tents on fire. The air-raid sirens. The bloodied
brides. The grand hotels. The outgoing tides. The slow
progress of certain diseases. The urgent warnings
The urgent warnings:
The dreamy terror of certain summer mornings.
Swan God, who
God, who—
Who shot our swans. Who
was a decent man. Who
loved his family. Who
could not bear to watch them suffer. Who
killed them lovingly one by one.
Swan boats.
Swan souls. Swans
in cages, in trunks, in boxes, in plastic bags. Swans still dragging. Swans
still circling. Swan
still
Swan stillness and swan slaughter still circling the center of the swan.
Riddle
Mars, the moon, the man hammering on the roof all afternoon. The Greenwich clock, the worker bees, the agitated bubbles in a stream. They have a plan, these:
Theirs is the world of the railing nailed down around the canyon for the sightseeing blind.
A woman sprawls out on a beach with a book, ready to read, but, opening it, she sighs. Oh my. She has settled down on her towel with the life story of a fruit fly—
Believable, chronological, but so quickly erased that it only serves to prove that the universe is made of curving, warping space. That, if you think about order, it becomes disorder. That to want to succeed is to fail: The way those satellites pointed at the stars pick up no sound at all, except, every few decades, the discordant music of a few chickens in a cave.
Oh, yes, oh, yes, I see.
There is a bridge from here to there. But we all know it is the kind of bridge that blows away. The kind of bridge made mostly of magazines, cheap beer, TV.
Not built to weather much at all.
Not war, nor despair, nor disease.
Not even health. Not even peace.
There is a chasm beneath it, and on one side my father is in his hospital gown watching that bridge blow around in the breeze—and, on the other side, waiting, is the mysterious unknowable thing that might have made him happy in this life:
What if it was me?
The drinking couple, similes
Like the dead photographer’s final image
of shadow and gravel, and then
that first drink, and suddenly
we were relaxing
like anchors
eyeless in the silence
of something like a sea
while we
were also clattering
crazily
over cobblestones, like carts
tied to runaway horses
in a fiery scene
from some old movie, and we
were also the directors
burning down the set
and also the horses
and the scenery
until the next drink
like a princess waking up
beside a chimpanzee—
or that chimpanzee
in a tuxedo, strapped
to a rocket, launched
in a living room, like
not the strong man’s arm, just
the sleeve, as if
not only the birds but the cages
had been set free, the way we
were enjoying one another
enjoying one another’s
company
like a couple separated by mirrors
straight down the center of a beach (if
you’re having another one honey will
you pour another one for me?)
like a crate of crutches
washed up on that beach
or a kite brushing
a satellite, a star, a whole
solar system, while also
snagged by its tail in a tree
still drinking
like a couple of cars without drivers
dodging each other in the street
or laughing, shouting automatons
or butterflies landing
now we’ll die
like party favors, as if we
were actual human beings
or completely normal people
until the last drink
when we
had no more need of similes.
Your last day
So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the very
air around us bound by chains. There was
stagnant water in which lightning
was reflected, like desperation
in a dying eye. Like science. Like
a dull rock plummeting through space, tossing
off flowers and veils, like a bride. And
also the subway.
Speed under ground.
And the way each body in the room appeared to be
a jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,
like frightened children’s laughter.
O elegant giant
These difficult matters of grace and scale:
The way music, our savior, is the marriage of math and antisocial behavior.
Like this woman with a bucket in the morning gathering gorgeous oxymora on the shore…
And my wildly troubled love for you, which labored gently in the garden all through June, then tore the flowers up with its fists in July.
Which set a place for you next to mine—the fork beside the spoon beside the knife (the linen napkin, and the centerpiece: a blue beheaded blossom floating in a bowl)—and even the red weight of my best efforts poured into your glass as a dark wine before I tossed the table onto its side.
Just another perfect night. Beyond destruction, and utterly unlikely, how someone might have managed, blindly, to stumble on such a love in the middle of her life.
O elegant giant.
While, outside, the woods are silent.
And, overhead, not a single intelligent star in the sky.
At the public pool
I could carry my father in my arms.
I was a small child.
He was a large, strong man.
Muscled, tan.
But he felt like a bearable memory in my arms.
The lion covers his tracks with his tail.
