ALSO BY MARY JO SALTER
Poems
Nothing by Design (2013)
A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008)
Open Shutters (2003)
A Kiss in Space (1999)
Sunday Skaters (1994)
Unfinished Painting (1989)
Henry Purcell in Japan (1985)
For Children
The Moon Comes Home (1989)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Salter
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Salter, Mary Jo., author.
Title: The surveyors : poems / by Mary Jo Salter.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016042321 (print) | LCCN 2016048870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732660 (hardcover)| ISBN 9781524732677 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3569.A46224 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3569.A46224 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042321
Ebook ISBN 9781524732677
Cover photography by Oote Boe
Cover design by Chip Kidd
v4.1
ep
for Keith
Contents
Cover
Also by Mary Jo Salter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
Yield
Bratislava
The Profane Piano Tuner
Pastry Level
Aloe
Mr. Boyfriend
Dragnet
Today’s Specials
A Word from Our Sponsor
We’ll Always Have Parents
Vierge Ouvrante
The Bickers
Little Men
Smoking the Dead Sea Scrolls
St. Florian with Burning Church
Advantage Federer
Tennis in the Snow
Part II
The Surveyors
Part III: from Rooms of Light: The Life of Photographs
Paparazzi
Here I Am
I’ve Got Your Picture
Dark Rooms
Part IV
A Vanity Table
So Far
Old Saw
Drapery for God the Father
Moon-Breath
The Buttonhook
Little Star, 2015
A Woman’s Tale
Lo Sposalizio
The Hotel Belvedere
An Afghan Carpet
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
YIELD
That’s what the sign said
below my window.
I’d step out of bed
to look down on the fork
the Y had made
in the word and the road.
YIELD was destined
for a field of YELLOW,
but scrambled like eggs
into something like DAILY.
Was firm, was an order,
but just meant CONSIDER.
And consider I did.
I stared at the sign
that was so little needed:
to stay or to go?
That was for others,
my parents, to know.
He might leave someday.
She might stay behind.
I was only one side
of the triangle.
I’d slip back in bed,
back into my own mind,
and more letters wanting
alone to untangle.
BRATISLAVA
So I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava.
That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive.
A sign in italics nudges us at the station:
Have an amazing time in Bratislava!
That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in English
and then Slovakian, posted above a trash can
that stands like the only monument in town.
We’ve heard there’s a castle, though. We need a tram.
We take one, and it heads in the wrong direction.
A pretty girl, cheerful and blond, straightens us out,
and we get on and off a bus at the proper stops.
That’s funny. Already a right place and a wrong one
to be in Bratislava, and I am among
the people who sort of get this, at least at the moment
I happen to occupy, within a vacation
in Vienna with a day trip to Bratislava.
That’s funny. I’d assumed my travel companion
through life would be my husband, even if
I’d gone to Bratislava, which I hadn’t thought of
long enough to think I would or wouldn’t.
The spanking white castle, standing high on a hill
we climb on foot, swigging our bottles of Coke,
dates to the year 800 or so, but burned
down to the ground, which tends, as we know, to happen,
and was reconceived in one of the worst times of all,
the 1950s, under Soviet rule.
That’s funny. Atop embarrassing pillars, knights
in plaster armor gaze up at the sky
triumphantly, although what for is forgotten,
and the sunlight they eclipse in silhouette
is all the sillier on those phallic cannons
between their legs, with three or four cannonballs.
More cannonballs per man. That’s human history
in a nutshell. Bullies unsated with all they’ve got
and below, the blindsided masses. That’s what it is.
And yet I’m happy, now, with my companion—
he likes me, I like him. He has his own backstory
of bleak encampments, battles lost, and sorrows
best not spoken of in Bratislava
lest we spoil our day, which so far is duly amazing.
I admire his dignity. Dignity is funny.
Everything’s funny now, which we hadn’t expected
to happen, either of us, after what happened.
We’re still alive and now we’re in Bratislava.
THE PROFANE PIANO TUNER
I finally let him go,
the man who’d tune our innocent piano
twice a year or so.
He knew his stuff,
and for a while, that was enough:
I’d leave the room so he could hit
B flat again and shout, You little shit,
Come on, you bastard, pounding and pounding it.
Hour after hour he’d swear
You filthy whore, Oh don’t you dare,
you stinking, stupid bitch—
a litany of abuses which
he couldn’t hear, though blessed with perfect pitch.
One day I understood.
Why pretend I’d tuned him out? What good
could come from smiling through profanities
like black, ill-tempered keys
against the white—black rage in twos and threes?
He said when he was done:
A perfect day! Hey look, we’ve got some sun.
I answered We’re in luck!
and handed him his check and watched
his truck
back out the driveway, thinking You dumb fuck,
not knowing I would think that. Very strange.
My daughter, who’d been out of range
all day at school,
sailed in and sat down, lifted up her profile,
and played a Chopin prelude like an angel.
PASTRY LEVEL
I was gazing out back
at the lemon-gold
sun on the cream-colored painted brick
of the new house.
(New again, I mean.
I’ve told you the story—
that it was finished just a few
months shy of the war;
that young families
moved in and out before a widow
who couldn’t care for it anymore
signed it over to me,
a single buyer lately
possessed by self-
possession.) This morning
at my writing table, looking
outward for a word,
in that sun-glaze on the wall
I saw again a baker’s shelf
twenty years ago in Paris.
You were there, of course.
The average American
four-year-old girl
stands at forty inches tall,
to stand still.
