That Said (11 page)

 

For six days and nights

a luna moth, pale green,

pinned herself to the sliding screen—

a prize specimen in a lepidopterist's dream.

 

Tuesday's wind knocked her off the deck.

She tacked herself back up again.

During Wednesday's rain she disappeared

and reappeared on Thursday

to meditate and sun herself,

recharging her dreams from dawn to dusk,

and all night draining the current from

the deck's electric lantern.

 

A kimono just wider than my hand,

her two pairs of flattened wings were pale

gray-green panels of the sheerest crêpe de Chine.

Embroidered on each sleeve, a drowsing eye

appeared to watch the pair of eyes

on the wings below quite wide awake.

But they're
all
fake.

Nature's
trompe l'oeil
gives the luna

eyes of a creature twice her size.

 

The head was covered with snow-white fur.

Once, I got so close

it rippled when I breathed on her.

She held herself so still,

she looked dead. I stroked

the hem of her long, sweeping tail;

her wings dosed my fingers with a green-gold dust.

I touched her feathery antennae.

She twitched and calmly

reattached herself a quarter inch west,

tuning into the valley miles away

a moment-by-moment weather report

broadcast by a compatriot,

catching the scent of a purely

sexual call; hearing sounds

I never hear, having

the more primitive ear.

 

Serene

in the middle of the screen,

she ruled the grid of her domain

oblivious to her collected kin—

the homely brown varieties of moth

tranced-out and immobile,

or madly fanning their paper wings,

bashing their brains out on the bulb.

Surrounded by her dull-witted cousins,

she is herself a sort of bulb,

and Beauty is a kind of brilliance,

burning self-absorbed, giving little,

indifferent as a reflecting moon.

 

Clinging to the screen despite my comings

and goings, she never seemed to mind the ride.

At night, when I slid the glass door shut,

I liked to think I introduced her

to her perfect match

hatched from an illusion—

like something out of the Brothers Grimm—

who, mirroring her dreamy stillness,

pining for a long-lost twin,

regarded her exactly as she regarded him.

 

This morning,

a weekend guest sunbathing on the deck,

sun-blind, thought the wind had blown

a five-dollar bill against the screen.

He grabbed the luna, gasped,

and flung her to the ground.

She lay a long moment in the grass,

then fluttered slowly to the edge of the woods

where, sometimes at dawn,

deer nibble the wild raspberry bushes.

On one side, a series of marshes.

On the other, the ocean level as a skillet.

Across the bay, the wooden church

suffers under the weight of its weathered circumflex,

beneath which, every Sunday, the natives come to pray,

and every Tuesday, hold town meetings.

And once, when the movie people sent a scout

who wanted to rent the island,

they threw him out. He ferried back that very day.

 

The latticework on each widow's walk,

like the cable knitted into each fisherman's sweater,

is as individual as his thumbprint.

Summer bungalows look like pairs of scuffed brown oxfords

that hiked to sea from far inland,

stopping short at the harbor.

Mornings, tennis balls

crisscross the Common like tropical birds.

Back and forth they fly, fat, chartreuse, echoing

across this roofless aviary.

Occasional tracks of baby strollers

struggle up clay cliffs irregular as molars.

Some dunes are now off limits, like the Parthenon.

The commissioners would like to bulldoze

the whole community of nudists,

who, by noon, in most weathers,

expose their white triangles and stripes

and look like negatives of themselves.

Puckered beer cans stud the public beaches, and here and there

an evicted hermit crab bleaches.

 

This morning, a Spanish freighter almost sideswiped

the island's cliffs. The sailors were friendly.

They waved T-shirts from the upper decks

as if hoisting up a patchwork rainbow,

and maneuvered through the channel, blowing kisses.

We watched the ship get smaller and smaller

(almost colliding with a rust-pocked trawler),

small enough to squeeze through the neck of a bottle,

and then the horizon swallowed it.

 

I unfurled my towel, and read, and slept awhile

(the water was too cold to swim),

and wondered about the glass armada

bobbing along the coast's two-hundred-mile limit.

At high tide, a bottle detached itself,

and riding the assembly line of waves,

tumbled up the beach faster, faster,

landing six inches from my sunburned feet.

I held the bottle up to light—

a dozen highlights oiled the glass—

and saw a five-masted warship, uncollapsed,

with its antique mizzens still intact.

 

Crawling like an ant along the hull,

the ship's unlucky stowaway tried to shout,

but the plug was stuck in the bottle's throat.

Upon the pages of the sails

he'd scrawled his message in letters the bottle magnified,

gigantic as a billboard painter's:

Each night, I dream that I walk the plank

of my wife's long hair, but I can't drown.

And now, I've sailed right into your own two hands.

I've survived my island of a shipwreck.

Someday, from your shipwreck of an island,

I will rescue you.

The writer needs an address,
very badly needs an address—
that is his roots.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

In memory of my parents,
Essie Shore (1915–1991)
and George Shore (1915–1993)

When I was twelve, I read
The Diary of Anne Frank
.

I identified with her having to live

stories above a busy street

over a business, and having to keep quiet

for hours at a time.

I'd pad about on tiptoe,

trying not to disturb the customers

shopping in my parents' dress store below,

voices drifting up through the floorboards.

I'd pretend I was eavesdropping

from Anne's attic, while downstairs,

life went on without me.

 

That winter a frozen pipe cracked,

thawed, flooding the cellar under the store.

Broken mannequins lay in heaps

and rats scuttled up through the drain.

My old books, old dolls, stuffed animals

bobbed among the giant torsos.

 

When the water receded,

I dredged up a china plate,

sole survivor of the Blue Willow tea set

I had when I was six:

its boat and bridge and willow plumes,

its turtledoves hovering above a pagoda roof,

glazed the same delft blue as the windmills

on our tile hot plate made in Holland.

 

My family admired the Dutch people;

they'd hidden Jews in their houses during the War.

Once, while I was playing with my tea set,

I heard my aunt Roz say that exact thing:

“The Dutch hid Jews during the War.”

My aunts and uncles sat in the living room

arguing the Holocaust—the inevitable subject—

who had helped and who had not.

Our German cleaning lady,

Mrs. Herman—my mother liked her—

literally scrubbed her way past,

on hands and knees, dragging her pail and rags.

My aunt Lil said something in Yiddish.

“What did you say?” I begged her.

Mrs. Herman had just rolled up the oval rug.

 

My aunt said, “Germans were bad. The Dutch were good.”

“And the streets in Holland are immaculate,”

my mother said, “because every morning

the Dutch wash their sidewalks down.”

 

And so I made up a game I called

Washing the Streets of Holland.

During my bath I'd climb out of the tub

and sprinkle Old Dutch Cleanser on the floor.

I'd hold my breath, careful

not to inhale the deadly powder.

The Dutch Cleanser lady wore a bonnet

whose flaps completely hid her face.

In her clogs and blue skirts and clean white apron,

and with a raised stick, about to strike,

she was chasing something—or someone—

on the other side of the can.

Chases Dirt,
the label said.

 

Naked, on my hands and knees,

I'd scrub the floor with a washcloth