Original Fire (5 page)

They’re women, not like me but like the sun

burning cold on a winter afternoon,

audacious brilliance from a severe height,

living in the center as the town revolves

around them in a mess. Of course

we want to know what gives behind their fence,

behind the shades, the yellow brick

convent huge in the black green pines.

We pass it, every one of us, on rounds

we make our living at. There’s one

I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,

her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,

and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.

I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,

scarred like the moon in her observance,

shaved and bound and bandaged

in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,

muttering for courage at the very hour

cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto

turns to me with urgency and power.

Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue

smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,

and the buried structure shows,

the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,

freeze to acid in the strange heart.

The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded

on gin. One bottle in the clinkers

hidden since spring

when Otto took the vow

and ceremoniously poured

the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew

down the scoured steel sink,

overcoming the reek

of oxblood.

That was one promise he kept.

He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips

in the meantime. I know

now he kept some insurance,

one bottle at least

against his own darkness.

I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.

From the doorway the clouds pass me through.

The town stretches to fields. The six avenues

crossed by seventeen streets,

the tick, tack, and toe

of boxes and yards

settle into the dark.

Dogs worry their chains.

Men call to their mothers

and finish. The women sag into the springs.

What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?

With a headful of spirits,

how else can I think?

Under so many clouds,

such hooded and broken

old things. They go on

simply folding, unfolding, like sheets

hung to dry and forgotten.

And no matter how careful I watch them,

they take a new shape,

escaping my concentrations,

they slip and disperse

and extinguish themselves.

They melt before I half unfathom their forms.

Just as fast, a few bones

disconnecting beneath us.

It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.

Not in this language.

Not in this life.

I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.

But these clouds, creeping toward us

each night while the milk

gets scorched in the pan,

great soaked loaves of bread

are squandering themselves in the west.

Look at them: Proud, unpausing.

Open and growing, we cannot destroy them

or stop them from moving

down each avenue,

the dogs turn on their chains,

children feel through the windows.

What else should we feel our way through—

We lay our streets over

the deepest cries of the earth

and wonder why everything comes down to this:

The days pile and pile.

The bones are too few

and too foreign to know.

Mary, you do not belong here at all.

Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.

Let everything be how it could have been, once:

a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.

But this is the way people are.

All that appears to us empty,

We fill.

What is endless and simple,

We carve, and initial,

and narrow

roads plow through the last of the hills

where our gravestones rear small

black vigilant domes.

Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars

deep in this strange earth

we want to call ours.

My four adopted sons in photographs

wear solemn black. Their faces comprehend

their mother’s death, an absence in a well

of empty noise, and Otto strange and lost.

Her name was Mary also, Mary Kröger.

Two of us have lived and one is gone.

Her hair was blond; it floated back in wings,

and still you see her traces in the boys:

bright hair and long, thin, knotted woman’s hands.

I knew her, Mary Kröger, and we were bosom friends.

All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.

Otto was for many years her husband,

and that’s the way I always thought of him.

I nursed her when she sickened and the cure

fell through at Rochester. The healing bath

that dropped her temperature, I think, too fast.

I was in attendance at her death:

She sent the others out. She rose and gripped my arm

and tried to make me promise that I’d care

for Otto and the boys. I had to turn away

as my own mother had when her time came.

How few do not return in memory

and make us act in ways we can’t explain.

I could not lie to ease her, living, dying.

All graves are full of such accumulation.

And yet, the boys were waiting in New York

to take the first boat back to Otto’s folks

in Germany, prewar, dark powers were at work,

and Otto asked me on the westbound bus

to marry him. I could not tell him no—

We help our neighbors out. I loved him though

It took me several years to know I did

from that first time he walked in to deliver

winter food. Through Father Adler’s kitchen,

he shouldered half an ox like it was bread

and looked at me too long for simple greeting.

This is how our live complete themselves,

as effortless as weather, circles blaze

in ordinary days, and through our waking selves

they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.

So I took up with Otto, took the boys

and watched for them, and made their daily bread

from what the grocer gave them in exchange

for helping him. It’s hard to tell you how

they soon became so precious I got sick

from worry, and woke up for two months straight

and had to check them, sleeping, in their beds

and had to watch and see each breathe or move

before I could regain my sleep again.

All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.

