Stag's Leap Read online

  emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:

  he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,

  and he gave me the gift, he let me in,

  knowing he would never once, in this world or in

  any other, have to do it again,

  and I saw him, not as he really was, I was

  still without the strength of anger, but I

  saw him see me, even now

  that dropping down into trust’s affection

  in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,

  and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,

  and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the

  passenger seat in a spiral like someone

  coming up out of a car gone off a

  bridge into deep water. And two and

  three Septembers later, and even

  the September after that, that September in New York,

  I was glad I had looked at him. And when I

  told a friend how glad I’d been,

  she said, Maybe it’s like with the families

  of the dead, even the families of those

  who died in the Towers—that need to see

  the body, no longer inhabited

  by what made them the one we loved—somehow

  it helps to say good-bye to the actual,

  and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,

  first, to have been able to love,

  then, to have the parting now behind me,

  and not to have lost him when the kids were young,

  and the kids now not at all to have lost him,

  and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have

  lost someone who could have loved me for life.

  Stag’s Leap

  Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine

  looks like my husband, casting himself off a

  cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

  His fur is rough and cozy, his face

  placid, tranced, ruminant,

  the bough of each furculum reaches back

  to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up

  and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,

  unwieldy. He bears its bony tray

  level as he soars from the precipice edge,

  dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart

  leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,

  I am half on the side of the leaver. It’s so quiet,

  and empty, when he’s left. I feel like a landscape,

  a ground without a figure. Sauve

  qui peut—let those who can save themselves

  save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone

  tiny being crucified

  on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,

  and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched

  legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he

  throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his

  faithfulness, as if it was

  a compliment, rather than a state

  of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he

  feel he had to walk around

  carrying my books on his head like a stack of

  posture volumes, or the rack of horns

  hung where a hunter washes the venison

  down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,

  leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old

  vow have to wish him happiness

  in his new life, even sexual

  joy? I fear so, at first, when I still

  can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy

  belly, in the distance, lie the even dots

  of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots

  clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their

  blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

  Known to Be Left

  If I pass a mirror, I turn away,

  I do not want to look at her,

  and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes

  I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.

  Often, when I feel that way,

  within a few minutes I am crying, remembering

  his body, or an area of it,

  his backside often, a part of him

  just right now to think of, luscious, not too

  detailed, and his back turned to me.

  After tears, the chest is less sore,

  as if some goddess of humanness

  within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.

  I guess that’s how people go on, without

  knowing how. I am so ashamed

  before my friends—to be known to be left

  by the one who supposedly knew me best,

  each hour is a room of shame, and I am

  swimming, swimming, holding my head up,

  smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,

  like being naked with the clothed, or being

  a child, having to try to behave

  while hating the terms of your life. In me now

  there’s a being of sheer hate, like an angel

  of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got

  her one shot, pure as an arrow,

  while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums

  bit the flesh no one seems now

  to care to touch. In the mirror, the torso

  looks like a pinup hives martyr,

  or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,

  full of the milk of human kindness

  and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.

  But look! I am starting to give him up!

  I believe he is not coming back. Something

  has died, inside me, believing that,

  like the death of a crone in one twin bed

  as a child is born in the other. Have faith,

  old heart. What is living, anyway,

  but dying.

  Object Loss

  The banjo clock, suspended in thirty-weight

  dreaming marriedness, for a third of a

  century, doesn’t come down easy from the wall,

  rusted to the hook, then it lurches up,

  its gangle throat glugs. Big-headed, murmurous,

  in my arms it’s like a diver’s bell,

  Davy-Jonesed. When I lean it by the back

  door, it tocks, and ticks, it doesn’t even

  cross my mind I might wish to kick it.

  Using his list, I remove his family

  furnishings, the steeple clock,

  the writing-arm chair, the tole-and-brass

  drawing table—I had not known

  how connected I’d felt, through him, to a world of

  handed-down, signed, dated,

  appraised things, pedigreed matter.

