Only As the Day Is Long

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Only As the Day Is Long Page 4

by Dorianne Laux


  soaking in a shallow pan, busted chairs stuffed

  in the rafters of the neighbor’s garage, the Chevy’s

  twisted undersides jacked up on blocks.

  It was what we knew best, understood least,

  it whipped through our bodies like fire or sleet.

  We were lured by the dumpster behind the liquor store,

  fissures in the baked earth, the smell of singed hair,

  the brassy hum of high-tension towers, train tracks,

  buzzards over a ditch, black widows, the cat

  with one eye, the red spot on the back of the skirt,

  the fallout shelter’s metal door hinged to the rusty

  grass, the back way, the wrong path, the night’s

  wide back, the coiled bedsprings of the sister’s top

  bunk, the wheezing, the cousin in the next room

  tapping on the wall, anything small.

  We were afraid of clothesline, curtain rods, the worn

  hairbrush, the good-for-nothings we were about to become,

  reform school, the long ride to the ocean on the bus,

  the man at the back of the bus, the underpass.

  We were afraid of fingers of pickleweed crawling

  over the embankment, the French Kiss, the profound

  silence of dead fish, burning sand, rotting elastic

  in the waistbands of our underpants, jellyfish, riptides,

  eucalyptus bark unraveling, the pink flesh beneath,

  the stink of seaweed, seagulls landing near our feet,

  their hateful eyes, their orange-tipped beaks stabbing

  the sand, the crumbling edge of the continent we stood on,

  waiting to be saved, the endless, wind-driven waves.

  Last Words

  for Al

  His voice, toward the end, was a soft coal breaking

  open in the little stove of his heart. One day

  he just let go and the birds stopped singing.

  Then the other deaths came on, as if by permission—

  beloved teacher, cousin, a lover slipped from my life

  the way a rope slithers from your grip, the ocean

  folding over it, your fingers stripped of flesh. A deck

  of cards, worn smooth at a kitchen table, the jack

  of spades laid down at last, his face thumbed to threads.

  An ashtray full of pebbles on the window ledge, wave-beaten,

  gathered at day’s end from a beach your mind has never left,

  then a starling climbs the pine outside—

  the cat’s black paw, the past shattered, the stones

  rolled to their forever-hidden places. Even the poets

  I had taken to my soul: Levis, Matthews, Levertov—

  the books of poetry, lost or stolen, left on airport benches,

  shabby trade paperbacks of my childhood, the box

  misplaced, the one suitcase that mattered crushed

  to nothing in the belly of a train. I took a rubbing

  of the carved wings and lilies from a headstone

  outside Philadelphia, frosted gin bottles

  stationed like soldiers on her grave:

  The Best Blues Singer in the World

  Will Never Stop Singing.

  How many losses does it take to stop a heart,

  to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?

  Each one came rushing through the rooms he left.

  Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.

  Trying to Raise the Dead

  Look at me. I’m standing on a deck

  in the middle of Oregon. There are

  people inside the house, It’s not my

  house, you don’t know them.

  They’re drinking and singing

  and playing guitars. You love

  this song. Remember? “Ophelia.”

  Boards on the windows, mail

  by the door. I’m whispering

  so they won’t think I’m crazy.

  They don’t know me that well.

  Where are you now? I feel stupid.

  I’m talking to trees, to leaves

  swarming on the black air, stars

  blinking in and out of heart-

  shaped shadows, to the moon, half-

  lit and barren, stuck like an ax

  between the branches. What are you

  now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?

  What? Give me something. I have

  to know where to send my voice.

  A direction. An object. My love, it needs

  a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.

  I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

  Say burning bush. Say stone. They’ve

  stopped singing now and I really should go.

  So tell me, quickly. It’s April. I’m

  on Spring Street. That’s my gray car

  in the driveway. They’re laughing

  and dancing. Someone’s bound

  to show up soon. I’m waving.

  Give me a sign if you can see me.

  I’m the only one here on my knees.

