by Marie Howe
someone might be setting the dining room table, he’d
place his face under my dress and press his cheek
against my belly and kneel there, without saying anything.
How is it possible that I am allowed to see him
like this—walking quickly by the glass windows?
—what he wears in the world without me,
his hands swinging by his side, his cock quiet
in his jeans, his shirt covering
his shoulders, his own tongue in his mouth.
The Bird
Even when I held my hands over my ears
I could hear the sirens squealing down the avenue:
somebody else’s trouble: broken or
bleeding or burned: and through the porch windows
a bird in the ash tree kept calling out: bleating,
like the hungry cry of a human child and wouldn’t stop.
Even when I opened the window
and yelled at the bird, it bleated on
the way a child does when you shake it.
Down the four flights to the courtyard of the building
I could still hear it,
and around the corner to the mailbox: there too.
Cool Hand Luke finally said: Just don’t hit me again Boss. Please
just don’t hit me again.
And his men turned against him and spit in his food.
No attic anymore; no stumbling drunk, he’s dead;
no belt; no pencil; no safety pin,
only a summer afternoon in a small city: porch windows,
bird singing. How many hands does a city have?
Yesterday each one was a sound.
And the bird’s trouble? It must have gotten solved
—all that insistent complaint.
By the time I fell asleep, it was quiet.
Prayer
Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:
one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:
It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell
the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up
and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.
And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,
and whoever it is that whispered to me
when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing:
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be—
beaten over and over—panicking on street corners,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,
afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me or
know where to bring me.
There is, I almost remember,
another story:
It runs alongside this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrows know it; the grass rises with it.
The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.
Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?
Two or Three Times
The two or three times my father tried to quit drinking,
for a few days
maybe a week,
he would walk carefully around the house, feeling his way
through the kitchen and the pantry.
His fingers trembled like a girl’s.
And there was a light around him, fragile and already cracked
we could see clear through
which was his hope, which he shared with no one.
James looked like that yesterday,
standing outside on the step, the cardboard deli tray in his hands…
a bright cold morning, his eyes clear and blue.
And he was up early, and he’d brought coffee the way I like it
with a straw he must have dropped in the driveway,
and a raspberry Danish he placed on the paper plate with ceremony:
the red-seeded center sticky within the little swirly circle.
Reunion
The very best part was rowing out onto the small lake in a little boat:
James and I taking turns fishing, one fishing while the other rowed slowly—
the long sigh of the line through the air,
and the far plunk of the hook and the sinker—
lily pads, yellow flowers
the dripping of the oars
and the knock and creak of them moving in the rusty locks.
The Kiss
When he finally put
his mouth on me—on
my shoulder—the world
shifted a little on the tilted
axis of itself. The minutes
since my brother died
stopped marching ahead like
dumb soldiers and
the stars rested.
His mouth on my shoulder and
then on my throat
and the world started up again
for me,
some machine deep inside it
recalibrating,
all the little wheels
slowly reeling then speeding up,
the massive dawn lifting on the other
side of the turning world.
And when his mouth
pressed against my
mouth, I
opened my mouth
and the world’s chord
played at once:
a large, ordinary music rising
from a hand neither one of us could see.
Yesterday
Just yesterday,
three days after my forty-fifth birthday,
a mild October afternoon,
somewhere around five o’clock,
and maybe the seventh or eighth time
I’d gone to check—
Now that it’s happened, it seems it had to happen.
Still the house had built itself a corridor I’d been hurrying through
towards the sleeping child,
thinking of Sarah’s angel, hearing Sarah’s laugh.
The white curtains billowed slightly in the mild, October wind
—but there was no baby, and hadn’t been.
Memorial
Michael took Billy’s black leather jacket,
Richard took his Polaroid camera,
I’m not sure but I think Nick took a big rug.
Frances wrapped a belt around Nick’s neck from behind
and said, I want this, can I have it?
I took the small white lamp, the green painted table
and the picture Billy had taken of the fish James said he’d caught
the afternoon he bought it from the fishermen
returning with their heavy silver boats at dusk.
Michael picked up the green vase and carried the ashes ahead, leading
us carefully along the icy spine of the dunes.
