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A Piece of Good News

Page 3

by Katie Peterson


  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

 

 

 


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