A Woman Under the Surface

Poems and Prose Poems

Alicia Ostriker

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691013909
  9780691065120
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691225425
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

From A Woman Under the Surface:
MOON AND EARTH


Alicia Ostriker


Of one substance, of one
Matter, they have cruelly
Broken apart. They never will touch


Each other again. The shining
Lovelier and younger
Turns away, a pitiful girl.


She is completely naked
And it hurts. The larger
Motherly one, breathlessly luminous


Emerald, and blue, and white
Traveling mists, suffers
Birth and death, birth


and death, and the shock
Of internal heat killed by external cold.
They are dancing through that blackness.


They press as if
To come closer.

II

To Kill the Dove

You can go at it either way, said the gentleman

In the study chair. Correctness, propriety, perfection

Should follow from sufficient life,

As we see if we glance

For an instant at the natural world, the cosmic

Or microcosmic, staggeringly (as Whitman warns)

Perfect in least detail, the aphid in dew,

The timid microbe swallowing,

The sheer gleam of the tetrahedral virus.

Unfortunate. Now, taking the converse angle,

If we begin with perfection,

The life following, it will be dry,

Perhaps, but true to life. It will be like a dry,

Glittering spring afternoon. Everything

Is in the most cheerful colors,

Like an actor, with cold lake-blue eyes,

And a smile of infinite charm, to the iceberg teeth,

Of whom we know that he is stupid,

That the attractive appearance signifies nothing,

For example, yet there it is, we fall in love.

And here is the sadness

I want to communicate, whispered the sour gentleman.

Remember, please, this is the twentieth century,

The comfortless.

We all, prone on the grass on a warm morning,

May think of some sprinkling of saints,

Billowed as pigeons, as if a

Hand let go the dust, and the wild wind was passing

Across, and then this was over, this adventure.

And I am getting to it.

To live in a time when the most developed minds

Open and close their papery suitcases.

I am getting to it, he said.

To acknowledge:

Coarse and gross our attachments, our pleasures, our sufferings,

Delusive our recollections, that landscape of breasts,

That history of song behind the ears, that calling, that floating.

To cease the quest for these,

Again, to rest, to close the eyes, to kill the dove.

Downstairs

When he walked downstairs

Into the ground

The final thing he noticed

Was some girls jumping rope down the street

And then the blue-white

Light steadily faded.

It smelled strange there at first

Among the roots, the hairs

The dirt-crumbs, worms, dankness—

Strayed bits of concrete—

At first he thought it like an Edgar Allan Poe story,

And it should have been gloomy and terrifying,

But no, there in the soil and wet

Everything and everyone showed friendship

Where he placed his hand,

Where he rested his forehead.

Ceremony of the Box

Of his own free will he worked on this for many years.

At last he was to present the finished product, which

We may conceive as a plain rather heavy box

Such as he could hold in front of himself with two hands.

As he left, passing under the cedar lintel into the breezy air,

A fist struck him on the right side of the face, another at

The back of his neck, another in the gut. It seems that

Knives and clubs might have been involved as well.

We see him stagger forward and lean over the broad porch

Railing, so that the vomit which pours torrentially from

His mouth, and contains wrenches, needles, playthings

Such as plastic blocks, gloves, artichokes and small

Mice, suspended, and as it were frozen in the stream,

Appears to fall directly upon the grass of the garden below.

The Call

In the world of rain

Where no words are

I am a prisoner of my breath.

D.F.

Rain does not freshen

Their lives this summer.

The house stays hot.

Wasps fatten on the ripening pears.

He goes in and out

With his briefcase

Awaiting the call

From another world to show him

A way to live without harm.

She and the children

Wallow in it

But his lungs hardly wish to work.

At night they quarrel

Although it is too humid to quarrel.

If nothing happens

He will grow to assume

The air of broken stalks

And their smokeless fume.

The Demonstration

They would lie down on the tracks as a demonstration

Against war and for love, and were to meet at dawn.

Under the old gray station dome stood many policemen

And a small but growing crowd of curious onlookers.

In the mild morning streets, activity began like a noble tune.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” they sang.

“The State is like a tree,” sang the sergeant, whose face resembled a bathtub.

“Energy is eternal delight,” they choraled. “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”

“Should old acquaintance be forgot,” responded, in mellow baritone, the sergeant.

“Swords into plowshares!” they cried, holding hands, like parts of a long equation.

When everything was ready, the Engineer emerged.

“Sir, I will not go on. Tyranny, like hell, is difficult

To resist. I agree with these people.” The leaders instructed them once

More in relaxed breathing and how to be arrested, and they placed

These instructions in the heart of buttercups each wore by the left ear.

At ten they heard the commuters within, restless to go to work.

Then they lay down and the train went over them.

One by one their bodies crumpled with a sigh, as if a child

Broke between thumb and forefinger, making a slight pop,

The dried thoraxes of crickets or mantises found in the grass.

The Terrorist Trial and the Games

At the trial, half the people on the stand were maimed,

Had not the use of their arms or legs, or couldn’t

Speak properly. This was as a result of police torture.

They told of being in this forest, being beaten and

Receiving electric shock.

When they began to tell these things, the government

Slaps on the “Suppression of Communism” act, which means

That no more such information can be made public.

At Sharpeville in 1960 the people were demonstrating

For bread. There was a food shortage. Families

Were marching, peacefully, but troops were sent in and fired

On the crowd without warning, killing sixty or s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• A Note on “Message from the Sleeper at Hell’s Mouth”