That Said Read online

(straight or kinky) hair to brush

  and braid, wash and set, chose

  her eye color and skin tone from the

  (Hispanic-American, African-American,

  Asian-American, Caucasian) models shown,

  and created a brown-eyed, brown-haired,

  huggable, “unique one-of-a-kind original.”

  Just like Emma, our own little girl.

  The minute she got her new doll, Emma

  named it Emma, and typed “Emma’s Life Story”

  on her mini make-believe Mac.

  But soon Emma grew tired of “Emma,”

  as she’d grown tired of her other “girls,”

  leaving them on their respective beds,

  where they closed their variously shaded brown eyes

  and slept the half-sleep of the undead—

  toys on their way to becoming heirlooms—

  only to be roused for a makeshift tea party

  when a younger child came to visit.

  Yet I often long to play with “Emma,”

  who was such good company, after all,

  and who lies unkempt, ear to her “boom box,”

  on the top bunk of her bunk bed.

  I wish I could brush her lifelike hair,

  wipe her face and dress her up again.

  New catalogues keep arriving in the mail.

  Though Emma has lost interest, I can’t resist

  paging through things to buy (camisa, mantilla)

  for Josefina (with a Spanish J),

  who lived on a rancho in New Mexico in 1824,

  and comes with her own line of furniture...

  I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on her

  and on all future “Girls of Tomorrow,”

  who have yet to ride the assembly line’s

  long fallopian tube of Time;

  the girls my daughter’s daughters’ daughters—

  whose faces I’ll never see,

  whose names I can’t imagine—

  will carry, as I once carried mine.

  Mirror/Mirror

  You can’t step twice into the same mirror,

  said Heraclitus, of the river’s mirror.

  A vessel holding water was the first mirror.

  A mirror held to nostrils, life’s last mirror.

  “Who is fairest?” the queen asked her mirror.

  A vampire has no reflection in a mirror.

  Those backward letters without a mirror

  spell AMBULANCE in your rear-view mirror.

  After Mom died, I covered all the mirrors

  with cloth, sat seven days without mirrors.

  Staring at myself staring in my mirror,

  “I” became the “other” in the mirror.

  Watching themselves making love in the mirror,

  they were aroused by the couple in the mirror.

  The amputee stood at an angle that mirrored

  his phantom limb, now visible, mirrored.

  In the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait’s mirror,

  its painter’s captive in that convex mirror.

  A palindrome is another kind of mirror

  like the couplets in a ghazal’s mirror.

  Her beloved’s eyes were her only mirror.

  Seven bad years when he broke a mirror.

  I avoid, when I can, cruel three-way mirrors.

  “Mute surfaces,” Borges called mirrors.

  As Vanity combs her long hair in the mirror,

  an old bald skull awaits in the mirror.

  Standing between two facing mirrors,

  I shrank down a long hallway of mirrors.

  Which Jane are you? I asked my mirror.

  My mirror answered, Ask another mirror.

  Gaslight

  He points out that she fidgets and wrings her hands,

  so she sits on them when he’s near.

  When the telephone rings and she answers,

  no one’s on the line.

  And she doesn’t remember his telling her

  about the dinner party on Friday.

  If he had, she would have brought her dress

  to the dry cleaner. And washed her hair.

  Then one Sunday, looking up a number

  in his address book, she finds

  a snapshot of a woman

  she doesn’t know. A stranger.

  He says it’s a bookmark.

  Has no idea how it got there. Or

  who this woman is, or the numbers repeated

  on last month’s phone bill, or why

  she doesn’t trust him. Like Paula—

  exactly like the wife in Gaslight.

  And isn’t he her very own Charles Boyer,

  the husband who calls his wife hysterical,

  high-strung, absent-minded,

  inclined to imagine things?

  Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental, says the disclaimer.

  Staging Your House

  The chandelier does not convey.

  It was your mother’s. You’ll take it with you

  when you move. But all the fixtures and fittings,

  anything attached to the property, conveys.

  It stays. Toilets and ceiling fans convey,

  and the refrigerator dispensing crushed ice and cubes

  when it’s in the mood.

  And when the professionals are done with it,

  your house is as bland as when you first bought it,

  uncluttered, impersonal as a hotel.

  Your daisies replaced with a funereal bouquet.

  As for the Tomato Bisque foyer—too quirky.

  Now it’s beige.

  The creaky eleventh stair;

  the leaky faucet, Muzak to your insomnia;

  the Japanese maple scratching the screen;

  the church bells, when you moved in,

  ringing at fifteen-minute intervals, interrupting

  your every thought, then you stopped hearing them;

  the limos and hearses parked across the street,

  drivers in dark suits smoking, waiting for the wedding

  or the funeral to end—they all convey.

  They say you can’t take it with you, but you can.

  You’re not going to heaven, you’re just moving.

  The roofer, the gardener, the plumber,

  the stonemason who cobbled a path

  of flagstones to the front door,

  journeymen you relied on, like family, do not convey.

  The kisses, the arguments on the porch,

  tears washed down the drain do not convey.

  But the shutters and awnings and azaleas, pink

  and darker pink, that bloomed annually without fail

  on your daughter’s birthday, and the gigantic

  tulip poplar you were afraid a storm would uproot,

  topple, crushing your neighbors’ roof, killing

  that nice elderly couple—they convey.

