May Day Read online

January and no place to go, bitterest month in memory—when I laid about the house and watched the dark move from one room to the next, like sealing the lid on a jar, me inside—larval, needy.

  We were new in town and I hadn’t realized yet how bad things were going to get for us. That month I walked alone, at Como Zoo. The lions seemed submerged in artificial light, like fish in a tank. The kudu, backdropped by cinderblocks, chewed their cud and cupped their ears toward every sound. Prey animals, an eye on each side of the head. None of us was convinced summer would come back and save us. None except the bison, their noses steaming under festival costumes of snow.

  At last you came home—dirt mashed into the fibers of your clothing, the blues of your coat and sweatshirt seemed almost blanched by cold. Your face was chapped, your hands skinned and too sore to open a jar for me. Your name was misspelled on the paycheck, your per diems missing. You smelled like diesel. I felt like I was touching a stranger. Plows rumbled past. The neighbor came dashing up the stairs—our car had just been towed. A few blocks away, a lion chuffed in his sleep. On the muted television, the weatherman was gesticulating grandly toward the west.

  V

  Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes

  When I see a man

  in a dress shirt, I want

  to walk up behind him,

  place my hand

  between his shoulders,

  to rest it there

  for a moment. I think

  about his socks, how

  he chose one pair

  that morning and the rest

  are still at home

  in a drawer.

  And his shoes—

  God, those shoes, they break me,

  especially when they’re polished, what

  does he do to make them shine

  like that, yes, all it takes

  is a pair of shiny black shoes and such

  a wave of tenderness

  collapses over me

  that I see his ties, at rest

  on their little carousel, imagine

  that he held them up

  in the mirror

  at the department store,

  unsure.

  Figure Drawing

  On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk

  dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves

  and not a single sparrow. I knew then,

  somehow, that I would never take my own life.

  And I knew it when I sat still

  before your easel and watched you

  holding your sighting stick to measure

  my trunk. Occasionally, you pressed fingers

  against my legs and hips, bluntly

  but with care. You are learning

  about the body and its trappings.

  You’ve referred to my clavicle as a bony

  landmark. There are so many ways to speak

  about the body. There is a mundane history

  of people telling their god, If you’d asked me

  if I wanted to come here, I would have said no.

  When I was your age, I entered the woods

  with my hurt and sat against a tree and was

  surrounded by deer that paid me no mind.

  Their feet made no noise. They had no scent,

  no color. You’ve painted my hair across my back

  as fire. You’ve painted my face in mourning

  and didn’t know. Sometimes I’m filled with fear

  at the thought of seeing this through,

  like I was that day in the woods, when all I wanted

  was to lie like a dropped antler on the forest floor.

  Still, today I’m thrilled to be shown

  the muscles of my own back, drawn in charcoal.

  The bones of my pelvis seem larger than my hips,

  warmed over with skin. We’ve a history of telling our gods,

  If you asked me if I wanted to leave here,

  I would say no. Done with your work, we walk

  to the diner for pancakes. You have a smudge

  of yolk-colored pigment under your nose,

  another ashy smudge near your right ear.

  I know how easily I could have missed it.

  Whatever else happens, I don’t want to miss it.

  The machine of my body is humming. There is a record

  of my body, resting on your easel. It is static, almost.

  I saw the Cooper’s hawk leave the ground with nothing,

  and carry it into the air. The nothing he carried

  was yellow. It was the most beautiful thing.

  Despite

  Despite fear, which is alive and breathes in me and turns

  three times attempting to lie down. Despite my body

  that burns along its vagus nerve and is ninety percent gut.

  Despite this body that is crushed like a corsage

  against the chest of the one I love. Despite my mind,

  which wants to tell the whole truth—forgets

  it’s honest to say: the body I’m trapped inside has a thorax

  and a compound eye. Despite the way I can love

  anyone at all; the stranger in the courtyard—her one bare foot

  dangling over the edge of a low stone wall—despite my desire

  to hold the elegant arch of her. Despite pulled hair,

  disturbed sleep, bent flatware—despite memory’s

  clean scent. Despite all blood, the realities of brain

  as tissue like any other soft matter, and despite

  the possibility that all we are is flesh. Despite the only sealed door

  I batter myself against, and my naked body, my empty

  body. Despite all the ways a body can be empty.

  Despite the eagle’s four-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch

  grip and the whip width of her tether. Despite the way she screamed,

  watching a bird outside fly the river’s length. Despite the dog,

  moldering, how I grieve her white eyelashes, her quick gusts

  of breath when she dreamed or ran. Despite what we’ve been taking

  for granted: first among them, the blood still inside our bodies.

