Read an Excerpt
Monster
Poems
By Robin Morgan OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1972 Robin Morgan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7805-7
CHAPTER 1
The Improvisers
Crouched by your boots, I look along your body
to that mouth, smiling,
wreathed in the circle of the whip you coil,
but lunge free from your grasp in time to run
unerringly to that other door
the huge woman, the nursemaid,
flings back expectantly, grinning my welcome,
my false safety.
She drags her charge to another room
where the father rises,
black coat, stiff collar, accent, switch, to chide
the daughter pleading she is naughty.
As your hand falls, I scream,
scuttle away to the hall museumed with chains,
belts, sticks, knouts, leather,
past open doors
that expose the sultan's stern command,
the thin schoolmaster's frown, the pirate's anger,
the eluded priest's ecstatic curse.
To the corridor's farthest end
I crawl, to the chamber's center, to the bed
with crimson hangings
I know will muffle all my cries.
Naked you wait,
whip coiled at your thigh, for my demand.
Hours, nights, and years
behind my lidded curtain—
a long, successful run—
I watched my characters
who, scorning their producer,
refused to improvise.
At last, I gave them notice
and locked the theater,
the stage dark ever since.
Only now new actors
hold me by their postures
a captive audience.
I do not know them. I did not call them up.
But they are rude with indifference,
stroll a stage-
street real to the sound of late-night traffic,
calmly light slow cigarettes in doorways,
and watch for some approaching shape.
Then you appear, by chance,
windbreaker tight against the cold, and stop,
ask for a light?
(I cannot seem to hear the words.)
Casually you talk,
then you recede together, you and he
(or they) past any imagined following.
Sometimes there is a bar,
and a man, untypecast, always laughing
(I cannot seem to hear the joke)
your arm around him,
then your departure, easy, together.
Or clouds of steam, from some dry-ice department
of my mind, blend and blur
the movements of you both—
only a line of muscle, a limb
delineated.
But always it ends, and this I fear
more than my rack-suite
or the bed looming behind a crimson shroud:
always it ends with me among them,
too swift to tell
which arms embrace women, which men,
caressing beards, full breasts, until we fall
in pantomime
to that living carpet, some dismembered,
calves haired and soft,
torsos planed unlike a woman's.
Her nails on my breast describe his triangle hips
beside us, narrowed from shoulders that curve
as your fingers mold them. Her hair
brushes my lips as whose hands
widen my thighs,
and mouths open all like flowers
soundless, stroboscopic, slow, to darkness,
opening to the room where you and he
and all of them squirm, then stiffen
oh beyond
my help or hurt or memory.
You curl beside me, sleeping,
unreachable, alien, known.
How can I finish the scene
that betrays me to such waking?
Each night the actors play
this ritual of vengeance:
I murder every stance
by which I watch them die.
Soon I will have nothing
but our own reality. Listen
before I can be heard,
before my voice can reach you through these hangings:
However strange I seem, learn me
at least to the limit
my foreign posture will allow
or lacerate the scrim, risk sight of the familiar.
You love perceptive mourning.
I prefer
even this daily confrontation
with what we never meet
to all you could see, know, love, too late.
Though a reluctant Prospero,
I've buried all my books,
paid and discharged my actors, struck my sets.
Break your sleep and look at me
before their gesturing
reclaims the dark proscenium.
See that I acknowledge you a stranger
but hold whatever I can learn
like your flesh, inside me.
Asleep in our marriage bed,
so I call out, while you
lean through the steaming day
to make certain I am dead.
Satellite
I wonder if I hate him yet.
We lie awake to feign sleep-even breathing
through space that weights the perigees
our separate bodies spin, fearing to burn, burst, crater
such stillness by a word or hand.
I wonder if he thinks I hate him yet.
How can I hate? I am not here
but coasting a moonscape utterly far from him,
light seconds from the quarrel we did not have:
space, water, time, my breasts and blood divide us:
dishes ticking, clocks to be laundered,
even his eyes that know these things divide us.
"We are equal," he says and says. I will write
my poems in indelible ink on the laundry then
while lost buttons roll where green-marbled meat
molds books unfinished, unvacuumed ovaries, self-pity.
Women ought to be born one-breasted or male
or mindless. "We are equal," he says. We find me wanting.
Yet I've patterned and stitched no other man
to lie beside. Effortlessly faithful
I wax toward curves he charts himself
for straying. I couldn't care more. No woman, either, smiles back
sleeping in my arms. Not even
I—not now—lie there. He has no rivals.
I think of others though: of one
whose lunatic footprints on this dust stopped where
she rested her head in a moderate oven;
of one who sorts through drifted years to start all over,
sweeping out her husband-son
so that their child might breathe, a daughter, though human;
of another so young she thought she had time
to play the woman game, who now must search
his closets for her own stored clothes;
of the seasoned poets, just divorced, her recipe—
unwritten poems—still not having
nourished his appetite. And the showgirl, drawn
by a mind to learn its gravity
repulsed books, talk, thought—all but a child.
