The Law of the Unforeseen

by Edward Harkness

of her work, including one with my margin scribbles,

  suggesting where she might open the poem’s door to let in more

  of her particular light and dark. She never saw my half-legible jottings,

  likely written just days after her death. There she stands again,

  in the hall, rucksack slung on her shoulder, holding the door for me.

  Welcome back, Genevieve. Happy to be here, she says, her eyes vivid.

  Again I see how tall she is, how rail-thin, find I’m still unconvinced

  by the black mascara and dyed hair, startled, almost breathless by her

  green gaze, her irises I’d never noticed—till now—flecked with gold.

  THE LESSON

  Red-eyed, mascara smeared, she slumps in her chair

  against the back wall. Above her, the clock glowers,

  fast one day, slow the next, begrudging its hours.

  Scarlet highlights inflame her graying hair.

  She fishes a tissue from her tattered purse.

  I’ve recited a poem about a son

  saying goodbye to his father. I alone

  see her daub her cheeks from the edge of the class.

  The others half-listen, their young, bored

  faces unreadable. From her cloister,

  she mouths the words “So sorry.” Her lips quiver.

  She knows too well what the others haven’t heard—

  a poem can unlock grief and set it free.

  Now it’s her I read. She knows the son is me.

  SPOON

  Thrift store find. Fifty cents. I like how stout

  it is, carved of some uncertain hardwood,

  one black scar on the handle suggesting

  its owner snatched it off a hot burner.

  I like the wear on the tip of the spoon.

  Someone stirred and stirred, sanding the right side

  of the bowl to near-flatness—the stirrer

  left-handed, it appears, more than likely

  a woman, perhaps living—wild surmise—

  in Iowa in the thirties, baby

  balanced on her right hip while she stands

  in the heat of her Monarch cast iron stove

  stirring porridge or corn mush or mutton stew.

  Now it’s my turn to keep milk from scalding,

  milk into which I will stir chocolate

  pudding powder. It’s three a.m., the third

  of January. I can’t claim to see

  the light snow that dusts the cars parked out front,

  since I’m at the stove stirring the pudding.

  I can, however, see grains fall like salt

  on the outer sill of the near kitchen window,

  just as she too might have seen snow

  or rain fall as she stood and stirred, switching

  hands when her left grew tired, as my left hand

  does now. Yes, it was a woman who carved

  the much-used spoon in my hand. And if not

  on an Iowa farm, then somewhere else,

  preparing countless meals, hanging the spoon

  on its nail, through the augured off-center

  hole in the handle, taking down the spoon,

  putting it on its nail, taking it down,

  putting it on, down, on, the years passing,

  kids having grown and left the farm, removed,

  I’d venture, to the city. So the spoon

  contains all the sadness of her left hand.

  Even the spoon journeyed away from her,

  settling against all odds in my kitchen

  to stir the just-now-bubbling pudding.

  It’s as if I’ve entered another life,

  one where I cook, clean, give birth, raise children,

  watch snow whiten a stack of cordwood.

  It’s as if she’s beside me as I write, as if she has

  given me the spoon and taken my free hand

  in hers to stroll the garden of our two worlds.

  DEAR FRIEND

  I was not a good friend, and that’s a gun to the heart,

  a fist to the soul’s gut. Gut. Where your cancer struck,

  boom! One night you were alone in a hotel in...where was it?

  Maybe Bogotá. I’m at loose end as always, every time

  I want to speak or write to you. So. Hotel in Bogotá,

  we’ll say, where one night the gut pain came as a full moon

  on the dirty window, moon of dull ache, not moon

  of food poisoning, which in your travels you no doubt encountered

  in fair measure. I’m not a good friend, still, dear friend.

  I never wrote after your daughter’s birth, your life

  in Boston, the appearance—and disappearance—

  of your only published novel, your sundry jobs—

  textbook rep, bus driver, drugstore clerk. Steve,

  I’m writing now. Please don’t call it pointless, though it is.

  Please permit me to remember that simmering day in July,

  me just off the train, drugged by sleeplessness

  from the all-night jerk and clank, Seattle to Missoula,

  my new next home, lugging backpack and suitcase

  across the Clark Fork Bridge. There you sat

  on the porch of your run-down rental. Straw-hatted

  you were, shirtless, beer bottle balanced on the arm of a rocker.

  I stopped to ask directions—first person I’d talked to in a day,

  first Montanan I talked to ever. That was then, dear friend.

  Years are dew on grass, gone by noon. Bad friend, call me,

  for my neglect, for the way time knifes the cord that bound us

  for a time. I tracked your daughter down only to learn

  you died twelve years ago from the cancer that chewed away

  till the moon, dear friend, no longer shone in any window anywhere.

