foundations of education. There are the minimal facilities, washrooms and halls, stuffy polyhedrons, hollow during off-hours but quiet even in the nightly rush to classes. In the center of the edifice, like the hole in a stony, squared letter O, an enclosed outside air column sits over a park, a patch of shady, shabby grass. And I sit too, my body inside, my mind out, of a box within sight of a bit of dark window high above the alleged park. I am dispensing independent

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INSIDE THE NEW COMMUNITY COLLEGE (continued) study according to prescription, giving a minimum of 10 minutes per week per student, weighing in the work by word count or pages, scribbling in my patients charts, diagnosing, perhaps scolding, giving receipt or bill toward grades, as needed, on this grim, gray April 3rd. Looking away from an angry rash of fragments and dangling modifiers, I see beyond the window slit what look like scraps of paper, maybe torn-up pages of vapid and overblown freshman essays, falling upward against gravity. Overgrown snowflakes, not blowing but drifting slowly as balloons, lazily raised, I supposed, by hot air, no doubt from classrooms but not likely to be heated by fires of debate. Anyway, up the flakes go, like little albino birds riding thermals. My own encasing thermals, nubbly long underwear, is chafing legs oh so ready and willing for a sprint or a spring. Or just to rise above this place till I lie supine afloat some warm ocean of air going anywhere, anywhere, else.

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IS THAT YOU, PRINCE? When willows fizz with beaded wiggles, reflecting yellows in streams their early weeping feeds, something sluggish bubbles beneath, grabs amphibians up from muddy slumber until they blow

their throats madly, Satchmos, antic in their horny scramble to copulate. I listen to them swinging in ditches and inlets where nothing but dust will ripple come August. I will clip some willow sprigs, bring spring into my grim living room in a thin glass vase.

Later I sit in my window feeling the breeze and the seasons sweet fever. I cannot see but believe my willow twigs are in the mood to grow roots. I wish for I want to know what, the missing difference that will whisk me out of winter. An idea. I close my eyes, try whispering RIB-IT, RIB-IT. Were those splashes I heard? And what is this warm urge to make tadpoles?

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IT TAKES GOOSESTEPPING to move through soft new snow thats light and thick and relatively dry. But when its too heavy and wet to drift, you cant kick a path and, lacking shovel or snowshoes, must prance like a majorette, lifting knees stiff in woolen pants to make prints the width and depth of wastebaskets. Walking in anothers tracks takes balanced high-stepping. Takes some others legs and gait. Following in footsteps makes me shaky. Id rather walk as through water which snow is, however rigid pressing stiffly against the resistance, slowly pushing out a way molded at my own pace to my own shape.

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IT TAKES SOME BIG BEES Driving what he slyly calls his honey wagon, the farmer spreads manure on his slice from the nations breadbasket. There is a fragrance, and, coming out to watch the work one Thanksgiving, a neighbor sniffs and says, I dont have much to be thankful for today. Another neighbor, planning a yard party, asks for some unhoneyed air, finding nothing sweeter. The farmers wife no longer holds her nose when washing clothes of such fertile smell they alone could grow the corn that pays for real bee-sweetened honey on her childrens muffins.

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ITS A LITTLE LIKE LOVE When drifts go liquid and slush runs into mud, amid the raw, green creep of gill- over-the-ground and small heart-shaped strawberry leaves, the thawed crap and trash steam, booby-trapping the path. Then defrostings over. The freezer hums once more. Sooty old snow stops flowing, is caught in odd postures, like kids playing statues, as drips solidify into crags and canyons. Vitreous, recrystalized, surfaces shine like mica. One night new soft falling snow disguises underlying ice, bleeds extremes into each other. Undefined for the hiker, pits and inclines threaten. I sink, slide, trip, and slip on what passes for a path. making me wary, a bit scared of apparently flat, easy places. I dont know what is solid and what is not, what will stand and what crack. I have been drenched and bruised so often when testing what appears deceptively pleasant. Taking chances these days is no longer great fun.

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ITS CUCKOO On public television a female cuckoo, strutting as if aiming to be an avian Mussolini, is bullying reed warblers. In plumage like a striped brown and white turtlenecked sweater, she looms over her victims nest. And a relentlessly aggressive scam commences. She lays her eggs in a space she vacated by heaving over- board most of Ma Warblers clutch. The displaced eggs crash against branches. Twigs scramble them. Youd think the warblers would notice. Exclaim, Wheres our bunch? We loved them so much! And Whats this scumbag doing here? Some warbler folks, its so, do abandon that desecrated nest and change residences. But most give the suspicious egg barely a glance and never attend at all to the exposed yolks of lost loved ones below. Better to pretend not to know about what cant be mended. The cuckoo meanwhile has gone to find more homes to vandalize. Her baby, she knows, can make its own grisly way. And it does, growing daily inside the shell until hideous and hairless and clearly of reptilian descent, it cracks its calcium case and begins to flay everything out of its way, quickly sweeping any unlucky remnant of the real

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ITS CUCKOO (continued) warbler brood out of the nest. Ready-to-crack eggs and new hatchlings are strewn helpless and broken where they fall. Lord of it all now, the cuckoo baby waits as the foolish warbler parents respond like automatons to the demands of its awesome jaws. They forage themselves to a frazzle to satisfy the appetite of the outsized monster crowding even them from the nest, its mouth a bottomless, growing red bowl. The imprinted cuckoo infant will want to get in a nest of the same warbler species when its ready itself to breed. Barring warbler revolution, the pattern of slave and master shall repeat forever. Yet cuckoos are blameless amoral beings, no matter what humans may read into it. And then there is the cuckold, whose story is equally old. And whose home has also been invaded. Who may also be raising anothers chick, but who wears horns rather than warbling. What about that? I ask you, Aint nature outrageous?

