If only I knew what I needed and what would prove burden.
Jesus! Satan says. Just play. If only I could gnaw on
another archetype. Take your goddamn turn, Satan barks, and then,
impossibly, improbably, the draw pile flashes so fast
I’m not sure I saw it flutter, but it does, and I know already
my three of hearts waits there like the little atom of love
that drew it forth, and I am grinning, flush with my micro-orgasm
of victory—until I raise my gaze up to the empty chair.
Oh that miserable son of a bitch, tickled pink by his punkish thievery,
even as he races off to the next sucker—
and it may be the raven barking from the cypress grove,
or a motorcycle growling on the highway across this bay—
but I swear I can hear the Prince of Darkness snicker
as he watches his next victim arrange her draw
of genetic blessings or tax-deductible donations,
that she imagines, just this once, could trump the Devil’s hand.
All Night You Ask the Children of the World to Forgive You
For polar melt, acid rain, the last blue whale.
For big box stores laid on top of bobcats,
wild iris, vernal pools, trackless skies.
And of course, for greed and envy,
rape and horror, the neighbor’s Hummer
parked over another angel of experience
busy sewing feathers
onto the thousands dead, the child soldiers,
a young woman strapping her body to a bomb.
And if not all night, at least once a week,
you ask for worldlight, sunlight,
the abundant longshot,
tease of unending delight,
slant fate of riches for them, for theirs,
for all the children, but especially
for this girl, your youngest
calling you out at dusk.
On the cooling walk,
she crouches beside a black stray.
He purrs like a factory of pleasure.
Arches up to meet her palm.
She wants to know if it’s just in movies
that cats drink milk.
And then, out of nowhere, asks,
Mom, I forget, what was nine eleven?
Do you answer?
Or rub behind the creature’s ears,
down his thin back.
Look out at the street oaks
moving lazily in wind
and say, I don’t remember.
Then all night ask the children of the world
to forgive you for cowardice,
passivity, the simple lie.
III
magnitude
At the Zoo
Pausing before a panther pacing savagely,
black testicles swinging,
heart smoldering in its half-lit house,
I ask my father if he believes in God.
A flock of peacocks has gathered near his wheelchair.
They chase each other, shrieking.
Silently my father watches them run in circles,
then answers, No.
I’m fairly certain that this is all there is,
and smiles at me, not ungladly.
Even the eucalyptus are ponderous with song.
In the world just before his going,
I could watch him
watch those wingless birds a long time.
Their spectral iridescence,
their small revolutions of shine.
The Viewing
Angular, your cheek colder than the room,
you must have slept on ice all night,
a white blanket tucked underneath your arms.
And under that, your unknown nakedness
laid out like a shadow loose in wind.
Behind us someone has carefully arranged
two chairs, a table with an unlit candle.
I touch your calves,
the shocking softness of your feet.
Let my hand linger on your forehead,
then pull a few silver hairs
and lay them in a Kleenex,
before awkwardly dropping my head
onto your chest. Nothing
but an untouchable history
between us. Everything after
asleep on your lips.
The First Spring Since you Died
begins, of course, with rain tamping down the soil.
Rain arguing with what is dormant, what is not—
a raccoon pawing through trash,
the groaning rumble of a train.
And it’s there that I can feel you
trying to remember your body—
the word hello, or yes, rolled inside your mouth,
your heart throwing its pulse
like a red ball against your chest,
until I whisper, It’s okay Dad, go back to sleep.
And then it’s lighter, the rain stops and starts.
Daffodils inch nearer to explosion.
By morning, the homeless men
outside my office roll up their blankets.
Take up their corner posts.
I give money to the first that asks
so that I never have to choose.
Like the day you told me, Don’t come, I’ll be fine,
so I unpacked my clothes, put up my suitcase,
and then you died.
Now the fruiting plums
bud young and pink.
The sky festers with jays and crows.
Listening, you might think that spring
was just another assault on eternity,
what with all those snowbells
stringing pearly mines,
a blood-hot seething of the tulips.
Tomorrow wiring the fields
to a wet and searing gold.
Now and Then
He is never dead when I ask him
how many stations between grief and rapture.
