you are trying to drown.
Remember bloodletting was medicine
back in the day. And who did it.
Remember to leave a window open,
oven door closed, stones on the ground
not in your pockets. Maybe just one
precious in a fist, or against a hot cheek.
Remember all the openings,
same ones used for pushing out
filth, lullabies, the blues, brand-spanking
life bellowing at both ends? That’s
what you get. And in defiance
of all higher rulings ever handed down,
remember who lives longer.
Cage of Heaven
Watching the polar bear in his enclosure,
I am thinking of Emily Dickinson,
her fine feet pacing the floors of her house,
the white dress dragging delicately out
the kitchen door and over the circular paths
of the backyard whose perimeters
she would not leave for decades, to the end.
Forsaking even the church she loved.
The dome of trees in her garden would
have to do. Bobolinks for a church choir.
We are all beasts born to our burdens.
Whether by law or the rifle, sharp crack
of sanity or a spine, enclosure is waiting.
This white bear with his splayed paws
parting the water like heavy drapes
was not plucked from some wild perfect life
but orphaned, borne by trauma into this
or nothing. Maybe hell and heaven are both
an existence within limits: the lesser evil.
Do we not all have the same stones
lining the bottoms of our minds, the same
narrow plank of reason crossing the top
of that chasm, same funeral when it breaks
to send us plunging? I’ve had my days.
Weeks, even. When I could not bear to leave
the safety of my own trees, my choir of
Carolina wrens. I have what she had: fleets
of ships in our libraries to take us anywhere;
some goodly sort of god arranging his furniture
in our houses, that we might try out heaven;
and poetry’s clear pools where the lone swimmer
can feel against bare skin the ice of revelation.
The plank has cracked for this bear
I’m afraid. I watch him and find myself
praying for the saving arts we all have
to make ourselves—that on his circular walks
through blue-painted concrete glaciers
he is meeting angels in hats of snow.
That when he swims and swims he believes
he will find things heretofore unseen—
not the fish at hand but the piercing teeth
of risk, his polar zero at the bone.
Insomniac Villanelle
The chore of blunting night’s tormented edges
Austen, Byron, Cather, Dickens, Emerson
while cats of sentience creep out on the ledges
demands some dull device for driving wedges
Faulkner, García Márquez, Hugo, Ibsen
into the ticking torment of night’s edges
a steady, flogging tedium that fledges
Joyce, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Merton, Nin
tense flights of apprehension from the hedges,
hounds spirits from the stairs, and slowly dredges
Orwell, Plath, Queirós, Rilke, Stein
regrets like broken glass from night’s deep edges
and still tomorrow’s weary pending pledges
Tolstoy, Updike, Verne, oh patient Whitman
are cats of sentience sprawling on the ledges
Saint-Exupéry will pass, Yeats, Zola. Austen,
Jane—you again, Cather, Eliot, no! Byron
Now there’s birdsong, daylight on the ledges.
My Afternoon with The Postman
The day of the cruel review, I fled
to the museum believing beauty
might cotton the clappers of all these
alarm bells in my head. Beauty failed.
I sat on a bench in the corner with The Postman.
Who knows why they put him in that corner?
The proudly functional blue hat. Beard
like a spring flood. Red-rimmed eyes
unnerving. Or no, disarming. Sympathetic.
Critics are asses, I told him. Why make art
for people who never make anything,
who live only to dismember it and send
its creators to sit in the corner like children?
The Postman appeared content with his position.
But artists, I insisted, we who make ourselves
of self-critical bones, self-critical skin! This is not
some business of rapping us on the knuckles.
This is knowing the peanut allergy
and making the peanut butter sandwich.
The Postman wasn’t biting.
I tried gossip, thinking surely every postman
has carried a neighborhood story or two around
in his bag: my critic’s squalid habits, his vendetta
against my friends—these nitpickings roused
the interest you’d expect from a dead French mailman.
Fine, then. What kind of mail did you bring Van Gogh?
That did it. Mostly bills. Tabac, le caviste,
the regular gathering storm of the landlady,
he was always short of cash. You know. Artists.
So much for my gloomy party. I’m not starving.
I changed the subject: He gave you the eyes of Christ.
Not really. It’s a good likeness. Even my wife
thought so. Augustine, now there was a critic.
Really, those are your eyes?
Must be. He couldn’t pay anyone else to sit for him,
the girls who smile for a price. The faces he could
afford were sunflowers. He didn’t know a soul
when he came to Arles, asking me every day for news
of the locals, even news of their cats, anything
to keep me there on his porch to light a pipe with him.
He made you look like Socrates.
