1 You, once a belle in Shreveport,with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,still have your dresses copied from that time,and play a Chopin preludecalled by Cortot: "Delicious recollectionsfloat like perfume through the memory."Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,heavy with useless experience, richwith suspicion, rumor, fantasy,crumbling to pieces under the knife-edgeof mere fact.
In the prime of your life.
Nervy, glowering, your daughterwipes the teaspoons, grows another way. 2 Banging the coffee-pot into the sinkshe hears the angels chiding, and looks outpast the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said:
Have no patience.
The next time it was:
Be insatiable.
Then:
Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,a match burn to her thumbnail,or held her hand above the kettle's snoutright inthe woolly steam.
They are probably angels,since nothing hurts her anymore, excepteach morning's grit blowing into her eyes. 3 A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.
And Nature,that sprung-lidded, still commodioussteamer-trunk of tempora and moresgets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,the female pills, the terrible breastsof Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.
Two handsome women, gripped in argument,each proud, acute, subtle,
I hear screamacross the cut glass and majolicalike Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knivesthat have rusted in my back,
I drive in yours,ma semblable, ma soeur! 4 Knowing themselves too well in one another:their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn...
Reading while waitingfor the iron to heat,writing,
My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,or, more often,iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life. 5 Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,she shaves her legs until they gleamlike petrified mammoth-tusk. 6 When to her lute Corinna singsneither words nor music are her own;only the long hair dippingover her cheek, only the songof silk against her kneesand theseadjusted in reflections of an eye.
Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, beforean unlocked door, that cage of cages,tell us, you bird, you tragical machine--is this fertillisante douleur?
Pinned downby love, for you the only natural action,are you edged more keento prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shownher household books to you, daughter-in-law,that her sons never saw? 7 "To have in this uncertain world some staywhich cannot be undermined, isof the utmost consequence."Thus wrotea woman, partly brave and partly good,who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore. 8 "You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dreambehind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,all that we were--fire, tears,wit, taste, martyred ambition--stirs like the memory of refused adulterythe drained and flagging bosom of our middle years. 9 Not that it is done well, butthat it is done at all?
Yes, thinkof the odds! or shrug them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time's precious chronic invalid,--would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:mere talent was enough for us--glitter in fragments and rough drafts.
Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is maleand in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hearour mediocrities over-praised,indolence read as abnegation,slattern thought styled intuition,every lapse forgiven, our crimeonly to cast too bold a shadowor smash the mold straight off.
For that, solitary confinement,tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor. 10 Well,she's long about her coming, who must bemore merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind,
I see her plungebreasted and glancing through the currents,taking the light upon herat least as beautiful as any boyor helicopter,poised, still coming,her fine blades making the air wincebut her cargono promise then:deliveredpalpableours.
