Two Bowls of Milk (2 page)
Authors: Stephanie Bolster
those bones:
hammer, anvil
and
stirrup
. Words that conjure
machinery, weight,
horses, that morning her leg
caught and the mare dragged her
for miles. From the first,
each word she’d learned
a hoof just missing her
temple. It is all pain,
the reddish shell the side
of the head cups, and hears
itself, hears itself.
Stunted remnants of plants, months-old dogshit, a single red mitten that belonged to a girl who’d been punished for the loss, one hand made to go bare the rest of that winter. When her mother, tending tulip shoots, found the mitten, she pinned it to the girl’s chest, broke the skin so she would not forget. The next winter they found the girl’s heart, grey and hard as stone, in the centre of a thrown snowball. It nearly blinded the boy. In the kitchen they set the heart beside the turkey wishbone, meatless and saved for later. Microwaved on low, stroked with new white towels, it thawed into the pumping of nothing through itself. In the hospital they returned it wrapped in sheets and anaesthesia, stitched deep, a gift she could not return. The next year she went walking in her red rubber boots until only a trail of hollow exclamation marks was left.
By the lake I find a mole unearthed, mouth raw as supermarket steak. Its body is a cylinder furred with the passive half of Velcro. Its feet curled pink as a bird’s.
A friend says he has killed two mice in as many days. He wakes to the snap and finds one caught behind the eyes, dancing its last dance. Afterwards it’s hardly a heft in his palm, less than a skipping stone.
I find the fish plucked eyeless and scaleless where the tide has left. It might have been perch or flounder, might have been angelfish. Wind stirs no inch of it. Sand sifts around it. This is the longest its fins have been anywhere.
When I visit my friend, a car hits a crow, and the street’s a sudden gathering of crows. For half an hour outside his window black eyes watch the curb and that black unflapping thing. Then they’re gone. I leave behind my half-drained teacup.
This evening each thing dies before me. A bundle of muddy newsprint is a chewed raccoon’s tail and those distant blown shreds of tire by the roadside, what’s left of a bear.
How could I not turn away from the precious bald head of that man waiting in the bus shelter?
Tamarack, shamrock,
black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:
Very shade-intolerant. Branches brittle and breakage
frequent
. Limbs under water. Black ash:
Neither as strong nor
hard as white ash wood
. Black hawk falling. Squirrel call. Teeth against
teeth against hunger. Variations of predation. What’s swallowed
still warm in the throat. I don’t want the names of vegetation
in my mouth, only his tongue, his different speech. Variations
of flight and flighlessness. Crows are rooks, but rooks
are sharper and still blacker. Nettles can make healing
teas. Bluebells by the river ringing someone’s
gone too far.
Hills are islands, waiting. Mountains
will wait longer. This valley
was once a lake, until we made it land. See how the rain
against the windshield turns to fishes.
Each puddle a premonition. The woman’s face
is clearer there. When I peer in,
the trees shift. The sky is bluer
than the sky and when I look deeper there is the sun.
Any rain is enough to make all the colours
come out. The fuchsias sting my eyes
and the bees shine. The lawn teems with drops
that might be diamonds, might be frogs.
The first time I ran inside and shut my house. The second
I let it all wash over me. The third time I went looking
where the clouds were and weeks later
waded back with minnows in my boots.
Between storms: a segment of train track. A red
block with the letter O. A mouse the colour
of bread mould. An ace of spades. Three steps going down
and who knows how many underwater.
I keep a canoe on the back porch just in case.
Each morning I listen for the lap against the bedposts.
Each morning I imagine my legs floating down the steps,
my hair seeping back from my face.
Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are
is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.
Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red
rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings.
When the first drop falls, she is there
to meet it. The underside of her arm is a fish’s belly,
her mouth a rain gauge. She is the watermark
and the water rising.
Her rusted car. Where the road was, a river the colour of asphalt.
A rag doll is growing heavier beside her boat. Beneath,
a catfish looms. Farther down, street signs
and streets, yellow lines down the centre.
Two-thirds of the earth is composed of water,
not counting floods. I’m more water than this world is.
Maybe that explains the shift of my organs
during sleep, the glass beside my bed.
The curve of the boat’s hold
is the shape my hand makes
when it wants something. How quickly
my palm fills when I stop asking.
Are two bowls of milk. They are round
and white and have nothing to do
with the moon. They have no implications
of blindness, or sight. They wait
on the doorstep like bowls
or like things that closely resemble
bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not
foreshadow cats. There are two
because two hands set them out
and each wanted to hold something.
Milk because not water. The curve of
milk against the curve of bowl.
FLOOD, DEER LAKE, B.C.
I’m out in it. The water’s ruddy
with the seepage of needles
fallen from towering fir. Ice
floats thinly in it, and slush,
and patches of snow farther
back in the trees I came from.
It’s shallower there. Here reaches
midway to my knees, here
where the path was last week.
My parents have hung back
in soggy boots, but mine
can take it. I might go farther
still, not around the lake,
as we planned, but into.
The water’s clear white, flat,
under slivers of ice a duck broke,
landing. It laps at the brown rubber
of my boots, cedar trunks.
When was I not out there?
If I leave here, where will I be?
When the first wasp would not stop flying near me I sat still
and let it stay. All thin legs and yellow, it did not find my skin
but the silvered mouth of the Pepsi can. It crawled inside
and then another joined it there. I let those two
fill themselves while I finished my greasy knish and thought
how I would soon not be here and how painful
not wanting anyone. One wasp staggered out
and flew, and then the other, and in Manhattan
they were two cabs on their way in one direction. Inside,
what I had loved most: the folds of the woman’s scarf
in Vermeer’s portrait, their depth of shadow,
how the fabric came so close to itself without touching.
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter
, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1662-64. Oil on canvas.
I’ve been told she is not pregnant, but regard:
I mean not only look at her but hold her in esteem,
because her heft of belly cannot be attributed to style
or the way her bluish smock rucks up
under her breasts. She would not otherwise hold
the letter at that height, above the swell,
to protect her child from grief. She would not let
the windowlight fall over all that new weight, fall
on the cold within. I would not say a man has written,
the lover from a wide distance,
husband, unsuspecting, coming from the colonies,
father or her brother who will not help.
It might be her mother:
come to me
.
Or the girl she giggled with when thinner,
now with one at each breast.
It’s long since she was singular and stood
with her forehead warm against the glass, her waist
to the ledge with no flinching tenderness.
Soon she will be forced down and open
and then what rooms will let her and the other in?
Take care, she’s not herself these days
or ever was. To let go of an emptiness
so large, to look upon and love it, how could she not
require the light? The panes divide her and divide.
Because Vermeer looked into a room and saw a map was lit,
I now find it possible to sit here: my shutters flung to sun on brick
on the apartment across the street, where the man rocks
before the blue-draped lamp. Light falls on my pictures
of salal and fern still growing elsewhere (home is not this frozen
sparrow on the porch, an icicle across my sight)