That Said Read online

  a luna moth, pale green,

  pinned herself to the sliding screen—

  a prize specimen in a lepidopterist’s dream.

  Tuesday’s wind knocked her off the deck.

  She tacked herself back up again.

  During Wednesday’s rain she disappeared

  and reappeared on Thursday

  to meditate and sun herself,

  recharging her dreams from dawn to dusk,

  and all night draining the current from

  the deck’s electric lantern.

  A kimono just wider than my hand,

  her two pairs of flattened wings were pale

  gray-green panels of the sheerest crêpe de Chine.

  Embroidered on each sleeve, a drowsing eye

  appeared to watch the pair of eyes

  on the wings below quite wide awake.

  But they’re all fake.

  Nature’s trompe l’oeil gives the luna

  eyes of a creature twice her size.

  The head was covered with snow-white fur.

  Once, I got so close

  it rippled when I breathed on her.

  She held herself so still,

  she looked dead. I stroked

  the hem of her long, sweeping tail;

  her wings dosed my fingers with a green-gold dust.

  I touched her feathery antennae.

  She twitched and calmly

  reattached herself a quarter inch west,

  tuning into the valley miles away

  a moment-by-moment weather report

  broadcast by a compatriot,

  catching the scent of a purely

  sexual call; hearing sounds

  I never hear, having

  the more primitive ear.

  Serene

  in the middle of the screen,

  she ruled the grid of her domain

  oblivious to her collected kin—

  the homely brown varieties of moth

  tranced-out and immobile,

  or madly fanning their paper wings,

  bashing their brains out on the bulb.

  Surrounded by her dull-witted cousins,

  she is herself a sort of bulb,

  and Beauty is a kind of brilliance,

  burning self-absorbed, giving little,

  indifferent as a reflecting moon.

  Clinging to the screen despite my comings

  and goings, she never seemed to mind the ride.

  At night, when I slid the glass door shut,

  I liked to think I introduced her

  to her perfect match

  hatched from an illusion—

  like something out of the Brothers Grimm—

  who, mirroring her dreamy stillness,

  pining for a long-lost twin,

  regarded her exactly as she regarded him.

  This morning,

  a weekend guest sunbathing on the deck,

  sun-blind, thought the wind had blown

  a five-dollar bill against the screen.

  He grabbed the luna, gasped,

  and flung her to the ground.

  She lay a long moment in the grass,

  then fluttered slowly to the edge of the woods

  where, sometimes at dawn,

  deer nibble the wild raspberry bushes.

  The Island

  On one side, a series of marshes.

  On the other, the ocean level as a skillet.

  Across the bay, the wooden church

  suffers under the weight of its weathered circumflex,

  beneath which, every Sunday, the natives come to pray,

  and every Tuesday, hold town meetings.

  And once, when the movie people sent a scout

  who wanted to rent the island,

  they threw him out. He ferried back that very day.

  The latticework on each widow’s walk,

  like the cable knitted into each fisherman’s sweater,

  is as individual as his thumbprint.

  Summer bungalows look like pairs of scuffed brown oxfords

  that hiked to sea from far inland,

  stopping short at the harbor.

  Mornings, tennis balls

  crisscross the Common like tropical birds.

  Back and forth they fly, fat, chartreuse, echoing

  across this roofless aviary.

  Occasional tracks of baby strollers

  struggle up clay cliffs irregular as molars.

  Some dunes are now off limits, like the Parthenon.

  The commissioners would like to bulldoze

  the whole community of nudists,

  who, by noon, in most weathers,

  expose their white triangles and stripes

  and look like negatives of themselves.

  Puckered beer cans stud the public beaches, and here and there

  an evicted hermit crab bleaches.

  This morning, a Spanish freighter almost sideswiped

  the island’s cliffs. The sailors were friendly.

  They waved T-shirts from the upper decks

  as if hoisting up a patchwork rainbow,

  and maneuvered through the channel, blowing kisses.

  We watched the ship get smaller and smaller

  (almost colliding with a rust-pocked trawler),

  small enough to squeeze through the neck of a bottle,

  and then the horizon swallowed it.

  I unfurled my towel, and read, and slept awhile

  (the water was too cold to swim),

  and wondered about the glass armada

  bobbing along the coast’s two-hundred-mile limit.

  At high tide, a bottle detached itself,

  and riding the assembly line of waves,

  tumbled up the beach faster, faster,

  landing six inches from my sunburned feet.

  I held the bottle up to light—

  a dozen highlights oiled the glass—

  and saw a five-masted warship, uncollapsed,

  with its antique mizzens still intact.

  Crawling like an ant along the hull,

  the ship’s unlucky stowaway tried to shout,

  but the plug was stuck in the bottle’s throat.

  Upon the pages of the sails

  he’d scrawled his message in letters the bottle magnified,

  gigantic as a billboard painter’s:

  Each night, I dream that I walk the plank

  of my wife’s long hair, but I can’t drown.

  And now, I’ve sailed right into your own two hands.

  I’ve survived my island of a shipwreck.

  Someday, from your shipwreck of an island,

  I will rescue you.

  Music Minus One

  The writer needs an address,

  very badly needs an address—

  that is his roots.

  —Isaac Bashevis Singer

  In memory of my parents,

  Essie Shore (1915–1991)

  and George Shore (1915–1993)

  Washing the Streets of Holland

  When I was twelve, I read The Diary of Anne Frank.

