by Emily Raabe
It’s about a blackbird, I plead with them,
and argue that Edward Albee knew
his characters had issues with alcohol and self-esteem;
but they are out ahead of me, not afraid
to pierce themselves or change their gender: they know
Martha needed therapy, they know lovers
always come back. It was clear from her face,
one student reads in class, that he had committed a major fox paws.
The other students might be high, or just polite,
or maybe they recognize that art is malleable and is up
for grabs and a fox paw is just as good as fake French anyway,
but no one seems to mind; and so the fox paws
travel the path opened by the young man’s voice,
trotting lightly toward the smell of sunlight,
to where the warm green song of a thrush gathers
in a puddle of velvet over a star-filled tree.
An Old Story
Jesus called up Lazarus
and it was amazing!
Crowds of people stood around
to watch him reappear.
Jesus said, “Lazarus,” which meant
your body, and so the body
came forth: named-body, name-
of-body, body still blurry with dirt.
Lazarus woke in the body,
but something had changed.
His youngest child no longer knew him,
his dog growled at him in the door,
suddenly he hated fish. At night
when he entered the warm body
of his wife, who had fasted and wept
without stopping for three days
and nights, Lazarus felt something
slipping, as though his body
were rolling over the edges of the earth,
as though the earth itself
was not at all as it displayed itself
but instead was something rounded
and unknowable.
Lazarus began to drink at night,
staying out late until his name
slid away. His neighbors carried him home,
bleary and weeping, his robes dragging
in the dust. His skinny dog
crouched in the doorway, moving easily
when Lazarus swung a clumsy foot—
dumb beast, it didn’t even run
but sat just out of reach
with its tongue out, laughing.
Early Freeze, Fairbanks
When Molly dragged home the fawn, perfect
as a teacup, its small feet
as round as spoons but softer,
she ate it to its bamboo bones
then licked the faint stains as they sank
away in unexpected early snow.
That night the rivers broke and froze,
crying their names through frazil closing:
Ester, Chena, Tok, Nenanna
under the whirring of a thousand wings
moving over the closing lattice, seeking
the warmth of solace near the house,
finding only Molly, crying to come in.
Elegy II
I thought of you the other night,
thinned the way you were the last time
by the unexpected demands of blood.
I too am thin, as empty as a handbag after thieves
have taken everything worth weight.
I try to write but I don’t believe
in language like I used to—I’m reduced
to pointing, saying, here, here, here,
running my palms over the curves of the city
to claim them, that inheritance
that once was effortless
in the low light before we met
and taught each other
about the limits of speech,
the insistence of the body,
the fisted muscle of the heart.
The Doctor Only Heard One Heart
in their mother’s womb
holding each other
neither she nor her sister remember
not yet born
the dumb animal of longing
two heartbeats synced to a pitch
without tides or waves
there would have been liquid darkness
there would have been liquid darkness
without tides or waves
two heartbeats synched to a pitch
the dumb animal of longing
not yet born
neither she nor her sister remember
holding each other
in their mother’s womb
it’s just a story told in the family.
At Seven They Say
that they can fool people
with their faces
but the mirror, faithless,
gives them otherwise:
green eyes to brown,
pale skin and hers
like a flush
from their Irish mother,
her small frame and hers
from their father.
They can’t get
to what they know
to be the truth.
Then they are ten years old.
The world outside
them keeps insisting
like a palm insisting
its existence in a fist.
At Eleven They Fight
Why can’t we—
—Why can’t we what?
(She can’t say it)
—Just say it!
(but she doesn’t know what)
One draws a line down the center of the bedroom
while the other one watches.
At Twelve They Tear Apart
She has been locked out of the bathroom now
for three days and three nights—
the bathroom where they meet before bed
where they used to sit together on the toilet
back to back for the delight of naughtiness
yes but more
for fitting on something really made for one.
Now she pounds her fists
on the faithless door:
—open the stupid door!
(She is still afraid to swear because of God.)
Her sister opens the door and passes by her
as though she follows someone patiently
but cannot see the world, moving
to her side of the bedroom and sitting on the bed,
looking toward the window.
She finds the proof in the basement,
crumpled and shoved into a basket of dirty clothes
so she has gone ahead again
but says nothing, and a few days later
her sister lets her back into the bathroom.
Then she bleeds
too and they are together again
but she does not forget
forget how could she forget
the door closed to her, her sister’s face
closed like an inlaid box,
the ease with which she took
her leave—
it is as she suspected it would be.
Her Nightmare
In it, her sister has died.
It has already happened, but they are allowed
to see each other one last time.
Her sister’s hair falls in her face
as it did when they were children
and the barrette would slip
in her baby fine hair. She asks her sister:
—Are you happy? Are you sad?
Her sister shakes her head
full of something else
that is not knowing
what wanting to be happy is,
or sad,
only the taste of waiting
to go back. Seeing finally
what she has always feared,
she quickly starts the story:
The Story
Imagine this, now
this: a pitc
h
in the liquid, a sudden twist
of longing—
she can’t quite remember
but she knows
who came first,
whose lungs folded
in shock
she waits in a house,
waits days
while her sister works
for air in a dim-lit tent—
but this is the part of the story
she can’t remember:
did her sister want to come back
or did the hunching tank insist on
pouring air into her resolution, pinching
salt for luck on her head?
waits without looking,
breaks no rules,
believes she will return,
and then, and then—
but her sister in the dream wants
nothing. Silence
covers patience in her face.
Spring, El Portal
I told you the story in the kitchen,
shouting over the shouting river.
You examined your hands,
the thin lines in your wrists
like the snaking of blue on a map,
then gave your apple a name and went hungry.
Outside, the Merced river churned,
a sullen Chinese river harnessed barely for rice.
