by Emily Raabe
Giving You Back the Musée d’Art
The show was the teeming darkness
of video: visions flashing like starlings
over the ceiling and walls, an overheated
room, a set of stairs, a chair, a woman
on a porch, blue sky through glass,
nothing lining up for its turn but jostling
the brain unhitched to let the world
come in hard without mercy.
I was sick from the teeming, staggered
to the lobby, and had to sit with my head down
for an hour until I could drive—
For once let’s tell it right. You were driving.
You were driving and the blizzard came
as we drove south, white wind
and double fists of snow thinning the road
to something squeezed from a tube,
the world nothing on either side of us.
All the long ride home, Canada cracking
under the weight of the freeze, Vermont
a pinpoint swimming in black, and penitence
already beginning to drive us apart,
we practiced our stories, threaded our lies
so well that for all these years
when I described the video exhibit
I saw in Canada—the details of confusion
and the dark—I myself forgot that you
were there. Finally, here: your fingers
slipping past elastic, mouth on the back
of my neck, a chair, a woman on a porch,
blue sky through glass, Montreal poised
at the precipice of a storm.
Now that I don’t feel this, I remember.
Wedding Poem
That night I dreamt I killed a dwarf.
At first, it seemed it was an accident,
but then my dream self murmured,
I did get away with the first two,
so maybe this time I should turn myself in…
I went to a party but didn’t enjoy myself.
The space where the dwarf had been
loomed everywhere, making a shape in the world
of a small and absent body.
My guilt filled the shape exactly
and I began to hope
that they would come for me—
then I remembered your dark eyes secret
in sleep, your rough palms
pressed flat between dreams,
and a waking fierceness rising in me whispered,
let the dwarf stay dead.
Let its missing body sink into the fabric of earth
without a mark. Let good and evil shrink
to the size of a hand—
you have given them away.
I woke up beside you with the truth
inside me like a dream that follows your day.
I will never let you go.
Love Poem
My godmother wants to die, when her time comes,
by taxi. She plans to throw herself in the path
of a yellow cab on Park—she’s confident
the driver will never think to use the brake.
She will be wearing her best suit, and my mother,
her oldest friend, will be there too, to smooth
her skirt sedately over her angled knees.
New York City will move around her,
traffic like water splitting around a rock
in a river, coming back to itself
unchanged. My godmother will lie on her corner
in her Chanel suit, resplendent
and splendid under the wheels of an unprotesting
cab on its way to pick up, or drop off,
just doing its business, which on one particularly
brilliant autumn afternoon,
sun working its way down the avenues
like light unfurling in tunnels, will include
lifting my godmother from the city she loves,
leaving just a vast and rippled wake, catastrophe
one thumbprint smeared and blurring.
Elegy I
The city existed in a fog to me then,
streets unfolding without warning, corners
turning into darkened alleys, subway stations
that brought you into daylight
blocks from where you thought you were.
You took me to a place on a sidewalk,
chalked a circle into the pitted cement.
Where we met! you finally said, exasperated.
The buildings were utterly unfamiliar, their windows blank faces.
Were we east or west of Union Square?
Already the child was beginning inside me.
This was another city still, secretive
and unavailable to mercy.
Its streets lay in impassable shadows, its doorways
unmarked on any maps we carried.
I didn’t know this then. All I knew
was that I was lost and what I was beginning
to know: that you
were going to prove useless
for finding my way home.
II.
Leave It Behind
I. Wolf
The wolf comes in July.
You open the door because you live
in a house in a meadow
and understand yourself to be
more than your body: bull thistle,
oxeye daisy, Klamath weed, fir;
marjoram on window shelves, baby’s
breath behind the house, small
spots of dirt on the hands.
The wolf wears the costume
of a man, blue jeans and a shirt, but is
nettles and bloodwort,
beetles clacking, caws in the digger pines,
water pooling red as rust.
The wolf takes his costume off
and ruins your house,
meadow grass watching you run
with what looks like a dog at your back.
II. Forest
run through the thickets the river
to houses that buttress the hill
the blacktop to flag down a car I keep pushing
and dragging you pulling your arms
to make you run faster and almost
the blacktop the houses the yellow
of rescue I’m grateful and say so
you turn and fall backwards
just turning to check on the
breadcrumbs spun into
the forest your loosening fingers
house yawning with sugar
eyes counting your knucklebones
moon on its side
your small brother watching
the dull steel of morning the grinding
and grinding he rattles the bars
and shouts at your braids standing out
in the wind for gods sake
stop running stop running lie down
III. Meadow
One winter the meadow behind
the little green house filled with beasts.
The snow in the high country
emptied the peaks, and coyotes came down
to look for their meals in the space
between frozen ground and snow.
They slept in tight bunches but ranged
winter mornings close to the house.
This was the winter of fires
in the stone fireplace, quick jig
to the outhouse, open tumblers
of jaegermeister at four pm.
We thought we might finally be animals
because we felt the outside world.
Then we began to wake before dawn
bristled by voices running like water
blue shadows heaped in the meadow
something like the cover of night
ringing the house, thick fur
standing up at the neck, noses
cocked for scent. We thought
it might be the animals, watching.
Night to us was coco in a mug, blood
running tender under the skin.
What did we know about anything?
Beyond the thin green walls
of the little house, a thump and toss
of brown, a flash of white escaping.
IV. Flight
She would like to lie down under the silken weight
of a man and not feel fear.
She would like to walk into the falling cape
of twilight alone.
She agrees it was like lightning: eighteen years old
and raised on myths;
reading after how she learned it, leaning in to love
the wings that took her.
No: it was like falling in the dark over a stone,
hidden until you trip.
