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.