Every day it rose further, crowded
with stones from the high country,
swallowing unsated the neighbors’ dog,
two or three trailer homes,
the hotel bar built too close to its banks.
The story: Roger Williams died,
was buried, became an apple tree.
The people in Rhode Island
ate him every fall, inside the reddened skin
and sweet white crisp of the crop,
and when they dug him up to move his grave,
they found only roots
like limbs in the shape of a man.
That night the river entered our yard,
its long arms calling us awake.
We reached across that silent bed as water
jostled the doors then imitated lonely,
begging to come in. After
would be different—the house like a boat
barely moored, everything
cancelled for days
while the river called in its debts,
one of us gone by summer—
but that night we lay together
and let the river in. It didn’t hurt
as we thought it might,
so we filled and filled our greedy mouths
as the water rose, dark, in the house.
Rain Is Black and White, Like a Photograph
It has a long memory, but cannot tell
its own stories: green river, gritty
run-off, black water in a lake.
Now, like the dead, it is all one thing.
Like the dead, it crowds
the windows, even as we think
that we are looking out.
All this changes, we admit, gesturing
at the window where even now
the rain is beating harder
than it was this morning.
But we whisper to ourselves. I remain
the same. Rain pounds
on the skylight, washing helplessly
from the point of the roof to the ground
like a singular thing.
Milestone
Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous.
—Samuel Beckett
We arrived at this place in the woods: green,
quiet, no peaked roof in our line of sight.
Our hearts were silver in our chests, our bodies
as good as though we had four legs and slept
in the thickets of soft branches at night.
The blood in our veins was the whirring
warning of hurried wings over slowing rivers,
but we didn’t know to head south
so what we conjured answered, gathered
like clouds in front of thunder and arrived.
Then the dark house rose like mud on a riverbank,
windows yellow ovals in the night.
We waited at the knob and were let in,
a single mercy for the cold and frightened.
You were there so long, a favorite
long after I had sold my knucklebones for bread.
Given one small window, you could see the forest
but it was stripped and bare, receding
in a shrinking aperture towards language—poor
mimic. You gripped memory like a stone
in your fist, clenched it to make
what might have happened speak to you.
But remember? Memory is water
when held in a fist—runs out, heads for earth.
The Hinge
The bat on the table has the face of a baby,
button nose and round brown eyes
when he thumbs them open. It’s June twenty-two
in the Downs, the longest day of the year.
The knees are indeed backwards, made
to bend behind the bat, walking sticks
for hanging upside-down. Darwin says
articulus but, once again, it’s what we don’t know
that will find us; and the word, which also means
“a hinge,” takes fire as it leaves his mouth
on this night, the pivot in the ancient solar year.
The body, he muses, looks familiar
but as in a tale to frighten children:
the fingers as long as the nightmare hair
on the fairy-tale baby, the tiny, clutching
feet not palm like bear or toe like fox,
the leathered reach of unfeathered wings
as in a dream of hovering, poised forever
between flight and ground. Articulus,
the scientist murmurs, England’s
own magician of shells and bones.
The study darkens for a moment as if night
has been pulled in with a drawstring,
light gone red at the window, the creak
in the house the conjured hinge of the year.
Upstairs, Emma is weeping.
She creases again the letter she has written
that tells her husband there are things
we cannot see and simply must believe;
describes her incurable grief—if I thought
we did not belong to each other forever—her faith
a pebble carried always in her mouth.
Darwin notes his findings in the number
seven notebook. Emma folds
the coverlet back for night.
The doubled-jointed envoy on the table
stirs and whiskers out the window,
the light of a thousand bonfires pricked
in its eyes. Fingertips slip the sky
on the dotted line, breaking the seal between
the dark door waiting and the neighbor’s
terrified pets—messenger not skin or wing
but something in between, like between
the window and the frame or the humans
and the silent world that waits,
the yellow space that brightens briefly
for the truly watchful just before
the door is gently, firmly closed.
Self-portrait as a House
If I were a house, I’d be a little
green house, with peeling paint
and an Ali Baba stairway
to my swinging green screen door.
If I were this house, I’d have
one floor, so no one would be lost
testing the stairs after sundown
to see where they reached.
Once safe across my lintel,
the ones I l
ove make fires
with magically appearing wood,
eat food in the kitchen from cupboards
that refill themselves each night.
Outside are seasons, and wolves in rings,
and the pitiless moon
on a cloudless night who watches;
but inside the little green house,
it will always be not night and not yet
morning pushing at the glass,
music playing in the living room,
and people eating in a yellow light
like lamplight who love each other
fiercely and yet cannot remember
how they met or if they are related
or how they came to live
in the little green house with the strange
innumerable bedrooms, animals
walking in and out at dusk, and windows
of an odd clear glass that lets in light
but only shows an endless meadow
all around the house: not sunlight,
and not real grass, but
two things that, when looked at from
a distance, show themselves to be
what you need, or what you thought
you did when all of this began.
A Dream of Horses
For Paul
In the dream it started to snow: slow
unfettered clouds drifting through the sky
without direction, an unguided flight
until the flakes began to settle
an arched neck, dark flank, cocked
fetlock filled in slowly line by line,
gently coaxed into arriving
as a field of horses resting
under robes of snow; and what had been
invisible shone forward into sight—
what was hidden, what was blurred with night
made clear, brought into shape by light.
The Other Story
she is not telling.
Or, rather, she knows not
what to tell. She has always
had nightmares, seen shapes
in the bedroom, raged
against anything that leaves
or is taken; always she is mourning
or stealing, aware
that she is the darker one.
But that’s a stupid story, like twins
brought to sickbeds for cure
or left in forests for beasts
or someone who travels
to drag back an unwilling—
she can’t say because she won’t
think about that long journey,
not allowed to look back