  As I add to the stash which will go to him,

  I feel as if I’m falling away

  from family—as if each ponderous

  object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were

  the scenery of the play now closing,

  lengthy run it had. My pitchfork

  tilts against the wall in the dining room,

  web thick in its tines, spider

  dangling in one cul-de-sac…

  What if loss can be without

  dishonor. His harpoon—a Beothuc harpoon—

  and its bone and sinew and tusk and brine-wood

  creel I add to the pile, I render

  unto Caesar, and my shame is winter sunlight

  on a pine floor, and it moves, it sways like an old dancer.

  Poem for the Breasts

  Like other identical twins, they can be

  better told apart in adulthood.

  One is fast to wrinkle her brow,

  her brain, her quick intelligence. The other

  dreams inside a constellation,

  freckles of Orion. They were born when I was thirteen,

  they rose up, half out of m
y chest,

  now they’re forty, wise, generous.

  I am inside them—in a way, under them,

  or I carry them, I’d been alive so many years without them.

  I can’t say I am them, though their feelings are almost

  my feelings, as with someone one loves. They seem,

  to me, like a gift that I have to give.

  That boys were said to worship their category of

  being, almost starve for it,

  did not escape me, and some young men

  loved them the way one would want, oneself, to be loved.

  All year they have been calling to my departed husband,

  singing to him, like a pair of soaking

  sirens on a scaled rock.

  They can’t believe he’s left them, it’s not in their

  vocabulary, they being made

  of promise—they’re like literally kept vows.

  Sometimes, now, I hold them a moment,

  one in each hand, twin widows,

  heavy with grief. They were a gift to me,

  and then they were ours, like thirsty nurslings

  of excitement and plenty. And now it’s the same

  season again, the very week

  he moved out. Didn’t he whisper to them,

  Wait here for me one year? No.

  He said, God be with you, God

  by with you, God-bye, for the rest

  of this life and for the long nothing. And they do not

  know language, they are waiting for him, my

  Christ they are dumb, they do not even

  know they are mortal—sweet, I guess,

  refreshing to live with, beings without

  the knowledge of death, creatures of ignorant suffering.

  Winter

  Not Going to Him

  Minute by minute, I do not get up and just

  go to him—

  by day, twenty blocks away;

  by night, due across the city’s

  woods where night-crowned heron sleep.

  It is what I do now: not go, not

  see or touch. And after eleven

  million six hundred sixty-four thousand

  minutes of not, I am a stunned knower

  of not. Then I let myself picture him

  a moment: the knob that seemed to surface in his

  wrist after I had held my father’s

  hand in coma; then up, over

  his arm, with its fold, from which for a friend

  he gave his blood. Then a sense of his presence

  returns, his flesh which seemed, to me,

  made as if before the Christian

  God existed, a north-island baby’s

  body become a man’s, with that pent

  spirit, its heels dug in, those time-worn

  heels, those elegant flat feet;

  and then, in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis

  waist, and I run my irises

  over his feathered chest, and there,

  on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish

  set in time’s throat, and up to the nape and then

  dive again, as the swallows fly

  at speed—cliff and barn and bank

  and tree—at twilight, just over the surface

  of a sloping terrain. He is alive, he breathes

  and moves! My body may never learn

  not to yearn for that one, or this could be

  a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

  Pain I Did Not

  When my husband left, there was pain I did not

  feel, which those who lose the one

  who loves them feel. I was not driven

  against the grate of a mortal life, but

  just the slowly shut gate

  of preference. At times I envied them—

  what I saw as the honorable suffering

  of one who is thrown against that iron

  grille. I think he had come, in private, to

  feel he was dying, with me, and if

  he had what it took to rip his way out, with his

  teeth, then he could be born. And so he went

  into another world—this

  world, where I do not see or hear him—

  and my job is to eat the whole car

  of my anger, part by part, some parts

  ground down to steel-dust. I like best

  the cloth seats, blue-grey, first

  car we bought together, long since

  marked with the scrubbed stains—drool,

  tears, ice cream, no wounds, but only

  the month’s blood of release, and the letting

  go when the water broke.

  The Worst Thing

  One side of the highway, the waterless hills.

