dismiss the second-class life
of the dream with its colorful
cargo of talking bears and the ogre
wearing the ruby amulet—we live
unrepentantly on gingerbread doorknobs
and edible glass, our child fears hand-in-hand
with child delights, while the dreamer
gets more brazen in the witness-box of
daylight: Not real! Only a dream!
Yet, the hands are sticky,
the tongue coiled to the memory
of molasses. Oh stick your finger out
of the cage of sleep, little girl, so we can
rub your finger bone! But the mind
in the corner with its skirt fallen
over its daylight cries No! then substitutes
a chicken bone. And if your brother
is eaten in another room, you somehow meet
down a long cavernous hallway
where the melting polar ice has sluiced you
together again. Is there something real
on the other side of “real” when the dream
fails to exceed or cancel itself? His gingerbread
hand clings eternally to yours as you tilt
and slide away from heartbeats, from breath
on the window pane, from proof and cunning—yet
you manage somehow to stay alive
in the same way the mind
abandons its corner to stand its head up,
allowing its dream worlds to glisten as particulate
vanishings. Still, the you of “you”
puts nothing aside or behind as it
enters the red core of the amulet
whose protective attributes
sustain the no-such-thing-as-dream,
the no-such-thing-as-awake. The mind
lays its head down, puts its hands
in its sleep-pockets, turns the day over like
a fried egg, saunters off into the sunrise,
into the vast on and on, whistling
like a day laborer.
STOLEN DRESS
I was walking through a vast darkness
in a dress studded with diamonds, the cloth
under them like chainmail—metallic,
form fitting like the sea to its horizon. I could
hear waves breaking on the shore and far off
concertina music drifting over the dunes. What
was I doing in high heels in sand in a diamond-studded
dress that had to be stolen? Fear washed
through me, as if one of those waves had
risen up and, against all the rules of waves,
splashed me from the shoulders
down. I was wet with diamonds and fear.
A small boat held offshore with its cold
yellow light pointing a long watery finger at me
while the stolen feeling of the dress sparkled
my location out into the universe. Thief! Thief!
came an interplanetary cry, causing me to
gaze up into the star-brilliant firmament,
for it wasn’t just a sky anymore. It had
taken on biblical stature. How had I
gotten into this dress, these unruly
waves, this queasy feeling I would be
found out? Time to run! my heart said,
pumping away under its brocade
of diamonds. Strange vacancies had
accumulated after all my sleep-plundered
nights. Thief! came the cry again, as if
I should recognize myself. And I did.
I flung those high heels into the depths,
took up my newfound identity, and without
the least remorse, began to run those diamonds
right out of this world.
GLASS IMPRESSES
most as it breaks. Look
how placidly it held our milk
in childhood as we sucked on the universe,
missing our first breasts. The wine glass
accidently dashed to
the floor is instantly replaced
with another—the party must go on!
Someone a little drunk
swept it up, but next morning
a shark’s tooth glinted
its half-smile from under
the refrigerator skirting. Thank
goodness no one wanted
ice cream in the barefoot
night. Little glass of my dreams—half
full, half empty—dream-glass—
I’m filling you to the top
with Russian vodka drinkers.
Let’s see how long you’ll hold out
against their heedless elbows, their
desperate wounding of the inevitable. If
I break myself open to one more day,
am I not more glass to last night’s sleep
for how my dreams shine through me,
sweeping me up, then dashing me
with impeccable impunity?
Broken? No, shattered! Loan me
a shard of tomorrow, or give
what is spilling me its freedom-tongue
so that in the Meadow of the Dead
there will be no blade of grass
that doesn’t call to the passing lovers
to lie down and try out their broken songs
above the bones, below the shadows
of the clouds.
HUMMINGBIRD-MIND
Flit, a useful word,
allowing one in, yet escape
from presence. If mind is
at least hinge
to body, its jade lantern
gives dart and hover
their difference—an arm
that wishes it were
a wing, air displaced
by a finger-length
of wit. We do not so much as argue
with the never-was as slip
its noose. Suck down
two-thirds of your body
weight in nectar and by nightfall
you are no heavier than a star
to anyone’s gaze. A lantern
communing with the dark
takes memory to another level
and even when lifted high
cannot bother to care
it does not illumine
an ocean with its
flotilla of shore-prone boats.
