May Day Read online

  I was born first. I want my own child now. I want him to place his hands on either side of my ribcage and make me feel small again. I want to feel the burst of his breath against my neck, just below my ear, the way he breathes when he first finds the part of me he most wants to touch. The damp center. The dying star. Sitting in the dark of the restaurant, leaning forward to hear you, face over a tea light, hands cupped over my ears under my hair, I couldn’t understand how a person’s eyes could be that dark and still be blue. Or how wicked affection is, once you’ve let it loose.

  II

  Deer Suite

  And these deer at my bramble gate: so close

  here, we touch our own kind in each other.

  TU FU

  (I)

  Her neighbor was an archer who drew his bow

  on paper deer.

  He tacked them to trees in the ecotone between

  his clipped lawn

  and the scrolling ferns and roots

  of the woods.

  Told to stay back, she went close enough

  to hear arrows

  shuck and plait light between birches, to listen

  to the piercing

  of their paper lungs. The deer stood,

  arrow filled,

  eyes trained on the horizon. Dusk

  masked their falseness.

  (II)

  At school we dissected the hearts

  of deer, gifts

  from hunters, our fathers.

  Hearts frozen

  and thawed, glistening on blue dissection

  mats. They reeked.

  It was the stink of old death. But how

  did we know? We knew.

  We looked at one another, pretended

  we didn’t want to pull

  our scalpels along ventricles, the hair

  on our arms stiff

  and no spit in our mouths. It wasn’t

  like the sheep’s eye,

  or the pitiable frog, pithed for us

  out of sight.

  Blood implied a living thing. All

  that remained was

  its four-chambered heart.

  (III)

  They asked us to envision medieval surgeon

  William Harvey

  standing over the living doe belted

  to his table. We tried

  to imagine the thrill of discovery

  at her open chest,

  the way ventricles sucked his fingers

  like women

  or infants did. He named the domed

  structures atriums: rooms

  filled with light. But we were thinking

  about heat,

  what the doe’s body transferred

  to his hand, the tarry dark

  of her blood. The hearts we opened

  held thickets of clots, pearls

  of blood like blueberries from a tin,

  lumps like buckshot.

  (IV)

  If I say my longing is a doe,

  that it bounds,

  that it chokes, has parts that splinter,

  that it can be split

  from breastbone to pelvis. If I tell you

  I remember the doe,

  strung up in the neighbor’s yard, throat

  unzipped, flesh

  delivered again in a surge of water,

  that I’d never seen anything

  born; calves came at night, but deer

  were butchered

  during daylight. If I tell how I watched

  her dismantled,

  that I searched for the deer

  in the hide like a pit

  in a plum. That he plundered her

  but I found nothing there.

  If I say the rope was stained copper yellow.

  That it became the color

  of ruin under the green walnut tree.

  If I say that it had a scent

  like rain in rusted eaves, will you

  tell me, then?

  When the deer leave after dusk,

  where do they go?

  Trophy

  Up north, deer are eye lights among pines,

  green lanterns of tapeta lucida, ghosts

  licking the salty periphery of dreams.

  They’re tabletop figurines, thin running legs

  cracked and mended, line of glossy residue,

  glue made of bone.

  Watching figures stalk the fields,

  small flames threatening to touch off

  the chaff, my brother vowed to build a barn

  to hide deer during hunting season—

  an old story we tell to watch him flush.

  He’d seen trophies in the basements of men,

  black noses giving a wet illusion.

  On highways, the inside out

  of a deer—viscera slick, shocking

  as a stranger’s nude body.

  Yesterday, he said soldiers in Iraq

  call tattoos meat tags—hard

  glint in his eyes.

  Fisherman

  I read that fishermen

  lose fingers if rings catch in netting,

  and rarely do they wear wedding bands.

  You’re the only man I know

  who could handle life

  on a fishing boat, so the hand I saw

  holding the net was yours.

  I don’t always want to be

  your wife, can’t make you dance

  in public, don’t want to give up

  everyone I could love, but I confess

  that when I saw you, rain slick,

  red face and a rough

  sea behind you, my first thought

  was how do I get him off that boat

  and home, safe beside me?

  Apart

  We kissed in a broken elevator

  in a bar in downtown Tacoma; an elevator

  stalled in the basement. We slipped inside

  this metaphor and kissed

  until my face felt raw.

  When we returned

  to Minnesota, I started

  sleeping in the back bedroom, away

  from our bed.

  You came in the first night

  and drew the curtains—these windows

  face east, you said.

  The second night you carried an extra blanket.

