Singing the Mozart Requiem
Ralph Salisbury, my husband
Erin Salisbury, my daughter
Kathleen Wendt Sikelianos, my sister
and to the Eugene Concert ChoirFor all of the songs given
each of us yet to sing
I. Endangered Species
“What is past is not dead;
it is not even past.
We cut ourselves off from it;
we pretend to be strangers.”
Christa Wolf
A Model Childhood
(Translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt)
Endangered Species
If I had been five minutes later, or ten,
earlier, or hadn’t gone down the lane for mail, the fields
of alfalfa ripe with robins, a fresh crop of grasshoppers
If the coyote flashing through one chance lift
of my head from a book, in broad daylight, hadn’t
gone the wrong way, detoured by one rabbit less
Or the bear whose track I found on my way back
fresh and unmistakable as a blinking red light,
had staked out in just the right place, I might
Never have seen the pause of wild turkeys under
the shelter of pines: aloof, the eternal
black robes of mourning; steady as county fair targets
One by one leisurely along
the edge of the field, the creek, up the hill into trees,
the edge of extinction, beyond
All powers of observation. Purposeful.
As if there were others to take their place.
As if all of us had all the time in the world.
Mussels
for Ralph
We’ve learned where the big ones grow,
to harvest not from the tops of rocks where shells
fill with sand
to follow the tide out to the farthest reefs we can reach
and still not get wet, where last time we found
giant anemones green-sheathed and dripping under
the overhangs like the cocks of horses, we laughed, or
elephants, having each come to the same conclusion,
fresh from bed and married long enough
to say such things to each other, again
to remember the summer we first discovered mussels
big as fists protecting Sisters Rocks.
Just married and ready for anything, even
mussels were game, black as obsidian, stubbornly
clinging to rocks, to each other, their shells
so tightly together we had to force them apart
with a knife, the meat
inside a leap of orange, poppy-bright; and when
three perch in a row took the hook you’d baited
tender as liver we said we must try them ourselves
someday, if they’re safe, which they weren’t
all the years we lived down south: red algae in summer
tides infiltrating our chance to experiment, food without precedent,
how would we know what to do?
Counting at last on friends who had been to Europe and now
are divorced, we waded waist deep to pick some,
scraping our knuckles raw on barnacles
none of us knowing to soak our catch two hours at least
to clean out the sand; the sand we took in with butter and lemon
cleaning our teeth for a week.
Now we can’t get our fill of them.
Weekend vacations you work to the last, cooking
one more batch to freeze for fritters or stew.
Now we harvest them easily, take the right tools, wear boots
we gave to each other for birthdays so we don’t have
to remember to watch out for waves
to feel barnacles unavoidably crushed underfoot
like graveyards of dentures waves have exposed, although
sometimes now I find myself
passing over the biggest, maybe because
they’ve already survived the reach of starfish,
blindly prowling on thousands of white-tipped canes,
or they’ve grown extra barnacles,
limpets, snails, baby anemones,
rock crabs hiding behind. As though
age after all counts for something
and I’ve grown more tender-hearted,
wanting you not to know about the cluster
I found today, for the first
time in years having taken time off from job
and housework and child care, sleeping so late
my feet got wet on the incoming tide, unexpectedly
talking aloud, saying look at that one, bigger even
than Sisters Rocks: a kind of language
marriage encourages, private as memories of mussels,
anachronistic as finding I miss you
picking mussels to take home to you
not the ones you’d pick if you could but fresh
as any young lover’s bouquet and far more edible,
more than enough to last us at least a week.
Sestina
for Rich
The day you found him started
like any other vacation, the children
awake ahead of the best part of your final
dream, the sun like a thin arm
plucking the tips of waves like feathers, a race against
rain, high tide, no time
for breakfast. This time
no one started
without you, nothing was against
your will. When the children
worried over the starfish missing an arm
you could tell them nothing was final,
as if you had the final
say and time
was on your side, an arm
you’d only started
to raise between the children
and what you were up against.
