May Day Read online

  Why Loneliness

  Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named, not good.

  MILTON

  To make a red coat inconspicuous on a morning walk.

  To ensure our notice of the heron, hovering like a kite.

  To give the dry violet on the windowsill the faith she will be watered.

  So that the city herself might have friends.

  So that we might identify with fish that prefer shallow water.

  So that we can say feather with thumb and forefinger. Can say theory.

  To give us time to contemplate movement: Ana, Kata.

  So that we would each wish to be lovely.

  To give the moon many histories:

  Ch’ang-O once slept with Jade Rabbit curled inside her sleeve.

  For Edward Hopper’s palate.

  For to contemplate the horizon line.

  For to fill in maps before anyone had struck out into nothingness.

  To keep us from feeling guilt, plundering hives for honey.

  To ensure the translation of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts:

  Your bones are those of female hawks. You will climb down ropes of brass.

  So that we might be students of the shape.

  So that the powerful might have a punishment.

  To understand the significance of facts:

  Within twenty-one feet, a knife is deadlier than a gun.

  So that everyone will not cry out at once and rupture the sky.

  To ensure peace of mind: All three apples belong to you. Both fish. Every mouthful.

  So that a cat might truly be admired: For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.

  So that some of us would learn to take charcoal and make a throat. To make ears of bronze.

  So that the whole world will never be enough. For the flag shuddering at the North Pole.

  For another, tranquil on the moon.

  IV

  What I’ve Learned about Cottonwoods

  (I)

  The body has deep fissures.

  It doesn’t dry well. It rots,

  splits poorly—

  (II)

  Cottonwood is a riparian tree,

  which pertains to rivers. The word arrive

  originally meant to touch the shore as in a boat

  onto the bank of a river. It’s too late to tell you,

  but I think you’d have liked to know—

  (III)

  A cottonwood’s heart-shaped leaves

  are the favored food of the larva

  of Banded Wooly Bears. Hatching in autumn,

  they spend the winter frozen.

  First its heart stops, then its gut freezes,

  then its blood. Were you ever listening?

  I want you to listen now.

  (IV)

  A cottonwood’s serrated leaves

  split wind from light. We lie

  in our bedroom shaped

  like a boxcar and listen

  to the Cottonwood’s

  absentminded

  rending.

  (V)

  The white tufts. A small child comes

  into the yard, touches them, tentatively.

  I think about touching our own child that way.

  Imagine us, making something new in our old world.

  Something that leaves a print. In Italy, they call them

  flowers of the people. In Minnesota, children

  pretend they’re snow.

  (VI)

  Paste a leaf of cottonwood

  on each temple and wait until it falls

  on its accord, you will be cured. The word

  accord comes from Latin and meant

  to bring heart to heart.

  (VII)

  When the wind stopped, I walked into the park

  to see about the cottonwood. The leaves

  were torn and scattered. Fresh leaves

  steeped in cold, believed to purify the blood,

  to heal an inflamed heart. Upside down

  against wet grass, they were the wrong

  kind of green. The tree itself

  was unmoved.

  Boy

  Last night the phone rang.

  My brother said, Afghanistan. December.

  He hadn’t begun to tell us about Iraq yet.

  Let’s not dwell on it, he said,

  meaning Afghanistan.

  My brother sent pictures last year,

  from Iraq—mostly of himself

  petting stray dogs, though in one photo

  his eye looks bruised.

  I had to accept: a weapon moves

  through another country

  on the back of my brother,

  whose head is full of glum

  love songs.

  It wasn’t just the heat, it was

  the aridity. I’m trying to plant some grass,

  he said. Something green. We sent it

  across the ocean as seeds. It’s so

  dry here, he said. I can’t explain.

  As kids, we spent summers

  in lakes, in rivers, in pools.

  My brother was first to dive,

  no matter how cold the water.

  No one flinched if it took time

  for him to surface. We trusted

  his body’s ascension,

  that before long, we’d see

  his ecstatic face.

  Styx

  (I)

  It’s hard to forget what you’re built to remember.

  The river in August—doe’s weathered vertebrae,

  fish’s white pin ribs, broken rock and rust, oily

  sand—a silver heron I want to scare into flight.

  Dark comes. Humidity carrying its plug

  of carcass and refuse. I’m looking for the right

  words but you’re already far away, barely

  turning to mark my progress through debris,

  grit of you inside me as the heron departs.

