Stag's Leap (4 page)

    Approaching Godthåb

So much had become so connected to him

that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,

flying, for hours, above the Atlantic

still felt like being over his realm.

And then, in the distance, a sort of land—

rows and rows of tilted, ruched-back

pyramids and fangs of snow—

appeared, and along its bitten hems, in the

water, hundreds of giant, white

beings, or rafts, nuzzled the shore,

moon-calves, stoats, dories, ships,

tankers green-shadowed cream, a family

of blossom-tree icebergs, his familiars—never

mine, but once contiguous

to what I felt was almost mine,

they were like the flowers a boreal storybook

king would give his queen, hoarfrost

lilies. It struck cold awe to my heart,

now, to look at who I had been

who had thought it was impossible

that he or I could touch another.

Tu wit, tu woo—lhude sing

goddamn, cuckoo, to look back

and see myself living, vowblind, in cloud

cuckold land. The glacierscape called it

up, the silent, shining tulle,

the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems

and corollaries, that girl who had thought

a wedding promise was binding as a law

of physics. Now, I stood outside

the kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera,

the emerald-sided frozen plenty,

as if, when he took his stones and went home, he took

snow, and ice, and glaciers, and shores,

and the sea, and the northern hemisphere,

half of the great blue-and-white aggie

itself, I sat on the air above it

and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.

    Once in a While I Gave Up

Once in a while, I gave up, and let myself

remember how much I'd liked the way my ex's

hips were set, the head of the femur which

rode, not shallow, not deep, in the socket

of the pelvis, wrapped in the iliofemoral and

ischiofemoral ligaments,

the ball bearings suspended just so

to give him that walk. Wooden yokes, in

grade-school foreign-country-custom

movies, had moved like that, over opulent

zinc buckets of milk—the motion

was authentic, it was from another place, it was

planetary, it was model-of-the-solar-

systemic. I idolized it without

reserve, caution, or limit, I adored it with an

unprotected joy. Months,

a year later, I still dreamed it

sometimes, the illusion of a constellation

visible only from a certain vantage,

glittering peaks of his iliac crest:

A is to B up, as B is to

C across, as C is to D

down, bright winching bitings, I even

let my right hand describe

the curve of that posterior, cool

thirty-year night's waxing gibbous

now set—in stubborn fundamentalist

conviction my hand described the mortal crescent.

    To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

Though I never saw you, only your clouds,

I was afraid of you, of how you differed

from what we had wanted you to be. And it's as if

you waited, then, where such waiting is done,

for when I would look beside me—and here

you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood

is now, and every action with him,

as if a thousand years from now

you and I are in some antechamber

where the difference between us is of little matter,

you with perhaps not much of a head yet,

dear garden one, you among the shovels

and spades and wafts of beekeeper's shroud

and sky-blue kidskin gloves.

That he left me is not much, compared

to your leaving the earth—your shifting places

on it, and shifting shapes—you threw off your

working clothes of arms and legs,

and moved house, from uterus

to toilet bowl and jointed stem

and sewer out to float the rivers and

bays in painless pieces. And yet

the idea of you has come back to where

I could see you today as a small, impromptu

god of the partial. When I leave for good,

would you hold me in your blue mitt

for the departure hence. I never thought

to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

    French Bra

Then low in a fancy shop window, near my

anklebone, like a Hermes heel-wing

fitted with struts and ailerons,

fragile as a silk biplane, the
soutien-

gorge
lies, lissome, uncharged,

slack as a snakeskin husk. I stop,

I howl in seventh-grade French. The cups are

lace net, intricate as curtains in a

bee's house, in a kitchen where honey's

on the stove, in the mouth, in the pants—and there are pants,

in eyelet appliqué, and there are gold

pinions like brushes of touch along the tops of the

poitrine
—and it's as if my body has not

heard, or hasn't believed, the news,

it wants to go in there and pick up those wisps,

those hippolyta harnesses, on its pinkie,

and bring them home to my ex and me,

mon ancien mari et moi.
It's as if

I'd been in a club, with him, with secret

handshakes, and secret looks, and touches,

and charmeuse was in the club with us, and

ribbon, they were our wing'd attendants—

and satin, and dotted swiss, they were our

language, our food and furniture,

our garden and transportation and philosophy

and church, stateless state and deathless

death, our music and war. Everyone

dies. Sometimes a beloved dies,

and sometimes love. Such far worse happens,

this seems it should be a toy lament,

a doll's dressmaker's dummy's song,

though people are often murdered, to celebrate

the death of love. I stand, for a moment,

looking down, at the empty costumes

of luxury, the lingerie ghosts of my sojourn.

    My Son's Father's Smile

In my sleep, our son, as a child, said,

of his father,
he smiled me
—as if into

existence, into the family built around the

young lives which had come from the charged

bouquets, the dense oasis. That smile,

those years, well what can a body say, I have

been in the absolute present of a fragrant

ignorance. And to live in those rooms,

where one of his smiles might emerge, like something

almost from another place,

another time, another set

of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be

held in mysteriousness, and a little

in mourning. The thinness of his lips gave it

a simplicity, like a child's drawing

of a smile—a footbridge, turned over on its back, or seen

under itself, in water—and the archer's

bow gave it a curved unerring

symmetry, a shot to the heart. I look back on that un-

clouded face yet built of cloud,

and that waning crescent moon, that look

of deep, almost sad, contentment, and know myself

lucky, that I had out the whole

night of a half-life in that archaic

hammock, in a sky whose darkness is fading, that

first dream, from which I am now waking.