And I don’t know what he can hear
over this sea cursing in a gale wind,
though certainly it’s not mercy
or even comfort that I expect.
It’s simply what goes on ahead
shadowing the steep cauldron of this bay.
I tell myself to breathe.
Pull my lifejacket tighter.
Our last night with him, it hurt my own chest to listen.
He gasped and spoke and gasped again.
Outside his window, a bird with a yellow blaze
waited and sang. His last night with us,
I kissed my father on the mouth.
The bird had already gone, though I never saw it go.
Today the water wrestles with a slow anger,
a blistered slate of spark and rain.
I wish my father had told me
how death remembers the living
as a story that being tells itself.
A story about loneliness
broken into now and then.
I Tell My Dead Father a Secret
If you remember California
in October, leaf litter and pollen
spun into a destroying radiance.
If you remember radiance,
how the year’s last spit of heat
makes a glass coffin of our windows.
There, on the counter, a frame from our hive
sweats honey into a baking pan.
If we had lifted the frames more slowly,
had not slid them in so quickly,
there would still be brood in the chambers,
a queen to spark the soft center of time.
If you remember time
and its honey like an exploding box of light.
If you remember light.
The days are so short now, we wake in the dark.
The workers are tireless.
Even at night, ear pre
ssed to the hive,
we can hear their thrum,
a million tiny wings warming the queen
their bodies tell them is still there.
If you remember a body.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep
I come down to the kitchen
and cut a bit of comb from the frame,
until I can taste darkness
broken into its undeniable sheen.
If you remember stars,
before you woke cold and crushed inside an urn,
dusk undressing the fragrant spell of oak.
That last afternoon in your wheelchair,
you confessed,
“When you were a child,
I was wrong to hurt you.”
Do you remember cruelty?
Our carelessness doomed the body of the bees.
Without a body, is there shame?
In spring, we will sweep the glowing engine
of another swarm into a box, and start again.
Do you remember beginning?
This afternoon, braiding my daughter’s hair
on a bench before the sea,
it seemed I was binding
last summer’s light and wind together.
If you remember wind.
How it cannot be held even as it touches.
How I pretended my fingers were yours,
and those sunlit strands in her hair,
mine, all mine.
Instruments of Loss and Wind
The last time the bay lay half in glitter and half in fog,
he was dying, and so I waited, alert to the world
that had made him, and, so I reasoned,
knew best how he should be dissembled.
So too, this morning, low clouds snag on cliffs,
a grey pelt blown open to sun,
while the sparse pines remain black on the distant shore.
Perhaps this strange halving and doubling of light
is how the sky quarrels with the sound caught inside my dream
of swimming as I once did, laid against his back,
his arms pulling us through the dark pastures of the bay.
Perhaps the argument is orchestral,
a score the wind plays on the shadow’s instrument—
one more variation on the many about love
and how close we must come, at the end,
without looking away. Because this morning,
there is another whiteness edging nearer, floating closer,
finally stepping on shore, a black gaze fixed on mine,
until eventually I give this gull my father’s name,
and it is like happiness or breath, god, for once
having nothing to say, before he rises and is gone.
Letter to My Newly Widowed Mother
All day a seal rose and disappeared into the bay,
as if looking back at an old familiar body
he’d left behind. A vulture unsettles the cypress.
Soon the winged ants will rise up from the floorboards
and chrysalis will float through ancient stands of oaks.
At this hour, I wish you could hear the deer
as they travel down the ridge, snap brush.
In the morning, the beach will be scattered
with shells and hoof prints
where they paused
and touched their lips to shore.
Sometimes when I think of you alone
in my father’s study, staring out the window,
I like to imagine your loneliness as a doe
nibbling on the willows, brushing up against a pine,
easy in her body, its wild solitude.
IV
risking delight
Poem Ending with an Unanswered Question
As if two girls could wear that green
like a dress of portent or memory—
whole fields of it laid down by rain—
they run through the pasture
shouting, arms spread out,
chasing the farmer’s Holsteins into thunder.
In the distance, someone’s father hammers at the gate.
