SMALL DISASTERS SEEN IN SUNLIGHT
BARATARIA POETRY
Ava Leavell Haymon, Series Editor
SMALL
DISASTERS
SEEN IN
SUNLIGHT
POEMS
JULIA B. LEVINE
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baton Rouge
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2014 by Julia B. Levine
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
First printing
Designer: Barbara Neely Bourgoyne
Typefaces: Requiem, display; Adobe Garamond Pro, text
“A Brief for the Defense” from Refusing Heaven: Poems by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following periodicals, in which the poems listed, some under different titles and/or in slightly different versions, first appeared: poetry now, “Ode to Fruit Flies” (December 2009); The Southern Review: “Poem Ending with an Unanswered Question” (Autumn 2009), “Tahoe Wetlands” (as “Wetlands”) (Winter 2011); “After Visiting Your Mother, We Drive to the Rifle Range” (as “Rifle”), “I Tell My Dead Father a Secret,” “Netherland” (all Autumn 2012); Thomas Merton Seasonal: “St. Augustine, Florida” (Summer 2009). “Tahoe City, 1988” first ap- peared as “Denver, 1988” in The Healing Art of Writing, ed. Joan Baranow, Brian Dolan, and David Watts (Berkeley: UC Press, 2011).
The author would like to thank Ava Leavell Haymon, for her extraordinary editorial care, gener- osity, and vision; Jeff Gundy, Dorine Jennette, and Ruth Schwartz, for their friendship and essential feedback, guidance, and support; the Art of Healing workshop and staff, as well as the Other Word’s Literary Conference, for their gift of time and mentorship; Elizabeth Pollie, for her exceptional artistry and enduring friendship; her beloved family and friends, especially Mia, Hannah, Sophie, Dawn, V., Amy, Nancy, and Rachel; and of course her best friend, best husband, and basic miracle man, Steve.
This book is dedicated in memory of Gregory Humphries, artist, astronomer, aviation fanatic, ath- lete, adventurer, mathematical genius, master teacher, master carpenter, master friend, and all-around extraordinary member of humanity.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levine, Julia B.
[Poems. Selections]
Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight : Poems / Julia B. Levine.
pages cm — (Barataria Poetry Series)
“LSU Press Paperback Original.”
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8071-5453-3 (paper : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5454-0 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5455-7 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5456-4 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS3562.E89765S63 2014
811'.54—dc23
2013022861
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Pro- duction Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
In memory of Gregory Humphries, 1958–2012
. . . We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything . . .
— JACK GILBERT
“A Brief for the Defense,” from Refusing Heaven (2005)
CONTENTS
At the Hog Island Oyster Company
I ruthless furnace
St. Augustine, Florida
A Week of Storms
Heat Wave on the Children’s Unit
Instead of Orchids or an Elegy of Swans
Strolling in Late April
On the Dementia Floor
After Visiting Your Mother, We Drive to the Rifle Range
Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight
II locomotive of the Lord
Netherland
Post-Surgery Narratives in Triptych
In One of Ten Thousand Versions
In Another Version, I Have a Child with God
In a Later Version
In Another Version, I Play Gin Rummy with Satan
All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You
III magnitude
At the Zoo
The Viewing
The First Spring Since You Died
Now and Then
I Tell My Dead Father a Secret
Instruments of Loss and Wind
Letter to My Newly Widowed Mother
IV risking delight
Poem Ending with an Unanswered Question
Adultery
you tell me the end
Inheritance
In the Real Paradise
Menarche
When the Door Between Worlds Finally Opened
The Raccoon
We Sit in a Beached Rowboat
Leave-Taking
Eventually
V music despite everything
Tahoe Wetlands
Tahoe City, 1988
Ode to Fruit Flies
Songbird
Yes to the Youth at an Outdoor Concert
Garden Party as the Prow of a Small Ship Traveling
Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse
Interlude
Variations on Rupture and Repair: Cottage
In Praise of What Remains
Notes
SMALL DISASTERS SEEN IN SUNLIGHT
At the Hog Island oyster Company
In this summer of vast foreclosures
crumbling into condoms and empty cans,
clouds of blackbirds drop from sky
like punctuation marks estranged from meaning.
