I Watched You Disappear
I watched you disappear
poems
ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER
Louisiana State University Press
Baton Rouge
Published with the assistance of the Sea Cliff Fund
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2014 by Anya Krugovoy Silver
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
First printing
Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom
Typeface: Livory
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silver, Anya Krugovoy, 1968—
[Poems. Selections]
I Watched You Disappear : Poems / Anya Krugovoy Silver.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
“LSU Press Paperback Original”—T.p. verso.
ISBN 978-0-8071-5303-1 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5304-8 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5305-5 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5306-2 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS3619.I5465I93 2014
811'.6—dc23
2013018692
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for
Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
To my husband, Andrew
and my son, Noah
Carry my spells with you and keep them in your heart;
you’ll prosper for as long as my words live in you.
—The Ballad of Svipdag
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open.”
—TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, “VERMEER”
Contents
Dedication
I
Night Prayer
Advent, First Frost
Stage IV
Vigil
Reading “Ulysses”
Hospital at Night
Leaving the Hospital
On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary
Periwinkle
Russian Bells
Three Salvations
Paper Mill, Macon
The Dybbuk
I Watched You Disappear
Skirts and Dresses
New Dress
Sexually Explicit Lyrics, Ash Wednesday
II
Owl Maiden
Maiden in the Glass Mountain
Strawberries in Snow
The Burned Ones
Silver Hands
The Flowered Skull
The Hazel Tree
III
Doors
Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est
Perigee Moon, Loose Tooth
My Son’s Legs
Chasing a Grasshoppper at the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds
Borscht
The Overcoat
My Father in Vienna, 1958
Sorting Peaches
On Our Anniversary
Doing Laundry in Budapest
There’s a River
Epiphany
No, it’s not
Sea Glass
IV
Late Renoir
Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915)
Portraits in the Country
“Aren’t we all so brave?”
Saint Sunday
The Buried Moon
The Firebird
Notes
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Because I know that healthy people fear us,
that they invent ways in which we differ
from themselves, it’s to you, dear friends,
to whom I write my poems. You,
whom I’ve never met, to whom I type
my frantic letters, whose suffering
fills my inbox long past midnight,
who read path reports like prophecies.
Who exist in stages.
You sit in the waiting rooms of
faraway cities, I invent faces to match
your histories, which regimens
have worked and which have failed.
I speak your names at night, a litany,
the repetition like picking a scab
or saying a rosary.
To you, I dedicate these words.
Let them stand before God
like a sheet of flame, smoking
your precious, flickering names.
in memory of Paula Ford
I
Night Prayer
I talk and talk and hear nothing back.
You who are neither voice, nor sign,
nor image. In answer to my pleas,
not the slightest flutter of humid air
or pause in cicadas’ raspy vespers.
No stutter of starlight, no pillow
slipped beneath my knees or swallowtail
alighting on my waiting hands.
No bird pecking up the pain in my chest
like a handful of sprouting peas.
The clock’s face does not waver;
neither does matter bend.
And what I speak remains traceless—
like a beetle’s breath, this Amen.
Advent, First Frost
Something has descended
like feathered prophecy.
Someone has offered the world
a bowl of frozen tears,
has traced the veins and edges
of leaves with furred ink.
The grass is stiff as the strings
of a lute.
And, day by day, the tiny windows
crack their cardboard frames,
seizing the frail light. The sun,
moving through
these waxy squares, undiminished
as a word passing
from mind to speech.
Every breath a birth,
a stir of floating limbs within me.
I stay up late and waken early
to feel beneath my feet
the silence coming.
Stage IV
I have no other body no other city
—DRAGAN JOVANOVIĆ DANILOV
Suddenly, gloved hands empty the rooms
of my house, and I’m told
to take only what I can carry.
Faces turn away from me—I’m taboo, now—
the boat I’m set inside is crowded
with others like myself—
they come from their own cities.
Cautiously, we take each other’s hands
and trade stories. We learn
of the lucky few who return—
who are able to cross back over.
