SHE SLEW NOT GOLIATH

The Star of David

sparkled in the snow globe,

Reminding her of the day

she almost bought grape jelly.

Spread on thick,

his accounts of life

gave richness to the day,

Like the jelly,

she almost bought for him

to spread on thick

on peanut butter

sandwiches --

Both would have given

sustenance

to a relationship

still forming.

Hesitant,

she left the globe

on the shelf,

the possibilities

still ajar.

A RIVER CROSSING

Not the Styx,

No,

nor the Xanthos,

No steamboats here,

no sacred burials.

Just a gentle flowing

tributary --

the moon reflecting

as a footpath on its waters

lovers have been known

to cross.

ALICE MADONNA

She is pink

And the baby in her arms

shares the pinkness

of her aura.

She is a mother

first and foremost.

A Madonna of a survivor

Her home,

her friend’s life lost,

Her husband rising 

from the ashes --

Propane had proven
fatal.

Oxygen, by all accounts,
her Elixir

as it passed from hers 

unto her child’s breath.

Her daughter poised
at her breast,
she celebrates renewed hope.

Her husband by her side,

her sons waiting at home --

Her life, at once, complete

and whole again.

A NOD TO INDIA

I dress in Green
and rub kohl ashes
down my face.

I rend the Dark Green
garment,
Beating my breasts
and crying into the wind.

I never saw the face
of my daughter,
Never cradled the head
of my son.

Red was never my color.
I find no solace in White.

In India, colors of a woman’s

sari indicate her stage in life.

Green signals fertility and pregnancy.

Red is worn on her wedding day.

White is a sign of mourning.

TRAVELERS WITH A BIKE

It could have been any of us,

that gentle man who pushed a bike
laden with his belongings,
that angry woman -- toothless, coatless,
who walked in sandals on a winters day.

But few of us have the courage

to face the streets alone.

Frigid nights,

soup kitchen meals,

people's eyes averted

from studying your face.

What ache drove them to the streets?

What events left them so fragile,

so broken

that societal norms were beyond reach?

Did he once sit alone

in silence
in a rented room,

Come face to face with the reality 

that he could no longer 
hold home and hearth together?

Did her money run out?

And with it, the capability of making more?

Did she reach out for help

only to find no help there?

Did he not even reach at all,

too broken to make the effort.

We will never know,

those of us who walked past them

as they sat on vacant storefront steps,

Giving but a nod of acknowledgement

to their presence, their lives, their souls.

 *Written in memory of Paul Rake, who

pushed his bike along the streets of 

New Milford, who died on Oct. 12, 2012.

TRIANGLE OF TRAGEDY

If Aphrodite had been with them that day,

If he had been Aeneus

And his father

Anchises

He would have carried him

slug over his shoulder

down the narrow stairwells,

through the burning building.

But the gods 

were not with him

that day,

Nor with the 146 

young immigrant women

who must have cried out

in Yiddish and Itakian

As they smelled their own hair

burning.

Not Troy that fell that day,

instead a shirtwaist factory.

A dark and dingy

8th and 9th-floor nightmare

of a sweatshop

Where 400 had labored,

struggling with the new

language and culture

in which they found themselves

engulfed:

Easy victims of industrial greed.

Exit doors were locked,

the investigation proved.

The fire escape buckled,

collapsing beneath the weight

of no doubt screaming workers,

fleeing the conflagration.

Desperately

many lept from the windows:

Better to splat on the cement

nine, eight stories below

than to have flesh

burned off in the flames.

Later,

Isida Wegodner

would wander, dazed

praying that his father --

who he had somehow forgotten

as he himself had fled from

the burning eighth floor --

was somehow still alive.

Tears must have streamed

from Isida’s eyes

when the door of that train

slid open

And his father disembarked,

pants torn, flesh showing, 

shirt ripped from his torso,

face dirty and blackened,

But somehow 

still alive.

*On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

on the top floors of the Asch Building in New York

City burned. One hundred forty-six young immigrant 

workers died in the fire. A young worker, Isida Wegadner

was interviewed by a reporter in the days following the

fire.

ABANDONING MALE PEDAGOGY IN POETRY

For centuries, women poets sought to make the structure of male poetics their own.

Dickinson took the sonnet and sought to carve out a feminine place within it.

But a new breed of women poets have set out on their own, creating a poetics that

ignores the structure of sonnet, quatrain, ode and all of the European male canonical framework.

