Open Shutters (5 page)

who rummaged in convention’s

midden for tools and symbols

and made with them a maiden

voyage from mere verse

into the unmapped world

of poetry. A mermaid

(like Eve, you wrote—a good

analogy, and yet

your creature acts alone)

chooses to rise from wordless

unmindful happiness

up to the babbling surface

of paradox and pain.

I whose job it’s been

to protect you read my lesson:

you’ll wriggle from protection.

Half-human and half-fish

of adolescence, take

my compliments, meant half

as from a mother, half

one writer to another,

for rhymes in which you bury

ironies—for instance,

sirens
into
silence;

and since I’ve glimpsed a shadow,

forgive how glad I felt

when I set down your sonnet

to read your letter again

with only silliness in it,

the old tenth-grade bravado:

“Oh well, I bombed the chem test.

Latin’s a yawn a minute.”

Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns

crowned by the crepe-paper party hats

of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book;

an afternoon in late July to read it,

or read the middle of it, having leisure

to mark the place and enter it tomorrow

just as you left it (knock-knock of woodpecker

keeping yesterday’s time, cicada’s buzz,

the turning of another page, and somewhere

a question raised and dropped, the pendulum-

swing of a wind-chime). Back and forth, the rocker

and the reading eye, and isn’t half

your jittery, odd joy the looking out

now and again across the road to where,

under the lush allées of long-lived trees

conferring shade and breeze on those who feel

none of it, a hundred stories stand confined,

each to their single page of stone? Not far,

the distance between you and them: a breath,

a heartbeat dropped, a word in your two-faced

book that invites you to its party only

to sadden you when it’s over. And so you stay

on your teetering perch, you move and go nowhere,

gazing past the heat-struck street that’s split

down the middle—not to put too fine

a point on it—by a double yellow line.

Profiles framed in the window’s

glare of Florida sun,

two friends, both snow-capped widows,

are sharing a cinnamon bun.

Are they economizing?

Fearing their waists can afford

just half of that white icing?

Neither one says a word

while they divide with a knife

the whorling galaxy

of their treat, like girls at tea,

starting to play at life.

Alike impeccable

in Keds and peds and pleated

tennis shorts, they’re seated

at their accustomed table—

or what feels customary

now that they needn’t worry

about filling another’s mouth;

now that they don’t fly south

anymore, or north, or provide

eggs for anybody.

And yet our cares die hard.

One woman is still ready,

unasked, not looking up,

to pour a long white stream

from a tiny pitcher of cream

into the other’s cup.

Silently, the green

long-tailed lizard glides across

our floor like a queen.

Who was first to spear

toothpicks through melon balls and

diced alligator?

Ice cubes in a glass:

outside, the chilling shake of

rattlesnake through grass.

                         6:48 a.m., and leaden

               little jokes about what heroes

    we are for getting up at this hour.

Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running.

    T minus ten and counting, the sun

               mounting over Canaveral

    a swollen coral, a color

bright as camera lights. We’re blind-

    sided by a flash:

                         shot from the unseen

               launching pad, and so from nowhere,

    a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne

pen on fire, its ink a plume

    of smoke which, even while zooming

               upward, stays as oddly solid

    as the braided tail of a tornado,

and lingers there as lightning would

    if it could steal its own thunder.

     —Which, when it rumbles in, leaves

    under or within it a million

    firecrackers going off, a thrill

of distant pops and rips in delayed

    reaction, hitting the beach in fading

    waves as the last glint of shuttle

    
receives our hands’ eye-shade salute:

the giant point of all the fuss soon

    smaller than a star.

                         Only now does a steady, low

               sputter above us, a lawn mower

    cutting a corner of the sky,

grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!—

    some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute

               to wonder’s always-dated orbit

    and the itch of afterthought. I swat

my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat:

    what the locals call no-see-’ums.

Heads turn: in the taffeta rustle

of leaves, clutching a dance-card

acorn under her chin,

a high-society squirrel

curls her tail like a bustle.

The leftward-peaking curve

of the mountain just behind

our house puts me in mind

of a huge, arrested wave

engraved upon the sky’s

absorbent paper … wait,

that thought

was Hokusai’s.

The name of my neighbors’ black Lab is Shadow.

He stands on the deck in back of their house

like a figurehead fixed on the wrong direction.

The house—across the street, at the corner—

I view from one side, as I do the dog.

Shadow faces astern while the prow

    leans into the morning sun.

Whenever I wake, my first sight is Shadow

already at military attention.

His profile’s imperial, nearly Egyptian.

Turning in bed, I stare out the window,

unaware of my room, as if the glass

were my eyes, and what I see out of it

    is freighted as a dream.

But no, this is the day’s first emblem

of the real, because it
is
real: a black

dog that doesn’t know I’m looking

as he looks out over the back yard thinking

at whatever level he’s thinking,

while I lie in silence, starting to grasp

    whatever it is I feel.

