The Tree

after Ronald Baylans He who sleeps on my lap

The one who sleeps
in my lap
is from the ribcage
of someone else
The storyteller says the one
is a woman
who needs a man
and I disagree
We argue until one falls asleep
tired of listening
on this moonlit night
I sigh.
Tomorrow
when light falls
I must
rouse our snakes
from within

Another Meeting
I see her at the curb
just another person in
the crowd. The market
vendors of fruit. Season of
mangoes and chaos
She smiles, laughing
in her eyes
she asks
where I am taking her
I am a child again
climbing the neighbors wall
Rapunzel next door
Inviting her to come
outside the window
A foothold at a time
The mangoes are ripe, if
We are careful, we can
Steal time. Pick
the fruit that is not ours
Her smile is
and is not a lie. She looks
the vendor in the eye,
and we walk
a pace apart from each other,
purposely
not holding hands

the debutante
Mother found out I bound my breasts
bandaged them as a ribbon would
wrap a gift I did not want to receive
She said nothing. Only kept still
as I uncover my chest
allowing flesh to remember
its swelling, swollen self.
I looked
estranged at the dark nipples
I would have otherwise,
Want, to have, on someone else. It was
not a lie to tell mother whose hands
clasped and unclasped holding
another beaded gift

Like the majority of Bishops poems, Vague Poem was published first in The New
Yorker. It is among the fifty or sixty unfinished poems found in her papers at Vassar
College library, and it will appear in a volume of posthumous works that Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux will publish under the title Edgar Allan Poem and the Jukebox. As her friend
Lloyd Schwartz has observed, in her lifetime Bishop published very few poems with an
explicitly sexual content. Since her death, however, many of the poems that have
surfaced, either completed or nearly completed, have been quite strikingly sexual.
Vague Poem
The trip west.
I think I dreamed that trip.
They talked a lot of rose rocks
or maybe rock roses
Im not sure now, but someone tried to
get me some.
(And two or three students had.)
She said she had some at her house.
They were by the back door, she said.
A ramshackle house.
An Army house? No, a Navy house.
Yes,
that far inland.
There was nothing by the back door but
dirt
or that same dry, monochrome, sepia
straw Id seen everywhere.
Oh, she said, the dog has carried them
off.
(A big black dog, female, was dancing
around us.)
Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she
found one
a sort of one. This one is just
beginning. See
you can see here, its beginning to look
like a rose.
Itswell, a crystal, crystals form
I dont know any geology myself
(Neither did I.)

Faintly, I could make outperhapsin

the dull,
rose-red lump of (apparently) soil
a rose-like shape; faint glitters Yes,
perhaps
there was a secret, powerful crystal at
work inside.
I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again.
Crystallography and its laws:
something I once wanted badly to study,
until I learned that it would involve a lot
of arithmetic,
that is, mathematics.
Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock,
rock-rose
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen,
shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning,
crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline
nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses,
roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex

Barbie Doll
by Marge Piercy
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.