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Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,
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May Day
Copyright © 2016 by Gretchen Marquette
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the Jerome Foundation, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-739-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-936-2
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2016
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953602
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Eamonn McLain, “34th and 15th,” from the series Around the Park. 2014. Oil pastel relief on spray-painted wood. Used with the permission of the artist. Digital image created by Nikki Ivanovsky-Schow.
FOR BRIDGET
FOR MY FRIENDS
Contents
I
Elsewhere
Doe
Prologue
Know Me
Prophecy
Colossus
Gregory
Andromeda
Painted Turtle
Macrocosm/Microcosm
I Know One Thing for Sure
II
Deer Suite
Trophy
Fisherman
Apart
Split
Lost
Montana
S = k • log W
III
Want
A Poem about Childhood
Dear Gretel,
Lament with Red Wall and Olive Tree
About Suffering
Childhood
An Orange
Why Loneliness
IV
What I’ve Learned about Cottonwoods
Boy
Styx
Translation
Red
Sketch for an Ode or Elegy
The Offering
A Cold Front
V
Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes
Figure Drawing
Despite
Deer through a Boutique Window
Song for the Festival
Mule Trail
Two Trains
May Day
Powderhorn, after the Storm
What We Will Love with the Time We Have Left
For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.
— W. B. YEATS
May Day
I
Elsewhere
I’ve kept it quiet,
where to find the brightest,
most exacting love.
Much of it burns off.
What remains, remains.
Fox-wild, desire
is a trap. I recognize
places I’ve slept
despite every branch broken
and the new snow.
What I said before, about love,
you have to let it be.
I’ve never told
how I walk around thinking
of the hollow of a throat or curve
of a shoulder or how I hold the reins
of horses who are men in hiding.
We sat under hot light,
in a round room plush with the breath
of strangers. I said, We have
seventy pages left to love one another.
Across his chest burst a sash
of gold chrysanthemum.
One thing I’ve learned—
you have to let love be practice
for what might happen
elsewhere.
Doe
A Wounded Deer—leaps highest—
EMILY DICKINSON
The smell of wet,
like earth, like the breath
of the beloved.
There’s movement
on the opposite side
of the wall, a deer, head
down, licking at a shallow
wound. I hope you know
how hard this is, to arrive,
to remember the way in.
I have dreams I return home,
find everything changed,
and I’m lost in hallways,
between walls. I hear birds,
though I don’t know what sort.
They serve no poetic function,
but they sing. Think of them
as wild birds, use any image
that comes to mind. I imagine
small scraps of tissue: red
and blue and green—not birds,
but moving like them, and singing.
The doe lifts her head. Sometimes
the deer has a split
ear. Sometimes the doe
is made of bone, the femur
warped, broken and healed.
How would it be, to lie
in wet grass, or snow,
leg broken—to need water, to get up
again? Don’t think on it too long.
I know I’d die of thirst.
During Thanksgiving dinner,
everyone laughed at his story,
how he’d shot a buck with six points,
found it was a doe, a doe with antlers.
Why are so many love stories tragedies?
Prologue
There was a child carried
into the house after a long
drive. Aware of the hush
hush noise of father’s feet
on the carpet, she felt
for the first time her weight
in someone else’s arms.
Know Me
I was once the tree you hammered shims into
so you could climb me like a ladder.
And I was the new strawberry, larvae white and hard,
and the bleeding-heart bush dropping valentines over your acreage.
I was the fox on whom you did not pull the trigger, the air trapped
beneath the frozen creek, and the broken milkweed’s white sap.
I did my growing far from you, arrived
late one summer, shirt like a tartan flag.
Come over. I said. Get to know me.
Now I am the bottle-blue boat, lost in the squall of you,
and the wave curling over your head.
Prophecy
You will bruise the meat of your palm
striking the wall, open handed,
trying to quiet squirrels gnawing
behind plaster,
but out of reach. You will have lived
for months, on milk and oranges,
the result being a sweet mouth.
This is the day you’ll come home
to your spare keys naked
and singular unto themselves—
teeth set on edge as you touch the first one,
cold on the table, find the other, hidden
under the door, locked from outside.
Your sleeping body will be protected
by a bolt of metal, your sleeping body
will be full of raw sugar
and milk fat. But first you will lie
awake, pressing the bruised palm.
You will have a quiet mouth, untasted.
You’ll have the sound of teeth
grinding red wire. You’ll have the sound
a woman makes. You’ll have no trouble imagining
the key thrust into the lock, shock—and then
the turning, slick. You’ll believe you want
a recording of it—the last sound
he made in your life.
Colossus
On the outskirts of town,
past the seven churches
and eleven bars. Past the yellow
bungalow of the woman
who sold pumpkins.
Past the yard with the white
ducks. Away from the horses,
heads down, talking to the grass.
Past the field where Tom and I
flew our kite. Over the blue bridge.
Past the ice-cream parlor and its rainbow
sherbet. Past the post office and defunct
theater’s permanent red-letter marquee.
Past the library’s picture books
and white squirrel under her bell jar.
Past Shepard’s hamburger stand. Away
from the smell of the paper mill
and color of the river. To the place
where lines were painted on the center lane.
Past the liquor store, and the ramshackle
house of the couple who’d lost their only child.
