Open Shutters (4 page)

One plucks a lute. One twirls a cape.

Up close, a lifted pinafore

exposes cellulite, and more.

O why aren’t they in better shape,

    the middle-aged Morris dancers?

Already it’s not hard to guess

their treasurer—her; their president—him;

the Wednesday night meetings at the gym.

They ought to practice more, or less,

    the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Short-winded troubadours and pages,

milkmaids with osteoporosis—

what really makes me so morose is

how they can’t admit their ages,

    the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Watching them gamboling and tripping

on Maypole ribbons like leashed dogs,

then landing, thunderously, on clogs,

I have to say I feel like skipping

    the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Yet bunions and receding gums

have humbled me; I know my station

as a member of their generation.

Maybe they’d let me play the drums,

    the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Unlock the door, drop my backpack,

turn the computer on, and the kettle;

waiting for both to warm up, settle

behind the unfilable disaster

of my cabinet, and ignore that stack

    on the floor since last semester.

What a strange job I have—supplying

people with meter and metaphors!

I could be trying to write poems.

Instead, I’ve tried improving yours—

the ones about your grandmothers dying,

    your cats, your broken homes,

your clueless junior years in Europe;

vainly I’ve tried to quash the onset

of another sonnet on a sunset.

Commencement Day should make me cheer up;

and although today I feel elated

    a pack of you graduated

(the few who slaved to get a summa,

the hundreds who will die not knowing

the proper placement of the comma),

I must admit that, watching caps

and gowns go by, I had a lapse

    in judgment: I was growing

sorry to lose—well, two of you.

Funny, clever, and modest too,

fresh from an internship at
Glamour,

lovely Amanda would always bring—

throughout the autumn, winter, spring—

    poems about sex last summer.

Diane was writing a Book of Hours.

Terse through her Terce, mutely applauding

her Lauds, I knew my place, at least.

Deferring to her higher powers,

behind the grille of my desk, nodding,

    I listened like a priest.

Sure, it was selfish that I booked

you both for Tuesdays at eleven,

but didn’t you find to your surprise

(as I did) that fine-tuning even

projects unlike as yours soon looked

    part of one enterprise,

and to hell with “independent studies”?

To view the whole thing as a game

we’d dare to lose at; to focus on

one line until it’s more than one—

yes, you
got
that, and I came

    to see you as my buddies,

who reminded me of that grand plan

I had, I think, when I was young.

You showed we could write anything

at all, if we took the time to do it.

Excuse me, Amanda and Diane,

    if I now start to get to it.

Two bodies in bed, each with a book.

“Would you mind if I turn

the light off?” I ask nicely.

“Would you mind waiting

just a few more pages?” he asks nicely;

“They just found another dead body.”

(My husband is reading Raymond Chandler.)

“Sure,” I say. “I understand.”

So I go back to my book.

Mine is about the disastrous history

of navigation, before the solution

of the problem of longitude.

More often,
he’s
reading about science,

and I’m reading fiction.

After a while I set down the book,

and behind my lids I see floaters of planets

slide and flicker—

celestial bodies, all unlabeled,

that could never guide me if I were a sailor.

My husband’s the one

with the sense of direction.

(Yes, I’m aware

of the gender cliché—

but what can I do? It’s true.)

Amazing what he doesn’t notice—

what I’m wearing, what he’s wearing,

half the things I notice.

But he can’t believe I’d never dare

to experiment with a new route home;

that before reading this book, this week,

I’d always confused latitude and longitude.

For now, though, nobody’s going far.

“Want me to read this aloud to you?”

he offers. “It might help you sleep.”

He reads me a few pages

of snappy dialogue and guns

before I stop him.

“It’s too funny,” I say.

“It’s too wonderful. It makes me laugh.

I’ll never get to sleep.”

He turns off the light—

which may mean what it does

in Raymond Chandler movies.

But soon we slide, lock, side to side,

my stomach to his back,

like continents buckling

over the rumpled waters,

and in time, although no observer

is there to report it, we probably look

like corpses, except that he always snores.

Sometimes I do. We wake each other up

a lot, and apologize,

his body and my body,

till death do us part.

You opened with the rules. Outside this room

nothing I said inside would be repeated

unless in your best judgment I posed harm

to myself or others. It was like being read

my rights in some film noir—but I was glad

already I’d at last turned myself in,

guilty of anxiety and depression.

And worse. Confess it: worse. Of narcissist

indifference to how other people felt.

Railing against myself, making a list

of everything (I thought), I’d left a fault

unturned: the one of needing to be praised

for forcing these indictments from my throat.

For saying them well. For speaking as I wrote.

Not that the goal was chalking up demerits.

Indeed, I hoped you were basically on my side.

That’s how I interpreted your nod,

your pleasant face (at first, a little hard

to judge behind that beard), your intelligent

air of listening further than I meant.

And never falsely, just to raise my spirits,

but because you couldn’t not be interested.