There’s something cheering about him, something

comic in his erect, respectful

salute to the day; and a call to sadness—

though I resist this, not wishing to greet

my own life with less gratitude

than a dog chained to a post. What is it

    about his silhouette

that lends the whole neighborhood the flat,

deluded air of a stage set—like

a backdrop whose painted simplicity

of House and Tree only seals the fate

of the characters in the tragedy?

Besides, what’s the tragedy? I’m all right,

    and so, I think, is Nancy,

who now steps out to the deck in her robe,

unhooks Shadow’s leash. He follows her in.

I know what will happen next: she’ll emerge

briskly in work clothes, and back the car out

past the woodpile, the trash cans, the basketball hoop,

her late summer garden; I’ll watch her turn up

    the street to disappear

on the hilltop, seeming to tumble off it.

No tragedy. She’ll be back at three.

Yet the thought was
there
just a moment ago,

barely within the range of my senses:

an equal consciousness

of how little I understand that the life

    one has is one’s only life

and how well I understand it; and how

most of the time one functions better

forgetting. Do I want to function?

It’s humbling to think that human ears

are duller than dogs’. I rise and dress,

and for better or worse the darkness curls

    behind me, like a tail.

Heart-transplants my friend handed me:

four of her own peony bushes

in their fall disguise, the arteries

of truncated, dead wood protruding

from clumps of soil fine-veined with worms.

“Better get them in before the frost.”

And so I did, forgetting them

until their June explosion when

it seemed at once they’d fallen in love,

had grown two dozen pink hearts each.

Extravagance, exaggeration,

each one a girl on her first date,

excess perfume, her dress too ruffled,

the words he spoke to her too sweet—

but he was young; he meant it all.

And when they could not bear the pretty

weight of so much heart, I snipped

their dew-sopped blooms; stuffed them in vases

in every room like tissue-boxes

already teary with self-pity.

You fly to my table with unbuttoned sleeves.

You look like an angel with unbuttoned sleeves.

Where have you been? Did you run from a fire?

Here, share my meal with unbuttoned sleeves.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff’s in my coffee.

You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

Don’t say it yet. That’s not what you mean.

I know you too well with unbuttoned sleeves.

How many years since I first loved your face?

You could have set sail with unbuttoned sleeves.

Clothes make the man. Our bed’s still unmade.

Please pay the bill with unbuttoned sleeves.

Unbutton me back to our first nakedness:

I have no name at all with unbuttoned sleeves.

“Here’s a story for you,” he said. He slid the paper

off his chopsticks and snapped them, making two from one.

Then folded a red accordion from the wrapper,

pressed it between his fingers, let it spring

and slide across the table like a snake.

There were red snakes on our placemats too, and dragons,

monkeys and rats. “This story that I see

before me”—and he studied the zodiac’s

combination plate of animals—

“occurs, how perfect, in the Year of the Horse.

In ’54. Did you know the Japanese,

maybe the Chinese too, think it’s unlucky

to be born in one of them if you’re a girl?”

“I
was
born in ’54.”

                         “Right, I forgot!

But that’s perfect too. Everything fits today.

I just took Val for her final sonogram.

Next comes the birth. I’d never seen her move—

my daughter. Today I saw my daughter swim

inside Val, fuzzily, for the first time.

We’re used to seeing
anything
on TV,

so for a second that seemed almost normal.”

“1999. Is this a Year of the Horse?

Is that what you’re trying to say? I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Of course she is.” He studied the mat again.

“We ride to the millennium on the back

of the Rabbit—see? Fertility!—and then

the Dragon’s waiting for us at the gates

of the year 2000. That number sounded

impossible, didn’t it, when we were kids?

Amazing that it’s matched up with the only

chimera for any year, the Dragon …”

“So come on. What’s the story, anyway?”

He sighed, took a gulp of tea; then sat up straight.

“I don’t—I can’t describe it. Last night, Val

and my father and I watched a video

from 1954. Or just a clip

from a home movie, made by a family friend

who’d had it saved on video. A surprise

for my mother’s younger child, age 46.

It was the only record of my mother,

moving and breathing, that I’ve ever seen.

My mother who died when I was two, whose death

has haunted me more than anything—”

                                        “I know—”

“because I can’t remember her. There she was.

Sick, on her last vacation, in Venezuela—

you like the exotic touch? It was as if

she was destined always to be worlds away—

and standing at the counter of some store,

trying out perfumes. You can see her lift

a bottle up, to study it like a doctor

checking an IV. No, she was happy.

She lifts the bottle, you can see her smile,

laugh, even, and say to Dad,
It’s beautiful
—

I mean you can read her lips. Of course, no sound.”

He raised his chopsticks, like a magic wand.

“What I would give to hear her! I must have played

those few seconds back a dozen times, as if

the next time, anytime, I’d hear her voice.

As if, I swear to God, I’d learn to crawl

inside that crystal bottle of perfume

like a little genie. As if in the end

I’d smell what my mother smelled.