The Law of the Unforeseen
Page 3
has powerful but as yet unknown properties. Parents, please
supervise your children at all times. Don’t let them out of your sight!
Around a dim U-turn, another sign with a red arrow
warned that visitors in the House of Mystery should
not attempt to open the Yellow Door, padlocked for our safety.
A family from France, said the sign, had gone through
the Yellow Door and were never seen again. We four—
Dad, Mom, my brother and I—paused before the Yellow Door.
A faint strip of gold light shone from below. I felt an icy draft
on my ankles. That’s as far as we got in the House of Mystery.
Back in the car, my head still whirled. I’d felt the dizziness,
the vague nausea caused, I was certain, by the hidden power.
Even at 14 I had my doubts about everything. I believed in ESP,
poltergeists, the inexplicable. I believed in the asteroid,
the magnetism that caused trees to lean sideways.
How else explain the dizziness, the difficulty of walking
upright, the urge I felt to fall on my face? How else
explain the chill seeping from under the yellow door?
What of the French family, who might have taken the warning
for a joke and gone through, never to return?
And what of the band of light? How I’d have loved to open
the Yellow Door, to see with my own eyes the source
of that gold glow, to feel the pull of the hidden power.
“BARB’S HEALING HANDS”
“Barb’s Healing Hands,” says the hand-painted sign
I pass each day on my neighborhood stroll.
Who’s Barb? There’s her hand-lettered phone number
in black. Those would be her hands, I gather,
pressed not quite in prayer, more like reaching—
a little swollen, the fingers crooked,
arthritic on a plywood stand propped up
on curbside grass. Apparently, Barb does not
paint well. The bouquet of florid lilacs
the hands hold, faded by the usual
erasure of sun, rain and winter wind,
seems childlike, as if she’d turned the pages
of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, pausing
at Gauguin, her brush daubed in Prussian blue.
I could use Barb’s healing hands myself.
The world could. Every day the unspeakable occurs
somewhere, in some far country, some city,
prison, senate chamber, my city, my
neighborhood. Every blessed day Regan
gouges out Glouster’s eyes. Soldiers fire missiles
through the windows of a family’s bedroom.
I should drop in some afternoon and see
what Barb charges, assuming she still lives,
assuming Barb’s Healing Hands still massage
those muscles knotted from living on earth.
Her hands might revive my numb lower back,
my bum left shoulder. As for the world’s aches,
Barb would need, like Maioshan, Chinese goddess
of mercy—she who hears the cries of the wretched—
every one of Maioshan’s one thousand healing hands.
Three: Ash
I was fifteen, I think. Wilmington then
was far along on its way to becoming a city
and already well-advanced on its way back to dust.
~Galway Kinnell, from “Memory of Wilmington,” in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.
THE RETURN
The name of my grandmother’s horse
escapes me, as most names do, finally,
cantering into the trees of unremembrance.
Any number of times she would tell
of a blond girl crouched over the pommel,
the saddle’s horn bumping her sternum,
her hair flying, slapping her neck,
clods and dandelions leaping as she streaked—
Streak! Yes! That’s the name she gave
to her chestnut filly, its forelock blazed
with a lightning bolt—as she streaked
across her father’s orchard, ducking limbs
of cherry and pear, where now a freeway
overpass curves high into a cloudless day,
shading me in the din of traffic
hidden overhead as if a waterfall
might be near, or an airport runway
and not this vacant parking lot,
its asphalt littered with plastic trash,
broken by dandelions outside an abandoned
tanning salon where the orchard might have been.
PHOTO OF THE TWINS, CA. 1897
For the pose, they pinned white camellias
in their hair, so despite the dark heavy gowns,
it would have to be April in Indiana.
They are the Savoy girls, Mert and Gert.
Mother Amanda stands between, her small
mouth so pinched she appears to want to spit.
Maybe she’s annoyed by the endless wait
for the photographer to light his white powder,
a flash that will briefly blind her
and propel their faces toward the future,
to this kitchen counter, where now they gaze
at me as if they’ve never seen a clean-
shaved man in some kind of billed woolen cap
festooned with the letter S. They’re aghast.
The photographer wanted symmetry. Thus,
Mertie’s hair topples left, Gertie’s right.
They’d have been something near 18.
All the evidence—the ruffled sleeves
of their gowns, the girls’ several rings, tresses
in pleated waves toppled nearly to their knees,
Amanda’s gold time piece half-mooned
from her waist pocket—points to late 1890s,
hardly gay if judged by their somber eyes.
