That Said Read online

  Her partner’s wavering hand

  connects with her sequined wrist;

  but his other hand misses, clamping

  shut on the air that frames her,

  no connection, her body blurring

  its slurred speech, as scanning

  the sawdust floor, the camera locates

  the broken italic of her flesh.

  No connection! I can’t remember

  no matter how many times I see her,

  no matter how many times

  my father runs the film.

  Projecting in reverse, he has her

  climb the ladder of light

  one more time, for my benefit,

  but he can’t rescue her

  from gravity forever.

  Backward, she bullets up toward

  the bull’s-eye of her partner’s fist,

  her face enlarged in its unknowing—

  and lands back on the platform,

  squarely on her own two feet!

  Spliced into the same reel, unreal

  documents of the commonplace.

  A picnic under way. Then it is Sunday.

  The living room upholstery is brand new.

  The Frigidaire is white-enamel white.

  Then, a lucky break to catch this,

  I am crawling, hoisting myself up

  my mother’s skirts to take my first

  steps, fighting to keep my balance,

  staggering toward whatever it was

  I reached for out of the camera frame—

  held and lost in that drifting

  instant of attention,

  from which the body performs

  its miraculous escape.

  The Russian Doll

  After Elder Olson

  Six inches tall, the Russian doll

  stands like a wooden bowling pin.

  The red babushka on her painted head

  melts into her shawl and scarlet

  peasant dress, and spreading over that,

  the creamy lacquer of her apron.

  A hairline crack fractures the equator

  of her copious belly,

  that when twisted and pulled apart,

  reveals a second doll inside,

  exactly like her, but smaller,

  with a blue babushka and matching dress.

  An identical crack circles her middle.

  Did Fabergé fashion a doll like her

  for a czar’s daughter? Hers would be

  more elaborate, of course, and not a toy—

  emerald eyes, twenty-four-karat hair,

  and with filigreed petticoats

  like a chanterelle’s gills blown inside out.

  An almost invisible fault line

  would undermine her waist,

  and a platinum button that springs her body open.

  Now I have two dolls: mother and daughter.

  Inside the daughter, a third doll is waiting.

  She has the same face,

  the same figure,

  the same fault she can’t seem to correct.

  Inside her solitary shell

  where her duplicate selves are breathing,

  she can’t be sure

  whose heart is beating, whose ears

  are hearing her own heart beat.

  Each doll breaks into

  a northern and a southern hemisphere.

  I line them up in descending order,

  careful to match each womb

  with the proper head—a clean split,

  for once, between the body and the mind.

  A fourth head rises over the rim

  of the third doll’s waist,

  an egg cup in which her descendants grow

  in concentric circles.

  Until last, at last, the two littlest dolls,

  too wobbly to stand upright,

  are cradled in her cavity as if waiting to be born.

  Like two dried beans, they rattle inside her,

  twin faces painted in cruder detail,

  bearing the family resemblance

  and the same unmistakable design.

  The line of succession stops here.

  I can pluck them from her belly like a surgeon,

  thus making the choice between fullness

  and emptiness; the way our planet itself

  is rooted in repetitions, formal reductions,

  the whole and its fractions.

  Generations of women emptying themselves

  like one-celled animals; each reproducing,

  apparently, without a mate.

  I thought the first, the largest, doll

  contained nothing but herself,

  but I was wrong.

  I assumed that she was young

  because I could not read her face.

  Is she the oldest in this matriarchy—

  holding within her hollow each daughter’s

  daughter? Or the youngest—

  carrying the embryo of the old woman

  she will become? Is she an onion

  all the way through? Maybe,

  like memory shedding its skin,

  she remembers all the way back to when

  her body broke open for the first time,

  to the child of twelve who fits inside her still;

  who has yet to discover that self,

  always hidden, who grows and shrinks,

  who multiplies and divides.

  Anthony

  Your absent name at roll call was more present

  than you ever were, forever

  on parole in the back of the class.

  The first morning you were gone,

  we practiced penmanship to keep our minds

  off you. My fist

  uncoiled chains of connecting circles,

  oscilloscopic hills,

  my carved-up desk as rippled as a washboard.

  A train cut you in half in the Jersey marshes.

  You played there after school.

  I thought of you and felt afraid.

  One awkward a multiplied into a fence

  running across the page.

  I copied out two rows of b’s.

  The caboose of the last d ran smack against

  the margin. Nobody even liked you!

  My e’s and f’s traveled over the snowy landscape

  on parallel tracks—faint blue guidelines

  that kept our letters even.

  The magician sawed his wife in half,

  then passed his hand through the gulf of air

  where her waist should be.

  Divided into two boxes, she turned and smiled

  and all her ten toes flexed.

  I skipped a line.

  I dotted the disconnected body of each i.

  At the bottom of the page,

  I wrote your name. And erased it.

  Wrote it, and erased again.

