That Said Read online

  you fall out of and out of.

  The more chances you are given,

  the more the diminishing returns.

  If you had the hammer

  you could fix the stairs

  that lead to the basement

  that shelters the rat

  that shows you his nest

  where the nails are hidden.

  Though your heap of jackstraws

  keeps growing, the player

  with the most points wins.

  Why is an arrow

  worth less than a saw,

  and a saw worth more than a hammer?

  It’s a foolish carpenter

  who doesn’t know the value

  of his tools.

  The pile dwindles to two.

  You’ll play until love

  either kills or heals you—

  like the young husband

  who, at daybreak, extracts himself

  from his sleeping bride,

  careful not to wake her,

  lifting his trembling body,

  pale and weightless as straw.

  Tender Acre

  As you slept, your pulse

  flickering on your neck like a trick of light,

  I thought how, earlier, beside the sleeping shape

  Adam labored the whole night to stay awake,

  afraid she’d vanish in the morning with the moon.

  Out from the earth sprang the planet’s

  blurred, unpredictable life.

  The pulse of the near hill—

  or was it the shudder he was born with?—

  rocked him. The animals, also,

  that yesterday brushed like wind against his body,

  were now given form. On a branch,

  an icicle began to melt.

  It hung, glistening and patient,

  while a zipper of vertebrae inched all the way down

  its back. Then bands of bargello

  stitched the skin—tiny sawtooth flames

  of dull gold and rust, rust and gold.

  This he named snake.

  On the topmost branch of the tree,

  a bird bristled with little white thorns.

  Then each thorn fanned out like a palm frond

  and the bird flew away.

  All day, Adam watched and listened,

  but he couldn’t name his loneliness—

  the long “oh” of sorrow, the “ooh” of hallelujah.

  Eleven curved knife blades

  of his rib cage, and the twelfth

  that cut his flesh without injury,

  he accepted, as he accepts

  these other gifts placed before him.

  All night, he memorized her human shape,

  so that later, were she not there,

  his memory could reconstruct that absent body

  from the air, and wrench him from his solitude

  before the tender acre cradled her.

  Wood

  At eight o’clock we woke to the chain saw.

  Stands of pines quivered

  as the empty flatbed lumbered by

  printing snakeskins on the snowy road.

  The telephone company was thinning out the woods.

  That afternoon, we snowshoed to a neighbor’s farm.

  They were gone, but their brown cow leisurely chewed

  the rags of grass beneath the snow.

  The sound her teeth made tearing

  was like a seamstress ripping out a seam.

  The enormous head swayed and dipped—

  it scared us too. A skein of spittle

  dangled from her lower jaw;

  her tongue was big as a boot, awkward and dull pink;

  her black leather nostrils snorted

  a storm of cumuli, hot and white.

  It got colder. Dusk held the trees in amber—

  the ones, that is, left standing.

  Around the fresh-cut stumps, sawdust, a fringe of twigs

  were mashed into the snow.

  The telephone company had cut down a tree

  to erect, in its place, a sort of monument to a tree—

  an imported, pitch-stuck pole with its own tin badge and number

  linking house to house and voice to voice.

  That night when we fed the fire, the embers

  glowed under the logs the flames systematically ate,

  nibbling slowly, deliberately,

  from left to right. Like reading.

  Sometimes, a fire devours a book all at once

  in one sitting; or slowly, disinterestedly, leafs through it,

  turning its pages to ash one by one.

  There’s pleasure in watching it ignite

  and flare, pleasure that does not want to stop—

  in looking around the room

  and throwing in anything that will burn.

  A paper napkin thrills the flame,

  but briefly; a chair causes greater excitement—

  its rush seat a catherine wheel sputtering, shooting sparks.

  And punching a hole in plaster

  and snapping the laths ribbing the walls;

  and peeling shingles from the gray

  bird wings of the roof

  until the whole house burns with pleasure.

  Then the fire died down. We closed the book.

  A few of the ashes’ soft feathers

  drifted lazily up the chimney shaft

  into the vanished daylight.

  Persian Miniature

  Two hairs plucked from the chest of a baby squirrel—

  the brush of the miniaturist freezes an entire population.

  Within each quarter inch,

  a dozen flowers puncture the spongy ground,

  and even the holes where tent poles stuck

  bear ornamental weeds.

  Upon a wooden balance beam—this painting’s equator—

  a cat is prancing.

  Other animals are eating or being milked:

  three spotted goats, a suede camel,

  half a donkey’s face lost in an embroidered feedbag.

  Under a canopy, seven elders in pajamas radiate

  like spokes around a bridegroom;

  white beards frost the elders’ chins.

  Outside, a fat iron cauldron squats upon a fire

  whose flames spike up golden minarets.

  A kneeling boy pours coffee;

  his pitcher handle, the size of a human eyelash,

  is larger than the bridegroom’s mustache.

  A wedding! Is the bride asleep somewhere?

  The bride’s attendants hover in tiers

  like angels in heaven’s scaffolding,

  but heaven, here, is the hanging gardens,

  or maybe tent poles are holding heaven up.

