its black-and-white photos and rotting couple
of oars poised above the fire pit, taken here,
the photos seem to say, old men standing in front
of crafts that survived gales in no fresh
air that hasn’t lived with salt, no fresh
catch without a hook, no woman
in the picture, or one, looking a bit too proud, in front.
What she likes is that he likes this place.
The ocean happened here
first, though pioneers claim they did, and a couple
had coves named after themselves. “That couple
chose the fire and not the view. Asked what was fresh
and then they ordered it,” you can almost hear
the waitress saying to another woman.
“As if to put love in its place,
they looked at each other, not out front.”
I hear, in the garden,
fresh from making the ocean, God found a place
for a couple at the front, and the woman paid.
IN YOUR BODY
You have an organ shaped like a heart
that’s not a heart. Poppies by the highway grow the color
of traffic cones and look like fistfuls of firecrackers
before the snap and pop. The weatherman wonders about the water
table the way a vintner cultivates
a public understanding of the promise of his grapes,
selling something, the story stands in for all
that hasn’t been, anesthetizing years
of drought. The surgeon likes to win. What’s wrong with girls
like you he says he can fix. He turns his hands
into a picture you can understand of who you are
inside, more legible than a photo, since it moves.
But he must take you under!
The day after, the neighbor’s wisteria, April
edition, hangs
in doubles like lungs. That’s how you see it—one day,
a lattice strewn with snuggling bright almosts,
those pairs in fine negotiation about their bloom.
The next, twin sacs of one working system.
But how the purple weighs down the apparatus,
making the white seem weightless when it’s not,
when seriously each petal weighs the same,
and all of them together not that much,
and not too much for a good fence to take.
Or is that you, again, with your descriptions,
fresh from the hospital, fresh from the earth?
What good comes of saying how things are? The surgeon did.
Then he told you how they must be changed.
SWEETNESS IN THE FACE
The baker at the edge of the cemetery
displays the raspberry and almond tarts
that look delicious all across the city.
His visual arrangement beckons hunger.
On a rainy day the berries glisten.
It is not like either of us to gorge
ourselves on sweets. A coin
sat in your throat. Your throat, the day before
coated in some liquor of the south.
Drink slowly, and with two cubes of ice,
and as you drink turn sunshine into blood.
Somewhere an angel worth your faith
throws his leg over a casement. Over his right shoulder
ascends a crescent moon. The coin in your throat, an understanding
of how much more you were entitled to.
I would take any palliative measure,
you said in the gallery as we settled
into a wordy astonishment at the dead toreador’s
two white-socked feet pointing into space
just north of the outstretched drama of his cloak,
its pink as delicate as a girlish wound.
I believe you have been through enough.
The coin you spent is just a taste of what
the treacherous and fecund earth will cough
up when you stare its sweetness in the face.
MUSIC, 1980
Turning in the middle seat of the Country
Squire
wrapped in one blanket and clutching
another,
trying to find some way
to lie down
and look out the window at the same
time,
home sick from school.
A year later, I’d see the smoke
horizon pushing
against the ceiling
of my first airplane, my mother’s lips
parted in pleasure. In the Advent
part of the liturgical
calendar, Christ isn’t born
yet, and everyone in the roads
takes leave to return
to the homes of their fathers.
In the pageant I didn’t
get the role I wanted, innkeeper,
because the month before
I’d been the sun.
At the center of the solar
system, no one spoke up
but me, and my mother
cut pieces of orange
and yellow poster board into rays
for a circle
the size of the table.
I don’t know if I was carried
to the car. I thought,
The snake might be
at school.
In the black space I could
make by closing
my eyes and wanting,
I saw him taken
out of his cage and placed
on the taped circumference.
I knew that
would never happen.
From the back
of the seat I wailed,
Where are we going?
You go through the richest
places to get to
the poorest, she said, her
sunglasses on top
of her head, a quilted
jacket with a print of birds
with flowers
in their mouths, red and green
for the holiday against black
piped in pink trim.
Sometimes healing is a kind
of laundry, a reminder
that the earlier state
was better but not good.
The radio played
“Yesterday.” At a stop
sign I heard
my mother crying.
John Lennon has been
shot, she said, John
Lennon is dead.
Who was he? I asked.
He made a record
called Double Fantasy
but that’s not why
I’m crying, I’m crying
because of the Beatles.
“Yesterday” was done.
Next came “Working
Class Hero.” We looked
at the stop sign
for a very long time
and drove on. Music,
it was not sadness
that gave birth to you,
but astonishment.
The person whose body
I lived inside loved
something before me
and drove around singing.
SELF HELP
The eye is the lamp of the body, so I tried
to make a world where all I ate was light. A butterfly
completes a similar labor in the summer
garden, beating its wings slowly like a healthy
person, the kind who runs for fun, could
run from an attacker, eats greens in the same
quantity as the salty meats the storytelling part
of us appears to favor. I couldn’t decide
whether I wanted to stay alive or go
faster, they appeared to contradict each other, I tried
in all I did to eat light. I left the argument
about the diffe
rence between a slave and a servant
on the table, though I think what I think is that
consent to servitude is as much a fiction as a butterfly
having a nervous breakdown because of the beauty
of the lavender. The longer your hunger takes
to find a shape, the longer you can hold it. Consider the butterfly,
only at rest in the middle of consumption, but even
then preparing for departure, for disappearance,
closing in the middle of the landscape.
