A lot of people. He leans on a branch,
his ear bluish in shadow.
If I say everybody, I don’t know if everybody prayed.
I can tell you, a lot prayed.
How still she is.
(Her small lips pursed, her finger still in the pages,
her eyes almost slits as they narrow—)
Nothing matters in this meadow.
There is a girl under pear trees with her book,
and it doesn’t matter what she does or does not promise.
There’s no next scene to hurt her.
Not even the pears fall down.
I want the words to happen here.
God loves you, and I love you, he says.
Not far beyond his touch,
a wind shakes a dusting of sunlight
onto the edges of pears.
I’d rather think some things are like this.
The water’s green edge dissolves
into cerulean, cerulean pearls
into clouds; the girl’s unsandaled feet
into uncut fringes of grass—
I don’t need to explain, he says
(his sleeves swelling in a nudge of air)
—but the highest call of history,
it changes your heart.
She looks down: her finger in her book.
On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw Flowers
I.
I can begin the picture: his neck is bent,
his mouth too close to her ear as he leans in
above her shoulder—to point
to poppies shaded in apricot, stippled
just as he taught her. Class is over.
They are alone in the steady air—
Through the window, a jump rope’s tick.
An occasional bird. High voices.
Perhaps, so caught up in composing her flower,
she doesn’t feel his fingers
there and there, her neck exposed
to the spring air—
II.
There are only a few lines in the newspaper: her grade, his age, when the police arrived. J. calls to say he doesn’t believe the girl. Girls that age, he says—you know how that goes. Hey, if there’s a trial, you could be a witness.
What kind of witness?
Character witness.
III.
Yes I knew him. One summer we lounged in the backyard sun and listened to songs about what would be nice. On the swing, on the lawn, I posed for him, leaned my head against the picnic table. That was when I did not have enough, could not have enough looking at.
That summer he carried his sketchpad everywhere, and on those slow, humid afternoons, I felt him elongate, shade, and blur. Above us the sky was like a white rush of streetlights, and I wanted to be nothing but what he shaped in each moment—
I closed my eyes, felt the sunlight on my thighs. To be beheld like that—it felt like glittering.
IV.
What should be remembered, what
imagined?
She shifts in her chair. Her uncertain fingers
trace, against the sky—how many times?—
the red edges of the petals, caress
the darkening lines, trying to still them—
though she cannot make the air stop
breathing, cannot make cannot
make the shuddering lines stay put.
Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
The sculptures in this gallery have been carefully treated with a protective wax so that visitors may touch them.
—EXHIBITIONS, THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
Stone soldier, it’s okay now.
I’ve removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.
I’m allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.
Nothing peels from you.
Your skin gleams like the silver earrings
you do not wear.
Above you, museum windows gleam October.
Above you, high gold leaves flinch in the garden,
but the flat immovable leaves entwined in your hair to crown you
go through what my fingers can’t.
I want you to have a mind I can turn in my hands.
You have a smooth and upturned chin,
cold cheeks, unbruisable eyes,
and hair as grooved as fig skin.
It’s October, but it’s not October
behind your ears, which don’t hint
of dark birds moving overhead,
or of the blush and canary leaves
emptying themselves
in slow spasms
into shallow hedgerows.
Still bride of your own armor,
bride of your own blind eyes,
this isn’t an appeal.
If I could I would let your hair down
and make your ears disappear.
Your head at my shoulder, my fingers on your lips—
as if the cool of your stone curls were the cool
of an evening—
as if you were about to eat salt from my hand.
To the Dove within the Stone
Sleeper, still untouched by
gravity, invisible
for the stone, I cannot
hear you shift in its dark
center. How many centuries
since the first girl—pressing hand
against stone—hardly meaning to
make an inside—
roused you? The stone had no
emptiness, and her body no
emptiness until she felt you
move under her palm, her steady
pulse. Already flesh was something to
stir you, something to make you
true. Stone-dove, untouched
by thistles, moths,
listen now
my hand is open.
Holy
Spirit who knows me, I do not feel you
fall so far in me,
do not feel you turn in my dark center.
My mother is sick, and you
cannot help her.
My beautiful, moon-faced mother is sick
and you sleep in the dark edges of her shadow.
Spirit made to
know me, is this your weight
in my throat, my
chest, the breath heavy so I hardly
breathe it?
I do not believe in the beauty of falling.
Over and over in the dark I tell myself
I do not have to believe
in the beauty of falling
though she edges toward you,
saying your name with such steadiness.
I sit winding blue tape around my wrists
to keep my hands from falling.
Holy Ghost, I come for you today
in this overlit afternoon as she
picks at the bread with her small hands,
her small rough hands,
the wide blue veins that have always been her veins
winding through them.
Ghost, what am I
if I lose the one
who’s always known me?
Spirit, know me.
Shadow, are you here
splintering into the bread’s thick crust as it
crumbles into my palms, is that
you, the dry cough in her lungs, the blue tape on my wrists.
The dark hair that used to fall over her shoulders.
Fragile mother, impossible spirit, will you fall so far
from me, will you leave me
to me?