And when we arrived at the promontory place
and threw the ashes into the wind that blew some of them back into our faces,
I didn’t think: This is Billy’s bones and flesh, his eyes and mouth and cock,
I thought: Michael is taking charge when Billy said I was in charge of the ashes.
Jesus said, Mary chose the better part, to Martha, who was complaining about
her sister not helping. She never helped.
But I love that woman slamming around the kitchen. She’s made food enough
for more than a dozen people, and no one’s even the least bit hungry—
She’s scraping the plates into a stack to carry to the table and now she sets them
down heavily with a huff. Jesus is speaking in a quiet voi
ce.
He’s a kind man, Martha is thinking: he doesn’t mean any harm, but if I don’t do it,
it won’t get done.
—as Billy died,
the space between his breaths got bigger
and longer,
then three quick breaths
a little gurgling of breath and blood,
then a long silent space
—and not another breath,
then one more,
and that was it.
His sister weeping,
and something began to move through the room,
as if energy were
rising, like thickening air,
as if spirit were pleasure
pushing through the room, through
even our faces,
a molecular, invisible…
If this was Billy
he was so vast—
the way one field leads onto another,
vast to have been contained,
all that time, in that body,
—a nearly unendurable joy
a steady outpouring for over an hour
so that when the men came back from dinner they found
Billy dead in the sheets
and the three of us almost drunkenly smiling.
When James comes in from plowing for hours, stomping
his big boots by the open door, he’s beautiful,
but I don’t tell him that. I say: aren’t you going to your music lesson?
Thinking: why don’t you make more money?
When I tell him about post-modern brokenness in Caroline Forche’s poems,
that can’t be repaired, he stirs the old fire with a stick,
and reaches in with his hands and moves one log so it sits
on top of the other. Then I think: James is stupid,
he doesn’t know that the personal narrative is obsolete. And I think
about how Billy used to call me Angel Face—
how after he died we found out that he called a lot of us that.
I don’t know the meaning of my own life anymore, is what I tell James,
and he says, Yes you do. You’ve forgotten, but you’ll remember again.
And when I stare at him steadily, he rises
from where he’s crouching by the fire and leans over my chair,
and opens and closes his eyes so his lashes brush my throat and lips and cheek
I’m hungry, he says. What do you want to eat?
My Dead Friends
I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were—
it’s green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I’ll do.
The Visit
Some fumbling,
turning it this way and that:
OK, here it is, the doctor said,
and there was the little tumor
of nerves or blood that ought not
to be there: my brain’s upper right window,
a little face peeking out, a child
who won’t go to bed: little knot of cells
little hairball on the sill,
Benign is what he said, as God is said to be,
but for a moment I still stood,
—I could almost feel it with my foot,
in the place where they had stood:
John and Jane and Billy.
Then I was in the corridor again,
it was Spring Street in February and raining,
and the negatives slipped into a plain brown envelope
so I could take them home with me.
The New Life
This morning, James still deep asleep under the embroidered white sheets
a heavy heavy rain
the city still dark and the rain so loud the city was quiet,
a shhhh in the streets, as I drove up First Avenue happy, from Twenty-first Street
to Fifty-seventh Street without a light to stop for, a deep privacy in the car,
and nobody, for once, beeping—
the sky behind the falling rain lightening from dark to heavy gray—
and why shouldn’t I be happy, and why shouldn’t we argue
and sit in the two kitchen chairs, our faces downcast, after I get home
after what we’ve done, what we have allowed ourselves to long for?
What the Living Do
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living, I remember you.
Buddy
Andy sees us to the door, and Buddy is suddenly all over him, leaping
and barking because Andy said: walk. Are you going to walk home? he said.
To me. And Buddy thinks him and now, and he’s wrong. He doesn’t
understand the difference between sign and symbol like we do—the thing
and the word for the thing, how we can talk about something when it’s not
even there, without it actually happening—the way I talk about John.
Andy meant: soon. He meant me. As for Buddy, Andy meant: later. When he
was good and ready, he said. Buddy doesn’t understand. He’s in a state
of agitation and grief, scratching at the door. If one of us said, Andy,
when Andy wasn’t there, that silly Buddy would probably jump up barking
and begin looking for him.
