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More Advance Praise for Half-Hazard
“When Kristen Tracy’s dazzling Half-Hazard arrived in the mail, I had been reading the critic John Berger and thinking about his claim that to deliver the true ambiguity of experience requires the most demanding verbal precision. Berger writes about authenticity in literature, and here it is, poem after authentic poem, as thrilling a read as I’ve had in a long time. Here is an unmistakable talent, someone with the verbal dexterity of a Sylvia Plath, who finds ways to stay alive amid the difficulties of love and loving. ‘The things / we kiss good-bye make room for all we kiss hello,’ she concludes in ‘Field Lesson,’ just one of the many memorable moments in this first-rate debut.”
—Stephen Dunn
“What animal grace in these poems of the human stumble and dance on the road to becoming human. These songs of lively observation are wise and wiser. Watch out for laughter as it rides the ocean of tears that slams at the shore of all of us ragged inhabitants, animal and human, right here, in these poems. There is no ducking the political. From ‘What We Did before Our Apocalypse’: ‘Underneath the table … / we all held hands and prayed. We watched an old man insult / nearly everybody and then let him fondle the nukes.’ This first collection of poetry by Kristen Tracy is a keeper.”
—Joy Harjo
“There’s a serious, addictive playfulness to the poems in Half-Hazard. The comic-inflected, subversive voice of this debut makes metaphors strike with the lightning of one-liners and turns of phrase turn transformative. Kristen Tracy writes with a sense of sustained invention that, poem by poem, gathers into a vivid, figurative fabric.”
—Stuart Dybek
“If you’re a rabbit or cow or mouse or human, beware this book—there is risk here for all who breathe. The cure? Embrace this book, for Kristen Tracy’s curiosity and resilience, her appreciation for the collision as well as the near-miss, her affection for the hangers-on as well as the thrivers, will engage you if this sounds at all like who you are or want to be—‘Love hears me coming and waits / on every stair’—and why wouldn’t it?”
—Bob Hicok
HALF-HAZARD
Also by Kristen Tracy
Books for Tweens
Camille McPhee Fell under the Bus
The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter
Bessica Lefter Bites Back
Too Cool for This School
Project Unpopular
Project Unpopular: Totally Crushed
Books for Teens
Lost It
Crimes of the Sarahs
A Field Guide for Heartbreakers
Sharks & Boys
Death of a Kleptomaniac
Hung Up
HALF-HAZARD
POEMS
KRISTEN TRACY
Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2018 by Kristen Tracy
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Winner of the 2017 Emily Dickinson First Book Award established by the Poetry Foundation to recognize an American poet over the age of forty who has yet to publish a first book.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-822-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-873-0
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934511
Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art: McLoughlin Bros, The Circus and Menagerie Picture Book (1890), courtesy VintageLithoArt.com
for Alan Tracy (1977–1980) & Sheriann Tracy (1980–1995)
This all could have been so different.
Contents
I
Good-Bye, Trouble
Presto
What Kind of Animal
YMCA, 1971
Cannibals and Carnivores
To the Tender
Local News: Woman Dies in Chimney
Urge
Sometimes This Happens
Bountiful, Utah, 1972
Vampires Today
Vermont Collision
Urban Animals
Unofficial Lady Bible
Undressed
Circus Youth
II
Good-Bye, Idaho
Half-Hatched
An Analogy
Local Hazards
Yesterday
When Fate Is Looking for You
Having It?
Contemplating Light
Breaking
About Myself
Assignment: Write a Poem about an Animal
Happy Endings
Teton Road
III
Half-Hazard
Gardening on Alcatraz in July
What We Did before Our Apocalypse
State Lines
Rain at the Zoo
Field Lesson
Fable Revisited
Taming the Dog
Tell
The Unavoidable Pigeon
Hanging Up
Hepatoscopy
Autobiography
Waiting for Crocuses
How could she have known that statistics show convincingly that when a bear attacks, the victim who fights back is likely to fare better than the one who plays dead?
