I sat there frozen, holding my Seferis
and thinking how they wouldn’t let me sleep,
the images, that girl reading her book
in Chicago when they came with the awful news.
I held the book so tightly in my lap
that I had bent its cover.
The children came. I saw that they were children
in spite of their gracious manner with the wine.
They both wore shorts. I admired their brown limbs,
saw the gentle way he touched her hand.
At last we heard the singing from the shadows
of the dark, silent chorus of the leaves.
We listened for the life inside each note,
or rather the children did, Ross leaning
out as if resisting an urge to fly;
Angela, her sense of possibility
untarnished, smiled like an archaic statue.
For me it had all gone flat. I won’t deny
the music of the birds was beautiful,
but I saw how we transformed it in our minds
to what we had expected it to be.
I saw the evening’s mood envelope them,
how what they had desired became a shell
of words—of empty, captivating words.
It angered me that I could think this way.
I knew that I was spiteful, that the girl
had everything I thought I’d ever wanted,
the thoughtlessness that comes with being young.
Because of who I am, who I’ve always been,
I know the nightingales won’t let me sleep.
I do not think I have ever been young.
I do not think I have let myself be young.
I am a woman whose father committed suicide
in Chicago in 1939.
AT THE GRAVES OF CASTOR AND POLLUX
It breaks your back
to consider the stones
men used to bear,
not to mention their burden of belief.
The constellations
animated
guards against loss,
guiding sailors home.
We are meant to believe
of Leda’s sons
that the wrestler was a midget
and lay with his brother
in these chiseled troughs.
Brothers who fought,
scaling Taygetus
on a worn path
above the trees
to the bluest death,
the farthest arch,
Gemini.
I dreamed
a hall light was on,
my own brother
coming to see me
months after he fell.
I was never happier,
shouting his name that was
palpable as a shell.
In the old days
dead men were seen
in the stars,
courses charted,
walls built . . .
I’ll watch tonight.
SPOONING
After my grandfather died I went back
to help my mother sell his furniture:
the old chair he did his sitting on,
the kitchen things. Going through his boxes
I found letters, cancelled checks, the usual
old photographs of relatives I hardly knew
and Grandmother, clutching an apron in both hands.
And her. There was an old publicity still
taken when she wore her hair like a helmet,
polished black. Posed before a cardboard shell
and painted waves, she seemed unattainable,
as she was meant to.
For years we thought he lied
about his knowing her when he was young,
but Grandfather was a man who hated liars,
a man who worshipped all the tarnished virtues,
went daily to his shop at eight, until
the first of three strokes forced him to retire.
He liked talking. Somebody had to listen,
until my parents called me home to supper.
We’d sit on his glassed-in porch where he kept a box
of apples wrapped in newsprint.
He told me about the time he lost a job
at the mill. Nooksack seemed to kill its young
with boredom even then, but he owned a car,
a ’24 Ford. He drove it east to see
America, got as far as Spokane’s desert,
sold the car and worked back on the railroad.
Sometimes he asked me what I liked to do.
I told him about the drive-in movies where
my brother, Billy, took me if I paid.
In small towns movies are the only place to go.
Not Grandfather. He said they made them better when
nobody talked, and faces told it all.
“I knew Lydia Truman Gates,” he said,
“back when she was plain old Lydia Carter
down on Water Street. One time her old man
caught us spooning out to the railroad tracks.
Nearly tanned my hide. He was a fisherman—
that is, till she moved her folks to Hollywood.”
I don’t know why, but I simply couldn’t ask
what spooning was. He seemed to talk then
more to his chair’s abrasions on the floor,
more to the pale alders outside his window.
The way he said her name I couldn’t ask
who was Lydia Truman Gates.
“Nonsense,”
was all my mother said at dinner. “His mind
went haywire in the hospital. He’s old.
He makes things up and can’t tell the difference.”
I think my father’s smile embarrassed her
when he said, “The poor guy’s disappointed.
Nothing ever went right for him, so he daydreams.”
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “And anyway
no Lydia Truman Gates ever came
from a town like this.”
“It’s not so bad a place.
I make a pretty decent living here.”
My mother huffed. While I stared past my plate
Billy asked, “Who is Lydia Truman Gates?”
