Stag's Leap Read online

  and icy waters, and I lay in that bowl-of-

  cream bed purring. The room was like the bridge of a

  ship, windows angled out over the harbor—

  through thick, smooth Greenland glass I

  saw the port city, I curled and sinuous’d

  and slow-flicked my most happy tail, and

  farther into cold fog

  I let him go, I lay and stretched on love’s

  fucking stretcher, and let him wander on his

  own the haunt salt mazes. I thought

  wherever we were, we were in lasting love—

  even in our separateness and

  loneliness, in love—even the

  iceberg just outside the mouth, its

  pallid, tilting, jade-white

  was love’s, as we were. We had said so. And its inner

  cleavings went translucent and opaque,

  violet and golden, as the afternoon passed, and there were

  feathers of birds inside it preserved, and

  nest-down and maybe a bootlace, even

  a tern half shell, a baby shoe, love’s

  tiny dory as if permanent

  inside the bright overcast.

  The Healers

  When they say, If there are any doctors aboard,

  would they make themselves known, I remember when my then

  husband would rise, and I would get to be

  the one he rose from beside. They say now

  that it does not work, unless you are equal.

  And after those first thirty years,

  I was not the one he wanted to rise from

  or return to—not I but she who would also

  rise, when such were needed. Now I see them,

  lifting, side by side, on wide,

  medical, wading-bird wings—like storks with the

  doctor bags of like-loves-like

  dangling from their beaks. Oh well. It was the way

  it was, he did not feel happy when words

  were called for, and I stood.

  Left-Wife Goose

  Hoddley, Poddley, Puddles and Fogs,

  Cats are to Marry the Poodle Dogs;

  Cats in Blue Jackets and Dogs in Red Hats,

  What Will Become of the Mice and Rats?

  Had a trust fund, had a thief in,

  Had a husband, could not keep him.

  Fiddle-Dee-Dee, Fiddle-Dee-Dee,

  The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.

  They Went to the Court, and Unmarried Was She:

  The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.

  Had a sow twin, had a reap twin,

  Had a husband, could not keep him.

  In Marble Halls as White as Milk,

  Lined with a Skin as Soft as Silk,

  Within a Fountain Crystal-Clear,

  A Golden Apple Doth Appear.

  No Doors There Are to This Stronghold

  Yet Robbers Break In and Steal the Gold.

  Had an egg cow, had a cream hen,

  Had a husband, could not keep him.

  Formed Long Ago, Yet Made Today,

  Employed While Others Sleep;

  What Few Would Like to Give Away,

  Nor Any Wish to Keep.

  Had a nap man, had a neap man,

  Had a flood man, could not keep him.

  Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,

  Fishes in the Sea.

  If You Want a Left Wife,

  Please Choose Me.

  Had a safe of 4X sheepskin,

  Had a brook brother, could not keep him.

  Inter, Mitzy, Titzy, Tool,

  Ira, Dura, Dominee,

  Oker, Poker, Dominocker,

  Out Goes Me.

  Had a lamb, slung in keepskin,

  Had some ewe-milk, in it seethed him.

  There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,

  Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;

  A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,

  And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.

  Had a rich pen, had a cheap pen,

  Had a husband, could not keep him.

  Put him in this nursery shell,

  And here you keep him very well.

  Something That Keeps

  Heavy on the cupboard the wreath hangs,

  the bulbs pouring up their hull withers.

  Borne home, from the garlic farm,

  it will last a year, she says, not

  like one from Lucky’s, which could sprout, or rattle—

  they sell the previous season’s, she says,

  they think of it as something that keeps.

  One thing that I did not think

  I had to worry about was that

  my then husband or I would be willing

  that the spirit of the other be taken apart.

  Meanwhile, I left minutes of each hour,

  hours of each day, days of each week,

  untended—to the whim of mildew, stallor,

  and the lonesome tooth of the granary scuttler.

  Girdle of curdled pubic roots,

  lumped breasts, husk-spouted nipples,

  eyeballs with iris gone bazook medusa,

  I thought that he and I were in

  some sacred precinct—which does not exist,

  we were in the barn, the store, the bin,

  the pan, the bowl, the breath. One two three

  four five six seven eight nine ten eleven

  thirty-two heads on the succulent throstle.

  It is in the past, enough looking back,

  it is gone, it is more over with

  than the shocks of childhood. Rope of heaven,

  ladder of hex, all is in

  the tending, and we cannot tend

  another’s rows. But I did not tend

  my knowledge of who he was—nor did he

  his of me, nor did he care to.

