For then I scorn to change my state with kings.
—SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 29
It is not the icing laid
in lines over the wild cherries.
Nor the cube of crystals
next to the bitter coffee.
Nor the cap of whipped cream
sheltering the hot chocolate.
It is your smile, sly at the eye,
corner perked in self-love,
that whirls me in sweetness,
that lays me in an orchard
in full bloom.
TO MY DAUGHTER AT FOURTEEN IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST FULL MOON
Men will never understand you.
You are too deep for them,
too rich.
They will stand in front of you
for hours
with nothing to say.
Then they will say it,
and it will be nothing.
Understand that males, for all their power
and all their mind and all their wit,
are awash in awe.
It laps at their ankles
like waves breaking on a beach.
Yes, you can count on them to protect you
when bats wake you in the night
and you scream and scream and scream.
But it is best to count on yourself,
even in the matter of bats.
Hitting them with a broom
and carrying them out to the garden
with their broken wings and stunned,
high-pitched bleating,
is a nasty business.
But somebody has to do it.
Don’t let him be the only one to learn
that the bat that fills the echoing halls
of your nightmares
barely fills the palm of your hand.
Like a hummingbird, it is practically weightless.
Now that you are a woman, you can learn the truth:
nobody likes to kill bats.
And men, huge and blue-eyed sailors in your dreams,
are practically weightless in the palm of your hand.
DRIVING LESSON: TO MY SON AT SIXTEEN
Driving a car is the least of your worries.
It can kill you in an instant.
A woman can wreck you
in the rearview mirror.
Women are like pianos.
In the beginning you hit the wrong keys
and nobody likes it.
Sometimes the key cover
slams down on your knuckles.
Sometimes not.
To be good,
you have to learn how to play:
allegro, andante, vivace, moderato,
misterioso, grosso, profondo.
Yet some days
they remain out of tune
regardless of your persistence,
your practice.
Your timing is bad.
Forget harmony.
Go play the violin.
Go drive the car.
CHORES
Chores every day, no debate.
Table set, dishes washed, garbage out.
No car keys without gas money.
No gas money without grass cut.
And then at sixteen she
drives off one Saturday night
and doesn’t come home.
And the policewoman’s bored reassurance
at 4 a.m. does not reassure at all.
And when she drives up the street
a few minutes past noon the next day
it takes a decade of hard work
to figure out who we all are now.
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.
Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.
An overdose?
An overdose of what?
Of diamond rings?
Of glass?
A looking glass.
A cart rolled over.
No more pretty baby.
Didn’t the mockingbird sing
for you, my daughter?
I stand before the looking glass,
no more pretty baby in my arms
reaching for my worn finger.
Now you grip the steering wheel
to change freeway lanes.
We thought that would add chance
and terror enough.
But you felt stuck, you said,
stuck with the Plains warriors:
Is it real?
Is it real,
this life I am living?
And no way to test it,
to prove it.
Didn’t the mockingbird sing for you,
my darling daughter?
There were acres of diamonds
at home.
They were all
for you.
PRAYER
I left my daughter alone
like a sheep
left alone
with a pacing moon.
I walked the mile to my hotel
from her college room
with barbed wire stretched
through my back.
I lay in my bed,
an old shepherd
exhausted with tending,
stomach sick with the taste
of bad water.
Even through thick walls
I could hear the howling
deep inside her head,
see her shy reflection
in the water.
She huddled alone in moon shadow
against the stares of her own eyes,
pitiless and knife-toothed.
I did what I could—
cobbled a rough shelter
out of windfall,
lit a hazy lamp,
gave blood,
tucked covers.
I was limping myself,
silent as an empty bell.
In the moonlight through the window
I see my gray beard rise and fall,
rise and fall
with ancient syllables
laying me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If she should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
amen
amen
amen
FOR A RESCUED DAUGHTER, AN ARTIST, COMING UP FOR AIR THROUGH WATER
Everyone knows where the waterline is.
Below feels like home,
but humans die there. Drowned,
it is called. And dead it is.
But soft, floating death, like living fish,
or flowing muslin folds, or sleep long longed-for.
Water mitigates gravity,
eliminates needs like bathrooms
and beds and cooking and cleaning
and loving and hating.
Above the waterline lies rough air,
one rasping breath after another, wind,
steep hills, and thin, gasping mountains.
Yet you breathe on,
for your husband, sons, and
one taut canvas after another.
Like a phase change:
Watery blood and skin and hair
transmuted to watery blue-green paint,
watery paint becoming shadows
and the shadows of shadows.
Amid the daily clamor of puffing
swimmers and climbers,
a divine talent, ascending.
BACKSCRATCH BOY
Your righteousness
is mighty as a king’s.
Your anger lasts the time
an egg cooks.
Your smile charms cobras
and cataracts.
Your indolence is a jungle
in which butterflies live whole lives.
But we can scratch each other’s
backs for hours,
&
nbsp; like monkeys quiet in the trees
or baboons squatting
in the grass.
Your hands salve
old wounds in my back,
while I find in yours a billion
nerve endings that all shriek joy.
A WILD WOOD
This rangy son across restaurant
eggs and toast is twenty-one.
He breaks me up as jokes
slip from his tongue like crumbs.
And when he hugs, his arms float
wide as wings, an unobstructed
heart wide open chest to chest.
But I hear the rumble in his gut.
His eyes sweep the floor like brooms
with dreams and fears.
