Excerpt from A Table of Content

DESTINATIONS

Yesterday I saw some bears at the top of a waterfall.
They were watching salmon leap up from the cascade.

It was on television and, moreover, part of an ad.
Not one of them, salmon or bears, was impressed

by the water’s will, its weight, its wrath, its wall,
the salmon flying out from the knockout force

like careless birds rising from a field of silver wheat.
The falling water obviously had no intention of getting

in the way of a salmon’s destination. It was beautiful.
Trouble was, the bears were there with bear intentions.

Their heads bobbed up and down, perhaps admiring
every quiver and flash, their four feet as firmly planted

in water as the rock-face itself. Now and then one of them
opened its mouth to let a fish dive into it. That was the part

that made me think of my own headlong leaps and dives
when I thought there would be no mouths to receive me.


NO PALMS

No palms dolled up the tedium, no breathing wind.
No problem was the buzzword then, their way to go.

In truth, my case was black as sin, a thing to hide,
In that they feigned to find me sane, so not to know.

Someone brought in a medium. Anathema!
Some clown sewed up my eyes, he said it wouldn’t show.

Confusing hands with craze, they howled, “Let’s cut them off.”
Confusing, too, their spies, my lies without an echo.

Time and again they stitched my mind with warp and woof.
Time pounded in my ruby hear, doing a slow,

Slow dim-out in the lupanar, slow take, slow fade,
Slow yawning like a door. “Hello,” I said. “HELLO.”

There, flung across the room between inside and out,
There must have shown itself to me…an afterglow.

With such a blaze to celebrate where centuries meet
With time itself, how could I hesitate? Although

Still trapped in the millennium I knew I had
Still time to blow some kisses. Look up, there they go!


SECRET

On one of those birthdays of which I’ve had so many
I was walking home through the park from a party,

pleased that I’d resisted mentioning the birthday –
why hear congratulations for doing nothing but live?

The birthday was my secret with myself and gave me,
walking under all those trees, such a strong feeling of

satisfaction that everything else fell away: party sounds,
the hostess who stared and as suddenly disappeared

on seeing her husband walk in with a young(er) friend;
another guest examining garment labels in the room

where I went to leave my jacket; one of two waiters
balancing a trayful of foot-high champagne glasses;

a bee-like buzz of voices I ought to have enjoyed
but heard as foreign babble, so remote it was from

a birthday, so empty of import nothing would remain.
I got my jacket, waved from the hall, pressed Down.

In summer the park, for an hour or so before night,
is at its greenest, a whole implicit proposition

of green leaves, a triumph of leaves enfolding me
that day in a green intimacy so trustworthy I told

them my secret: “It’s my birthday,” I said out loud
before turning to cross the avenue.

Copyright 2004 by Dorothea Tanning. All rights reserved.