When you were four,
in those ruffled French dresses
I couldn’t help spending
a fortune on,
you couldn’t be kept away
from patisserie
after patisserie;
you guided me by the hand
to every window display
that we might inspect another batch
of little pleated
tartes au citron,
glistening neatly
at the level of your eye.
Remember when
you, your sister,
your father and I
all spoke the same language?
Because of you
we invented a phrase—
“pastry level”—
to indicate the height of any
four-year-old on the street…
It seemed to go without saying
we’d be strolling together
all the rest of our days.
ALOE
Somewhere between the store
where I’d bought the aloe plant
and its home arrival,
one waxen, prickly spear
had been rent in half.
Why leave a dead thing dangling
by a string? I snapped it off.
A pearly unguent oozed
into my palm, as if
I were the one bruised.
Well, if it thought so, sure.
I rubbed it in my skin.
So rough: I hadn’t taken
care in so long…And why
hadn’t I cried for help?
In the morning, a fresh ally
by instinct with itself,
the aloe had sealed up
its broken fingertip—
a low, but unbowed beauty
in its handicap.
My hand, not soft, was softer.
Well then, healing aloe?
Something to allow?
MR. BOYFRIEND
New lover, known and unknown,
you’ve risen before dawn
and, delicious in suit and tie,
you lean down to the bed
to kiss my rumpled head
the tenderest goodbye.
A military bearing
adheres to what you’re wearing.
Oh, how many years
did I wait to know a man
who knows he is a man
and not a boy?—who steers
himself through the long day
and rides it, come what may,
in a waft of aftershave
and the bracing, scratchy starch
of his dress shirt? As you march
off to the office, brave
and clear-eyed in your tortoise-
shell glasses, looking gorgeous,
I feel both safe and weak
slipping back to your kiss
in my sleep, and the light graze
of your cuff link on my cheek.
DRAGNET
The story you are about to read is true.
The names have been changed to protect the internet.
I’m thinking back to that old show, Dragnet,
starring Jack Webb, before the World Wide Web
was possible. I’m thinking about the “data dragnet”
the talking heads have been talking about
on TV today. There was congressional oversight.
There was bipartisan agreement
and I have an alibi. I was at home
when it happened. When I turned on my laptop,
when I answered my phone. OK, I admit it,
I wasn’t at home, not right then, not that minute,
but there’s bicameral oversight
over my sidewalk, and both of their videos
confirm I was only taking out the trash,
even if nothing now is the trash,
it’s all permanent, but here’s the good news,
we’re training young people, but never enough,
in computer science to sift through the stuff
we thought we deleted, and meanwhile we’re all
going to live longer and longer, thanks
to advances in medicine, and the universe
will go on expanding and we’ll be so advanced
in years that all that we say will be gibberish.
I just thought of something unnerving, though.
Your robot will know you—a robot who sounds
just like Jack Webb. What a terrible actor.
I don’t mean robot, I mean avatar,
your cyborg twin, your remotely piloted
vehicle, your 3-D sort-of friend
who will never be bored by who you are
or by what you don’t understand.
TODAY’S SPECIALS
Why did I come tonight?
Too late: I’ve handed my keys
to some boy valet, polite
to the point of insolence.
He’s so young, I’m so old—
really, why take offense
or even take the time,
the precious time, to reflect
that I was once like him,
appalled at the parade
of the hair-sprayed and the bald?
I tip him, scan the crowd,
and advance toward the cliques
of nerds, cheerleaders, potheads,
jocks, and Jesus freaks
I’d felt awkward with, and forty
years on, at last are peers:
yes, this is my party.
It’s mid-June, and bright tents
are erected to shield our kind
against the elements,
which hardly could be milder.
A faint breeze stirs the scents
of sunscreen, crab cakes, beer,
cut grass, and gasoline.
I think I’ll get a drink.
I begin to cross the lawn
(ducking that guy I dated
once or twice, and did he
see me? Do I seem…dated?)
and spot, beside the wine bar,
a whiteboard with Today’s
Specials in black marker.
Why do I trust my eyes?
I can’t read at this distance.
I’m nearer now—and surprise,
here’s what it really says:
In Memoriam. What
genius arranged for this?
How thoughtful and horrible.
Different hands have come
as they once did at school
to diagram the sentence
of those who lef
t us first.
More like taking attendance:
names, dates, an excuse
for absence when it’s known—
cancer, accident. Who’s
that, Bob Rogers? Bob.
My funny, uncle-faced pal,
pride of the Drama Club,
who tended to land the role
of banker or judge because
he had a middle-aged middle?
Dead at thirty-seven.
He probably looked the same
as he had at seventeen,
while most of us lived to stare
for decades at the stage
makeup in the mirror
that gave back our true age.
Bob Rogers. I played your kid.
Our names met on a page
in playbills kept awhile,
tossed away—just as I turn
now from the other special
names for today, and scout
for anyone to talk with
to drive the wisdom out.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Tell me it is not a work of art,
the one where the little boy in the backseat of his father’s car
looks up at a rocket being fired from the desert out into space,
all combustion and speed
while he remains only a little boy, and he says simply, softly,
“Whoa,”
a drawn-out “whoa,” as you might say to a horse.
Meanwhile, the rocket keeps going up,
and the astronaut, viewed at a thrilling, almost vertical angle
as he climbs the sky with his astronaut buddy,
looks down at the ever-tinier car traversing the empty landscape,
the really cool car the astronaut envies
from the vehicle he is now propelled in
but cannot steer, any more than the boy can—
no, neither of them gets to drive—
and looking down at the car, the astronaut says simply, softly,
“Whoa.”
These are the two words written by the ad man—