Stranger in You: Selected Poems and New

by Mary Di Michele

Mary di Michele's writing has been described by critics as "both contemporary and timeless", "fiercely intelligent", "feminine, tough, ironic and unsentimental", and as the work of a "mind at the farthest reaches of itself". Drawing from nearly twenty years of published and unpublished work, Stranger in You is gathered primarily around the recurring themes of gender, language, and cultural identity. Di Michele believes with Kristeva that the self is a strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed. These poems are more than immigrant songs or nostalgia for the old world or mere wonder at the new; they are interrogations, revelations, of the stranger, of the uncanny, in us all.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

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[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stranger in You is a selection of poems from six of Mary di Michele's previous collections, including: Tree of August , Bread And Chocolate , Mimosa And Other Poems , Necessary Sugar: Poems , Immune to Gravity , and Luminous Emergencies , along with New Works...

From Tree of August (1978)...

Born in the fifth house
under the sign of Leo
on the sixth of August,
four years after Hiroshima,
180 years after the birth
of Napoleon Bonaparte,
born Maria Luisa di Michele,
baptized at Santa Lucia
in an ancient town, Lanciano,
of the single miracle, since the middle
ages, the host, bleeding for you.
Born in the wake of World War Two,
in the green ,though scarred, hills of Abruzzo
where the Allied guns and the German guns
rendevoused. All I knew of this history were family
anecdotes yet for years I dreamt of low flying
planes overhead, dropping their exploding cargo.
Austerlitz, Auschwitz, Hiroshima!
Born with the rising sun,
the predator moon, a lion,
born from a woman's will to survive
the concentration camp, to continue
in awe to see again the blue
eyes of the dead. When she cradled
her first child, she recognized
her father looking up from her arms.
And so my mother lost her teeth
while I grew miniature bones
like pearls in an oyster mouth.

- Born in August, pg. 1

From Bread And Chocolate (1980)...

The hand-coloured darling in the black
and white photograph is me, acquiring
the look of an antique. I am
propped up on the table, I am

a feast for your eyes. To be beautiful
at three was not difficult. To be diffident.
To be blessed with hair of soft spun
honey and eyes of lapis lazuli, to be

initiated into the tricks of the vanity so young.
This is the picture which dreams itself larger
than my life. (Half-ashamed) my parents display it,
the photo, proof, the photo serving both as shrine

and trophy, mounted like the stuffed head
of a fawn accidentally killed in a hunt.

- Cara, pg. 4

From Mimosa And Other Poems (1981)...

Whatever passes through my head,
whatever sits on my tongue
made solemn by a sad and lovely mouth,
whatever preaches and makes the air
quick with yellow pollen
like a jack in the pulpit,
whatever fits together like a chain of hydrocarbons,
whatever empties itself of essential organs:
heart, liver, brain, uterus,
and makes of itself an abalone shell
for the greater song of the sea to sing in,
whatever the water gives me, I give back,
with an open and singing mouth.

- So It Begins, pg. 30

From Necessary Sugar: Poems (1984)...

I watch you sleeping by the window
where the horse-chestnut breathes,
its white candelabra blooms
aflame in the solemn mass
of the sun. Giving birth

I realized that men build cathedrals
in an attempt to sculpt light.
you are the firefly I collect
between my legs. A fiction

that last summer's romance had
to write for your father, for myself,
not believing love could be a lie
even if mistaken. However the years

tell this story to you
already June has ground up
the petals strewn across the walk
like a welcoming carpet for a queen
under the wheels of my shopping-cart.

My little bag of sugar, ten pounds,
I carry you in the corduroy snuggli,
my kangaroo pouch
or the house a man might build
for his love to grow in.

- Necessary Sugar, pg. 33

From Immune to Gravity (1986)...

My daughter before she knows
she is human, might be content
to nest with birds, to lap water
from a bowl with the cat and to feel
in the likeness of her blush to peaches,
the fruit itself plumping her cheeks,

knows the language of other animals:
chimpanzees and their kennings,
parrot talk like poetic refrain,

knows our garden and its flowers
without their names of tulip, lilac,
or daffodil that I announce,

revels in the lawn, under the sky.
I ask what's blue, what's green?

- Translated World, pg. 38

From Luminous Emergencies (1990)...

Red's for immediacy, for intimacy, for sensation,
Red's for courage, for cowardice, and for everything
not in between.
Red's for light when it dazzles
for light when it doesn't shine.
There's no stopping
what it stops.

Red's for love when you don't know how
to praise it or
to damn it.
Red means business, sex
when it's commerce, sex
when it's not.
red's for the escape
of affairs, of exits.

Red's for life, when it's hidden
death when it's spilt.
Red riots in tulip, in geranium, in ribbon.
Red like ants in the pink
peonies. Red's ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
almost relaxing when it's rose
deadly when it's crimson!
Red's in the masticator
and in the
masti
cator
y.

Never camouflage, never reticence.
red just can't be red enough.

- La Couleur de la Chaleur, pg. 54

From La Benvenuta, New Work (1995)...

Because it is dark because
the room must be illuminated
and because in winter chill the crickets
retire their legs, those cellos locked in cases,
we write music as if we were caged,
as if we were the moths, white and thin-
winged stumbling against the pane.
Pressed against glass they become
living frost flowers. You lock out
their eggs laid in furniture, in wool,
in silence. Freezing rain and the violin's
song is cat
gut, not platinum wire, but the sound
the words, wisteria on the vine,
make in your mouth. Leonard Cohen
is still our man in stereo.
His voice crackles, black carbon,
from the fire, what is left
of wood, what is left of
Joan glowing in embers. You show
me a fragment of blue
tile from the baths of Caracalla.
You cannot lose Rome in this loose
mosaic of memory. You let me touch
the pure cipher, the ceramic bit.
Because I come from east of the Eternal
city, I know less than nothing.
I know silence and song
always in another language.
The poem stirs in the sternum
before it can be
scripted through the inky
darkness of Chianti. We will again
taste silence in these syllables
sipped from the body
of red wine, the body
a tongue both tender and tannic
for which I thank you, Patrick.

- Fragment of Blue, for Patrick Lane, pg. 74-75