It wasn’t long before we all found out.
The paper ran a story on her. How
she was famous in the twenties for a while,
married the oil billionaire, Gates, and retired.
She was coming back home to Nooksack. The mayor
would give a big award and ask her help
to renovate our landmark theater.
We had better things, our mother said, to spend
our money on that some old movie house,
though she remembered how it used to look.
She said that people living in the past
wouldn’t amount to much.
We didn’t tell our parents where we went
that night, riding our bikes in a warm wind
past the fish houses on the Puget Sound
and up Grant Street to the Hiawatha.
Inside, Billy held my hand, and showed me
faded paintings of Indians on the walls
and dark forest patterns in the worn carpet.
The place smelled stale like old decaying clothes
shut up in a trunk for twenty years,
but Nooksack’s best were there, some in tuxes,
and women stuffed into their evening gowns.
We sat on the balcony looking down
on bald heads, high hairdos and jewels.
Near the stage they had a twenty-piece band—
I still remember when the lights went out
the violins rose like a flock of birds
all at once. The drums sounded a shudder.
We saw Morocco Gold, The Outlaw, Colonel Clay
and the comic short, A Bird in the Hand,
flickering down to the screen
where Lydia Truman Gates arose in veils,
in something gossamer
astonishing even in 1965.
Lydia Truman Gates was like a dream
of lithe attention, her dark eyes laughing
at death, at poverty or a satin bed.
And when they brought her on the stage, applause
rising and falling like a tidal wave,
I had to stand up on my seat to see
a frail old woman, assisted by two men,
tiny on that distant stage.
My brother
yanked me past what seemed like a hundred pairs
of knees for all the times I said “Excuse us.”
waiting by her limousine, his face painted
green by the light from Heilman’s Piano Store,
breathing smoke. “You guys keep your distance.”
“Is she coming out?”
He crushed his cigarette:
“No, she’s gonna die in there. What do you think?”
More people joined us, pacing in the alley,
watching the chauffeur smoke by the door propped
open with a cinderblock.
And then the door half-opened, sighed back,
opened at last on the forearm of a man.
Behind him, Lydia Truman Gates stepped out
with her cane—hardly the woman I had seen
enduring all the problems of the world
with such aplomb. She stared down at the pavement,
saying, “Thank you, I can see it clearly now.”
“Mrs. Gates,” Billy stuttered. “Mrs. Gates.”
The chauffeur tried to block us, but she said,
“That’s all right, Andrew. They’re just kids. I’m safe.”
“Our grandpa says hello,” I blurted out.
She paused for half a beat, glanced at Billy,
then peered at me as if to study terror,
smiling. “Well I’ll be damned. And who’s he?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Billy said. “He’s nuts.”
“George McCracken,” I said, “the one you spooned with
down to the railroad tracks.”
“George McCracken.”
She straightened, looked up at the strip of sky.
“Spooned. Well, that’s one way to talk about it.”
She laughed from deep down in her husky lungs.
“Old Georgie McCracken. Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?”
She reached out from her furs and touched my hair.
“Thanks for the message, little man. I knew him.
I knew he’d never get out of this town.
You tell your Grandpa Hi from Liddy Carter.”
The man at her elbow said they had to leave.
She nodded, handing her award and purse
to the fat chauffeur.
Then flashbulbs started popping.
I saw her face lit up, then pale and caving
back into the darkness. “Christ,” she whispered,
“get me out of here.”
I stumbled, or was pushed.
My eyes kept seeing her exploding at me,
a woman made entirely of light
beside the smaller figure who was real.
Two men tipped her into the limousine
and it slid off like a shark, parting the crowd.
A picture ran in the next day’s Herald—
the great actress touches a local boy.
For two weeks everybody talked about me,
but I kept thinking, Is he still alive?
Too scared to come downtown and say hello?
I thought of her decaying on a screen,
her ribs folding like a silk umbrella’s rods,
while all the men who gathered around her
clutched at the remnants of her empty dress.
DISCLOSURE
With blue official flap and legalese
the State acknowledges an end to what
began in privacy, in passing glances.
What I remember of your voice is not
an issue lawyers willingly address,
and I’ve avoided their neat document.
There was a time when the word wife warmed me,
but as you say I think too much of words.
