Building Fires in the Snow
Page 8
the beginning I’ve found with every lover.
The black-beaded choker dangling threads
of malachite over the stammer of raised veins.
The loose-fitting ring when the setting turns
and a small amethyst eye gazes from her palm.
She tells a lie and her hand reaches for the lapis
bracelet, which she twists until the clasp is there,
fingernail snapping the release. Her tongue
drawing its barbell ring along my thigh,
hot bead flicking its own course at the light.
The intricate battle of the bent ear-wire catching
on my sweater, its stainless steel holds her head
to my chest, though we’ve finished kissing.
Her moonstone brooch clear and cloudy,
at once a way in or a way out.
Hotel Reverie
My lover keeps the room: the faded comforter
tangled between her legs, a barely creased Bible
open on her pillow, clothes she drapes on a chair.
I straighten a picture over the bed: tumbling spore
of dandelion, a red barn in the background.
I can find no single history the maid’s stark finish
won’t erode. Frayed edges fringe the bath towels.
An incidental landscape of stains falls across
the bleached cushions of the couch.
Some other lover may have looked up, untangled herself
from the brushed polyester bedding to belong
to the instance getting away. So comes my first desire:
to carve initials in a wood bench, mark name and thought
in a bathroom stall: I was here and I buried in the middle of her
—the heart of me. She left me wordless. I was here
at the window, counting on that one, ominous blackbird
who follows. I was here surveying the room with her eyes
and I saw my incompleteness. I saw she had settled into me
like a bone caught in swallowing. I was here and light
broke a crack and cut down the middle of me.
Lake Shore Deer
You break the jaw from the crushed skull, collecting
more remnants for the mantel, souvenirs you’ll lose
the meaning for. In the bony cavity, teeth rattle
the clack, clack of abandoned purpose.
I lift the yellow bone to my nose. Breath and cry
remembered. The well-worn molars ridged in black.
A heron heaves off its post. An eclipse of wings
like a blue bow over the lake. I don’t forget
the whole task of prayer and longing. I hold
the deer’s unclean break of mouth and a gray feather.
I hold your fingers, which I steal to my mouth
to keep from talking, to keep the want from invading the purpose.
I deliver you quiet and shaking. You say, “I’ll kiss you
because no one’s looking.” I summon that mouth of grazing molars,
mud in the crevice, beetle fleshing the bone back to dust.
In the jaw, our inadequate chewing. It seems we’ve acquired the beast
when we put it in our pocket, because we take it with us.
Come in from the Sky
A cathedral waited in my mind
as I leaned over her mouth.
The shelves around us spilled
casebooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries.
I repeated the doctrine: a man should not
lay down with his neighbor’s wife.
Her dildo’s curved beak glistened
as it left my body.
The curfew on my flood
of shame was punctuated by her moan.
I heard a chorus in her throat, the bird’s ribs
snapping against her palate. She might have
spoken if not for my kiss, the fat sound
rolling around in my mouth like a jaw-
breaker: affirmed, allowed.
Had praise been the clitoris’s silky crown,
and not a bud of oak or elm.
Had the hymns been practiced by shaky
woman tongues we put each into each,
I would have sheltered here.
In the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
A swollen hive opens its fluttering eye.
My gaze slides over ten unnamed cities.
So many people not to think of,
so many countries of thought
where I cannot take refuge.
Stopped at the viewing line,
I lean toward gold-framed petals
and wade into red cannas.
I burn your letters again,
unsettled your vases, my face
and mouth full of your weather.
I am exalted by the pianist ruffling
the same notes in the lobby. Across the room,
heels snap the floor into applause.
I’m undoing your sashes again,
lowering your skirt. Into the rushes, up against
the veins and dew, I press my mouth;
horses canter into the red wake.
Era of a Happy Heart
It was a marriage of August and dirty dishes.
A moth settled for three days on the wall behind the bed.
I brought my eyes into the room of her eyes.
I came away with black brown heather muslin dust.
I said, “Now I’m going to undress you”
and washed against a creature of air.
The ceiling spoke a trick of wood knots, changing
scripture of the slope. I wondered about a life spent alone.
For hours a violin played down the hall. I said, “Look,
a hundred black birds rising in unison.”
The mind of sadness was unified flight,
the aerodynamics of the flock in a neighboring field.
The dogs in the valley tore the silence open
for a passing fox. Her breath fasted on dream.
I came away with black brown heather muslin dust.
Shadows stole knowledge of her in their disposal of the day.
Here
I call your body home and listen
for all the rooms I’ll occupy,
the brag of my heels on marble,
a curtain’s steady notes,
tonguing the wall.
Quiet afternoons
when the postman passes
at three, sorting the day’s news.
The prayer I bend into you
finds a thief with her hand
in the silverware drawer.