—Attacked! John Long, ed.
Goodness won’t protect you; if you’re too good you will die, but then it can be seen as a kind of reward.
—Kathryn Davis, Hell
HALF-HAZARD
I
Good-Bye, Trouble
I fell from a Bible. A half-blonde tease.
With a good good start, I struck out
God-filled and thrilled to claim a spot.
Here? Where? There? I touched grease,
dough, steels. Raised my low country hem.
Up. Up. I met the butcher, the baker,
the transmission maker. What next? Girl-girl
sin? Boy-girl err? No. No. Trouble came.
Pure purr. He led me off a hat-flat roof.
All swish. He spun me near a slippery crag.
And I let him, let him. It wasn’t all bad.
Trouble makes trouble and soon Trouble went poof.
It’s not sin or err I live down now. Wow. Wow.
But his act, so thought
less, like a bull mounts the cow.
Presto
At the magic show I always wanted the tiger
to reappear. Did I have a pea-sized brain?
The beast was in the box. And it was impossible to tell,
but I thought the tiger looked blue, as blue
as a little girl who has lost her purse with money inside
for milk. I wanted someone to tell the tiger
it could lead a completely different life if it stopped
being so good at performing the trick.
But who listens to me? The tiger was replaced
by a lion with a caramel-brown face.
It had a new trick. It opened its mouth and received
a man’s head. He put it in sideways
and it came out wet, hair sometimes sticking
to the cat’s fat tongue. Bright bulbs
lit up the lion from behind. Its big fur
held the light as it balanced
all four paws on a milking stool.
It stayed steady, mouth open,
so a man would not die,
not in front of us.
What Kind of Animal
Atop his mower my father chewed the yard
in the garage. I wasn’t perfect,
one day she got loose. Fox,
dog, tomcat, it wasn’t clear what found her.
Behind the raspberry bushes, days away
from having her first litter, my pet bled
like a machine. Fully dismantled.
Prey versus predator. I couldn’t stand the story.
What kind of animal has that kind of heart?
When our chickens finally lured a weasel,
to keep them safe, for days I fed the beast
a small dish of food. Lunch meat. Cereal.
Popcorn. But it wasn’t enough.
Not even close. Among the ravenous,
I am a sock, a sneeze, a plastic spoon.
YMCA, 1971
It took a quarter to keep the lights on—
that was all the machines knew. And so
my mother emptied her purse for change
while my father tried to resuscitate a man
on the tennis courts in the dark. But the man died.
The paramedics called the heart attack massive,
a widow-maker. My parents had just wed,
neither one knew how to play tennis well,
it was something they would pick up together.
Years later, after their son died,
after they divorced, this is the one story
where their two sides continue to match.
They say it felt like it was another ordinary day.
They fed the dog, then walked into
the damp indoor air, onto the invisible stick of the courts.
My father was poised to receive my mother’s serve,
when a woman cried, my God, my God,
I don’t know what to do—the buzzer sounded that time
was up on the lights, everybody dropped their rackets,
and began running in the dark
toward the white glow of the fading man’s clothes.
Cannibals and Carnivores
The power of a mouth lies in what it will not eat and people don’t like piranhas—not because of their exaggerated teeth, but because we fear their determination to eat even themselves. Or so the animal expert believes, standing on a riverbank, his rubber boots pressing down the grass. And so, he says, the Indian tiger is revered by the natives, of course: her spirited stripes, padded feet. And the valley dwellers do not hunt her, because she will eat their flesh, but not her sister’s or her own children’s. She, like us, looks at the chain the universe has her by and nods.
To the Tender
Midsummer, and along came a hapless jay—
blue and wobbling—flight feathers nothing more
than pins of white. It arrived at the nest’s edge
unready, which was only half the problem.
Crows perched in the oak across the street, alert,
aware of all the world’s worst secrets. Naturally
I rooted for the blue jay. Oh, but this was life.
