May Day Read online

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  Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,

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  May Day

  Copyright © 2016 by Gretchen Marquette

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the Jerome Foundation, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-739-9

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-936-2

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953602

  Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design

  Cover art: Eamonn McLain, “34th and 15th,” from the series Around the Park. 2014. Oil pastel relief on spray-painted wood. Used with the permission of the artist. Digital image created by Nikki Ivanovsky-Schow.

  FOR BRIDGET

  FOR MY FRIENDS

  Contents

  I

  Elsewhere

  Doe

  Prologue

  Know Me

  Prophecy

  Colossus

  Gregory

  Andromeda

  Painted Turtle

  Macrocosm/Microcosm

  I Know One Thing for Sure

  II

  Deer Suite

  Trophy

  Fisherman

  Apart

  Split

  Lost

  Montana

  S = k • log W

  III

  Want

  A Poem about Childhood

  Dear Gretel,

  Lament with Red Wall and Olive Tree

  About Suffering

  Childhood

  An Orange

  Why Loneliness

  IV

  What I’ve Learned about Cottonwoods

  Boy

  Styx

  Translation

  Red

  Sketch for an Ode or Elegy

  The Offering

  A Cold Front

  V

  Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes

  Figure Drawing

  Despite

  Deer through a Boutique Window

  Song for the Festival

  Mule Trail

  Two Trains

  May Day

  Powderhorn, after the Storm

  What We Will Love with the Time We Have Left

  For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.

  — W. B. YEATS

  May Day

  I

  Elsewhere

  I’ve kept it quiet,

  where to find the brightest,

  most exacting love.

  Much of it burns off.

  What remains, remains.

  Fox-wild, desire

  is a trap. I recognize

  places I’ve slept

  despite every branch broken

  and the new snow.

  What I said before, about love,

  you have to let it be.

  I’ve never told

  how I walk around thinking

  of the hollow of a throat or curve

  of a shoulder or how I hold the reins

  of horses who are men in hiding.

  We sat under hot light,

  in a round room plush with the breath

  of strangers. I said, We have

  seventy pages left to love one another.

  Across his chest burst a sash

  of gold chrysanthemum.

  One thing I’ve learned—

  you have to let love be practice

  for what might happen

  elsewhere.

  Doe

  A Wounded Deer—leaps highest—

  EMILY DICKINSON

  The smell of wet,

  like earth, like the breath

  of the beloved.

  There’s movement

  on the opposite side

  of the wall, a deer, head

  down, licking at a shallow

  wound. I hope you know

  how hard this is, to arrive,

  to remember the way in.

  I have dreams I return home,

  find everything changed,

  and I’m lost in hallways,

  between walls. I hear birds,

  though I don’t know what sort.

  They serve no poetic function,

  but they sing. Think of them

  as wild birds, use any image

  that comes to mind. I imagine

  small scraps of tissue: red

  and blue and green—not birds,

  but moving like them, and singing.

  The doe lifts her head. Sometimes

  the deer has a split

  ear. Sometimes the doe

  is made of bone, the femur

  warped, broken and healed.

  How would it be, to lie

  in wet grass, or snow,

  leg broken—to need water, to get up

  again? Don’t think on it too long.

  I know I’d die of thirst.

  During Thanksgiving dinner,

  everyone laughed at his story,

  how he’d shot a buck with six points,

  found it was a doe, a doe with antlers.

  Why are so many love stories tragedies?

  Prologue

  There was a child carried

  into the house after a long

  drive. Aware of the hush

  hush noise of father’s feet

  on the carpet, she felt

  for the first time her weight

  in someone else’s arms.

  Know Me

  I was once the tree you hammered shims into

  so you could climb me like a ladder.

  And I was the new strawberry, larvae white and hard,

  and the bleeding-heart bush dropping valentines over your acreage.

  I was the fox on whom you did not pull the trigger, the air trapped

  beneath the frozen creek, and the broken milkweed’s white sap.