  I identified with her having to live

  stories above a busy street

  over a business, and having to keep quiet

  for hours at a time.

  I’d pad about on tiptoe,

  trying not to disturb the customers

  shopping in my parents’ dress store below,

  voices drifting up through the floorboards.

  I’d pretend I was eavesdropping

  from Anne’s attic, while downstairs,

  life went on without me.

  That winter a frozen pipe cracked,

  thawed, flooding the cellar under the store.

  Broken mannequins lay in heaps

  and rats scuttled up through the drain.

  My old books, old dolls, stuffed animals

  bobbed among the giant torsos.

  When the water receded,

  I
dredged up a china plate,

  sole survivor of the Blue Willow tea set

  I had when I was six:

  its boat and bridge and willow plumes,

  its turtledoves hovering above a pagoda roof,

  glazed the same delft blue as the windmills

  on our tile hot plate made in Holland.

  My family admired the Dutch people;

  they’d hidden Jews in their houses during the War.

  Once, while I was playing with my tea set,

  I heard my aunt Roz say that exact thing:

  “The Dutch hid Jews during the War.”

  My aunts and uncles sat in the living room

  arguing the Holocaust—the inevitable subject—

  who had helped and who had not.

  Our German cleaning lady,

  Mrs. Herman—my mother liked her—

  literally scrubbed her way past,

  on hands and knees, dragging her pail and rags.

  My aunt Lil said something in Yiddish.

  “What did you say?” I begged her.

  Mrs. Herman had just rolled up the oval rug.

  My aunt said, “Germans were bad. The Dutch were good.”

  “And the streets in Holland are immaculate,”

  my mother said, “because every morning

  the Dutch wash their sidewalks down.”

  And so I made up a game I called

  Washing the Streets of Holland.

  During my bath I’d climb out of the tub

  and sprinkle Old Dutch Cleanser on the floor.

  I’d hold my breath, careful

  not to inhale the deadly powder.

  The Dutch Cleanser lady wore a bonnet

  whose flaps completely hid her face.

  In her clogs and blue skirts and clean white apron,

  and with a raised stick, about to strike,

  she was chasing something—or someone—

  on the other side of the can.

  Chases Dirt, the label said.

  Naked, on my hands and knees,

  I’d scrub the floor with a washcloth

  until my bathwater turned cold.

  There was a lot of dirt in Holland,

  but I was doing my part to help.

  One night, my father yelled from behind the door,

  “What are you doing in there?”

  I was washing the streets of Holland.

  Blue woman on the powder can,

  blue willowware plate,

  gentle brushstrokes of the pagoda roof,

  blades of windmills, glazed waters of the lagoon,

  blue tattoo inked in flesh,

  blue ink in a diary,

  blue ocean whose water is really colorless, like tears,

  a flood of tears, all seven seas running together—

  blurring the words

  and washing them away.

  Monday

  My father sways before the mirror

  in the blue-tiled bathroom, shaving.

  The wide legs of his boxer shorts

  empty as windsocks,

  the neck of his white cotton undershirt

  fringed with curly black hairs.

  Overnight his shaving brush

  has stiffened into the shape of a flame.

  When he swirls it around in the mug,

  the bristles plump up with lather,

  as if he’s folding egg whites into batter.

  The empty razor lies open-jawed

  in a puddle of milky water.

  The double-edged blades come packed

  in envelopes of five, each blade

  wrapped separately in waxed paper

  like a stick of gum.

  My father glances at the mirror

  like a woman applying makeup,

  then paints on a mustache and beard

  leaving only a thin mouth hole.

  His lips look redder against the foam.

  He lathers his chin, his Adam’s apple,

  the pebbly skin of his throat.

  Scraping, he works quickly, in silence,

  in distracted concentration,

  the same way he eats his dinner every night.

  But what is making my mild father so angry,

  arguing with the man on the glass?

  He stretches his lips into the widest

  possible smile, then bares

  his teeth in a grimace.

  He nicks himself. Here and there,

  the lather is flecked with threads of blood.

  Then stroke by stroke, my father’s face

  gradually returns to him,

  so raw and tender I ache to touch.

  What in the world would harm him now,

  looking as he does, with shreds

  of toilet tissue stuck on his face like feathers,

  each one glued with a small red dot.

  Learning to Read

  “Jane lived in a big white house

  with a garden and a yard

  and an apple tree out back.”

  Waiting my turn to read

  out loud before the class,

  my wooden desk and chair

  bolted to the wooden floor,

  Jane skipped and jumped and ran.

  Jane—my very name—

  was all we had in common.

  Jane’s mother knitted socks.

  Mine couldn’t knit a stitch.

  Jane and Dick—her brother—

  a matched pair

  of salt and pepper shakers,

  ate dinner

  opposite each other,

  Father facing Mother.

  Two parents, two children, two pets.

  My sister wasn’t born yet.

  Big A and little a,

  upper- and lower-case b,

  the sibling alphabet

  paraded across the chalkboard

  white on black, a negative

  of my primer’s printed page—

  the page I’d read at home,

  the passage I knew by heart—

  where the kitten, Puff,

  jumps into the sewing basket,

  bats her paw and chases

  a rolling ball of yarn

  across the kitchen floor