THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salter, Mary Jo.
Open shutters : poems / by Mary Jo Salter—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-375-71014-0 (pbk)
I. Title.
PS3569.A46224 O6 2003
811’.54—dc21 2002030185
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-53936-6
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-71014-8
v3.1
For the three who make us four:
Brad, Emily, Hilary
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Readings PART ONE
Trompe l’Oeil
The Accordionist
Advent
The Reader
The Newspaper Room
TWA 800
Erasers
Tanker
Glasses
Hare
In the Guesthouse
Night Thoughts
Snowed-on Snowman
Light-Footed AN INTERLUDE
Deliveries Only
School Pictures
A Morris Dance
Office Hours
The Big Sleep
Readings PART TWO
Another Session
For Emily at Fifteen
Midsummer, Georgia Avenue
Snowbirds
Florida Fauna
Discovery
Double Takes
Shadow
Peonies
On the Wing
Crystal Ball
After September
An Open Book
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Readings
PART ONE
Trompe l’Oeil
All over Genoa
you see them: windows with open shutters.
Then the illusion shatters.
But that’s not true. You knew
the shutters were merely painted on.
You knew it time and again.
The claim of the painted shutter
that it ever shuts the eye
of the window is an open lie.
You find its shadow-latches strike
the wall at a single angle,
like the stuck hands of a clock.
Who needs to be correct
more often than once a day?
Who needs real shadow more than play?
Inside the house, an endless
supply of clothes to wash.
On an outer wall it’s fresh
paint hung out to dry—
shirttails flapping on a frieze
unruffled by any breeze,
like the words pinned to this line.
And the foreign word is a lie:
that second l in l’oeil
which only looks like an l, and is silent.
The Accordionist
A whining chord of warning—the Métro’s version
of Concert A—and we clear the sliding doors.
People take their seats as if assigned.
Some of them open paperbacks, like playbills,
with a formal air of expecting interruption.
Or as if the passengers themselves are actors
in a scene the stage directions might have called
Passengers reading, so that it scarcely matters
when they turn the page, or even if it’s blank.
Enter a gypsy boy, who lurches forward
carrying an accordion, like a stagehand
awaiting orders where to set it down.
But when the doors wheeze shut, as if by reflex
his accordion too collapses, opens, closes
to the tune of “La Vie en Rose.” He has no shoes.
Unlike the rest of us, dressed soberly
in solid colors, he’s a brazen mess
of hand-me-down, ill-fitting plaids and paisleys.
He’s barely old enough to be skipping school,
but no note of fear or shyness, or of shame,
shadows his face: it was years ago already
somebody taught him how to do this.
To entertain, that is—and in the coin
of the culture: an Edith Piaf song pumped
for all it’s worth from the heartsore instrument
the audience links with soundtracks of old films,
as a loving camera climbs the Eiffel Tower.
But nobody is looking entertained.
They seem to be in some other kind of movie,
more modern, calling for unblinking eyes
(the actor’s oldest trick for coaxing tears)
that no longer lead to tears. No words. Just chords
too grand to be specified. Or is it that?
Blank faces, maybe, standing in for blank
faces, much like wearing basic black.
The boy’s still young enough he plays right through
the next stop—when he might have passed a cup—
and now, with a shrug, he segues crudely to
another chestnut: “Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
My station’s coming up. I start to rummage
furtively in my wallet, held as close
to heart as a hand of cards (of credit cards
luck dealt me); isolate a franc. And stand,
nearly tumbling into him, to drop
the object of my keen deliberation
into the filthy pocket of his jacket,
careful not to touch it. In a second
I stride out from the car to my next scene
on the platform, where I know to exit right
and up the stairs, out to the world of light.
I’ll never see him again.
But some instinct (as the train accelerates
and howls into the tunnel on its pleated
rubber joints, one huge accordion)
tells me to look back—a backward take
on Orpheus, perhaps, in which now only
Eurydice goes free? And fleetingly
I catch through windows of the next three cars
the boy repeated. No, these are his brothers—
each with an accordion in hand
and each boy inches taller than the last—
who handed down to him these blurring clothes,
and yet because the train unreels as fast
as a movie, a single window to a frame,
my eye’s confused, has fused them as one boy
growing unnaturally, an understudy
condemned to play forever underground.
Advent
Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until
it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down
to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned—then glad
to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.
Look, in my surprise
I somehow split a wall,<
br />
the last one in the house
we’re making of gingerbread.
We’ll have to improvise:
prop the two halves forward
like an open double door
and with a tube of icing
cement them to the floor.
Five days until Christmas,
and the house cannot be closed.
When she peers into the cold
interior we’ve exposed,
she half-expects to find
three magi in the manger,
a mother and her child.
She half-expects to read
on tablets of gingerbread
a line or two of Scripture,
as she has every morning
inside a dated shutter
on her Advent calendar.
