by Emily Raabe
Leave It Behind
Emily Raabe
FutureCycle Press
www.futurecycle.org
Leave It Behind
Copyright © 2011, 2013 Emily Raabe
All Rights Reserved
Published by FutureCycle Press
Hayesville, North Carolina, USA
***
Cover artwork, “Andover,” by Allison Gildersleeve
Cover design and ebook programming by Diane Kistner
Note: We follow Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) conventions for typesetting poetry; lines that do not fit on your screen will “run over” to the next line and indent by a small amount. If you find this distracting, and to better appreciate the poet’s intent, you may prefer viewing the poems in a smaller or more condensed type or “sideways” in landscape mode.
For Norm Walker, teacher
And for always, Paul
Contents
Beginning
I.
My Best Dream
Darwin in the Andes
Field Trip
Babysitting
The Game
First Dead
Route 7
Turning Back
The Wolfman’s Sister
Confession
Dancing
Graduate School
Giving You Back the Musée d’Art
Wedding Poem
Love Poem
Elegy I
II.
Leave It Behind
III.
I Love the Animals
Lesson for Snake Charming
Fox Paws
An Old Story
Early Freeze, Fairbanks
Elegy II
The Doctor Only Heard One Heart
At Seven They Say
At Eleven They Fight
At Twelve They Tear Apart
Her Nightmare
The Story
Spring, El Portal
Rain Is Black and White, Like aPhotograph
Milestone
The Hinge
Self-portrait as a House
A Dream of Horses
The Other Story
The Mirror
Acknowledgments
Beginning
We passed a lean-to somewhere in Scotland,
empty except for a pile of hay.
The hay bore a mark left deep by an animal.
This cow with its baby, two sheep in love, a vagrant
looking to sleep unmolested left behind them a sign of the body,
body in silence that shows itself
through emptiness
in the battened-down hay.
I.
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
—Robert Frost
My Best Dream
goes like this: two fields
cut by a thin line of trees.
In the dream I’m at the line
when the storm comes in.
I dig a ditch in the dark
in the snow in the dream
and get in, and then
the animals arrive—
long noses, soft bodies,
raccoons maybe, deer,
bears, all the creatures
with night eyes
climb into my ditch
with deliberation, settle
their tails, snouts, paws,
speckled haunches
around and over me
so we are cuddled in
like kit fox kittens in a den.
There is no fear of freezing
in this dream, no muttered
counting off of time
because everything is here,
has arrived on padded feet
with something like love
in that it is the absence
of distance. We rest
warm in the sleep
we fear to allow ourselves,
not even on the darkest night,
not even with the snow
falling fast oh fast, and animals
so unafraid that they sleep
unfurled in your arms.
The dream, you understand me,
was a gift, but it came
with a price. I sleep each night
with my palms up
and wake
each morning alone.
Darwin in the Andes
All day today I’ve felt lucky: time is nice
instead of a yawning tunnel, the dog sighs
in her sleep at my feet, food is warm and eaten
off the good plates. I know I will pay
for this abundance when afternoon looms
like a bony forearm thrown across
the beginning of the moon, ill portent,
animal dead in the road—
no matter. This morning in my reading,
Darwin found the Andes, climbed higher
than his shipmates to the fossils of the sea things
in the cliffs, lifted his face to blue
and did not panic, as I believe he will
in later days, journey over and infirmities
besetting him, God too close to be forgotten
and the creatures in a museum
in London, packed in cotton and smelling of rot.
Let Darwin have his day
in the Andes, the first flush of freedom
from salvation upon him, the world revealing
its face in the thin air like green over the choppy sea.
Let me have my small pleasures: love
in the afternoon, the dog who cries to go out
and is let out, the words that arrive
like mysteries—like the gift of a bone-white
shell in rock four thousand feet above the sea,
silence leading into silence, the Englishman
who slips his god from the Ark,
sensing only that the wind is fresh
and up today, feeling only the weight
in his hands of the spiraled things
and the ache in his legs from climbing so far.
Field Trip
I went to jail with my fourth-grade class.
The trip was only meant to scare us
from small lives of crime—our teachers
didn’t mean to show us what they did,
the beds like cordwood cut and stacked for cold,
the men alone in cages who looked at us
as though they couldn’t get enough.
We scattered after high school, some of us
to waiting farms and some to towns
where we could finally feel alone.
But one night in the backseat of a dented
Chevy bellied to the curb on Mott,
I realized what the men in jail had wanted:
they didn’t want to look through bars
at our small faces, but for us to look
at them. What’s more, they left us carrying
their need: when we were brought out blinking
from the dark grey belly of the jail,
we had been taken by desire, marked
with it like ashes on the forehead, a smear
of promise we could barely understand.
