stop sign and supermarket: each crossroads
brings sustenance and holds an argument.
We stopped at the grocery store for liquor.
Almost letting ourselves be tired,
we continued. The argument concerned
the public and the private.
Where we should live. Snow
descended on the windows of the vehicle,
refraining not accumulating rhythm.
The wipers brushed all of it away
towards one side and two ranges of mountains.
The older hiding the base of the taller.
The taller the kind that tempts a climber.
I think my father made his peace
with death on one of those peaks once.
I think he has forgotten. We could finish
the drive up the backside
of the Sierra in a day. I loved
the names of those lonely places that we passed
so much I felt ashamed to let my mouth
linger over syllables: Adelanto.
Nothing could convince me
anything was fragile. I saw my breath
against the windows, towards the last pass,
beginning with the chute that goes straight up
towards the first trees of the bristlecone forest.
Then the road turns topsy-turvy
before it levels out, a mile-long tabletop
summit. Anybody wants to speed there.
If you do, you miss the single boot
hung from a pine tree for no reason.
After that the road becomes a gully.
You drove faster than I even noticed.
I noticed. You kept going.
We argued about what we should love.
Beauty must be witnessed to exist.
I took the opposite position.
I took the side of the icicle
melting at midnight on a day
when work had taken it out of everyone
sweet enough to notice.
We stopped looking at each other.
I know your cheekbone and your forehead
by the argument they make.
Right now it is two winters later.
January: a fragile domesticity.
I have no idea what to eat.
Two winters. We continued
into the valley. We mended
the argument. The cows bedded down
in the frozen sage
with their identical animal children.
You opened a cold beer. The cat had missed me.
The owl found a visible shelter
in spite of two handfuls of snow
collecting in the juncture two cottonwood branches
made into a perch by their separation
from a trunk whose isolate location
made the owl easy to see.
Two in the morning, you didn’t want to touch me.
The next day, you wanted to do everything.
ECHO BEFORE THE ECHO
God wasn’t my father, so I kept lookout
for him while he went
with women who weren’t his wife. I wasn’t
his desire, so when I got caught,
nothing kept me
from punishment, and my tongue
found a new home at the bottom
of a river already rich with victims
and fish. We were never
as together as the night I lost my voice
for hiding his pleasure,
his going so far into the body of a mortal
and coming out, his masquerade
of manliness as masculinity wasn’t enough.
His fingers on her
watery gown made current
of that river,
one rivulet of strap, and then another,
and then the girl was done, the bed
of that river unmade,
if you want to keep
that metaphor
and I do.
I like a metaphor to stay
conventional, to have been used. I ran
to my mother
since I’d woken without speaking.
When she looked into my mouth,
she gasped. I saw
her open
mouth ringed in teeth lose all
its rose and close, her hopes
for me dashed. I was past
even a “shouldn’t have done,”
past being
sent to sleep without dinner. I call
this growing up. You have to pay
but never to the right person. She had stayed
up all night, waiting
for me. I loved my mother,
but lost my language
for a trashy god, and that’s the truth.
So I learned to listen
again. It meant to translate
wildly. To imitate is never
enough for the listener
who desires
participation. I gained
the power
to repeat, repetition
became a way of life,
I will always be in school
I became required to reply
in exactly the words I heard.
Everything in me, of its own
volition, would strain
towards the intonation the words had first
time around. My interpretation
meant my wild
translation. It would always
be inside and against.
You should see a girl’s body outside
her dress but not be able
to say what you have seen.
That is decorum. I can’t remember
whether my mother said this:
imitation
does not copy material but continues
it, giving shape
to the spirit of its making, as if the mind
at last became a pair of hands.
And if a god said this, remember: I am using my own
mouth to say what he has said.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Because he spends all day looking at the images he finds
beautiful, no, because he spends
all day looking for those images in the visible
world, he is not ashamed of looking for a long time
at something he finds beautiful that is not an image.
