Terrible Blooms
Page 2
is already happening and you’re pickling okra
and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests
and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets
and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data
and maybe even thinking about having
children, which you swore in a million
billion years you would never do.
Wheel
Why do I keep hearing
dryers spinning?
Everything’s gone
warm and sweet.
Life’s a container
we’re tumbled in.
Time the container
life’s tumbled in.
Space contains that,
and maybe it’s the planets
careening across some galaxy
that make it so hard to breathe.
Peep
Some sit and watch
the lights blink.
Some feed the quarters in.
Some wheedle for
just a little more
for the quarters they’ve inserted.
They say you get out
only what you put in.
What kind of alchemy is that?
I’d give my whole life
for another minute.
How I
Stupidly. Like a dog,
like drought
flood, like a vole
the hawk lifts screaming
to its first and last
panoramic.
Each want sired
want and I
was drowning in it—
but kept my head
just enough above
the choking to choke
more. A dog, I said,
or rat pressing
lever unto death.
May we all die wanting
and getting it.
Cave
So baroque the way
he looked at me
like meat
like last night’s
remains on their spoiled
slab, working
the blade, the blade
doing its work—
it’s what I liked
about him, that raw
regard
unmitigated
those walls
carved out of nothing
by firelight
that heap
of bones
on the ground
Semaphore
Barn collapsing in wet clay. Ants
stranded on grass-tips, signaling
like the blind. Sun scraped across winter
in its numb chariot. Fiddlehead, godhead,
the universe crammed in that green spiral—
larch limbs swaying like anemones, tossed—
sweat-streaked stallion hide, unspeakable
grace— the last few beats in a bird-body,
crusted in crimson, muffled in down—
rubber’s calligraphy on asphalt
and the bright jewels of machinery, of engine
padded in a ditch of white violet and clover—
She fell where she stood in the grocery line
as all the padlocks sprung open, all the gates.
Vows
He didn’t invite me to the wedding.
Am I some kind of ghost? A few roses
blown open. People kept trooping back
and forth in downpour to view
the thorny stalks. I saw the photos.
Am I shameful? Even from far away
you can tell someone’s age by how her body
moves. What bird by the steadiness
of its wings. Some trees are simply
more picturesque. Some days
I’m a regret machine. Why
are children always running, is there
so very much to get to? You terrify
the moments. You waste them like this.
And behind walls doors and screens,
everyone you’ve ever lost
is repeating marriage vows.
Montgomery Inn
Two old people are quickstepping
across freshly lacquered parquet.
It’s been years since I’ve been stuck
at some celebratory banquet
counting calories and facelifts.
At the one I remember best my sister
and her brand-new husband were dancing at arm’s length
because she was six months gone
and he a large guy himself. We all wore
dusty pink and my mother sniffled compulsively
into a coordinating handkerchief with joy or shame
or both, I never knew.
My dad had shaved off his moustache
for the first and last time. My uncle
drunk again, an incandescent bulb.
And so was I. I can’t remember what I drank—
chardonnay? Vodka concoction? Champagne?—
but I took off early in my Corolla
and swerved home blasting Joy Division
and the Cure. I was twenty-four
and headed soon to graduate school
to get three thousand miles away
and write some poems and learn
to hike the California hills and have
anxiety attacks. I suppose this is where I get back
to the two old folks dancing like young folks
and draw some conclusion or parallel
like how my parents never once touched so tenderly
or if I ended up like this pair I wouldn’t mind so much
and that’s how I know I’m getting old, too,
since when I was twenty-four and somehow
simultaneously suicidal and invincible
I vowed I’d never wind up old
or writing poems in this flaccid, middle-aged key.
But maybe he slips and drops her on her back
during some particularly fancy dip
and the paramedics are called
and the Sternos are sheeted
and we all go home loving and fearing
ourselves a little more desperately.
Safehouse
Despite lightning, despite god
rearranging his furniture, I feel
safe as houses. When houses
were safe: from mudslides, arson,
quakes. Houses were never safe,
I suppose, from human intent or force
of nature, only the concept
of home, and that’s internal, and malleable.
Come to think of it, I don’t really feel safe
in this city, in this building, in this body,
what with the tsunamis, and the cancer, and the leaping
from burning buildings, and the fiery
archangels, poised and muttering at the gates.
Crush
When I said I felt like twelve again
I meant a stumbly, ashamed girl
who didn’t know where to put her limbs,
whose fantasies were a terrible accident
she couldn’t stop reliving. I meant
a girl whom everyone was growing past,
grabbing up handfuls of being grown.
A girl too smart for her own good
who saw too much and felt too everything
and sometimes could barely leave her bed
for all the wounding. When I said
like a kid again, it’s the one hiding
in a thicket of books while all the other kids
were climbing rocks and kissing things.
I meant the books I crammed to get away
from them and me and you.
When I said I had a crush on you I meant
a car pinned under itself on the asphalt,
organs exposed for all to gawk, slowing
each unsirened instant to an eon I fell
in desperate, ravaged love
with my own incapacity. Wanting
does not look good on me.
Lion
Split dandelion, peeled down its silvery
stalk, split head eyeing two directions.
In one, I’m headed west in a Volvo
stationwagon held together by a filigree
of rust. In the other, I’m drowning
in the bath, pristine and lavender. Either way
the path rolls up behind me. I could
dazzle in the volts of the car battery.
I could rise, fragrant and redeemed.
A relief to know it’s always earlier
someplace else. Somewhere—dear lion,
dear crown, my dear sweet resting place—
the ruin I’ve made is in one piece.
October
Grace in fury.
Fury in sinew.
