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FOR MY SISTER,
Mary-Ellen (1955–2017)
Contents
from AWAKE
Two Pictures of My Sister
What My Father Told Me
Ghosts
The Garden
The Tooth Fairy
Quarter to Six
Awake
Girl in the Doorway
On the Back Porch
Bird
The Laundromat
Sunday
from WHAT WE CARRY
Late October
After Twelve Days of Rain
Aphasia
What We Carry
For the Sake of Strangers
Dust
Twelve
Each Sound
Fast Gas
As It Is
The Thief
This Close
The Lovers
Kissing
from SMOKE
Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
How It Will Happen, When
Fear
Last Words
Trying to Raise the Dead
The Shipfitter’s Wife
Abschied Symphony
Family Stories
Pearl
Smoke
The Orgasms of Organisms
Life is Beautiful
from FACTS ABOUT THE MOON
Moon in the Window
Facts About the Moon
The Crossing
The Ravens of Denali
The Life of Trees
What’s Broken
Afterlife
Savages
Vacation Sex
Democracy
Face Poem
Superglue
Cello
Little Magnolia
Starling
from THE BOOK OF MEN
Staff Sgt. Metz
Bakersfield, 1969
Juneau Spring
Mine Own Phil Levine
Late-Night TV
Homicide Detective: A Film Noir
Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
Men
Antilamentation
Cher
Dog Moon
Mother’s Day
Dark Charms
Lost in Costco
Second Chances
Fall
Emily Said
The Secret of Backs
ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG: NEW POEMS
Lapse
Before Surgery
Death of the Mother
Under Stars
Changeable Weather
Only as the Day Is Long
Piano with Children
My Mother’s Colander
Ant Farm
Heart of Thorns
Ideas of Heaven
Crow
Ode to Gray
Evening
Error’s Refuge
Augusta, Maine, 1951
Chair
Urn
Letter to My Dead Mother
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
from
AWAKE
Two Pictures of My Sister
If an ordinary person is silent,
this may be a tactical maneuver.
If a writer is silent, he is lying.
—JAROSLAV SEIFERT
The pose is stolen from Monroe, struck
in the sun’s floodlight, eyes lowered,
a long-stemmed plastic rose between her teeth.
My cast-off bathing suit hangs
in folds over her ribs, straps
cinched, pinned at the back of her neck.
Barefoot on the hot cement, knock-kneed,
comical if it weren’t for the graceful
angles of her arms, her flesh soft
against the chipped stucco.
The other picture is in my head.
It is years later.
It is in color.
Blonde hair curls away from the planes of her face
like wood shavings.
She wears a lemon-yellow ruffled top, denim
cutoffs, her belly button squeezed to a slit
above the silver snap.
She stands against the hallway wall
while Dad shakes his belt in her face.
A strip of skin has been peeled
from her bare shoulder, there are snake
lines across her thighs, a perfect curl
around her long neck.
She looks through him
as if she could see behind his head.
She dares him.
Go on. Hit me again.
He lets the folded strap unravel to the floor.
Holds it by its tail. Bells the buckle
off her cheekbone.
She does not move or cry or even wince
as the welt blooms on her temple
like a flower opening frame by frame
in a nature film.
It lowers her eyelid with its violet petals
and as he walks away only her eyes
move, like the eyes of a portrait that follow you
around a museum room, her face
a stubborn moon that trails the car all night,
stays locked in the frame of the back window
no matter how many turns you take,
no matter how far you go.
What My Father Told Me
Always I have done what was asked.
Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels.
The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord
wound around my hand. Laundry
hung on a line.
There is always much to do and I do it.
The iron resting in its frame, hot
in the shallow pan of summer
as the basins of his hands push
aside the book I am reading.
I do as I am told, hold his penis
like the garden hose, in this bedroom,
in that bathroom, over the toilet
or my bare stomach.
I do the chores, pull the weeds out back,
finger stink-bug husks, snail carcasses,
pile dead grass in black bags. At night
his feet are safe on their pads, light
on the wall-to-wall as he takes
the hallway to my room.
His voice, the hiss of the lawn sprinklers,
the wet hush of sweat in his hollows,
the mucus still damp
in the corners of my eyes as I wake.
Summer ends. Schoolwork doesn’t suit me.
My fingers unaccustomed to the slimness
of a pen, the delicate touch it takes
to uncoil the mind.
History. A dateline pinned to the wall.
Beneath each president’s face, a quotation.
Pictures of buffalo and wheat fields,
a wagon train circled for the night,
my hand raised to ask a question,
Where did the children sleep?
Ghosts
It’s midnight and a light rain falls.
I sit on the front stoop to smoke.
Across the street a lit window, filled
with a ladder on which a young man stands.
His head dips into the frame each time
he sinks his brush in the paint.
He’s painting his kitchen white, patiently
covering the faded yellow with long strokes.
He leans into this work like a lover, risks
losing his balance, returns gracefully
to the precise middle of the step to dip
and start again.
A woman appears beneath his feet, borrows
paint, takes it onto her thin brush
like a tongue. Her sweater is the color
of tender lemons. This is the beginning
of their love, bare and simple
as that wet room.
My hip aches against the damp cement.
I take it inside, punch up a pillow
for it to nest in. I’m getting too old
to sit on the porch in the rain,
to stay up all night, watch morning
rise over rooftops.
Too old to dance
circles in dirty bars, a man’s hands
laced at the small of my spine, pink
slingbacks hung from limp fingers. Love.
