Secrets

Secrets
infesting my half-sleep...
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd...
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?

Secrets,
running over my soul without sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes in frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness....
I shall know you, secrets
by the litter you have left
and by your bloody foot-prints.

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge, was an Irish-American anarchist poet and influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. Best known for her long poems and involvement in various social movements, Ridge's work addressed issues such as oppression and social justice. She published her first book of poems, "The Ghetto and Other Poems," in 1918, which gained her considerable acclaim. Ridge's poetry often focused on the lives of immigrants and the working class.

Lola Ridge

Dedication (To my Mother)

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Flotsam

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Nocturne

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

Dreams

Lola Ridge, Simple Poetry

English

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Under-Song

There is music in the strong
        Deep-throated bush,
Whisperings of song
        Heard in the leaves' hush -
Ballads of the trees
        In tongues unknown -
A reminiscent tone
        On minor keys...

Boughs swaying to and fro
        Though no winds pass...
Faint odors in the grass
        Where no flowers grow,
And flutterings of wings
        And faint first notes,
Once babbled on the boughs
        Of faded springs.

Is it music from the graves
        Of all things fair
Trembling on the staves
        Of spacious air -
Fluted by the winds
        Songs with no words -
Sonatas from the throats
        Of master birds?

One peering through the husk
        Of darkness thrown
May hear it...

Lola Ridge

Jaguar

Nasal intonations of light
and clicking tongues...
publicity of windows
stoning me with pent-up cries...
smells of abattoirs...
smells of long-dead meat.

Some day-end -
while the sand is yet cozy as a blanket
off the warm body of a squaw,
and the jaguars are out to kill...
with a blue-black night coming on
and a painted cloud
stalking the first star -
I shall go alone into the Silence...
the coiled Silence...
where a cry can run only a little way
and waver and dwindle
and be lost.

And there...
where tiny antlers clinch and strain
as life grapples in a million avid points,
and threshing things
strike and die,
letting their hate live on
in the spreading purple of a wound...
I too
will make covert of a...

Lola Ridge

Nocturne

Indigo bulb of darkness
Punctured by needle lights
Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,
And a sliver of moon
Spigoting two high windows over the West river....

Boy, I met to-night,
Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision....
They reflect as in a fading proof
The deadened eyes of a woman,
And your shed virginity,
Light as the withered pod of a sweet pea,
Moist and fragrant
Blows against my soul.
What are you to me, boy,
That I, who have passed so many lights,
Should carry your eyes
Like swinging lanterns?

Lola Ridge

The Edge

I thought to die that night in the solitude where they would never find me...
But there was time...
And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain, staring into the abyss...
I do not know how long...
I could not count the hours, they ran so fast
Like little bare-foot urchins - shaking my hands away...
But I remember
Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein...
And a wind came out of the grass,
Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.

As the night grew
The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth
Fell in ashen folds about the hills,
Like hooded virgins, pulling their cloaks about them...
There must have been a spent moon,
For the Tall One's veil held a shimmer of silver...

That too I remember...
And the tenderly rock...

Lola Ridge

Mother

I

Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors...
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.

You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall...
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.

II

(To E. S.)

You inevitable,
Unwieldy with enormous births,
Lying on your back, eyes open, sucking down stars,
Or you kissing and picking over fresh deaths...
Filth... worms... flowers...
Green and succulent pods...
Tremulous gestation
Of dark w...

Lola Ridge

Wild Duck

I

That was a great night we spied upon
See-sawing home,
Singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars
Shuffling off behind the smoke-haze...
Fog-horns sentimentalizing on the river...
Lights dwindling to shining slits
In the wet asphalt...
Purring lights... red and green and golden-whiskered...
Digging daintily pointed claws in the soft mud...
... But you did not know...
As the trains made golden augers
Boring in the darkness...
How my heart kept racing out along the rails,
As a spider runs along a thread
And hauls him in again
To some drawing point...
You did not know
How wild ducks' wings
Itch at dawn...
How at dawn the necks of wild ducks
Arch to the sun
And new-mown air
Trickles sweet in their gullets.

II

Lola Ridge