  Braiding of summer, harvest, winter,

  moonlight, noon, frost, enough,

  lie quiet on the wall that guards the dishes,

  honor the clove now gone to ash,

  the clove once split at its core by the liquid shoot.

  The Easel

  When I build a fire, I feel purposeful—

  proud I can unscrew the wing nuts

  from off the rusted bolts, dis-

  assembling one of the things my ex

  left when he left right left. And laying its

  narrow, polished, maple angles

  across the kindling, providing for updraft—

  good. Then by flame-light I see: I am burning

  his old easel. How can that be,

  after the hours and hours—all told, maybe

  weeks, a month of stillness—modeling

  for him, our first years together,

  odor of acrylic, stretch of treated

  canvas. I am burning his left-behind craft,

  he who was the first to turn

  our family, naked, into art.

  What if someone had told me, thirty

  years ago: If you give up, now,

  wanting to be an artist, he might

  love you all your life—what would I

  have said? I didn’t even have an art,

  it would come from out of our family’s life—

  what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

  Approaching Godthåb

  So much had become so connected to him

  that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,

  flying, for hours, above the Atlantic

  still felt like being over his realm.

  And then, in the distance, a sort of land—

  rows and rows of tilted, ruched-back

  pyramids and fangs of snow—

  appeared, and along its bitten hems, in the

  water, hundreds of giant, white

  beings, or rafts, nuzzled the shore,

  moon-calves, stoats, dories, ships,

  tankers green-shadowed cream, a family<
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  of blossom-tree icebergs, his familiars—never

  mine, but once contiguous

  to what I felt was almost mine,

  they were like the flowers a boreal storybook

  king would give his queen, hoarfrost

  lilies. It struck cold awe to my heart,

  now, to look at who I had been

  who had thought it was impossible

  that he or I could touch another.

  Tu wit, tu woo—lhude sing

  goddamn, cuckoo, to look back

  and see myself living, vowblind, in cloud

  cuckold land. The glacierscape called it

  up, the silent, shining tulle,

  the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems

  and corollaries, that girl who had thought

  a wedding promise was binding as a law

  of physics. Now, I stood outside

  the kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera,

  the emerald-sided frozen plenty,

  as if, when he took his stones and went home, he took

  snow, and ice, and glaciers, and shores,

  and the sea, and the northern hemisphere,

  half of the great blue-and-white aggie

  itself, I sat on the air above it

  and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.

  Spring

  Once in a While I Gave Up

  Once in a while, I gave up, and let myself

  remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s

  hips were set, the head of the femur which

  rode, not shallow, not deep, in the socket

  of the pelvis, wrapped in the iliofemoral and

  ischiofemoral ligaments,

  the ball bearings suspended just so

  to give him that walk. Wooden yokes, in

  grade-school foreign-country-custom

  movies, had moved like that, over opulent

  zinc buckets of milk—the motion

  was authentic, it was from another place, it was

  planetary, it was model-of-the-solar-

  systemic. I idolized it without

  reserve, caution, or limit, I adored it with an

  unprotected joy. Months,

  a year later, I still dreamed it

  sometimes, the illusion of a constellation

  visible only from a certain vantage,

  glittering peaks of his iliac crest:

  A is to B up, as B is to

  C across, as C is to D

  down, bright winching bitings, I even

  let my right hand describe

  the curve of that posterior, cool

  thirty-year night’s waxing gibbous

  now set—in stubborn fundamentalist

  conviction my hand described the mortal crescent.

  To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

  Though I never saw you, only your clouds,

  I was afraid of you, of how you differed

  from what we had wanted you to be. And it’s as if

  you waited, then, where such waiting is done,

  for when I would look beside me—and here

  you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood

  is now, and every action with him,

  as if a thousand years from now

  you and I are in some antechamber

  where the difference between us is of little matter,

  you with perhaps not much of a head yet,

  dear garden one, you among the shovels

  and spades and wafts of beekeeper’s shroud

  and sky-blue kidskin gloves.