  Thumbelina

  Thumbelina, poor sleeping child,

  swaying in the hammock of a leaf,

  nested in my left hand the whole

  summer of my seventh year,

  her skull just the size of my thumbnail,

  her bird heart ticking against my pulse.

  Only a child, I was an only child,

  small for my age, but a giant

  towering over a clump of crabgrass.

  A belly button in the dirt,

  the anthill was the slave plantation

  I oversaw, ants laboring

  in the fork-raked furrows,

  hoisting heavy sacks of cotton—

  crumbs twenty times their body weight.

  To be a giant, you must learn to step

  softly, carefully, so as not to hurt

  the working earth.

  That year in school I was learning

  how to add. The backyard thundered

  with my mother’s yelling. “Ssh.

  Don’t wake the sleeping Thumbelina,”

  I’d whisper into my
left hand.

  “Don’t hurt the sleeping child,”

  the shell of my left hand echoed.

  At home I was learning to tell time.

  Each night when I tried to sleep,

  I heard the alarm clock’s jeweled

  movement, seventeen diamond planets

  on sawtooth wheels orbiting a ruby sun.

  But something else was ticking

  in another part of the Milky Way.

  A cloud-spasm in the utter darkness,

  something else was swimming into the galaxy.

  Who could imagine anything as silly

  as a child the size of a thumb,

  a replica, a shrunken opposite,

  a speck of sand that no amount

  of wishing could dislodge.

  Inside my mother’s body, a baby

  as big as a lima bean

  was growing. But the child I carried

  with me, who slept the sleep

  of a speechless animal,

  I carried for my own protection.

  I never raised a hand against my mother

  because the hand can crush what it protects.

  High Holy Days

  It was hot. A size too large,

  my wool winter suit scratched.

  Indian summer flaring up through fall.

  The shul’s broken window bled sunlight

  on the congregation; the Red Sea

  of carpet parted the women from the men.

  Mother next to daughter, father next to son,

  flipped through prayer books in unison

  trying to keep the place. Across the aisle,

  my father wore a borrowed prayer shawl.

  A black yarmulke covered his bald spot.

  The rabbi unlocked the ark

  and slid the curtain open. Propped inside,

  two scrolls of the Torah dressed like matching dolls,

  each a king and a queen. Ribbons hung down

  from their alabaster satin jackets;

  each one wore two silver crowns.

  I wondered, could the ancient kings

  have been so small? So small,

  and still have vanquished our enemies?

  The cantor’s voice rose

  like smoke over a sacrificial altar,

  and lambs, we rose to echo the refrain.

  Each time we sat down

  my mother rearranged her skirt.

  Each time we stood up

  my head hurt from the heat, dizzy

  from tripping over the alphabet’s

  black spikes and lyres,

  stick-figure battalions marching to defend

  the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

  Rocking on their heels, boats

  anchored in the harbor of devotion,

  the temple elders davened Kaddish, mourning the dead.

  Our neighbor who owned the laundry down the street

  covered his left wrist out of habit—

  numbers indelible as those

  he inked on my father’s shirt collars.

  Once, I saw that whole arm disappear

  into a tub of soapy shirts,

  rainbowed, buoyant as the pastel clouds

  in The Illustrated Children’s Bible,

  where God’s enormous hand reached down

  and stopped a heathen army in its tracks.

  But on the white-hot desert of the page

  I was reading, it was noon,

  the marching letters swam, the regiments

  wavered in the heat,

  a red rain falling on their ranks.

  I watched it fall one drop at a time.

  I felt faint. And breathed out sharply,

  my nose spattering blood across the page.

  I watched it fall, and thought,

  You are a Chosen One,

  the child to lead your tribe.

  I looked around the swaying room.

  Why would God choose me

  to lead this congregation of mostly strangers,

  defend them against the broken windows,

  the spray-painted writing on the walls?

  Overhead, the everlasting light, a red bulb,

  was burning. As if God held me in His fist,

  I stumbled down the synagogue stairs

  just in time to hear

  a cyclone of breath twist through

  the shofar, a battle cry so powerful

  it blasted city walls to rubble.

  I reeled home through the dazed traffic

  of the business day—

  past shoppers, past my school,

  in session as usual,

  spat like Jonah from the whale

  back into the Jew-hating world.

  The Game of Jackstraws

  One at a time from the pile

  each player in turn tries

  to remove the jackstraws—

  the miniature hoes, shovels,

  ladders, pickaxes, rakes—

  without moving any of the others.

  Light as a bird bone,

  the fragile sword fallen free

  from your lucky scatter

  is easily yours.

  You may keep it and attempt

  another. Using the tiny hook

  or your fingers, you barely

  touch a wrench when the hammer

  below it stirs.

  On your next turn, careful

  as a paleontologist,

  bones craning over bones,

  you lift a pitchfork

  cantilevered on a scythe

  balanced on the flat blade

  of an oar which rests

  against the nervous edge

  of the saw—one body

  touching the body of another

  which has touched another’s

  body, and so on, that graveyard

  of relations better left buried

  and forgotten like the casual love