  I did my growing far from you, arrived

  late one summer, shirt like a tartan flag.

  Come over. I said. Get to know me.

  Now I am the bottle-blue boat, lost in the squall of you,

  and the wave curling over your head.

  Prophecy

  You will bruise the meat of your palm

  striking the wall, open handed,

  trying to quiet squirrels gnawing

  behind plaster,
inches away

  but out of reach. You will have lived

  for months, on milk and oranges,

  the result being a sweet mouth.

  This is the day you’ll come home

  to your spare keys naked

  and singular unto themselves—

  teeth set on edge as you touch the first one,

  cold on the table, find the other, hidden

  under the door, locked from outside.

  Your sleeping body will be protected

  by a bolt of metal, your sleeping body

  will be full of raw sugar

  and milk fat. But first you will lie

  awake, pressing the bruised palm.

  You will have a quiet mouth, untasted.

  You’ll have the sound of teeth

  grinding red wire. You’ll have the sound

  a woman makes. You’ll have no trouble imagining

  the key thrust into the lock, shock—and then

  the turning, slick. You’ll believe you want

  a recording of it—the last sound

  he made in your life.

  Colossus

  On the outskirts of town,

  past the seven churches

  and eleven bars. Past the yellow

  bungalow of the woman

  who sold pumpkins.

  Past the yard with the white

  ducks. Away from the horses,

  heads down, talking to the grass.

  Past the field where Tom and I

  flew our kite. Over the blue bridge.

  Past the ice-cream parlor and its rainbow

  sherbet. Past the post office and defunct

  theater’s permanent red-letter marquee.

  Past the library’s picture books

  and white squirrel under her bell jar.

  Past Shepard’s hamburger stand. Away

  from the smell of the paper mill

  and color of the river. To the place

  where lines were painted on the center lane.

  Past the liquor store, and the ramshackle

  house of the couple who’d lost their only child.

  To where the ditches got deep. I’d beg them

  to take me outside of town where the giant

  buck lived. I could spot him from a distance—

  he was a hundred feet tall, antlers regal

  and chalk white. He watched us arrive

  from the field near the gravel lot. Up close,

  you couldn’t see him anymore

  in his static, frozen jump. The paint

  on his body was chipped, spattered

  by birds. If you patted him, there was an empty

  sound. I always wanted to be taken to him,

  but the closer I drew, the more it was snuffed out—

  what burned in my chest.

  Gregory

  (West Point)

  Traveling those dark roads to see him, twisting

  through carved forests, the eyes of animals

  appeared jewel bright in the sweep

  of my headlights. He didn’t want to pose

  for pictures, hot in his dress gray-over-whites,

  the coat with the bullet buttons, all of us

  sweating as we pointed out statues

  he’d strode by thousands of times. I kept mistaking

  another girl’s brother for him, marching in formation,

  soft haircuts under plumes of black feathers.

  He was already less ours. Later,

  in blue jeans, he skipped rocks on the Hudson,

  the river swallowing the sun in a rush, boats

  scattering across the long arm of the water,

  tiny lights I would remember

  when I fastened a bracelet to my wrist,

  spectrum of stones, he gave me for Christmas

  when he was twelve.

  Andromeda

  From 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away,

  they took Andromeda’s photograph, tinted it like a daguerreotype,

  put her in a purple dress. We’ve got Hubble, got the electron microscope.

  You can choose between them but still see the same thing. Almost 500,

  000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a teaspoon

  of water.

  A star exploded, bore iron,

  then came blood. The hole in my jaw has clotted

  with something from a star. Lost tooth, too weak to last

  my lifetime, it will exist, broken and bad, long after my femurs

  turn carbon. This transmutation—it’s how my beloved will become

  an olive tree, an eggshell. There are places in the universe where time matters

  less. Remember this when you want to gut yourself, in love with a married or dead man.

