January and no place to go, bitterest month in memory—when I laid about the house and watched the dark move from one room to the next, like sealing the lid on a jar, me inside—larval, needy.
We were new in town and I hadn’t realized yet how bad things were going to get for us. That month I walked alone, at Como Zoo. The lions seemed submerged in artificial light, like fish in a tank. The kudu, backdropped by cinderblocks, chewed their cud and cupped their ears toward every sound. Prey animals, an eye on each side of the head. None of us was convinced summer would come back and save us. None except the bison, their noses steaming under festival costumes of snow.
At last you came home—dirt mashed into the fibers of your clothing, the blues of your coat and sweatshirt seemed almost blanched by cold. Your face was chapped, your hands skinned and too sore to open a jar for me. Your name was misspelled on the paycheck, your per diems missing. You smelled like diesel. I felt like I was touching a stranger. Plows rumbled past. The neighbor came dashing up the stairs—our car had just been towed. A few blocks away, a lion chuffed in his sleep. On the muted television, the weatherman was gesticulating grandly toward the west.
V
Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes
When I see a man
in a dress shirt, I want
to walk up behind him,
place my hand
between his shoulders,
to rest it there
for a moment. I think
about his socks, how
he chose one pair
that morning and the rest
are still at home
in a drawer.
And his shoes—
God, those shoes, they break me,
especially when they’re polished, what
does he do to make them shine
like that, yes, all it takes
is a pair of shiny black shoes and such
a wave of tenderness
collapses over me
that I see his ties, at rest
on their little carousel, imagine
that he held them up
in the mirror
at the department store,
unsure.
Figure Drawing
On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk
dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves
and not a single sparrow. I knew then,
somehow, that I would never take my own life.
And I knew it when I sat still
before your easel and watched you
holding your sighting stick to measure
my trunk. Occasionally, you pressed fingers
against my legs and hips, bluntly
but with care. You are learning
about the body and its trappings.
You’ve referred to my clavicle as a bony
landmark. There are so many ways to speak
about the body. There is a mundane history
of people telling their god, If you’d asked me
if I wanted to come here, I would have said no.
When I was your age, I entered the woods
with my hurt and sat against a tree and was
surrounded by deer that paid me no mind.
Their feet made no noise. They had no scent,
no color. You’ve painted my hair across my back
as fire. You’ve painted my face in mourning
and didn’t know. Sometimes I’m filled with fear
at the thought of seeing this through,
like I was that day in the woods, when all I wanted
was to lie like a dropped antler on the forest floor.
Still, today I’m thrilled to be shown
the muscles of my own back, drawn in charcoal.
The bones of my pelvis seem larger than my hips,
warmed over with skin. We’ve a history of telling our gods,
If you asked me if I wanted to leave here,
I would say no. Done with your work, we walk
to the diner for pancakes. You have a smudge
of yolk-colored pigment under your nose,
another ashy smudge near your right ear.
I know how easily I could have missed it.
Whatever else happens, I don’t want to miss it.
The machine of my body is humming. There is a record
of my body, resting on your easel. It is static, almost.
I saw the Cooper’s hawk leave the ground with nothing,
was yellow. It was the most beautiful thing.
Despite
Despite fear, which is alive and breathes in me and turns
three times attempting to lie down. Despite my body
that burns along its vagus nerve and is ninety percent gut.
Despite this body that is crushed like a corsage
against the chest of the one I love. Despite my mind,
which wants to tell the whole truth—forgets
it’s honest to say: the body I’m trapped inside has a thorax
and a compound eye. Despite the way I can love
anyone at all; the stranger in the courtyard—her one bare foot
dangling over the edge of a low stone wall—despite my desire
to hold the elegant arch of her. Despite pulled hair,
disturbed sleep, bent flatware—despite memory’s
clean scent. Despite all blood, the realities of brain
as tissue like any other soft matter, and despite
the possibility that all we are is flesh. Despite the only sealed door
I batter myself against, and my naked body, my empty
body. Despite all the ways a body can be empty.
Despite the eagle’s four-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch
grip and the whip width of her tether. Despite the way she screamed,
watching a bird outside fly the river’s length. Despite the dog,
moldering, how I grieve her white eyelashes, her quick gusts
of breath when she dreamed or ran. Despite what we’ve been taking
for granted: first among them, the blood still inside our bodies.
