That Said Page 4
with your beautiful skirts,
do you contain a window too—
like the church’s arched door
opening on a nave of tiny worshipers?
Behind the clerestory window
a crèche appears—
the Madonna mobbed by putti,
the infant cushioned
on the backs of sheep.
Madonna of the Beautiful Skirts,
you carried into Egypt
within your body
a world of such belief!
I can only carry
myself into my life.
In my windowed room, only I
am multiplied
and pray to be whole.
2
These lives I randomly
release into the world
like doves!
In seconds I do it!
I unlock the stalls,
twenty-three windows open,
all but the window of the moon.
I used to wish those numbered days
would vanish, a miracle!
But would hurrying
break the spell,
would the windows turn real
and shatter in my eyes?
Better to shut them,
keep the future out,
as this last window
of the moon stays shut.
But who can resist
the moon’s bright eye
in this paper sky,
or any other?
Once, looking for the moon,
at the far end
of the telescope, I saw
the echo of my own dark eye
shining. The more I tried
to take the glass away, the more
that eye deepened into mine,
burning beyond the human shape
the self takes on.
Can light be so intense
the future’s in a glance?
If I hold my hand to light,
the bright lattice of my bones
shines through.
3
Stars are falling.
I open the crescent window of the moon.
Inside, a man is hiking in sheer daylight
clear across Tibet where it is day.
The mountain peaks break in yellow waves
as the man walks unconcerned
on a tide of birds.
Morning lies behind this window,
the window of sunrise,
its movement over the world
arrives always with gifts in both arms.
A Letter Sent to Summer
Oh summer, if you would only come
with your big baskets of flowers,
dropping by like an old friend
just passing through the neighborhood!
If you came to my door disguised
as a thirsty biblical angel
I’d buy all your hairbrushes and magazines!
I’d be more hospitable
than any ancient king.
I’d personally carry your luggage in.
Your monsoons. Your squadrons of bugs.
Your plums and lovely melons.
Let the rose let out its long long sigh.
And Desire return to the hapless rabbit.
This request is also in my own behalf.
Inside my head it is always snowing,
even when I sleep. When I wake up,
and still you have not arrived,
I curl back into my blizzard of linens.
Not like winter’s buckets of whitewash.
Please wallpaper my bedroom
with leafy vegetables and farms.
If you knocked right now,
I would not interfere.
Start near the window.
Start right here.
Noon
Along the creek girls are lifting
their thin skirts and as they bend
low, under their loose scoop-neck
blouses the pale flesh shows.
They notice you and wave, turn back
again laughing, dipping their feet
into the cool water. Now scarves go;
they unpin their hair. On the banks
the grass turns down like sheets
and the sun is big and close.
You can barely see them through
the heat as they peel and peel away
their clothes. And when they open
their slender arms to you, thinking
they are doing this because they
want to, thinking there is a choice,
who can blame them for giving in
this easily, or you, nearer now
to yourself than ever as they pull
you with them, sister, down.
Home Movies: 1949
Woozy from death they hog the camera
that revives them, blinking like children
we shook awake. Intensities of plaid
coagulate on screen. One distant cousin.
Above the picnic baskets, bobbing
like icebergs they investigate the silence
each time we run them through the same
embarrassing routines. I am swimming.
In the river my father’s trousers cling,
two drooping cylinders. He stumbles
toward us, digs deep, retrieves a cow bone.
Thrusts it like a barbell above his head.
Soloing, my uncle handles his trombone
careful as dentures. Next to me his widow
stiffens. An aunt glides by with a thermos.
We are kept always out of earshot,
safe. Clutching their trophies they wave
us off. I forget how cold the water was.
Fortunes Pantoum
You will go on a long journey
You will have a happy and healthy life
You will recover valuables thought lost
You will marry and have many children
You will have a happy and healthy life
Your sweetheart will always be faithful
You will marry and have many children
You will have many friends when you need them
Your sweetheart will always be faithful
Soon you will come into a large inheritance
You will have many friends when you need them
You will succeed in your line of work
Soon you will come into a large inheritance
You will travel to many new places
You will succeed in your line of work
Be suspicious of well-meaning strangers
You will travel to many new places
A message from a distance is soon to be received
Be suspicious of well-meaning strangers
Important news from an unexpected source!
