"Vesuvius @ Home": Lesbian-Feminist Readings of Poetry and Life

matos, I seem to be...: I think Rich's insistince on making a connection with Dickinson most interesting. I loved this line:"For months, for years, for most of my life, I have been hovering like an insect against the screens of an existence which inhabited Amherst, Massachusets, between 1830 and 1886"....I know I've felt this inadequacy when trying to reach back to an artist that's touched me...

--retranslate her own unorthodox, subversive, sometimes volcanic propensities into a dialect called metaphor

--inventing a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date....

--the novel...can be a construct, planned and organized to deal with human experiences on one level at a time. Poetry is too much rooted in the unconscious; it presses too close against the barriers of repression....

--The poet's relationship to her poetry has...a twofold nature. Poetic langauge...is a concretization of...the forces within the self...rescued from formlessness, lucidified, and integrated....But there is a more ancient concept of the poet...endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of langauge, or to see for those who...are less conscious of what they are living through...the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

--There is one poem which is the real "onlie begetter" of my thoughts here about Dickinson:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

IV. How does this poem/poems like this work as precursors to AR's 21 Love Poems?

I.
....No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.


VI.
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own
.... such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.


VIII.

....The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

XI.
Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,
making them eternally and visibly female.
No height without depth, without a burning core,
though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.
I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain
smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod,
I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,
to feel you arteries glowing in my clasp,
never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower
unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,
that clings to the slowly altering rock-
that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,
was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.

XII.
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream - ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.
I've walked to your muttered words
spoken light - or dark - years away,
as if my own voice had spoken.
But we have different voices, even in sleep,
and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings -
through in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one generation.

XIII.
The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we're out in a country that has no language
no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years we're driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear -
neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung
but a woman's voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

[The Floating Poem, Unnumbered]
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine - tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come -
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there -
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth -
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.

XXI.
....this is not
...any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
Shared, could be chosen without loneliness,
not easily nor without pains to stake out
the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.
I choose to be the figure in that light,
half - blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.