So demure the girls are, so dear, so
unsmilingly radiant, as though they’ve glimpsed
a forecast of the century about to dawn.
No names on the back of the photo.
Mert could be Gert, for all I know.
The one on the right is the prettier,
softer, though more forlorn. I can’t release
my gaze from theirs. So unsettlingly direct
are their eyes, they seem outside of time.
That, and the strict formality of the pose,
suggests this studio photo was their debut
to the world, and the world, if I rightly read
their looks, is cold—something the twins feel
but can’t explain—not yet, not at 18.
Maybe I read too much. Maybe the photo
merely reflects its era—the time of taffeta,
bustles, bowlers and steam trains, before
the invention of the photographic grin.
Or maybe I know too much. Know, for instance,
of Gertie’s failed marriages, her moves
from Evansville to Bremerton to Pasadena,
her job there as a maid in a rich man’s home.
Mertie, I learn from an early city directory,
lists her occupation as “laundress.” So the photo
shows them staring at the blank wall of their future,
and the future is a blinding flash of light.
Their expressions are intricate—accusatory
but not unsympathetic, as if, somehow, they see me,
well aware that I’ve looked too long and deep
into their hearts, dwelled too long in the ill-lit
rooms of their lives, and thus learned things
they themselves, beforehand, could not have fathomed.
Do eyes forgive? Let that be true as the camellias
behind their ears. I want to think my
kinswomen,
Mert and Gert, would smile, finally, or at least
have understood—not forgiven but understood—
my life’s work, which has been to rouse them,
raise them from their graves, to light the flash
that saves them, and saves the unsmiling
radiant world, against all odds, from oblivion.
DAHLIAS
Endless replication of clam shells, ants,
hyacinths in spring, the return of Orion,
the floral design of pond ice—things never stop.
You stand by her stone and picture
how she rolled her hair in that tight silver bun.
You see her on her knees among gaudy dahlias,
tanned arms dirt-flecked, neck sweat-beaded.
Silver strands come loose, quick-swiped back
behind her ear—scenes you play over and over
because they’re yours, because the sky is pale.
You divide yourself between all-is-illusion
and who-the-hell-cares. She ran off with a man,
Archibald something, Wyoming, 1920-something,
she 19 with child in tow—your father, as it happens.
You only knew her later—her silver hair,
freckles under her green-specked eyes.
In loving memory, intones the stone—stock phrase
if there ever was one. Still, it’s true, if complicated.
The squabbling robins in the laurel hedge agree.
So does April drizzle. Those dahlias were as colored
as her life, just as real as your love for her.
Real too is your father’s life, written in the Book
of Sorrows Unspoken. The world recycles itself,
breaking your heart and, somehow, mending it.
BLUE HYDRANGEA
With apologies to Rainer Maria Rilke
When she returns from the store,
I’ll tell her I’ve written a haiku for her,
for the blue of a blue hydrangea.
I lie, as she will immediately know,
about writing a haiku. I’ll tell her
it’s no longer possible to write
any kind of poem about hydrangeas,
haiku or otherwise, not after Rilke,
who likens them to strange notepaper,
unlike the yellow legal pad
that suffers my failure to see the blue
in this mass of petals arranged in a vase
on the kitchen table. The petals are soft
green coins, washed-out gray-green
some might see as a kind of almost-blue,
hazy like dusk, like memory,
the undiscovered blue of time,
the blue of childhood sadness,
scribbled on strange notepaper on which
I’ve written the longest haiku in history:
July already?
Hydrangea petals—mintage
of a winter sky.
When she sees the vase of hydrangeas,
when I read to her my bad haiku,
she’ll know I’ve adhered to Basho’s dictum:
“Learn the rules, then forget them.”
She’ll know that beauty happens sometimes
by surprise, like summer stars gone to seed,
like the coin of a sudden moon on the window,
its almost-blue smudged on the hardwood table
by the vase of hydrangeas no longer blue
but the color of the night sky.
AX
1.
The new-honed ax he swings freezes mid-stroke
in a photo never taken. You could
walk up to him. You could peer into his
gray eyes, examine his peppery beard,
his grimed, care-lined brow, sweat bright on his neck,
muscles tensed, veins bulged, ready for duty,
eager to relax but ready. You could
study the hunks of green pine—a small pile
since he’s just begun to split fifty rounds
on this fall morning behind the mess tent
where the reek of rancid bacon fills his head.