ONE DEER AT DUSK
The hummingbirds are still
fumbling the feeder with
occasional dive-bombing
to show each other how easy it is
to slip a tongue into sweetness
while others fight for
priorities—who sips first or
longest, or who can sit
pensive without sipping
at all. They know less
about deer, their
magnetic noses trained
to the young red tips of
roses. Yet tongue-sheath
beaks would challenge
fiercely if they caught deer
mawing the blossoms
of their honeysuckle.
The stealth-step of the deer
seems wishing not to tear
the fabric of this easing down
of night, shadow entering
shadow. And dusk, which allows
us to gaze across the boundary
of night’s oncoming dream of
possessing us entirely, has enabled
the deer, in its shuttlecock moment,
to let us watch ourselves
as a soft muzzle
caress and take teeth
to what we’ve never tasted,
then be ourselves
consumed, as if night’s unsheathed
all-over talisman of where we came from
had entered us while a deer
and hummingbirds occupied
what must have been
the night-nest of one mind
&n
bsp; choosing not to close
until each step of the barely visible deer
has blended with the last whir
of hummingbird, vanished.
iii
I hate Batyushkov’s arrogance:
“What’s the time?” they asked him
once. He answered, “Eternity.”
OSIP MANDELSTAM
CORRECTION
When he drank, he who was silent
talked into the night, and early on
you could get anything you
asked for. I can’t remember
what I asked for, only that he
called me Queenie, a sweet-bitter
name, for try as he might, it was hard
by his day-to-day earnings to keep
a queen, even a child-queen. Anciently
he would tell my brothers and me the dark
of the coal mines, some proof of his
delivery from one hell-life to another.
How could a child lift that? So much
of being young just raw listening, waiting
for life to catch up and add
meaning. Time gentled us both
so at last he could break through
to plead his case, that time I’d
come home from studies. I was
grown, full of plans that didn’t
skivvying for a Russian who
owned a pizza joint on the Ave—
one of three jobs to keep her
in food and classes. “If
I’d of known,” my father said,
“I’d of helped you more.”
He’d taken me up wrong, he
said. “I thought you were just
off to find a man”—spoken with his
’50s mind of things. Then, like
some accident of truth, tears,
and, face to face in that sudden earthly
moment, we could take our bearings
and enter the stumbling of the heart
with its stored-up light.
for my father, Leslie Bond
SULLY
It hurts me to think of you
under the ground.
JAIME SABINES
My view of you is always aerial
like time to a child who surrounds
everything with promise. I’m above
you like a ceiling fan and you—laid out
as my father described you—on the only flat
surface in the house, the kitchen table—like
a banquet to which everyone is invited
but to which no one can sit
down. For the record, my father told us
your death as if it were the heaviest
grief of his young life. He’d been away working
in the Iowa coal mines, then come home on a whim
to the Oklahoma farm where you lived,
taking care of the youngest children. Sully,
a half-sister, that demotion—your mother dead, your father’s
bride sending child after child
toward your protecting hands. “She did everything
for us,” my father told us, so I saw she was their
de facto mother. She wouldn’t have known
her half-relation status as anything but
bounty—her future already lodged
in her—that she would have no children.