  What becomes of those we once loved once the train door closes,

  one of us aboard, the other waving, exiting the station

  with no umbrella against the rain, nothing to do but walk

  the city street all night? I write to say so long, dear friend,

  aware of the absurdity of saying it this way, twelve years late.

  In ways I won’t even try to explain, crossing

  the Clark Fork Bridge, spying you on the porch,

  I knew I’d outlive you. I knew you’d leave Helen for another woman.

  I knew your daughter would care for you in your last days.

  I knew I’d locate her in Fresno, not one week ago.

  I even knew, after Montana, I’d lose track, that I’d one day

  look back to realize, after Montana, I’d never see you again.

  LETTER TO J, TWO DAYS AFTER HER DEATH

  -Montagnac, France

  A friend calls your poems “perfectly cut gemstones.”

  I couldn’t have said, having never read your work—

  until last night. Yes. Gemstones. Light-filled.

  Will they endure? Doubtful. It doesn’t matter now.

  The sun has gone down on the first day of eternity,

  that winding cavern whose walls are adorned

  with animals no one can remember

  having roamed here. Yesterday, this place was ice,

  then tundra, now a town with a cell tower taller

  than the bell tower of its 14th century church.

  In my best bad French, I’ve ordered café au lait

  and a croissant. Across the lane from this patisserie,

  the church’s ancient door glares, barricaded,

  a weathered poster announcing what I gather says

  “Closed for Repairs.” The dour saints carved

  in the door’s cracked oak could be mistaken

  for those two old men at the table to my left

  smoking Gauloises, nursing their tiny coffees,

  frowning at today’s Le Monde, their eyes

  more dolef
ul than the sainted faces across the way.

  As if you care, in light of where you are—

  I stayed up half the night, opened to you,

  my damp hotel room cramped as a cave shelf,

  water-worn by the eons, the drip of time.

  I set your life aside and saw again

  bison, ibex, a black-maned yellow horse,

  reindeer fording a swollen stone river,

  only their antlered heads above water—

  all painted by flicker of oil lamp—

  all alive and moving on the walls

  of nearby Lascaux cave. Good tourist,

  I spend three hours gawking with the herd

  in the cave’s chilled remote interiors.

  Some of the animals turn their heads to observe

  the observers, our dim faces rivering

  though the hollowed vaults and chambers.

  Calcite walls suddenly become 3-D.

  Seams and bulges appear to flow

  along natural contours of the rock,

  transformed by art into backs, bellies and hooves.

  Even the high ceilings are painted,

  as if the cosmos was itself a bestiary,

  the sky a great pasture grazed by the creatures

  of our dreams. No trees in this region back then,

  no wood with which to make scaffold.

  And you, friend? What mysterious scaffold

  did you build to access your most private niches?

  Reading your book, I think I know: words were ladders

  to climb and descend. One thin ladder-like poem

  recounts your daughter’s suicide, how,

  fighting traffic and tears, you drove miles

  to find a Salvation-Army drop-box.

  You deposited a bag of her clothes,

  neatly folded, saving only several

  of her Nirvana CDs, a poster signed

  by Kurt Cobain, who, you say in the poem,

  called to her from a darkened concert hall.

  No trace of self-pity in your quiet elegy.

  That’s why I find it crushing, unbearable,

  the spare rungs of its lines so lean, so luminous,

  it’s as if you’ve borne a daughter’s death

  to some higher point of clarity—

  a mountain lookout of contemplative grief.

  In another poem, you walk a lakeshore

  at dawn, startling—being startled by—

  a great blue heron lifting off a limb

  just above your head. You speak of being stunned

  by the heron’s deep-throated squawk of alarm—

  a sob you call it in the poem. You describe

  the shudder of wings in your chest,

  the shattered air, the rain of nesting twigs

  showering you as you stood on the path

  among cattails trying to make sense

  of the sense of being in the presence

  of some majestic being skimming inches

  over the lake’s morning mirror.

  In the poem, you follow the heron’s legs

  trailing the blue of its great body to where

  it settles on a stump on the farther shore,

  alighting delicately as a tremor on the lake.

  The cry was your own, the poem reveals,

  the sob you made at the birth of your only child.

  An obelisk stands in grass outside the church.

  Its four sides list the village boys who died

  in the Great War, their names grouped alphabetically,

  brothers and cousins together, incised in marble

  blackened by a century of sun, rain,

  car exhaust. Long list for a small town.

  Nos chers enfants, says the plaque, its words

  implacable as the gaze of the carved saints.

  J, you died from wounds in that other Great War,

  that nobler campaign to paint or carve or write

  the heart’s winding chronicle, to discover

  the cave of beautiful beings, to see them

  move their ponderous haunches, hear them

  snort and low, chuffing as they shift on the walls.