She takes it from the mantel
and coaxes one fingertip
under the perforation,
as if her future hinges
on not tearing off the flap
under which a thumbnail picture
by Raphael or Giorgione,
Hans Memling or David
of apses, niches, archways,
cradles a smaller scene
of a mother and her child,
of the lidded jewel-box
of Mary’s downcast eyes.
Flee into Egypt, cries
the angel of the Lord
to Joseph in a dream,
for Herod will seek the young
child to destroy him. While
she works to tile the roof
with shingled peppermints,
I wash my sugared hands
and step out to the deck
to lug the shutter in,
a page torn from a book
still blank for the two of us,
a mother and her child.
The Reader
It was the morning after the hundredth birthday
of Geraldine—still quite in her right mind,
a redhead now and (people said) still pretty—
who hadn’t wanted a party.
Well, if she’d lost that one, she’d stood her ground
on no singing of Happy Birthday, and no cake;
next year, with any luck, they’d learn their lesson
and not be coming back.
My friend who tells the story (a distant cousin
and a favorite, allowed to spend that night
in the nursery of the Philadelphia mansion
Geraldine was born in),
woke to the wide-eyed faces of porcelain dolls
and descended a polished winding stair that led
like a dream into the sunroom, where Geraldine
sat with the paper and read.
—Or sat with the paper lifted in her hands
like the reins of Lazarus, her long-dead horse
that had jumped a thousand hurdles; shook it once
to iron out the creases;
and kept it elevated, having been
blind for the twenty years white-uniformed,
black-skinned Edwina has been paid to stand
behind her, reading the news aloud.
The Newspaper Room
Sterling Library, Yale University
Hand-towel tabloids, editorial
bath sheets folded into the crannies
of the walk-in linen closet of knowledge!
Ever replenished, freshly washed
of whatever yesterday’s forecast was—
The Asahi Shimbun, Der Spiegel, The Swazi
News, The San Juan Star, The Sowetan,
La Jornada, The Atlanta Constitution,
Il Tempo, The Toronto Globe and Mail,
Pravda, The Age, The Financial Times
(still fancifully tinted salmon)—
they’re stuffed in the walls like insulation.
Consolation, too—which is odd,
because here, if you read them, are a hundred
windows open onto the howling
miseries of the day. How many
get skimmed by even one cardholder
in a week? And even when they are,
what wisdom rubs off when The Daily
Mirror’s mirrored on the thumbs?
The one-night newsstand of the mind,
always bored the morning after, stares
blankly at the warning “To Be
Removed After Six Months.” Removed
to where? To microfilm? Recycling?
The World Wide Web? The fireplace? And if
we know and hardly care, why is it
we’d feel bereft if there remained
in the universe not one such room,
relic itself of a lost age
when people hand-carved wooden shelves
with useless, newsless decoration?
Why should we relish solid proof
these pages are our days that turn
away to leave the past in ashes,
most of it local and unread?
No, she does no harm in her armchair,
that woman curled in a ball, for whom
the whole world is Le Monde.
TWA 800
Months after it had plummeted off the coast
of Long Island, and teams of divers scoured
the ocean floor for blasted puzzle pieces
to hoist and reassemble like
a dinosaur (all human cargo lost,
too shattered to restore to more
than names), I heard my postcard
to friends in France had been delivered at last.
Slipped in a padded bag, with a letter
from the U.S. Postal Service (“apologies
for any inconvenience caused
by the accident”), and sea-soaked but intact,
it was legible in every word
I’d written (“Looking forward
to seeing you!”) and on the stamp I’d pressed
into a corner: “Harriet Quimby,
Pioneer Pilot.” Under her goggled helmet,
she was smiling like a hostess at
this fifty-cent anecdote, in which the most
expendable is preserved and no
rope’s thrown to the rest.
Erasers
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm’s length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they’d sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
Tanker
On the horizon
One toy tanker pitches south
Playing hide and seek.
Broad as a fan, each rust-pocked
Leaf of the sea-grape.
—from “Fort Lauderdale,” by James Merrill
Almost a tanka—
Which (to remind the reader)
Allows a haiku
To glide above two submerged
Lines of seven syllables.
In my living room
Seven years after your death,
As a tape gave back
Your suave, funny-sad voice, I
Suddenly understood it.
“Toy tanker,” of course!
You’d pruned the tanka’s final
Syllables to five.
No one but you would have made
a bonsai of a bonsai.
The tanka I cite
Is the Mirabell of three:
A toy trilogy.
Florida: last stop before
The grandeur of Sandover?
You played hide-and-seek—
Hoping a few fans might take
A leaf from your book.
Glimpsed behind the geisha’s fan:
Your quick smile, eyebrows lifted.
Some people make real
Tankers that can transport oil,
Do the heavy stuff.
Your father was one of them.
He greased your way: God bless him.
Why count syllables
When half the world is hungry?
You had no answer,
Planted another sea-grape
In bright rows, ornamental.
How many poems
Open Shutters Page 1
