no recollection of a house filled with so much light.
The trees outside, so bright with rain. So much depends.
Here begins my life as no one’s bad daughter.
4
Walking Each Other Home
By the Roots
Crouched in the garden
knees to elbows, fists to the earth,
wrenching weedy orchard grass
from the mud-soaked roots
of my tendered corn,
ripping the soil that feeds me,
feeling its outrage, I am
all of a moment tearing out
the hair of the world. Memory runs
through me like hot water: My brother
is nine. I am seven, loyal as oxygen
but still near enough his size
that our fights want to go
to the death. Our parents
reflect, too late, on the charms
of the only child. We two
are hell-bent, knees burnt raw
by the grass, our fists to earth,
my knuckles twined in his hair
cannot stop pulling: dear God
the terror in that helpless crave for
wounding the one you couldn’t live without.
My First Derby Party
He says I am old enough now to stop hating horses.
This Kentucky friend, youngest of eight, who started
school in shoes that had already been to first grade
twice. I was luckier, newly shod at each summer’s end.
For the purchase we always drove to Lexington, past
all the mansions, fists tucked into my sweaty armpits,
scowling from the back seat at the training center
where horses had a swimming pool all their own.
Important horses, according to my mother. No child
in our county, white nor brown nor gritty from setting
tobacco, was important enough for a swimming pool.
We had the Licking River and snapping turtles.
How I despised those rich foals tossing their manes,
running the length of a birthright on green bluegrass.
Our schoolyard was gravel. We brought it home when
scrapes with our authorities embedded it in our knees.
Some girls dreamed of currycombs and power
clenched between their thighs, had secret names
for the thoroughbreds they’d have one day. Not me.
I looked up blueblood, connected blood and grass.
On school day mornings, on Derby Day at the starting
gate, we sang one song. Children with tobacco-stained
hands, Louisville ladies in fancy hats: we all stood
together to reconcile ourselves to the state of our birth.
And now the friend who’s traveled these same miles
with me is having a Derby Party. For our juleps
I pick mint from my arid garden, where I’ve tried
for years to cultivate the greenness of Kentucky.
The sun shines bright. I squint at the sky, consider
how far I’ve run without bloodline or contract.
We will sing one song for my Old Kentucky Home,
revising the words as needed. Weep no more, my lady.
We gather to watch the run for the roses on television
at five thirty sharp, tape-delayed to erase the time
we’ve lost. Shoulder to shoulder we watch the shining
muscle-bound haunches straining under the whip.
It ends with a great gold cup in the owner’s hands,
a victor with neck bent low by roses he can’t even eat,
our glasses raised: freeborn, field-stained, I wonder
at my old envy for the well-shod mansion slave.
Snow Day
The blizzard came and went last night as we slept.
The woods were first to wake up
as their own black-and-white photograph.
Next a rabbit: revealed
as the history of its many
indecisions along the lane.
Black ponies on the hill:
round-bellied shadows of creatures
that stood just yesterday
in their own breakfast.
The pasture: a toboggan slope.
Children who wait like fence posts,
on other days, for the school bus
now howl their demon love for speed,
calling me to join them.
Nothing is what it was.
The mailbox sports a white toupee,
compensating for a certain
internal emptiness.
The mail won’t come today.
All professions called on account of weather.
Every identity canceled. I have no choice
but to set down these words,
wrap my long limbs in the cloak
of a perfect disguise,
walk down the lane,
steal into life as a ten-year-old
leaving footprints: traces of my escape.
Six Women Swimming Naked in the Ocean
An even dozen, as it happens,
changeable as the lunar egg
and milky like that, breasts
that have waxed and waned
answering the tides and tugs that
rule the world: men and children.
These bosoms have heaved
with passion and impatience,
but here in the midnight ocean
they just float
like jellyfish. Lifebuoys. Bottles
flung out with no message inside.
We tumble and crash like so much
sandy laundry, sing out names,
keep an eye on each other
by means of our headlamps,
twelve shiny melons. We
have been called so many things,
have come from so many places.
Earlier in the beach house we were all
such different people—modest, illustrious,
or provisional—forgetting we had this
standard equipment to bind us.