The light divvying up
dust motes where red silk poppies
anchor a web by the door.
I fall into the greedy
snapping of breath in the well
which is your kiss.
And later, silence is a trophy
in every room, owning the days
with its crumpled sheets and
many, many questions.
ALYSE KNORR
Alyse Knorr is the author of Copper Mother (Switchback Books, forthcoming), Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013), and Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, Columbia Poetry Journal, The Greensboro Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2012), among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University. She serves as a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press and teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Fact-Checking
“You’re a long sad book about love,” she said. Or I said, about myself. We were smoking inside Darwin’s—back when you still could smoke inside—and eating the free popcorn and drinking the cheap beer. After the Rainier bottle-cap puzzles ran out, we’d turned to a game called Which Book Are You. She was a bestseller I lost on the bus. She was a work in translation. She was the one I kept starting
over.
She picked up my wrist and held it. She was always doing that—tugging at me, staking her claims. But she had none, at least technically. I was dating a man at the time—a truly Good Guy. And she had set us up.
“Let’s try and see the Titbook,” she said next. “I’ll ask the waitress.”
“No,” I said, “It’s taking advantage.”
“Don’t you want to see what another woman’s breasts look like?” she asked. This was a test or a flirtation or both.
“I have to work early,” I said. “I’ll call you for lunch.” And so there were no tits that night.
The truth is, I’d loved her since we were fifteen and met on the ski team. She was always warm, no matter what the temperature. She could sit beside me on the bus and heat me like a furnace.
My job at the paper was to check the facts and edit the copy. In practice, this meant correcting commas for eight hours a day. I didn’t mind cleaning up after others. I didn’t mind having no byline. It felt comforting to make a decision and immediately take action on it, even about something as small as a comma.
The fact-changing began as a one-time affair. I still remember the headline: “MOOSE OVER-RUNNING KINCAID PARK.” I’d gone back and forth on whether to add the word “are”: “Moose are over-running Kincaid Park.” I didn’t want to insert a clunky “to be” verb, but as it was, it sounded like only one moose was over-running the whole park.
And that’s when I got the idea. The article’s lead read, “A female moose protecting her calf charged a skier Monday at Kincaid Park on the Roller Coaster trail.” And just as easily as I would correct a comma, I changed “calf” to “calves.” Just like that, the moose had twins. In that moment, reality changed entirely, and I was the one who had changed it.
In fact, the closest I ever came to dying, I had thought of her. We were on a team-building trip whitewater rafting near Hope. Six of us in the boat plus the red-bearded guide in the back shouting out paddle commands. She was right behind me, and she was seventeen like me. Seventeen meant I had never once thought of death.
We hurtled over an eddy and crashed down bow-first. Water rushed into my corner of the raft, and the front lip caved into the river, and then I couldn’t breathe—sucked out of the raft and helmet smacked against rock, and my very next thought was, Did she see it happen? I was hoping to make her worry, to wring her hands and watch me drift downstream, struggling to turn onto my back like the guide had instructed: Let the current take you; don’t struggle.
I looked upstream for the raft and saw a yellow speck. Cold river trickled under my fingers, and I imagined the way water flowed over her skin in the shower, her fingers running through her soapy hair. She actually dyed her hair purple later, in college down in Seattle, and gained weight, then lost it again—plus much more—on an all-saltine cracker diet she adopted for various roles in various plays put on by the theatre troupe.
Through the window of the sandwich shop, we watched a line of tourists shuffle around the block clutching cartoon maps and water bottles.
“You know I skipped bingo for you,” she said. She worked at an assisted living facility called Anchorage Manor. Her job was to plan the activities—crafts, spelling bees, and movie nights where they served mocktails. Those living with assistance were never allowed alcohol.
“Listen,” I said. “Do you think the Titbook’s real?”
Specific rumors about the Titbook varied depending on whom you asked. According to some, only women were allowed access to it—and only if they agreed to a Polaroid of their own breasts first. Like a sisterhood of tits. Others had it that the exchange was “a shot for a shot.” And still others claimed that there was no Titbook at all, or that the bartenders only showed the book to those they thought would be too drunk to remember it.
“Why don’t you do a story on it and find out?” she said. “Isn’t that the whole point of the paper? To uncover the truth?”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “I’d never do that.”
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked, and her eyes locked on mine and made their point known.
For years we’d been doing this dance—testing each other, slowly building a case. About 60 percent of the time, I was sure she wanted me. But that wasn’t enough to tell her. There was too much at stake. It was too great a gamble.
A week or two after the moose, in an article about the Salmon Derby in Seward, I changed the weight of the prize salmon from 51.4 pounds to 51.9. I knew the winning fisherman wouldn’t call in to report an error half a pound in his favor. This was the art—getting away with it, of course, but more importantly, ensuring that the fact change did not disrupt anything essential to the story’s meaning. That, I decided, would be unethical, and I am a very ethical person.