  On the third night, you found me wrapped

  in a towel, stepped in close, drank

  from my collarbone. As if I were

  a flower holding water in its throat,

  a thing patient with drought

  and cold. You touched me

  like it was nothing—

  nearly nothing,

  that mouth on that skin.

  Like tracing a circle on your own hand

  again and again until it hurts.

  Until you don’t know

  if you are touched

  or doing the touching.

  Split

  He kneels,

  hand on my sternum.

  I forget how soft you are, he says.

  After two days, I forget.

  To preserve—

  the inclination to.

  If I could have,

  I would’ve slipped away

  on thin legs, become

  invisible at the tree line.

  I wanted. I wanted to go on

  wanting. Is it any different

  than any animal want,

  to go on breathing

  in order to love someone?

  Nobody wants their life

  to become unrecognizable to them.

  Lost

  Weeks after the last time, she bled.

  It was startling. There would never be anyone

  made from the way he needed her.

  Montana

  You and I are sitting in the sun eating ice cream with huckleberries outside the entrance to Glacier National Park. I’m wearing my white bikini top and blue jeans and I’ve recently cut off my long ha
ir. Your pockets are full of blue-green stones we stole from the Kootenai River. As I eat the ice cream, I save the huckleberries under my tongue. I’m not used to you kissing me, so when you lean over, my mouth is already full of huckleberries. I’ll save everything from this trip—the receipt for our admission into the park, the cork from the bottle of wine that night, the map of the campground where the ranger marked our site with a red circle.

  Later that night, after the wine is gone, we lie on our backs, away from the fire, and look at the stars. When you first see them you say, I can barely breathe. It’s so dark we can see every one—blue, orange, white—and I talk about temperature, the length of my body grazing the edge of yours. I wish you’d have brought it up, how those stars had been dead for millions of years, so it wouldn’t have been such a surprise, later—what happened to you and me.

  I was the one you loved first and best; the owner of a dozen names you’d chosen. My body had taken the years it needed to make itself over as something only you had touched. But it didn’t matter anymore if I was dying, or if I was brilliant, or if I was lit up with a light anyone could see for miles. That last night, you knew it, even though I didn’t yet. What burns has to burn itself out. I was already someone else.

  III

  Want

  When I was twelve, I wanted a macaw

  but they cost hundreds of dollars.

  If we win the lottery? I asked.

  Macaws weren’t known to be great talkers,

  but they were affectionate.

  Yes, my mother said. If we win the lottery.

  I was satisfied, so long as it wasn’t impossible.

  The macaw would be blue.

  A Poem about Childhood

  A girl at Penny’s was crying—

  her parents wouldn’t buy

  the pajamas she wanted.

  You didn’t like them,

  but you chose them, made sure

  she saw when you put them in

  your cart.

  The pajamas were yellow;

  you wore them all summer.

  Dear Gretel,

  Did you spend the night

  curled close to his cage?

  Near enough that you smelled

  the straw of his bedding, did you lie there

  and listen to him exhale? Did he talk

  in his sleep, a sound loud, nonsensical,

  its echo disappearing into dark

  like a rock tossed down a well?

  How did you keep him safe?

  Was it merely proximity? Say the danger

  is too large to fit in an oven.

  What would you do?

  Dear Gretel,

  Was it your idea to give the witch

  something to pinch? The chicken bone,

  I mean. Did it haunt you how akin

  it was to his little finger?

  Dear Gretel,

  They say you stole her glasses,

  ground their lenses to dust, to flour.

  Is that a hint? What’s to steal

  when hazard has excellent sight?

  Dear Gretel,

  Did you ever consider

  the moment his face

  could disappear behind flames?

  Did you wonder if it would be

  a clear day, a Wednesday

  laundry day? That without him

  you would no longer be

  a sister, just a girl

  with an ashy apron?

  Gretel,

  When the stones in the pit were cold,

  the witch out collecting

  herbs or busy snoozing,

  did you fill these lulls

  with distraction? Did it help

  to give him things, chocolate,

  gummi bears, magazines

  to read? If he asked for sheets

  with a higher thread count or

  for grass to plant,

  because he was lonely

  with all that dry straw,

  did that finally break your heart?

  Gretel,

  How did it feel, later,

  to walk in the woods with him,

  a witch’s smoldering bones

  just color in the sky? Was it relief you breathed,

  or did you keep your fear, introduce it

  to thin ice, unstable rock,

  opaque water. Did you always wince,

  afterward, watching him dive?

  Did you let it go on too long?

  For my brother, 1st Lieutenant Greg Rueth

  Lament with Red Wall and Olive Tree

  —After Lorca

  It occurs to me the places

  where the bullets entered and

  escaped, and the cup

  of your skull emptying of light

  and filling, hourglass slow with clay,

  your teeth in your mouth

  and nothing left to chew.