  The Shipfitter’s Wife

  I loved him most

  when he came home from work,

  his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,

  his denim shirt ringed with sweat,

  smelling of salt, the drying weeds

  of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat

  on the edge of the bed, his forehead

  anointed with grease, his cracked hands

  jammed between his thighs, and unlace

  the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles

  and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.

  Then I’d open his clothes and take

  the whole day inside me—the ship’s

  gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,

  the voice of the foreman clanging

  off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead

  kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,

  the white fire of the torch, the whistle,

  and the long drive home.

  Abschied Symphony

  Someone I love is dying, which is why,

  when I turn the key in the ignition

  and the radio comes on, sudden and loud,

  something by Haydn, a diminishing fugue,

  then back the car out of the parking space

  in the underground garage, maneuvering through

  the dimly lit tunnels, under low ceilings,

  following yellow arrows stenciled at intervals

  on gray cement walls and I think of him,

  moving slowly through the last

  hard days of his life, I won’t

  turn it off, and I can’t stop crying.

  When I arrive at the tollgate I have to make

  myself stop thinking as I dig in my pockets

  for the last of my coins, turn to the attendant,

  indifferent in his blue smock, his white hair

  curling like smoke around his weathered neck,

  and say Thank you, like an idiot, and drive

  into the blinding midday light.

  Everything is hideously symbolic:

  the Chevron truck, its underbelly

  spattered with road grit and the sweat

  of last night’s rain, the dumpster

  behind the flower shop, sprung lid

  pressed down on dead wedding bouquets—

  even the smell of something simple, coffee

  drifting from the open door of a café,

  and my eyes glaze over, ache in their sockets.

  For months now all I’ve wanted is the blessing

  of inattention, to move carefully from room to room

  in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.

  To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,

  drawn thin and pale, unable to swallow.

  How not to imagine the tumors

  ripening beneath hi
s skin, flesh

  I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,

  pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights

  so hard I thought I could enter him, open

  his back at the spine like a door or a curtain

  and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,

  nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,

  brushing over the blue coils of his bowels

  with the fluted silk of my tail.

  Death is not romantic. He is dying. That fact

  is stark and one-dimensional, a black note

  on an empty staff. My feet are cold,

  but not as cold as his, and I hate this music

  that floods the cramped insides

  of my car, my head, slowing the world down

  with its lurid majesty, transforming

  everything I see into stained memorials

  to life—even the old Ford ahead of me,

  its battered rear end thinned to scallops of rust,

  pumping grim shrouds of exhaust

  into the shimmering air—even the tenacious

  nasturtiums clinging to a fence, stem and bloom

  of the insignificant, music spooling

  from their open faces, spilling upward, past

  the last rim of blue and into the black pool

  of another galaxy. As if all that emptiness

  were a place of benevolence, a destination,

  a peace we could rise to.

  Family Stories

  I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,

  how an argument once ended when his father

  seized a lit birthday cake in both hands

  and hurled it out a second-story window. That,

  I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger

  sent out across the sill, landing like a gift

  to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine

  it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,

  and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed

  the people in his stories really loved one another,

  even when they yelled and shoved their feet

  through cabinet doors or held a chair like a bottle

  of cheap champagne, christening the wall,

  rungs exploding from their holes.

  I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury

  of the passionate. He said it was a curse

  being born Italian and Catholic and when he

  looked from that window what he saw was the moment

  rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous

  three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship

  down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk

  deep in the icing, a few still burning.

  Pearl

  She was a headlong assault, a hysterical discharge, an act of total extermination.

  —MYRA FRIEDMAN,

  Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin

  She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,

  this moonfaced child who opened her mouth

  to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced

  daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Otis, and the booze-

  filled moon, child of the honkytonk bar-talk crowd

  who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown

  open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted

  at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out

  into the sawdusted air. Barefaced, mouth warped

  and wailing like giving birth, like being eaten alive

  from the inside, or crooning like the first child

  abandoned by God, trying to woo him back,

  down on her knees and pleading for a second chance.

