Only As the Day Is Long

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Only As the Day Is Long Page 6

by Dorianne Laux


  tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold

  at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought

  of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide

  which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping

  the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched

  to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head

  shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down.

  So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade,

  familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have

  a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have

  a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up.

  You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog

  off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled

  on the steps of the church. If it weren’t for them you could believe in god,

  in freedom, the bus would appear and open its doors, the driver dressed

  in his tan uniform, pants legs creased, dapper hat: Hello Miss, watch

  your step now. But you’re not a Republican. You’re only tired, hungry,

  you want out of the cold. So you give up, step into line behind

  the grubby vet who hides a bag of wine under his pea coat, holds out

  his grimy 85 cents, takes each step slow as he pleases, releases his coins

  into the box and waits as they chink down the chute, stakes out a seat

  in the back and eases his body into the stained vinyl to dream

  as the chips of shrapnel in his knee warm up and his good leg

  flops into the aisle. And you’ll doze off, too, in a while, next to the girl

  who can’t sit still, who listens to her Walkman and taps her boots

  to a rhythm you can’t hear, but you can see it—when she bops

  her head and her hands do a jive in the air—you can feel it

  as the bus rolls on, stopping at each red light in a long wheeze,

  jerking and idling, rumbling up and lurching off again.

  Face Poem

  Your craggy mountain goat face.

  Your mole-ridden, whiskered, stumpy fish of a face. Face

  I turn to, face I trust, face I trace with grateful fingertips,

  jaw like a hinge, washboard forehead, the deep scar a gnarl

  along the scritch of your chin.

  Your steep, crumbling cliff of a face.

  Your U-Haul, bulldozer, crane of a face. Face worthy

  of a thousand-dollar bill, a thickly poured, stamped, minted

  and excavated coin. Your mile-high billboard of a face looming

  up from the pillow of sighs.

  Your used car lot of a face, the bumpers

  and sprung hoods and headlights of your eyes, your DieHard

  battery of a face, the pulpy pith of it, the flare and slur and flange

  of your ears, the subterranean up-thrust ridge of your nose.

  Your many-planed, light-catching, shadow-etched face.

  Your sallow, sun-wracked, jowl-hung face. Eye flash

  in flesh folds, gunnel rope and upper lip storm on the high seas

  thrash of a face. Your been-there, done-that, anything-goes face.

  Luck-of-the-draw fabulous four clubs five-knuckled slug

  of a face. Toss of the dice face.

  Superglue

  I’d forgotten how fast it happens, the blush of fear

  and the feeling of helpless infantile stupidity, stooped

  over the sink, warm water gushing into a soapy bowl,

  my stuck fingers plunged in, knuckles bumping the glass

  like a stillborn pig in formaldehyde, my aging eyes

  straining to read the warning label in minus two type,

  lifting the dripping deformed thing up every few seconds

  to stare, unbelieving, at the seamless joining, the skin

  truly bonded as they say happens immediately, thinking:

  Truth in Labeling, thinking: This is how I began inside

  my mother’s belly, before I divided toe from toe, bloomed

  into separation like a peach-colored rose, my eyes going slick

  and opening, my mouth releasing itself from itself to make

  lips, legs one thick fin of trashing flesh wanting to be two,

  unlocking from ankles to knees, cells releasing between

  my thighs, not stopping there but wanting more double-ness,

  up to the crotch and into the crotch, needing the split

  to go deeper, carve a core, a pit, a two-sided womb, with

  or without me my body would perform this sideshow

  trick and then like a crack in a sidewalk

  stop. And I’d carry that want for the rest of my life,

  eyes peeled open, mouth agape, the world

  piled around me with its visible seams: cheap curtains,

  cupboard doors, cut bread on a plate, my husband

  appearing in the kitchen on his two strong legs

  to see what’s wrong, lifting my hand by the wrist.

  And I want to kiss him, to climb him,

  to stuff him inside me and fill that space, poised

  on the brink of opening opening opening

  as my wrinkled fingers, pale and slippery,

  remember themselves, and part.