Ruined, we were not to be the mother
leaning in to watch her child breathe,
but instead the blood that takes a left
turn at the heart and makes a circle
for the grateful, dazzled brain. I hoped
you saw my foot rise up
to slap the glass or heard him call out,
guessing at my name. I wanted you
to sit up later in your darkened room,
to see again that crappy Chevy rocking
/>
on its metal hips, knowing
you can see, the way a woman late
at night might leave her shades
undrawn, and then pretend to be alone.
Babysitting
We thought it was gross, and funny, and said we’d never babysit in that house again, and anyway the twins were brats and there was no tv. Lila was the prettiest in our class, like in the Billy Joel songs we agreed were written just for her. She got a locket for her birthday from her boyfriend, who hung it on her neck on the bus ride home while we watched from sticky plastic seats. He kissed her after, gently. We called Mr. Ellison perv, and felt sorry for the twins, whose dad was such a dork. We didn’t think of Lila in the darkened car, wearing the locket that marked her Lucky, waiting for Mr. Ellison to move his hand, hoping he thought it was resting on the seat, her bag with her math book in it, anything but the thing that he was teaching her. We told it at slumber parties, not having yet discovered what it is to have been picked, the dark space that opens up between the choosing and the way you choose to tell, the way your life can separate into two halves and never come back to you, the flush of confusion to be lucky, to be chosen, to be these things and also feel this way.
The Game
My brother the pitcher was skinny and anxious, dangerous without ever meaning harm. On Saturdays, we took our places on the lawn with my father. My job was to represent the batter, which frightened us both. My father remained unreadable under his Charlotte Indians hat. The ball was smooth, as hard as a stone. My brother wanted to control it. His desire narrowed the distance between pitch and hit until, inevitably, the target was struck. I walked it off without talking about it, following my father’s instructions. I tasted the sting on my skin, then a low ache that entered my body and claimed a place in my life. Each failed pitch made my brother angrier, his good intentions leaving him like light out of a window. Each bright mark from contact made me love him, in bewilderment, more.
First Dead
In the end, it wasn’t Buster or the cornering school bus that killed the Foster’s dog, but the milkman, his rounded toy-truck just big enough to drop a bouncing retriever in its tracks, tongue still out for barking and the good taste of the morning chase. Danny found the dog by the spot where we waited for the bus, its coat dust over gold, one maroon trail snailing from its open mouth. We eyed our own small mutt, who would not smell the dead, who pressed close when we boarded the bus then lay by door, my mother said, until we got home. By then we were full of the small injustices of the day, the Foster’s dog forgotten, bagged and driven to some dark building, replaced by a succession of labs who all died by bloat from stealing at the compost pile. Pearl survived our childhoods, grew deaf and blind and trembled when she walked, loved by then only by my mother, who put ribbons around each soft ear the day the vet came whistling with his black satchel down the long dirt road for the dog.
Route 7
The policeman pulled us over on old Route 7, just miles from home. He held his flashlight forward in two hands, the shock of yellow in our father’s station wagon like the lines that sometimes fall through cloudy days and pitch the Little League game into a left-field finger of light. Then my sister sleeping in the back seat woke up screaming, and even after we didn’t get arrested or have to call our parents, and got to keep our shoes on standing under the hot moon while the policeman pored over the seats and crickets called just off the road, she cried and wouldn’t explain herself. Danny drove the rest of the way slowly with his backbone hunched, his week-old old license shoved back in his jeans. In the driveway, Rachel finally answered me—I dreamt we were old. We were at Danny’s funeral—then went into the house through the fritzing electric front-porch light.
Turning Back
The grandmother, for example, has stilled her motions so close to zero that her arms no longer work to feed her. Young nurses spoon food into her mouth at meal times. In the yellow afternoons, she lies as still as a blanket stretched tight on an empty bed. Yet when the emergency comes—pneumonia or the stroke—she panics and comes back. Afterwards she is always these two things: furious, and hungry.
The Wolfman’s Sister
Though cast as lady or grotesque,
as hectic membrane in the flesh,
she would not be neither-nor.
—Alice Fulton
I was the child wrapped in a red cloak,
knuckles on my shoulders
turning me to face the forest.
A slight push, only a tiny one
to set my feet on the path,
unwind the string, re-gather
the breadcrumbs, and get it right
this time; or this: to be the girl
he wanted, but the prayers held
not together in that light.
When I was twelve I tried to disappear,
to slip away without notice
into smooth, resistant bone.
