That Said (26 page)

 

And it grew and grew,

luminous and green, it grew

in its nakedness, and when it was a yard long

the magician knotted it,

and with a few deft flicks twisted it

into a dachshund—buoyant, electric, tied to a leash

of fuchsia ribbon—that bounced

along the floor, bumping after our daughter

on their walks around the house.

 

Weeks later, cleaning under her bed,

I coaxed it out with a broom—

a collapsed lung furred with dust.

As long as it still had some life in it,

I couldn't throw it away.

 

So I popped it with a pin.

And God's breath, a little puff

from elsewhere, brushed my cheek.

After Uncle Al's final coronary,

Aunt Flossie gave my dad

Al's unworn, tasseled, white

patent-leather penny loafers,

 

the Florsheim labels still stuck

like chewing gum to the heels.

Shoes my elegant father

was too polite to refuse.

 

So his brother-in-law's shoes

cured in a closet for twenty years,

soles stiff as planks, until

I boxed them up

 

with my father's things

and shipped them home,

where side by side

in the dark crawl space

 

under my roof they idled

for another twenty, enduring

long ice-hatcheting winters

Uncle Al would have hated.

 

Now the last of him

is gone, with his temper

tantrums, and his bad taste,

and his black eye-patch

 

that covered the empty

socket of his right eye,

lost in a car crash. Gone,

the thick wad of fifties

 

he carried in his pocket

to intimidate and impress.

No cheapskate, I slip

a dime into the stubborn

 

slot on his loafers meant

for pennies, the way

you'd close a dead man's

staring eyes with a coin

 

so he won't take you

along with him.

Haven't I already

done my time?

It was not our story. It was hers.

That's how friends told us to think of it.

It was not our story, it was hers.

In what book does it say that you're

supposed to live until you're eighty?

Our house was hers for the summer.

Our forks and spoons and knives.

She seemed happy waving goodbye.

We said,
So long, take care, enjoy.

It was not our problem, it was hers.

Her clothes hung in our closets.

Her little boy slept in our daughter's bed

and played with our daughter's old toys.

It was not our sadness. It was hers.

Her sadness had nothing to do with us.

She borrowed books from the library.

Scrubbed the bathtub. Baked a pie.

We were just going about our business.

We were hundreds of miles away.

It was not our madness, it was hers.

She finished the book. Sealed

the letter in the envelope, telling why.

We replaced the bloody floorboards

where their two dead bodies lay.

We stained the new boards to match

the old ones—a deep reddish stain

our daughter first thought was blood

until we told her it was not blood.

And not our desperation, it was hers.

It was scraped, sanded, varnished.

No one can tell. It could have happened

to anyone, but it happened to us.

We barely knew her. We weren't there.

We didn't want to make their tragedy

our tragedy. It was not our story.

They had their story. We have ours.

They're playing Scrabble in heaven

to pass the time, sitting at their usual

places around the table—

or whatever passes for a table there—

my father opposite my mother,

Uncle Al across from Floss,

husband opposite wife—all four of them

bickering as they did in life—

the Scrabble board laid flat

on the wooden lazy Susan,

as Sunday afternoons they'd play

while dinner was cooking,

or if my mother was too tired to cook,

order takeout from the Hong Kong.

 

After dinner, they'd resume the game,

a conversation interrupted midsentence;

cigarette smoke rising from ashtrays,

dirty dishes stacked in the sink,

chopsticks poking from the trash pail.

They never invited me

to join them. So I'd sprawl on the rug

feeling sorry for myself,

one ear tuned to Ed Sullivan on TV,

one ear tuned to their squabbling,

which continued even when they consulted

the
Webster's
to check a word,

tucking its red ribbon bookmark between

tarnished gilt-edged pages.

 

Sunday after Sunday,

the lazy Susan rotating on the table,

the pastel squares checkering the grid,

the light blue squares, the navy, the red,

the black star on the pink square

in the dead center of the empty board,

the silky feel of the tiles brushing

fingertips as they select the letters—

just as I'm doing now, touching these keys—

as their memories of the earth

and all the words they had for them—

daughter niece husband wife sister

tree rock dog salt
—

diminish one by one.

When Caravaggio's Saint Thomas pokes his index finger

past the first knuckle, into the living flesh of the conscious

perfectly upright Jesus Christ, His bloodless wound

like a mouth that has opened slightly to receive it, the vaginal folds

of parting flesh close over the man's finger as if to suck,

 

that moment after Christ, flickering compassion,

helps Thomas touch the wound, calmly guiding

the right hand of His apostle with His own immortal left,

into the warm cavity, body that died and returned to the world,

bloodless and clean, inured to the operation at hand

and not in any apparent pain—

 

to accidentally brush against His arm

would have been enough, but to enter the miraculous flesh,

casually, as if fishing around in one's pocket for a coin—

 

because it's in our natures to doubt,

I'd doubt what I was seeing, too.

 

Drawing closer, Thomas widens his eyes

as if to better absorb the injury, his three companions also

strain forward, I do, too,

and so would you, all our gazes straining toward

the exquisite right nipple so beautifully painted I ache to touch

or to kiss it, press my lips to the hairless chest of a god.

His long hippie auburn hair falls in loose

girlish corkscrew curls, the hairs of His sparse mustache

straggle over His upper lip, face so close that Thomas must surely

feel Christ's breath ruffling his brow.

 

The lecturer closes his notebook and we exit the auditorium.

Conveyed smoothly on the moving sidewalk, as if on water,

but not water,

whooshed through the long, shimmery tunnel connecting

the east and west wings of the National Gallery,

my friend and I hurtle away from the past, that open wound,

and toward the future—

 

the dark winter colors saturating my eyes suddenly

blossom into the breezy pastels of Italy's gelato,

milk sherbet quick-frozen and swirled

into narrow ribbons of cold rainbow

unbraided into separate chilled stainless steel tubs set

under glass in a cooler case:

 

                                       
tiramisù, zabaglione, zuppa inglese,

milky breasts whipped, rippled peach and mango, pistachio,

vanilla flecked with brown dizzying splinters of bean,

coffee, caramel, hazelnut,
stracciatella,

raspberry, orange, chocolate, chocolate mint; silken peaked

nipple risen from the middle of the just barely opened

undisturbed tub of lemon so pale it's almost white,

scraped with a plastic doll's spoon,

scooped and deposited on the tongue,

then melting its soothing cooling balm.

Versions of these poems first appeared in the following publications:

 

NEW POEMS

 

Contemporary American Poetry: A Bread Loaf Anthology,
ed. Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly: “A Reminder.”
Kaimana: The Journal of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council, 2011:
“Danny Kaye at the Palace.”
The New Republic:
“Mirror/Mirror.”
Ploughshares:
“Fortune Cookies,” “Pickwick.”
Salmagundi:
“Priorities,” “Willow,” “Chatty Cathy,” “Gaslight,” “Staging Your House.”
Slate:
“Last Words.”
Wooden Teeth:
“American Girls.”
The Yale Review:
“Rainbow Weather.”

 

EYE LEVEL (1977)

 

Audience:
“Home Movies: 1949,” “The Lifeguard.”
The Iowa Review:
“Noon.”
The New Republic:
“Fortunes Pantoum,” “Witness.”
Poetry:
“A Letter Sent to Summer.”