  I can’t help but think of blue herons in Como Park,

  our old apartment so close to this river—

  what it’s like to be dead. Separated

  from all you once loved.

  (II)

  A paddlewheel shutters past—yellow lit mirage, ferry

  to the spirit world. I’ve got an urge to swim out,

  to call for help, but I photograph you instead. I take a picture

  of your back. You appear just as you are. A dark shape—

  (III)

  On the way here, I notice your car has a sickly

  sweet, interior smell like something rotting,

  and the woman’s sunglasses in the cup holder

  you haven’t bothered to remove.

  (IV)

  I’m picking my way over rock that clatters

  like bone china and slides into water, I’m seeing

  on the bank how, over time, even metal can be warped.

  That even brick can be crushed—I’m so afraid, so just hold me

  or drown me, please do something—

  (V)

  You deposit me curbside, your new habit

  of not asking where I want to go, or when,

  so it startles me when you put your face to my throat, say I just

  love you, say I just love you so much. The two of us, we belong

  back in the dark and reek, like the pair of bullheads

  we found tonight, in a plastic bucket, abandoned.

  Translation

  —After Lorca

  It’s been a long night.

  You keep finding a way

  to speak to me. I’m weary,

  from the root of the

  root of me, my bees

  breaking open and the lust

  in the furious snap

  of the flag flown over the country

  of one woman.

  You translate

  cicada speech like something

  ratcheted, tuned, and in the morning
/>   the scratch of a stick being dragged

  through sand.

  How often am I the one missing

  from conversations, however

  patient you are with me?

  You possess every word

  to set anguish like a bone,

  to fix it—

  every word awake.

  You’ve got all the words

  though I go on, fumbling.

  Let me learn another language.

  Red

  For weeks, flakes of eraser, curls of wood

  and pigment across the landscape

  of our dining room table. Poppy,

  Scarlet, Carmine—

  Purity of color, I learned, is ensured by the absence of iron.

  I’d gotten used to the sound of pencils

  rolling across the table, tapping against

  the floor. The curd of white eraser,

  your lovely muscled back, sore from work,

  bent over the drawing of the cardinal.

  The hours you spent on a single eye.

  Absence makes the heart

  a) grow fonder

  b) go to ground

  Talking to another woman late at night, you show her

  the drawing, and she marvels at it, at you. You tell her

  that this drawing was commissioned and will be paired with

  a poem.

  Not my poem, just

  a poem.

  If you want to see a red bird, / learn winter.

  My flush of blood. My rushing heart.

  Everything slipping out of place.

  The rest of the body cold, heart having

  gathered all blood and forced it across the face.

  “An explanation [for blushing …] proposes that when we feel shame we communicate our emotion to others and in doing so we send an important signal to them. It tells them something about us. It shows that we recognize that something is out of place. It shows that we are sorry about this. It shows that we want to put things right.”

  I used to live in Como, you told her. Now

  I live in Powderhorn.

  Males sometimes bring nest material to the female, [but it’s she] who does most of the building.

  I called from Chicago while you were still working on

  the drawing. I wish you were here to encourage me, you say.

  This bird looks like shit now. When I say goodnight at the hotel,

  you say, I don’t believe you miss me. I don’t mention the song

  at the restaurant, how I had to excuse myself, how I sat and wept

  in the restroom where the song was more audible.

  A cardinal’s call is recognized as purdy purdy purdy … what-cheer what-cheer.

  You bring home raspberries in chocolate pastry

  shells. Bring home snap peas and flowers. I wash

  work clothes, fold and leave tidy stacks on your

  dresser. Pants that look as filthy out of the dryer

  as they did lying on the floor. Dirty shirts with white

  lines across the belly—salt your body lost in the heat.

  I pack coolers with frozen washcloths, with watermelon.

  I don’t fold your socks the way you like. But

  I bring home pineapples; I stand them upside down

  to make them sweet. At night we still search for each other

  across the open space of the mattress.

  Cardinals are songbirds and the male uses its call to attract a mate. Unlike most northern songbirds, the female also sings. Females will often sing from the nest in what may be a call to her mate.

  One night you wonder at how our neighborhood in Minneapolis

  can be so silent. As soon as the words exist, an ambulance’s

  red siren. And then our laughs; yours and mine

  together make a particular sound.

  Both male and female cardinals sing clear, slurred whistled phrases that are vocabulary of several phrase types which combine into different songs.

  Hour three of an argument, I say,

  Don’t you have anything

  to say? Weeks later, in bed, after

  I think you’re asleep you say,

  I don’t want to lose you.