Yells something at the girls,
and they stop, sit down.
Then stretch across the wet grass,
arms braided over their heads,
and roll down the slope,
hurtling one into another.
Soon enough lust and time will blister
the flat boards of their bodies.
Tell me,
why is there is no angel
mortal enough to keep even one childhood
everlasting?
Last night, they slept together on a narrow bed,
their faces so perfectly undressed of wariness—
it hurt
to look, to wonder
which is crueler, memory or forgetting?
Adultery
It was impossible to cleave him from me.
There were signs of another woman
in our daughter’s neatly braided hair
and how, in dreams, I kept hearing him
like a radio playing music from a car
driven into sea.
I wish I had known then the whole story of myself.
How an isolated fact is as close to a lie as any other.
Mostly I hate the hinge I called into being
that late afternoon on the porch, our daughter not yet three.
I remember looking out at hail, its gorgeous shatter,
the way the blue was bitten with icy petals.
Back then, her hair was so blonde,
if you combed it with your fingers,
the lifted strands fell like blown snow.
She was weeping.
Asking why her father would not come home.
I was trying to find the smallest, simplest words I could,
forgetting how innocence works:
the first time you name betrayal,
you tell me the end
has happened already
is traveling toward us the double star of Sirius
exploding into a black hole
our universe swallowed into itself
with such force everything becomes essential
atomic elemental
the earth erased into vapor
and if there is a part of the soul that fights death
that doesn’t believe in losing even a single afternoon
waves frayed and split the wind
banging against an osprey our girls at dusk
turning cartwheels across the reddened sand
then why
does grief feel so at home inside us
our wonder a kind of singing
that comes from far beyond the self
the way touch renders us speechless
your hands on my back our mouths salty and alive
while behind us water keeps on pouring into the bay’s
enormous room
that cannot hold us that never promised to
hold us here for long
Inheritance
What parents leave you
is their lives.
—FRANK BIDART, “Lament for the Makers”
All afternoon, our daughters in sundresses take turns
posing barefoot before the camera, blonde hair flying.
We sit beside the shore watching the stubborn gold
of their limbs twist and leap,
the live oak and blue gum
letting go into lush spans of heat. Now there is nothing
they have not taken from our hunger.
At dusk, the hours pack up their light,
while we shake out towels, rinse plates in the sea.
The stars wait for everyone to go home.
Say that love is a darkroom ripening their brightness.
Say that rapture travels like a bird
through the open windows of our plunder,
singing all the while to make the silence wild.
In the Real Paradise
There are seven strings of birdsong,
a brief percussive flash
as a Steller jay and nuthatch brawl inside a pine.
And of course, there is our youngest,
the child we almost didn’t have,
throwing driftwood off the dock.
There is a hatch of flies to swoon and plummet
in the seaweed, the musseled crust of shore.
There is everything we desire,
but still don’t have.
Like the farmer’s cows our daughter has wanted
more than half her life to touch.
Or, in the hour of her deepest sleep,
you and I, unclothed. After all these years,
still unsure. Still a little shy.
Menarche
The moon in August is the color of sand,
and shines on this child stroking the hen gone broody.
That first summer I bathed her in this sink
and sometimes, in the kitchen window,
her untried lips would part and close,
as if she were swallowing light.
It was a completeness that haunted me.
Blossoms on the peach and pluot trees.
In my hands, her entire weight.
A completeness, now torn by time.
I remember the weeks she spent
teaching the chickens to fly.
How she’d toss one up above the perch,
and then command, Down!
her hands netted underneath
to catch their bodies. Tonight
I watch her kneel in their coop.
An owl warns softly across the fields.
I know she is unwilling.
But the body is an animal too
that must sleep and wake,
while small winds thread down the delta.
Does she feel it yet—how the slightest breeze
unlocks the last few doors of dark,
opens the entire house of sky?
When the Door Between Worlds Finally opened
I found myself at the sink where she lay asleep
in a bath, light ripening the window.
And if the moment was about the unknown
perfecting itself in form—
a faint snow of down swirled across her skull,
ten fingers capped in ten tiny pearls—
it was a revelation and a betrayal, too,