And once unbound, to carry us away.
Courtship Dance on Playa Luria
The tourists’ bikinis touch down like witless butterflies
trying to suck nectar from the blazing sand
while the feet of the blanket vendors trudge across it
on thick black soles they have cannily cut from tires.
Blankets she has seen. But never this one on his shoulder,
woven color on color, luminous birds. Nuptial plumage.
He sees her looking.
Gazing across the field of torpid sleepers
into her eyes, he squares himself against blue sea,
snaps out his arms, opening wide the blanket.
She glances away.
Too late, he’s caught her. Now with every turn
of her head he throws open the feathered wings again,
dares her to imagine these wild colors in her bed.
She inhales through pursed lips:
¿Cuánto es?
His mouthed response:
Treinta y cinco.
Too much: she tosses her head to the side.
He counters:
For you only thirty.
She looks away. Then back.
Barely moving her lips, offers fifteen.
He hangs his head, colorful feathers offended.
She shrugs, reaches into her bag where all he asks
and more is hiding, pulls out a book instead,
inciting his fevered passion:
For you, twenty-five!
For you, I am prepared to lose everything.
She opens the book, shows him
her doubtful profile, the shape of his loss.
Suddenly there is motion. Through one narrowed eye
she watches the sunburned matron, flagging spandex,
&n
bsp; owl-eyed shades, swooping out on scalded feet
toward her suitor. The gray curls nod: Thirty-five only!
Clutching her gravid bag, the wallet extracted,
sincerity takes all. This dance is done.
I was the one. For whom he would lose everything:
left to imagine even now those colors on my bed
as he slips the bills in his pocket and leaves me forever.
Will
Who will peel these red hearts,
Roma, San Marzano,
that have to be slipped
by the hundreds from their skins?
I will, she says. My mother-in-law is
ninety, her bones the slimmest threads
to stitch a body heels to skull, a tenuous
seam of spine. The everyday apron
that swaddles my curves
hangs from her neck toward the floor
like a living-room drape. Here
in my kitchen, the little red hen: I will.
The heartless tomato massif
looms in bowls and colanders.
As reliable as geology and erosion:
the will of her hands, the motion
of mountains, the ocean of marinara
in our cauldron. She is rock, and I am
weather, dancing from stove to pantry and
back, conducting our creation with my wand
of steel spoon, reading our crystal ball
of steamed canning jars where our family
secrets of thyme and salt will meld with
the elements of one more growing season.
Time slips away from us, comes back: I see
her steadfast, and my apology breaks over us
like an egg. I’ve held her here, she should go
have a rest. She only shrugs: I’m Italian.
Everything she is, I’m not. But can see
what I will spend these hours becoming.
I dread a summer to come, the curtain
falling on her stories that held us together:
mothers and fathers, country people bound
to me by a thread, no common blood
but the hours we’ve stood in labor. How
will I know then what I’m worth?
And how will I stitch this seam for another
wife or child of a child while we move
other mountains, fill kettles in some
kitchen yet to come alive; how will I stand
holding my bones in a careful stack, skull over
spine, knees over ankles, a body well over
all its own secrets of birth and desire;
how will I slip an apron onto that
hipless atelier, take up the knife and give
myself to the sacraments of a household
now unknown to me. How do I know
I will.
Creation Stories
The Christmas she was five, I stayed up
until first light making boots, of all things,
the very pair the brave girl wore
in her storybook. She wanted no other thing.
Leather and needle-punctured
palms, inventing skills I didn’t have,
cuffing and embroidering, cursing
an illustrator whose tools were ink
and fancy while I had rawhide:
well, that was the year of the boots
worn everywhere but bath and bed.
A story made real. The year she believed
in Santa Claus, she said, Because
no regular person could do that.
Years later, she longed for the jacket
all the cool girls had. My ways and means
couldn’t stitch that one together. I hoped
a luxury denied might be the travail
a brave girl pressed in her memory book,
instead of the rest: my long-held breath
for those years we had to go it alone
without support, the miles from family,
the making of her everything in the place
where life had nailed us down to nothing.
