Two Bowls of Milk (4 page)

Though I made it holy in my mind,

that place I left was never mine.

Where did summer come from,

the field awash in clover? A woman

I should know is placed just so, as all

your women are, elegant and self-

contained, extending in her hand

wildflowers a blue I thought extinct.

Her colours layered upon your old

palette over grey and black make

your eyes tear up. Her lips rise into

a smile you had not foreseen. Can you

reach to meet her hand? All of this

is yours. You scratch your name, small

near the edge of her white dress,

then trade this canvas for another,

blank. If I turn from you and take her

offered luck, will this sky break?

This couple used by sun then left

behind could be your parents,

old: his face driftwood whittled

too long, hers a blob of cocoa butter.

That place of snow and mapled

beans, kitchen with its crucifix,

might not be real from here. The boy

a sheaf of wheat behind them,

midday hot on the back of his head,

turned away. Why is he here?

He’s looking at that scatter of small

figures far down the sand.

He could go there. But you didn’t,

you became that downcast

man who casts no shadow under

unrelenting sun. I could have turned

into her, hat wide-brimmed to keep

my face from melting. Instead I’m

so distant I might be a grain of sand

or the water my feet enter.

You remember yourself: boy, aged

six, striped into a sailor suit alone

between two figures:
la mère, le père
.

You have not changed, painting

that cloud a stone above your head,

approach of hope as a woman

under her white parasol. She might

save you, if the sky doesn’t fall before

her steps draw near. Listen: I’ve feared

earthquakes, falling asteroids, being

alone. Let your fingers span that

distance to the crenellated edges

of your mother’s parasol. We’re

loved. Your wife sitting in the garden

as you paint, my love calling me

in his magic accent. Our mothers

never leave us. Toward that promise

on your flat horizon I’ve walked

under overcast sky, then out. Sun

bathes me, forgives my doubt.

This is only part of it: red smear

of her lips at the left, his at the right.

Which is longer, winter

or the distance between them?

How little they like each other, how

alike they look. Soon you will

leave us with this, no spare room

in the wide frame for your wife’s

body close through twenty thousand

nights. I wait with her downstairs

in the kitchen where she taught

children how to paint. We clink

our glasses of red wine, liquid jewels

lighting the white cloth. In that field,

you’re still waiting for the train.

Why did we believe we needed

tickets? Why didn’t you walk? Here,

a fire melts snow from my socks.

Tu me manques
to my English

mind means “you are missing

from me.” But I don’t miss you

and am whole as I cross this white

plain that is the river. Water

holds me up. This was blue

just months ago, rippled, and will

soon return to ripples to return

to sea. You were dead when I

first saw your painted faces

taking numbness as their due.

They still loom up, open

their mouths, too weak to break

through ice. I do not bend

to crack open breath-holes

I could fall into. Home is my feet

laying a path I’ll follow back.

Sun streams through a buoyant

sky to dazzle snow. My shadow

flits, so quick it can’t be fixed.

Nothing is unsplit.

In the cabinet of flap anatomies,

babies burst through women’s paper

flesh full-term, germinated

through some random crash of cells.

Framed upon the wall, fathers frolic

in various degrees of nude

and skeleton and écorché, muscle

stripped like bacon from their thighs.

My jutting pelvic bones

injure my lover, scare children

from my lap – I might be that dissected

girl in pen and ink, perused

by a dark-suited man who smells

of hot secretions. He examines each

of her named parts, then my narrow waist.

Does he imagine the soft gap

that lies inside? I must be oblivious to it, I am

a brain aloft within a skull. I have seen

skunks torn to a stink of crimson,

white and black; Frère Andrè’s heart

in glass; but not the inside

of my body. Opened like that woman

a hyena’s jaw tore into while she watched

or the yellow-fever victim

who vomited his stomach out,

could I claim those ruddy clots

and pulses as mine, as me?

Could I look upon my insides, out?

I loved her when we washed our hands

in matching sinks at school. She feared the cubicles

where a raincoat with a man in it might stand

on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife

tight in his fist. Once her desk waited

all day for her. She was not dead, the teacher

reassured, just camping with her family. I doused

my tears in icy water, wished for her braids.

She did not come. My letter slot released

a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb

engorged beneath. Veins so intricately etched

they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers

had done it. Then I forgot. Time passed

until I visited a gallery and ticking stopped

before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw

in bracelets of taut rope. A posture

she had practised during recess to prepare.

Peeled to reveal her braided spine, skin draped

her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted

to her upper arms. The alphabet named her

crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked

behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed

at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.

Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am

no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;

fear; one bound hand and the other binding.

Flesh was here: eyes shut under

sticky white, whorl of ear within

which plaster hardened, muting

all sound. All that remains

is the space a woman once took.

What if these sarcophagal hinges

swung shut, enclosing my whole

body? A ship inside a bottle, but

who outside could pull the string

to lift its sails? Once, on a Gulf

island, my friend pressed wet sheets

of plaster against my face until

my face was there without me.

Later she painted rose and yellow

over that hard white and on her

cabin wall I didn’t recognize

myself. The air around her naked

body as she showered in the forest

glistened. Two profiles engaged

with each other make a curving vase

between them. One face that shuts

itself into a box has made a box.

It was so dark that I was blind

to shapes my face engraved inside.

Who’s to say I’m not

that dog, that small

woman low to ground

and wrought of greenish

stone, packed inside

the flaccid palm of who

I think I am. Snow

and blue ice, song

of a woman cutting

excess from a rock

she found. She kept it

warm a long time in her

fist, the idea of dog-

woman hardening

to bone, barking hot.

It took her a week.

Ice cracked, her kids

cried for meat. Now

dog-woman lives

in a glass case in

a basement where a girl’s

paid to wear a suit

and watch that no one

steals her. I come

on Fridays. That girl and I

have nearly melted

the glass with our breath

waiting for animal speech.

In silence, dog-woman’s

replete, unleashed.

You frame many parts of him.

Anonymous buttocks, torso

the delicate curvature

of treble clef, he’s become

another thing entirely.

Fresh from his mother, he was

all light and stirring; unlike

your vegetables he would not

lie still until the right shadows fell.

Now he lets you prop him

in a doorway. For the last

picture you open the shutter

to let in his face you’ve placed

in profile. What part of you

made him look like that?

His cheek is desert. It will outlast

all the stones you’ve photographed.

It’s hot, the door is blocked, your

dark clothes hurt you, you have

never loved anyone enough.

In childhood I dreamt I would be in such a still place.

These plants were never pulled from actual

earth, they were always here under pebbled light.

Their leaves are green and paler green, and flowers

bloom an antiseptic pink in rows. Painted,

this would be more than real. Itself, it’s less,

a simulation copied from no thing. And I?

What air is here is thin, held under a bell jar.

In the dream, goldfish the colour of blossoms

were under a bridge under a sky, it was a good place.

If that look originates in eyes

identical to yours but not

your eyes, who is watcher

and who watched? All three

might be you, each responding

to the name a child gives

the plastic baby she bestows

her heart and all her hurt upon.

Once my friend – my sister

but for blood – strode toward me

in a café I was not in, in a city

I had left.
You didn’t answer

when I called your name
–

she blurted by phone and I,

lost and fraught with guilt,

apologized. If I’d been her,

would the café-me have answered

to myself, then turned away

as Vermeer’s girl – anonymous

but for grief – turns from

and to me? Do you, Dolly, take

comfort in that mother,

sister, child whose smell

is you and yours – or want