Despite the dead god of my youth who promised his protection,
who smelled like dust and tasted like starch and sounded like a sudden
bell. Despite his evaporation. Despite the fact that I don’t know
how I got here but still belong in this place. Despite the fragility
of our eyes, the liquid that holds light, our thin skulls, our fingernails growing
at the same rate at which the moon leaves the earth behind,
and the possibility that all we are is flesh. Despite the lasso of color—
the aura and the sting. Despite the dishes that need to be done,
the sheets we dirtied that I continue to sleep in. Despite the fruitless search
for a single piece of important paper, the simple economics
of my even simpler wealth. Despite inadequate technologies.
The matchless touch. Exhaustion. Despite the miles between us
and how the universe has labeled us a Roman candle.
Despite how we eject stars, how we’re not even a slow burn,
nothing like a standing stone.
Deer through a Boutique Window
Some things can’t be mended.
Some of us are broken, and some
remain whole. Something has died
in every place on earth. But I can’t stop
thinking about hooves on waxed, black diamonds
of linoleum—also thousands of deer,
unharmed in the woods, bedding down,
and fawns unborn to this doe, wrecked
among silk stockings, satin slips, pearl
earrings. How do we get lost in such a small world?
Why are some of us lucky? And some of us
not? There she lies, scent of her own blood
in her nose, the eleg
ant pheromones
in their frosted glass bottles, oblivious,
unbroken on the shelf.
Song for the Festival
At the May Day parade, my mask made of moss
and bark, my hair full of flowers, my friend beside me,
her pretty red mouth under the hawk’s beak
of her mask of green sage.
At the children’s pageant, music
died in the speakers. The shadow
of a crow passed over. My hair a crown
of flowers, yellow and red roses large as fists,
flowers on which I’d spent my last $20
at the mercado.
But beauty wasn’t enough. Being admired
by strangers was not enough.
I saw a girl, wandering, looking for her mother.
my face. She’s looking for you too, I say.
She tries to spot her mother’s yellow dress.
A gold dog passes, happy and white-faced,
wearing pink nylon fairy wings. The girl points
and laughs; the hard part of her day
is over.
The people I’m looking for—I don’t know where they are.
I don’t know the color of their clothing. From across the park,
I see the dark windows of my apartment.
Spring has arrived.
Let me not despair.
Mule Trail
Stirring the fire’s coals with a stick—a familiar sound
I couldn’t place until I shut my eyes—
the sound of walking through snow.
Each morning now, I wake thinking of him
because all night I hold on—like at the motel
when I slept curled around him, back against the headboard,
my hands in his gold hair. I’m trying to find a place to rest,
but loving him is like flying, like being starlings,
knowing when to move and how. It’s nothing
like migration; no safe landings in brackish,
green estuaries. Still, there’s the way the match hisses
when I touch its head to the glass of water.
There’s the way he loves me. There’s the way
the sun can heat the juice inside a berry
to the temperature of blood, and how good he is
at loving me. Something is building inside.
Pearls make me think of fevers. Blood oranges,
finches, the stick of a fish’s silver skin to its flesh—
what do you do, when you realize you want
the whole of everything inside of you?
I don’t want to tell what I’ve learned—
there’s no way to repel love or to draw it close.
I don’t want to say I’m bewildered, but
what makes a man love a woman?
I know the way he loves is not for spectacle. I know
this will not last. Before the end we’ll drive to the desert
to see it bloom, to see vacant motels and red-gold buttes,
see the desert’s blue stars and the collapsing
castles of its abandoned mini-golf courses,
the dark signs of its empty diners.
For now we have Mule Trail, where everything
looks like something else. The firewood in the pit,
lit from inside like a church’s stained-glass window,
the plum’s gold flesh laced with scarlet veins,
replica of a human brain. Maybe this is all we are—
carbon, water, color. We spent the storm in the tent,
woke up later and rebuilt the fire, heard coyotes’
eerie chatter, then the wolves’—lower and wiser,
with authority. Why am I so ungainly with love
after all the loving I’ve done? I didn’t realize
until I was hours away—the insect bites, the pin-sized
blisters of stinging nettle, the raw interior skin.
What does it mean to be in love? As it turns out,
the second best thing that can happen to you
is a broken heart.