  Despite the dead god of my youth who promised his protection,

  who smelled like dust and tasted like starch and sounded like a sudden

  bell. Despite his evaporation. Despite the fact that I don’t know

  how I got here but still belong in this place. Despite the fragility

  of our eyes, the liquid that holds light, our thin skulls, our fingernails growing

  at the same rate at which the moon leaves the earth behind,

  and the possibility that all we are is flesh. Despite the lasso of color—

  the aura and the sting. Despite the dishes that need to be done,

  the sheets we dirtied that I continue to sleep in. Despite the fruitless search

  for a single piece of important paper, the simple economics

  of my even simpler wealth. Despite inadequate technologies.

  The matchless touch. Exhaustion. Despite the miles between us

  and how the universe has labeled us a Roman candle.

  Despite how we eject stars, how we’re not even a slow burn,

  nothing like a standing stone.

  Deer through a Boutique Window

  Some things can’t be mended.

  Some of us are broken, and some

  remain whole. Something has died

  in every place on earth. But I can’t stop

  thinking about hooves on waxed, black diamonds

  of linoleum—also thousands of deer,

  unharmed in the woods, bedding down,

  and fawns unborn to this doe, wrecked

  among silk stockings, satin slips, pearl

  earrings. How do we get lost in such a small world?

  Why are some of us lucky? And some of us

  not? There she lies, scent of her own blood

  in her nose, the eleg
ant pheromones

  in their frosted glass bottles, oblivious,

  unbroken on the shelf.

  Song for the Festival

  At the May Day parade, my mask made of moss

  and bark, my hair full of flowers, my friend beside me,

  her pretty red mouth under the hawk’s beak

  of her mask of green sage.

  At the children’s pageant, music

  died in the speakers. The shadow

  of a crow passed over. My hair a crown

  of flowers, yellow and red roses large as fists,

  flowers on which I’d spent my last $20

  at the mercado.

  But beauty wasn’t enough. Being admired

  by strangers was not enough.

  I saw a girl, wandering, looking for her mother.

  I knelt down, lowered my mask, showed her

  my face. She’s looking for you too, I say.

  She tries to spot her mother’s yellow dress.

  A gold dog passes, happy and white-faced,

  wearing pink nylon fairy wings. The girl points

  and laughs; the hard part of her day

  is over.

  The people I’m looking for—I don’t know where they are.

  I don’t know the color of their clothing. From across the park,

  I see the dark windows of my apartment.

  Spring has arrived.

  Let me not despair.

  Mule Trail

  Stirring the fire’s coals with a stick—a familiar sound

  I couldn’t place until I shut my eyes—

  the sound of walking through snow.

  Each morning now, I wake thinking of him

  because all night I hold on—like at the motel

  when I slept curled around him, back against the headboard,

  my hands in his gold hair. I’m trying to find a place to rest,

  but loving him is like flying, like being starlings,

  knowing when to move and how. It’s nothing

  like migration; no safe landings in brackish,

  green estuaries. Still, there’s the way the match hisses

  when I touch its head to the glass of water.

  There’s the way he loves me. There’s the way

  the sun can heat the juice inside a berry

  to the temperature of blood, and how good he is

  at loving me. Something is building inside.

  Pearls make me think of fevers. Blood oranges,

  finches, the stick of a fish’s silver skin to its flesh—

  what do you do, when you realize you want

  the whole of everything inside of you?

  I don’t want to tell what I’ve learned—

  there’s no way to repel love or to draw it close.

  I don’t want to say I’m bewildered, but

  what makes a man love a woman?

  I know the way he loves is not for spectacle. I know

  this will not last. Before the end we’ll drive to the desert

  to see it bloom, to see vacant motels and red-gold buttes,

  see the desert’s blue stars and the collapsing

  castles of its abandoned mini-golf courses,

  the dark signs of its empty diners.

  For now we have Mule Trail, where everything

  looks like something else. The firewood in the pit,

  lit from inside like a church’s stained-glass window,

  the plum’s gold flesh laced with scarlet veins,

  replica of a human brain. Maybe this is all we are—

  carbon, water, color. We spent the storm in the tent,

  woke up later and rebuilt the fire, heard coyotes’

  eerie chatter, then the wolves’—lower and wiser,

  with authority. Why am I so ungainly with love

  after all the loving I’ve done? I didn’t realize

  until I was hours away—the insect bites, the pin-sized

  blisters of stinging nettle, the raw interior skin.

  What does it mean to be in love? As it turns out,

  the second best thing that can happen to you

  is a broken heart.