A message from a distance is soon to be received
You will meet a dark and handsome foreigner
Important news from an unexpected source!
Do not take unnecessary chances
You will meet a dark and handsome foreigner
You have a fear of visiting high places
Do not take unnecessary chances
Your misunderstanding will be cleared up in time
You have a fear of visiting high places
Grasp at the shadow and lose the substance
Your misunderstanding will be cleared up in time
Sometimes you worry too much about death
Grasp at the shadow and lose the substance
You will recover valuables thought lost
Sometimes you worry too much about death
You will go on a long journey
The Lifeguard
The children vault the giant carpet roll
of waves, with sharp cries swing legs
wide over water. A garden of umbrellas
blooms down the stretch of beach. Far
offshore always I can spot that same
pale thumbprint
of a face going under,
grown bigger as I approach, the one arm circling,
locking rigid around my neck. The other
as its fist hooks and jabs my head away.
Ear to the conch, ear to the pillow,
beneath a canopy of bathers each night
I hear the voice and pry the jaws apart,
choke on the tangle of sable hair that blurs
the dead girl’s mouth: that anarchy
of breath dog-soft and still at my neck.
She calls from the water glass I drink from.
From my own throat when I swallow.
Sounding the Lake
This is a remarkable depth for so small an area, but not an inch of it can be spared in the imagination.
—Thoreau
The one cloud
in a blue sky
is also the one cloud
in the lake, the feeling
of something
to be distrusted
that cloud
constantly
reinventing itself.
In long light
minnows move like stars
in shallow water.
Who can calculate
the light-years
from fish to fish?
You’re living
your whole life
with someone
who is more
important to you
than skin.
I watch the white
boats shift
lakeside to lakeside.
But the cloud
in the lake
is more beautiful,
its shimmer,
in which I constantly
mistake myself
and fall in. This is
how it is
with you and me.
I would rather be the lake
filling the silent
yawn of the earth
where trout
move
through clear water.
I would rather be
the trout, or
the dream of the trout,
the spasm of cloud
in the trout’s brain,
oh anything but this
feeling, which is
what breaks me, friend,
when you enter.
Eye Level
If exposed to total darkness for seventy-two hours, the retina degenerates, causing partial loss of vision.
1. North
Wisteria worked its patient violence on the house.
Working at civility, we moved
from room to room like diplomats,
dividing china, dismantling the easy chair.
Out from the linen closet, the tent collapsed
into a small bag of telescoping poles; the compass;
the Coleman stove’s blue bracelet of flame.
Your Swiss Army knife tamed any emergency—
miniature corkscrew, screwdriver, fish scaler, file—
blades snapped into that miracle of steel.
I slipped it in my pocket, the red handle
shining like a deep wound in my palm. Only this
I kept to cut my narrow path away from you.
2. Haiti: Skin Diving
My legs break
the thick glass floor
of water.
My foot magnifies
blue as the foot
of a corpse.
One unshuttable eye
spans my face
and sees easily
what two eyes
can barely see.
I breathe
and go under.
Sea urchins fan
black sprays of quills.
Sea fans sway
at right angles
to the current.
My snorkel’s ball
spins in its atmosphere
of breath
like tiny Mars
above my head.
The sixth sense
must be gravity!
I measure distance
now by fin-kicks,
the sun’s angle.
Finned, the swimmer
wades backward
to the sea,
waist-deep, to plunge
and turn almost
weightless inside
the moving
body once again.
All the lyre-tailed,
stippled, rainbow-
flecked bodies
flash—shaped by water.
A school of fish
spills from the coral
and circles me.
I stiffen
without moving.
My fingertip’s
slightest tremor
could shatter that order,
blurring
as my breath
clouds the mask.
3. Port-au-Prince
In the thatched choucoune,
I learned Creole proverbs
from the maid. The fish
trusts the water and in the water
it is cooked.
Was that thunder in the harbor?
Smoke funneled from the Iron Market.
The gardener shinnied up a palm tree
like a sailor up a mast,
binoculars bouncing against his back.
The maid translated his shouts
half in Creole, half in French,