This is an important step in asserting a selfhood, if you will: A reality of poetics in which women abandon the need to identify their thoughts, their existence, their selves by male standards.

This feminist poetics opens vistas of possiblities. Woman can stand separate, no need for a Freudian battle to overthrow the Oedipal and assert the -- the what? The Iphigenia? The Dido?

The poet Rae Armantrout is a prime example with her poem “As We’re Told”

“At the start, something must be arbitrarily excluded.

The saline solution. Call it an apple. Call this a test

or joke. From now on, apple will mean arbitrary

choice or ‘at random.’ Any fence maintains the other

side is ‘without form.’ When we’re thrown out, it’s onto

the lap of our parent. Later, though, Mother puts

the apple into Snow White’s hand,

and then it’s poison.”

Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine present this feminist poetics in “American Women Poets in the 21st Century.” The women whose work they present , along with critiques, use modernist techniques within lyric context.

Whether working in the language school or imagist, these poets reject “ the fence” and assert their own existence.

Spahr and Rankine’s book is published by Wesleyan University Press. 

It focuses on 10 major American women poets -- Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berseenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach and Harryette Mullen.

It is a must read for women poets.

If you use the universal in your discourse as you create a work, be it poetry or prose, you don’t have to use a construct of form -- like the sonnet, villanelle or pantoum -- as an emotional distancing device. 

These phallocentric devices are crutches. The universality of experience can be used as the restraint mechanism when talking about grief and other emotions.

This classical challenge, of the need to emotionally distance oneself, need not be met with the classical solution and all it inherently carries as a male pedagogical construct.

THE ONYX MAN

There is no holiday from race.

I think that I 

can enter his world,

But it is foreign to me 

and I find

I want to keep it that way.

Tears, 

tears and grief

flow from his eyes.

His body shakes,

his form so soft, so malleable,

It pulls at my heart.

And yet, I stand

a distance off,

watching this man,

his anguish, washing

over the room,

tidal waves

that  ebb and flow, 

catching in his throat,

escaping as sobs,

the depth of which I know too well.

I want to take this man,

envelope him

in understanding

reach out gently

to touch this wound,

this gaping maw 

that makes him lift the bottle,

But his path is solitary.

Surges pull him

awash in dopamine --

from my world

to an expanse, a void

too solitary to join.

And so, as he pushes off,

I stand on the shore of sanity

and watch,

No widow’s walk for me.

PONDERING BRIDGEWATER & THE PRESS

How do you unwrap an enigma

about a man and his town?

How do you separate wheat from

shaft 

as you shake allegations,

searching for the facts?

There is a responsibility 

weighing heavily here.

There is a need to paint,

with not too wide a swath,

the portrait of this man --

He is sinew and flesh.

He is a blend

of contradictions and certainties,

like any other man.

He fears.

He is under fire.

He is in our hands.

We must be gentle.

*Through 2008 to 2013, Bridgewater's long standing

first selectman was under fire in the press as lawsuits,

allegations and investigations haunted his last years

in office.

A SUDDEN MOMENT

I was thinking,

as he was talking,

And our consciousness

Clicked,

linking together,

entwining,

And I thought the thoughts he thought
as he spoke them.

It was magic, ephemeral --

And I looked away.

A THOUGHT FOR AVERILL

“I learned life is not personal,” the poet Averill Curdy writes in his piece in the July/August 2012 Poetry magazine.

You learned wrong, Averill. Life is nothing if not personal. 

We go to colleges of some prestige to learn to distance ourselves from the all-to-personal aspect of life. We come away somewhat shielded, perhaps with veneration for those who went before us into that good night untouched, unfettered by the insatiable personal-ness of it all.

OH REALLY LAWRENCE?

 I rail against Ferlinghetti’s premise:

“there is what used to be called the ‘mystery of Woman,’

a romantic concept that endowed her with an illusive inscrutable

allure, both sexual and spiritual. 

Then the feminist revolution brought Woman down from her

pedestal.”

What pedestal? I ask.

Raped in back alleys, suffering back-room abortions, or

raising children alone in ghetto apartments?

Where is the allure of a screaming child,

going without enough to eat, warm clothes to wear,

or a man to hold him and to mold his character?

No mystery in the drudgery of waitress

days, spent

Standing on swollen feet, 10, 12 hours at

a stretch.