  When she sang she danced a stand-in-place dance,

  one foot stamping at that fire, that bed of coals;

  one leg locked at the knee and quivering, the other

  pumping its oil-rig rhythm, her boy hip jigging

  so the beaded belt slapped her thigh.

  Didn’t she give it to us? So loud so hard so furious,

  hurling heat-seeking balls of lightning

  down the long human aisles, her voice crashing

  into us—sonic booms to the heart—this little white girl

  who showed us what it was like to die

  for love, to jump right up and die for it night after

  drumbeaten night, going down shrieking—hair

  feathered, frayed, eyes glazed, addicted to the song—

  a one-woman let me show you how it’s done, how it is,

  where it goes when you can’t hold it in anymore.

  Child of everything gone wrong, gone bad, gone down,

  gone. Girl with the girlish breasts and woman hips,

  thick-necked, sweat misting her upper lip, hooded eyes

  raining a wild blue light, hands reaching out

  to the ocean we made, all that anguish and longing

  swelling and rising at her feet. Didn’t she burn

  herself up for us, shaking us alive? That child,

  that girl, that rawboned woman, stranded

  in a storm on a blackened stage like a house

  on fire.

  Smoke

  Who would want to give it up, the coal

  a cat’s eye in the dark room, no one there

  but you and your smoke, the window

  cracked to street sounds, the distant cries

  of living things. Alone, you are almost

  safe, smoke slipping out between the sill

  and the glass, sucked into the night

  you don’t dare enter, its eyes drunk

  and swimming with stars. Somewhere

  a dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws

  of a black machine. All down the block

  something inside you opens and shuts.

  Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,

  trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.

  You don’t flip on the TV or the radio, they

  might muffle the sound of car engines

  backfiring, and in the silence between,

  streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff

  of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own,

  growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.

  There’s no music for this scarf of smoke

  wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers

  crawling the pale stem of your neck,

  no song light enough, liquid enough,

  that climbs high enough before it thins

  and disappears. Death’s shovel scrapes

  the sidewalk, critches across the man-made

  cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters,

  digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.

  You can hear him weaving his way

  down the street, sloshed on the last breath

  he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:

  breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman’s

  sharp grasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.

  You can’t put it out, can’t stamp out the light

  and let the night enter you, let it burrow through

  your smallest passages. So you listen and listen

  and smoke and give thanks, suck deep

  with the grace of the living, blowing halos

  and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains

  linking around your head. Then you pull it in

  again, the vein-colored smoke,

  and blow it up toward a ceiling you can’t see

  where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,

  like the ghost the night will become.

  The Orgasms of Organisms

  Above the lawn the wild beetles mate

  and mate, skew their tough wings

  and join. They light in our hair,

  on our arms, fall twirling and twinning

 
; into our laps. And below us, in the grass,

  the bugs are seeking each other out,

  antennae lifted and trembling, tiny legs

  scuttling, then the infinitesimal

  ahs of their meeting, the awkward joy

  of their turnings around. O end to end

  they meet again and swoon as only bugs can.

  This is why, sometimes, the grass feels electric

  under our feet, each blade quivering, and why

  the air comes undone over our heads

  and washes down around our ears like rain.

  But it has to be spring, and you have to be

  in love—acutely, painfully, achingly in love—

  to hear the black-robed choir of their sighs.

  Life is Beautiful

  and remote, and useful,

  if only to itself. Take the fly, angel

  of the ordinary house, laying its bright

  eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out

  delicately along a crust of buttered toast.

  Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest

  dump where other flies have gathered, singing

  over stained newsprint and reeking

  fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate

  ballet above the clashing pirouettes

  of heavy machinery. They hum with life.

  While inside rumpled sacks pure white

  maggots writhe and spiral from a rip,

  a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips

  a living froth onto the buried earth.

  The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch,

  rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon

  their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded

  dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges,

  a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh.

  And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening,

  husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening

  and shifting within, wings curled and wet,

  the open air pungent and ready to receive them

  in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts,

  a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost

 

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