BREAKING THE TIRED MOLD OF AMERICAN POETRY
by Ruth Stone

Page 9

WOMEN LAUGHING

Laughter from women gathers like reeds in the river.
A silence of light below their rhythm glazes the water.
They are on a rim of silence looking into the river.
Their laughter traces the water as kingfishers dipping
circles within circles set the reeds clicking;
and an upward rush of herons lifts out of the nests of laughter,
their long stick-legs dangling, herons, rising out of the river.


TRANSLATIONS

Forty-five years ago, Alexander Mehielovitch Touritzen,
son of a white Russian owner of a silk stocking factory
in Constantinople, we rumpled your rooming-house bed,
sneaked past your landlady and turned your plaster Madonna
to the wall. Are you out there short vulgar civil-engineer?
Did you know I left you for a Princeton geologist who called me
girlie? Ten years later he was still in the midwest when he died
under a rock fall. I told you I was pregnant. You gave me money
for the abortion. I lied to you. I needed clothes to go out with
the geologist. You called me Kouschka, little cat. Sometimes I
stopped by the civil-engineering library where you sat with other
foreign students. You were embarrassed; my husband might
catch you. He was in the chemistry lab with his Bunsen burner
boiling water for tea. Alexander Mehielovitch Touitzen, fig of
my pallid college days, plum of my head, did the silk stocking
factory go up in flames? Did the German fox jump out of the
desert's sleeve and gobble your father up? Are you dead?

Second-hand engine, formula concrete, we were still meeting in
stairwells when the best chess player in Champaign-Urbana went
to the Spanish Civil War. He couldn't resist heroic gestures. For
years I was haunted by the woman who smashed her starving
infant against the Spanish wall. Cautious, staid Mehielovitch, so
quick to pick my hairpins out of your bed.
Average lover, have your balls decayed?

Mehielovitch, my husband the chemist with light eyes and big
head, the one whose body I hated, came back in the flesh fifteen
years ago. He was wearing a tight western shirt he had made
himself. (There wasn't anything he couldn't do.) He talked about
wine- and cheese-tasting parties.
We folk danced at a ski lodge. So this is life, I said.
He told my daughter he was her daddy. It wasn't true.
You are all so boring. My friend from Japan, Cana Maeda, the
scholar of classical haiku, whose fingers, whose entire body had
been trained to comply: her face pale without powder, her neck
so easily bent, after she died from the radiation her translations
of Basho were published by interested men who failed to print
her correct name. So the narrow book appears to have been
written by a man. Faded in these ways, she is burned on my flesh
as kimonos were burned on the flesh of women in the gamma
rays of Hiroshima. She wasn't one of those whose skin peeled in
the holocaust, whose bones cracked. Graceful and obscure, she
was among all those others who died later. Where are you my
repulsive white Russian? Are you also lost?

Pimpled obscene boy employed at an early age by your father,
you pandered his merchandise on trays using your arm as a
woman's leg slipped inside a silk stocking with a woman's shoe
on your hand. Do you understand that later I lived with a
transvestite, a hair-dresser who wore wigs? When he felt that way
he would go out and pick up an English professor. After we
quarreled, I cut up his foam-rubber falsies. I had a garage sale
while he was out of town. I sold his mail-order high heels, his
corsets, his sequined evening gowns.

Those afternoons in bed listening to your memories of prostitutes
with big breasts, how you wanted to roll on a mattress of
mammary glands; the same when Rip Hanson told me about the
invasion of France. Crossing the channel he saw infantry, falling
past him from split open cargo planes, still clinging to tanks and
bulldozers. Statistical losses figured in advance. The ripped-open
remnants of a Russian girl nailed up by the Germans outside her
village, also ancient, indigenous.
But what can I tell you about death? Even your sainted mother's
      soft dough body: her flour dusted breasts
by now are slime paths of microorganisms.
Where were you when they fed the multitudes to the ovens?

Old fetid fisheyes, did they roll you in at the cannery?
Did you build their bridges or blow them up?
Are you burned to powder? Were you mortarized?
Did you die in a ditch, Mehielovitch? Are you exorcised?

Poor innocent lecher, you believed in sin.
I see you rising with the angels, thin forgotten dirty-fingered son
of a silk stocking factory owner in Constantinople,
may you be exonerated. May you be forgiven.
May you be a wax taper in paradise,
Alexander Mehielovitch Touritzen.


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