TIME AWAY
A female cardinal has taken up a limned branch
but her prey has flown inside, with me. Tonight, on the phone
I fought again with my son’s mother. She has become
so used to my cruelty that it is simply questioned
and assessed. I used to surprise myself. A friend reads
a story I’ve written, finding the main character “deplorable.”
There are a lot of things I don’t tell him. Earlier,
I passed the ostensibly intelligent woman with pock-marked
cheeks, who works at the bookstore down the block, who
has lived here her whole life, so whose only remaining
chances are those who move here, or return after
years away. Out back, sheaves of silverweed and Indian pipe
sink and buckle into mud. During grad school there was a string
of suicides in the school library. One jumper from the atrium
fell silently to land at the feet of my student. She told me
about his breathing, was nervous about taking some time away
from classes, and came to ask if that might be okay. “Yeah,”
I said, “that would be okay.” I’ve moved and come back so many
times. By December the backyard will be a moist cushion
of decay, bits of spider, robin, and mouse carcasses. One day,
I’ll pack up what little I own that’s unbroken and move
to Montana. For now, I put off going home — there is
nothing but empty conversation, and the historical moment.
The first time my father got in my face, and for once
I came closer, I turned away only to throw
an antique dresser across the bedroom, before inviting him
to hit me — all he could do was threaten to call the cops, the brittle
embarrassing admonishment of middle-age. I feel sure I won’t
find anyone, now. I’ve settled into that a bit. And I find myself
attracted more and more to pregnant women — I’m familiar
with their bodies — the solid, outsized stomachs, and darkened
nipples, and maybe I think this time I could get it right.
THE CHILDREN, THE GRASS
Here are the children, tall as knee-high grass,
who will climb the mornings into bed with you
to make the day loose and foolish, and the sea
not so far away. They are soft as warts of moss.
And still they are ignorable, which suits.
It is not easy to know how best
to move yourself from one place
to another but they will help.
They rinse your arms, feet and face
with seawater, provide a pocketful of almonds.
UNDERCOVER
The train to Trieste — Schiele, fifteen,
hoisting his sister’s
suitcase onto the rack, a wash
of cold light flushing her face like breath
traveling across
glass. Lost in fog, the windows
would not give their faces back. Her sleeping feet
brush the skin above
his socks, and outside, the honeysuckle
like a pattern of blood repeating itself
around a fence.
Lincoln, depressed, flickering
about the edges of the woods for weeks—
his eyes’ snow-lashed
halo, and his gun — like his uncle Mordecai,
a hermit who kept a dog named Grampus
and hundreds
of pigeons — here are their elaborate houses
with gables and columns, far from the double-bed
above a general store
where Joshua Speed and long Ishmael lie
for four years like brothers. Far from what will swell
and blacken
at Gettysburg. In the glow of low fire on charred brick
sweat-pale Adolf Schiele is laid out,
in a railway
official’s dress uniform, syphilitic, a dagger
at his side. Not burning the family’s stocks
and bonds. Not storming.
Not breaking down the door to a lightless room
that hides Egon and his sister, his first and best
model, simply
developing film. Plaster cast brains, hydrocephalic
skulls, and weight scales — Alphonse Bertillon comes
every workday
to the Laboratoire Anthropologie, to his
father’s skeleton hanging from the wall
like some mobile
of the Pleiades, as if the bones’ equilibrium
could keep him from slipping beyond reach. Young
urchins, three sisters,
sit in Schiele’s studio. They sleep, comb hair,
pick their ears, pull at dresses — the raw mottled
flesh of inconvenient
limbs, bruising, impassive, the vent of ribs beneath
thin skin. John Brown had the eyes of a goat,
and beating
his sons, forced them to strike back
as often as he struck. Brown called his killing
“work,” watching
in the late moonlight while his sons
and others knocked as lost travelers on the nightdoors
of anti-abolition families
and cut their men to pieces — like opening
a seed-bag — while the women slept, the ground alive
where bodies fell, black
scars on dark grass, and when it rained the smell
came into the houses. A child
with the shambling
gait of a circus bear, Clyfford Still’s family
in South Dakota was digging a well and they needed
someone to go down
to see the condition of the pit. It smelled like
the faint decay of overripe almonds—
the way his father
smelled in from the rain, the deep creases of his hands
and coveralls traced with night-crawler soil. “They put
a rope around my ankle,
tied a simple knot, and dropped me down head first.”
APPREHENDED AT A DISTANCE
The colorless lake — buoy bells
in fog; groaning, algaed pylons.
The impractical sand, clouds hanging
in dystrophy. Blue trees below the struts
of a radio telescope. A hare racing
through the tide. Eels dead and alive
sold from back of a truck. A preacher
stumbling over a mastiff, like a little man;
the insinuation of a human on a chain—
the slobbering aperture. A street sweeper
swinging his broom like a scythe. A starling
speaks and goes. Like someone who has a choice.
SNOW IN A BRICK COURTYARD
On a kitchen window’s slate ledge,
a swallow, white chest dusted orange
from the moth in its beak. Across
the courtyard, a black dog perched
atop its house, one ear pricked
to the wind. A rusty nail
sticks up from a sodden
half-buried plank, shocking the snow
with a faint russet pulse. And a child’s
distant croup-cough seems to stir
snow from frost-glazed branches.
Here is the cloud-helmeted sun, and here
is the world smoothed and close
to the eyes, like the gleam of cupped hands
bathing a face above a sink’s darkening basin.