Stag's Leap (5 page)

    Attempted Banquet

Lugging of shellfish in coolers, boiling

and bouillabaissing—summer luncheon

we had tried to give, canceling twice

when the parasite had come back to my gut,

then trying again, recurrent hope

of serving up the creatures of the shallow

deep. We joked about putting it off, but

underneath the joking, grim

and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was

working toward it and against it, maybe worried

he could not do it, longing for it

and fearing it, and not speaking of it, bent

over the shucked crustaceans and the finny

wanderers from the tide pools, their feelers which

had writhed their last in the home language.

It touches with a sharp, shelling touch,

still, to remember his joyless labor

in the heat, we sweated side by side three

times like a spell or a curse, until,

on Labor Day, the salmon at last

undulated out the kitchen door in its

half-slip of thin cucumber scales

on its fluted platter to the table laid with a

linen cloth under the old

trees of life. And almost no one

actually got there, at the last minute there were

sprains and flus and in-laws and flats

so the few of us there moved through the heavy

air like kids at an empty school on a holiday,

and the wasted food was like some kind of

carnage. We lived on it a week, as we'd been

living, without my seeing it,

on the broken habit of what was not lasting

love. When I remember him

at the stove, the sight pierces me

with tenderness, he was suffering, then,

as I would soon. When I see that day,

at moments I see it almost without guilt,

or with a pure, shared guilt,

or a shared cause, without fault, and there is

nothing to be done for it,

it can only be known and borne, it cannot be

turned into anything fruitful or sweet,

but just be faced, as what it was,

just be eaten, portion of flesh and salt.

    The Haircut

Then against my will I thought of the day he'd been

sick, and I'd cut my then husband's hair

to cheer him up. First I combed it,

sensing, with its teeth, the follicles

of his scalp. His hair was stiff from fever, close-

laid and flat, each plane a worn

conveyor belt come out of his head,

and his skull was flattish in back, with a hollow

in the center. I loved to eat-eat-eat

with the scissors, to chew sheaf. He was

so tall it was like tree husbandry,

childish joy of tiptoe. On his shoulders,

the little bundles would accumulate,

like a medieval painting's kindling

dropped when a meteor passed over. He was so

handsome it was kind of adorable when he

looked horrible. His face that hour was

gaunt, the runnels of his cheeks concave, his

lower eyelids and the sacks below them

ogre-swollen, but within the rims

were the deep-sea swimmers of his eyes, the sounders,

by which I read the depth of his character, not

knowing how else but by beauty to read it,

and he closed them, he bowed, I did his nape

and patted up chaff from the floor. Before sleep,

I stroked his satiny hair, the viral

sweat creaming out at its edge, I petted his

coat and he took a handful of my hair in his

fist and gripped it. Don't be sick,

I said, OK, he said, and love

seemed to rest, on us, in a place

where, for that hour, it felt death could not

reach, and someone was singing, in my hearing, without

words, that no one can live without reaching

death, but I could have lived without having

loved almost without reserve, and for a

moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.

    Crazy

I've said that he and I had been crazy

for each other, but maybe my ex and I were not

crazy for each other. Maybe we

were sane for each other, as if our desire

was almost not even personal—

it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there

seemed to be no other woman

or man in the world. Maybe it was

an arranged marriage, air and water and

earth had planned us for each other—and fire,

a fire of pleasure like a violence

of kindness. To enter those vaults together, like a

solemn or laughing couple in formal

step or writhing hair and cry, seemed to

me like the earth's and moon's paths,

inevitable, and even, in a way,

shy—enclosed in a shyness together,

equal in it. But maybe I

was crazy about him—it is true that I saw

that light around his head when I'd arrive second

at a restaurant—oh for God's sake,

I was besotted with him. Meanwhile the planets

orbited each other, the morning and the evening

came. And maybe what he had for me

was unconditional, temporary

affection and trust, without romance,

though with fondness—with mortal fondness. There was no

tragedy, for us, there was

the slow-revealed comedy

of ideal and error. What precision of action

it had taken, for the bodies to hurtle through

the sky for so long without harming each other.

    Discandied

When my hand is groping on the toolroom shelf for ex-

marital liquor to drink by myself,

it bumps something it knows by one bump

and rustle, one chocolate bar with almonds, then the

muffled thunk of another—he would hide them,

then give me one when I was sad. When he left,

he did not think, as who would,

to go to the caches and empty them, to the

traps and spring them. I take the fascia

of bars to the compost, denude them of their peel,

and chuck them in with the rumps and grinds,

the grounds and eden rinds,

and I carry the bowl outside, to the heap,

and trowel a pit in some eggshell crunch where the

potato sends its crisp shoots

of rage up, I tuck the cocoa

shards in—vanillin to vanillin,

very nut to very nut,

and remember how he hated it

when I tried to get him to talk to me,

tried with a certain steadiness—

nagged him to reveal himself—

maybe these desserts were not only gifts,

but bribes or stops, to close my mouth

an hour on sweetness.