He goes to the terrible Euphrates and drinks.
He is snared there by a little shrub.
The hunter hears his cries, and hurries for his gun.
What of these public waters?
Come in, I said to my little son.
He stood at the edge, looking down.
It was a slowly rolling mirror.
A strange blue porcelain sheet.
A naked lake, transparent as a need.
The public life.
The Radio Songs.
Political Art.
The Hall of Stuff We Bought at the Mall. The plugged-up fountain at the center
of the Museum of Crap That Couldn’t Last
has flooded it all.
Come in, I said again. In here you can carry your mother in your arms.
I still see his beautiful belly forever.
The blond curls on his perfect head.
The whole Botticelli of it crawling on the surface
of the water. And
his sad, considerate expression.
No, he said.
My son makes a gesture my mother used to make
My son makes a gesture my mother used to make. The sun in their eyes. Fluttering their fingers. As if to disperse it. The sun, like so many feverish bees.
I keep driving. One eye on the road, and one on the child in the rearview mirror. A man on the radio praying. The awful kid down the block where I was a child who buried a toad in a jar in the sandbox, dug it up a month later, and it was still alive.
He does it again. The sun, like the drifting ashes of a distant past. The petals of some exploded yellow roses.
The miracle of it.
&
nbsp; The double helix of it.
The water running uphill of it.
Such pharmacy, in a world which failed her! She died before he was even
alive, and here she is again, shining in his eyes.
Light nodding to light.
Time waving hello to time.
The ninety-nine names of Allah.
The sun extravagantly bright and full of radiant, preposterous spiritual
advice—like a Bible rescued from a fire that killed a family of five:
I squint into it and see both a glorious parade of extinct and mythological beasts, and an illustration in a textbook of a protective sheath of protein wrapped around a strand of DNA—all cartoon spirals and billiard balls, and the sole hope of our biology teacher, Mr. Barcheski, who, finally enraged by the blank expressions on our faces, slammed it shut and walked away.
Recipe for disaster
Too sweet, the ingredients. Too high the heat. From this ladder leaning against a cloud, I see the future—that luminous egg of the mouse and her lover the Wild White Bird.
Deep time passes. Affection. Family. Herd animals and garden plants. And that woman balancing an exaggeration made of glass on her head. She’s muttering something she overheard a girl once say to a steering wheel:
If you were so in love, why did you leave?
But she doesn’t want to hear the answer to that question when the guy beside her opens his mouth to speak. Trust me.
Still, she grows older, and continues to believe. The gentle runners disappear behind the sun. War rolls down the side of the Mountain of Grief so peacefully.
And, swarming north today in the soft green of spring, those glittering killer bees. A mother now, she opens the door and sends her son scampering into the lovely hum with an empty jar and a kiss on the cheek.
Atoms on loan
for Bill
The eyelid of a stone in my hand
flutters, and then it opens. I say, Hello?
For a moment, I was a woman with her son standing under an arch made of ancient rocks in Scotland. (You took the photo.)
For an hour in 1981 I was a girl with drunken hair in a swaying tower.
For a month or two in my twenties I paddled a boat made of lead down a river of blood with my hands.
Once, I stood on a mountaintop gulping air from a cup made of that thin stuff. I drank so much I even drank the cup.
And, all that time, my bare feet in love with the ground. My green grapes scaling my green wall. My kite tangled in the highest wires, and something electrified into fire inside me.
And you, my shining Viking. You, my Viking’s shining shield. You arguing with some other wife in some previous existence. The ivy splitting straight through the bricks. The children screaming obscenities on the beach. My father dragging on this lit cigarette for a century. Our son when he slips into the shadows of his classroom:
Maybe we can still hear his laughter, but we can’t see him.
Who are we? Without one another,
who were we? Without one another,
who will we be?
Water washing away the flowers.
Flowers being taught how to speak.
You’ll always remember me, my mother said, but someday you’ll no longer be sad about me.
How could she have been so wrong?
How did she know?
