The Sleeve Waves (3 page)

as is evident when the moon crinkles

Lake Michigan so it shimmers

like a black plastic Glad bag

but bigger, and inside

there's more stuff (not all of it trash)

than any one sleeper remembers.

At 46 I climb

the Cascade Mountains of my mind,

which is easier on the knees

than physical climbing,

but harder than dreaming,

since every step reminds me

I'm far from childhood,

far from the State of Washington,

“in a dark wood,” in midlife,

like Dante, only Unitarian,

and therefore stripped of all faiths equally

as I walk two pugs

through a nun cemetery

behind the boarded-up

Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

The nuns recuse themselves:

they don't care whose sacred

text was right,

and I'm edging closer

to their neutrality,

which is a hum in the trees,

mingled with crickets,

but firm enough to ease

all opinions, even righteous ones,

off like a habit shed.

The Virgin bows her head:

she's plastic, presiding

in a blue molded gown

over a shrine strewn with flowers.

She'll never biodegrade—

she's eternal as a juice box straw,

which makes me thirsty

for what she can't give me:

salvation,
an abstraction

that flooded my limbs

in eighth grade

when I converted, briefly,

to a Christianity

that promised to carry

the girls' cross country team to victory.

We stood in a circle, praying

so fervently the field rose,

though the team lost State.

Now we're close

to sea level—

Mary, the dead nuns, and me,

and my phalanges are collapsing

into crooked bouquets,

so when paleontologists

dig up my bones, they'll wonder,

What was the ritual?

Who were the priestesses?

Where was their grove?

I want to leave them a note:

walk the dogs.

Let the oracles keep their secrets.

When I tire of unclear people,

their skin matte, their retinas black

as raccoon-masks, their vocabulary dense

with grit and fog,

I think, but what if they were clear?

We are not clear, you and I.

We are not vases, not lenses, not directions given

to a rapt class on the first day of kindergarten.

We are not rainwater: look, when the deer come up

to drink from the bird bath, their tongues

cloud it up, but cloudy

is a subset of velvety

Canadian whiskey,

a dram to calm

the lees of the day, a way to relax

into the dirty easy

chair on the porch. The sun sets,

and our unclear neighbor

drives up with a grocery bag full

of God-knows-what,

but there's no God,

so her mysteries are intact. She's 95 and still

all we know is her name,

Mary,
a name she carries lightly,

in common with thousands of others.

Mary:
the word tells us nothing about her,

but what word would?

             Our lawns adjoin,

and the deer use all

the back yards on this street as one long hall leading

through this, our present tense—

our strange, indivisible evening.

The star and the star's child

 are both stars,

as is the star's child's child—

 the universe goes on and on,

which is not news, but gossip.

 No one can substantiate

such sweep. Walk the enormity

 with me, son, but let's not forget

the grocery list,
milk, rice, sugar,

 because matter consumes

its way greedily into eternity,

 the pug with its large eyes,

the rust on the dry-docked boat,

 and the clouds—

how they drink rain,

               and are rain.

Is it because I am finally old

that my young body passes by?

I catch it in the corner of my eye.

It has no clear gender.

Its shoes are in its hand.

It is condemned to wander

the lots where truckers park

their big rigs. Wheels are taller

here. Drivers log fake

numbers in their books

to make long hauls last longer.

And on the dark shoulder,

a stranger: that body. Its skin

fits too tightly. Its face

is drawn,

 more notion than person,

like a pencil sketch of nightfall

fallen. Don't look back,

wheezes Bob Dylan,

on the radio between stations—

that body's heart is not your heart,

and all its cells are dead.

But Officer, I'm wide awake, I swear.

Go ahead. Slap my face. Pull my hair.

Xiamen, PRC.

A bare apartment.

We speak no Chinese,

so what can we do

if our middle son eats

a fish head that sticks

in his throat?

When he breathes,

the bone breathes:

a sharp out and in,

more gill than lung,

more scale than skin.

We feed him hunks

of bread, hoping fiber

will force out the head.

Go, fish, go,
we urge,

  until, at last:
goodbye
.

Later, we burn amber

incense on the porch

and watch the fish's

spirit leave our lives

in a curl of smoke—

still flexible and strong,

like the old monks

in Speedos who swim

out to sea at dawn.

Celibacy keeps us fit,

they say. To love

is to cede power.

At birth the infant

is helpless,

but so is the mother.

To make the soul solid:

a Hohner harmonica.