Otto brought one sister from that town

they never talk about. His father shook

one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air

behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.

I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—

a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.

They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.

Proud Hilda hides his picture
in a drawer with underskirts.

Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain

my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men

have gifted her with more impressive things.

She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.

I came upon a sentimental locket,

embossed with words, initials interfixed

within the breasts of dour, molting swans.

Proud Hilda cracked it open,
smiled, and clicked it shut.

How many men had begged her heavy hand

I do not know. I think I loved her too

in ways that I am not sure how to tell—

I reached one day to gather back her hair:

wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear

and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone

that swung a cold light from the polished lobe.

Tall Hilda took my hand in hers and kissed
the palm, and closed that mark inside my fist.

She lived alone and thickened in that town,

refusing company for weeks on end.

We left food at her door; she took it in;

her dull lamp deepened as the night wore on.

I went to her when everything was wrong.

We sat all evening talking children, men.

She laughed at me, and said it was my ruin.

My giving till I dropped.
Live blood let down the drain.

I never let her know how those words cut

me serious—her questioning my life. One night

a slow thing came, provoked by weariness,

to cram itself up every slackened nerve;

as if my body were a whining hive

and each cell groaning with a sweet, thick lead—

I turned and struck at Otto in our bed;

all night, all night the poison, till I swarmed

back empty to his cold
and dreaming arms.

At first we all wondered what county or town

she had come from. Quite soon it was clear to us all

that was better unquestioned, and better unknown.

Who wanted to hear what had happened or failed

to occur. Why the dry wood had not taken fire.

Much less, why the dogs were unspeakably disturbed

when she ground the cold cinders that littered our walk

with her run-to-ground heels. That Waleski approached

with a swiftness uncommon for one of her age.

Even spiders spun clear of her lengthening shadow.

Her headlong occurrence unnerved even Otto

who wrapped up the pork rinds like they were glass trinkets

and saluted her passage with a good stiff drink.

But mine is a good word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski.

Scavenger, bone picker, lived off our alleys

when all we threw out were the deadliest scrapings

from licked-over pots. And even that hurt.

And for whatever one of us laughed in her face,

at least two prayed in secret, went home half afraid

of that mirror, what possible leavings they’d find there.

But mine is a good word, and even that hurts.

A rhyme-and-a-half for a woman of parts,

because someone must pare the fruit soft to the core

into slivers, must wrap the dead bones in her skirts

and lay these things out on her table, and fit

each oddment to each to resemble a life.

I thought I saw him look my way and crossed

my breast before I could contain myself.

Beneath those glasses, thick as lead-barred windows,

his eyes ran through his head, the double barrels

of an old gun, sick on its load, the trigger held

in place by one thin metal bow.

Going toward the Catholic church, whose twin

white dunce caps speared the clouds for offerings,

we had to pass him on the poured stone bridge.

For nickels we could act as though we’d not

been offered stories. How these all turned out

we knew, each one, just how the river eats

within its course the line of reasoning.

He went, each morning, to the first confession.

The sulking curtains bit their lips behind him.

Still those in closer pews could hear the sweet

and limber sins he’d made up on the spot.

I saw a few consider, and take note—

procedural. They’d try them out at home.

And once, a windless August, when the sun

released its weight and all the crops were burned,

he kept watch as the river thickened. Land

grew visibly and reeked to either side,

till windowed hulks, forgotten death cars reared

where dark fish leapt, and gaped, and snatched the air.

When I take off my glasses, these eyes are dark magnets

that draw the world into my reach.

First the needles, as I walk the quiet streets,

work their way from the cushions of dust.

The nails in the rafters twist laboriously out

and the oven doors drop

an inch open.

The sleep smell of yesterday’s baking

rises in the mouth.

A good thing.

The street lamps wink off just at dawn,

still they bend their stiff necks like geese drinking.

My vision is drinking in the star-littered lawn.

When the porch ivy weaves to me—

Now is the time.

Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.

Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,

What did she want?

But it is too late for husbands.

Their wives do not question

what it is that dissolves

all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.

They uncross themselves, forsaking

all protection. They long to be opened and known

because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire

in love with its private ruin.

I open my hands and they come to me, now.

In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,

only followed, only known along the way.

And it is right, oh women of the town, it is
right
.

Your mouths, like the seals of important documents

break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,

the cracked edges melting to mine.