That Said Read online

  That afternoon on the Bay of Fundy,

  as the car plunged in and out of the cobweb fog,

  everything was in the process of erasing

  or being erased.

  At low tide, the tidal bore’s puddle-raked mud flats

  looked like a bolt of brown corduroy

  running down the coast.

  Later, when the sun came out, the puddles

  turned into shattered mirrors, long shards,

  blue sky and clouds lying in pieces on the ground,

  as though the heavens had fallen down.

  Stopping at a gas station for directions

  and a Coke, my husband and I heard the local joke:

  “You go from Upper Economy, to Middle, to Lower,

  to Just Plain Broke.”

  The next day, on Cape Breton, pressed for time,

  we wanted to drive the entire Cabot Trail

  in a day. If we started at dawn

  and drove clockwise around the coast,

  we’d end up at dusk where we began.

  The road linked town after coastal town,

  each with its prim white clapboard church

  starched stiff as a christening gown.

  Azure woodsheds, chartreuse barns,

  stilt houses shingled gray or shingled brown,

  matchbox houses two stories high

  painted the same pea green, ochre, or peacock blue

  as the boats docked in the harbor below.

  In Nova Scotia—nowhere else in the Maritimes—

  fishermen paint their houses to match their boats!

  It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,

  everything scaled down, “smaller than life.”

  In Belle Côte, four wooden fishing boats

  bobbed single-file gosling-style

  in the middle of the harbor

  while real full-size fishing boats

  bobbed, tethered to the dock.

  Were they a practical joke

  or a winter evening’s woodwork?

  Those little boats looked too serious to be toys.

  And that dollhouse stuck on a pole—

  a whittled-down version of the gabled house

  looming up behind it—

  was really a mailbox!

  No mail today. No one home.

  Everyone seems to have vanished,

  leaving their toys behind.

  We counted more scarecrows than farmers

  working in the fields.

  No solitaries crucified on broom poles

  meditating over a quarter acre of corn,

  these posed in groups, in gay tableaux,

  whole families of scarecrows

  watching their gardens grow.

  We drove past a family of scarecrow men

  lovingly dressed in their Sunday best—

  workshirts, overalls, and stovepipe hats.

  Great-grandfather, Grandfather, Father, and Son

  holding hands like a row of paper dolls,

  passing on the deed to the farm

  to the last son, the current one, the heir,

  stretching out his hand to thin air.

  A few miles up the road

  a scarecrow child was dressed for winter

  in dungarees, sweater, mittens, and a scarf,

  standing between his scarecrow mother and father,

  whose broomstick arm stuck out

  in a permanent gesture of waving hello—or goodbye—

  depending on the direction

  you were driving to—or from.

  That day, I was wearing an Indian cotton skirt

  printed with huge vivid flowers.

  A bee flew into the open window of the moving car

  and tried to pollinate my skirt.

  Given the modest scale of things,

  whose idea was it to build

  “the largest lobster trap in the world,”

  a wooden scaffolding the size of a cathedral?

  How many weathered traps had we seen

  stacked by the side of the road?

  A lobster trap?—it was a tourist trap!

  Inside, a little gift shop

  sold the usual array of junk:

  lobster ashtrays, lobster key rings,

  and foot-long lobster-claw combs.

  Not nearly as grand, the crafts museum

  masqueraded as a souvenir stand.

  We arrived just before closing.

  The curator had just taken out her teeth.

  Tight-lipped but cheerful, she led us

  through a room jammed from floor to ceiling

  with antique spinning wheels.

  It was like strolling through the inside of a clock.

  She sat on a low stool, carding raw wool

  into clouds that she proceeded to spin,

  pumping her treadle like an organ pedal,

  demonstrating, for at least the hundredth time that day,

  one of the lost arts of the district,

  kept just barely alive by her

  and a few elderly lady volunteers.

  Down the road lived her Micmac counterpart—

  the last of her tribe who knew how

  to weave baskets from sweet grass and porcupine quills.

  Crayoned signs read, PLEASE DON’T TOUCH!

  the swatches of Scottish tartans and coats of arms,

  and the bagpipe, a droopy octopus.

  Don’t touch the yellowing scrimshaw,

  the tiny ivory- and bone-handled tools

  that tatted feverish edges on doilies and handkerchiefs

  also on display. Don’t touch the battered toys—

  dolls, locomotives, decoys, and the love letter

  whose frilly signature’s a faded sepia lace.

  In a separate glass case, a missionary’s

  English-Micmac dictionary, and a pair

  of beaded moccasins with stiff enormous tongues.

  Of course, you can’t touch them!

  Or the sand-encrusted gold doubloon

  shipwrecked off the coast like the rising moon—

  lost, all lost, and then recovered.

  Missing

  These children’s faces printed on a milk carton—

  a boy and a girl

  smiling for their school photographs,

  each head stuck atop a column

  of vital statistics:

  date of birth, height and weight, color

  of eyes and hair.

  On a carton of milk.

  Half gallon, a quart.

  Of what use is the body’s

  container, the mother weeping milk or tears.

  No amount of crying will hold it back

  once it has begun its journey

  as you bend all night over the toilet,

  over a fresh bowl of water.

  Coins of blood spattering the tile floor

  as though a murder had been committed.

  Something wasn’t right, they say,

  you are lucky.