Finding him there against
the base of the cliff like the final
opinion you hadn’t planned on, the children
knew he wasn’t asleep, but for a time
you tried not to believe them, you started
to shake his arm
as if in waking him you could arm
yourself against
words of three doctors, the cancer started
too early to tell how final
this time
on the beach with the children,
next week’s operation, the children
told more than you knew you could say. Arm
under his head, no time
to explain, against
knowledge forcing a final
breath into his lungs, what started
there started without you: the children
a final time saying they knew all along he was dead; at arm’s
length, untouchable, this fact against all you’d yet say, given time.
Pictures, South of Seal Rock
1
Ruby Johnson, who tosses the seagulls and one crow
table scraps out of a pail, blames
the dredge in Newport Bay for the sand.
There aren’t enough clams, she says, for her birds.
They need her, orbit around her sun-yellow slicker
each morning before she raises a hand.
Where she stands was thirty years ago nothing
but rock, a shelf
edging up to the cliff:
red, gold, orange, brown exposed
by rain and swirled smooth as shells,
toboggan runs, canyons at
Zabriski Point, whose colors
in sun not even the films of Antonioni
could catch.
2
And farther south, where these rocks end,
clams once were so thick Ruby could get
her limit without
trying, her husband
always got fish.
Today she says it takes longer, which may
be why all
we ever get each time is wet
up to our waists, our sleeves
full of sand to the elbows, never
finding the hole like a tiny volcano
sucking back its own eruption
each time a wave shuttles in still
more sand from the north, or so
the science film said: a natural
pattern we saw in slow
motion — red
dye relentless as lava, out and in
and down, the trail of a headless fowl.
That’s how, they said, harbors fill.
3
In winter even the tidepools are full.
I remember last summer the way anemones
blazed under water like meteors
all in a row: balls of green fire,
as they entered our atmosphere, caught
on film, each frame a slight
variation on what came before, how
I tried to make everything stop!
My camera went where I went, and I mourned
double exposures, a roll I shot and later found
the winding spool never
took up. Oh,
I wanted forever to see again pea crabs
I mistook for pebbles until a shadow
chased them away
and tidepools
so complex it took more
patience than focus to find
occasional snails
orange as mussel meat,
hermit crabs, starfish, chitons, all
covered in winter with sand so deep
we walked over the rocks as over soft
shoulders, anemones popping like blisters,
my trust in a natural balance framed
by assumptions only a newcomer makes,
the sun for weeks at a time in clouds
so thick I swore it would never return.
Fir Tip Jelly
In spring, when the tips of each branch bristle
Breen as sunlight wrapped into the crests of waves
and you for once have remembered to bring
ladder and boots for climbing, are wearing
a shirt that can take permanent sap, you don’t mind
vacation time you can’t spend on the beach, for hours
hair filling with needles and bark,
steam in your kitchen clouding the windows,
pot liquor gray as the months ahead when no one will
notice, fir tip or Welch’s, what’s
on peanut butter.
No matter. You’re making what one day
you saw at the county fair and swore
someday you’d try. And some other day
you’ll pick, like the pioneers did, kinnikinnick,
twinberry, salmonberry, wild lily of the valley, already
around your ladder more salal blossoms than dates in history:
rows of small white bells balanced
on last year’s growth like time lines you’ll never get straight
or catch up on, uncovering secrets the Forest Service
preserves, recipes
next to drawings of leaves thin as the difference between
Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, which
if you haven’t already checked with the guide you could have
picked by mistake (and may
or may not be poison) .
County Extension says
if this happens, to spray it on
bugs in your garden, although there’s no way
(since it’s after all spring and nothing is
even planted) to keep
scum thick as oatmeal from bubbling under the lid
or to know in advance these processes
history doesn’t record: trials
and errors of good intentions even
pioneers must have made, somehow
sometimes succeeding without your clear advantage:
food coloring which, not knowing yet how
little good it will do, green as springtime you
trust will do the trick.