  If you can figure how to try again, you could be the one fixing your hair for him,

  be the one he’ll probably stop loving. You still have a chance to meet the other

  one, some afternoon at the piano, a duet. The dark magnolia of your belly,

  when you sense it and tremble, you can be a wave of salt water,

  you can collapse for a little while. Time matters less,

  in other places in the universe. Fetus, mummy,

  think about all that new skin.

  And think about your body

  and its toughness, how briefly it’s allowed

  to be. You’ve got to see it through. Glut yourself

  with the sound of bells if you have to, use whatever you need.

  It’s such a fleeting state really, like the sixty-second theatrical tour

  of Andromeda, flushed in red and gold. A body, heavenly or not. Her name

  means to think of a man. Andromeda, reserved for one she didn’t love, chained to a rock,

  doomed to be devoured. She still had passion, seven sons, a little girl, heavenly

  entombment—but believe me, you may never get what you want. So when

  your ribs prove too small a cage for such feeling, bones bowing outward,

  and higher up, you’re almost blind, you can stand still, you can be

  a conductor. You can think of a cluster of stars, you can think

  of one of your atoms as a galaxy with its own type

  of horse, and music, maybe something akin to

  the viola. There are mothers there, certainly,

  and something like the vulture.

  Think of a woman, wrists manacled,

  think of any Nautilus shell, of any name you’ve given,

  it may as well have been Andromeda. We may be laying this place to waste

  and you may never get what you want. It can’t matter much.

  Somewhere a star is ceasing to be a star.

  We call it death.

  Painted Turtle

  Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.

  Why aren’t I your wife?

  You swerved around a turtle sunning itself.

  I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass.

  We were late for dinner.

  One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around.

  Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,

  crushed Roman dome, the surprise of red blood.

  I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm.

  I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.

  The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know.

  Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle.

  During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes.

  It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.

  Macrocosm/Microcosm

  Horses are pulling grass

  with their square teeth—

  their hollow throats

  sweeten their chest cavities.

  I can go weeks without thin
king of whales

  and they never think of me. One pair

  of human eyes first saw

  the planet Saturn. Where are the bones

  of the dog I loved first?

  Which are the trees

  that will become invitations?

  Somewhere, a dish sits in a sink

  holding only three crumbs and

  I will never eat from this dish

  no matter how hungry

  I become. How long has it been

  since I’ve considered the leopard,

  its fire growing smaller

  in the jungle hearth?

  Filaments are bursting

  inside bulbs. Oranges are falling,

  dully, from branches. Plants everywhere

  are laying down their green planks.

  Either the man who will kill

  my brother does not exist,

  or else he has been breathing for decades

  under the Iraqi sun.

  I Know One Thing for Sure

  I was born first. Birds nested in the eaves of our house. I didn’t find new birds ugly. I liked seeing blood in their naked bellies, like the veins in my skin, like the blue line in the night crawler, wet in the ground. I wasn’t allowed to watch storms come through. I remained in the basement under the pulse of the siren, frustrated. I always wanted to touch the soft muzzles of horses, grazing in the fields. Sometimes I was allowed. Hold your hand flat, they said.

  I was born first. My sister came later, blue eyed and girl soft. When I was small, a dog bit my face; I could’ve lost an eye but the tooth found my cheekbone instead. Bone against bone.

  I was born first. My brother came along later. It was coming on Christmas. The lights were what mattered, lights of every color. My brother was small and red. My brother was like an animal, warm and murmuring. My brother was like an animal and I loved him that way. I’d been in the hospital for surgery the week before his birth. I woke at midnight to the blue light of the television, my pregnant mother asleep in a chair. Everything hurt. I have been close to death, but not enough to know it well; it’s been like flying over the desert in a plane. I remember one night, the gentle pressure of the boy’s fingers, finding the bones of my face and skull—mandible, maxilla—when he finished, I said again, the way a child does, and he traced the sockets of my closed eyes.