Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight

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Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight Page 4

by Julia B. Levine


  this whole before consciousness,

  this evanescence resetting the world

  one loss at a time.

  It was apprehension before I could name it,

  and then it was after,

  and already she was thirteen,

  carrying buckets of feed stall to stall,

  calling out to the roan, the bay,

  in a voice strangely like my own.

  Before separation and its invention of longing,

  there was the silence where she once woke

  patiently staring up at me

  as if I was a place the sky should have been.

  And of that drowse and lush permission

  almost nothing remains.

  Only my banishment.

  Only a glimpse, now and then,

  out my car window

  of a girl cantering along the farmer’s slough.

  The Raccoon

  Dusk wakes the den beneath the house.

  A female climbs from the congregational warmth,

  her ringed tail sweeping the deck.

  At the glass doors, she stares in,

  lifts onto her haunches.

  Around us, our clothes are scattered

  like ephemera, like the moment

  turning physical before it vanishes.

  On the table, our meal untouched.

  Wineglasses glint through a spill of light.

  Behind her, we can hear the sea

  rework the silence.

  It’s not exactly starting over,

  but whatever breaks the body

  into handfuls of flesh and time, flaw and blessing,

  has summoned its hopeful shadow

  near the joining, has left us watching

  her dark hands at the door.

  We Sit in a Beached Rowboat

  beside each other, facing out to sea.

  Just beyond us, the dock has broken free

  so that the rotted planks of the ramp

  fall now, unworshipped, into deep water.

  How deftly one version has vanished—

  our daughters standing there in nightgowns and boots,

  their flashlights trained on a wild boil of shiners,

  or lying on the sun-warmed deck,

  shirts pulled up,

  setting a handful of newts free

  across each other’s skin.

  Already those children are too far away,

  too small to rescue, and it is growing dark.

  In the cliffs above us, the deer rise up

  from their crushed beds of grass.

  Around them, rings of blue gilia

  shut their delicate purses of seed.

  Soon Venus and the North Star

  will enter the sky’s deepening meadow.

  Already this is the version

  where time is made beautiful

  with waiting.

  Where everything breakable in you

  appears to me so often,

  so easily now—

  Leave-Taking

  How suddenly good-bye occupies the deepest place in us.

  So the shy ghosts of deer stop and stare

  at chrysalis and leaf jitter shifting in the vast fires of wind.

  All being is processional. It makes a sound like a scar,

  the path poorly translated into corridors of willow.

  Already our truck, loaded with mattresses and cookpans,

  grinds one last time over the cattle guards onto the highway.

  Behind us, darkness plumps the emptiness.

  Touches with all its plant and animal hands

  through a diaspora of doors. If only we could stay,

  listening to claws clicking on the linoleum, an army

  of mandibles dissembling the weathered timbers,

  we’d see the outside has waited so long to enter

  that now it arrives like prophecy, a wild fecundity

  taking up where it left off—

  wood-rats weaving strands of our hair into nests,

  bats chiming through shattered windows,

  comet scars ripening in a roofless bowl of sky.

  Eventually

  There will be a reckoning with joy and its aftershock:

  a family poised together under the burn of pistache,

  finches gathered on the lawn like a latch in sunlight.

  And though there will be no tragedy beyond the usual unfastening,

  it will begin with wind turning the pages of dominion,

  and children, dressed as soldiers,

  marching lantern-like into a gone summer. Afterwards,

  a heron will groan as it unfolds over the bay,

  water glistening like skin beneath an opened blouse,

  one daughter dragging a suitcase to her car, the other

  cantering a quarterhorse through the farmer’s fields.

  Nothing exotic or unbound,

  no unseemly disclosures or armies rising up

  like crop circles around them—no, it will be an ordinary

  banishment, rich with surrender,

  desire splitting the joinery into time.

  And yet, for a while under the trembling pistache,

  a man and woman will hold hands, dazed

  and small, wondering how abundance vanishes so quickly

  into a sky carved with birds, a winged and yellow chaos

  exploding into air, drifting slowly down.

  V

  music despite everything

  Tahoe Wetlands

  Here the ground sings,

  the marshes whir with invisible coots and swans.

  Here the self is a flyway

  over the hieroglyphics of wheel and track,

  and the winged husk that was my hovering

  just beyond his body’s piston.

  Each summer these rice fields burn to carbon.

  Each winter, rain pours into the rutted cradles

  the way the nurse

  passed her hands across the bruise

  his gun forced into my thigh.