Mushroom Picking, I Talk With a Bear
“Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect,
and whistle a happy tune, and no one will suspect
I’m afraid. ”
Oscar Hammerstein
The King and I
I could of course moralize, say forgetting to sing
was what did it. Or haste, one last chance:
chanterelles blunt tongues dissolving luminous
into the too-early dusk, unrecognizable
constellations ready to wink and go out. Oh,
I knew what I was after, climbing alone on the overgrown
logging road, wading the inarticulate grass
snarled brown. And maybe the bear did, too: that
unmistakable scat I stepped around
fresh with the orchard just that morning I’d been
told was raided, telling me if I wanted to keep
going I’d have to belt out a human announcement,
keep it up through clouds closing darker than moss
around me, thick glisten of needles, the edges
of leaves and air between blurring. And yes,
the bear would have been there anyway, I might
never have known: focusing not on the words
I was singing, no Anna lost in Siam, and I wasn’t
afraid, though maybe I should have been,
thinking instead of someone I should have
long before this forgotten, last words
that never were spoken: hidden
months, years at a time, deep as mycelium
feeding on decay this possible danger I couldn’t
identify. No field guide for it. Nothing to see.
No excuse, that day in the Coast Range forgetting
to sing, at last the mushrooms I hunted for opening
out of the gloom: golden
wings, victory
marking the edge of the road. No
mistaking that low unambiguous roar,
my surprise at how close
anything big as that could not be heard coming
“Bear,” I said, loud as I could. “I hear you.
Don’t worry. I’m here. You’re there. That’s fine.”
Bear language I made up on the spot,
trusting what mattered was not
what I said but that I was saying it, no
question at all of running away from it,
silent as humus my fingers
picking double time more than I’d come for:
chanterelles, fir needles, soil
still in the making; wordless
resolve I took with the dinner
down the hill. The basis for
moral decision a moment’s experience shifts.
Behind me, a bear
too real to be a metaphor.
Somewhere ahead, the letter
I didn’t yet know I would write.
Middle Sister Poem
Real as the ridge
line children draw sharp on the edge
of mountains, there’s a point
friendship sometimes will reach,
thin as a footstep between
east and west, where one of you
won’t go on and the wind
to the other says Don’t look
back oryou’regone.
Up ahead, the peak
you can climb
alone. And then?
California Interstate 5: Some Travelers’ Warnings
Silent as the false
teeth we found in the rest
stop restroom halfway between
Ball’s Ferry and Jelly’s Ferry roads
silent as Fourth of July all summer
bursts of oleander lining
the freeway profusion of fuchsia
magenta crimson cushioning
north from southbound traffic
the fact of their poison
my mother’s friend’s story
of soldiers on leave from
the war who never
returned having chosen a twig
to stir their coffee
instead of a spoon
messages I
wouldn’t hear anyway
car Japanese-made and purring
content as a lion at thirty-five miles
per gallon past a plague of oil wells
grasshopper heads single-
mindedly drinking their fill
trusting as red-winged blackbirds
perched on cattails deep in the ditch
or the chicken shiny as bootblack
scratching shoulder gravel miles
from any farm
determined
as giant crows one
every few miles flapping
off the attacks of sparrows
or
the biplane dusting fields for medfly
shooting up over the highway
after each row like a killer
whale in a show so low
over the road its shadow
could swallow us all.
The Willow in Jackson, Wyoming
1
Someone wanted to save it, pruned it
high as car tops, judged the line
between asphalt and roots thin as a dare
the limit sentiment could stretch
across our balcony view of Cache and Pearl,
gift shops, museum, the scene
of the evening shoot-out, the loser always
living for ski season, mountains stockaded
dead-end of every street in Jackson.
2
Out of the context of neon, the Hitching Post Tavern, a time
when holiday lights were once a year
and the transformation of branches to sky was more
delicate even than these
constellations of miniature bulbs
whorled around branches too many to see,
their wire connections invisible as the flight of Pegasus,
threat of The Bear, that incomprehensible pitcher spilling
all of the Milky Way.