  The artists took their tools and lamps, sealed

  the entry 200 centuries ago and, with no illusions,

  walked away to wait for us to find their gallery.

  J, I agree: It’s preposterous for me to believe

  the dead remember what it’s like to breathe.

  That admitted, I want you to know your book

  lay beside me last night in the bad bed

  in Montignac. I’ve discovered the entry.

  I’ve read what you incised, seen the creatures

  you made by blowing paint through reeds

  to animate inanimate stone. J, you need not wait

  for 20,000 years. I’ve lifted my lamp.

  I’ve glimpsed your deep interiors,

  the moving images you left behind.

  PINE SISKIN

  Small thing, the black seeds

  of your eyes will never see day again,

  never again cloud or weed.

  The window killed you—

  the clarity of it, appearing as air,

  your branch mirrored in its false tree.

  I heard the thump and knew

  you wouldn’t live—too loud

  not to be fatal on this first bright

  April afternoon. A jay guffaws. Robins

  call for mates, or warn outsiders

  to stay outside the glass of understanding,

  glass that divides in from out,

  my world from theirs, yours.

  In a few minutes, the sun will fail,

  still aflame in the tops of firs

  along the drive. Plum-like,

  you weigh little more than a dime

  in my palm. The speck of blood

  on your head means nothing now.

  Your yellow wing bars, nothing.

  Nor your ivory rice-grain beak,

  nor your twiggy feet, drawn inward.

  I’ll trowel you a grave, friend,

  in the ground where this morning

  I planted peas. The first rhododendrons

  are primed to burst into wads

  of gaudy fire. Wondrous is the last light.

  Wondrous, a cloud of crows

  languid in the evening sky.

  Wondrous, the hum of the earth,

  reddish glow in trees. Wondrous, too,

  when the fire flickers, falters and dies.

  CHICKADEES AT THE FEEDER

  Light and looping they drop in from across

  the street, a neighbor’s lawn or shrub, to dally

  in the bare lilac tree near our feeder.

  I’m their seed man. They draw my attention

  with their black toupees and buzzy chatter.

  It doesn’t matter a whit who feeds them.

  They come for what’s available, as,

  I suppose, I do myself, though I’ve yet to learn

  how to make those insistent bits of sound,

  how to give the world flashes of chestnut and bone

  white as they do, perched on the phone line.

  In this life, you take what you can get and

  if there’s time enough give back some small thing,

  some wedge of joy, even if you fiction it.

  For now, for this given day, I’m happy

  to fill the feeder once again. Later,

  they’ll scoot off to the next yard where shadows

  deepen. No guarantees of food or water.

  That’s the way it is in this life and, most likely,

  the other. There is no “other,” of course.

  Just this one. Your job, you gadabouts,

  is to keep an eye on the gray cat below

  the rose, who has all the time in the world

  to wait for your false move, your two-second

  lapse of attention when a black
spot of earth

  shows promise, you go there, and it’s over.

  Not over today, however. The rhodies

  are the colors of real and unreal fire,

  smoldering for a single brilliant week.

  That’s the way it is in this life—the brief one—

  and the other as well, creased and folded inside

  the first. It’s the second life that dazzles forever.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Two years now since your young heart stopped.

  I never had what it takes to start it or stop

  the father in my head saying Hearts go wrong,

  they stop even when there’s nothing wrong,

  even as the sun rises inside my chest, rises

  routinely from the sea, from mountains, rises,

  rises and then one day it does not rise.

  Two years. New Year’s Eve, my dear young one.

  The EMTs shocked you back, threw not one

  but three electric punches. He’s gone, they said. Gone.

  I never had what it takes to bear that word, “gone,”

  that fatal punch to the heart, so final,

  gone from the gold world. Your heart woke, finally,

  to gift a second, a third, a fourth chance.

  It wasn’t luck or God. Still, one chance

  in a million, New Years Eve, red lights

  aflame in the trees, fire trucks, cruisers, lights

  awhirl like blue acetylene, you, gray-faced,

  gurneyed into the aid car, revived, your face

  intubated, slack by the induced coma, but revived,

  the aid car shrieking away. Revived! Revived!

  Dear young one, I have what it takes

  to step from grief to muted joy, to take

  what is dispensed by the random hand

  extended from the ether, to hold you and

  feel your living fingers in my hand.

  PRESENCE

  There’s the ridge again through leafless limbs.

  A heron follows the river upstream,

  deep into the blue. In the sharp winter light,

  aspen shadows crisscross the snow—

  a foreshadowing of their falling: flood, age,

  disease, a beaver’s incisive jaws.

  Walker’s pasture sundials the afternoon.