it bursts. Too fragile to bear touch,
the skin of the fruit I gathered
skidded off. Pulp pushed past
my knuckles’ best intentions.
Men can be considered good
for what they don’t do. How small
of a taken action could be a saving
grace then? I tried again, another day,
dropping a persimmon in the emptiness
between my breasts.
Home, undressed,
there was only a sweaty smear
no man could find sensuous.
Some things are best
enjoyed alone. Some things can only be
enjoyed alone.
And so, this morning, I eat right
on the roadside, picking grit from fruit’s soft insides.
Across town, a man I love sleeps.
Around the world, the hungry and sleepless.
Here, my fingers so sugared
I can’t suck them clean.
AMBITIONS
Ruskin acclaims valleys not wide,
forests of no extent, because they are
of England, his home country.
The child furnishes a dollhouse
with a spool table, wine cork stools,
a sardine can and its bathtub possibilities,
the content of her own construction.
* * *
Bachelard advances the theory
that any goal appears to be
in miniature, away on the horizon.
The girl continues, building a dresser
by stacking matchboxes
for drawers, with an ambition
already close enough to burning.
* * *
And the days on which nothing
is written, who will ever know
if they are of no note,
or the woman has come to
glory in tending to the need
of napkins to be put in rings, the feeding
of vases with the slim stems of flowers.
I LIVE NEARBY
Brides come to the park
to be photographed,
late in life, against the backdrop
of borrowed flowers.
They’ve worked themselves
into white gowns. No matter
that they’ve wakened beside men
for years of rushed morning routines,
and are women as known
as the dresses displayed
days early in full light.
They lift the skirts above the dirt,
hugging their fabric to themselves.
* * *
Once I wore a white skirt, walking
with ice cream and a man.
It melted and spilled over
on my hem. He knelt
to suck out the stain.
And stopped there,
so, for years, the sense of his lips
has hovered on,
never lost in the lifting
of our layers of cover,
some sweaty
next unsubtlety.
* * *
The nights before ceremonies,
from my rental home, I can
see white tents raised, illuminated,
in the rose gardens.
And celebrate what has not
quite occurred, what could.
I walk out to the canopies
of what precedes.
EVENINGS SLIP INTO EARLY LIGHT
Like a shave of palm sugar or the dash of Luxardo
are just a note in the air. That should be enough.
I wouldn’t ask for a too-sweet, womanly drink.
One morning, I awoke after a blackout drunk
to find I’d done all the dishes. The miracle of the body
walks you where you ought to be though you won’t recall,
then washes up from dinner. It could be
a kind of ideal: labor accomplished without awareness of it.
But I want that late hour in the kitchen back,
every hour, sloppy-staggering or soap-slick-clean.
Evening, with its lamps, is eager to be like early light,
and so often I have stayed until they meet.
Like lingering at a party to see last singles pair off. Or
being a wakeful mother waiting up. Must I choose?
Mornings, children stand waiting for the bus,
set out by each household as offerings to what will come.
Almost as if I could select one for my own. They are passive,
passengers preceding conveyance, nothing to do but stand
and be seen. And see.
Nothing expected but to stare at the neighbors’ lots,
the walled gardens only inviting more investigation,
imagining a way through fence slats. To assess cracks
in sidewalks spread by roots. To ride the slight seesaws
of the loose cement pieces, watching your own feet.
How did I look, drunk? A condition acceptable
to speak of if I am sure to tell you I was younger then.
Not concerned with health, the long years ahead,
windows framing me, alone and unwholesome,
or homemaking, for whom? If anyone were looking.
In my life, I have made unusually much time for looking.
Let the children stand with their limbs hanging loose,
facing the street. They will soon be borne elsewhere.
By the aging body, into adult busyness, fuller hours.
Though how full are those hours? Haven’t I
held my glass out whole nights, asking for more?
ABUNDANCE
Reflective, skyscrapers
amplify the heat of the city,
bouncing the sun off their sides.
Walls I am in, where the cool
is plentiful and false. Phalanxes
of men running on gym machines
stay strong and go nowhere. Not a one
leaves. And because it does not rain,
the chalk drawings of children who play,
if they go outdoors, on cement,
are never erased and I live among
their summer instants as if
eternal. While store window displays
reassure that there is nothing wrong
with our growing numbers
and rising temperatures.
Red dress, red dress, red dress,
the warming world repeats,
racks well stocked with multiples.
FULL CAPACITY
It’s called a kneeling bus because it lowers for those who need it.
And we bend our knees to allow others to pass. Here,
we’re humble. The woman holding her briefcase the whole time
so it won’t slip onto my side, the man mouthing every word
he reads but careful not to make a sound, each person
trying to fit some task into the bounds of their small seat
and hour, all diligence, drawn elbows, and dropped eyes.
There is not enough room to unfold the newspaper’s
black headline (Habitat Destruction), but somehow, hope fits.
The others too, headed home, must look out the window
when we pass a building with a balloon tied to the mailbox.
Imagine that was your welcome. You are wanted in this place.
How
often can humans feel less than harmful to where we are?
Balloons just outline the space occupied by the air
we would have expelled anyway, but they fill a room
with the promise of cake, sugar paste connecting one layer
to more of itself. Bus riders stack on board,
scanning for seats. There are open spaces, if only
in our searching eyes.
UNCOLLECTED
What becomes of the facts I learn and can’t apply? (Liming
is spreading a paste on branches to capture birds.) Of words
about to be said before the bus starts or light turns
to red, flashing caution across the night?
Of the floral perfume confined in the buds of spring,
after a late frost’s heavy covering? Of the wishes the married
woman will now never say? Of the feeling she possessed some
small beauty, gone with the inch of hair, trimmed too sensibly?