3
White as the piles of linen
the driver delivered, the truck
at two in morning at getaway speed shot
everyone out of sleep,
leaves from the branches, the trunk
of the tree back down to its first six years.
The rain of glass the sound
of all most gentle
small promises breaking.
In the Teton National Forest
Porcupines, hungry as spring
for freshness, young tips of trees
or else it could have been lightning
I said, one snap judgement
of clouds lower
than a squirrel is safe.
But the seedling at home, transplanted from
the base of our friends’ own tree
is split at the top like the rest, you said.
And then we found one other trunk
divided not two but three
parallel ways: a quiver
of arrows, rifles
held at attention,
rockets years beyond us.
Learning the Silence
“When Japanese arrange flowers, the space
between the flowers is considered.
the shape of space between.”
Ellen Bass
You’ve been here before, your ears insist,
though you know it’s not true,
there’s nothing to count on — no vague
perk of the coffee pot, faraway
lawnmowers measuring tolerance —
how much space between small irritations
you used to call quiet
consoling as traffic
vibrations rocking the cells of sleep.
Alert as zinnias, sea anemones
poised for the least touch, here
in this cabin remote on this mountain
your ears put out feelers, any
moment a message, your ears
hollow as shells are on call:
Pine cone on roof!
Hummingbird’s wings!
Nuthatch checking the bark for bugs!
And what comes in between:
silence
so sure of itself
nothing you do can
ignore it, escape it.
Whatever sound is next is yours.
Learning the Clouds
“Rain crows can’t be trusted up here.
None of the signs up here can be trusted. ”
Al Bearce, Manayer
D. H. Lawrence Ranch, New Mexico
If this were Oregon under such sky, each day
it would rain. Morning clouds scouting
the western horizon bringing back more would know
what to do with themselves,
when it was time to quit grouping and re-
grouping like hands of cards covering all bets until
someone somewhere else lays down first and all
is waste: cloud the orchard could have used,
this one for cattle nuzzling sand,
one for this mountain whose air is so dry my
thoughts of home spark static between them,
so thin when my stomach growls the sound
startles the horse in the meadow below.
Knocking on wood I say so far I’m lucky,
Gallina Creek isn’t quite dry. I wait
all day to wash dishes, all week to bathe.
The water I used to let run while brushing my teeth
I shut off between rinses, the toilet
unflushed until odor insists: simple
rituals no one is witness to,
nothing like carrying water up ladders in pueblos
or hauling whole tankfuls to cabins in trucks.
Nothing sacred as corn dances
tourists cluster around like beads
on rosaries, circle suspecting something here
must be understood: Zia
the sun-shaped capitol building in Santa Fe
imitates: sun
around which all life in this land
revolves, the clouds
just passing by I try
as though it were the least I could do, to name:
Cirrostratus Cumulonimbus Stratocumulus
Cirrus Stratus Cumulus Nimbus
Cumulus Cumulus Cumulus.
El Santuario de Chimayo
1
They are all here, as always parked in
whatever shade is left: Winnebago La Familia
Ruiz, pickups, imports, Greyhound
charter bus. Children
inside the courtyard, around
and around the tombstones. Grandmothers
in whom all the sorrow
again is only beginning, waiting.
Those who have come from inside.
Those gathering strength to go in.
Dust from the parking lot shuMing sun,
settling, unobserved: feet
of miracles too tiny to claim.
Across the street: hamburgers, hot dogs, tamales.
Film in the Potrero Trading Post nearly always all gone.
2
Dim, the fidget of votive
candles, spotlight on
the altar, gilded retablos
carved almost two hundred years ago
fresh as silk
roses, carnations, handmade
lace on the altarcloth. Here
no one speaks, no one smiles,
all attention
ahead on the crucifix. Lips
fluttering: petals,
bouquet in the breath of God. Paid for,
trailing, knee by knee all the way up
the aisle, silent as hem stitches, whatever sins
this one woman could own.