  Time is like this kind of light,

  equal parts ravage and mercy

  striking the berm black, the brush gold,

  the molten edges

  lifting a flock of tundra swans

  into the Sierra’s remote shoulders.

  Finally, the years have drained his shadow

  into the pond’s mirror-finish. Now all that remains

  is what vengeance spawned:

  a wish like bones

  scattered after the kill,

  a voice pulled from ice, wind rattling the cattails.

  If you could have seen me that morning—

  new mother, new wife,

  crawling this half mile over mud

  into my soon-to-be

  ex-husband’s arms, you might ask,

  Is the violence over? No,

  first the self must join prayers

  with its collapse. No, it takes a long time

  to learn how to lose everything.

  Tahoe City, 1988

  I want to tell it again as the story of two lovers

  meeting in a park just before winter,

  a light frost crusting the fields.

  I want him to appear small and forsaken

  beneath the immense vault of the Sierras,

  his hood pulled away from his face.

  A kingdom of starlings

  lifts from the nearly bare branches,

  one wave of disturbance becoming another,

  as he watches me run, his hands in his pockets,

  and I want him frozen between doubt

  and a blaze of desire.

  As for those birds setting back down,

  I want the last few leaves they’ve knocked into air

  to fall as apology, an error in tense.

  And even if I can’t decide

  whether sun kindles the lawn,

  or the first snow is waiting just under the hour,


  every story must happen in time.

  In time his gun slips from its sheath,

  presses cold to my temple.

  Here, no language for asking,

  no jacket to lay between dirt and my face.

  And because truth is a current

  that both enters and carries the story,

  here the story wrestles with silence,

  and here it returns as a ghost,

  as he shoves his gun back in his pocket,

  bends to my ear, wet lips muttering,

  “That’s all I wanted,”

  his boots kicking up a clatter of birdsong,

  a feather sifting violet over the trail.

  Ode to Fruit Flies

  They lend a sparse fur to the air

  just above the bananas,

  or hover like a small cloud

  over the cut daffodils on my table,

  while two or three

  tread wings in a glass of wine.

  Urge and urge and urge, Whitman wrote

  about the coming apart,

  the coming differently back again.

  When I woke this morning

  there were yellow tulips opening in the garden.

  I stood at the sink, filling the kettle,

  and looked out at each corseted flower.

  In my dream, wind was tossing a child

  between trees, and my father had returned

  from death

  to catch her just in time. Sometimes

  I need the truth close and in my face.

  Sometimes when I no longer wish

  to be diminished, the very air flares—

  sudden hallelujahs

  strung like jostled, tiny lanterns

  across the changing mind of sky.

  Songbird

  Listen—

  nothing is more damned than joy.

  Like the fine pain of a papercut

  on the lips of a desperate plea,

  let it enter—

  the unheard falling of a colossal pine

  and its armature, its delicate green ceilings

  adrift on a cloud of earth.

  If the idea of delay is prayer,

  if the sky suffers in its weightless swinging

  between branches, perhaps song itself

  is a prelude to brokenness—

  velvet indentation

  of something thrown down,

  a vireo floating face up in grass

  like a small excerpt of silence,

  a golden visible

  lashed to a darker wing.

  Listen—even if narcissus burn

  in acrid welters of yolk and petal,

  even if the orchard

  explodes in downy shrapnel,

  still, the world was made from divided parts

  and passed through

  on its way to a larger shining.

  Yes to the Youth at an Outdoor Concert

  Because today they are everywhere, supple

  and flushed with something just lit.

  Even the cows raise their heads from the fields to stare.

  The boys are shirtless, their backs sinewy and marbled.

  And the girls in sundresses, all slope and cleavage

  like these mounded hills fired up

  in the extravagance of mustard, new grass.

  Sure, they will drink too much, redden and burn.

  In the car behind me, there is the flare

  of a lighter, a pipe passed around.

  But this is the hour of the zenith.

  This is the first afternoon of real heat

  when the forget-me-nots and columbine and bush lupine

  clamor and swell, the mule ears flare,

  when new buds turn inside out the earth’s hunger,

  fragile arches of the petals

  offering up a thousand little doors.

  And why not enter wherever you can?

  Why not let them dive together

  into another round of joy and longing,

  before they learn the names for brevity?

  Why not gather up a kingdom of the newly risen

  and rub their bodies together into fire?

  Garden Party as the Prow of a Small Ship Traveling

  Above the blue-glass goblets,

  mismatched plates, something winged but crying persists.

