Fall
I’m tired of stories about the body,
how important it is, how unimportant,
how you’re either a body
hauling a wrinkled brain around
or a brain trailing a stunned sheen
of flesh. Or those other questions
like Would you rather love or be loved?
If you could come back as the opposite sex,
what would you do first? As if. As if.
Yes the body is lonely, especially at twilight.
Yes Baptists would rather you not have a body at all,
especially not breasts, suspended in their hooked bras
like loose prayers, like ticking bombs, like two
Hallelujahs, the choir frozen in their onyx gowns
like a row of flashy Cadillacs, their plush upholstery
hidden behind tinted windows, Jesus swinging
from the rearview mirror by a chain.
And certainly not the body in the autumn
of its life, humming along in a wheelchair,
legs withered beneath the metallic shine
of thinning skin. No one wants to let
that body in. Especially not the breasts again.
Your mother’s are strangers to you now, your sister’s
were always bigger and clung to her blouse,
your lover’s breasts, deep under the ground,
you weep beside the little mounds of earth
lightly shoveled over them.
Emily Said
Emily said she heard a fly buzz
when she died, heard it whizz
over her head, troubling her frizzed
hair. What will I hear? Showbiz
tunes on the radio, the megahertz
fuzz when the station picks up Yaz,
not the Hall-of-Famer or the Pez
of contraceptives, but the jazzy
flash-in-the-pan 80’s techo-pop star, peach fuzz
on her rouged cheeks singing Pul-ease
Don’t Go through a kazoo. Will my old love spritz
the air with the perfume of old roses,
buy me the white satin Mercedes-Benz
of pillows, string a rainbow blitz
of crystals in the window—quartz, topaz—
or will I die wheezing, listening to a quiz
show: What year is this? Who was the 44th Prez
of the United States? Where is the Suez
Canal? Are you too hot? Cold? Freezing.
The Secret of Backs
Heels of the shoes worn down, each
in its own way, sending signals to the spine.
The back of the knee as it folds and unfolds.
In winter the creases of American-made jeans:
blue denim seams worried to white thread.
And in summer, in spring, beneath the hems
of skirts, Bermudas, old bathing suit elastic,
the pleating and un-pleating of parchment skin.
And the dear, dear rears. Such variety! Such
choice in how to cover or reveal: belts looped high
or slung so low you can’t help but think of plumbers.
And the small of the back: dimpled or taut, spiny or not,
tattooed, butterflied, rosed, winged, whorled. Maybe
still pink from the needle and ink. And shoulders,
broad or rolled, poking through braids, dreads, frothy
waterfalls of uncut hair, exposed to rain, snow, white
stars of dandruff, unbrushed flecks on a blue-black coat.
And the spiral near the top of the back of the head—
peek of scalp, exquisite galaxy—as if the first breach
had swirled each filament away from that startled center.
Ah, but the best are the bald or neatly shorn, revealing
the flanged, sun-flared, flamboyant backs of ears: secret
as the undersides of leaves, the flipside of flower petals.
And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my
nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love.
Don’t stop. Don’t turn around.
ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG: NEW POEMS
Lapse
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I
see the leaves turning on their stems. I am
not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not
fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived
by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I
do not think my dead will return. They will not do
what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not
even if I kiss their photographs or think
of them as I touch the things they left me. It
isn’t possible to raise them from their beds, is
it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Still-
ness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.
Before Surgery
In another life you might hear the song
of your neighbor clipping the hedges, a sound
oddly pleasant, three coarse dull snips,
three thin branches thumping softly as death
onto the closed doors of the mown lawn.
You might get your every dark wish: damson plums
for breakfast, mud swelling up between your toes
as you brush the green scum from the face of a pond
with a stick, gold carp flying like flocks of finches
through the azurite blue, a copperhead with a minnow
struggling in its mouth winding away from you.
In that hush you might hear the gods
mutter your name, diamonds of salt
melting on your tongue. You could lie there
molten and glowing as a blade hammered to silver
by the four-billion-year-old middle-aged sun.
In another life you might slip under canal after canal
in a coracle boat, look up to see river light
scribbling hieroglyphs on the curved undersides
of each stone arch. You might hear
an echo, the devil’s fiddle
strummed just for you, and you might sing, too,
unbuckle your voice. You can’t speak
the meaning of being. The nurses can’t help you.
Beautiful as you are with your plasma eyes,
beautiful as they are in their mesh-blue protective booties,
their sugary-white dresses, so starched, so pressed.
Your deepest bones might ache with longing,
your skeleton draped in its finest flesh
like the lush velvet curtains that open slowly
before the opera begins.
Death of the Mother
At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise . . .
—JOHN DONNE
At day’s end: last sight, sound, smell and touch, blow
your final breath into the hospital’s disinfected air, rise
from your bed, mother of eight, the blue scars of infinity
lacing your belly, your fractious hair and bony knees, and go
where we can never find you, where we can never overthrow
your lust for order, your love of chaos, your tyrannies
of despair, your can of beer. Cast down your nightshade eyes
and float through the quiet, your nightgown wrapped like woe
around your shredded soul, your cavernous heart, that space
you left us like a gift, brittle staircase of ifs we are bound
to climb too often and too late. Unleash us, let your grace
breathe over us in silence, when we can bear it, ground
as we are into our loss. You taught us how to glean the good
from anything, pardon anyone, even you, awash as we are in your blood.
Under Stars
When m
y mother died
I was as far away
as I could be, on an arm of land
floating in the Atlantic
where boys walk shirtless
down the avenue
holding hands, and gulls sleep
on the battered pilings,
their bright beaks hidden
beneath one white wing.
Maricopa, Arizona. Mea culpa.