  That he left me is not much, compared

  to your leaving the earth—your shifting places

  on it, and shifting shapes—you threw off your

  working clothes of arms and legs,

  and moved house, from uterus

  to toilet bowl and jointed stem

  and sewer out to float the rivers and

  bays in painless pieces. And yet

  the idea of you has come back to where

  I could see you today as a small, impromptu

  god of the partial. When I leave for good,

  would you hold me in your blue mitt

  for the departure hence. I never thought

  to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

  French Bra

  Then low in a fancy shop window, near my

  anklebone, like a Hermes heel-wing

  fitted with struts and ailerons,

  fragile as a silk biplane, the soutien-

  gorge lies, lissome, uncharged,

  slack as a snakeskin husk. I stop,

  I howl in seventh-grade French. The cups are

  lace net, intricate as curtains in a

  bee’s house, in a kitchen where honey’s

  on the stove, in the mouth, in the pants—and there are pants,

  in eyelet appliqué, and there are gold

  pinions like brushes of touch along the tops of the

  poitrine—and it’s as if my body has not

  heard, or hasn’t believed, the news,

  it wants to go in there and pick up those wisps,

  those hippolyta harnesses, on its pinkie,

  and bring them home to my ex and me,

  mon ancien mari et moi. It’s as if

  I’d been in a club, with him, with secret

  handshakes, and secret looks, and touches,

  and charmeuse was in the club with us, and

  ribbon, they were our wing’d attendants—

  and satin, and dotted swiss, they were our

  language, our food and furniture,

  our garden and transportation and philosophy

  and church, stateless state and deathless

  death, our music and war. Everyone

  dies. Sometimes a beloved dies,

  and sometimes love. Such far worse happens,

  this seems it should be a toy lament,

  a doll’s dressmaker’s dummy’s song,

  though people are often murdered, to celebrate

  the death of love. I stand, for a moment,

  looking down, at the empty costumes

  of luxury, the lingerie ghosts of my sojourn.

  My Son’s Father’s Smile

  In my sleep, our son, as a child, said,

  of his father, he smiled me—as if into

  existence, into the family built around the

  young lives which had come from the charged

  bouquets, the dense oasis. That smile,

  those years, well what can a body say, I have

  been in the absolute present of a fragrant

  ignorance. And to live in those rooms,

  where one of his smiles might emerge, like something

  almost from another place,

  another time, another set

  of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be

  held in mysteriousness, and a little

  in mourning. The thinness of his lips gave it

  a simplicity, like a child’s drawing

  of a smile—a footbridge, turned over on its back, or seen

  under itself, in water—and the archer’s

  bow gave it a curved unerring

  symmetry, a shot to the heart. I look back on that un-

  clouded face yet built of cloud,

  and that waning crescent moon, that look

  of deep, almost sad, contentment, and know myself

  lucky, that I had out the whole

  night of a half-life in that archaic

  hammock, in a sky whose darkness is fading, that

  first dream, from which I am now waking.

  Not Quiet Enough

  Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into

  every reach, there comes the hour

  I wonder if my husband left me

  because I was not quiet enough

  in our bed. I can hardly see those nights

  and afternoons, anymore, those mornings,

&nbs
p; but now, for a moment, I can almost hear

  the sound of him then, as if startled, or nearly

  caught up with, nearly in the grip of something, then those

  honeysuckle moans, trellis

  and lattice to mine, in the body’s mouth-

  to-mouth full-out duet. He lived

  so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not

  exactly like others, but hibernating—

  I called for him through solid earth

  until he woke, and left. Christ if my

  cries woke him. Sometimes they were only

  low, drenched, lock-clicks of the breath

  stopped, then drifting in mortise-light

  with him.…11,000 nights,

  he seemed content with me, he seemed to like

  anything, any screak or high C, but were there

  brayings that graded through off-key shimmer into

  prism of bruise-color, were there

  mortal laments, mammal shrieks against

  division, as if, in sex, we practice

  the cauter of being parted. Or maybe

  it was not my chirps, not the sounding

  flesh of those sheets, floor, chairs, back

  porches, a hayloft, woods, but this telling

  of them—did his spirit turn against the spirit which

  tolled our private, wild bell

  from the public rooftop, I who had no other

  gift to give the world but to hold what I

  thought was love’s mirror up to us—

  ah now, no puff of mist on it.

  After that life in the singing dream,

  I woke, and feared he felt he was the human

  sleeper, and I the glittering panther

  holding him down, and screaming.

  Summer

  Sea-Level Elegy

  Then my mind goes back to the summer rental,

  the stairs down into the earth—I descend them

  and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go

  into the bedroom, one wall the solid

  pane the warbler flew into skull-first,

  the opposite wall the inches-thick

  seagoing mirror. Even now,

  I see us, long horizontals

  in the luminous pool of the wall, speckled

  by the silt of the heavy plate glass, spotted

  like other animals. Above us are the pine

  planks, planed, and sawn aslant,

  and marked with the boot-sole ridges of the builders’