  Cello

  When a dead tree falls in a forest

  it often falls into the arms

  of a living tree. The dead,

  thus embraced, rasp in wind,

  slowly carving a niche

  in the living branch, shearing away

  the rough outer flesh, revealing

  the pinkish, yellowish, feverish

  inner bark. For years

  the dead tree rubs its fallen body

  against the living, building

  its dead music, making its raw mark,

  wearing the tough bough down

  as it moans and bends, the deep

  rosined bow sound of the living

  shouldering the dead.

  Little Magnolia

  Not nearly a woman like the backyard cedar

  whose branches fall and curl,

  whose curved body sways in wind,

  the little magnolia is still a girl,

  her first blossoms tied like white strips of rag

  to the tips of her twiggy pigtails.

  Who are the trees? They live

  half in air, half below ground,

  both rooted and homeless, like the man

  who wedges his life between

  the windbreak wall of the Laundromat

  and the broken fence, a strip of gritty earth

  where he’s unfolded his section

  of clean cardboard, his Goodwill blanket.

  Here’s his cup, his candle, his knife.

  Starling

  Tail a fanfare and the devil’s

  kindling. Oh to be a rider

  on that purple storm. Not

  peacock or eagle but lowly

  starling, Satan’s bird,

  spreading her spotted wings

  over the Valley of Bones.

  To build a home within her, stark

  shanty for the soul, bonfire stoked

  with pine-sap sage, smoke

  rising through her ribs, her skin,

  tainting the undersides of leaves.

  Marrow house from which the one

  wild word escapes. Stave and barrel

  world of want. Of late, my plush

  black nest. My silver claw

  and gravel craw. My only song.

  from

  THE BOOK OF MEN

  Staff Sgt. Metz

  Metz is alive for now, standing in line

  at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear

  and buzz cut, hi
s beautiful new

  camel-colored suede boots. His hands

  are thick-veined. The good blood

  still flows through, given an extra surge

  when he slurps his latte, a fleck of foam

  caught on his bottom lip.

  I can see into the canal in his right ear,

  a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head

  toward the place of dreaming and fractions,

  ponds of quiet thought.

  In the sixties my brother left for Vietnam,

  a war no one understood, and I hated him for it.

  When my boyfriend was drafted I made a vow

  to write a letter every day, and then broke it.

  I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love.

  I burned their letters in the metal trash bin

  behind the broken fence. It was the summer of love

  and I wore nothing under my cotton vest,

  my Mexican skirt.

  I see Metz later, outside baggage claim,

  hunched over a cigarette, mumbling

  into his cell phone. He’s more real to me now

  than my brother was to me then, his big eyes

  darting from car to car as they pass.

  I watch him breathe into his hands.

  I don’t believe in anything anymore:

  god, country, money or love.

  All that matters to me now

  is his life, the body so perfectly made,

  mysterious in its workings, its oiled

  and moving parts, the whole of him

  standing up and raising one arm

  to hail a bus, his legs pulling him forward,

  all muscle and sinew and living gristle,

  the countless bones of his foot trapped in his boot,

  stepping off the red curb.

  Bakersfield, 1969

  I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhike

  to the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hours

  through the sun-blasted San Fernando Valley

  just to sit on his fold-down bed in a trailer

  parked in the side yard of his parents’ house,

  drinking Southern Comfort from a plastic cup.

  His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal,

  and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab.

  Once his mother knocked on the tin door

  to ask us in for dinner. She watched me

  from the sides of her eyes while I ate.

  When I offered to wash the dishes she told me

  she wouldn’t stand her son being taken

  advantage of. I said I had no intention

  of taking anything and set the last dish

  carefully in the rack. He was a bit slow,

  like he’d been hit hard on the back of the head,

  but nothing dramatic. We didn’t talk much anyway,

  just drank and smoked and fucked and slept

  through the ferocious heat. I found a photograph

  he took of me getting back on the bus or maybe

  stepping off into his arms. I’m wearing jeans

  with studs punched into the cuffs,

  a T-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pair

  of stolen bowling shoes and a purse I made

  while I was in the loony bin, wobbly X’s

  embroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn.

  I don’t remember how we met. When I look

  at this picture I think I might not even

  remember this boy if he hadn’t taken it

  and given it to me, written his name under mine

  on the back. I stopped seeing him

  after that thing with his mother. I didn’t know

  I didn’t know anything yet. I liked him.