My mother got her child, then drowned
the man beneath freak tides, eclipsed herself in me.
No other course but this then? To thread
blood trails past clouded windows to a satellite
where lesbians, eyes streaming sperm,
rock fatherless daughters on their crescent laps,
spinsters dance naked, brutalized brides
scrub their nightgowns endlessly. I am unclean.
I would still sink back to earth, to him.
I wonder if I hate these women yet.
Who set me orbiting this bed?
My two escapes: to kneel before the oven
or hang his wrung-out love to dry,
each leaving these windows unwashed of that moon—unless
I turn to rouse his sleepless fear
with mine. I wonder if he hates me yet.
Eight Games of Strategy
1
He placed the figure on the highest shelf
in his one room, startled to see its shadow
spring at the wall and pose, elongate to
what seemed a grieving for the other's life.
In the dwindling space it suddenly was unsafe
to take the figure down again: the neat
paws begging for their prey, the eager snout
carved to a smile by some deliberate knife
froze on his sight less than the hidden fangs
swelling with what he knew he dare not prove
was poison. Worse, who dare unfurl such wings?
He shut his eyes against the shape, fugitive
through alley dawns, knowing that where he walked
lamian blessings brooded above his head.
2
Strange, but this castle is not foreign to me.
I somehow know the place. I know these halls,
however grand, are where a creature prowls
in search, he claims, of beauty. I can spy
beneath his velvet cloak to where he
wears beast-hide, wherein a blond prince dwells
in turn; within the prince, whose fairness peels
away like wax, a monster, who can free
a new prince, smiling through new monster-jaws.
I shall settle my gown, arrange my lace,
and rest my ringed white hand between his paws.
Although I fear his eyes upon my face
may yet release in me fur, fangs, and claws,
I sense my saving death in such a place.
3
"I am not yours when you are too much mine."
That phrase predicts the pattern of our ruin:
the victim, self-enchanted with her plea
demanding mercy. And the killer's cry.
"You are not mine when I am too much yours."
That credo curses us, orthodox liars
who claim mouth-to-smooth-mouth responses reach
the love who must not ever love too much.
Poised in the spiral stage we mutely pray
for honesty to slit the masks that kiss,
letting us glare the lover in the eye,
recapture what we hoarded as our loss.
Meanwhile I flee, knowing that you pursue
my step, hard on your heels, pursuing you.
4
And did you think we would not still be enemies?
Dared you assume these hands, fouled with the stain
of older battles, calloused with blasphemies,
would raise white flags between your face and mine?
Upon our battlefields the dead grow ripe
unburied. This is a truce, not an end to war.
Even our concourse bears my spoil, the rape
I cannot shield you from, for all your fear,
nor would I care to, knowing my own desire.
Pledge me the same exposure in your eyes.
Such terms at best are temporary where
cadaverous lovers still obscure our way
with grinning halleluiahs. Here is my hand.
Only these corpses show us where we stand.
5
Slivers of ivory like bone petals flawed
open between them. "Oh look, your queen has broken!"
she cried. He watched the fragments on the board
—pale limbs dismembered in some rite forgotten
by dead gods. "My fault," he said; "you could
have trapped my king, except for her. Checkmate,
almost. I'm such a clumsy beast." She smiled
and swept the shards away. "They're delicate
with age. You couldn't help it, I myself
almost wince to touch them. Pull down the shade.
We'll play again, and use my little she-wolf
for your queen. Ferocious? Yes, rare jade,"
she mused; "your move. Here's brandy, if you like.
Your king's in check again. There's still my queen to break."
6
Always, it seemed, we sat out in the rain
or lingered in the snow, afraid to lose
what cold comfort we had found again,
lightning-bared, like a familiar bruise.
Rarely in spring or summer did we touch.
I watched your body's leap against the wave
from where I lay, chilled, longing on the beach
for the warmth of some ice-isolated cave.
Now at this winter's melting, here we sit
silently watching the season's final flame
consume itself with a grace that comes too late
to save us from the crocus. Each year the same
tears surprise my prayer—that we may bring
our blizzard closeness safely through the spring.
7
That every artery your slow spine branches
is for me to prune—all play of sinews
skeletoned, eyes socketed, hips, haunches,
smile, and walnut brain decaying tissues
ripe as my fear that defoliates this midnight—
that what you are is lost to me as if
I never knew you, that even our love's sweat
dries on the skin in seconds: not for myself
I mourn, though you melt through my flesh like a bullet's silver,
sing like a splintered stake green in my heart.
I who enshroud your human shape could labor
to make you immortal, but love that art
less than your waking, dawn-lit, alive, alone.