Lonely men mistake kindness for a philosophy.
People think genius thrives in tortured isolation.
Lonelier ones can mistake contempt for kindness.
You’re suggesting I’m lucky to know the difference.
For example, that painter friend of his who kept promising
to visit! Vincent wagged his tail like a dog for that man.
Gauguin, we’ve all heard about that. His tormenter.
I was the one to fetch him from the hospital, after
the incident. I took him for a good dinner.
So I’m asking, was it criticism that did him in?
Critics are flies. They buzz. They vanish, unremembered.
But the hate mail. You would know—did anyone say
he had no business making stars so fierce, or trees
so pointed, the whole thing uncomfortably much
too close to the truth of the mess we’re in?
They didn’t have to. They just didn’t buy his paintings.
No one had to be told not to buy a painting.
It’s different now. Critics tell millions of people not
to buy our work, who mostly weren’t going to buy it
anyway. The artist risks unending humiliation.
Also unending love, but that is not the point.
I have to ask, then.
Madame, what could I tell you
more than one hundred years after all
the postmen I knew in Arles, all the women,
smiling or otherwise, throwing water on
alley cats, the cats themselves, the stars
and trees such as they were and also of course,
the artist: gone entirely.
Look at you looking into the eyes of a stranger
for the consolation of his quiet ear.
6
Where It Begins
Where It Begins
Winter is for women—The woman, still at her knitting . . .
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
—SYLVIA PLATH
It all starts with the weather. Comes a day when summer
gives in to the slenderest freshet of chill, and just like that,
you’re gone. Wild in love with the autumn proviso. Trees
will light themselves ember-orange at the hemline, starting
their ritual drama of self-immolation. The honkling chain
gang of geese overhead fleeing warmward-ho, chuckling
over their big escape, you see it all. But you will stick it out.
Through the woodsmoke season that opens all hearts’ doors
into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink
at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling, brushstrokes of
snow on branches—this is the whole world calling you to
take up your paired swords against the coming freeze. The
chromosomes plied by all your thin-skinned forebears can
offer no more bottomless thrill than the point-nosed plow
of preparedness. It begins on the morning you see your
children’s bare feet swinging under the table while they
eat cold bowls of cereal. You shudder like a dog hauling up
from the lake, but can’t throw off the pall of those little
pink-palmy feet. You will swaddle your children in wool.
It starts with a craving to fill the long evening downslant.
There will be whole days of watching winter drag her skirts
across the mud-yard from east to west, going nowhere. You
will want to pin down these wadded handfuls of time, to
frame them on a 24-stitch gauge. Ten to the inch, ten rows to
the hour, straggling trellises of days held fast in the acreage
of a shawl. Time by this means is domesticated and cannot
run away. You pick up sticks because Time is just asking for it,
already lost before it arrives. The frightful movie your family
has chosen for Friday night, for instance. They insist it will be
watched, so with just the one lamp turned on at the end of
the sofa you can be there too, keeping your hands busy and
your eyeshades half drawn; yes, people will be murdered, cars
will be wrecked, and you will come through in one piece, plus
a pair of mittens. It’s the same everywhere. Your river is rife
with doldrums and eddies: the waiting room, the plane, the
train, the lecture, the meeting. Oh, sweet mother of Christ, the
meeting. The-PTA-the-town-council-the-school-board-the-bored-
board, interminably haggled items of the agenda. Your feet
want to run for their lives but your fingers know to dig in the
bag and unsheathe their handy stays against impatience, the
smooth paired oars, sturdy lifeboat of yarn. This meeting may
bottom-drag and list on its keel, stranded in the Sargasso Sea
of Agenda, and you alone will sail away on your thrifty raft of
unwasted time. You alone, to swaddle the world in wool.
Strangely, it also begins with the opposite: a hankering to lose
time. To banish all possibilities: the shattered day undone, the
bitter tea leaves of old regard, the words forever pushing ahead
of each other in line, queuing up to be written. Especially those.
Words that drub, drub at the skull’s concave inner wall. Words
that are birds in a linear flock, pelting themselves all night long
against the windowpane. Nothing can stop the words but this
mute alphabet of knit and purl. The curl of your cupped hand
scoops up long drinks of calm. The rhythm is from down inside,
rocking cradle, heartbeat, ocean. Waves on a rockless shore.
Sometimes it starts terribly. With the injury or the accident, a
wrecked life flung down like an armload of broken chair legs
on your doorstep. Here lies the recuperation, whose miles you
can’t see across, let alone traverse. Chasm of woe uncrossable
by any bridge, here lies you. And in comes the friend bearing
needles of pale bamboo—twin shafts of light!—and ombré
skeins in shades that march through the stages of grief, burnt
umber to gold to dandelion. She is not in a listening mood, the
friend. Today she commands you to make something of all this.