    Bruise Ghazal

Now a black-and-blue oval on my hip has turned blue-

violet as the ink-brand on the husk-fat of a prime

cut, sore as a lovebite, but too

large for a human mouth. I like it, my

flesh brooch—gold rim, envy-color

cameo within, and violet mottle

on which the door-handle that bit is a black

purple with wiggles like trembling decapede

legs. I count back the days, and forward

to when it will go its rot colors and then

slowly fade. Some people think I should

be over my ex by now—maybe

I thought I might have been over him more

by now. Maybe I'm half over who he

was, but not who I thought he was, and not

over the wound, sudden deathblow

as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core

of our life together. Sleep now, Sharon,

sleep. Even as we speak, the work is being

done, within. You were born to heal.

Sleep and dream—but not of his return.

Since it cannot harm him, wound him, in your dream.

    On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult

By evening, I am down to the last,

almost weightless, mineral-odored

pages of the morning paper, and as I am

letting fall what I have read,

and creasing what's left lengthwise, the crackly

rustle and the feathery grease remind me that

what I am doing is what my then husband

did, that sitting waltz with the paper,

undressing its layers, blowsing it,

opening and closing its delicate bellows,

folding till only a single column is un-

taken in, a bone of print then

gnawed from the top down, until

the layers of the paper-wasp nest lay around him by the

couch in a greyish speckle dishevel. I left him to it,

the closest I wanted to get to the news was to

start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was

reading, the clouds of printed words

gradually becoming bedsheets around us.

When he left me, I thought,
If only I had read

the paper,
and vowed,
In two years,

I will have the Times delivered,
so here

I am, leaning back on the couch, in the smell of ink's

oil, its molecules like chipped bits of

ammonites suspended in shale,

lead's dust silvering me.

I have a finger, now, in the pie—

count me as a reader of the earth's gossip.

I weep to feel how I love to be like

my guy. I taste what he tastes each morning

without moving my lips.

    Maritime

Some mornings, the hem of the forewash had been almost

golden, alaskas and berings of foam

pulled along the tensile casing.

Often the surface was a ship's grey,

a destroyer's, flecks of sun, jellies,

sea stars, blood stars, men and women of war,

weed Venus hair. A month a year,

for thirty years. Nine hundred mornings,

sometimes we could tell, from the beach,

while taking our clothes off, how cold the water

was, by looking at it—and then,

at its icy touch, the nipples took

their barnacle glitter, underwater

a soft frigor bathed the sex as if

drawing her detailed outline in the seeing

brain, and he braced his knees in the press

of the swell, and I dove under, and near the

floor of this life I glided between his ankles, not

knowing, until he was behind me, if I had got

through without brushing him. Then,

the getting out, rising, half-poached

egg coming up out of its shell and membrane,

weight of the breasts finding their float-point

on the air, soppy earths, all this

in the then beloved's gaze,

the ball in the socket at the top of his thighbone

like a marrow eye through which the foreshore could have

seen us, his hip joints like the gravital centers

of my spirit. Then we'd lie, feet toward the Atlantic,

my hypothermic claw tucked

beneath the heat of his flank, under

day moon, or coming storm,

swallow, heron, prism-bow, drizzle,

osprey, test-pilot out to No Man's.

And then, before our sight, the half world

folded on itself, and bent, and swallowed,

and opened, again, its wet, long

mouths, and drank itself.

    Slowly He Starts

And slowly he starts to seem more far

away, he seems to waft, drift

at a distance, once-husband in his grey suit

with the shimmer to its weave—his hands at his sides,

as if on damselfly wings he seems

to be borne through the air past my window. And a breeze

takes him, up and about, he is like

a Chagall bridegroom, without the faith-

fulness, or with a faithfulness which can

change brides once, he is carried, on a current,

like a creature of a slightly other species,

speech unwoken, in him, as yet,

and without the weight to hold him to

the ground. Silent meteor,

summer shower of perseids,

he is floated here and there so dim and

quiet he is like a sleeper, with large,

heavy-lidded, calm eyes

open. I am glad not to have lost him

entirely, but to see him moved

at the whim of the sky, like a man in the wind,

drawn as if on a barge resting on

updrafts, mild downdrops, he is like

an icon, he is like a fantasy.

I did not know him, I knew my idea

of him. The first years alone,

they said I would get over him

sometime soon, and the skin of my heart

seemed to be lying along the skin

of some naked heart. But now the invisible

streams show themselves, in their motions

of him, in the low empyrean

above the playground—look, he is out

there, casting his narrow shadow

over the faces in the carriages

in the park, and I am in here! I do not let

go of him yet, but hold the string

and watch my idea of him pull away

and stay, and pull away, my silver kite.

    Red Sea

And at a party, or in any crowd, years

after he has left, there will come an almost

visible image of my ex, appearing

at the far side of a room, moving

toward me, making his way between people,

as the soul used to make its way, through

clothes, until it lay, bare,

beside the soul of the beloved, then they seemed

to swim into each other, and they sang. Before me,

on either side, facing each other

like opposing armies, two columns

of words keen and catcall to each other:

much work to be done. And Love said, to me,

What if I, myself, asked you

to love him less. And I stepped out into

the trough between the pillars, the dry

ground through the midst of the sea—the waters

a wall unto me, on the right hand,

and on the left.