Women, she knows, can sometimes be hurt
and learn to live easily again.
She will never live again without a dog to watch her
or, uneasily, a man.
V. City
I knew before I knew because I smelled him:
wet wool under the stairs
behind me, sticky locks, flat mailslots, nothing
for me there and he with his cheek
on the wall like a child,
fists tucked under his tipped-down chin.
I used to think (when I thought of what
it might have been like for you)
of jumping from the high rock over the river:
long enough in the air to regret the leap,
but then the landing
in the cool green pool, the quick swim to the edge,
the limbic system already on to other things.
But gripping my blunt and useless
keys in the company of my own adrenalin-scented
dark-eyed man, I realized it wasn’t like the river
at all, and then I knew
what went on and on for you, the moves
from getting out unharmed to getting out at all
to simply maybe living;
and so I ran and I was saved, and only later did I think
about your message, which is something
I have been waiting for—
don’t the dead ones always signal to those they left behind?
I was looking for peace like the flat of a sheet I could snap
over my head, or a light in the kitchen
that would not shift, something settling like hayseed
to let me know that you were fine, but instead
I got this one word: run! the way it must have felt
to have the angel bring the news:
filled to the rim with a blazing sight so absolute
and so unwelcome
that it doesn’t seem to have a proper name.
VI. Field
Then one day, it was amazing, she escaped. Yes, sometimes it is like that. She got up from the broken-down ferns and shook her lovely shoulders back and ran, yes, she ran, faster than the dark wolf, faster than the stories they would tell about her later, her red hair burning behind her—that’s how fast she ran, you see, so fast her hair caught fire, and her feet turned into wings, and her beautiful fingers flew up and away and she ran beyond the neighbor’s house (which had been her goal, get to the house and he won’t—) but no need, no, never anymore for the neighbor, or the men in windbreakers who dug up her garden, or the harnessed dogs that knew to go to the river; no, there never was a need for any of them, and they just stayed on in the city and never came—no, never came at all—and she ran until she was gone, not tired, just gone, and you may not know this, but I will tell you: the papers got it wrong—she did get away and she stayed there.
III.
I Love the Animals
So why do they keep charging me in my sleep?
Giant flies with human faces crowd
the air in the kitchen—I battle hard with a rolled-up
Times, but the flies fight back,
bumbling me toward strips uncurling
sticky from the ceiling, a rising
buzz and shoving, then the mercy
of awake in bed. Last night’s dream closed
with tiny fuel-efficient cars, us racing
to get in one ahead of the mice,
who had swelled to pony-size and angry,
cramming themselves into every available space.
Of course you were there too, and when I dreamt
about our dog dying in the road outside
the house or hit in stopped-motion by the
passing truck, crying to be helped from pain
and I woke up in agony, you were there
too, stitched into the lexicon of outsized
truth that dreams deliver—your body opened
at its side with its crazy seams showing,
possible here to fear the one you love
—and both as real as dreams in which
the cage of fancy holds the real disease,
the latch for leaving smooth and hot, so real
that if your hand closed on it dreaming you’d step
through and, waking, find yourself in a new place,
the rules dismissed, the path home sewn with brambles,
and something buzzing, faintly, gone.
Lesson for Snake Charming
Thus follows the question: is snake charming an art, and if so, how is it acquired?
—Ditmars’ Reptiles of the World
The Naja is wrenched awake again, time and repetition
doing nothing to knit her threadbare nerves.
The glass caps balanced on her lidless eyes
fail to keep the world from entering her slightest dreams.
It’s not the music—with her tongue to the breeze
she can hear the nervous heartbeat of a hesitating mouse,
so what could music mean to her? It’s the body in motion
that pulls at her like a thousand strings hooked
in the keels of her scales, marshalling her every move.
Tortoise-colored, short-toothed serpent, Naja naja
of tales, as furious as if the first time thus disturbed—
this footpacked dirt, these frightened, lascivious faces,
smell of grease from last night’s meal. The jerky movements
catch the hemstich of her sight, making her sick
from a sensation of reeling, an animal transfixed by the bit.
Her ribs spread out like shells releasing
the muscle within, her flattening hood a death’s head
embroidered on a lady’s square. The crowd convulses
as she opens to the trace his body makes in the air.
Her jaw aches for the doubled unfolding
of bones, the mute give of skin under her teeth.
The man throws a rooster and she strikes,
her point of fury safe behind the fluttered dying
in the puffs of dust. Then he is still
and she can’t find him, the confidante
to Cleopatra drained to torpor, a fine hand
closed on this exactitude of wanting
and dust: butcher birds like dark priests
praying at the plate and the man who bends to spit
in the dirt, the marvelous charmer of snakes.
Fox Paws
Because I’m a total color-whore, I noticed the palate first in this piece—
grading thirty-seven art school essays in my living room,
I’ve been drinking since the middle of the pile; do they all
come high to my class? I know the three painters
who snack through the seminar, the ones I thought
were getting all my jokes, are actually thinking things like,
what if you were reading a book, and you opened it,
and the pages were blank, but you kept on reading anyway
cracking themselves up while I preen myself
at the far end of the table like the Sally Fiel
d of higher education.
Anna K. reminds me of my Mother god I hate that bitch.
Monday nights are Coco, reading from her freewrites—
a tiny blush and then the spanking scene with her girlfriend
on the roof of the dorm, or the three-way
on the folding couch while the band plays on in the kitchen.
Arden wears a hand-made pieced fur toga
and has a project going to knit every hour
she’s awake for a year. She drags the yarn-mass
behind her like a filthy pet, lets us know the day
she can no longer fit on public transportation.