Our mother fed me sweets
and tiny cakes, filling my mouth
and kissing it shut, sighing
in my ear, so take dominion, take—
So I became a still life
in a glass bowl and then a window
to be looked through, landscape
as far as the eye could see. I traveled
deep inside of it, but the woods
rose up and became a corridor lit
with footfalls each night and every
night, forevermore—my cloak slips
from my shoulders and it sighs a red
fall brother can’t you see that
I am burning?—think of ashes
in the dispassion of the morning,
a cool grey coating over grass; and when
you kneel to sift it through your hand
like sand, it gives up nothing,
not a whisper or a chip of bone,
just particle and drift already gone.
Confession
I walked into a James Turrell piece. I stood in it,
I say it here: once I made my little sister sit
in dog shit, I pick my nose most days, I took off
my shoes and slid across the museum floor
in my socks, over the black tape line to the
blue blue blue of the double box glowing
like a nightbird diner. Once I got high
in the afternoon just to read the giant MOBIL
sign when the sun went down and the neon
came up in the sky. I wasn’t alone, by the way,
not to excuse myself, but my companions
were all artists and should have known better.
Everybody knows that poets have no
boundaries. I did once steal a boyfriend’s letters
to read the one that called him cold “except
your body, which you can’t help.”
There was a camera, and we took turns
posing gravely in the blue. I held
your hand so we could go together.
Once I killed a kitten because I thought
they always landed on their feet, but
I was three so I’ve forgiven myself for that one,
as well as the fact that I do always take
the front seat in the car. Do I think I’m better
than everyone else was a fair enough question
put to me by a man on a flight to Alaska
when I opened a book during the summation
of his plan for a Manhattan commuter helicopter.
The Turrell piece was in a museum in Napa.
I still have the picture. You and I
are silhouettes with our arms out, pasted up
on blue like something you might see
out the window of a plane if angels existed,
featureless happiness glowing at its edges.
I left you after I promised you I never would,
and I met James Turell and did not tell him
I’d been in his work. So here it is, although
&nb
sp; I have to say we passed the guard on our way out,
flushed faces and laces flapping, and she smiled;
she knew human nature as well as anyone: we are made
to promise things to one another under the firm duress
of wanting, promises we drop like coins
in every puddle, expecting a return;
promises we never meant to keep.
Dancing
We were all night at a party
in a warehouse by the docks
where you danced Big Bird Walks
and Oscar Rises from His Can,
dipping me low while the floor
rose up and night reaching forward
spun us so all I could see
was the blur your body made
leaving one place for another
the way an animal smells footprints
in the snow, understanding
everything about the heel
and toes that left the mark—
the story of the rough pad,
the broken nail,
if it was hungry or old—
understanding everything
but where the animal
who left the mark, the beautiful
animal, went afterwards.
Graduate School
For a while, it’s the funniest story you’ve ever heard, funnier than Nicole trying to climb off the plane over Texas jacked up on champagne and valium and the handsome steward as he laid her down but this one is told by your lover, the one who slept with his professors and so now is sleeping with you, who nights is smoking in your bed with a single-minded joy that could never be American, moody over vagaries in Hegel in a way that could never be American, and sexual in a way that, as far as you can tell, is entirely not American. The story? He was eighteen, his first trip to America, was working as a greeter at the gates of Disneyland. He went to the bathroom for a cigarette and in the next stall over, someone was grunting on their toilet, loudly urging on the effort like a dog with a bone, so he looked and saw, beneath the bright red short pants puddled on the floor, the two gigantic plastic feet in Mickey’s yellow shoes. Later you will find out he does lines off the head of Foucault on the hardcover edition of Discipline and Punish and that the men who followed him from bars were acting on a solid hunch, and he will say that he can never live in America because of the death penalty—which is very different than a harmless Mickey taking a dump, and far more permanent—and then he will say the lines “I want to be with you but never in the same apartment,” so you will pack your bags and go back to America where you will fall in with a banker from Connecticut who will hurt you in ways your European could never have imagined, having not grown up with that particular American dream of being given all you ever wanted by parents who regret you; but all of that is later, is arriving but not yet, for now you are in a bar in Europe and a man is telling the funniest story you have ever heard, and you are thinking how he will come back to your lonely flat and transform you all night long, how he will speak to you in languages you don’t understand, until, dazzled, you forget yourself what it means to come from a country where your grandparents came as children to escape starvation, that kills its criminals and pays good money for men to dress as Mickey Mouse. You won’t understand his story until much later, when you hear that he has moved to New York on the dime of a university and you think of his America being Mickey taking a shit, and finally you ask yourself why he didn’t just speak to you in English, and why it was so important to say Goethe right, and then you think of him, eighteen in America, shaking hands with Americans in brightly colored polo shirts and shorts and how sometimes it is not enough to want the right thing, not when you are hungry or alone, not when you are offered something you didn’t even know you needed until the moment it is given, and after that you let your mind go blank and you take it.