And in time, their shame
comes to be known as victory.
We use words that once embarrassed
us—courage, prayer, miracle.
And always, we long for our old homes—
we draw scarves over our faces when we weep,
singing the songs of our ancestors.
In this exile, no pillar of dust and fire guides us.
Our passports have been stamped—
our wrists and collarbones have been marked.
Even when the old promises begin to fall away—
when we see less clearly the gardens
of our former lands—still, we are together, friends—
and we know what our beloveds do not
yet know. We can see through each other
to the lapping silence beyond the Milky Way.
Vigil
Music do
esn’t drown out her dying.
Rain, rain, two a.m., every drop
I’m sitting in my nightgown, listening
to the staccato of drops, and the Brahms
Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Adagio.
We are circling around her—
all the women I’ll never meet—
all those who can’t sleep tonight.
Our fingers are touching.
The violin’s lunge and stagger
mimic her sick lungs. She lies on her back,
gasping to bring breath to that drowned net.
Rain in the water oak, in the cracked branch
of the gingko that’s fallen on the electrical wire.
God responds with a sobbing of strings.
I can’t understand what He’s saying.
Notes rise, then drop, like a hoopoe’s wings.
The wire is drooping, a black rubber smile.
The broken gingko, its pale wood, its green fruit
scattered over the wet lawn, is not an omen.
So we are holding her to the earth.
She is at the center of this circle of praying women.
Her lungs resist the air, there’s no space.
God’s voice is red and unreadable—
the music is a broken spell.
The violin ascends, dives, ascends.
Will water overflow the drains?
Will I sleep tonight, in this cage of rain?
God’s voice is somewhere is somewhere
is somewhere I know it is but somewhere where
in memory of Lori Grennan
Reading “Ulysses”
It’s easy to mock Tennyson. But when cancer progresses, we return to “Ulysses.” Susan, who’s dying, posts, “Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.” Which is what makes the poem elegy, and not bluster.
Even in this cursed circle in which I dwell, we try to yield to nothing. The thin young woman opposite the room from me doesn’t want to stoop as the nurse injects chemo into a port drilled, eye-like, into her skull. She covers her face with a towel, and then feels ashamed for hiding herself. We are made monstrous by tubes dangling from our wrists, trailing behind us as we walk to the bathroom. Some require to be held up, doll-like. We know we frighten others as we nap open-mouthed, wigs askew.
Even when the rope is round our throats, cutting oxygen from the collapsed lungs through which we can no longer breathe, we gasp and gasp. Death will claim us as we brace ourselves up on our bed rails. I laughed, once, at Tennyson, but no longer. “Though much is taken, much abides.” I believe it. Which is why I read this poem so often, and why Susan does too. The newer world does come closer. We can’t help it coming closer. Ulysses will sail the storms till he dies. And so, my dear ones, will we.
in memory of Susan Freed
Hospital at Night
All visitors must go—
only those confined to the floors
are permitted to stay.
In the alleys between closed doors,
shoes walk briskly on their various
errands, steel carts rattling
machines from room to room.
In the background, the TV’s
bright chatter, its counterfeit joy.
Goodbyes are said, too cheerfully,
before the elevator drops.
A woman stands at the window
watching her husband and son
as they walk to their car,
the boy with a brand-new backpack.
She stands waving,
her arms making wide motions.
It’s impossible for them to see her
through the tinted glass,
though she stands as close as she can—
her face touching that dark barrier.
Leaving the Hospital
As the doors glide shut behind me,
the world flares back into being—
I exist again, recover myself,
sunlight undimmed by dark panes,
the heat on my arms the earth’s breath.
The wind tongues me to my feet
like a doe licking her newborn fawn.
At my back, days measured by vital signs,
my mouth opened and arm extended,
the nighttime cries of a man withered
child-size by cancer, and the bells
of emptied IVs tolling through hallways.
Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary—
holding off pain with its muscular wings.