To think it
is the last hard kiss, that seasick
silence, your bits of breath
diffusing in my mouth—
How (Not) to Speak of God
&nb
sp; Yet Not Consumed
But give me the frost of your name
in my mouth, give me
spiny fruits and scaly husks—
give me breath
to say aloud to the breathless clouds
your name, to say
I am, let me need
to say it and still need you
to give me need, to make me
into what is needed, what you need, no
more than that I am, no more
than the stray wind on my neck, the salt
of your palm on my tongue, no more
than need, a neck that will bend
lower to what I am, so
give me creeping, give me clouds that hang
low and sweep the blue of the sky
to its edges, let me taste the edges, the bread-colored clouds,
here I am, give me
thumb and fingers, give me only
what I need, a turn here
to turn what I am
into I am, what your name writ in clouds
writ on me
On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes
—how her loose curls float
above the silver fish as she leans in
to pluck its eyes.
You died just hours ago.
Not suddenly, no. You’d been dying so long
nothing looked like itself: from your window,
fishermen swirled sequins;
fishnets entangled the moon.
Now the dark rain
looks like dark rain. Only the wine
shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses
as we raise a toast to you
as so-and-so’s daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow—
slides into another lap
to eat another pair of slippery eyes
with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time,
for being chewed a little.
If only I could go to you, revive you.
You must be a little alive still.
I’d like to put the girl in your lap.
She’s almost feverishly warm, and she weighs
hardly anything. I want to show you how
she relishes each eye, to show you
her greed for them.
She is placing one on her tongue,
bright as a polished coin—
What do they taste like? I ask.
Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily.
They taste like eyes, she says.
Annunciation in Play
—into the 3rd second, the girl
holds on, determined not to meet his gaze—
she swerves her blue sleeve,
closes down the space,
while his eyes are intent, unwilling
to relent and
late into the 5th second they are still
fighting on, their feet sinking into
the slippery grass—
Approaching the 6th second
he can’t repeat the sweeping in
and each time he tries to clear
the way to her thorn-brown eyes by the gesture of a hand
it is easily blocked by the turn
of her cheek.
By the 8th second she is still repelling
every attempt, still deflecting (you can see
the speed, the skillful knee action)
his gaze. And she must know (she has to think
every second, there’s no letting up)
this is only
delay, but the delay
is what she has
before his expert touch
swings in, before
she loses her light, clean edges, before she
loses possession—
before they look at each other.
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove
Bellagio, Italy
—3:21
The startled ash tree
alive with them, wings lacing
through silver-green leaves—jumping
—3:24
from branch to branch
they rattle the leaves, or make the green leaves
sound dry—
—3:26
The surprise of a boat horn from below.
Increasingly voluptuous
fluttering.
—3:28
One just there on the low branch—
gone before I can breathe or
describe it.
—3:29
Nothing stays long enough to know.
How long since we’ve been inside
anything together the way
—3:29
these birds are inside
this tree together, shifting, making it into
a shivering thing?
—3:30
A churchbell rings once.
One pigeon flies
over the top of the tree without skimming
—3:30
the high leaves, another
flies to the tree below. I cannot find
a picture of you in my mind
—3:30
to land on. In the overlapping of soft dark
leaves, wings look
to be tangled, but
—3:32
I see when they pull apart, one bird far, one
near, they did not touch. One bird seems caught,
flapping violently, one
—3:32
becomes still and tilts down—
I cannot find the dove,
have not seen it for minutes. One pigeon nips
—3:32
at something on a high branch,
moves lower (it has taken this long for me to understand
—3:33
their wings without leaving their branches and
I am tired
of paying attention. The birds are all the same
—3:33
to me. It’s too warm to stay still in the sun, leaning
over this wood fence to try to get a better look
into the branches. Why
—3:33
do the pigeons gather in this tree
or that one, why leave one for another
in this moment or that one, why do I miss you
—3:33
now, but not now,
my old idea of you, the feeling for you I lost
and remade so many times until it was
—3:33
something else, as strange as your touch
was familiar. Why not look up
at high white Alps or down at the
—3:33
untrumpeted shadows bronzing the water
or wonder why an almost lavender smoke
hovers over that particular orange villa
—3:33
on the far shoreline or if I am
capable of loving you better
or at all from this distance.
The Cathars Etc.
loved the spirit most
so to remind them of the ways of the flesh,
those of the old god
took one hundred prisoners and cut off
each nose
each pair of lips
and scooped out each eye
until just one eye on one man was left
to lead them home.
People did that, I say to myself,
a human hand lopping at a man’s nose
over and over with a dull blade
that could not then slice
the lips clean
but like an old can opener, pushed
into skin, sawed
the soft edges, working each lip
slowly off as
both men heavily, intimately
breathed.
My brave believer, in my private re-enactments,
you are one of them.
I pick up in the aftermath where you’re being led
by rope
by the one with the one good eye.
I’m one of the women at the edge of the hill
watching you stagger magnificently,
unsteadily back.
All your faces are tender with holes
starting to darken and scab
and I don’t understand how you could
believe in anything that much
that is not me.
The man with the eye pulls you
forward. You’re in the square now.
The women are hysterical,
the men are making terrible sounds
from unclosable mouths.
And I don’t know if I can do it, if I can touch
a lipless face that might
lean down, instinctively,
to try to kiss me.
White rays are falling through the clouds.
You are holding that imbecile rope.
You are waiting to be claimed.
What do I love more than this
image of myself?
There I am in the square walking toward you
calling you out by name.
To You Again
Again this morning my eyes woke up too close
to your eyes,
their almost green orbs
too heavy-lidded to really look back.
To wake up next to you
is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you
to see you.
But I do look. So when you come to me
in your opulent sadness, I see
you do not want me
to unbutton you
so I cannot do the one thing
I can do.
Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk
and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase
away from me. Already it is years