3
Miracles happen here: milagros
like afternoon thunderstorms in the Sangre
de Cristos, predictable, who
knows on whom they will fall?
Earth from the back room — the hole, always
almost full, where once a mysterious icon
hundreds of miles from its absence
was found — this
same earth, eaten or even
touched, has made the lame
walk, the blind
see: mute
display on the walls, the proof, footsteps
of legend: rows of
crutches, remnants of dis-
belief, left behind.
4
Miracles yet
to come, leaving nothing to chance, for love of
someone back home
these Dixie cups, plastic bags, envelopes, here
the faithful take turns,
the earth they have come for obligingly powdered.
Sand. “Stand in it. Stand in it. Go
on!” this mother orders her son. “Both
feet! Step down!” This halo
over his head, his neck, his shoulders,
dust she fusses into his shirt: the miracle
set to begin.
Old man on the bench. Like bars of a crib
the walker holding him back. “Here,
Grandpa,” the girl
says. “Dirt. Dirt.”
“¿Tierra?”
“Dirt.”
5
Please Dear God help my husband control his drinking
smoking and to become a part of you Keep us in your prayers
Corners of envelopes, lined
paper from memo books, backs of deposit slips, these
messages edged into picture frames,
garlands of hope
grounded, public
the seeds of despair.
“Prayers,” someone whispers.
“This place is improved,” the man with her says.
“Last time, there wasn’t this kind of floor.”
6
Front of the Potrero Trading Post — overhang
dripping with ristras, red hot souvenir chiles
like so many teeth; delinquent
the horns of bulls, shriveled
in sun — the owners’ children argue
over the bicycle: whose
turn. Dust
scowling their feet.
Silent,
alone in the bank
of cottonwoods, over
and over the youngest
funneling
sand, one hand
to the back of the other,
ghost-thin the powder he washes
each time off in the creek,
returning, his own
hourglass
good for a whole afternoon.
Squash Blossom Necklace: Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, N.M.
Granada (Sp.): 1. Province of southern Spain. 2. The capital
of Granada in the central part of the province; site of
the Alhambra, the palace built in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries for Moorish kings. 3. Pomegranate.
4. Hand-grenade.
Silver descendant
of Moorish tradition Spain
absorbed like hail — turned into rain — all over
Granada sprouting
the glittering naja — fertile, the crescent
moon inverted: good
luck spilling like stars,
the fate of the Navajo for whom the moon
like a serpent
twined between this world and that
below, slender
as vines, bringing
news — squash
blossoms that centuries later in silver
would echo, hollow as bells
another defeat — transmuted through Mexico,
flowers of the granada in Navajo
hands flourishing
where farmlands were taken,
New Mexico desert
once fertile with miles of
irrigation — all attention
as far back as memory can go, channeled in
self-defense, towards war.
Pilgrim Pumpkin
25¢
Connecticut Field
(Cucurbita Pepo)
said the Northrup King display
in the University Bookstore that when I
was in school was the co-op
Grow pumpkins like the Pilgrims did.
Plant a little history
in your own back yard.
A pumpkin different, you think, from
all others, some purer strain, direct
descendant from the May-
flower, but no!
The pumpkin has been around longer
than you think. At least
7,000 years. Archeologists have found
pieces of pumpkin rind in the ancient ruins of
the Cliff Dwellers and sasket Weavers
in the southwestern United
States.