  Lappets of a tent fold back

  on a woman holding her soft triangular breast

  to an infant’s mouth. The rug she sits on

  flaps straight up behind her, like wallpaper.

  One-sixteenth of an inch away,

  a ram is tethered to the picture frame,

  but where’s the bride going to fit?

  In the left-hand corner of the painting,

  across what little of the sky remains,

  two geese fly in tandem, pulling two wheels,

  two mechanical knotted clouds.

  Maybe they are pulling a storm behind them.

  Crouched, swirling above the human event,

  if the storm fits, it could ruin everything—

  smash up the whole abbreviated acre,

  flush the bride from sleep—

  while the bridegroom sweeps it all away

  and enters her innocent tent like thunder,

  shattering the distance he’s had to keep.

  The Glass Slipper

  The little hand was on the eight.

  It scoured Cinderella’s face, radiant

  since her apotheosis; blue dress,

  blonde pageboy
curled like icing on a cake.

  The wristwatch came packed in a glass slipper—

  really plastic, but it looked like glass—

  like one of my mother’s shoes, but smaller.

  High transparent heel, clear shank and sole,

  it looked just big enough to fit me.

  I stuffed my left foot halfway in,

  as far as it would go.

  But when I limped across the bedroom rug,

  the slipper cut its outline

  into my swelling heel.

  No matter which foot I tried,

  I couldn’t fit the ideal

  that marks the wearer’s virtue,

  so I went about my business

  of being good. If I was good enough,

  in time the shoe might fit.

  I cleaned my room, then polished

  the forepaws of the Georgian chair;

  while in the kitchen, squirming in her highchair,

  a bald and wizened empress on her throne,

  my baby sister howled one red vowel

  over and over.

  Beside the white mulch of their chenille bedspread,

  my parents’ Baby Ben wind-up alarm

  was three minutes off.

  Each night, its moon face,

  a luminous and mortuary green,

  guided me between my parents’ sleeping forms

  where I slept

  until the mechanism of my sister’s hunger,

  accurate as quartz,

  woke my mother and me moments before

  the alarm clock sprang my father to the sink

  and out the door.

  Seven forty-five. His orange Mercury

  cut a wake of gravel in the driveway.

  Like a Chinese bride I hobbled after him,

  nursing my sore foot in a cotton sock.

  Cinderella’s oldest sister lopped off

  her own big toe with a kitchen knife

  to make the slipper fit, and her middle sister

  sliced her heel down to size.

  The dumbstruck Prince failed to notice,

  while ferrying to the palace

  each false fiancée,

  the blood filling the glass slipper.

  The shoehorn’s silver tongue

  consoled each one in turn,

  “When you are Queen, you won’t need to walk.”

  Dresses

  After Rilke’s “Some Reflections on Dolls”

  On wire hangers, on iron shoulders,

  the dresses float in limbo,

  flat-chested spinsters who will

  not dance. It is night,

  the hands of the clock circle

  their twelve black mountains,

  upstairs the children are dreaming,

  and over his red and black inks

  the father figures the books,

  the store as dark

  as the inside of the safe.

  Blouses like airy armor, trousers

  that marched off the cutting table

  through the needle’s eye.

  Dresses, it is your nature

  to be possessed. With feverish hands,

  your jailer will free you, undo

  the two pearl buttons on your cuff

  while her lover hitches up your skirt,

  his rough wool against your silk . . .

  eventually those caresses will wear

  you away. One day you will be

  the crushed body in the ragbag,

  the purple in the pauper’s closet,

  the hand-me-down passed from one sister

  to another in a distant state.

  Your pockets will fill with her

  perfume, ticket stubs, loose tobacco,

  the telegram that changes everything

  the moment it is read, and memory

  makes you too painful to wear.

  Houndstooth, black-watch plaid,

  mauve, teal, hunter green; shades

  flaring and dying with the seasons—

  but not for the mannequins heaped

  in the cellar under the store.

  Rashes of plaster dust cover

  the gash where the wrist screws

  into the arm; modestly dusting,

  like talcum, the chipped torsos,

  bald heads, bald crotches,

  and around each beautiful eye

  the corona of ten spiked lashes.

  In the morning, the older daughter

  descends the fourteen stairs

  to the store and tries on

  the frothy, white organza strapless,

  dragging its hem like a tide

  across the fitting room floor.

  And there you are in the mirror,

  up to your old tricks.

  She’ll curtsy for her adoring father,

  while her mother—

  mouth bristling with straight pins—

  kneels at her feet. The cash register

  resumes its noisy music, browsers

  breeze in and out of the swinging

  door. Sooner or later, each of you

  will attract your customer.

  Not on your own volition will you

  enter the blazing street and pass

  the sister whose smooth back

  you pressed against so long ago.

  Not on your own volition

  will you dance at a daughter’s wedding,

  dance unwearyingly until dawn

  with energies not your own.

  Nor for beauty’s sake alone will you

  be chosen from among all the others,

  when, in severe folds, you will outwear

  the body that entered your body willingly

  once, and lost herself there.

  A Luna Moth

  For Elizabeth Bishop

  For six days and nights