Why do you lie so still? What have I done?
8
Palaces built above alleys stink at least
as much as one's own breath behind a mask
of jade or fur or skin. Poison and princes
act about the same, and ghouls are comforting
as rhyme when set before an honest void.
My love, such as it is, has better things
to do than play at sonnets or murder,
not that my life's prepared me for much else.
Still, here we are, meek revolutionaries pledged
to overthrow ourselves, a world we made
useless as these white pages without black
ink informing them, and us, how we laugh
in loud terror to see our strategies tested,
whirling together through a chaos indifferent to all
our cries that we have passed the proper point of stopping.
Love Poem
that I've never written
simply, without qualifying in some corner
by a careful bloodstreak splashed against
lust-lovely pastel foam—I can risk casually now,
because that once-safe blemish (like a token
sacrifice to no god's jealousy) spread, hemophiliac,
across all sense of balanced order to destroy
my composition's lie.
And only now, free to stand back and gaze
at that impenetrable rust
I see a varicosity so fine
I can look through its fading threads
to where you float and beckon, riding the spray-blue
of an old nightmare's tidal wave
that breaks its bubble against islands
anodyne as torsos beached in sand
cascading through my fingers. Familiar demons frolic
in the orchard of your face, my dear,
more perfect than a prince's death-mask
because you cannot ever know that you exist
this way. I live alone, a woman so far gone
in fantasy as to create out of herself a creature
with whom she lives, loved beyond either of their skill,
a life-work masterpiece spectrumed as white on white,
endlessly unfinished as a
Annunciation
(dedicated to the five men who beat up my faggot-husband at dawn on Sunday, February 25, 1968)
I don't know you. I didn't call you up,
either, this time, though I was aware
as always, of the restlessness that sent him out
for a short walk,
to give love, perhaps, or to buy cigarettes.
Was one of you his father, violent
with tenderness for that strange particle of yourself
you couldn't understand, but could destroy, at least?
Was one of you his lover, envious
of what you already shared beyond the same male body:
his talent, intellect, art, though not his willingness
to be hated for their use?
Was one of you his closet-friend, passionate
to affirm a love you must have felt
needed affirming, if only to deny it afterwards?
Was one of you an acquaintance, sophisticated
as the cocktail-party man who told him he was mad,
naive, fanatic, and perverted?
Was one of you his brother, bitter
as our 'gay' neighbor whose stereotype-kindled misogyny
consumed even his own pain,
raging to see us try and cross
his/your/my boundaries?
I can't tell anymore. I don't know you.
And this husband I hold in my arms, who is he
who lavishes my lap with such uncyclical
blood? How did this frail farmer's silhouette
fall, a bird-sized sniper, from its nest, brought down
by five grenades' overkill? His narrow eyes are empty.
Why does this black flesh I clutch
whimper like some large cat long after
its head has been clubbed five times flat
by dutiful policemen?
I can't tell anymore.
Or would Vietnamese and Panther suffering
be put aside when offered a more basic bond—
to join the five original also oppressed of course
white workingclass American men
in a brotherhood convened to prove each member
capable of beating up a faggot?
I have seen what I have seen.
You are not rhetoric or theories or statistics,
you are real.
Real as the silver Our Lady dangling from the bull-neck
that craned to see the effect of the ten fists
crushing his skull, not knowing, never knowing
that those blows release only more gaudy hallucinations
of freedom rainbowing from his heart
through all your grey matter;
real as his mad poems, his naive love,
his fanatic revolution, his perverted struggles to change;
real as my young husband dying before his murder in Detroit;
real as my boy husband tortured before his execution in Saigon;
real as the rape of faggots by yes look until your eyes weep
red clots of despair the Attica freedom-fighters;
real as his own long hair, his flowing shirt,
his shaven, unmanned face, his smile
that met the fury of your weekend ritual kicks:
to pulverize some hippie commie bastard queer
before speeding off, unlicensed,
back to Queens in time for early Mass.
What are your dreams like, you five?
What do you notice
in your locker rooms, your caucus rooms,
your gyms and bowling alleys?
Whose bodies rivet you
when they smash in lust
on your football fields?
Which thoughts of poolrooms, barrooms, war
most harden you
before, resplendent in sadistic maleness,
you rape "your" women?
I know you. You are real.
I spit this at you, five straight patriotic clean Americans,
and at any who despite whatever else oppression
they have known still choose the luxury
of a united front of masculinist pride:
I will not bear your children, no,
I will not bear you,
whatever line you hand me
for your rapes or revolutions.
I know why you hate strong women,
fear gentle men.
I will abort your contempt, your terror, your babies
by my own hand.
For I am pregnant with murder.
The pains are coming faster now,
and not all your anesthetics
nor even my own screams
can stop them.
My time has come.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Monster by Robin Morgan. Copyright © 1972 Robin Morgan. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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