  A mated pair of cardinals shares song phrases, but the female may sing a longer and slightly more complex song than the male.

  For weeks I watched you, riveted. Loved

  to watch you do something I couldn’t.

  What you created with five pencils: black,

  and white but mostly

  Poppy, Scarlet, Carmine—

  It has also been suggested that blushing and flushing are the visible manifestations of the physiological rebound of the basic instinctual fight/flight mechanism, when physical action is not possible. The common call in a situation of alarm is a metallic chirp.

  Let the sky be bright with all you can’t see.

  Let yourself be hungry, the world frayed and turning its face away in sleep.

  Let’s get together, she says. She says, Don’t

  be a stranger …

  [Cardinals] are obsessed with defending their territory against intruders. Birds may spend hours fighting these intruders without giving up … one female kept up this behavior every day or so for six months without stopping.

  See you soon, you say.

  A berry splitting / with its own water.

  The next day you call and leave a message: I just read

  your cardinal poem again. It’s perfect.

  A wound / stitching itself together.

  I watch you pack your pencils in their black case. It makes

  me sad, to watch you put them away. The next day I remove

  the photo of us—our first vacation in Montana—and shove it

  under the dresser where I won’t have to see.

  Pairs may stay together throughout winter, but up to twenty percent of pairs split up by the next season.

  When you were out of town,

  I sat down and arranged your colored pencils

  based on a color wheel you’d taught me.

  I did it because something was out of place.

  I wanted to put things right.

  The pencils were dull, smooth like the tips of fingers.

  I sharpened every single pencil, the first knuckle

  of my middle finger, raw and shining. Red.

  Sketch for an Ode or Elegy

  1 Not silent exactly, with the rain-stick sound of squirrels along branches; pollen from spruce trees disturbed and floating like gold smoke; even lighter than what’s invisible. Sometimes I want to be

  2 The Cottonwood’s shade protecting us from certain truths. How he woke in Japan with shards of tooth under his tongue. How my grief is nothing here; a bird’s exhalation. He thinks one person’s suffering can’t be compared, but I love him, know who’s story I would amend, if only

  3 A heron floats past, then a cormorant. The sound of geese, hissing nearby. A man with a gold tooth walks to the edge of my blanket. What do you think that means? he asks, pointing to a faded red ribbon tied around a slender limb of a nearby catalpa tree. I don’t know

  4 It’s time to start admitting it: misery made me beautiful. It lasted only as long as I was miserable

  5 Now I’m myself again, made ordinary by love. Full fat milk steamed by favorite baristas and drawings in the mail from Nola—my smile extending past the edge of my face. Also green spines of fantasy novels, the dog and I sleeping in, X’s love letters thrown in the trash with the coffee grounds. Phone calls from the friend, en route to Boston to begin her own new life. Another friend assuring, Whatever you need, pal. Whatever you need … The way my father held me close, then

  6 The dog’s gold face turned white in the span of one year, and I hated X for it. I had to concede

  7 It’s time to start brushing my hair again. The loveliest man has sat down beside me and opened a book. You don’t mind if I sit here? He has quarters stacked beside his cup for refills
. I smile; I’ve got all day too. What are you reading? Beautiful arms. Wrists. I’m a match with nothing to strike against

  8 I’m still going on about loss. At the café, Khosrow says, You should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Think what she saw, and still she survived. She wears cold blue silk, hot white light, her heart outside her body.

  The Offering

  No one knows what to call rapture as it builds,

  as water working itself to a boil

  cannot be said to be boiling. We’ve no word

  for the moment before rapture—

  focused on the approach we never notice

  the shape it takes

  without its wings—ravenous, fragile.

  Unable to flee—pinioned

  to the moment. You arrive at my altar

  with no idea

  what it means to worship—to adore.

  You haven’t even learned it:

  ecstasy and suffering

  make the same face.

  A Cold Front

  It’s true there were nights when I didn’t sleep, with you gone out west.

  You sent photos—eyelashes crusted with ice. I ate nothing but vinegar and oil on bread for weeks. I lay on the living room floor, counting all the doors in my childhood home, and still found myself awake when the room filled with light.

  The trucks ran all night or they wouldn’t start in the morning. Locals couldn’t believe you were shingling roofs in that wind. Ice glossed your pants to your boots. The boss was tucked away back home, climate controlled, but raged about deadlines. Lost jobs. Lots of men who wanted work.