So I never gave misinformation or invented quotes. It was the small details I altered, and in this way it felt like leaving my mark. Like an artist’s signature—like finding the artist’s hand in a painting’s tiny brushstrokes. I started to love seeing copies of the paper around town in a way I never had before. A thrill went through me every time, knowing at least one of my secrets always lay inside.
One year I flew down to surprise her when she was a Shark in the chorus of West Side Story, and I was shocked at how thin she was. All golden eyes hungry and hollowed out in her skull. She didn’t even have a speaking part. All I wanted was to hold her shaky bones in my hands and feed her directly from my mouth, and I wanted to put her fingers into my mouth, too, and that’s when I first realized that, like her, all I am is hunger and need.
Sometimes she’d call me from the Manor after she put the Assisted to bed. We’d do crosswords over the phone together or watch Bewitched and fight over which Dick we liked better. I’d cross out commas and listen to all the things she had to say.
“It’s depressing around here,” she might mutter.
“Isn’t it your job to keep them happy?” I’d ask.
“There’s only so much you can do,” she’d say, “to make them remember who they are.”
That afternoon, I made my biggest fact change yet. The story was about a brown bear who’d been shot in Girdwood after breaking into a house. He had smelled a pizza cooling on someone’s kitchen counter and had smashed in a window to get it. The homeowner had shot him three times with a shotgun.
My first thought was: What a stupid reason to die. For pizza, of all things. But then I felt embarrassed for the bear, and then I felt sorry for him. He was either so hungry he had to barge into someone’s home, or so brave he didn’t care. One was pitiable and one was admirable, and as I sat at my desk, oscillating between these two feelings, I realized that I couldn’t tell the difference, and that the difference didn’t matter.
I was The Great Gatsby, and she was The Sound and the Fury. I was 100 Years of Solitude, and she was Gone with the Wind.
I was surprised when she came back North after college. I thought she’d move to New York and star in off-off, then off, then Broadway productions. Singing and acting and dancing were all she’d ever cared about. Once I’d asked her how she could be so completely—so believably—someone else, and she shrugged and said, “That’s why it’s called acting.” And I knew then that she would ruin me all the way through.
The only thing that could be done to restore the bear’s dignity was to retell this one part of the story—how many shots it had taken to bring him down. In one quick moment I blacked out the “three” and changed it to “six.” Then I stood up quickly and carried the page down the hall to the copy chief for final proofing.
The whole walk back to my desk, my hands shook and I was hot with fear and relief. I reached for the phone as soon as I sat down.
“It’s me,” I said. “Do you have a movie night tonight?”
“Yeah, A League of Their Own,” she said. “But I can skip.”
“Okay. Let’s do Darwin’s at nine.”
“I’ve always loved what a wild woman you are,” she said.
By ten we
were silly drunk and by eleven she had cried once, put her hand on my knee once, and interrupted me in the middle of a story to hug me because I was so funny and she loved me so much and she was so, so glad we’re friends.
As the night went on, tourists smelling like hotels and buses started crowding the small bar, knocking over beers with their elbows and pointing at locals indiscriminately.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, taking my hand, and we walked down Sixth to the Inlet.
The ravens had all changed into their summer whites and were cawing so loud I could barely hear her when she said, “Tell me a secret.”
“What kind?” I asked. “You know all of mine.”
“If I knew all your secrets,” she said, “I wouldn’t still hang around you.”
I thought of the bear dying with the taste of hot bread in his mouth. I thought of the way her chin tucked to her chest when she glided down a hill. I thought of myself, in the ladies room after her play, holding my head in my hands and breathing.
“Tell yours first,” I said, and the gulls cawed at the thumbprint moon, and we both felt lonely.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been really loved,” she said. “Except by you.”
“What?” I asked. A hole tore open in my stomach. “You know?” And she did.
“No,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Well, it’s true.”
She was sitting beside me in the cool air pumping out heat like a radiator. Across the bay, Susitna slept in the purple light, waiting in the water for her love to come back to life.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.” And that’s when she put her hand on top of mine, and my chest tightened and released all at once. In that moment I felt like she’d opened some kind of backdoor in my life I didn’t know was there. I was seventeen again—seventeen still—and I would never, ever die. She kissed my hand, and I couldn’t believe it. She looked in my eyes, and I couldn’t believe it. She leaned in, and my heart was drowning itself.
We talked for hours, long after the sun finished setting. Making plans, telling our stories. Laughing about how long it had taken. I felt like I was at the first act of my own wedding. She held my hand, and she traced my lifeline. She found herself in all my futures.