Breathe out chords

and slowly it grows

sweaty and warm.

How many roads …?

When the screws fall out

it's fixable, unlike children born

with normal skin,

the kind that age thins.

At airports harmonicas

rattle security.

The X-ray tech asks

Why so many holes?

What is it?

Will it explode?

Duct tape can keep

an old harp together,

and keeping's not nothing—

it's the opposite of terror:

fixed notes,

sticky integrity.

Steady now,
breathes the B-flat

Hohner.
Hold me.

We're sheep. We knit

unitards no thief can lift.

We're exacting, but effortless.

We got a gig!

 —playing ourselves

 in an amphitheater so vast

 our fans disappear in the grass.

 Are they human?

 Are they Gods?

 We don't give a rat's ass.

We're
sheep:
our job

 is to stabilize the field.

We're purely instrumental.

We don't speak. Why bother?

In summer it's summer forever.

Goodwill smells of sweat and whiskey. Still the tightwad

palms her penny. Nothing can escape

her grip. She does not wish

to be rich, only safe,

which is a way of backing slowly

into an unbuttoned cardigan sweater,

like Mr. Rogers (R.I.P.),

whose words were parsimonious,

as if he had no rage, no urge, no penis.

Yet Fred was as masculine—in his way—

as Abe, whose head the shopper holds

hard in her hand

until it marks her skin: a red ring with no tail,

its beginnings fused to its ends,

impossible to keep,

impossible to spend.

The cost of the loafers is unclear black

marker scrawled on black leather.

O Fred, your name means peace in the tongues of the ancestors—

so why these needs, these expenditures?

Peace suspended, peace-in-amber—

won't you be my neighbor?

Mary Nohl's house

is hemmed in by flora

and fauna she fashioned

from hand-mixed cement.

For years she practiced

the art of continuous error,

wrong turns taken

so meticulously

they began to form peonies,

horses, and trolls,

all cracked and lumpy.

Now the vandal's task

is obscure: to ruin ruins,

to spray-paint stones

that take gang tags

so easily even such small

crimes feel impossible,

like flying. And yes,

the cranes come too,

down from Baraboo

to shit all over.

When they spread

their white wings they fail

to resemble angels—

they're too saurian, too clumsy,

but as they rise

in the summer dark

they knock loose

the abstract idea of heaven,

and leave it behind,

like a thug's tooth,

in Mary's concrete garden.

i.

Dismantle the desks.

Melt the monkey bars.

Rip the clock off the wall.

Augment the drinking fountain with fake

 marble cupids and replace

childhood with something easier,

say, lilacs afloat in their own scent,

and then,

then I can go back to Fernwood School

with my daughter and explain

that school is impossible

but worth the pain

because you learn an alphabet that settles

 into marvels, into fearless Jane

Eyre, whose childhood was miserable,

and whose face was plain.

ii.

Except my daughter is beautiful,

and she hates long novels,

and she's adopted from a country

with so many intimate Gods

that when I watch her I wonder

whose supernatural hands

are guiding her—

but of course it's just me,

bringing her a lilac

in a coke-bottle vase,

which she accepts,

because she wants to be polite,

as she steps gracefully over her p's and q's

into her lace-up flying leather

miraculous

cheerleading shoes.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

—L
UDWIG
W
ITTGENSTEIN

It's a law:

even the same socks

aren't the same,

post-wash.

I cover the bed with singles,

some familiar, some strange.

Green stripes, peace signs,

and of course whites,

that are, like white people,

not really white,

which was Wittgenstein's point:

nothing matches.

We moved for jobs

to the land of dead

deer strapped to cars.

Deer country sure

ain't horse country—

no one rides anyone's back.

It's all fleeting sightings:

a flash of fur, a horn, a single

eye among the branches.

Tiny ice-fishing houses

dot the lakes, and in each house,

a man, a thermos,

and a phone with no reception.

Can't call the men.

Can't ask them how to gut

fish, or smoke venison.

Our mantle's antler rack

is ironic, from an L.A. thrift

store, hung with bits

of broken chandelier,

but it's grown grave

in Wisconsin, a state

that's neither boot-

nor mitten-shaped,

but larger and harder

to place: rivers pour

themselves into stillness.

Jesus preached “have faith”

at Galilee, but here every lake

is walkable in winter.

O Lord, we will always be strangers.

During the sea blizzards

she had her

own portrait painted.

—A
NN
S
EXTON
, “The Double Image”