These days tragedies are only markings in a score
that crescendos behind the cannery,
where someone abandoned their Kenmore
to two nine-year-old girls hiding inside it.
Still, the world has ended before and will again.
In the bombed-out moment
before the wrong decision, think of clarity
as a torch for the exceedingly lost.
Think of paddling across Tomales Bay
toward the lawless vigor of a knife
set against oysters, no doubt aching like organs,
and your mouth, that throne of epistolary grammar,
taken to grinding through a global story.
In the long forgetting that we call a life,
think of bivalves as a portal to sensorial faith.
Listen, how else but through the body’s doors—
the sweet flesh juiced and spiced,
existence doubled and unhinged—
might aliveness still be tasted whole?
I
ruthless furnace
St. Augustine, Florida
A predatory lushness hums just out of sight—alligators, egrets, a jaguar maybe, lunching on orchids and sunlight—
while the engine of amusement turns,
and a boy, dark as the coke I’m drinking, and too young to be alone, grips a metal pony, sandals dangling above the stirrups.
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote that the soul is a house too sm
all for God to enter, though it can be enlarged, remade.
Can spill over, like the foster mother in my office last week, confiding, It’s too late to talk me out of it—
just tell me what I’m getting into.
And the baby herself, wild with whatever swells
once it is unstrapped from torment, frantically mouthing blocks,
plastic keys, a bottle held to her perfect lips.
Who knows how goodness persists. Or why,
when I said her given name, the baby grinned up at me,
her foster mother telling me they found her in a motel room,
thighs bruised black as eggplant, her tiny openings torn apart.
Even Augustine knew that the soulless suffer no pain.
It’s so much to carry, I said to that good woman.
The hand-shaped bruise where someone held that baby down.
The sheets and dirty tissues mounded over the satchel
of her slowing breath. Still, you must remember everything
and slowly give it back to her. Even here, even now,
beside this sun-drenched bay,
under canopies dreadlocked with Spanish moss,
do you see how that boy cranes backward to find me?
How desperately the slender narrative of a soul
needs someone, anyone, to stand at one spot
and watch what comes around.
A Week of Storms
This morning, rain softens the bones of trees
the way faith might make impermanence
bearable, if you believed.
Here, the creek goes underground.
Here, wood-ducks spread their wings and fly,
while a young woman in braids
walks the arboretum trails,
her arms crossed around a notebook,
Anything would help, she explains.
Opens her binder to an x-ray
and bows shyly when I lay a few bills
over the unmistakable cloud of a tumor drifting there.
My daughter’s blind now, the woman says,
but if we hold her between us
she still wants to ride her bicycle
up and down the drive.
And then a pause
while the Pacific gathers into the next storm.
At the café, sparrows warm themselves on tables.
A day so golden and raw, it spills through
the dogs we pass everywhere
leaping, straining at the throat of light.
Either we must start over
or die like this—gilded, naked,
hearts wetted long enough to split apart
the world’s difficult skin.
A homeless couple lays their sleeping bags out to dry.
The tallest trees are still raining
onto the green calderas of the lawns.
At the stoplight, the signal chirps
and five people start across the raindark street,
their white canes like a chorus of fingers
touching against concrete, curbstones,
the ceaseless fissures we walk between.
Heat Wave on the Children’s Unit
Draw the best person you can, the instructions go,
and this afternoon in my office, the boy squints up at me
to see what a real person looks like.
The air conditioner rattles my windows.
Outside every breeze has been beaten into stillness,
sun merciless as a scalding brand laid against flesh,
or the searing tear of a stranger forcing himself inside this boy.
Now his buzzcut brushes my hand, a surprising softness
to the bristles,
as he sketches what isn’t here: a nasty gash on my forehead,
a broken bone cracked through my arm.
Because some children are a warning for anyone who might listen,
the way a bird will sing at the edge of a storm,
or a horse might batter a barn just before an earthquake.
Because he wants to know if I can help with a bad dream,
the one he has every night now,
his house on fire, his body trapped on the third floor, enflamed
and falling.
Because this heat is the fire of the actual,
and always another life burns behind this one.