So I hover above you, Sully,
one of my long undeclared loves, because
my father declared you in his quiet account
of having walked toward that house surrounded
by cars, the question weighing on him
as he approached: what’s happened? Through
the door then (and now his children
with him in his telling), your black hair
as in a García Lorca play, rayed out
on the white pillow. He tells us
of your coward lover, who took you
to the quack doctor with this result. How it
quenched my child heart to suffer your
death like that. Did you guess your story
would pass to anyone as words in air,
you who were bound in the amber of your
will to help everyone around you, not
extending yourself more truly than that? If
a poem could kiss dead eyes awake, you’d
come back to me here in the house my father
built, thousands of miles from where you
were buried. And because time is both fire
and star, you’d open yourself like a music box
given to a child for nothing but delight. You’d
tell me how it is in the round of time,
to live outside it all in the beauty and sadness
your name carries when I remember
it in my father’s voice each time he brought you
back to us. Sully. His soft saying of it—so you
are alive and dead at once—you whom
the world tried to squander, but failed
in just this dimension: that if I were to say
your name aloud in this solitary room
where my father’s hammer, its exact singing,
steel to steel, came down
on every board, some air of you
might wake from the dead and speak.
RETROACTIVE FATHER
He didn’t get the father he
wanted when he was
a child. His father wasn’t even
himself in those days. But
later, when the son didn’t need
him like a child needs a father,
his father became the good
father. But it would never be,
man-to-man, what the son had
deserved, he felt, when he
should have had that good
father, back then. The son
was like a bank and his
memory was floor to ceiling
money. He liked to go over
with his good father all
those failed back-there-times
and watch the blue stain of
that lost past creep from
his father’s fingertips to his
palms. He’d change the dye
sometimes, but blue told
a better story. It was a kind
of solvency, don’t you
see. The son accumulated
his father’s debt, and even with
regret that debt could never
be paid off—just a father
running through all time
with blue hands and a son
piteously calculating his
loss. The father did not last
as long as many fathers. But
before he died he made sure
his son heard from his own lips
all his present and his back-there
missing-love. It should have been
enough, anyone would think. Still
the son walked through life
like stolen money ever after,
while his bad-good father
dug that child up again and again,
even from the grave. That story
could have no other ending.
Blue father. Blue son.
EARTH
Those dogs chuffing down black dirt
at the end of the driveway,
seeming to grin with delicious
intake—I knew earth wasn’t
what it seemed. Envious, I could get down
on my knees and join their feast. Tails
wave, one paws the ground open
for the other.
The display ends as suddenly as it
began. They’re off, lifted legs
marking territory. Some dogs
are only human. Yet what they did
there with th
eir teeth and mouths stays
with me through the day. I see them as I can’t
see myself, finding what they need
just under the surface—
digging for it, eagerly, letting me
wonder at sufficiency,
at certain insatiable hungers.
Needing a few bites of earth
to settle us out.
THE SEEMINGLY DOMESTICATED
cat, preens all morning
like a ballerina, caressing
its white underbelly, stretching
a hind leg into impossible
contortions, then positions
itself near the window overlooking
the birdfeeder, there to hone its
quickness to deadly ends. The door
left ajar invites it to drop its
maw of death over the greenfinch.
What it could not expect was
interception. Surprise
startles open its mouth just
that fraction needed for escape. Can
it be called a miracle to see a bird fly
from the teeth of its near
death? Skyward with ragged
desperation it gives
back more sky than it left.
The cat, its nature reasserted, takes up
its accustomed perch before
the fire on a side cushion,
reassuming its former kindly
aspect. But in the mind
of the room something free
and glad goes careening and
will not settle. Something
to do with hope, with plunder.
Wing beats coinciding
with shouts to fly! fly! Language itself
inhabiting the moment
with uplift.
REACHING
Eyes, mouth, hands—you’ve left me equipped
in your portrait Green-Eyed Poet with essentials, all
for moving outward, to touch, to open
what may be touched and opened. The eyes
open other eyes, have opened
hearts, hundreds of books, have met
the stolid searching eyes of the doe
in the orchard beside her fawn, teaching it to run
or stay. Fifty-three years we’ve shared
art and lives, with and without Ray,
whose ring of marriage is on my finger
yet. As is your right, you’ve turned the lapis
of his love-ring from blue
to green, to match my eyes, yet
exceeding them in that early spring promise-green.
The lips parted to the eternal “would-speak” or
“about-to-speak” or “have-spoken,” the past
edging out future. The hands nest the head,
cradle the chin, anchoring the flower