That other pumpkin we picked from the middle
of our own lot the morning our house
moved in
That pumpkin had a history too:
seed a single survivor of tilling, vacant lot
weeds once the garden of Robert Keefe
who built for his mother-in-law the house next door
whose plans were drawn for his own
who planted the apple tree
I built my daughter’s sandbox under
over the spot where later
I learned the old lady’s heart
stopped
whose widow who sold us this lot now lives next door alone
That pumpkin whose seeds we saved for next year’s garden
coming from not
just one but thousands
of previous pumpkins
Which certainly qualifies
the pumpkin as a true
native American
Chromosomes linked like arrows: arm in arm in
arms: truths innocent
of good as of harm
of words of pride
of a nation
a father, a mother
My daughter, Halloweten Sunday child chanting
“My great great
great great grand-
mother was
an Indian
woo-woo-woo-woo-woo”
The child I was in grade school boasting “I
am one hundred percent
German”
because everyone else was already
melted in the pot
my name was Ingrid which made me
special, my father
Chilean (but German)
my mother from Michigan (German)
The child not knowing Germany had
just lost another war, not knowing
what war was
that her parents refused
to teach her German for fear of what people would think
Her father refusing to fight, his heart
tolling in her like a bell, a copihue
blood-red Chilean
national flower growing high
on its vine, the song
she — barely a woman — learned, tracing
backwards steps he took away forever, the song
she learned to play
on his brother’s borrowed guitar
“Aquí mismito te déjo
hecho un copihue mi corazón”
The child the woman she was
trying to keep
alive in Villa Alemana, calling
through every market for
a pumpkin
“Calabaza, calabaza”
the word the dictionary said
“Calabaza”
not gourd
“Calabaza”
not squash
Pumpkin, there!
“¡Ay!
¡Cidracayote! ”
Pumpkin
meat solid to the core
I
the child the woman
my small college sent to bear goodwill
and understanding, bearing the need
to explain away Goldwater, Johnson, Viet-
nam beginning, to mourn a Kennedy I barely knew
Mississippi summer
How any grown nation could hate
so much
Explaining instead a pumpkin hollowed out
for Hallowe’en, a jack-o’-lantern
that after so much effort must
be good for something
Myth I invent
because a myth is needed
Procession of cousins behind a grinning pumpkin face
we carry like the Child of God, Mexican children’s
candles winding through dark streets
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
“Lo mismo cómo hacemos
en los Estados Unidos”
I
being borne next morning to graves
of grandmother, grandfather, everyone
in town with flowers (buying), flowers (selling), All
Saints’ Day mass pilgrimage in which my own
grows silent as a seed
Nothing
is that simple any more.
Consider this: pump-
kin vines may be
trained to climb a trel-
lis or fence. This takes
less space and can
give an exceedingly
handsome effect. The
fruit will hang safely.
That pumpkin we saved from the new
foundation of our house
Pumpkin whose seeds saved for next year’s garden grew
their vines between a dozen other vines, a summer-
fall-winter-squash harvest
grew
other seeds
whose genes like the souls of pollen
bees run
together like paint:
turban-pumpkin
Danish pumpkin, yellow crookneck-
pumpkin, butternut, zucchini, patty-
pan-pumpkin
next year’s indefinite orange and green.
Kurpark, Bad Homburg
Here, where often the Kaiser came from Berlin
hundreds of miles by train, his own private station
now a nightclub, the gambling casino
Dostoyevsky is said to have lost and kept on losing in,
still the same glamorous destination here at the end of
park benches pacing the distance
fountain to fountain where still the elderly stroll:
this water good for the heart, for digestion;
taste aside, this one good for the joints;
this one named for Elizabeth Brunnen, whoever
she was today majestic in stone overlooking
this garden of tulips, magnolias, this not-
so-young-herself American woman
jogging, she tells herself, for all the years
still between herself and these elegant pensioners —
arm in arm, in groups, who have already been through one,
at least, maybe two wars she cannot begin to imagine —
amazed at this woman running from something all of us
too well foresee. Around the next corner, this frog
splashing in stone, the golden ball in his hands in the pond
shiny as promise: that one kiss, which of us ever forgets.
Gast im Schloss
Upstairs in this castle, the same
romance of armor: swords, shields,
halberds each with the same
half-moon axe polished, the opposite iron
daw someone somewhere was killed with or
meant to be: empty
this chain mail someone somewhere else forged
link by link by the thousands by hand. And
on these helmets once measured to fit
the style of each artist, unique,
chromosome-thin, each engraving a glorious proliferation
of flowers and leaves, medallions, classical
heroes, their own
elaborate hearts long before Shakespeare
thought of it etched on their sleeves,
the hilt of this sword handle: lovers reclining
as once in this same chamber there must have been moments
no one gave thought to what this stone castle was for.
