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A Piece of Good News

Page 2

by Katie Peterson

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,

 

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