The Sleeve Waves (4 page)

Winter's what we're walking into. Our veins

map blue highways,

routes first traced

by William Least Heat Moon

in a travelogue my mother read me

years ago, before I could read myself,

before I wondered if Persephone

blamed her mother

for dragging her home by the braids.

Controlling bitch
. But

winter's what we're walking into.

If I put my arm in her arm,

will it sink too far

into the interior,

like a bone spur,

or a stent?

It's late. The light is brief.

If her boots leak, mine fit her,

and so we walk into winter.

Our shared DNA

makes us too unstable for skates,

but there is a gliding,

a set of parallel tracks,

an ease,

because we did not take the cocker

spaniel with her large

infected ears—

because our postmenopausal bones

are light and porous—

and because the lake ice

is thick enough for a Zamboni,

so I can't fall through,

and she can't rescue me.

We move like clumsy

poltergeists—too wide for the doors,

too big for the chairs.

We can only stare

as the rooms progress

through ages of teensy

domestic fashions:

Tudor, Victorian, Modern.

O for a beaker fit for a finch!

O for a pocket-divan!

How we burn to enter

the one-twelfth-scale kitchen.

There must be a way to smuggle food in—

a snip of chive or a blueberry—

but no. Maybe when we're very old,

we'll lose the urge to stuff ourselves

into the miniature

Art Deco parlor

with its lamp stamped Tiffany,

or maybe desire's

what makes old ladies so skinny.

They wonder,
Are we wiry

enough to slip in? Are we ready?

They know the key

to power is not bulk

but compression,

which is why grown women

love dollhouses.

Love is solid but also narrative,

so no matter how far the frame expands—

the frame with its gilt edges,

its fleur-de-lis, its stylized squirrels—

there's always an outside

that ought to be in:

junk DNA, random ancestors,

spoons, spackle, syllables,

so when I say
I love you
I mean

I love the parts I want to see,

which is why the frame

is integral to the picture,

even in the calmest Vermeer,

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

She's been pregnant since 1664,

but she's content to wait,

which is how it feels to stand still

in the pool of your natural light,

filling an hour with exactly that hour,

the way humans fill skin in pictures.

Eighth grade. Sex.

How it made us

antsy. Dizzy.

How it forced us

into ourselves,

all slick and sticky—

quivers shooting

through dirt, down

roots, up stems.

Sex. How it pressed

us into flowering.

So embarrassing—

but embarrassing

like the preacher on the bus.

Armpit stains. Buzz cut.

He starts reading

Genesis aloud:

in the beginning—

Everyone snickers,

but soon falls silent,

because yes,

it happened to us.

The darkness. The sword-bearing angel.

The garden. The flood.

Part Bible, part bullshit—

but which is which?

That's the Dead Sea

Scrolls in a nut-

shell: none can tell

the aleph from the rip,

God from a census list.

Airlessly the population drifts,

a thousand years dead,

still stuck in bits

and pieces to the clay.

In lieu of God's right hand,

ossuaries hold knuckle-

bones turned to sand.

Prophets? They're easy to picture.

What's tougher is lovers:

how flexible they were—

touching in tents,

their flesh mostly water,

leaving no trace,

except in the fountain

between two doors marked

men
and
women.

Drink,

and the gnostic text begins

its exegesis: how the sea

is the scroll's twin,

but deeper. Press

a lever and upwell

the same identical molecules

the spirit hovered over,

in darkness,

in the beginning,

and here is the miracle:

we can drink them,

again and again.

We can be purified.

We can be sated.

Baronet Watson's emblem

depicted his lost foot,

which was eaten by a shark

off the coast of Cuba in 1849.

When he fell into the ocean,

Watson was fourteen,

an orphan,

not yet a baronet, not yet the ex-

Lord Mayor of London.

In Copley's oil,

Watson and the Shark
,

the boy Watson's long hair

streams like elegant

seaweed. He's nude. The shark

wants to consume

his luminous flesh,

but so does every viewer.

Together we hold Watson half-

underwater. He looks more like a girl

than a predator. The paint

suspends Watson

in pigment that makes us believe

there's a new world floating

behind the painting,

alive with edible leaves.

When we visit the Gardner Museum

we never see Rembrandt's

Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

It's burgled. Only thieves

know where it rages—

so we repair to Whistler's Wand,

the Degas, and the Florentine credenza.

We can locate the Sea,

the earth's lowest,

in
McKnight's Geography
,

but Rembrandt's weather is out

of Doppler-radar reach,

gone like the students

we can't begin to teach.