Instead of orchids or an Elegy of Swans
gliding across a spring-fed pond, there was Danny Romeo
(Danny by day, the women like to call me Romeo at night),
in a pressed white shirt and tie, offering to wash my windshield
at the Arco, and then his offhand suggestion to fix two divets
I couldn’t see, but felt, his hand leading my thumb
over the dimpled chips, my insurance company already dialed up
on a cellphone, and his guy in a t-shirt and jeans, strolling over
from nowhere to plug the holes Danny said would explode
the first cold morning, shattering your entire glass.
Clearly a scam, I should have turned away.
But when his guy injected epoxy and dried it with a blue flame,
I was disarmed by how Danny had delivered what was promised.
We shook hands. Smiled. Then, all the way across the delta,
the late summer sun blindingly gold and generous,
cattle egrets unfolding over the slate grey bay,
it seemed August was not the month
to go round the heart’s four rooms
without opening the blinds, letting the wind in—
Danny Romeo, no doubt closing a few more deals
before ending with a girl in his bed,
his hands touching her carefully as if she was the world itself,
one made as much of sweetness as of damage,
or at least perched at the very beginning of disaster,
with time enough for just the right repair.
Strolling in Late April
With its complete lack of morals,
spring has tongued bud and stamen,
uncoiled tulips, seduced entire fields
into swollen cups of color.
Each time I tell your mother that you are her son,
she opens her mouth, fumbles at her buttoned collar,
How could she have made a man?
Her clipped hair is moist around her forehead.
I cuff her sleeves, kneel to roll up her pants.
Around us, light floats like a bridal cotton,
a delicate curtain drifting between worlds.
Everywhere there are maples and oaks
just leafing out, families on blankets
with ice and cakes and chips,
babies wobbling on their overpadded bottoms.
Sometimes your mother forgets to walk
and stops dead in the middle of the path.
Dogwood blossoms hover on their invisible limbs.
The Kwanzan cherry blushes, tumbles down.
Perhaps dying is just another way to live
briefly, in a world gone strange
and wondrously new.
Up ahead, a monarch dips in and out of shade.
Butterfly? she repeats after me,
eyes wide in awe.
Is that really a word?
On the Dementia Floor
Wheelchairs huddle around the television
or sit angled to afford a better view
of the finches and their handfuls of flight
inside a glass cupboard,
though the residents only sleep, fully clothed.
The translucent whites of their necks. Their hands
slipped from laps. Falling
like snow through the windows—
not just its ribbon and flake haunting the cedars,
undressing the indifferent poplars—
but how each peta
l seems a tiny raft
lashed to the ceaseless edge.
Oh piano, gladioli, raspberries in the basement freezer.
Oh door in water and floating past—
After visiting your Mother, We Drive to the Rifle Range
Oiled and easily cocked, this gun is loved.
The shells gold as a bright forgetting,
the forest silent with snow.
Who is out there? your mother had asked,
pointing to an orderly.
I hold the rifle up to my shoulder.
Squint through the sightline.
Same shoulder where your mother
laid her head and sobbed. Sad sad,
she said, then listed forward and slept.
Dismantle me, the body says. Or the mind.
The trees undressed of leaves
like a kind of stone against stone.
The being of us, hitched one to another,
before the discharge, the dark bits
sparked and afflicted. In the white fields,
someone had lined up clay pots
against the fresh nothing of beauty.
We would take turns. Going
first one, then another.
Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight
The swarm came from deep inside the blossoms,
bees like children laughing and laughing,
and the sound of apprehension
opening a white canopy under the tree,
all flowering deeded to a slow drift down.
It was not just the last ripe oranges I held,
wanting to bring something of this shimmer
to his hospital bed, but also the stopped film
from the camera mounted on his helmet.
There he went on jumping from a plane
into vastness, his mouth bruised
with the joyous rush of deceleration, articulations
of wind and cable tearing silence. Listen,
no matter what you believe about the soul
and its flesh, attachment has its own gravity,
the ground forever rising up too hard and fast.
In that last frame before the image blackens,
I see the shadow of his two unshattered legs,
his paired, not-yet-exploded feet,