And the line cut for the sake of the larger poem?
But what if she’d spent the hours caring for hair, first impressions
yet to be made, or telling her same stories to a new person again,
drinking awkward drinks, then recovering? If either of the two
who make a house’s singular scent took his old books or her cooking
elsewhere? If the road hadn’t been abandoned before it reached
the building site, to be grown over, return to forest, as it should stay?
Don’t I want hummingbirds to have flown safely away from nooses
of silk string collectors once hung from the necks of lilies?
Best that some things are left in disuse, lustrously dangling.
THE RIND REMAINS
A dry river runs through,
or rather, idles in,
our small city where
we never intended to settle.
Between mudflats, on the few
pools, birds alight.
* * *
We rinse glasses to be
filled with affordable whiskey,
with scotch or absinthe,
my love and I.
One swallow of good liquor
enough to scent the whole.
* * *
A baptism in reverse—
that’s birds in the river,
the bodies that enter
proclaiming the water pure.
They bow their heads. That is,
they dip their heads to drink.
* * *
I no longer dream other lives,
forget other men.
He rubs the rims of Sazeracs
with rind. From the remains
of eaten fruit, makes
perfume arise.
HEREAFTER
When men end streams and make
artificial lakes, the bottoms
are blank and featureless
and so we sink crashed cars into them
to give fish a place to live.
I’d like to say that’s beneficent.
And that ice melt, the sea rising,
will have a solution in it.
Imagine all the swimming then,
among wrecks filed along the freeways.
An idyll of engines stopped utterly.
No notion that a next life
above the one here
is ever to be had. Not even the halos
of opalescent motor oil
making the motion of ascending elsewhere.
SEASONAL
Neighbors have erected an inflatable pumpkin
out of which arises an inflatable dog. Then
it descends, then rises again. I had imagined
a life set in another landscape, long stretches
of rivers and fields. Now I know it is autumn
from the lawn decorations, the lawn mowers
trimming the football field. Men measure
and spool out string, lay straight lines
of paint on the canvas they’ve been given,
the kind that keeps growing grass through
their accomplishments. Showing great care.
As I suppose they do padding and helmeting
five-year-old sons sent so soon to practice
struggle. Why not such a field as subject for study,
rather than a farm’s, which was never pastoral
for many, not in the land of cotton, not for those
who hoed and picked it? And though the rivers here
are few, there is rain. When that water falls,
equally and indiscriminately soaking everyone’s shoes,
it weights the inflatable dog. Now, nothing comes
from the pumpkin, and my love and I admit,
over our early supper, we are made earnestly sad.
We’ve got none of our young loftiness left,
nor laughter for others’ losses, no matter their bad taste.
When the dog did work, its unfurling was slow,
one eye unfolding, a limb lengthening. It had done
this since September. A limb sagged out of sight,
an eye was sucked back, how many times already?
Yet we want all the measures, so much extension,
even of these days. Because the children on the field
rush forward. As bidden. Coaches screaming
that they can’t cry. When they aren’t. Five and already
they don’t cry. They try for strong faces. People put up
what they’d like to look at. It doesn’t stop them,
that the elements will take all ornament down.
EXPRESSION
On the human bodies of their gods,
Egyptians placed the heads
of falcon, lion, ibis, and jackal.
Mouths never contorted with words.
Give me a cat face. An inscrutability
so great as to be sublime.
After many years of what I meant
to say and what I tried to show, to whom
have I made reverence truly known?
Felines, mummified and gilded,
unchanged since ancient times,
wear the one expression
worth affixing in gold.
SIGNS MAY SAY “DON’T TOUCH”
In museums, I have obeyed velvet cords’ commands to keep my distance
from displays and stepped back farther still to get a better view of paintings.
But when I have gone to a hill above my home at night and watched
a well-known form (my mother, who will go on getting older,
or a man to whom I would make vows for life, which wouldn’t be enough)
stepping away from a lit window, moving out of the frame—
I’ve wished that body would disregard whatever my words were
about wanting to walk alone, and would cross the dividing space,
bringing along its warm hands. That could blank my eyes from seeing
separations that will come. As it is with antique busts touched too much,
the paint of the pupils worn bare.
LITTLE MONSTER, MASTERPIECE
In the sun, I scorch,
dizzy. It’s a danger day—
the new phrase for when being outdoors
can burn you dead.
And imagine: She’ll have
her father’s golden, resilient skin
(but my strong chin),
assembling a baby of best parts.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein
shivering, the Year Without Summer,
while volcanic ash encircled
the earth in shadow. Enwombed.
A sharp crust of frost covered all crops,
ruining corn in America, wrecking
Asia’s rice fields. Farmers foraged
for nettles, then people ate clay, then they
themselves froze.
In this year’s atmosphere—blazing
afternoons when laborers are warned
not to work, when children
may not play outside—
I also select words.
Try saying nursery,
not unfurnished room,
referring to the empty space
in our house, redeeming it.
Shelley salvaged
a few hundred pages, a great book,
from the tens of thousands
climate killed. And from her own body,
which had born another life, only briefly.
A child too soon entombed.
She warned against
the monsters humans can create,
and made her masterpiece.
As many women still try to do.
One strokes the round
of her stomach, sets her mind circling,
taking in swing sets and schools.
They are so near.
She extends the radius
of wishfulness
to the fantasy of a future,
in walking distance
widening out to
when my girl grows up.
“MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF IT”
Everything is past, below the overpass, behind in the speeding view, driving a six-lane, a straight, obliterating black line, interstate that can’t be crossed, that cuts off animals car-struck, animals bone-cracked—I was about to say.