  The other, in the distance, the tidal wastes,

  estuaries, bay, throat

  of the ocean. I had not put it into

  words, yet—the worst thing,

  but I thought that I could say it, if I said it

  word by word. My friend was driving,

  sea-level, coastal hills, valley,

  foothills, mountains—the slope, for both,

  of our earliest years. I had been saying

  that it hardly mattered to me now, the pain,

  what I minded was—say there was

  a god—of love—and I’d given—I had meant

  to give—my life—to it—and I

  had failed, well I could just suffer for that—

  but what, if I,

  had harmed, love? I howled this out,

  and on my glasses the salt water pooled, almost

  sweet to me, then, because it was named,

  the worst thing—and once it was named,

  I knew there was no god, there were only

  people. And my friend reached over,

  to where my fists clutched each other,

  and the back of his hand rubbed them, a second,

  with clumsiness, with the courtesy

  of no eros, the homemade kindness.

  Frontis Nulla Fides

  Sometimes, now, I think of the back

  of his head as a physiognomy,

  blunt, rich as if with facial hair,

  the convex stonewall shapes of the skull

  like brow nose cheeks, as hard to read

  as surfaces of the earth. He was as

  mysterious to me as that phrenology—

  occiput, lamboid—but known like a home

  outcrop of rock, and his quiet had

  the truthfulness, for me, of something

  older than the human. I knew and did not

  know his brain, and its woody mountain

  casing, but the sheer familiarness

  of his brow was like a kind of knowledge,

  I had my favorite pores on its skin,

  and the chaos, multiplicity, and

  generousness of them was like

  the massy stars over the desert.

  He hardly ever frowned, he seemed

  serene, as if above or alien

  to anger. Now, I can see that his eyes

  were sometimes bleak or sullen, but I saw them

  as lakes—one could sound them, and receive

  no sense of their bounds or beds. Something in

  the paucity of his cheeks, the sunken

  cheekbones, always touched me. Bold

  Old English cartilage of the nose, wide

  eloquent curve of the archer’s bow, its

  quiver sometimes empty as if languagelessness

  was a step up, in evolution,

  from the chatter of consciousness. Now

  that I travel the land of his sealed mask

  of self in memory, again, touching

  his contours, as if I am the singing blind,

  I feel that ignorant love gave me

  a life. But from within my illusion of him

  I could not see him, or know him. I did not

 
; have the art or there’s no art

  to find the mind’s construction in the face:

  he was a gentleman on whom I built

  an absolute trust.

  On the Hearth of the Broken Home

  Slowly fitting my pinkie tip down

  into the feral eggshell fallen

  from inside the chimney, I lift it up

  close to my eye, the coracle dome

  hung with ashes, rivered with flicks

  of chint, robes of the unknown—only

  a sojourner, in our home, where the heart,

  after its long, good years,

  was sparrow-netted to make its own

  cage, jessed with its jesses, limed

  with its radiant lime. And above the unclasped

  tossed-off cloak of the swift, in the back

  reaches of the Puritan oven, on a bed

  of sprung traps, the mice in them

  long gone to meltdown and to maggotmeal

  and to wet dust, and dry dust,

  there lies another topped shell—

  next to it, its doffed skull,

  tressed with spinneret sludge, speckled with

  flue-mash flecks, or the morse of a species—

  when I lift it up, its yolk drops out, hard

  amber, light coming through it, fringed

  in a tonsure of mold and soot. If I ever

  prayed, as a child, for everlasting

  union, these were its shoes: one dew-licked

  kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one

  sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead,

  which I wore, as I dreamed.

  Love

  I had thought it was something we were in. I had thought we were

  in it that day, in the capital

  of his early province—how could we

  have not been in it, in our hotel bed, in the

  cries through the green grass-blade. Then, knees

  weak, I thought I was in it when I said

  would he mind going out into the town on his own.

  I knew there was sorrow there, byways, worn

  scrimshaw of a child’s isolateness.

  And who had pulled us down on the bed for the

  second time that day, who had

  given-taken the kiss that would not

  stop till the cry—it was I, sir, it was I,

  my lady, but I thought that all we did

  was done in love’s sight. So he went out by himself

  into the boyhood place of deaths