Two Trains
Two trains leave different cities heading toward each other at different speeds. When the man in train #1 slides across the seat to kiss the woman who has been looking out the window, what texture is the upholstery of the seat on that train if the upholstery in train #2 is a faded, tobacco-colored naugahyde? If the conductor of train #2 had not had to milk the cows every morning and afternoon of his childhood, would he have had more time to stay after school, peering in microscopes? In this case, who would then be commanding train #2? If the conductor of train #1 was able to express how much he loved to drive the train into the night, that he imagined it, not along any track, just shoving into the dark, never arriving to bathe in the bright lights of Seattle, would they demote him to porter? If the porter in train #1 was not pretending to be well when in fact he was sick, who would care for him? Which city? Which woman: the one with the salmon-colored geraniums, or the one whose stockings drip all night against the radiator? When the man in train #2 drops his briefcase, and it pops open, sending seven small bottles to bounce soundlessly across the carpeted aisle, will the small girl who witnessed it remember the color of the bottles later? Will she think of them when she sees, for the first time, the sulfuric green water, on her honeymoon, in Yellowstone National Park? Who is her spouse? Which train have they boarded? When and where do they meet?
May Day
I’ve lived in my neighborhood long enough to recognize
that morning glories bloom early here—they don’t signify the end
of summer. I’m beginning to understand that parts of me
are wasted entirely.
Somewhere it’s the last snow of April and the dead dog knows.
Somewhere my lost uncle is eating sweet and sour at Ming’s, steam
touching his face so gently.
If something happens in this world, it goes on
for billions of years, but if something doesn’t happen, it never does.
For a billion years I rock the babies of other women.
Tell me I’ve nothing to fear.
Powderhorn, after the Storm
It’s vertigo, walking among downed trees’
belled skirts of dirt and tender clover.
Birds sit on branches laid prone
over fragrant hearts of trunks.
Hearts slick and white. So many trees
uprooted, yet some bushes kept
pink blossoms, which today are open,
tender throats. My dogs and I traverse
the wounds, full of heady bliss,
as when a fever breaks
or morphine is administered—
there’s a suppleness to everything.
A dampness. One of the dogs bounds
through debris, the other picks
her way. Both are old. Neither
seems to realize it, though one
is suddenly afraid of thunder,
has spent the last two nights
whining at my bedside
and pissing on the floor.
I lost my temper
when I took her out at 3 a.m.,
fingers of sirens reaching
from all directions, hazard
lights of crushed cars blinking
an anxious orange in the dark.
I jerked her leash, nudged
her through the door
with my knee. These cruelties
aren’t held against me.
I regret them deeply.
Now there’s light from another,
better world. The sun is out.
We stop at the water fountain
and I cup my hands to give them a drink.
The tentative dog, the one who was afraid
and who I betrayed, drinks from my hands.
Her gentle mouth and soft tongue.
I fill my hands for her
again and again.
What We Will Love with the Time We Have Left
All life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it never happened. That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is traveling, that is the “benevolent” end of the furious living and furious dying … All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again. The final result … is to deprive it completely of meaning
LESLIE PAUL
First, the purple flowers growing along the sidewalk,
so saturated with color they make us blind to look at them.
Then, the sound of a screen door slamming, the smell of pine pollen
and beeswax. The silvery eyes of the concrete deer, guarding
a bird bath. The uncomfortable feel of wet jeans, stiff with sand.
The taste of well water from an aluminum cup. The sound of water
being poured into a glass. Hot tea with one ice cube in it.
The silk of frog skin and the stinging nettle. Smell of wet rock. Scent
of aftershave on steam. Squeak of finger against the mirror.
The day-old cookies in their white paper bag, brought home
to surprise the dogs. The lambswool way an old dog’s legs feel,
her body failing her. The way the child sings a song
she was taught about loneliness, before being taught
about loneliness. Throats, armpits, arches of feet. Perfunctory
head nods of strangers walking the opposite direction. The smoke
pulled in soft, through the open window along with the wind
through wet hair. The twin images of neurons and cluster galaxies. The cold
calm of a museum exhibit—maces and daggers, backlit and serene.
The way Bernini made marble supple, the way Caravaggio’s brutal
hands painted light. All the furious living, the turtle dragging herself, algaed
from the lake to the sand at the top of the playground to lay her eggs. All the furious
dying. The unidentifiable viscera that the wasps are drinking from
on the sidewalk. The way the wasps relish it. The heron lifting off
with the skyline behind her. Berries, crushed in mouths. The alabaster egg.
The toy horse. The little brother at age three, in his gray pajamas, waving.