Loose Woman: Poems Book

Of the poems in this collection, the ones I like the most come from the central section entitled "The Heart Rounds up the Usual Suspects": here is the poem of the same title:

I sleep with the cat
when no one will have me.
When I can't give it away
for love or money-

I telephone the ones
who used to love me.
Or try to lure the leery
into my pretty web.

I'm looney as a June bride.
Cold as a bruja's tit.
A pathetic bitch.
In short an ordinary woman
Grateful to excessiveness.

At the slightest tug of generousness,
I stick to the cyclops who takes me,
lets me pee on the carpet
and keeps me fed.

Have you seen this woman?
I am considered harmless.
Armed and dangerous.
But only to me.

Most in this section are in a similar vein, or mood, with a certain dry humour aimed at herself, which I think is what I like. Phones feature quite a lot in her poems and you certainly arrive at the sense that she is a woman, often waiting for her lover:

I Don't Like Being in Love

Not like this. Not tonight,
a white stone. When you're 36
and seething like sixteen
next to the telephone,
and you don't know where.
And worse-with whom?

I don't care for this fruit. This
Mexican love hidden in the boot.
This knotted braid. Birthcord buried
beneath the knuckle of the heart.

Cat at the window scratching at
the windswept moon
scurrying along, scurrying along.
Trees rattling. Screen
doors banging raspy.

Brain a whorl of swirling
fish. Oh, not like this.
Not this.

This poem more or less reveals the age of the writer, who was born in 1954 and this collection - Loose Woman, was first published in 1994, so most of the poems are about a woman in her late 30s. Sometimes I felt I was a little too old to appreciate her love fantasies, or even her dependence on love and that elusive, perfect male; but then I also felt jealous, perhaps re-inspired. No one is too old for love, for the pain, and its massively egocentric whims?

Most of Cisneros' poems are about love - it's strange because I have just left a woman from the late 12th century whose every poem was also about the vagaries and traumas of Love - Marie de France. Perhaps I am a little obssessed.

In the third part of her book - "Heart, My Lovely Hobo", the poems are longer and thus a little more complex and also quite descriptive, for example there is one entitled "Los Desnudos: A Triptych", which is about 3 Spanish or Mexican painters and particular works by each of them; Goya, Diego Rivera and of course Frida Kahlo, - Cisneros pays homage to her fellow artists - but the poem is still about love, or rather the dangerous aspects of love.

I will take just a couple of verses because it's a long poem:

I
In this portrait of The Naked Maja by Goya
I'll replace that naughty duquesa
with a you. And you
will do nicely too, my maharaja.
The gitano curls and the skin a tone
darker than usual because
you've just returned from Campeche.
All the same, it's you raised
with your arms behind your head
staringly coyly at me from the motel pillows.

Instead of the erotic breast,
we'll have the male eggs to look at
and the pretty sex.
In detail will I labor the down
from belly to the fury of
pubis dark and sweet,
luxury of man-thigh
and coyness of my maja's eyes.

The poem continues with another 11/12 verses, but what I like, is that she makes no bones about the fact of her multiple lovers and secondly this poem is clever; she does what all good academic feminists are doing now, which is to reverse the traditional roles of viewer and viewed. And, she suggests the erotic move down her lover's body with - "will I labor," - but means explicitly as an artist, rather than lover - with her words. She, therefore, positions herself powerfully as viewer and artist - which I like.

Also from this third section - a poem which designates a balance between love and work, an important one, because I think it helps us to perceive the intense but essentially lighthearted nature of her poems about love-relationships. When you read the whole book you begin to understand the finely tuned balance she has achieved between the highs and lows of love.

A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs

I've stripped the bed.
Shaken the sheets and slumped
those fat pillows like tired tongues
out the window for air and sun
to get to. I've let

the mattress lounge in
its blue-striped dressing gown.
I've punched and fluffed.
All morning. I've billowed and snapped.
Said my prayers to la Virgen de la Soledad
and now I can sit down
to my typewriter and cup
because she's answered me.

Coffee's good.
Dust motes somersault and spin.
House clean.
I'm alone again.
Amen.

Very nice - do not let the simplicity of her lines woo you into thinking this is a simple poem or poet. Her muse is the Virgin, she gives her power, and when the lovers leave; it is with a sense of relief that she can return to her work, her writing.

And finally my last choice because otherwise I will be in trouble with the copyright laws - this one like so many of them hums with the sense of desire and sexual energy - but like a true artist she feeds that energy into her work:

Vino Tinto

Dark wine reminds me of you.
The burgundies and cabernets.
The tang and thrum and hiss
that spiral like Egyptian silk,
blood bit from a lip, black
smoke from a cigarette.

Nights that swell like cork.
This night. A thousand.
Under a single lamplight.
In public or alone.
Very late or very early
When I write my poems.

Something of you still taut
still tugs still pulls,
a rope that trembled
hummed between us.
Hummed, love, didn't it.
Love, how it hummed.

Last note: there is of course her famous, or infamous poem in this book - "Down There", which I believe she wrote, partly in defiance of John Fowles's "Confront the cunt" - and I like it too. I think it's good to remind men from where they come. (See page 82 - my edition - Julie!)