Now she is a mother herself.
No regular person. She knows the work
of a life is the making of things a child will
not believe we could have made. Because.
Meadowview Elementary Spelling Bee
The first graders fall
in a slow, rolling wave
as if before a firing squad,
the first full row swept empty:
brave-enough soldiers but new
to the business of books, they are
cannon fodder for beam and prowl.
The second graders behind them
stand frozen before the artillery,
hopeless when the time comes
and he tries to slip through the
gates as Tim. And easier, alas,
never in this world so hard.
A sole third grader survives,
stammering through comrade
as all of her mates fall away.
The fourth graders quake,
their squadron unequipped
for siege or attrition. They fall
to stealth, survive by guile
but are no match for ingenuous.
In the end it comes down
to the proletariat facing off
appropriation, no surprise—
but I am on tenterhooks for one
small laborer in this camp, word-smitten
since the days before her milk teeth:
She claims her trophy, ecstatic with glossolalia.
Blow Me—
away. Like the globe of
dandelion haze on the stalk I put
in your hand the first time you stand
up by yourself in the grass.
down. Like a hurricane
shredding the roof I only want
to keep in one piece over your head-
strong adolescence.
over. Likely as not I am
already stepping aside, blinking
at your improvised inheritance,
out. Like the candle
that lit your way into this dark house
ablaze now with your occupancy. Our bond,
the same as our breathing, out and
in.
After
The morning of the shattered leg
began as a small adventure with my children:
our maritime campaign of languid
tide pools, hardscrabble crabs, slippery rocks,
translucent fish darting wild from our shade
as we wreaked our careless catastrophes,
poking fingers into pink anemones just to see
them curl up into fists of composed trepidation.
After the slick sudden shock, dull crack
of bone collapsing inside its case
of flesh; after the slow crawl back
through the first months of my mending
we curl on the bed, my youngest and I,
reading of runaway bunnies while she
remembers it all again and again. Ocean-eyed
she asks what I will be able to do after this:
Will we skate on the ice next winter? Will I
ever again be the mama who held her tight
on the sled and howled with her when the world
was a fast blue whistle? Yes?
I say yes. I pretend my courage has tentacles
that still reach for light as they did before, before
careless chance took its poke at me. Say yes, but feel
curling tight in my chest the anemone of after.
Walking Each Other Home
My friend lives on this road
the same as me, two hollows down,
two gladed mountainsides,
briar patches that go without saying,
fields in pumpkin or hay or fallow.
Once,
we can never forget, a bear.
And once for too long a season
a road-killed deer whose return to dust
we both watched, the ragged pelt
dried to leather, the shipwreck of rib cage.
My friend alone saw the bear, and
told me of it, the winter of her chemo.
I was the one to see the deer
fresh struck, and had to find words,
though even now I can hardly bear
to say how I watched hooves beating air,
reaching for some blind heaven.
Between us, we know this map by heart.
I walk from my house to hers
and then together we speak of things—
or don’t, we are often quiet—
all the way back home to mine. Or she
walks here first, collects me for her return.
Either way, this is the road where we live.
Always we walk each other home.
And always we walk some of it alone.
5
Dancing with the Devil
Thief
I read Dickens by dim lamplight
casing the joint for plots. This
will not be a holdup, no clearing
out whole cash drawers into my bag—
just a shoplifter’s itch: I’ll take
the convict benefactor, the woman
who knits rebellions, into my pockets.
Woolf, I read in my room
behind a locked door where she
commands me to empty out everything
like airport security: Nothing!
Walk naked through the passage,
but quick as life I swipe her
badge, make off with her authority.
Emerson, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, H.D.
I read with my face
planted, belly to earth,
leavings of the infinite
composting in my rib cage
sun and rain on my back
bringing up a pelt of new grass.
Dancing with the Devil: Advice for the Female Poet
Remember about being quiet.
Canny, rowdy, quick, hitting
any nail in the vicinity of its head:
these could be the death of you.
Observing all posted speed limits:
that could be the death of you.
When the choice is speak now
or forever hold your peace,
remember how “peace” comes around
in time to feeling like this crocodile