ANNE HÉBERTI have no fixed name or face; waiting room and darkroom, track of dreams
and place of origin, my friend, my friend
Oh what a season of red leaves God has given me in which to lay you down,
my friend, my friend
A great black horse races over the riverbanks, I hear his hoofbeats beneath the
earth, his shoe strikes the source of my blood at the slender fetlock of death
Oh, what an autumn! Who then has taken me amidst the motion of subterra-
nean ferns, mixed with the odor of wet wood, my friend, my friend
Among the scrambled ages, births and deaths, all memories, colors shattered,
receive the shadowed setting of the earth, all night given and delivered into your
hands, my friend, my friend
It took only one morning for my face to flower, acknowledge your own great
darkness visited, all the enigma bound between your bright hands, my love.
—marilyn hacker
Earth at Its Origin
Land received in the hollowest of sleep
The bitter tree grows upon us
Its shadow at the highest waking
Its silence in the heart of speech
Its name to engrave on the field of snow.
And you, brought back from the break of day,
Leave this ancient dream on the old world shores
Think of our love, its honor is enough.
Brute age, pure face and eyes wide open.
Sweet water is no longer in season
Woman is salty like seaweed
My soul has the taste of sea and green oranges.
Forests alerted rivers unknotted
sing the mother-waters of this weather
A whole continent under a storm of wind.
And road, lovely friend, the world melts like a town of cloth
Now comes about the heart’s wild likeness
To earth at its origin.
—mary ann caws