To where the ditches got deep. I’d beg them
to take me outside of town where the giant
buck lived. I could spot him from a distance—
he was a hundred feet tall, antlers regal
and chalk white. He watched us arrive
from the field near the gravel lot. Up close,
you couldn’t see him anymore
in his static, frozen jump. The paint
on his body was chipped, spattered
by birds. If you patted him, there was an empty
sound. I always wanted to be taken to him,
but the closer I drew, the more it was snuffed out—
what burned in my chest.
Gregory
(West Point)
Traveling those dark roads to see him, twisting
through carved forests, the eyes of animals
appeared jewel bright in the sweep
of my headlights. He didn’t want to pose
for pictures, hot in his dress gray-over-whites,
the coat with the bullet buttons, all of us
sweating as we pointed out statues
he’d strode by thousands of times. I kept mistaking
another girl’s brother for him, marching in formation,
soft haircuts under plumes of black feathers.
He was already less ours. Later,
in blue jeans, he skipped rocks on the Hudson,
the river swallowing the sun in a rush, boats
scattering across the long arm of the water,
tiny lights I would remember
when I fastened a bracelet to my wrist,
spectrum of stones, he gave me for Christmas
when he was twelve.
Andromeda
From 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away,
they took Andromeda’s photograph, tinted it like a daguerreotype,
put her in a purple dress. We’ve got Hubble, got the electron microscope.
You can choose between them but still see the same thing. Almost 500,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a teaspoon
of water.
then came blood. The hole in my jaw has clotted
with something from a star. Lost tooth, too weak to last
my lifetime, it will exist, broken and bad, long after my femurs
turn carbon. This transmutation—it’s how my beloved will become
an olive tree, an eggshell. There are places in the universe where time matters
less. Remember this when you want to gut yourself, in love with a married or dead man.
If you can figure how to try again, you could be the one fixing your hair for him,
be the one he’ll probably stop loving. You still have a chance to meet the other
one, some afternoon at the piano, a duet. The dark magnolia of your belly,
when you sense it and tremble, you can be a wave of salt water,
you can collapse for a little while. Time matters less,
in other places in the universe. Fetus, mummy,
think about all that new skin.
And think about your body
and its toughness, how briefly it’s allowed
to be. You’ve got to see it through. Glut yourself
with the sound of bells if you have to, use whatever you need.
It’s such a fleeting state really, like the sixty-second theatrical tour
of Andromeda, flushed in red and gold. A body, heavenly or not. Her name
means to think of a man. Andromeda, reserved for one she didn’t love, chained to a rock,
doomed to be devoured. She still had passion, seven sons, a little girl, heavenly
entombment—but believe me, you may never get what you want. So when
your ribs prove too small a cage for such feeling, bones bowing outward,
and higher up, you’re almost blind, you can stand still, you can be
a conductor. You can think of a cluster of stars, you can think
of one of your atoms as a galaxy with its own type
of horse, and music, maybe something akin to
the viola. There are mothers there, certainly,
and something like the vulture.
Think of a woman, wrists manacled,
think of any Nautilus shell, of any name you’ve given,
it may as well have been Andromeda. We may be laying this place to waste
and you may never get what you want. It can’t matter much.
Somewhere a star is ceasing to be a star.
We call it death.
Painted Turtle
Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.
Why aren’t I your wife?
You swerved around a turtle sunning itself.
I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass.
We were late for dinner.
One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around.
Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,
crushed Roman dome, the surprise of red blood.
I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm.
I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.
The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know.
Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle.
During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes.
It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.
Macrocosm/Microcosm
Horses are pulling grass
with their square teeth—
their hollow throats
sweeten their chest cavities.
I can go weeks without thin
king of whales
and they never think of me. One pair
of human eyes first saw
the planet Saturn. Where are the bones
of the dog I loved first?
Which are the trees
that will become invitations?
Somewhere, a dish sits in a sink
holding only three crumbs and
I will never eat from this dish
no matter how hungry
I become. How long has it been
since I’ve considered the leopard,
its fire growing smaller
in the jungle hearth?
Filaments are bursting
inside bulbs. Oranges are falling,
dully, from branches. Plants everywhere
are laying down their green planks.
Either the man who will kill
my brother does not exist,
or else he has been breathing for decades
under the Iraqi sun.
I Know One Thing for Sure
I was born first. Birds nested in the eaves of our house. I didn’t find new birds ugly. I liked seeing blood in their naked bellies, like the veins in my skin, like the blue line in the night crawler, wet in the ground. I wasn’t allowed to watch storms come through. I remained in the basement under the pulse of the siren, frustrated. I always wanted to touch the soft muzzles of horses, grazing in the fields. Sometimes I was allowed. Hold your hand flat, they said.
I was born first. My sister came later, blue eyed and girl soft. When I was small, a dog bit my face; I could’ve lost an eye but the tooth found my cheekbone instead. Bone against bone.
I was born first. My brother came along later. It was coming on Christmas. The lights were what mattered, lights of every color. My brother was small and red. My brother was like an animal, warm and murmuring. My brother was like an animal and I loved him that way. I’d been in the hospital for surgery the week before his birth. I woke at midnight to the blue light of the television, my pregnant mother asleep in a chair. Everything hurt. I have been close to death, but not enough to know it well; it’s been like flying over the desert in a plane. I remember one night, the gentle pressure of the boy’s fingers, finding the bones of my face and skull—mandible, maxilla—when he finished, I said again, the way a child does, and he traced the sockets of my closed eyes.