And to your broken heart’s surprise, you do.
It begins with a circle of friends. Always there is something
beyond your beyond, the aged parents and teenager who crack
up the family cars on the same day. There is the bone-picked
divorce, the winter of chemo, the gorgeous mistake, the long
unraveling misery that needs company, reading glasses and
glasses of wine and all the chairs pulled into the living room.
Cast on, knit two together girlfriendwise. Pick up the pieces
where you can, along the headless yoke or scandalously loose
button placket. Knitting makes the talk go softer, as long as it
needs to be. Laughter makes dropped stitches.
It begins with a pattern. The riveting twist of a cable, a spiral,
a ladder, eyes of the lynx, traveling vines. A pattern hallooing
to you from your neighbor’s sweater when you’re only trying
for small talk, distracting you until sheepishly you stop and
ask permission to memorize the lay of her sweater’s land. Once
it starts, there’s no stopping. In your sturdy frame of double-
pointed needles you cultivate the apical stem of sock-sleeve-
stocking-cap. From a seed of pattern everything grows: xylem
and phloem of ribs, a trunk with branches of sleeves, the skirt
that bells daffodilwise. You are god of this wild botany. You
may take the familiar map in hand, look it over with all best
intentions, then throw it away and head for uncharted waters
where there be monsters. There you’ll discover a promised land
of garments previously undevised: gloves for the extra long of
hand, or short, or the firecracker nephew with one digit missing
in action. Sweaters for the short-waisted, the broad-shouldered,
your best beloveds all covetous of the bespoke, looking to you
for the bliss of a perfect fit.
And a perfect color. It starts there too. An eye has hungers of its
own: the particular green of leaves overturned by the oncoming
storm. A desert’s russet bronze, mustard of Appalachian spring,
some spectral intangible you long to possess. Or a texture. There
are nowhere near enough words for this. Textures have family
trees: cloud and thistledown are cousin to catpelt and infantscalp
and earlobe. Petal is a texture, and lime peel and nettle and five
o’clock shadow and sandstone and soap and slither. Drape is the
child of loft and crimp; wool is a stalwart crone who remembers
everything, while emptyhead white-haired cotton forgets. And in
spite of their disparate natures, these strings can be lured to sit
down together and play a fiber concerto whole in the cloth. A
lamb’s virgin fleece can be sp
un with the fuzz of a lush blue hare
or a twist of flax, you name it, silkworm floss or twiny bamboo.
Creatures not known to converse in nature can be introduced
and married on the spot. The spindle is your altar; you are the
matchmaker, steady on the treadle, fingers plying animal with
vegetable, devising your new, surprisingly peaceable kingdoms.
Fingers can read; they have secret libraries and illicit affairs.
Twined into the fleece of a ewe on shearing day, hands can
read the history of her winter: how many snows, how barren
or sweet her mangers. For best results stand in the pasture and
throw your arms around her.
Because really it starts there, in the barn on shearing day, with
the circle of friends assembled. One fleece shorn all of a piece,
flung out on a table surrounded by help at the ready. All hands
point toward the center like an introverted clock, the better for
combing the fleece. Fingers can see in the dark to pull out twigs
and cockleburs. Fleeces rolled and stacked look for all the world
like loaves of bread on a bakery shelf, or sheaves of grain or any
other money in the bank: the universal currency of a planet where
people get cold. On shearing day all ledgers will be balanced; the
sheep are woolly by morning and naked by night, as barrows fill
and warmth is bankrolled in futures. Six women can skirt a fleece
in ten minutes, just enough time to run and collect the next, if the
shearer is handy. It starts early, this day, and goes long.
It starts in the barn every morning of the year. The sheep are
both eager and wary at the sight of you, the bringer of hay,
reaper of wool, as you enter the barn for the daily accounts.
You inhale the florid scents of sweet feed and mineral urine,
and there they stand eyeing you every time, on blizzard nights
or mornings of spring lambing when you hurry out at dawn
to find dumbfounded mothers of twins licking their wispy
trembling slips of children, exhorting them to look alive. The
sloe-eyed flock mistrusts you fundamentally, but still they come
running when you shake the exquisite bucket of grain, money
that talks to yearlings and chary wethers alike, loudest of all
to the ravenous barrel-round pregnant ewes that gallop home
with udders tolling like church bells. In all weather you take
their measure and send them out to pasture again. Willingly