  Too soon to glimpse the evidence

  of gender, or to hear a heartbeat.

  Put away the baby book, the list of names.

  There are four thousand, at least, to choose from.

  No need now to know their derivations,

  their meanings.

  Faces pass you in the supermarket

  as you push the wire cart down the aisles.

  The police artist flips through pages

  of eyes and noses, assembling a face,

  sliding the clear cellophane panels into place.

  You take a quart of milk.

  Face after face,

  smiling obedient soldiers,

  march in even rows

  in the cold glass case.

  Postpartum, Honolulu

  Before she was born,

  I was a woman who slept

  through the night, who could live

  with certain thoughts without collapsing
...

  if my husband died,

  I could remarry; if I lost

  my job, I could relocate,

  start afresh...

  I could live through “anything.”

  Even my daughter arriving

  four weeks early,

  a smile stitching my raw abdomen, hurting

  as if I’d been cut in half.

  When they brought her to me

  for the first time, her rosiness

  astonished me, she

  who had been so long in the dark:

  now swathed in an absurd cap and a blanket

  washed, rewashed, folded precisely as origami;

  a diaper fan-folded to accommodate

  her tiny body, a long-sleeved undershirt

  with the cuffs folded over her perfect hands,

  making them stumps.

  In my private room

  filled with expensive gift bouquets,

  the stalk-necked bird of paradise flowers,

  blind under their spiky crowns of petals,

  gawked at me, and the anthurium’s

  single heart-shaped blood-red leaf

  dangled a skinny penis.

  The next morning, they wheeled me to the nursery.

  Behind the glass window,

  the newborns were displayed, each

  in its own clear plastic Isolette.

  A few lay in separate cribs, under heat lamps,

  and among them, mine,

  born thirty days early, scrawny, naked, her skin tinged

  orange with jaundice.

  Under the ultraviolet lamps, her eyes taped shut,

  like a person in a censored photograph,

  a strip of tape slapped over her genitalia,

  a prisoner, anonymous, in pain—

  my daughter, one day old, without a name,

  splayed naked under the lamps,

  soaking up the light of this world,

  a sad sunbather stretched out on Waikiki.

  The Bad Mother

  When we play our game, Emma

  always saves the best roles for herself:

  the Princess, the Mermaid, Cinderella.

  Pushing her toy broom around the kitchen,

  she’ll put up with the dust and the suffering.

  She knows she’ll be rewarded in the end.

  We act out one of her favorite scenes,

  where the wicked stepsisters

  tear Cinderella’s gown to shreds—

  the dress she’s about to wear to the ball,

  the dress sewn from scraps

  of her own dear dead mother’s clothes.

  While I rip the invisible lace,

  Emma flings herself to the floor, sobbing

  until I, her Fairy Godmother, show up

  and spoil her with a coach and a chauffeur,

  and a ball gown tiered like a wedding cake.

  I’ve expanded my repertoire.

  I’m Snow White’s vain stepmother

  disguised as a pimpled crone,

  a traveling saleswoman

  knocking on the Seven Dwarfs’ door,

  selling Snow White—no, giving away for free—

  my entire inventory of poison bodices, apples, combs,

  to a heroine who gets instant amnesia

  every time evil is about to strike.

  I’m the Thirteenth Fairy

  who makes Sleeping Beauty

  prick her finger on a spindle

  and fall into Adolescence’s deep sleep

  from which she’ll awaken,

  years later as I did, as a mother.

  Over and over, I watch my daughter

  fall into a faint, and die.

  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I call from below,

  eye level with the hem of the dust ruffle,

  “let down your hair!”

  And Emma solemnly flips her long beige braids

  over the edge of the bed—wearing

  a pair of my pantyhose on her head, like a wig.

  The nylon feet softly brush the floor.

  Now I am witch, now prince, now witch

  climbing the pale ladder of Rapunzel’s hair.

  Pretending my fingers are scissors,

  I lop off her braids, cutting off

  the source of my daughter’s power,

  her means of escape, her route

  to loving someone other than me.

  Once, I played the heroine,

  now look what I’ve become.

  I am the one who orders my starving child

  out of my house and into the gloomy woods,

  my resourceful child, who fills her pockets

  with handfuls of crumbs or stones

  and wanders into a witch’s candy cottage.

  I am the one who sends my Vassilissa on an errand

  from which it’s doubtful she’ll return alive

  from a fate too horrible to say aloud,

  a witch’s hut built from her victims’ bones.

  I’m the one who commands the hunter to kill,

  and cut out my daughter’s heart

  and bring it back, posthaste, as proof.

  I will salt it, and eat it.

  I do this as a present for my daughter.

  And like the good girl I started out as,

  I mind my manners.

  I lick the plate clean, lick it

  clean and shiny as a mirror—

  Time’s talking mirror—who is my daughter.

  The Sound of Sense

  Through the heat register I can hear

  my daughter reading in the room below,

  eating breakfast in her usual chair

  at the kitchen table, two white pages

  of her open book throwing the blinding

  pan of sunlight back at her downcast face.

  I hear her chirping up and down the scale

  but I can’t decipher a single word

  as Emma learns to read. She’s in first grade

  and has to read a new book every day,

  a weight she carries between school

  and home in her backpack, in a Ziploc

  baggie, with her lunch—a nibbled sandwich