Green apple on the white desk,
he stares at it, no, he looks at it like he wants to eat.
If I were the photographer, I’d consider the color
before the shape, I’d think and try to conjure,
to keep, in my head, that shade of green.
If it were a sound it would be a ping,
the kind used by submarine commanders to sound
a presence at the epic depth such vessels
occupy, the shade of green that has a bit of yellow
in it, somewhere in between the yellow lily
and the yellow lily’s leaf. Then I’d think about
the rotten place on the lower right-hand side,
at the base, which does not right now keep
the apple from balancing, from somehow
standing up. Green-apple green.
Now watch me put his image in my throat.
AN OFFERING
Early memories dim with their recollection: the fern kingdom
rebuilt when the rest of the fence-wrecking foliage got ripped
out, sweet William in abundance at another edge of the lawn-dominated
yard, dozens of kinds of once-cultivated blooms running wild abandoning
their original plot, like the misbehaving setter released to run
after some human food she could smell on the beach.
Look how I am letting them
go for you, calling them up, like trellises the twilight
clings to, pointing out so many things left out by day, pointing
out the population of unspotted
ladybugs perching at times with visible
nonchalance on the thorns that accompany the roses,
better than any terribly infernal noon or cool
loose morning light could ever do. It is the one thing
I have discovered I can give you that requires
my own diminishing but does not call
attention to my body as a source of pity, at least
for very long. And so, I give them
to you freely, as I have been told to do,
these stories that are now barely stories.
Tell me what I know when I’ve forgotten it.
NEW PARABLE
Was birth the worst thing, or the first
time a body left your bed? I dozed off into that
question like a person reading a text
too closely to be understood, and when I woke,
I remembered I had seen a woman working
in the field, and by her posture, simply by the way
she went at it, bent over, halfhearted, like a person
no longer wanted, no longer working
hard, I could tell, as she pulled garlic
by the root, those stalks streaked with purple, which I could see,
someone had abandoned her,
necessity all over the forced leisure of her hands,
still covered with that good dirt caked in company.
THE ECONOMY
I will take the story of his kindness and sequester it
from all the other stories of his character: his bluntness
of speech, the time he thought me selfish.
Or the Christmas I gave him music, and he gave me a stone.
Gorgeous strains of green in the granite, eye could search
for a pattern forever and never find it, but where would I put it?
So it is with friendship. He kept it in his house.
I was told, Do not store up what’s precious.
THE GOVERNMENT
Years later, the same argument
about what to eat and drink
for hours. Those in elected
positions whirl around those positions
like petals on a flower. At night,
the story of the accident gets told again, this time,
the greatest dramatic pause follows the rescuer
walking away. I say it has been years,
years, I say, to any flower that will
listen, to our excuses for lilies, a flower
I’ve never actually seen.
THE REWARD
If you love those who love you, what reward do you have?
And so I went into the world, determined not to love
the black lizard doing his mighty push-up on the middle crossbeam
of the three-pronged trellis any more than I cared for
the dented Marine truck no longer useful, save for sitting in and remembering
the Marine who left it in this used-to-be-an-ocean, remembering his time
in a unit devoted to the design, cultivation, and placement
of smaller explosives, and the detonation of those devices, though the cleanup
got left to another person in another truck.
THE BARGAIN
On one side of the scale, a dish the size of a fist
with a pinch of mint the same amount
as the largest tooth of your youngest child. The man
removes it, replaces it with another dish, two pinches of cumin
ground from the seed and roasted over a fire just hot
enough to burn a light orange for at least the time it took to tell
the story of your birth to a stranger who knew nothing of your
country, not even its name. The man removes it, sets it next to the mint. In a small
tin cup, he places a handful of dill, so fresh it smells like seaweed from the earth.
The soft plant looks cool and sea-shaped, an imagination of ocean
submerges it, a little sea imagined right there, in the cup.