How can what’s wild
bear such innocence?
I lost a tender thing.
He lay high up
on my chest, one paw
on each shoulder,
head tucked under my chin.
Clung to me.
Not innocence—
guilelessness—
we deceive ourselves.
I never asked
to be anyone’s mother.
On the last day
he couldn’t use his legs.
The worst thing,
the indelible thing
was his incomprehension.
Portrait of my family as a pack of cigarettes
I’d barter your life
for a brief orange
flame and a lungful
of peace. My whole family
was like that, tobacco-
stained, curling
a little at the edges.
Singed. Whenever
the wind rose, a few
blew away, easy
as an exhale, and we let go
in the way one does
with paper, smoke.
Until the box lay
empty, on its side,
in some dump. Now and then
cold hands would
fumble it, in hope.
Blue ring
The sun is high
you hitch your apron on
the wash flaps on the line
the cotton and the linen
its white is dizzying
these chores I dip the water out
for cows to dip their noses in
the new heads
in the furrows crest
their tender green you dredge
the drowned wren from its ditch
I scoop the hound its feed
the coffee lives on its blue
ring we’re steering by its fumes
our blades rust in the shed
a few ache with use
Playhouse
Under a collapse of honeysuckle
and its fury of bees, under a mulberry
canopy, its swaying thatch of green—
that’s where you’d find us, when the voices rose,
playing out civility: leaf-napkins, twig-utensils,
acorn-goblets, tea of wild scallion
and mud. Beside the garden’s tangled
wire. Chokecherry, thimbleberry. All summerlong
we colluded on a patchwork of dried leaves
stitched together by stems—crimson, bruise, amber,
brick, copper, cinnamon—to blanket us
when those voices called us home.
Quarry
Floating dock and the sun
and a lady with her infant
and a black dog swimming with a branch
and a boy I loved all silken
and mocking me
from his heavy lashes
surprised with bright drops of water.
He was kind but he had this weakness.
We swam together every day
as the water found new patterns
around our bodies. Dog, infant, lady, sun, dock
orbited as they always had.
And nothing would stop growing.
Halt
Before the pelleting and sway.
Before the heads of Queen Anne’s lace
are bent down, overweighted,
and the fronds bang out
some frenzied tarantella
and the lanes churn to runnels,
scouring and stranding
unconscionable debris.
For now, the attenuated
hush that is storm’s premonition
in leaves before a single drop careens,
that we halt in, every cell attuned
to how soon it will start,
how bad it will get before it closes,
or if it will pass us over.
[ iii ]
Vitrine
i.
Father, your antlers are growing again.
I’m between rocks and forest, I’ve
delayed waking up as long as I can.
I hear only one kind of birdsong.
Mother, your eyes are red as the loon’s
who dives down a century on one sharp breath
to dredge up a pilchard in that iron beak.
She built her nest too close to the sea
and it brined her warm white eggs. Failure
is a part of speech. You can conjugate it—
My sister, too, turned deer
and fled. My other sister lifted off
into a fog she deputized faith.
We wear everything out eventually,
love or neglect. We wear our very bodies down.
ii.
We each had our own chamber
of the honeycomb. We each had
our own sting. While he was here
my father played guitar. The guitar
was made from pearls. I climbed
a ladder when my mother sang
and hid up on the roof. I grew to love
the thinnest air winter could provide,
its white erasure. My sisters bled
the veins of night, my mom the throat
of day. My family: shadow of a wasp
crisscrossing yours, anaphylactic.
Nectar and venom, one sweet fang.
iii.
The sweet? Well, my father planted a garden
near a wide, protecting oak. And my mother
in the house did magic things with thread
and soap. Kitchen saint: mixing bowl,
wire whisk, and blade. The house itself a landmine
in a field of ravishment—such blossoms as
you’ll never see and books you’ll never taste.
My sisters plaited hyacinths into each other’s hair.
My father trimmed them down each year.
They sprang back out, unruly. Our rooms
were clean; we made a pretty mess. I walked my father’s
black umbrella out in lightning storms. I courted
fire in matches, in vapors, in eyes. I called the bolts down.
iv.
Band of locusts bent on a single task:
we ate what grew. I see him on the railroad tracks
walking off toward the low sun. My mother
on a towboat, about to cut the rope.
My sisters? One a doctor painstaking
needles, blood. The other spends her days and nights
widening the moat. I suppose I’m in a meadow
cupping ears to hives, or stepping through
a forest, peeling shadows from trees.
I bring them home and carefully cut them
into another family. This one
speaks in whispers. Its violences
are understood. We held such ordinary
menace in our hands. We crouched and hid
behind each door. We signaled. We froze.
We bolted. We grew new bodies. We rose.
v.
I once told you of a prisoner I tried to set free.
They found him,
white and bloated, miles north
on a beach. She was my sister; I had the care of her
and failed. Food for crabs, food for snails,
food for emery teeth of fish. They loved her well
until the sea refused. My father was a sailor
on the sea of his own mind. My little boat
could never approach; some wind
always spun me round. But how lovely that sea
in a vitrine, and I never stopped trying.
Until I did, when land jolted up solid,
amazed beneath my feet. None of us
ever reached him. How fathomless the trying.
Zero
Papercut contracts the whole world
to its sting. A stubbed toe to its throb.
Oh beautiful contusion, is it wrong
to love your annihilation
of everything but you?
This valley like a thumbprint
in bruised mountains.
This bruising like a flower
of attention. Out in the field,
a starling blurred to an idea
of feather and blood. Ribbonsnake
a mere suggestion. What I’m trying to say
is I have lost the riveting.