Book Read Free

A Piece of Good News

Page 1

by Katie Peterson




  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:

 

‹ Prev