Trying to manage a world in which all you eat
is light is difficult. Labor, and the lungs should be like wings
of a butterfly beating, closing slowly, the moonlight
tensing the edge of each, almost lifting the edge of each
towards the middle distance. So all that I consume
can make me healthy, illuminate my throat
and the interstate of my digestive tract
with what a butterfly’s been swimming in.
HONEYMOON SUITE
When the light retreats,
the landscape focuses
but with no depth,
the ferryboat moving
into the dark—
you’re trying to find
a version of slowness
for the soul
accustomed to hurry
ravens
chasing each other, and the fourteenth-
floor window cuts through a midsection
of glacier
You said
Happy Holidays to the woman
in the market and she wanted Merry
Christmas
That’s what you wanted too—
a spark
in the nick of hay
the kings on their knees
and people confused
about a beautiful child
A weight on the world
cars moving but muffled
the roads indistinguishable
at last, from the rest of Earth
Now the harbor our television
eating dinner on our knees
waiting for the ship to Gustavus
to sail into broken ice
All good people are like ferryboats
They work
with current
until they can’t then go
against it bravely
diligent not faithful
capsized by excess
untroubled
by weight
The bore tide south
of the city brings Pacific
into the estuary
the urge to move closer
the ocean moving at cross-purposes
with the river’s current, the river that makes
a funneled bay, an arm
goes the idiom, and you love
the idiom, the starfish
of the idiom, the amputation
of the body
for water a body
would never survive
you heard
about the newlywed
who didn’t, who went towards
the tide, who stranded
herself in muddy shallows, you heard
the legend and sorrow of that story, imagined
the groom and his actual personality
and where
then do you put the desire
for property, the entitlement
to china
with a pattern of rosebuds and daisies bound
with grosgrain—
One train clears
the tracks for the real train that moves
goods from earth to moving water you heard
in the vibration
of the metal something about a reign
coming where debt could be abolished,
everyone save the lover
and the beloved in right
relation, and those two
skewered forever on top
of each other only
because they wanted to
Where
do your people come from?
On Kodiak Island, mine
are waiting, if you mean
those who share my name
the mountain rising into its own
cloud of falling snow
but if you bring
a wordlessness with you, any sound
can lift that mountain out
Each exceptional
person like a ferryboat
everyone waits for them
moving around in their lighted cabins
you can see
an exceptional person until they are entirely
gone
Ravens
turn into seabirds
when they cross the border
of the harbor, then turn
back
whether or not the pink
outlasts the morning,
as if the purpose had ever been warmth,
the future turns
to a perimeter
like a honeymoon suite.
PAUL BOWLES
He wanted them to give him money. He asked
for a massive tape machine
to collect the music of Morocco.
The book got made into a movie.
When I watched it, I saw a breast,
the first in my life that didn’t
belong to my family. In the Central
Valley, my husband teaches
his students. Husband,
a word from the Normans.
Younger than the word wife.
This morning we had to borrow money.
It made me want to say
to him, “Did you know
the things you’d have to do
if you came to my country?”
What kind of traveler are you?
Oppositional. I want what I didn’t have
before. Today I want my husband
to come home in the middle
of the day and sit here
at the kitchen table
and act like nothing bad could be
for very long. Tea in the Sahara,
a china cup with a spray
of pink rosebud importing
a strange and unacknowledged humidity
into the windswept scene.
Sand sediments in the saucer.
They wanted to do that in the novel.
In times like these, no one asks for sugar.
NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE
“ECHO BEFORE THE ECHO”
Up to this time Echo still had a body,
She was not merely voice.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III,
lines 362–363, trans. Rolfe Humphries)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems previously appeared or will appear, sometimes in slightly different form: The American Poetry Review, Cherry Tree, Iron Horse Literary Review, Octopus, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tuesday: An Art Project, Third Coast, and West Branch.
“New Parable” is included in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, Knopf/Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets.
“Pleasure” appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2013.
I thank the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for generous support during the years in which these poems were written. I thank those who have read this book closely and helped me find it—you know who you are, dear companions. And I thank my friends in Massachusetts, for giving me a home in that state that is not my home.
ALSO BY KATIE PETERSON
This One Tree
Permission
The Accounts
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katie Peterson is the author of three colle
ctions of poetry: This One Tree, Permission, and The Accounts. She lives in California and teaches at the University of California, Davis. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
The Border
Pleasure
A Citizen
Opera
Happiness
Speech on a Summer Night
The Fountain
The Massachusetts Book of the Dead
Provisioning
Echo Before the Echo
The Photographer
An Offering
New Parable
The Economy
The Government
The Reward
The Bargain
Autobiographical Fragment
Filibuster to Delay the Spring
The Sentence
Date
In Your Body
Sweetness in the Face
Music, 1980
Self Help
Honeymoon Suite
Paul Bowles
Note
Acknowledgments
Also by Katie Peterson
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Katie Peterson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71983-8
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eISBN 9780374719838
First eBook edition: February 2019
A Piece of Good News Page 3