    Not Quiet Enough

Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into

every reach, there comes the hour

I wonder if my husband left me

because I was not quiet enough

in our bed. I can hardly see those nights

and afternoons, anymore, those mornings,

but now, for a moment, I can almost hear

the sound of him then, as if startled, or nearly

caught up with, nearly in the grip of something, then those

honeysuckle moans, trellis

and lattice to mine, in the body's mouth-

to-mouth full-out duet. He lived

so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not

exactly like others, but hibernating—

I called for him through solid earth

until he woke, and left. Christ if my

cries woke him. Sometimes they were only

low, drenched, lock-clicks of the breath

stopped, then drifting in mortise-light

with him.…11,000 nights,

he seemed content with me, he seemed to like

anything, any screak or high C, but were there

brayings that graded through off-key shimmer into

prism of bruise-color, were there

mortal laments, mammal shrieks against

division, as if, in sex, we practice

the cauter of being parted. Or maybe

it was not my chirps, not the sounding

flesh of those sheets, floor, chairs, back

porches, a hayloft, woods, but this telling

of them—did his spirit turn against the spirit which

tolled our private, wild bell

from the public rooftop, I who had no other

gift to give the world but to hold what I

thought was love's mirror up to us—

ah now, no puff of mist on it.

After that life in the singing dream,

I woke, and feared he felt he was the human

sleeper, and I the glittering panther

holding him down, and screaming.

    Sea-Level Elegy

Then my mind goes back to the summer rental,

the stairs down into the earth—I descend them

and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go

into the bedroom, one wall the solid

pane the warbler flew into skull-first,

the opposite wall the inches-thick

seagoing mirror. Even now,

I see us, long horizontals

in the luminous pool of the wall, speckled

by the silt of the heavy plate glass, spotted

like other animals. Above us are the pine

planks, planed, and sawn aslant,

and marked with the boot-sole ridges of the builders'

Timberlands. And there, behind the pillows, are the

alcoves in which the owners kept lasts

of shoes, like wooden feet, Petrarchan

ankle slippers, out from the toe

the last-tip sprouting—how many times, as if

risen from inside the earth, where I'd seemed to have

ocean-fathoms-flown, with him,

scarcely recognizing, my gaze would

travel over the hermetic shapes of the

dummies shoemakers had shod. And I had clothed him

with my body and been clothed with him, again,

again, unquestioned, not fully seen,

not wanting to fully see. And now,

the image of him has gone inside

the raw closet, the naked bulb's

blazing golden pear beside his

August-island shaggy head.

That's it. Once, each summer, I howl,

and draw myself back, out of there, where

desire and joy, where ignorance, where

touch and the ideal, where unwilled yet willful

blindness—once a year, I have mercy,

I let myself go down where I have lived, and then,

hand over hand, I pull myself back up.

    Sleekit Cowrin'

When a caught mouse corpse lay hidden, for a week,

and stuck to the floor, I started setting

the traps on a few of our wedding china

floral salad plates. Late

one night when one has sprung, I put it on

the porch, to take it to the woods in the morning, but by

morning I forget, and by noon—and by after-

noon the Blue Willow's like a charnal roof

in Persia when the bodies of the dead were put for the

scholar vultures to pick the text

of matter and the text of spirit apart.

The mouse has become a furry barrow

burrowed into by a beetle striped

in stripes of hot and stripes of cold

coal—headfirst, it eats its way into

the stomach smoother than dirt, the mouse-bowels

saltier, beeswax and soap

stopped in the small intestinal channels.

And bugs little as seeds are seething

all over the hair, as if the rodent

were food rejoicing. And the
Nicrophorus

cuts and thrusts, it rocks and rolls

its tomentose muzzle, and its wide shoulders,

in. And I know, I know, I should put

my dead marriage out on the porch

in the sun, and let who can, come

and nourish of it—change it, carry it

back to what it was assembled from,

back to the source of the light whereby it shone.

    Tiny Siren

And had it been a year since I had stood,

looking down, into the Whirlpool

in the laundry nook of our August rental, not

sure what I was seeing—it looked like a girl

brought up in a net with fish. It was

a miniature woman, in a bathing suit,

lying back after the spin cycle—

the photograph of a woman, slightly

shaped over the contours of a damp towel.

I drew it out—radiant square

from some other world—maybe the daughter

of the owners of the house. And yet it looked like

someone we knew—I said, to my husband,

This was in with the sheets and towels.

Good heavens, he said. Where?! In

with the sheets and your running shorts. Doesn't it

look like your colleague? We gazed at the smile

and the older shapely body in its gleaming

rainbow sheath—surprise trout

of wash-day. An hour later, he found me,

and told me she had given him the picture

the day that they went running together

when I was away, he must have slipped it in

his pocket, he was so shocked to see it

again, he did not know what to say.

In a novel, I said, this would be when

the wife should worry—is there even the slightest

reason to worry. He smiled at me,

and took my hand, and turned to me,

and said, it seemed not by rote,

but as if it were a physical law

of the earth, I love you. And we made love,

and I felt so close to him—I had not

known he knew how to lie, and his telling me

touched my heart. Just once, later

in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if

a deck were tilting under me—

a run he'd taken, not mentioned in our home,

a fisher of men in the washing machine.

Just for a few minutes I had felt a little nervous.