The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

For the SleepwalkersTonight I want to say something wonderfulfor the sleepwalkers who have so much faithin their legs, so much faith in the invisiblearrow carved into the carpet, the worn paththat leads to the stairs instead of the window,the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.I love the way that sleepwalkers are willingto step out of their bodies into the night,to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,palming the blank spaces, touching everything.Always they return home safely, like blind menwho know it is morning by feeling shadows.And always they wake up as themselves again.That’s why I want to say something astonishinglike: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefsflying through the trees at night, soaking upthe darkest beams of moonlight, the musicof owls, the motion of wind- torn branches.And now our hearts are thick black fistsflying back to the glove of our chests.We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.We have to learn the desperate faith of sleepwalkerswho rise out of their calm bedsand walk through the skin of another life.We have to drink the stupefying cup of darknessand wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.The Poet At SevenHe could be any seven- year-old on the lawn,holding a baseball in his hand, ready to throw.He has the middle- class innocence of an American,except for his blunt features and dark skinthat mark him as a Palestinian or a Jew,his forehead furrowed like a question,his concentration camp eyes, nervous, grim,and too intense. He has the typicalblood of the exile, the refugee, the victim.Look at him looking at the catcher for a sign—so violent and competitive, so unexceptional,except for an ancestral lamentation,a shadowy, grief- stricken need for freedomlaboring to express itself through him.M i l kMy mother wouldn’t be cowed into nursingand decided that formula was healthierthan the liquid from her breasts.And so I never sucked a single dropfrom the source, a river dried up.It was always bottled for me.But one night in my mid- thirtiesin a mirrored room off Highway 59a woman who had a baby daughterturned to me with an enigmatic smileand cupped my face in her chapped handsand tipped her nipple into my mouth.This happened a long time ago in another cityand it is wrong to tell about it.It was infantile to bring it up in therapy.And yet it is one of those moments—misplaced, involuntary—that swim upout of the past without a conscience:She lifts my face and I taste it—the sudden spurting nectar,the incurable sweetness that is life.