I’m too old for that, the foreign tongues
loose in my mouth, teeth that rang
my breasts by the nipples like soft bells.
I want it back. The red earrings and blue
slips. Lips alive with spit. Muscles
twisting like boat ropes in a hard wind.
Bellies for pillows. Not this ache in my hip.
I want the girl who cut through blue poolrooms
of smoke and golden beers, stepping out alone
into a summer fog to stand beneath a streetlamp’s
amber halo, her blue palms cupped
around the flare of a match.
She could have had so many lives. Gone off
with a boy to Arizona, lived on a ranch
under waves of carved rock, her hands turned
the color of flat red sands. Could have said
yes to a woman with fingers tapered as candles,
or a man who slept in a canvas tepee, who pulled
her down on his mattress of grass where she made
herself as empty as the guttered fire.
Oklahoma.
I could be there now, spinning corn from dry cobs,
working fat tomatoes into mason jars.
The rain has stopped. For blocks the houses
drip like ticking clocks. I turn off lights
and feel my way to the bedroom, slip cold
toes between flowered sheets, nest my chest
into the back of a man who sleeps in fits,
his suits hung stiff in the closet, his racked
shoes tipped toward the ceiling.
This man loves me for my wit, my nerve,
for the way my long legs fall from hemmed skirts.
When he rolls his body against mine, I know
he feels someone else. There’s no blame.
I love him, even as I remember a man with cane-
brown hands, palms pink as blossoms opening
over my breasts.
And he holds me,
even with all those other fingers nestled
inside me, even with all those other shoulders
wedged above his own like wings.
The Garden
We were talking about poetry.
We were talking about nuclear war.
She said she couldn’t write about it
because she couldn’t imagine it.
I said it was simple. Imagine
this doorknob is the last thing
you will see in this world.
Imagine you happen to be standing
at the door when you look down, about
to grasp the knob, your fingers
curled toward it, the doorknob old
and black with oil from being turned
so often in your hand, cranky
with rust and grease from the kitchen.
Imagine it happens this quickly, before
you have time to think of anything else;
your kids, your own life, what it will mean.
You reach for the knob and the window
flares white, though you see it only
from the corner of your eye because
you’re looking at the knob, intent
on opening the back door to the patch
of sunlight on the porch, that garden
spread below the stairs and the single
tomato you might pick for a salad.
But when the flash comes you haven’t
thought that far ahead. It is only
the simple desire to move into the sun
that possesses you. The thought
of the garden, that tomato, would have
come after you had taken the knob
in your hand, just beginning to twist it,
and when the window turns white
you are only about to touch it,
preparing to open the door.
The Tooth Fairy
They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can’t hear it.
My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm breeze lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.
It’s harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chain-smoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in the walls.
I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.
He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
slowly of a rare bone disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.
She’s a nurse on the graveyard shift.
Comes home mornings and calls me.
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.
And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints . . .
Whenever I visit her, I ask again.
“I don’t know,” she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. “We were as surprised as you.”
Quarter to Six
and the house swept with the colors of dusk,
I set the table with plates and lace. In these minutes
left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep
and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say
if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,
this man I’ve learned to live with, afraid
of what he doesn’t know about me. That I’ve finished
a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself
for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish
as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me. Missy,
this is what’s become of the wedding you swore you’d come to
wearing black. That was in 1970 as we sat on the bleached
floor of the sanitarium sharing a cigarette you’d won
in a game of pool. You said even school was better
than this ward, where they placed the old men
in their draped pants, the housewives screaming in loud
flowered shifts as they clung to the doors that lined the halls.
When we ate our dinner of fish and boiled potatoes,
it was you who nudged me under the table
as the thin man in striped pajamas climbed
the chair beside me in his bare feet, his pink-tinged urine
making soup of my leftovers. With my eyes locked on yours,
I watched you keep eating. So I lifted my fork
to my open mouth, jello quivering green
against the tines, and while I truste
d you and chewed
on nothing, he leapt into the arms of the night nurse
and bit open the side of her face. You had been there
longer, knew the ropes, how to take the sugar-coated pill
and slip it into the side pocket in your mouth, pretend
to swallow it down in drowsy gulps while
the white-frocked nurse eyed the clockface above our heads.
You tapped messages into the wall while I wept, struggling
to remember the code, snuck in after bedcount
with cigarettes, blew the blue smoke through barred windows.
We traded stories, our military fathers:
yours locking you in a closet for the days it took
to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat
pulled over your head; mine, who worked
his ringed fingers inside me while the house
slept, my face pressed to the pillow, my fists
knotted into the sheets. Some nights
I can’t eat. The dining room fills
with their chatter, my hand stuffed with the glint
of a fork and the safety of butter knives
quiet at the sides of our plates. If I could write you now,
I’d tell you I wonder how long I can go on with this careful
pouring of the wine from the bottle, straining to catch it
in the fragile glass. Tearing open my bread, I see
the scar, stitches laced up the root of your arm, the flesh messy
where you grabbed at it with the broken glass of an ashtray.
That was the third time. And later you laughed
when they twisted you into the white strapped jacket
demanding you vomit the pills. I imagined you
in the harsh light of a bare bulb where you took
the needle without flinching, retched
when the ipecac hit you, your body shelved over
the toilet and no one to hold the hair
from your face. I don’t know
where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth
those nights you tongued me open in the broken light
that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern
found us and wrenched us apart, the half-moon of your breast