That Said Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  New Poems

  Willow

  Priorities

  Fortune Cookies

  Chatty Cathy

  Danny Kaye at the Palace

  My Father’s Shoe Trees

  Last Words

  Pickwick

  Gratitude

  A Reminder

  American Girls

  Mirror/Mirror

  Gaslight

  Staging Your House

  Where to Find Us

  Rainbow Weather

  Eye Level

  Witness

  The Advent Calendar

  A Letter Sent to Summer

  Noon

  Home Movies: 1949

  Fortunes Pantoum

  The Lifeguard

  Sounding the Lake

  Eye Level

  The Minute Hand

  A Clock

  Pharaoh

  Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze

  The Russian Doll

  Anthony

  Thumbelina

  High Holy Days

  The Game of Jackstraws

  Tender Acre

  Wood

  Persian Miniature

  The Glass Slipper

  Dresses

  A Luna Moth

  The Island

  Music Minus One

  Washing the Streets of Holland

  Monday

  Learning to Read

  Best Friend

  The Sunroom

  The Holiday Season

  The Slap

  The House of Silver Blondes

  Music Minus One

  Meat

  Workout

  The Wrong End of the Telescope

  Missing

  Postpartum, Honolulu

  The Bad Mother

  The Sound of Sense

  Holocaust Museum

  The Lazy Susan

  The Combination

  Happy Family

  Happy Family

  Crazy Joey

  Mrs. Hitler

  The Uncanny

  The Best-Dressed Girl in School

  My Mother’s Space Shoes

  Evil Eye

  Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium

  Reprise

  Shit Soup*

  My Mother’s Mirror

  Happiness

  A Yes-or-No Answer

  A Yes-or-No Answer

  The Streak

  My Mother’s Chair

  The Closet

  Possession

  Trouble Dolls

  The Blue Address Book

  Dummy

  Shopping Urban

  My Mother’s Foot

  Keys

  Trick Candles

  My Father’s Visits

  Unforgettable

  Dream City

  Body and Soul

  God’s Breath

  On the Way Back from Goodwill

  Fugue

  Scrabble in Heaven

  Gelato

  Acknowledgments

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2012 by Jane Shore

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shore, Jane, date.

  That said : new and selected poems / Jane Shore.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-68711-7

  I. Title.

  PS3569.H5795T53 2012

  811'.54—dc23

  2011036907

  Book design by Greta D. Sibley

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  MUSIC MINUS ONE® is a registered trademark of MMO Music Group, Inc. MMO Music Group has not in any way sponsored, approved, endorsed, or authorized this book.

  They inflict on us a tremendous silence.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Some Reflections on

  Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel”

  New Poems

  Willow

  It didn’t weep the way a willow should.

  Planted all alone in the middle of the field

  by the bachelor who sold our house to us,

  shoulder height when our daughter was born,

  it grew eight feet a year until it blocked

  the view through the first-, then the second-

  story windows, its straggly canopy obstructing

  our sunrise and moonrise over Max Gray Road.

  I gave it the evil eye, hoping lightning

  would strike it, the way a bolt had split

  the butternut by the barn. And if leaf blight

  or crown gall or cankers didn’t kill it, then

  I’d gladly pay someone to chop it down.

  My daughter said no, she loved that tree,

  and my husband agreed. One wet Sunday—

  the rainiest July since 1885—

  husband napping, daughter at a matinee

  in town—a wind shear barreled up the hill

  so loud I glanced up from my mystery

  the moment the willow leaned, bowed,

  and fell over flat on its back, roots and all,

  splayed on the ground like Gulliver.

  The house shook, just once.

  Later, when the sun came out, neighbors

  came to gawk; they chain-sawed thicker

  branches, wrapped chains around the trunk,

  their backhoe ripped out pieces of stump

  and root as if extracting a rotten tooth.

  I’m not sorry that tree is gone. No one

  ever sat under it for shade or contemplation.

  Yet spring after spring it reliably leafed out.

  It was always the last to lose its leaves

  in fall. It should have died a decade ago

  for all the grief I gave it, my dirty looks

  apparently the fuel on which it thrived.

  It must have done its weeping in private.

  But now I can see the slope of the hill.

  Did my wishful thinking cast a spell?

  I was the only one on earth who saw it fall.

  Priorities

  Sleeping alone in my Madison Avenue

  Upper East Side seventeen-by-seventeen

  fourth-floor walkup one night thirty

  years ago, I heard people arguing

  through the plaster and brick wall dividing

  my brownstone from the one next door.

  I’d hardly given my neighbors a second thought

  except those I’d occasionally see in the hall

  retrieving mail, struggling up narrow stairs

  with grocery bags, or leashing their dogs.

  I used to amuse myself by matching up faces

  with the names above the intercom buttons

  in the vestibule downstairs, but I never

  stopped for anything more than chitchat,

  never thought about the people living

  in the adjacent building until the night I hear

  a woman crying loud enough to rouse me,

  and a deeper voice, a man’s, whose words

  I can’t make out but whose angry bellowing

  bullies me awake. Perhaps they’re actors

  rehearsing a play, or he’s her drama coach

  and she’s practicing her lines from the scene

  where the man and the woman fight.

  I’m thinking I should dial 911 when—

  through the white noise of my hissing radia
tor—

  he shouts, “You’ve got to order your priorities!”

  like a therapist on an emergency house call,

  which works. She’s whimpering like a dog.

  There follows a clearing of the moment’s

  throat, a sponging of tears, a charged silence,

  as if now they’re making love and all before

  was foreplay. And I’m in bed with them.