No allure in broken bones, 

swollen lips or blackened eyes

suffered by battered women.

“the feminist revolution,” Lawrence,

freed women from their bondage

of male fantasy, Romantic pedagogy,

and unspoken suffering.

Take your wistfulness, Lawrence,

o’re fantasy lost

And shove It.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

I like the concave

shape of a spoon,

it’s simple symmetry

of curve and line.

“He liked to spoon,”

she said.

And I thought of you.

Curved  ’gainst my back,

or I ’gainst yours,

we’d drift 

eluding consciousness --

Two travelers in the

world of counterpane,

intent on hedonistic pleasures

of the gentlest kind.

ONE COW AT A TIME

Angie wanted to give a milk-producing waterbuffalo to a poor family.

She’d read it was the thing to do so families in developing countries

could have enough milk to drink. And some to sell.

She’d read it On one of those “Save The World” websites.

But why send good American Dollars to The Sudan? Angie thought.

She saved her dimes and quarters, 

And by December had enough to buy the cow.

She sent it to a family whose name she found on the web,

the address suggested a tenement apartment on the Lower East side

of Chicago.

Angie felt good about the gift.
But somehow the waterbuffalo gift Didn’t turn out right.

Sure, the family had more than enough milk, 

But the Housing Authority made them move.

Go Figure

NEPHILIM NO MORE

Do the children of the Nephilim

still walk the earth?

Banished from the Heavens,
their fathers defied
God's plan
mating with mortal women.

Slain by Michael,
They came to their end.
But what of their offspring?

Are they the Yeti

said to flee from man’s sight

As they wander the Himalayas,

timid, yet gigantic in size?

Would you know one 

if you saw one?

Would her language be

unfathomable to human ears?

“Eiiyee,

I am the Nephilim spawn,”

she’d cry.

Her attempts to share

her loneliness

falling on deaf ears.

I have expanded and reformated the chapbook of short stories and poems I published in May. It is titled "The Presence of Loss" It is available on Amazon by searching my name under "books" search, Susan Tuz or the title.

WOMAN AS VESSEL

Some sisters hate the thought

of woman as vessel.

But if the poet is

the vessel,

And language the medium,

then Vessel Woman I gladly am.

Picasso stands beside

an urn,

back of a nude adorning it.

His look is pensive,

his pose, the same.

Woman is truly his vessel.

His medium,

canvass and paint.

The medium of language

inadequate,

He is trapped in Spanish.

Thus,

he drinks from the vessel often,

Reporting his conversations

with nature in periods.

READING OVID IN NORTHEASTERN SPAIN*

Atalanta disrobes,

wearing little but ribbons

that flutter at her ankles 

and knees.

Hippomenes’ heart takes fire.

As they race, 

side by side,

Atalanta sighs --

languishing on his face,

she halts,

to pick up the golden apples

he lets fall,

losing the race.

I am no Atalanta,
but am I Lilith?

*In 8th Century Spain there was a myth among the Khabbalist community

that Adam had a first wife named Lilith. She was formed from the clay

of the earth by God at the same time he formed Adam. Lilith refused to

abdicate her equality to Adam, refused to submit to his will. She fought

with him about sex. She was a seducer of men and a strangler of  children.

One day she uttered the four-letter word for God and flew off into the sky

never to return.

TIME'S PASSAGE

There is a richness to life
that comes with old age.
I am glad to be here.

Somehow young,
yet somewhat old,
at 62
I savor life's riches.

The glint of memory
bathes each day's bounty,
giving dimension to events
in geometric proportions.

What riches await me
as age travels on?

YESTERDAY

YESTERDAY

There is no evidence of yesterday

existing as a place.

Yet we go there often,

visiting old friends,

licking old wounds.

How would the road signs

to yesterday read?

Would their shape and color

be the elongated yellow

of a passing sign?

Or an inverted triangle of white

signaling a merge?

OLD MEN'S EARS

Old men’s ears hang

large and lobed

against grey heads filled with

life’s knowledge.

The words they hear

formed by past years,

echos of experience,

a flood of life.

Old women’s voices,

caress those ears,

accost those ears,

fill those ears

with memories of

dreams once drempt

in young men’s minds.

Don’t box those ears,

outfox those ears,

remember years 

of sound have filled them.

A child's laugh,

a lass's gaffe:

True music to those ears.