  Long after the open house, the contract, the closing,

  driving past the church, you find yourself,

  as if in a trance, pulling into your old driveway.

  The house looks the same, but different.

  New shutters. New fence.

  A bike tipped over on the lawn.

  Where to Find Us

  After you’ve crossed the “singing bridge,”

  and passed Legare’s Farm Market—fresh

  pumpkins, peas, pick-your-own strawberries—

  drive two more miles, give or take a tenth.

  Here’s where my husband always said,

  “At Peck Hill Road hang a sharp left,”

  and I’d add my two cents, just to irk him,

  “But you’re not at Peck Hill Road yet!”

  I always hated it when he interrupted me

  giving directions, and he hated it when

  I’d point out every landmark along

  the way: my woman’s crow’s-nest view—


  not my husband’s God’s-eye view—

  directions we bickered over for forty years.

  Watch for the tilted green wooden pole.

  You’ll miss it. Everyone misses the turn

  the first time. For a century and a half,

  it was “Left at the old sugar shack,”

  and people knew exactly where to turn,

  until it collapsed and was dismantled,

  its barn board sold as fancy wainscoting

  for designer kitchens. You may see only

  an empty space, but to us that shack’s

  still disappearing board by board.

  When was the last time you saw us?

  You’d have to be blind not to see

  our three-story barn’s rusted roof

  up ahead, and our 1840s farmhouse.

  Are the clapboards still white?

  This house just didn’t want to be painted,

  it liked being naked, no matter how

  many coats we’d apply, it blistered

  and peeled the minute after the paint

  dried. If you’re not stuck behind

  a swaying hay wagon or snow plow,

  from Montpelier it should take you

  twenty minutes, tops.

  Stick to my directions, you won’t get

  lost. If you’d listened to my husband,

  you’d be halfway to Montreal.

  Though it may look like no one’s home,

  the mud room door is always open.

  We’re in the back pasture, waiting,

  buried under the crabapple tree.

  Rainbow Weather

  First my body feels it, like hunger

  or an itch prickling my entire skin,

  and the light outside looks odd,

  saturated, tinted greenish gold,

  so I drop the spoon, or the book

  I’m reading, and hurry to the back

  porch, where a sun shower’s busy

  pelting the pasture’s tall grass.

  When it happens, it’s always

  in the late afternoon, and always

  directly over the crabapple tree:

  a faint shimmer that intensifies,

  steeping the sky in a seven-banded

  cord of color that lasts a minute,

  then vanishes. Or it may loiter

  a half hour—neighbors phone neighbors

  to go look outside. Occasionally

  it’s a lucky double—the sign

  that told me I was pregnant.

  And because I know exactly where

  it will be, I love to show it off.

  I point. I wait. And it appears,

  as if commanded, to an awed round

  of applause. Greg Mosher, who sold us

  our house, must have known,

  and the Bassages before him, the Knoxes

  before them, all five Peck boys

  and girls, their father, and his father

  before him—farmer who felled

  the trees, positioned the beams,

  pitched the view just so—storm clouds

  scuttling away, sun warming his back,

  like that first astonished witness

  on his homemade ark, beholding

  the covenant, the promise.

  Eye Level

  Either the Darkness alters—

  Or something in the sight

  Adjusts itself to Midnight—

  And Life steps almost straight.

  —Emily Dickinson, 419

  For my parents

  Witness

  Chilled moonrise, his mother now in bed,

  her terror tranquilizing with the cold idea,

  we scoured the neighborhood with searchlights,

  the woods behind his school; the lumberyard’s

  cesspool, a black moon in the grass, called

  everyone and no one, called to me.

  Jackknifed in the pipe, he could not shinny up

  the mud and ooze, the narrow walls collapsing,

  dark water notching up his spine.

  Did he see me swimming in the glazed eye

  of light he woke to, did he wake at all,

  as the icy noose of water tightened around

  his chin, the north star of the squad car

  flashing? Navigating by touch and shadow,

  our lasso caught his feet. We tugged.

  His head slipped deeper in the cavity.

  Helpless, I held my breath. Hand over hand,

  we hauled him up and out into the humming air:

  limp and shivering, feet-first.

  He swung a long moment over us, shiny,

  bigger than we thought, his face bruised blue

  by metallic light. Cold gravity; release.

  He whined like nothing human in my arms.

  The Advent Calendar

  1

  Outside the bay windows

  the sky fills up with snow.

  The pentangular wall of night

  reflects my reading lamp

  into a constellation.

  But a neighbor glancing in

  can see just one lamp shining.

  The calendar windows

  seal off a winter landscape too.

  Skaters glide across a pond

  over the round window in the ice.

  Behind the shutters of a stall

  an aproned carpenter

  sweeps sawdust into a pile,

  barely enough to fill a thimble.

  A child peers through

  the bakery window.

  I slit along the window frame,

  lifting the boy and glass wall of tortes

  off into a prophecy...

  As his window swings open

  the boy sees himself

  up to his elbows in flour

  beside a pyramid of loaves.

  Is the night wind sifting the flour?

  Has a blizzard turned the kitchen

  inside out?

  Oh woman in the foreground