Dread
How simple, the beheading. Dread
It is also an illusion—diseased internal organ
floating in internal fog—You
could stuff it back in after pulling it out
or you could look at it carefully in the sun
It is also a projection—
awful shadow puppet on an awful wall
Also, a god, all-powerful, with a voice, without a tongue
It is a season, too
The season in which you carry the dead thing
up the mountain in your arms
only to be given something squirming in a sack
to carry back
Or the season in which you are given
the incalculable sums
and a lined piece of paper
and nothing to write with. Add it up
Animal shudder. Something’s coming
Wormwood
for C. Dale Young
That a star in heaven
might have poisonous feathers.
That an angel might cast it for
us into the sea.
So it is at the end of the oncology ward:
The little dish of complexion soap
beside the dying woman’s bowl.
So it is at Chernobyl:
The Ferris wheel rusting
for decades in a forest.
The tiny shoes, the ruined reactor, the broken toys, the gas
masks hanging
from hooks on the back of the classroom door.
And the strong husband, the virtuous wife, the obedient
son and daughter, the brilliant
physician, the shadow
on the mammogram, the vault
full of wristwatches, lost, with one
still keeping perfect time
then stopping
at the moment—.
Also, the termite
gnawing at the foundation.
And the silent herds of reindeer
moving as
catastrophe through
the cool spring grasses of Scandinavia.
That it might have been foolish to fall in love with this world.
That God sent Word.
That the radiant dust of that
catastrophe
traveled for thousands
of miles on their fur.
That if God
were a man
who might have taken a lover, the lover
might have been you, iris, you
with a bright black beetle this morning
chewing religiously away at your beauty.
The sweet by-and-by
There is a place at the center of the earth where the dim rooms of our ancestors flicker. Their birds are there, and their crickets. The warm sand beneath their feet. A picnic. A whale washed up on the beach breathing in all the air around it, becoming solidity and dreamless sleep.
But they had dumb jokes, and personal identity. Half-baked ideas. I’ve seen their magazines. They, too, sought pharmaceutical peace. Longed for sexual release. It was not black and white, that world, despite the photographs. The amputation saws. There were individual moments. A panoply! The discovery of good luck. The invention of anxiety.
But even I who bring you the news cannot begin to believe it. The lost details of their lives are also lost to me:
A white sack filled with black feathers.
A hole at the bottom of that sack.
Those black feathers drifting into an abyss of similar feathers.
Never, never to come back.
Thanksgiving
I want it back
Dying from the hunger of it
Stones in the Horn of Plenty
Cold in a gutter
But that’s all just a little taste of death
The cornucopia pouring tender memories all over the family table
My perfumed mother in a new dress
My father confused with an electric knife
The seasonal feast, tasting like Time
Oh, my lucky platter, full once of nothing
Oh, my future tears in a dry cup once
All the little sufferings still to come
And the Great Loves
And the Great Loves
And we folded our hands in our laps, thanking Him
And we did it again
And we did it again
Mercy
The one unheated room in hell. The one
unhappy couple in heaven, screaming
obscenities at one another
on a street corne
r on the loveliest
day of summer:
Once, that was us. Happy anniversary. But
we got older, and the love took over. The
sunken luxury liner of so much.
So long I’ll never forgive you.
So long I want to kill you.
What a joke:
An overcoat thrown out of the window
of a moving car. Wounds
to meat. Like
the Gorgon: A terrific
noise invented her.
Followed by silence.
A blaze of radiation
in a bedroom. Our mouths
left open. The way
they knocked the coliseum down
on the other side of town
and built a toy museum.
Little Christian.
Little lion.
Little cage.
Little door left open.
Right this way.
My son practicing the violin
Some farmers with their creaking machinery moving slowly across a field. Some geese. The sun rising somewhere on some unripe peaches. I wander the labyrinth of that orchard. The foxes creep out of their dens to peek at me. Even my high heels are green.
Such love, and such music, it’s a wonder Jesus doesn’t make me spend every waking hour on my knees.
We’ve traveled here from a distant planet to teach you how to be a human being.
Even the paper cup in my hand has learned to breathe. And each note is a beautiful, ancient kingdom precariously balanced at the edge of a cliff above the sea.
Stolen shoes
for the woman who stole my shoes
from the locker room at the gym
There is blood within the shoe
The shoe’s too small for you
Such is the message in the cleft of the devil’s foot
In the shrine piled high with sandals and pumps
In the shameless laughter of the younger women at Starbucks, leaning back, swinging their legs, full of foam, their cups