Outside this sidewalked town
and college by a lake
lies a wild wood. Inside live
hairy hogs that bite and
won’t let go.
It is time for him
to feel those teeth
that drag you to the ground,
against which you must
battle for your life.
TROUBADOUR SONG
It happened the way the troubadours
said it would—through the eyes.
His arm emerged from the window
of a small plane. She remembers
the sun-illuminated hairs, the woven veins.
Later, he saw her across a room.
He could not look again, nor speak.
Now she marks her textbooks
with his photograph,
reading in the company of his eyes.
Touch too has come, and strategy.
He conspires to escape to visit her,
a thousand miles for a single day.
She asserts her need to study.
But the eyes have opened
the windows of two souls,
across a runway,
a table, a room, half a continent.
Children will have those eyes.
MORNING OF THE WEDDING
On our early morning walk, the dog,
unwell, eats grass.
A tug labors a barge toward a splash
of sunlight on the lake.
Four cormorants fly by my shoulder.
Gulls carry on their obnoxious calling.
August 22, 1992. August?
No more than any other month.
Yet in the peace of early morning light
among the ripe raspberries of this
particular late summer season,
with the clap of horses rising the hill,
the world is changed forever
by these two courageous children.
Kneeling and touching an old gold ring
and making it burst into flame before us
with a few quiet syllables
from their bursting hearts,
mathematics and grammar implode.
Two become one,
I do becomes we are,
and infinity, that shimmering abstraction,
twists into a particular
double helix.
The splash
of sunlight on the lake
winks at me three times,
and smiles.
MIDNIGHT CALL
A friend took his from a silent skid on ice,
his daughter’s brain waves a straight line.
Another heard his message on the news.
Tonight a distant moan rings our sleep.
Our son, neck broken, climbed for help,
his wife wrapped in the car’s crushed cab.
At his birth we learned to listen
with our spines for broken
sounds like these.
On his wedding day we felt
her bones knit with our own.
Tonight, car lights race across the ceiling,
each one a phone, each phone ringing.
Without complaint, we answer.
We answer. We answer.
CHRISTMAS PRAYER, SANTA FE, DECEMBER 25, 1993
The ER nurse glances up.
Is my son sleeping?
Yes. And his wife?
Yes, she is sleeping.
You should too.
Outside, dawn stretches its golden arm
through a saddle in black mountains,
Sangre de Cristo, blood of Christ,
rounded, strangely female.
I walk and walk in the cold.
A grove of juniper and piñon
opens before me, a roadside chapel.
I pray.
I praise the east for the sun,
rising again in our lives.
for their strength to hold the tumbling car
in their arms. I thank the trees.
I praise the west for the Jemez Mountains,
born of fiery calamity, and the village
riding her sturdy shoulders
a thousand years.
I praise the north, St. Vincent’s hospital,
its sharp, clean edges outlined in light
against soft mountains.
I praise the south, for the road that brought me
here, praise the builders of roads,
and the snowplow drivers who worked
all night that I might safely arrive.
I praise my grandfather below, who practiced
surgery on vagrant children in Vienna that my son’s
wife may walk again today.
Praise his strong jaw, his pipe, the sharp
scalpel in his warm hands.
I praise the bowl of sky
filled with clouds of living breath
from my lungs and theirs,
the same moist smoke since life began.
Are they sleeping?
Yes.
Will they recover?
That is up to gods
like these.
ON A YOUNGEST DAUGHTER’S ACCEPTANCE AT THE COLLEGE OF HER CHOICE
A red door opens toward a cornfield.
Rows of stalks bear heavy golden heads.
Cribs and bins wait empty to be filled.
God made the weather and blue-green water.
Parents work night and day
to bring home every golden child.
So much poetry is about storms,
bruised fruit, locusts eating everything.
This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.
ON COURSE
At dawn, our youngest daughter
rises for her summer job.
Now I’m the intruder as she races
through morning rites, bed made,
dishes to the sink, newspaper splayed.
In a month she’ll live away at school
and for the first time in three decades
the pressure inside this house will equalize
with the shade under outside elms.
After the door slams, sudden stillness.
Ice tumbles to the freezer tray like calving glaciers.
A cardinal whistles through two panes of glass.
I listen, steady, like a captain at the helm,
white beard signaling the wisdom of the course,
storms abating, grandchildren reaching
for my knees, my logbooks.
ONCE IN THE SIXTIES
after William Stafford
When she walked toward me
radiant with pregnancy,
we laughed as if shaken
by some unseen wind
propelling our van
those long camping miles.
Children grew like wildflowers,
so obvious, green and yellow,
quick out of the ground.
We remember their firelit
faces from old photographs,
their unexpected humors congealing
around the campfire.
We barely had time to wonder at their beauty,
grades, spou
ses, children
and we are camping again,
under dark pines,
near lapping water.
PART THREE
And Still She Blooms
IN HER GARDEN, SHE
I am thinking she
does not know how to be happy.
Looking up over my book, I
expect familiar clouded brows,
earth heavy on her shoulders,
family boulders in her pockets.
Then she rises from her garden.
I see sunflowers bow toward her hair,
pea blossoms steal up her thigh,
sky blue forget-me-nots simulate her eyes.
As she stoops again to dig,
clumps of roses,
brilliant all season,
reach low to brush her glove.
My eyes visit her like hungry butterflies.
We feed, grateful, as if such
beauty could just happen here,
so quiet, in front of our house.
TWO KNIVES
She spends whole days cutting
vegetables, I cutting meat.