Page 17 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

We need, instead, to take another look at writers who have pondered the problem of going on under

the sign of species suicide, as George Oppen did in the passage I quoted from "The Image of the

Engine," or as Audre Lorde did when she composed the tartly witty warning with which she ends

"Between Our Selves":

if we do not stop killing

the other

in ourselves

the self that we hate

in others

soon we shall all lie

in the same direction

and Eshidale's priests will be very busy

they who alone can bury

all those who seek their own death

by jumping up from the ground

and landing upon their heads.

And then there is Linda Hogan, whose beautifully measured lines insisting on an open balance of

unbearable danger and tender possibility have stayed with me since I first read them over thirty years

ago. From her poem "Disappearances":

I remember how the Japanese women

turned to go home

and were lost

in the disappearances

that touched their innocent lives

as easily as they touched small teacups

rattling away

on shelves.

These are the lessons of old women

whose eyes are entire cities,

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