They use prison shivs

to tattoo H-O-M-E-S-I-C-K

on their skin. They mix

ballpoint pen ink

with ash, and rub it in.

They think we're shocked.

They think we're “sivilized.”

But we've stared down the blank

space on the wall:

no boat, no disciples, no Christ,

and when we die we'll come back

from Bardo as birds.

We'll light on the Gardner's roof

with our wings still warm,

and we'll offer ourselves

as interpreters of the storm.

The tattoo artist's

testicular tumor

came from a teratoma,

a malabsorbed embryonic twin.

The doctor said what mattered

was a cure.

The tattooist demurred:

what mattered to him

was the little sib lodged

in his right testis,

expanding benignly

at first, then deadly.

The teratoma took it slow.

Always the muffled music.

Always the black ink bath.

Always the guest in the guestroom

repeating

its fragments of DNA.

The tattooist covered

his calves with roses.

He wanted to send a single

stem to his twin,

but it couldn't be delivered

past the blood-brain barrier,

past the wall in the heart

that holds the possible

and the impossible

in adjoining cells,

but apart.

In medieval allegories,

Death's like us, but smarter.

He covers his face

to block his rank

odor. Last night

a raccoon-corpse

flooded the yard.

No visible body,

just a scent so fishy

it plunged us

into a pre-human

anoxic ocean. We fought

to breathe.

Why didn't we go indoors?

Why did we sit

in deck chairs

letting it come—

this wave we couldn't begin

to grasp

with our tiny

opposable thumbs?

Since I hate friendly

dogs they love me,

or maybe it's sincerity

that spooks me—I sniff

their eager scent

and get a hit so strong

it makes me dizzy.

Fall is complex:

part ochre, part setter.

The dog on the corner

isn't pure fur; his flesh

heats up as he barks.

I rush past to skirt

his to-do list.

 Still, he insists:

throw a stick, throw a stick,

as if I were not person but park,

a maze designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,

groves, curves, vistas,

and undergrowth “for mystery.”

Olmsted said scenery

“unbends the mind,”

but what then? Unbent,

trees gather and store

the sun. Unbent, space grows

larger than any one thought, or feeling:

always this tossing,

always this retrieving.

It is not the look but the act

of overflowing that attracts:

this falling out of an XXL shirt,

over the edge of the Rascal

scooter at Piggly Wiggly,

this turning a corner

into the snack aisle,

bearing the impossible

burden of the body,

how fat folds conceal

a rib cage identical

to the cage inside

the U.S. president

since no one's exempt

from the urge

to enlarge into eternity,

like the heads at Mt. Rushmore,

or the Statue of Liberty,

to extend the self beyond

its airplane seat,

into the space of strangers,

into discomfiting touching,

to gorge on sleeve after sleeve

of cookies, each stamped

OREO, starting and ending

with the same letter
O,

seductive and circular as the wheels

Ezekiel saw and instantly

craved so intensely

he thought they were part of his soul.

David Shields appears

on PBS to proclaim

the death of the novel,

but I always knew

the library was a repository

of corpses. By third

grade their silence

attracted: so pasty, so inky,

so compliantly unreal,

so unlike the reconstituted

orange juice smell

that took dominion

over us children,

recalling our obligation

to grow, to thrive, to speak.

The novel, bloodless

and cadaverous,

could keep secrets

grave-deep,

which is why it's tempting

to worship trees:

so many pages,

poised to leap,

like Daphne,

from sap to text—

the second-best kind

of little death.

i.

Just before it died,

their marriage went to Madeleine Island

with me, their third-wheel friend.

Why does beautiful weather

have no shame,

like a ukulele at an execution?

At dusk we drank at Tom's Burned-Down Café,

a tent stretched over ashes.

Was it a psilocybin flashback

that made me think I could coax them together,

like God if God were God?

We drained our pints.

The sun set, though I whispered
pause
—

Down, down it went,

metabolized by night.

ii.

Terrance McKenna, the ex-

hippie ethnobotanist,

says mushrooms

are the earth's way

of conversing with human brains,

but we are deaf,

made too sad by sadness, too joyful

by joy. Whatever the fungal shibboleth,

we're sitting here still

at Tom's Burned-Down Café,

missing everything.

A nineteenth-century Norwegian stove,

tall and ornate, forces heat

through my friend's villa

in Hamar. It's hard to let

her have her stove,

because I've been cold

since 1979.

I want to screech
That stove

is rightfully mine!

Still it sits in Norway

as winter enters the Western hemisphere

gently, like a sister,

through the unlatched door.