  Presses in on a June evening,

  the tornado warning finally lifted, the ribeye cooked

  to rare perfection. Kumquats burn

  inside the tree’s low cage like a brilliance troubled into fire.

  Someone has marinated oranges

  in wine. Wrapped trout in bacon. Someone says,

  They are probably owlets

  in a nestbox, frightened and hungry, so that now the cries

  separate into three, you think,

  one a little higher, one more rhythmic against the third

  screeching for the parent wings,

  the fresh kill. On the roof, a hivebox hums.

  Someone built those bees

  a cupboard, those owls a box, as if to make a sanctuary

  deep inside creation

  as it unravels, layer upon accelerating layer.

  Someone asks you to pass

  your plate. Now take a different vantage,

  say from infinity’s lookout.

  There, destruction has its opportunities for variance. Look

  at those Icelandic poppies,

  their fanfare and ruddy cups ruthlessly throwing themselves

  open, the star-threads of columbine

  sipping at the unforeseen. Look at the sensual doors

  of the mouths beside you,

  opening and closing around the edges of pleasure,

  a hoisted cake lit by candles,

  voices gathered into an arsenal of the colloquial,

  the well-intentioned. Yes,

  everyone is born inside time’s appetite for more.

  Live, live, live, you hear

  in the homesick hour of the clock, hurry, hurry, hurry,

  in the warning minutes

  of the hatchlings, their audible derangement vexing

  the night’s thickening stars.

  Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse

  It was summer, whatever that was—

  slow landscape of heat and sprinklers,

  the last cherries falling in a bloody circle

  around the tree, the sound of a firing range

  just beyond the pines.

  My daughter had asked me to turn out

  the coal black horse—

  his enormous hooves like iron hammers,

  his sweat-damp flanks like cannons

  locked against my shoulders.

  And my heart, that clock of many inside one,

  banging away

  as if to build itself another shelter,

  a better one with fewer doors.

  I stepped inside his stall and took the rope,

  calling out his name.

  Swallows rustled in the rafters, dust spiraling after.

  He laid his muzzle across my shoulder

  the way a fine wind touches sand,

  the heat and scent of the world in him.

  And he neither led nor followed,

  but plodded so close beside me

  his darkness kept knocking mine,

  as if carrying something of the unbearable

  between us until it could be borne.

  Interlude

  In September, the wind surprisingly warm

  after such a cool summer, we stand in the farmer’s fields

  and pick the last blackberries to make it into ripeness.

  Shaft and aftershaft of clouds wheel across the pasture.

  Vultures circle like winged erasers.

  Angry marks crosshatch your arms, but you refuse a jacket,

  meaning, you want to feel the thorns, the irrevocable flowering.

  The part of time no one can t
ouch.

  Deeper in, I find a hollowed-out copse of cattails

  where the blacktail sleep, a few seeds of milkweed drifting down.

  What if there is no death, only moments looking elsewhere?

  What if this is what listening does—

  the hour dissembled down to its smallest eternity,

  the still light of dusk slipping like water over Black Mountain?

  As for my can of berries, poorly ripened, but brimming,

  they have traveled a particular weather

  to reach this chirring, all the small particles of sound

  changing into evening,

  a few bats flying out like black kites between the trees.

  And you, who have had your share of sorrow,

  the kind that complicates the body, dirties the spirit,

  call back in answer

  from deep inside this lush and sharpened thicket,

  Yes, I have more than enough,

  and mean it.

  Variations on Rupture and Repair: Cottage

  Hidden inside ceanothus

  and a bed of wild poppies,

  it was unlocked

  when we knocked, entered in.

  I want to say we touched nothing.

  That the silence inside that strange room

  did not say, Lie down, undress,

  while our vigilance sorted out the tonalities

  of a crow outside the window

  from the orchestral hush of the sea down below.

  I want to say that we were altered

  by our hidden inventories of longing,

  when, simply, there was an unfamiliar bed

  covered in a blue comforter, three down pillows,

  and a damp stain when we rose up.

  We knew it was trespass,

  and yet there was a tenderness in your hands

  at the washbasin, a little slip of soap

  pressed against the coverlet, wetted and foaming,

  like a spirit going over and over the world

  of what it already knows.

  Perhaps there are blessings

  that blossom outward from violation.

  Perhaps we had to enter through a new door

  to rise differently, glad to have fallen

  from the wings we meant to put back on,

  from the myths we needed to walk through

  into the incandescence of our ordinary lives.

  In Praise of What Remains

  After he left you on the wrong side of beautiful,

  your body thrown like a coat onto the ground,

 

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