After a Strong Wind
Other
sound return
slowly, the way
the first
star blink on
unannounced.
Horses snuffling
weeds in the meadow.
Warbler patching the thicket
with song.
Flies on the screen
desperate again to get in.
See? See? Invisible
in the scrub oaks below,
western flyvatcher clearing
the air before landing, again
and again the single
note like a spear: See?
Like thoughts catching up to you.
Things you have known
all along.
II. A Shelter of Dolls
A Shelter of Dolls
Perhaps it began with the ornaments — fabric scraps
turned into mushrooms and teddy bears, flowers, birds, felt
storybook characters accurate down to the last
extra half-hour. You never saw such a tree. Or generosity,
how they would go to relatives, friends, neighbors just
over for coffee. Casual. As though right then
nothing else mattered. As though
this one didn’t take more than a day to make,
production line in her living room all year long.
Or earlier, purpose like security going
before four children were grown — or nearly, two
still at home when their step-father isn’t
fighting with them (his own, she says, lie and steal), or they
aren’t fighting their real father, thrown out of school —
their pictures in oils in the living room, forever small.
It’s nobody’s fault, she says, they’re good kids,
they help with charities, Children’s Services, church
bazaars she’s always in charge of — all summer, rummage sale
items in her garage, collecting like Saturday re-runs,
some things don’t change all at once.
Ihe youngest has all the boys after her.
Myself, I remember an answer from church camp.
Thirteen, I asked why people grew up. To have
children, our group leader said, so they some day can have
their own children. All he left out
curing tomorrow like salt, the girl on the label
spilling it, each time smaller, her picture
within a picture within her own hands
smaller, smaller, smaller.
The House on Douglas Street: A Map
Here is the house on Douglas Street
Here is the willow they planted in back of the neighbors
behind the house on Douglas Street
Here is the pear tree the father once picked
the bat in; the apple, too small for climbing;
fruit too wormy for eating; in front of the willow
behind the house on Douglas Street
Here, the two other apples, hammock between — tempting
the children to alley-oop-over, pulling the rope
all the way to concussion — the mother, pregnant,
thinking she held death in her arms, green
as the apples, the pear, the willow she wasn’t right then
aware of behind the house on Douglas Street
Here is the cherry, no branches for climbing, looming
over the playhouse, the mint in the garden, petunias,
the blanket after supper spread on the grass, the father
ready to catch the girl — each time on the ladder higher,
higher than the apple, the pear, the willow, small
below, behind the house on Douglas Street
And the plums no one ate — no one
but the wheels of the car picked up —
they don’t count
And the apples in front the girl picked up
for 10¢ a bushel, the honor of helping — smashed,
wormy, too close to grave conclusions — they
don’t count
But oh, the cherry south of her window,
its branches the squirrel — not knowing she watched —
came close in; cherry the rope swing hung in;
cherry Barbara fell out of;
here, the cherry she’d eat in all afternoon:
around her, for her, fruit
endless as morning cartoons;
trees outside her second-floor window in spring
she couldn’t see through, blossoms becoming
clouds the Baltimore oriole built a nest in, sunset
flashing all childhood long, all
around the house on Douglas Street.
Cinderella Dream at Ten
Each night under the tree the same wolf
waits for The Beauty to fall
down into the gravel circle the children
draw each day for marbles
(gravel fine as salt: ground
into your knees it has to
work itself out)
Each night the same wolf waits and no one
else is there to save
The Beauty waiting alone inside her
flowing yellow hair, the wolf snapping at her
plain blue skirts draped gracefully
over the lowest branch
(skirts the mice her only real
friends will trim with ribbons, lace, scraps
her wicked step-sisters don’t need)
So there’s no question: each night
you in your father’s car
(your father driving)
drive past the playground, your heart
in your knees even before
you see her
(in the tree where she always is)
struggle open the door,
struggle her into the seat beside you,
struggle to slam the door on the wolf who is
already gobbling down
(as you knew he would, painlessly)
your own legs
from toes to knees
waking you
right at the hemline of your own short skirt
knowing it’s happened before, your toes are
still there, not to cry out, knowing it’s after
all the price you pay for Beauty.