After the jay fell from the Scotch pine’s terrible height,
it righted itself in the grass and, like a skin-kneed child
after her first bad spill on a bike, cried out for help.
I set down my rake and shepherded the bird
toward my spindle tree. Hopping from
low branches, it pressed toward the center, tucking itself
into my tree’s sturdy heart. For two days
the parents swooped down to feed it.
Thankfully, the crows never came, though
I kept my eye on them. I knew their game.
Pirates. Gangsters. Extortionists. Thieves.
But even if the world is half bad, it remains
half good. While some of us sleep, our hearts
lie open, turned to the tender, dreaming up ways
to thwart the crows. Yes, a hapless jay stumbles
into our lives believing it can fly, and we—knowing
what we know—do what we can to make it so.
Local News: Woman Dies in Chimney
They broke up and she, either fed up or drunk or undone,
ached to get back inside. Officials surmise
she climbed a ladder to his roof, removed
the chimney cap and entered feet first. Long story short,
she died there. Stuck. Like a tragic Santa. Struggling
for days, the news explains. It was the smell that led
to the discovery of her body. One neighbor
speaks directly into the microphone, asks how a person
could disregard so much: the damper, the flue,
the smoke shelf. He can’t imagine what it was she faced.
The empty garage. The locked back door. And is that
a light on in the den? They show us the grass
where they found her purse. And it’s not impossible to picture
her standing on the patio—abandoned—the mind
turning obscene, all hopes pinned on refastening the snap.
Then spotting the bricks rising above the roof
and at first believing and then knowing, sun flashing its
God-blinding light behind it, that the chimney was the way.
Urge
If a pig walks out on you—
a literal teat intact, pink-necked pig—
don’t abuse yourself by asking,
What went wrong? You can’t expect
a pig to care. What sparks
that insistent desire to have
a one-to-one relationship—
be it bovine or ursine or swine?
I got too close. The rumor mill
spread the story that I caught a pig
and did the unthinkable. Lesson learned.
In the twenty-first century, far away
from Broadway, people still clap
for more. They want each
questionable curtain to be raised.
Demand. Demand. Demand. If it’s
meant to happen, if love is your
disease, go follow the hoof-pocked road.
Sometimes This Happens
A thin piece of ice covers the drinking trough
and for reasons only a cow can know,
she refuses to push her tongue through and drink.
And so my father breaks the ice with a shovel
and scoops off the slush, and the cow thankfully
lowers her head to drink. Is she thankful?
Shit is caked to the back of her hind legs.
A cough rolls from her throat, pushing
steam out of her mouth. Her pregnant belly
hangs below her. A hundred other cows
stand in the trees with their brown faces
turned away. This cow dr
inks alone
because something is wrong. My father caught her
chewing on a piece of fence. He’s worried
that she’s swallowed a strand of wire.
This is the third cow he’s seen that will die this way.
The metal will worm its way through all four stomachs.
He doesn’t know why a cow would do this.
He pats her side, rubs his gloved hand across her
frost-covered spine. Snow drops from the low clouds
and lands on our coats. A cow will never eat the snow.
This one lifts her head from the drinker, tossing the hose
onto the ground, spraying an arc of water over
our heads. A calf means money. We want her
to live long enough. She swings her unapologetic body
away from the tub and walks toward the other cows.
Her hooves are dark and slick and as she moves she stumbles,
the weight of her steps smearing the half-frozen ground.
Bountiful, Utah, 1972
Life began all wrapped up in the Lord.
Until I found the word sycamore
on the tip of my tongue.
It was my own perfect alveolar ridge.
It was twenty-five years of ordinary discoveries—
hot pans, wet towels, the absolutely round eyeballs
of the man next door. I took in odors
and was disturbed. I cut my finger
and let it drip. Just like that, I let go of the past
and the past’s people. They walked life’s short plank
and fell out of their clothes. I teetered