He looks familiar, this living statue,
far from County Antrim, now just outside
of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Well he should.
He smelled the bodies an hour before
he saw them, arrayed in rows neatly near
the rail line, most, but not all, blanketed.
So goddamned young, he thought, like George,
his son, somewhere in the Kentucky hills,
traipsing with the cold, exhausted 13th Illinois.
2.
As it must, the ax head flashes downward,
hard, glancing off the slick bark of the round.
Again you stop the frame to consider
the fate of your great grandfather’s grandfather,
this lean weaver who lied when he enlisted,
said forty when the truth was fifty-five.
By now he’d heard too much the din of war—
the clatter of caissons, the snort and shit
of horses, the silence and sudden shrieks
of limbless men, their curses so appalling,
so loud he more than once had covered his ears.
His sergeant, a Maine man not yet twenty,
had barked, You, private. Two cords. Do you hear,
Irish? Go, man!, then tossed the hickory-
handled ax on the ground. Several pickets
galloped by, their horses seething. One yelled
Nashville! Action in Nashville, you fresh fish!
3.
The ax head skids off the edge of the round,
slices through the leather of his brogans,
embeds itself well into his right foot
between the big and second toe, some four
inches in, severing bone and tendons,
ending, for him, the Civil War three months
from that morning he volunteered.
You think of what he might have had inscribed
on his stone when, in Anderson County,
Kansas, 1884, still hobbled,
having outlived three of four children,
he died in a dusty town called Lincoln.
He could have had Into the bosom of Christ
chiseled into the granite, or such like.
Or nothing more than his Scots-Irish name
and dates to encompass a mere arc of time.
The top of the stone broke off long ago.
It leans against the base so that Thomas
is no longer joined to Harkness. The sum
of his life thus reads: “He was a soldier
in the Union Army.” The sum of his life.
Why that? Surely this sojourner must have
wondered what he’d got himself into,
here in America, roaming from upstate
New York, there to marry Eliza, then
on to the textile mills in Queens, and by
1855 a shoemaker in Illinois,
now here at rest in Centerville,
next to Margaret, his surviving daughter.
The ax has gone to rust, just as his stone
will fall away to pieces, chunks, gravel, grit,
and at last to dust, its inscription
reduced to a whisper in the elms.
POTATOES
He came to me on one of those mild,
late winter days, my gloved hands gripped
on a hoe handle handed down from someone—
Aunt Philomena, it might have been,
or Ted Strickler, both gardeners, both gone.
Sweating, I’d flung my jacket on a limb
of the plum tree, went on breaking clods
with the nicked hoe blade until I was stopped
by the odor of cinnamon and pine.
I’d backed into the rosemary bush,
releasing its tang, releasing too my fat
her.
He appeared as he had in his last year—
cheeks papery, ashen, eyes dull, thin scruff
of beard no longer white but yellow.
He told me he was okay, said I needn’t worry
or feel sorry. And just as when he lived,
having lost by then his sense of taste and smell,
he laughed, went on and on about how much
he loved my potato wedges—salted, roasted
with rosemary, daubed lavishly, as always,
despite my frown, with mayonnaise.
MY FATHER MOWS THE LAWN
Slacks rolled, tee-shirt speckled green,
sweat-stained in the heat of July,
he’d push the mower through the knee-high grass.
Thankless task, after a day at his cubicle,
now home to the rectangle we called our yard.
I offered to help. Nah, he said. Exercise.
I’d hear him curse when the blade
cracked against a rock or bit into an object
hidden and rotting in the weeds.
Again I see him crouch, extract from the reel
a wet black thing twined in dandelions.
Without a word he chucks it high
into the summer afternoon. I watch it spin,
shedding bits of earth, flapping like a wounded crow.
When I catch the chewed, un-seamed baseball,
he claps his hands, dances around the mower
and whoops, What a grab in deep left field!
We go to extra innings. This game is tied!
I toss back the ball. He’s turned away already,
straining, muttering, wrestling the mower’s wooden
handles like a man who’s had it, who knows futility
and puts his whole being into its resistance.
TYING A TIE
I must be twelve or so. We face the bathroom mirror,
me in starched white shirt, trying not to squirm,
faint frown on my face. He in sleeveless tee,
his chest hair abundant, still dark, the last dots
of shaving soap on his chin. He calls the knot a Windsor,