Sources

I

Sixteen years. The narrow, rough-gullied backroads

almost the same. The farms: almost the same,

a new barn here, a new roof there, a rusting car,

collapsed sugar-house, trailer, new young wife

trying to make a lawn instead of a dooryard,

new names, old kinds of names: Rocquette, Desmarais,

Clark, Pierce, Stone. Gossier. No names of mine.

.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5

south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen

to me, surviving, herding her cubs

in the silvery bend of the road

in nineteen sixty-five.

.

Shapes of things: so much the same

they feel like eternal forms: the house and barn

on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;

the face of milkweed blooming,

brookwater pleating of slanted granite,

boletus under pine, the half-composted needles

it broke through patterned on its skin.

Shape of queen anne's lace, with the drop of blood.

Bladder-campion veined with purple.

Multifoliate heal-all.

II

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.

Everything that has ever

helped me has come through what already

lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong

across my heart.

This is from where

my strength comes, even when I miss my strength,

even when it turns on me

like a violent master.

.

III

For years I struggled with you: your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love. For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you. I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him. All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.

After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers. I saw the power and the arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.