As I step to the curb, an orange moth
dives into the basket of roses
that lately stood on my sick room table,
and the petals yield to its persistent
nudge, opening manifold and golden.
On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary
I’ve opened my veins to the drip of chemo,
accepted into my blood these poisons
that would sting the skin. The bag emptied,
I’ve been sealed again, released from hooks
and bells. Standing on the shaved lawn
outside the doctor’s office, I’m free to walk
left or right. Sunlight hums round my head
like bees reciting the hundredth Psalm.
Each leaf, like all live things, springs
toward the source of its swaying. That’s
when I feel it: this insane instinct for life.
The world’s thick and transparent as honey.
And the day takes my body back, simply,
the way a mother dresses her child.
Periwinkle
When thou shalt pluck this wort,
thou shalt be clean of every uncleanness.
—APULEIUS, Herbarium (1480)
Small low flower—
your nectar mends my bones.
Sown in my bloodstream,
your stems thread my veins,
root in my cartilage, bind my lesions—
your hundred eyes bloom
in tumor’s lunar grave.
Come summer, bees will fly into my open
mouth and build combs in my throat.
My tongue will lick honey
from my molars—exorcising
the bitter sores.
I will scarf my head in butterflies,
and my winnowed ribs flush Madonna-blue.
Russian Bells
Danilov Monastery, Moscow
I’d like to scale the cord
in the vibrating dark,
the way, as a child,
I clung to a knotted rope
and kicked myself back
from a tree
into the arc and blur
of summer air.
That’s the prayer I want.
To open my mouth
and ring with my Mother’s
voice. My heart
like a shattered peony,
musky petal after petal
unpeeling, pealing.
Three Salvations
i. Honey Salvation
My great-uncle, the priest–bee keeper,
must have heard the confessions of thousands
of bees as he covered himself in the vestments
of his profession and harvested their yield.
Combs split open in his stung palms
like the doors of the Ark. Glory of resin
and clover! Gladness of pollen! Golden
nectar, spun sleeves of the Theotokos!
Did he chant liturgies while filling jars?
Did the Mother mark with amber tears his death,
shot with his wife as passing armies smoked
the village empty, spoiling the yellow fields?
ii. Apple Salvation
There’s a stranger in the field of apples.
Somebody’s hands have left a blush
on the Staymans, have scattered half-
rotten fruit in which wasps will b
urrow.
Somebody’s presence has spun the sugar,
banished bitterness from yellow cores.
Pips have polished themselves like beaks
of sparrows, Sweet Wines waxed tender.
Now is the time for us to climb ladders
and fill a crate for our family’s pleasure.
To hear the tick tock of falling fruit.
To lighten the bearded branches.
Let husbands feel the round arms of their wives,
and wives laugh in voices rich as custard.
Let there be shouting like shaken tambourines!
Let the musician bring his fiddle!
iii. Nut Salvation
In the crate of ornaments not to be touched,
rested in cotton my mother’s golden walnuts:
glass, thinner than egg shells, easily shattered.
She hung them from the boughs herself.
Real nuts, we ate on Advent evenings,
sitting around the burning wreath, cracking
hazelnuts and almonds, peeling tangerines.
My father split the walnuts single-handed,
then let us root out gnarled halves and pieces.
Each nut, a mystery beneath its sealed shell.
I hate mysteries, my son proclaims one day.
And yet, he sits all season snapping nuts,
gathering pecans from the back lawn,
rejecting the green and black or gnawed.
The tools—a toothed and silver hinge, a screw
and lever, assorted picks—he places on the table.
Some of the harvested will be rotten, some unripe.
The best emerge from cocoons as rich as butter,
most in shards and others whole. All of these
will be put to use in pies and bread.
He works quietly, entirely focused on the task.
On the oilcloth, a pile of husks easily swept away,
and the delight of discovery, gleaming brown
and full of grace as a new pair of shoes.
Paper Mill, Macon