  That’s what I remember. That,

  and the I-don’t-know-what degree heat

  that rubbed up against the trailer’s metal sides,

  steamed in through the cracks between the door

  and porthole windows, pressed down on us

  from the ceiling and seeped through the floor,

  crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,

  sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air

  sucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal says

  If you ain’t scared, you ain’t right. Back then

  I was scared most of the time. But I acted

  tough, like I knew every street.

  What I liked about him was that he wasn’t acting.

  Even his sweat tasted sweet.

  Juneau Spring

  In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm

  pressed against the ice-feathered window,

  the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar

  of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed,

  hiked toward it when the men in the booths

  were finished crushing hundred-dollar bills

  into my hand, pitchers of beer balanced on my shoulder

  set down like pots of gold. My shift ended at 5 AM:

  station tables wiped clean, salt and peppers

  replenished, ketchups married. I walked the dirt road

  in my stained apron and snow boots, wool scarf,

  second-hand gloves, steam rising

  off the backs of horses wading chest deep in fog.

  I walked home slow under Orion, his starry belt

  heavy beneath the cold carved moon.

  My room was still, quiet, squares of starlight

  set down like blank pages on the yellow quilt.

  I left the heat on because I could afford it, the house

  hot as a sauna, and shed my sweater and skirt,

  toed off my boots, slung my damp socks

  over the oil heater’s coils. I don’t know now

  why I ever left. I slept like the dead

  while outside my window the sun rose

  low over the glacier, and the glacier did its best

  to hold on, though one morning I woke to hear it

  giving up, sloughing off a chunk of antediluvian ice,

  a sound like an iron door opening on a bent hinge.

  Those undefined days I stared into the blue scar

  where the ice face had been, so clear and crystalline

  it hurt. I slept in my small room and all night—

  or what passed for night that far north—

  the geography of the world outside my window

  was breaking and falling and changing shape.

  And I woke to it and looked at it and didn’t speak.

  Mine Own Phil Levine

  after W. S. Merwin

  What he told me, I will tell you

  There was a war on

  It seemed we had lived through

  Too many to name, to number

  There was no arrogance about him

  No vanity, only the strong backs

  Of his words pressed against

  The tonnage of a page

  His suggestion to me was that hard work

  Was the order of each day

  When I asked again, he said it again,

  Pointing it out twice

  His Muse, if he had one, was a window

  Filled with a brick wall, the left hand corner

  Of his mind, a hand lined with grease

  And sweat: literal things

  Before I knew him, I was unknown

  I drank deeply from his knowledge

  A cup he gave me again and again

  Filled with water, clear river water

  He was never old, and never grew older

  Though the days passed and the poems

  Marched forth and they were his words

  Only, no other words were needed

  He advised me to wait, to hold true

  To my vision, to speak in my own voice

  To say the thing straight out

  There was the whole day about him

  The greatest th
ing, he said, was presence

  To be yourself in your own time, to stand up

  That poetry was precision, raw precision

  Truth and compassion: genius

  I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin

  He said, I began in a tree, in Lucerne

  In a machine shop, in an open field

  Start anywhere

  He said If you don’t write, it won’t

  Get written. No tricks. No magic

  About it. He gave me his gold pen

  He said What’s mine is yours

  Late-Night TV

  Again the insomnia of August,

  a night sky buffed by the heat,

  the air so still a ringing phone

  three blocks away sings

  through the fan’s slow moving blades.

  The sleeping cat at the foot of the bed

  twitches in a pool of dusty sheets,

  her fur malt-colored, electric.

  Time to rub the shoulder’s tight knots out

  with a thumb, flip on the TV, watch a man

  douse a white blouse with ink before dipping

  that sad sleeve into a clear bucket.

  What cup of love poured him into this world?

  Did his mother touch her lips

  to his womb-battered crown

  and inhale his scent?

  Did his new father lift him and name him?

  He was fed, clothed, taught to talk.

  Someone must have picked him up

  each time he wobbled and fell.

  There might have been a desk, a history book,

  pencils in a box, a succession

  of wheeled toys.

  By what back road did he travel

  to this late-night station?

  By what untraceable set of circumstances

  did he arrive in my bedroom on a summer night,

  pinching a shirt collar between his fingers,

  his own invention locked in a blue box,

 

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