by Alan Shapiro
That grew less round the heavier it grew,
A tiny sack of water filled by water,
Held by water trembling as it clung
And dangled, swaying, till it snapped in two,
And one part plummeted and the other sprung
Back to the lip and grew all over again.
I told myself if I could just remember
The way the trembling surface tension full
Of surface tension hung there till it didn't,
Till it did again, somehow the house,
And everything and everyone within it,
The very moment of that day and year,
All of it, every bit would return to me
Exactly as it was. And I did. And it didn't.
Bedroom Door
The book informed you that the universe,
Infinite though it was, was still expanding
Though into where or what it didn't say.
You didn't need it to, it didn't matter,
Feeling space all around you moving off
The longer you stood there in the hall to hear
Their voices arguing behind the door,
One moment shouting and the next imploring,
Complaining, berating, don't take that tone with me,
See what you've done, you happy now, you happy?
Words flying beyond their meaning into sound
That flew in turn beyond sound into echoes
And after echoes you could feel, not hear.
And feel more keenly the farther away they flew.
The universe expanded to make room
For all the outer space their voices were creating,
Till even what was nearest moved away,
Till there was nothing near, and everywhere
In all directions all at once was rushing
Forever from the shrinking dot of your
Attention into who knew what or where.
Solitaire
The flip, flip, flip of card on tabletop,
The flat hiss of the cards her hands were sliding
From column to column as the columns grew
And shrank, and shrank and grew, by suit and sequence,
Her face unsmiling, fixed in its staring down
At the unsmiling faces of the queen,
The king, the jack that stared back up at her
From the wrong column, or the wrong order,
The royal family broken apart and scattered,
Unable without her help to reunite.
That's why she played for hours, sometimes all night,
To prove to them how much they need her, how
There'd be no family till she got it right.
Would it kill them, for once, to thank her for this devotion,
The slid cards hissing, the flip, flip, flip,
While down the hall that wasn't a hall at all
But a rope bridge over a gorge in the antipodes
I huddled before the snowy screen where Ralph,
The Honeymooner, shook his fist and said,
One of these days, Alice, one of these days—
Bang! Zoom! To the moon! And people laughed.
Cellar
They said the boy who lived here in my room
Before I did came home one day from school
And hanged himself from a hook in the cellar wall.
They said he left no note. They said he showed no signs
Of being blue—that's what they called it then—
They said the day was just another day
In just another week on a quiet street
Where nothing ever happened, until this did
And the family sold the house and moved away.
They never said the cellar was to blame,
The metal door slanted against the house
That led by steep steps down into the black
Of it that slowly as your eyes adjusted
Became a pit of dark and darker shadows
The darkest of which was the dead furnace
In a far corner, a dank cold smell of ash
Surrounding it as if to warn you off ,
And there beside the furnace a chainless bike
With fat flat tires, and above the bike
The hook below a narrow window that
The cut grass grew against and covered up.
White Gloves
Nothing as soft as the silk-lined leather gloves
Kept in the top drawer of her dresser, the black ones
And the cream ones, the slip-ons or the butt oned,
Laced-up or ruched, the flared, the elbow-length,
The heavy stifling odor of lilac and something
Talcum-like that rose from the open drawer,
Lustre of the red Dents, flat sheen of the Pitt ards,
Day in day out, for high and low occasions,
Until the last occasion, whatever it was,
When none of them were ever worn again,
Not even the white ones, the most expensive,
The ones she buried at the bott om of the drawer
That I would now and then dig out and look at,
As if by looking at the pattern of
The stitching or the textures of the grain,
I'd understand the meaning of the pictures
Of the president suddenly reaching for his throat,
And the first lady turning to look at him,
Turning to see what's wrong when the head explodes,
And she's crawling out across the back of the car
In a pink dress suit, pink hat and bright white gloves.
Shed
A cat jumped out of the shed when I opened it,
And from far away inside a startled room
Inside me that I didn't know was there,
Somebody screamed, and it was only then
I understood exactly what it meant,
The science book that told me I was made
Of cells, and the cells were made of molecules
Made of atoms made of mostly space,
And how within what wasn't space within them
There were other spaces, smaller and vaster spaces,
And somewhere within them all there was this room,
And somebody inside the room was screaming.
He screamed so far away across the outer
Reaches of all that inner space, light-years
Of emptiness between himself and me,
That the scream itself was like the light
Of stars that had vanished long before the light
Had ever reached my eyes. So while the boy
Screamed, and would not stop screaming, how could I tell him
That it was just a cat that had jumped out
From the shed, a cat, and now the cat was gone?
Hallway
You could stand in the hallway between rooms,
Between belonging anywhere, and feel
As if you were the wind harp of the house
That the voices played, trembling inside you,
If you were quiet enough, unseen enough,
Your nerve ends, tuned to their very tips
To every spoken and unspoken mood,
Discordant mutterings and "the random gales"
Of love cries, curses you could always feel,
If not quite hear, above the laugh track or
The gunfire or the talking talk-show host
They turned up high to hide themselves behind.
You were the wind harp of the listening house;
You were the open instrument the voices
Swept across, not knowing that they did,
The taut strings of your attention trembling
Long into what has long since disappeared
From the dark hallway that is nowhere now
But here in these lines where you feel the air
Of every lost voice quickening again
Across the mute harp they never knew was
there.
The Doorbell
The doorbell rang an eight-note melody,
And if I didn't hurry down the stairs
To the front door before the eighth note played,
I told myself there'd be nobody there.
The world impatient to be unaware
Of me again would never bring them back.
Why else would that eighth note linger in the stairwell,
Drawing itself out to its last vibration
Except to wait for me, keeping time away,
Turning the present moment to a birth-
Day present my every quick step down the stairs
Brought nearer till the front door opened it?
And even now I hear it, note after note
Of the old melody whose last note pauses
In the no time of my hurrying down
To get to you, in time, whoever you were,
You who I am now, whom I have become,
The one the world's impatient to take back,
The one behind the door who's pushed the butt on,
And waits there listening for the sound
Of anybody's footstep coming near.
Notes
"Dry Cleaner": the closing lines are by James Thomson.
"Close to You": from "Close to You," a hit single by the Carpenters in the 1970s.
"Amphitheater": the quotation is based on Pindar's fourth Pythian ode (lines 262–268).
"Convention Hall": the second line is quoted from Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge (page 213); "in the midst of doubt..." is from Oliver Wendell Holmes's essay on the Civil War.
"Hallway": the quoted phrase is from Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp."