Category: Poem

We stand there in our vestibule, me clutching
my car keys, you, your suitcase,
me about to recite the names of apples,

winesap, braeburn, etc., the way poets 
recite them, then to chant the names
of poets, too, anything you’ll listen to,

stanzas of lightning from red mouths.
It isn’t loveliness I’m after, I can tell you,
it’s any damn thing that keeps your hand

from pushing that door open.  Though you’re
long gone already.  And I know it’s wrong,
when the heart has stopped, to pretend it hasn’t. 

Like a taxidermist.  No, we’re mixed up
with time, my Love, and poetry, as usual,
fails to stop you.  You have to go away,

and you may not be back. 
I eat one of the apples in your memory,
like a pioneer who’s down to eating seed corn,

the sweet-sour juices running into a future
without you, while a voice tells me
I don’t own you, you were a gift, and

my barbaric unteachable mother heart doesn’t get it,
thinks, okay, fine, so you’re gone now, 
you’re that much closer to coming back. 

I can hear them in there, laughing,
the nurses on the children’s cancer ward,
as I walk through, my heart snagged
on a child in room 206, the boat of my hopes
tipping its freight into the water,
because kids in here are dying,
like trees turning in the fall
so slowly that we have to dwell
on each interval of suffering.

The door opens a slice and I see nurses
leaning into laughter, collapsing,
gripping each other’s arms.  Their laughter
skates on air, it fills the room up,
it towers above us.  I shut the door.

They laugh because grief adheres to them
as desire adheres to beautiful women. 
They have to pick it from their fur.  They
have to help each other comb it out. 
They study jokes as farm girls study
dresses in a catalogue.  They balance
on a high beam of laughter, knowing 
if they laugh they might come back tomorrow.

If I had stopped in a rush of deep love and
spent the money on that blouse as red
as the blush that rises after a full kiss on the mouth,

or if I had dropped the bills like seeds
into the dirty pocket of that drunk who
begged on the sidewalk, or if I had only snapped

my shoelace, so I’d had to leave
ten mortal minutes later, I might not have felt
the strap slip off, the purse go light and vanish.

When it was gone, I didn’t have a shilling for the bus,
no driver’s license, no passport,
nothing to hold me down to earth.

I felt bodiless and nameless in the clash
of evening traffic. Above me, some monumental clock
clanged five across the city and

I looked up into the face of time,
who someday will take my skin, my flesh, my bones
until I stand empty as pure hunger,

transparent as clean glass in sunlight—
while the bell pealed and pealed, a sound like joy
that in my life I never earned or paid for.

While you were still unborn
our friends brought, one by one,
the clothes their children had worn:
shirts with secret pockets,
blankets, a tie gown.

And because we were unable
to find you anywhere
we pulled you from the pockets,
we stitched a fable
of a baby yet unborn.

When you finally came
we dressed you in those clothes.
All winter they were kind.
Now I fold the clothes away,
a legacy refined.
Someone else’s child
may briefly take his turn.

For parents, now, who wait,
imagining new faces,
I will enumerate
the children whose graces
became your warmest jacket:

Elizabeth and Melissa,
Patrick, Andrew, Kate
wore these clothes once.
Teddy, Bess, and Ethan.
And may their loveliness
wherever these clothes are worn
shield against loss
and pass to those unborn.

Somewhere on Ellis Island
my mother’s mother lost the shawl
the women of the town crocheted for her
out of mauves and purples,
old tunes twisted in the strands,
and clever plots
woven, woven in the pattern.
It was a gift.
Away from that shawl
my mother’s mother had to move,
toward the waiting train, toward Minnesota,
through the smell of gasoline,
through the sycamores
whose leaves clinked down
like foreign coins.
She tripped over
a broken step, caught herself,
steadied her canvas bag, paid
her money, wrote her name on the form, washed
in communal showers, put on
her skirt with its stubborn hem. When
they opened the wire gate, she bowed
and hoisted the bag higher
to step over the threshold
into the calling distance
where the years stretched out
plain as good dirt
and she began to imagine
the calamity and extreme grace
of someone wearing that mauve shawl
till every night in dreams
she chopped it,
burned it, and
when it rose again,
she buried it.
 
She spent every minute
chasing the furious rooster, dropping
report cards into her apron pocket, bargaining
in zero weather,
forgetting that old grace,
finally carrying
her children’s
children on her hip,
while she stirred the soup,
their breath soft as moss,
their tiny feet stuttering against her.
My feet, my breath.
She bore my mother like a speck toward me
as I bear you in this plain dress
towards your own children,
holding in my empty hands her glorious shawl,
sunrise over Ellis Island.

          And so your husband is safe, and he will
          come soon; he is very near, not far away,
          and it will not be long before he returns.
                                 —The Odyssey, Book XIX

Accepting the shawl of light and
the thought of light and the actual
yellow jonquils nailing the patient ground,
she sits by the window,
                              casting out her thread and
               drawing in her thoughts,
weaving, weaving.

He has come with a clairvoyant eye,
               not the man himself
               but the old desire for him,
                              the prophet,

and cold staggers under a new weight of sunlight.
Time is for her to bear the warmth again
for her mind turns around, turns around and
the trees start pitying with green their own bare sticks,
the clouds start pacing across the unmoved sky,
the violent scent of lilacs starts staining the air.

               Laying aside her thread,
                              she straightens her shoulders
and leans into the terrible gaiety of spring.

Let’s make this one about a lion. And
it might just as well be flanking the Art
Museum steps, paw holding the world down,
falling asleep on peace treaties, bells, wrecked
cars. What love I have goes to such quiet.
He lies more still than any of us can
imagine being. Like the last voice saying
one last thing, frozen so we can see it:
glory of fur and blind absolute eyes,
dreaming us while grit goes on falling through air.

So suppose one day the stone lion lifts
a paw, the sky films gray, the stores close down.
The last heel’s cobbled. The wind stops. At two
o’clock by the Museum fountain a
sandwich sticks in my throat. The lion turns his
head, casually shaking off sunlight,
clearing his mind of the idea of us.
He gets up, kneads the marble and slowly
strolls off like someone we might have loved, now
on his way to becoming something else.

They outdo each other
drawing secret metals
from the earth
to turn magenta, crimson,
orchid, sun-bather cinnamon.
They wrap the brown grass like a present.

Where have they learned
this extravagance of  sun,
this flaring so improbably
into talent?  Look. This one eating
fire, that one juggling
silver knives.
Like a child stepping from
the chorus line of an average family,
each one is a prodigy, defying the odds. 

All summer they were rooted,
unable to move, unable
to scratch their most frantic itch.
They will roam far.  They will never return. 
But tonight they sing in the yard like violins,
calling the last ordinary, human child home.

I’ve seen 24,300 sunrises, maybe more,
     but this morning, the plump
sun sings the sky awake as if
     it were the first time.  I’m rusty at the feeling
of surprise, so I get down to business,
     practicing appreciation, telling myself
that light is an aria rolling
     an exotic language on the tongue
of our green lawn.   And then I think
     why bother with an opera?

Make it simple.  Come into this poem, sun. 
     Shine.   But what about tomorrow,
when my kids leave home, my mother
     can’t recall my name, when rain slides
its little thumbs down our window pane
     all morning?  Then I say to my self–who remembers
nothing simple–self, then remember,
     the sun is a fat diva, still
singing her head off somewhere
     behind the clouds, above the rain.