  How many times have I had to listen—

  half attracted, half repelled—to strangers’ thumps

  and moans in the hotel room next to mine?

  Their dramas? The next morning, sharing their

  elevator (too bright, too small) to the lobby,

  I have nothing to be ashamed of. But I’m feeling

  that same tongue-tied strangeness I used to feel

  with a one-night stand the morning after.

  Fortune Cookies

  My old boyfriend’s fortune cookie read,

  Your love life is of interest only to yourself.

  Not news to me. A famous writer

  once showed me the fortune in his wallet—

  You must curb your lust for revenge—

  slapped over his dead mother’s face.

  After finishing our Chinese meal

  at that godforsaken mall,

  eight of us crowded around the table,

  the white tablecloth sopping up

  islands of spilled soy sauce and beer,

  the waiter brought tea and oranges

  sliced into eighths and a plate of fortune cookies.

  We played our after-dinner game—

  each of us saying our line out loud,

  the chorus adding its coda:

  “You will meet hundreds of people...” “In bed.”

  “Every man is a volume if you know how to read him...” “In bed.”

  “You have unusual equipment for success...” “In bed.”

  And those with more delicate sensibilities,

  new to the group, blushed

  and checked their wristwatches.

  We divided up the bill, and split.

  A few left their fortunes behind.

  The rest slipped those scraps of hope or doom

  into pockets and pocketbooks to digest later.

  Maybe one or two of us got lucky that night

  and had a long and happy life in bed.

  On the ride home, I absent-mindedly

  rolled my fortune into a tight coil,

  the way you roll a joint, and dropped it

  into my coat pocket,

  and found it yesterday—

  oh, how many years later—

  caught between the stitches of the seam,

  like one of those notes

  wedged into a niche of the Wailing Wall

  that someday God might read in bed

  and change a life.

  Chatty Cathy

  The first time I got my hands on her,

  I took off all her clothes—to see

  exactly where her voice came from.

  I pulled the white plastic O-ring

  knotted to the pull string in her back,

  pulled it, gently, as far as it would go,

  and Chatty Cathy threw her voice—

  not from her closed pretty pink lips

  but from the open speaker-grille in her chest.

  Chatty Cathy was her own ventriloquist!

  She said eighteen phrases at random,

  chatting up anyone who’d pull her string.

  Tell me a story. Will you play with me?

  What can we do now? Do you love me?

  Did I love her? I loved her so much

  I had to be careful not to wear her out.

  Even though she always “talked back,”

  behavior my parents would have spanked me for,

  there wasn’t a naughty bone in her

  hard little body! When she’d say,

  Carry me. Change my dress. Take me with you.

  Brush my hair—she always said Please.

  When she’d say, Let’s play school.

  Let’s have a party. Let’s play house—

  she’d flash me her charming potbelly.

  May I have a cookie? she’d sweetly ask,

  in that high fake goody-goody voice.

  She wasn’t allowed to eat or drink—

  it would gunk up the mini record player

  inside her chest. May I have a cookie?

  She’d pester me while I combed her hair

  and buttoned her dress for a tea party.

  I’m hungry—she’d point her index finger at me until

  I held a pretend cookie against her lips

  and poured her another empty cup of tea.

  May I have a cookie? May I have a cookie?

  Finally, one afternoon I gave her one,

  squishing it into the holes of her grille.

  After that, sometimes she’d start talking

  all by herself, a loud deep gargling

  that shook her body—limbs akimbo,

  skirt inching up—showing her panties

  with the MADE IN HONG KONG tag

  still attached. I HURT myself! she cried.

  Please carry me. I’m hungry. I’m sleepy.

  She awoke with two black marks on her leg

  and a crack on her back along the seam.

  A rash of Chatty Pox dotted her cheeks.

  Give me a kiss, she ordered, and I did.

  I’d do anything to shut her up.

  Where are we going? bratty Chatty Cathy

  warbled for the last time.

  She stopped wanting to play. Stopped

  saying I love you. Next, laryngitis.

  Then a growling sound.

  Her O-ring cracked off, the frayed

  string a strangled loop spooling

  inside her damaged voice box.

  Then she was mute, stiffly propped

  against my bed pillow like a fancy

  boudoir doll made only for show.

  Danny Kaye at the Palace

  He kissed me once in his dressing room

  at the Palace Theater. I was six,

  and he was forty, and my aunt Rozzy

  had had a fling with him years before

  he was famous, when he was a tummler

  clowning at her first husband’s hotel

  in the Catskills. Danny Kaye was famous

  in our house too. My family would talk

  about his family like family; his daughter,

  Dena, just my age, was like a cousin

  twice removed. How many times

  had I heard the one about how Danny

  and Aunt Rozzy took a midnight drive

  and smashed up her husband’s roadster?

  (No one was hurt.) There’s a snapshot

  of them smooching on a rustic bench,

  Danny draped impishly across her lap,

  the boss’s wife, Queen of White Roe,

  not the thrice-married, thrice-divorced,

  childless bookkeeper she’d become.

  And on whose sumptuous lap I sat,

  that matinee at the Palace, although

  my orchestra seat cost her one week’s pay.

  Here was Danny Kaye in person,

  Aunt Rozzy’s Danny Kaye, rattling

  off the names of 54 Russian composers

  in the 38 seconds of a song named “Tschaikowsky.”

  “Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakoff...,”

  the stage so close I could see

  his spit-spray dancing with the dust.