  Two Trains

  Two trains leave different cities heading toward each other at different speeds. When the man in train #1 slides across the seat to kiss the woman who has been looking out the window, what texture is the upholstery of the seat on that train if the upholstery in train #2 is a faded, tobacco-colored naugahyde? If the conductor of train #2 had not had to milk the cows every morning and afternoon of his childhood, would he have had more time to stay after school, peering in microscopes? In this case, who would then be commanding train #2? If the conductor of train #1 was able to express how much he loved to drive the train into the night, that he imagined it, not along any track, just shoving into the dark, never arriving to bathe in the bright lights of Seattle, would they demote him to porter? If the porter in train #1 was not pretending to be well when in fact he was sick, who would care for him? Which city? Which woman: the one with the salmon-colored geraniums, or the one whose stockings drip all night against the radiator? When the man in train #2 drops his briefcase, and it pops open, sending seven small bottles to bounce soundlessly across the carpeted aisle, will the small girl who witnessed it remember the color of the bottles later? Will she think of them when she sees, for the first time, the sulfuric green water, on her honeymoon, in Yellowstone National Park? Who is her spouse? Which train have they boarded? When and where do they meet?

  May Day

  I’ve lived in my neighborhood long enough to recognize

  that morning glories bloom early here—they don’t signify the end

  of summer. I’m beginning to understand that parts of me

  are wasted entirely.

  Somewhere it’s the last snow of April and the dead dog knows.

  Somewhere my lost uncle is eating sweet and sour at Ming’s, steam

  touching his face so gently.

  If something happens in this world, it goes on

  for billions of years, but if something doesn’t happen, it never does.

  For a billion years I rock the babies of other women.

  Tell me I’ve nothing to fear.

  Powderhorn, after the Storm

  It’s vertigo, walking among downed trees’

  belled skirts of dirt and tender clover.

  Birds sit on branches laid prone

  over fragrant hearts of trunks.

  Hearts slick and white. So many trees

  uprooted, yet some bushes kept

  pink blossoms, which today are open,

  tender throats. My dogs and I traverse

  the wounds, full of heady bliss,

  as when a fever breaks

  or morphine is administered—

  there’s a suppleness to everything.

  A dampness. One of the dogs bounds

  through debris, the other picks

  her way. Both are old. Neither

  seems to realize it, though one

  is suddenly afraid of thunder,

  has spent the last two nights

  whining at my bedside

  and pissing on the floor.

  I lost my temper

  when I took her out at 3 a.m.,

  fingers of sirens reaching

  from all directions, hazard

  lights of crushed cars blinking

  an anxious orange in the dark.

  I jerked her leash, nudged

  her through the door

  with my knee. These cruelties

  aren’t held against me.

  I regret them deeply.

  Now there’s light from another,

  better world. The sun is out.

  We stop at the water fountain

  and I cup my hands to give them a drink.

  The tentative dog, the one who was afraid

  and who I betrayed, drinks from my hands.

  Her gentle mouth and soft tongue.


  I fill my hands for her

  again and again.

  What We Will Love with the Time We Have Left

  All life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it never happened. That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is traveling, that is the “benevolent” end of the furious living and furious dying … All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again. The final result … is to deprive it completely of meaning

  LESLIE PAUL

  First, the purple flowers growing along the sidewalk,

  so saturated with color they make us blind to look at them.

  Then, the sound of a screen door slamming, the smell of pine pollen

  and beeswax. The silvery eyes of the concrete deer, guarding

  a bird bath. The uncomfortable feel of wet jeans, stiff with sand.

  The taste of well water from an aluminum cup. The sound of water

  being poured into a glass. Hot tea with one ice cube in it.

  The silk of frog skin and the stinging nettle. Smell of wet rock. Scent

  of aftershave on steam. Squeak of finger against the mirror.

  The day-old cookies in their white paper bag, brought home

  to surprise the dogs. The lambswool way an old dog’s legs feel,

  her body failing her. The way the child sings a song

  she was taught about loneliness, before being taught

  about loneliness. Throats, armpits, arches of feet. Perfunctory

  head nods of strangers walking the opposite direction. The smoke

  pulled in soft, through the open window along with the wind

  through wet hair. The twin images of neurons and cluster galaxies. The cold

  calm of a museum exhibit—maces and daggers, backlit and serene.

  The way Bernini made marble supple, the way Caravaggio’s brutal

  hands painted light. All the furious living, the turtle dragging herself, algaed

  from the lake to the sand at the top of the playground to lay her eggs. All the furious

  dying. The unidentifiable viscera that the wasps are drinking from

  on the sidewalk. The way the wasps relish it. The heron lifting off

  with the skyline behind her. Berries, crushed in mouths. The alabaster egg.

  The toy horse. The little brother at age three, in his gray pajamas, waving.