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A Poem for Three Voices
Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about
FIRST VOICE: I am slow as the world. I am very patient, Turning through my time, the suns and stars Regarding me with attention. The moon's concern is more personal: She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse. Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so. She is simply astonished at fertility.
When I walk out, I am a great event. I do not have to think, or even rehearse. What happens in me will happen without attention. The pheasant stands on the hill; He is arranging his brown feathers. I cannot help smiling at what it is I know. Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.
SECOND VOICE: When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it. I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat! There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it, That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions, Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions. I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,
And the man I work for laughed: 'Have you seen something awful? You are so white, suddenly.' And I said nothing. I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation. I could not believe it. Is it so difficult For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth? The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,
Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples. I am dying as I sit. I lose a dimension. Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures! The silver track of time empties into the distance, The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup. These are my feet, these mechanical echoes. Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs. I am found wanting.
This is a disease I carry home, this is a death. Again, this is a death. Is it the air, The particles of destruction I suck up? Am I a pulse That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel? Is this my lover then? This death, this death? As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name. Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?
THIRD VOICE: I remember the minute when I knew for sure. The willows were chilling, The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine-- It had a consequential look, like everything else, And all I could see was dangers: doves and words, Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions! I remember a white, cold wing
And the great swan, with its terrible look, Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river. There is a snake in swans. He glided by; his eye had a black meaning. I saw the world in it--small, mean and black, Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act. A hot blue day had budded into something.