I did not fly to see your body
and instead stepped out
on a balcony in my slip
to watch the stars turn
on their grinding wheel.
Early August, the ocean,
a salt-tinged breeze.
Botanists use the word
serotinous to describe
late-blossoming, serotinal
for the season of late summer.
I did not write your obituary
as my sister requested, could
not compose such final lines:
I closed the piano
to keep the music in. Instead
I stood with you
on what now seems
like the ancient deck
of a great ship, our nightgowns
flaring, the smell of dying lilacs
drifting up from someone’s
untended yard, and we
listened to the stars hiss
into the bent horizon, blossoms
the sea gathered tenderly, each
shattered and singular one
long dead, but even so, incandescent,
making a singed sound, singing
as they went.
Changeable Weather
My mother might launch her thumb
into the air and say Get the hell
out of here or she might tell
us a parable about the quick and the dumb
pulling a splinter from a finger.
She’d linger at the back door
humming notes to a score
she was struggling to learn. Bring
me a cigarette she would shout
over her nightgowned shoulder.
The weather could change without
warning: clear morning, mountains
of cloud by noon. When you’re older
she would snap, turning off the TV
or snatching a book from our hands,
then scuff across the rug, a phantom
in her blue robe and slippers. We
lost her daily, then found her, devout
over a bowl of cherries, turning
to spit the seeds over our upturned
faces, us flinching in unison when she hit
the wall, her red lips shaped in a kiss.
We never knew which way to run:
into her arms or away from her sharp eyes.
We loved her most when she was gone,
and when, after long absence, she arrived.
Only as the Day Is Long
Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a block where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.
Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?
Piano with Children
Think of the leaning note: a dissonance
released by a consonance. Think
of the crushed tone or tone clusters, notes
piling up around the legs of a piano bench
like one-winged blackbirds,
all eye and beak, fallen letters of the alphabet
spelling out what’s missing. Think of purple bells
of delphinium in a window box, their stained light,
coarse granite slab chinked
into the semblance of a face, think of fate,
how it embraces the ghost gowns of the past,
the span of a hand, a clutch of keys,
a stick dragged along fence slats, the custom
of taking off one’s hat in church, scrap of lace
draped over a child’s still soft skull.
There are those for whom music is a staunch
against an open wound, the piano a tomb
into which the sparrows of sorrow tumble:
Clair de Lune perishes the terror of time,
and rivers run through, scumbling up the rocks.
Think of all that’s left behind, whatever leaves
trails as it trembles: horse tail, fish fan, feathers, flutes,
whispers like vespers in another room.
We did not question the hours’ rhythms,
the adagio of her hands, each a pale veined reckoning,
the day gleaned of its moments, embroidered berries
in the gathers of her dress, her scent unleashed
in a square of sun, one minute tilting into the next,
our house a battered ship on which we tossed
My Mother’s Colander
Holes in the shape of stars
punched in gray tin, dented,
cheap, beaten by each
of her children with a wooden spoon.
Noodle catcher, spaghetti stopper,
pouring cloudy rain into the sink,
swirling counter clockwise
down the drain, starch slime
on the backside, caught
in the piercings.
Scrubbed for sixty years, packed
and unpacked, the baby’s
helmet during the cold war,
a sinking ship in the bathtub,
little boat of holes.
Dirt scooped in with a plastic
shovel, sifted to make cakes
and castles. Wrestled
from each other’s hands,
its tin feet bent and re-bent.
Bowl daylight fell through
onto freckled faces, noon stars
on the pavement, the universe
we circled aiming jagged stones,
rung bells it caught and held.
Ant Farm
We saved our money and sent away for it,
red plastic frame, clear plastic maze,
packaged sand siphoned into a slot, then freed
the ants into their new lives, little machines
of desire, watched them carry the white
bread crumbs late into the night
beneath a table lamp. Sweet dynasty.
We bent our queenly ten-year-old heads
over their busy industry in 1962, Uncle Milton’s
personal note of thanks unfolded on the floor,
while underground the first nuclear warhead
was being released from the Polaris submarine,
and Christmas Island shook, shrouded in a fine
radioactive mist. And our mother sang
her apocalyptic gospel to anyone who’d listen,
the navy housing’s gravel lots shimmering
with each sonic boom, began a savings account
for a fall-out shelter she said she knew we couldn’t
possibly afford. The poor will die, she told us,
Who cares about us peasants? To them
we’re only workers: dependable, expendable,
and then thrust her middle finger up
into the oniony kitchen air. The ants died
soon after, one by shriveled one, then in clumps;
they looked like spiders with all their legs
and antennae sticking crookedly out
from a pea-sized knot of ruined bodies.
She was reading Fail Safe between loads
of laundry and we were reading Uncle Milton’s
cheerful instructions. Some questions have
no answers. That night we listened to the silence
occupy our room. We slept together in one bed,
heel to heel, head to head. We tunneled deep
beneath the covers and waited for the light.
Heart of Thorns
The two young women in the house across the way
are singing old-world songs, ballads dredged up
from our muddy history, tragic myths of peril,
betrayal. Harmonies slip across the paint-flaked sills
of the open window like vapor, drift up
into the unfolding cones of the surrounding pines
where the scarlet tanager, flame of spring,
his blood-red body and jet-black wings, answers
with his territorial chick-burr, chick-burr, as the girls
trill through a series of Appalachian blue notes
and sliding tones, one strumming the African banjo,
the other plucking a classical viola.
They seem unreal, though I can see the fact
of them through the glass, their tumblers
of iced tea, their heads thrown back,
the sudden laughter. I like to think
they’ve always been this happy, though I know
they must have felt alone, the last of one
they love burning out like an ember, a distant star—