That Said (4 page)

only to be roused for a makeshift tea party

when a younger child came to visit.

Yet I often long to play with “Emma,”

who was such good company, after all,

and who lies unkempt, ear to her “boom box,”

on the top bunk of her bunk bed.

I wish I could brush her lifelike hair,

wipe her face and dress her up again.

 

New catalogues keep arriving in the mail.

Though Emma has lost interest, I can't resist

paging through things to buy (
camisa, mantilla
)

for Josefina (with a Spanish
J
),

who lived on a
rancho
in New Mexico in 1824,

and comes with her own line of furniture...

I'm afraid I'll have to pass on her

and on all future “Girls of Tomorrow,”

who have yet to ride the assembly line's

long fallopian tube of Time;

the girls my daughter's daughters' daughters—

whose faces I'll never see,

whose names I can't imagine—

will carry, as I once carried mine.

You can't step twice into the same mirror,

said Heraclitus, of the river's mirror.

 

A vessel holding water was the first mirror.

A mirror held to nostrils, life's last mirror.

 

“Who is fairest?” the queen asked her mirror.

A vampire has no reflection in a mirror.

 

Those backward letters without a mirror

spell
AMBULANCE
in your rear-view mirror.

 

After Mom died, I covered all the mirrors

with cloth, sat seven days without mirrors.

 

Staring at myself staring in my mirror,

“I” became the “other” in the mirror.

 

Watching themselves making love in the mirror,

they were aroused by the couple in the mirror.

 

The amputee stood at an angle that mirrored

his phantom limb, now visible, mirrored.

 

In the
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
's mirror,

its painter's captive in that convex mirror.

 

A palindrome is another kind of mirror

like the couplets in a ghazal's mirror.

 

Her beloved's eyes were her only mirror.

Seven bad years when he broke a mirror.

 

I avoid, when I can, cruel three-way mirrors.

“Mute surfaces,” Borges called mirrors.

 

As Vanity combs her long hair in the mirror,

an old bald skull awaits in the mirror.

 

Standing between two facing mirrors,

I shrank down a long hallway of mirrors.

 

Which Jane are you? I asked my mirror.

My mirror answered,
Ask another mirror
.

He points out that she fidgets and wrings her hands,

so she sits on them when he's near.

 

When the telephone rings and she answers,

no one's on the line.

 

And she doesn't remember his telling her

about the dinner party on Friday.

 

If he had, she would have brought her dress

to the dry cleaner. And washed her hair.

 

Then one Sunday, looking up a number

in his address book, she finds

 

a snapshot of a woman

she doesn't know. A stranger.

 

He says it's a bookmark.

Has no idea how it got there. Or

 

who this woman is, or the numbers repeated

on last month's phone bill, or why

 

she doesn't trust him. Like Paula—

exactly like the wife in
Gaslight
.

 

And isn't he her very own Charles Boyer,

the husband who calls his wife hysterical,

 

high-strung, absent-minded,

inclined to imagine things?

 

Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental, says the disclaimer.

 

The chandelier does not convey.

It was your mother's. You'll take it with you

when you move. But all the fixtures and fittings,

anything attached to the property, conveys.

It stays. Toilets and ceiling fans convey,

and the refrigerator dispensing crushed ice and cubes

when it's in the mood.

 

And when the professionals are done with it,

your house is as bland as when you first bought it,

uncluttered, impersonal as a hotel.

Your daisies replaced with a funereal bouquet.

As for the Tomato Bisque foyer—too quirky.

Now it's beige.

 

The creaky eleventh stair;

the leaky faucet, Muzak to your insomnia;

the Japanese maple scratching the screen;

the church bells, when you moved in,

ringing at fifteen-minute intervals, interrupting

your every thought, then you stopped hearing them;

the limos and hearses parked across the street,

drivers in dark suits smoking, waiting for the wedding

or the funeral to end—they all convey.

 

They say you can't take it with you, but you can.

You're not going to heaven, you're just moving.

 

The roofer, the gardener, the plumber,

the stonemason who cobbled a path

of flagstones to the front door,

journeymen you relied on, like family, do not convey.

The kisses, the arguments on the porch,

tears washed down the drain do not convey.

But the shutters and awnings and azaleas, pink

and darker pink, that bloomed annually without fail

on your daughter's birthday, and the gigantic

tulip poplar you were afraid a storm would uproot,

topple, crushing your neighbors' roof, killing

that nice elderly couple—they convey.

 

Long after the open house, the contract, the closing,

driving past the church, you find yourself,

as if in a trance, pulling into your old driveway.

The house looks the same, but different.

New shutters. New fence.

A bike tipped over on the lawn.

After you've crossed the “singing bridge,”

and passed Legare's Farm Market—fresh

pumpkins, peas, pick-your-own strawberries—

drive two more miles, give or take a tenth.

 

Here's where my husband always said,

“At Peck Hill Road hang a sharp left,”

and I'd add my two cents, just to irk him,

“But you're not at Peck Hill Road yet!”

 

I always hated it when he interrupted me

giving directions, and he hated it when

I'd point out every landmark along

the way: my woman's crow's-nest view—

 

not my husband's God's-eye view—

directions we bickered over for forty years.

Watch for the tilted green wooden pole.

You'll miss it. Everyone misses the turn

 

the first time. For a century and a half,

it was “Left at the old sugar shack,”

and people knew exactly where to turn,

until it collapsed and was dismantled,

 

its barn board sold as fancy wainscoting

for designer kitchens.
You
may see only

an empty space, but to
us
that shack's

still disappearing board by board.

 

When was the last time you saw us?

You'd have to be blind not to see

our three-story barn's rusted roof

up ahead, and our 1840s farmhouse.

 

Are the clapboards still white?

This house just didn't want to be painted,

it liked being naked, no matter how

many coats we'd apply, it blistered

 

and peeled the minute after the paint

dried. If you're not stuck behind

a swaying hay wagon or snow plow,

from Montpelier it should take you

 

twenty minutes, tops.

Stick to my directions, you won't get

lost. If you'd listened to my husband,

you'd be halfway to Montreal.

 

Though it may look like no one's home,

the mud room door is always open.

We're in the back pasture, waiting,

buried under the crabapple tree.

First my body feels it, like hunger

or an itch prickling my entire skin,

and the light outside looks odd,

saturated, tinted greenish gold,

so I drop the spoon, or the book

I'm reading, and hurry to the back

porch, where a sun shower's busy

 

pelting the pasture's tall grass.

When it happens, it's always

in the late afternoon, and always

directly over the crabapple tree:

a faint shimmer that intensifies,

steeping the sky in a seven-banded

cord of color that lasts a minute,

 

then vanishes. Or it may loiter

a half hour—neighbors phone neighbors

to go look outside. Occasionally

it's a lucky double—the sign

that told me I was pregnant.

And because I know exactly where

it will be, I love to show it off.

 

I point. I wait. And it appears,

as if commanded, to an awed round

of applause. Greg Mosher, who sold us