Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
FOR MY HUSBAND
&
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
Very well, Socrates, what are your instructions to me and the others about your children or anything else? What can we do that would please you most?
Nothing new, Crito, said Socrates, but what I am always saying, that you will please me and mine and yourselves by taking good care of your own selves in whatever you do, even if you do not agree with me now, but if you neglect your own selves, and are unwilling to live following the tracks, as it were, of what we have said now and on previous occasions, you will achieve nothing even if you strongly agree with me at this moment.
— PLATO, Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube
THE BORDER
I had a lust for what was distant.
We were in love. We crossed the border
in broad daylight and the color
of the currency deepened
but didn’t change. The night before
we made love in my sister’s bed.
The coastline shivered and the wind
picked up. You lit a cigarette
inside the car. The potholes
made a song of ruin
so consistent no one noticed.
Vacation homes more proximate
than gas stations. The language
on the radio didn’t change.
When I was hungry you took me to the movies.
When I was tired we went looking
for a shopping mall to purchase
a pair of shoes like the locals
wear—not local. Later we chose a bar
because someone shouted at us.
You felt guilty I paid a man
to shine my tall black boots
but kept staring at the stripper
who must have rubbed her breasts
with lotion before she came to work.
The whole way home, I was never sicker.
I drank the water. I thought it was okay.
We talked about people we fucked
when we should have been
sleeping with each other.
PLEASURE
I remembered what it was like,
knowing what you want to eat and then making it,
forgetting about the ending in the middle,
looking at the ocean for
a long time without restlessness,
or with restlessness not inhabiting the joints,
sitting Indian-style on a porch
overlooking the water, smooth like good cake frosting.
And then I experienced it, falling so deeply
into the story line, I laughed as soon as the character entered
the picture, humming the theme music even when I’d told myself
I wanted to be quiet and not talk forever.
And I thought, Now is the right time to cut up your shirt.
A CITIZEN
I wanted to be seen. But who would see me? I couldn’t
think of the name for anything but a flower. The government
makes coins that size and shape so your hand can feel
safe holding them. The pictures stamped remind
us where we are, or how the landscape
we live in connects itself, through a common value,
to a different place. On this one, a spinnaker
sails past a bridge. On that, a diamond shines like a child’s
stilled top over a bird, as if the diamond made the rest of the natural
world—bird, forest, state flower, sheaf of healthy corn, shining
water—out of proportion in relation to itself. I love this. My own state
has a bear, so small and out of proportion to me that my life-
line crosses behind it. At last I do not fear
that but feel proud the animal can sit in my palm so silently
until I spend it. And if I lose it, it becomes
even more quiet. Most still just have an eagle,
so, it is as if thirty eagles were passed over
from one hand to another when the one
charged with arranging things for his Savior’s dinner
arranged his Savior’s death. Heavier the yoke
of heat in solitude. A walk uphill does not
feel manageable. Who will see me?
OPERA
The next morning, I tried to remember her face, but her dress
sailed into the center of my eye, a ship luscious with sail
crossing no horizon but stopping where I knew
my nose was, that ridiculous mountain
only lovers find right ways to compliment. But then I tried
harder to call it back, and my eyes rose to meet her
décolletage and her shoulders and the manner
in which her clavicle hinged at her neck to sing
with such dexterity she could stomach a world
of old and rich and earnest admirers.
And so, what I remembered came from a pose
I can recall, though his hands were around me in such a way
I could only watch sideways and still be loved,
and what I remembered could not be said
to appear at once at the top of a tall tree
like the endangered condor from a hiding place in some remote part
of California, or, likewise, over the ocean like a salt-crusted hawk.
She made the most sexual face I had ever seen
when she described why she sold her possessions.
HAPPINESS
They had decided against it,
but then they entered the field of sunflowers
together after some pictures had been taken
with a storm in the background,
the shape of a fist, and wrinkled like a raisin,
the color of the strong liquor made from raisins
they had yet to taste or buy. They entered
the field of sunflowers by pushing
through an avenue of stalks.
Her hair blows south-southwest,
the difficult girl who’s just been centered
by the lens of the easy boy,
and I am in the corner of the picture.
Each kilometer cost more than we knew.
He asked her to translate the American
films they watched in French
back into English. He wanted to hear
the meaning of what she remembered, doubled.
I wanted her to admit she posed
for the picture. I could see him beginning
to study happiness, how its large blue eyes
set limits on pleasure, but my one regret
from that summer was not cutting the stalk
of at least one sunflower so I could
see water ache from its insides.
We were heading towards a vineyard
of uncertain reputation. A translation
>
told us to find Street of the Mill.
Street of the Well was all we could discover.
Find a road and take it, keep
some conviction about your destination
though the evidence says the whole
thing’s going south. In the picture,
the girl could be my double, but her chin
tilts west towards the storm and I
am tacking north, towards a city
where a garden named for a smaller country
fills with locals drinking golden aperitifs.
SPEECH ON A SUMMER NIGHT
How do I begin to describe what it was? It was a terrible time to be on a horse. It wasn’t a family. I had no brothers. No one told me about the wind. The animals kept us honest. I believed most in friendship, its promises and disappointments. I had hopes for it, expectations. I fell in love too late with what I loved.
THE FOUNTAIN
Dark green water, reflection of the grove
of elms and pines, at the end of summer,
with a woman standing in it, a statue of a woman,
and a spray of water rising and falling,
the fiction of a natural spring.
Her arms raised in a pose of remembering
some invocation to a god of beauty, and her legs
twisted, with the right before the left
so her thighs, under her dress, give her hips a pose and give
her torso the elegance of intended height.
