Forage

by Rose McLarney

  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

  in a cocktail, children’s voices from the playground

  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.