Against each the man has weighed a piece of paper with a list
of all your transgressions from the time you mixed
up Mother and Father to the long way you took home
to see the sunset, just to be alone, avoiding chores
until they were too late to do. Then someone comes
who wants you to see the sunset, tells you to rejoice.
He tells you, Keep your spices for yourself. To flavor water,
to grill your game across the coals you only lit
to keep you warm, to fill a vase with dill and call it flowers.
But when the sun goes down, you wonder what it weighs.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
In those days I began to see light under every
bushel basket, light nearly splitting
the sides of the bushel basket. Light came
through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles
congregated like well-taxed citizens
untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one
underneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say.
When I grew restless in the interior,
the exterior gave.
FILIBUSTER TO DELAY THE SPRING
Man my mother never
voted for, I hear you lived
in the basement
apartment, underneath
mine, in Somerville,
Massachusetts.
Crocuses, then daffodils,
and the usual volunteers
of natives, even
the groundcover blooms.
Health care is a right
and marriage a gateway
to what most
people want at three
in the morning. Thank you
for believing in
global warming. I love
how you look at your wife.
Let’s talk about airport
security. The last
time I went through
an agent pulled the clip
from my hair himself.
An abalone shell
from the coast of California
still shines pink
the color of labia
in Massachusetts, where
Dickinson loved
the circle so much
it became an American
landscape. The day I
realized my mother
would never vote
for you, I taught
a classroom a poem
by Robinson Jeffers: a beautiful
woman puts on
the skin of a lion, and runs
into the cypresses on a rainy
evening, after her aged
father has died
so she will get shot
by the son
of her brutal husband.
When I call my brother
he doesn’t pick up his
cell and my father
goes to the ordination of
a priest, for pleasure,
on a Saturday,
with a new wife.
Man of state, how did
you study, late
into the night, or at a diner,
the whole day a list
of errands? Is the economy
a paycheck or happiness?
What I can’t buy
the dead I buy my friend
whose child shook
with seizures
all fall, and the crease
in the peach tulips edged in golden-
rod yellow lets in a bit
of light, then a streak
of fade, and though the bouquet
may stay less
time she’ll love
it more for
opening like that. Into
the ground, under a pine,
chosen for its thick
root potentially, in another
generation, upending
not hers but the next-
door stone, even in that purchase
we worried about ourselves and not
another, took note of and
moved straight over their loss, though
the tree might decide to hold
its ground and go deeper, not out,
she went and you
became president. Obama,
I am closer now
if I never meet you or stand
in the same room
with you than I’ll ever be
again to my mother.
The air you breathe
parts molecules and circulates towards
my body, towards the state
where I pay my rent.
The waste you make enters
the stream of general waste, and she
past waste makes nothing.
THE SENTENCE
I climbed a mountain and the air constricted breathing—
the terrain of the free spirit, that creature
so dedicated to surmounting that the mountain,
its hanging glacier, its granite slabs cut through
by the trail, its heaps of rocks blocking reasonable
access to the turquoise lake beneath, its wildflowers
with their fraying lackadaisical paintbrushes,
went by in my eyes so quickly I never truly left
the not-yet-turning aspens, carved by local lovers
who loved themselves so much they stayed right
there with their knives until they finished their names.
DATE
The waitress in the oceanfront
restaurant admires the choices of the couple
sitting by the gaslit fireplace:
fisherman’s stew with saffron and fresh
cilantro, and, for the woman,
linguine with clams. He was not born here.
When couples come here,
it is supposed to be romantic, they ask to sit up front
by the window, often it’s the woman
who asks, and if it’s a new couple
and the feeling between them fresh,
she will say, I love this place.
This time, the man says it: he likes this place.
He means he likes the ocean, always here,
and so the fish they serve tastes fresh.
Good fishermen hang full nets in front
of trusty boats to show their haul just like a couple
holds hands in public. He asks the woman
if she likes it too, and then the woman
smiles, not because she likes the place,
A Piece of Good News Page 2