  Your last words, written

  without the sway

  of your duende, its pied

  cloak swelling in the coil

  of wind raging from the place slashed

  between here and there, the figure

  born of watching bulls coughing froth.

  Ghastly, your last written words—Father,

  please give this man

  a donation of 1000 pesetas

  for the Army. A sum

  he swiftly paid, not knowing

  you were already gone.

  There are men in my family

  who’ve gone to war,

  they killed other men,

  men who didn’t want to die—

  this isn’t about war, only grief.

  O, let us be birds together,

  let us both be lilies let us

  eat the ineffable bliss of having stamens

  and pistils. I know a child

  who replaced his father

  with apples, carries

  green apples, and his mother

  swaps them when they soften

  and weep sugar, waits

  until he sleeps, then sets

  a glossy new fruit

  near his pillow.

  Why apples?

  Why green

  apples?

  About Suffering

  About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters …

  AUDEN

  In the Chauvet caves they discovered paintings: muzzles of lions, curled lips of cave bears, shuddering flanks of mammoth and ibex. They also found human remains: skulls, knitted in places with crusts of new growth—a body, mended. When someone suffered, another fed them, brought water, kept them warm.

  Thirty thousand years later, there are still corners untidy with fragments of a child’s skull. Some children are carried through the street by men with eyes like beauty turned backward. The uncles of the dead children, of Suhaib and Muhammad, bear their bodies through the street. A line of men form a funeral procession to the mosque. At the back of the line: fists punch and open hands claw air, mouths open in the vowels of rage: “E,” sometimes “O.” But the men who carry the children are weeping. Six thousand miles away, we can see the faces of these men, and of the children. Noted are the graceful eyebrows on the ashen foreheads, the careful knots of their white shrouds.

  Auden was wrong, unless all he meant was that the world is big, and there are so many places for grief to live that we can’t note each address. But it’s few who can turn away, leisurely, from disaster. We don’t just get on with it, though we all learn, eventually, that things can kill and then turn quiet again: empty weapons and men who’ve fallen asleep.

  Childhood

  Sometimes I feel you close—

  as if you’re asleep on my prairie,

  recreating childhood

  as something durable

  we could live inside:

  plates of leaves, sachets

  of green walnut, jar

  of mud for bee stings, chain

  of flowers to bless the door.

  Like
you, I was never fond

  of growing up. I was dragged into it

  by my hair, kicking, a knot

  like a bird’s egg on my scalp.

  Listen. We could take back

  your puppet theater, my lost dolls,

  your small guitar, and my broken horses—

  place something self-made

  and frightening in the root

  cellar, its floor you’d say

  was the color of blood,

  of the relentless reunion

  of iron and iron.

  An Orange

  I wasn’t hungry, but took down a saucepan. I wanted to see discs of yellow that butter made on milk, like when Dad made macaroni for dinner. Those little circles of light. I watched the water come to a boil. I didn’t care how long it took. While I waited, I thought about how good it would feel to believe in god. To believe that benevolence took a shape; that something larger than X was out there, and it loved me. That the frozen spring, my wet socks, and empty bed were part of a plan. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. Humans have trouble with their backs because we haven’t been upright very long. We’ve had culture and language for 50,000 years, but our modern concept of consciousness comes from philosophers working in the 1700s.

  I know that I’m missing something. It’s like looking at a painting with my nose pressed against it. I have a memory of sitting on the counter when I was five, waiting while my dad peeled an orange for me. He removed all the pulp, so when he handed it to me it was the soft color of the sky in the field across the street at dusk. It glowed in his hands like a nightlight. I hadn’t seen a peeled orange look like that until I saw one in a still life. The love the artist must have had for the orange, or for his paint—something was beloved. When I was five, my father never once looked at me and imagined I would be alone.

  I cooked the macaroni, carried it to my table. One bite and I knew I’d over-salted it. I had to throw it away. This last part is not a metaphor. It’s just what happened when I tried to make myself something to eat. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about what else my dad cooked when I was little. The roux with white pepper over canned peas, the pots of chili with whole tomatoes and the chicken a la king over toast. I couldn’t stop thinking that the universe is a big place, and that it’s getting bigger all the time; there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe. In the early part of the eighteenth century, Pascal said, “The eternal silence of endless space terrifies me.” It can’t be true that I’m far more concerned with the emptiness of the room I’m sitting in, but somehow, I am. Somehow it’s true that there was a moment in time (ten to the negative thirty-second power seconds after the Big Bang) when the entire universe was the size of an orange.