Many nights I raised my head from the pillow,
watched you sleeping, wife in a girl’s flannel,
there by the bed your window open.
Long-stemmed, unnamable flower in whom
I was lost and saved for ten brief years,
my rancor can’t contain these images:
your hair lightened to its roots by Greek sun,
my maps of married pleasure on your skin.
It’s strange what we can make ourselves believe.
Memory saves, recrimination uses
every twisted syllable of the past.
Still, with all the errors I acknowledge
added to those I fail or refuse to see,
I say our marriage was a gentle thing,
a secret bargain children sometimes make
and then forget when the weather’s changed.
Lawyers put it other ways. They don’t know
how small exchanges still take place, of gifts
collected long ago, drawings of a house
we lived in, letters from friends we haven’t told.
How separately we stumble on some object—
a book I signed, a scarf you knitted—
and call to tell the other it is there,
wondering if it will be wanted back.
BLACKENED PEACHES
One fall it was Jim and me living out
to the county. We were farmers then. A cold
northeasterly blew down like a sheet of ice,
nipped the peach trees so the leaves turned black.
All winter long the leaves was black as could be.
They never dropped, not even when it snowed,
and it scared me some to walk under the boughs,
the way they rattled so unnaturally.
We were married years when that happened. I first
come out here from Wisconsin on the train—
1902, when I was a little redhead.
I remember the train stopped in the Cascades
and I saw all the mountain sheep in the world
was crossing the tracks. You wouldn’t see that now.
A man named Slaughter met the train, shouting,
“This way to the Slaughter-house!” My father said
he meant a hotel, but I was never sure.
People have been dying on me ever since.
Soon after we moved up here to Nooksack
Father passed on. I went down with a fever
and that was when Doctor Hale first come to me.
He was a tall man, not a scary one,
and you could tell he was refined. He combed
his hair back neat, wore wire glasses that looked
tiny on a man so big, always wore
a suit and carried his black leather case.
His wife I believe died five years before,
but you saw no sign of sadness in him.
Once he asked me what was my favorite fruit
and I said, “Peaches,” and the next visit, why,
there was a good ripe peach waiting for me.
He called me Sally Peaches with a laugh.
On my sixteenth birthday Doctor Hale come by
in his buggy with a bucket to make ice cream.
Halfway through our party Mama left the room.
Doctor Hale and I sat in the kitchen,
him with his hands on his knees, looking shy.
After a while he took his glasses off,
rubbed them with his handkerchief. His eye
s was tired.
“Sally Peaches,” he said. “You’re too big for that.
I promise I won’t baby you again.”
He brought a box in from his buggy for me:
“I think, Sally, you’re old enough for this.”
The most beautiful party dress I ever saw
lay inside with its lace sleeves open to me.
Doctor Hale said he’d been saving it for years.
“I can tell it’s going to fit you perfectly.”
The next time I was over to town I walked
right by his office. I heard an axe’s sound
from his yard, tiptoed up to have a look.
There was Doctor Hale stripped to the waist
except for his specs and braces, swinging
that axe as if he were a younger man.
When he paused to wipe his brow I could see
he looked angry, tired, or not right with himself.
He seemed to want to tear those logs apart
with bare hands. I left before he saw me,
but that night I kept seeing him, the way
all gentleness went out of him when he swung.
One day, though nobody was sick, he come
again to our house. Mother left us alone
and Doctor Hale stood awkwardly and looked
down at me through his lenses. We were quiet
so you could hear the rain clap on the roof.
I give him a flower from the kitchen vase;
he fingered it like something that was ill.
“Sally,” he said, “tell me what I look like.”
He smiled strangely and I suppose I blushed
and couldn’t raise my eyes to look at him.
“No,” he said. “I know how I look. I look old.
Old enough to have been worn out working when
your father was sick. I never told you that
because I held some rather strange ideas.
You know, of course, I’m very fond of you.”
He coughed at the flower in his spotted hands.
“But I developed these peculiar ideas.
What I mean is that now you’re growing up.
You’ve had a lonely childhood in some ways,
but you’re a woman and you’ll marry soon
and then with luck you’ll never be alone.
I’m wishing you good luck. Good health. All good.”