She laughs the laurel garland off
her hair, almost, and since her hair is stone,
the askew of the wreath
indicates an unseen wind, the kind that might
visit a vineyard in a country
where currency can never be broken
into coin, where the midday
meal has at least three courses and finishes
with the ripest plums, not an assortment
but a selection of one kind of good fruit.
But time was made beside the glassy pool,
its sunken keyhole troubled by the motion of its waters,
waters that served as a mirror
much clearer than the fountain,
where the woman steadied her laurel
with her left hand, and with her right
chose more flowers, small wild white roses, for a garland
around her neck. That’s where you’d rather be on a hot day.
Each morning she comes here, but some she doesn’t
rise early from her bower in those trees, the pines
with their outrageous verticals,
their insistence on arranging partial views,
through columns that exclude as much as frame,
cutting off the hillside, amputating
some people’s progress
towards her part of the landscape. Some days she lies
late with her maker there,
though she is stone. He cradles her. There should be a word
for when events are natural
but their order makes no sense. He falls asleep
with his left hand on her breast, thinking
of his chisel and the block of marble
he left uncut to attend to this job
I suspect he only did for pay. I am happy
when I walk down my sloping lawn
to my fountain, in the morning
in the middle of the summer, I won’t admit
we are close to the end.
I am happy, and as you can see, my pride
has nothing to do
with anything I ever could have made.
THE MASSACHUSETTS BOOK OF THE DEAD
In Massachusetts, the sun of winter
is disappearing behind a fragile field
of cloud like Emily Dickinson
rising from the bedclothes to fasten
her corset and stay inside all day.
* * *
Sun, make yourself a silence on this house.
If my eyes are closed I am not sleeping. If they
are open let them rest
in between
the delicate snowflakes.
* * *
My mother died at nine o’clock at night.
I will be awake
past my bedtime forever.
* * *
When a picture of her gets fixed on
by my mind, even the fence that separates
this blue house from that blue house
divides itself into original planks,
reminds me that the tree began as trunk.
* * *
We should not go out when it’s like this.
As if not going out makes this a home.
* * *
Still, fresh produce fills the aisles of March.
Even as winter tires itself out.
* * *
What made the scholar remember the name
of the black paramour of the white news anchor
was what caused her to forget the length of time
her lover took to tie her up in leather,
anticipating the denouement of pleasure.
* * *
It is better the Atlantic and Pacific
do not cohabitate. Their arguments
over the origin of grains of sand
made the children think it was their fault.
Thus the flatness of tedious Ohio.
* * *
Abstain from intercourse anticipating storms,
from sex, abstain, she told herself,
looping with a homemade recording
the movement of the Schubert sonata
she loved most, that allegretto
whose architecture tells you how he died.
* * *
He said that when he fucked her he could feel
the orchards of California in their lines
of absences and branches, and branches.
* * *
The glass door to her office bore a pattern
of vines and apples and the shadow
of a woman sometimes appeared there
as if in a children’s puzzle book
opened in a doctor’s waiting room,
waiting for her eye doctor to turn
her eye back towards her nose
with a prescription for double bifocals.
* * *
The anguish of the river breaking apart.
Someone told me about it on the phone.
* * *
The graveyard lay a short walk through the wood
behind the Homestead. Hale and ruddy,
the Irishmen who stewarded her casket
to the gate did not find themselves out of breath.
One wondered, Was she even inside?
Apples on high branches. Midsummer.
* * *
The sense of the past and the pastoral
are not one sense. But past the outskirts
of the city, the fences fall away:
foundations of a house,
occupied by moss.
* * *
The trunk of the wet pine in the yard
crushed the crossbeam of the kitchen,
made hash of the skylight where the rain
drummed itself out for decades.
We spoke of the repair in whispers.
* * *
Said of the recluse: she loved music
drifting up the staircase that she saw
as the only portal to a world
whose code of conduct she disdained
as minor chords disdain a major scale.
* * *
Her shopping list, years after she was gone.
The pleasure of organizing need.
* * *
Halfway through the entirety of The Great Gatsby
read onstage by actors in the mock office
of a dentist in downtown Dubuque,
the scholar fell asleep
dreaming of her last Gauloises,
before she quit.
* * *
She could see the border from her house.
But where exactly did the horizon end?
* * *
Be decent and put on your moccasins.
* * *
I walked the Eastern Coast with my Western father
combing the cumulus
for signs of sunlight or signs of rain.
* * *
The young man buys a vinyl for his girl
who does not purchase rubbers for them both,
having been prescribed some pills for that.
He recycles her bottle of vitaminwater
watching a crested yellow flicker.
* * *
When I sleep fetal I sleep the best.
When I say likeness
I am referring to myself
considered as a form of happiness.
* * *
The difference between disintegration
and what was never true.
* * *
I was angry as the tree outside your window
split in half by a rusty sash thrown open in shitty weather.
* * *
By this I mean I was like everyone else.
* * *
At the end of all my education
about the literature of Massachusetts,
I knew Melville almost as well as Melville
knew women.
* * *
We were eating dumplings and discussing
whether history could happen without progress.
In the same way a river might appear
to hurtle between the walls of a Western canyon
neither away from nor towards any source.
* * *
The recluse had a reputation for making
delectable gingerbread of a texture
perfect for crumbling on a cold afternoon
into a cup of tea with milk and sugar.
A good way to make people come to her.
* * *
You could take your revenge on life
by living more years of it, sheer persistence.
You could fish the map instead of the river.
You could drink a boiling cup of tea
and burn your throat into a sunset.
PROVISIONING
We were provisioning. I thought we needed more.
The road black on either side, in both directions,
until we arrived at a fragile junction:
A Piece of Good News Page 1