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January 4, 1986 Its a dirty-lace day, though crystalline symmetries are pristine still in the trees where unblown snow white and scarce as a virgin brides slip trails liquidly over angular branches and makes them flow. Then around edges, on the ground, the lace grays, is ripped into rags yet still softens with its sooty folds the rougher ugliness from mans precipitations, his trashfalls and litter flurries.

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JIVE TURKEY, my mostly German Shepherd bitch, full of love and piss, damply sniffs my comatose face. 6:30 A.M., and time to walk each other. I lift my leg to put on jeans. She weaves under and around, pushing her head affectionately against my hopping leg; then doing her best to separate leg from shoe, she does a hula rug rub. Leash and keys jangle, signaling mad leaps, forepaws on my shoulders for one more morning- mouth wet kiss. She bangs the door, races three times up and down the stairs I slowly descend. At my maddeningly slow pace we make our way to the lot not vacant of weeds, trash, turds. Now no haste to deliver waste. Plenty of time to sniff, sniff, sniff, then circle the perfect place.

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JOHN DONNE, LONG DEAD Reading biographies of stars (I mean those fiery actors in universal 4-D movies), I skew into other histories, amazed again at like patterns in unlikely places. John Donne, long dead, do I dare compare marriage and star? I speak not as pop poet, of stars romantic backup to moons mood over Tin Pan Alley. Instead I sing the Einsteinian stars. I say lovers once swirled cold, interstellar dust until fused, none knows how, every atom married and changed, hydrogen burned to helium. No fuel glows forever, but in main sequence a marriage or star seems eternal, steady over insidious spread of inert core, gravity balancing expansion. Silent stars burn long, endure ages hot flash and red- faced bloat, kick up dust before, quiet and wizened, their white dwarves blacken from sight in nights graveyard. Speeding as in Hollywood toward explosive divorce, big stars live fast and found dynasties, from great burning orgies birthing carbon and oxygen, neon, silicon, and everything else when the

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JOHN DONNE, LONG DEAD (continued) supernova blows. Then, shrunk to neutron star or black hole buried with the dull dwarves, matter rides space with the stellar winds, finds nebulous relationships, seeks molecules for remarriage. LAP SWIMMING AT THE YMCA At the swims for women only, septuagenarians twist and stretch in the womb-warm water. There to ease arthritic limbs, they soak and stroll like old-world ladies at fashionable baths. They block my peevish way as I meander past, trying to swim laps. Later, we dress, all stretch- marked and flabby at our lockers. mothers drooping too soon come in for the Mom and Tot Plunge, their children goggle-eyed at the sight of so much sagging flesh. Someones son watches me dress. He is crotch-high and delighted. I wonder if here in this small town Midwest moms know about Oedipus.

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LAUNDROMAT Oil, first oozed eons before backbones ladder led to brain, stored secret in our cellar long before derricks lit long Arabian nights, now heats to tropic the Washing Well Laundromat. Spinning through cycles, machines green with enamel, not chlorophyll, direct rivers into synthetic necessities. On chains suspended from sky-blue ceilings, spider plants jump and wandering jews tremble as they vibrate through foreign fluorescent days. Eunuch music soothes what is troubled by the blood-bought thumps of so many sterile machines.

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LEARNING TO DIVE IN Over eight feet of water and four feet of air, when I first walked the plank, I crept, cowering there. Four shy steps, timid jump, then a leap to wet space. Feet feel bottom, rebound, kiss of air on my face. Amphibious feelings as sinuses clear. Having jumped, I must dive. Deep slow breaths swallow fear. With bowed head and raised hands, as in suppliant prayer, I plunge and am slapped by the water god there.

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MADE IT! Writing a publisher to whom I wished to submit, my hand slipped. I asked not about his next but about his nest competition. Whimsical, I didnt fix this. Eight days later, my bell rang. A tall bird, indeterminate species, waited. Lady, he said, wheres your entry? He flexed his talons, spread toes red with dried blood. Thinking quickly, I said Id get it. Under my bed was a collection: threads, mending, sewing odds and ends. Bell bottoms that needed a button decades back. Pins and zippers, tangled. I wound yarn around it all. Voila! At least I wasnt rejected. My nest was accepted, payment to be free photos of the winning nest collection, in which mine won ninth prize. Impressive feather in my rsum!

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MAKING WHOOPEE IN BARABOO At the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, they are worried about whoopers and are game for any plan to raise this endangered cranes population. Surrogate sand crane parents have been caring for whooping babies, taking them for their own. Then came

one George Archbald, imprinting a baby whooper named Tex (but yet a lady) to take him first as mother, then as lover. Wait a minute, you say, was their baby a wildly feathered biologist? Was Tex an incestuous lesbian? Listen here, this is no scientific soap opera. Insemination was only artificial and the mating imitation. George danced his flapping, hopping best, resting little, even feathering their nest until Tex put out. Then he snatched away the egg and placed it in an incubator to hatch. Oh, they say that George and Tex were not estranged, that they planned a greater family, that Tex had not been robbed or abandoned, had not felt sad, had never alluded to suicide. But who can interpret the pain in an ever-mournful whoop?

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MEMORIES OF A GEOLOGY MAJOR Students only seem not to hear. Twenty years later I remember that while climbing a cli