and my friend Karen remembers
as a little girl
studying Hebrew she inquired
of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard
and said in Yiddish "if there is a god
or if there isn't a god
a Jew studies"--isn't that a good story
beloved, but the woman in me
says that the poet lies
the poet can afford to lie
Tags: poetry
The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.
Alicia Suskin OstrikerWith women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.
Alicia Suskin OstrikerTags: poetics
To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.
Alicia Suskin OstrikerTags: poetics
May, and after a rainy spring
We walk streets gallant with rhododendrons.
Tags: poetry
Passing that fiery tree-if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes...
Alicia Suskin OstrikerThe life spills over, some days.
She cannot be at rest,
Wishes she could explode
Like that red tree—
The one that bursts into fire
All this week.
Senses her infinite smallness
But can’t seize it,
Recognizes the folly of desire,
The folly of withdrawal—
Kicks at the curb, the pavement,
If only she could, at this moment,
When what she’s doing is plodding
To the bus stop, to go to school,
Passing that fiery tree—if only she could
Be making love,
Be making a painting,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe
Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow flames—
She believes if she could only catch up
With the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest—
If she could forget school,
Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
burn like that.
Tags: poetry
The secret shape of this book is a parachute
all the lines leading to the person hanging there
drifting on the wind and always falling
waiting for the mists to clear
Tags: the-volcano-sequence
The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything....
Alicia Suskin OstrikerWanting All
Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs
Like a circus, sharp
As a sword somebody has
To swallow, rough as a bear,
Complicated as a family of jugglers,
Brave as a sequined trapeze
Artist, the only boy I ever met
Who could beat me in argument
Was why I married you, isn't it,
And you have beaten me, I've beaten you,
We are old polished hands.
Or was it your body, I forget, maybe
I foresaw the thousands on thousands
Of times we have made love
Together, mostly meat
And potatoes love, but sometimes
Higher than wine,
Better than medicine.
How lately you bite, you baby,
How angels record and number
Each gesture, and sketch
Our spinal columns like professionals.
Husband, it's fine how we cook
Dinners together while drinking,
How we get drunk, how
We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden,
Go to the movies, tell
The children to clear the bloody table,
How we fit like puzzle pieces.
The mind and body satisfy
Like windows and furniture in a house.
The windows are large, the furniture solid.
What more do I want then, why
Do I prowl the basement, why
Do I reach for your inside
Self as you shut it
Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait,
I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers.
Tags: love poetry marriage relationships
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