“You writers!” When the outburst came, I started

out of my chair. (I’d had a habit then—

feet on your coffee table. Never again.)

“This is real life. You don’t live in a novel.

People aren’t characters. They’re not a symbol.”

We stared, stunned at the other, stony-hearted.

Once or twice a week, for a year. But ten

years ago already, so that today

those intimate, subtle, freeform sessions shrink

to memorized refrains: “You seem to think

people can read your mind. You have to
say
”—

itself said kindly—or that time you accused me

of picturing love too much like “Barbie and Ken.

Why does it have to be all youth and beauty?”

Therapists have themes, as writers do.

(A few of mine, then: the repertoire includes

clocks, hands, untimely death, snow-swollen clouds.)

Like it or not, I picked up more from you:

No showing off. In failure, no surprise.

Gratitude. Trust. Forgiveness. Fantasies.

The last time I saw your face—how far back now?—

was when I took my daughters (I still don’t

know what possessed me) to a “family restaurant.”

Dinosaur portions, butter enough to drown

all sorrows in, cakes melded from candy bars …

Having filed you away for years and years,

suddenly I was nervous, my life on show.

I’m still married, thanks. Husband’s out of town.

But there was no talking to you across the aisle

where, by some predestined trick of seating,

your brood in its entirety was eating

(their dinners, I suppose, were just as vile)

with backs to me, remaining as they must

faceless to patients even from the past.

Killed instantly
. That’s what a mutual friend

told me when I asked how it had happened.

Good,
I said,
I’m glad he didn’t suffer
—

each of us reaching (not far) for a phrase

from a lifetime stock of journalists’ clichés

which, we had learned, provide a saving buffer

within our bifurcated selves: the one

that’s horrified; the one that must go on.

Killed in a bicycle race. I’ve scrapped the Wheel

of Fortune, the Road of Life. No, this is real,

there’s no script to consult: you’ve lost your body.

Still having one, I pace, I stretch, I cough,

I wash my face. But then I’m never ready.

This is the sonnet I’ve been putting off.

And also this one, in which your fancy bike

hits a concrete barrier and you fly

over it into fast
oncoming traffic
—

the obituary’s formula for one man

driving a truck, who didn’t even have

time to believe the corner of his eye,

until the thing was done, and he must live

always as if this nightmare were the one

deed he was born to do and to relive,

precisely the sort of person you would trust

in fifty-minute sessions to forgive

himself, to give himself at least two years

of post-traumatic whatsit to adjust

to thoughts of all those people left in tears.

Only once did you confide a story

from your own life. (And only to illustrate

how long “people” take to overcome a shock.)

An accident—you broke your neck? Your back?

Shameful I don’t remember—and for three

years you’d take a detour to avoid

the sight of it: that swinging, high red light

somebody ran, that road that crossed a road.

A run-through of the sped-up, drawn-out second

of terror before your second, actual end.

Swinging past the turnoff to your clinic

today, I saw I’d never choose to drive

that street again; would steer around the panic

rather than fail to find you there alive.

Notice—but you can’t—I don’t write your name.

People aren’t characters.
Here’s my concession

(small) to that view, and your need of privacy

which, I suspect, went beyond your profession.

When I knew you—no, you knew
me
—I’d missed the easy

truth we had acquaintances in common.

(A good thing, probably, I’d been too dim

to ask you; you too classy to let on.)

Nor did I find the public facts in print

(
age 53, father of three, an active

member of his church
) until you’d long

been dead. That July I came and went.

You reached me in a place I don’t belong—

seventeen months later, Christmas Eve.

I’d got there early, casually saved a front

pew for the whole family with some flung

mittens and hats. (In gestures we assume

the shoulder-to-shoulder permanence of home.)

Shouldn’t we come more often? “The Power of Love”:

our sermon. A list called “Flowers in Memory of”

on the program’s final page. I was feeling faint.

Your name. Your father’s name? Something was wrong.

I knew it was you. The church was going black.

Head down: my first anxiety attack

since the bad old days. Your face at the restaurant.

My plate heaped up with food I didn’t want.

Keep the head down. People would be saying

to themselves (and close enough) that I was praying.

Revise our last encounter. I’d rather say

it was that day a decade ago we made

a formal farewell: I was going away

on a long trip. If I needed you, I said,

when I got back, I’d be sure to give a call.

You stood up, and I finally saw how tall

you were; I’d never registered how fit.

Well, all we’d done for a year was talk and sit.

Paris,
you said. Then, awkwardly,
Lucky you.

Possessor of my secrets, not a friend,

colder, closer, our link unbreakable.

Yet we parted better than people often do.

We looked straight at each other. Was that a smile?

I thanked you for everything. You shook my hand.

    Sirens living in silence, why would they leave the sea?

                                            —Emily Leithauser

Allow me one more try,

though you and I both know

you’re too old now to need

writing about by me—

you who composed a sonnet

and enclosed it in a letter,

casually, with family news,

while I was away;