Against Regret
“Love you,” my sister says always last
second before we hang up, and you’ve
heard it, too, maybe said it
offhand as a habit, and said it
knowing it has to sound that way or it won’t
work: like dates you mother and father for years
put on the bottom of birthday cards, meaning
this is for keeping, this is to be saved, and God
knows you’ve tried, a clutter of good
intentions, charms against regret by now scattered
who knows where: the child
you almost remember each night in the inescapable dark
blessing like beads on a rosary each last
star bright name she can think of. Responsible.
Up to her not to leave anyone out.
The Teacher I Wanted to Be
my own forever, my mother
asked home to lunch each spring,
each spring someone new:
Miss Bloss, Mrs. Kuk, Miss Michaelson never
suspecting we waited for blossom time,
hoping the rain would hold off long enough,
counting the days like notes of that year’s recital piece
always I played for her, practising
hours longer than any
hundred years’ sleep any child could ever imagine:
the princess, the castle awakening, parting
branches blossoming over that aisle of tulips and lilacs, bright
promises I didn’t know I was making someday
to become that same teacher each spring
on the last day of school surprised by a girl planting
instead of a secret next to the ear bent low
a kiss, so quick she never could hear what running
all the way home, crying, she all year
had listened for: yes, she was
yes, a good girl
a good
girl
a good girl.
On the Nature of Tact
Poor teacher, her new dress is ugly, the girl
sees clearly: polka dots, hundreds
of little white lies exposed
on black nylon, obvious as
the permanent smell she has
nowhere to hide from, who
will sit next to her? How could her mother
force on her curls like notebook
spirals, blackboard-stiff, her dignity
shorter by three
inches at least. How
could the teacher believe her own words
confidential as grade books, bending
close, “Why dear, your hair looks so nice.”
“Thank you, Miss Erickson. That’s a pretty new dress.”
9:55 P.M.
Alone in the kitchen, this table
made from a door, cleared of everything
but paper, pencil, plants.
On windowsills other plants
double in darkness,
their breath that in the morning
in the steam of coffee making will porthole
this glass like my daughter’s eager nose,
tonight self-effacing as distance
darkness erases like chalk,
like dreams she’s tunneling through like a mole,
her father neatly tucked out of town on business.
Pulse of the heater beside me dense
as silence I slip into like water, each depth
insisting the mind is clearer than before.
Small pockets of vision rising
like souffle all the way into morning,
a promise of coffee, my own face
among the opposite plants.
Delicacies
Bears won’t come near this honey, defended
every inch of the way by thorns longer than
even the bodies of hornets, thicker
than porcupine quills — these gooseberries your
fingers learn safely to find, exploring
the meaning of once-a-year delicacy like
land newly discovered, inherited idiom
grandmothers knew — these
gooseberries must be worth more
than a sweet tooth satisfied. Two
hours at least in the picking-one at
a time, small melons random all over the vine.
Not your compliant blueberries, stripped
by the handful. Not
blackberries so big
you don’t need so many or even the silent
bells of salal, lined up mild as lullabies
almost remembered. Gooseberries
two hours more in one-by-one snipping off
blossoms with fingernails, dried
tassels of green
Chinese lanterns. Luminescent. Time
when doing this there’s
not much else you can do. Not
laundry. Not dishes. Not changing
diapers or mopping the floor. Time
for more than fingers to be pricked
into remembrance — new
reverence for the unrecorded
delicacy of dreams that must
once have gone on in all of our lives,
uninterrupted, for hours.
Signals
Just in time my sister remembers to put on the baby
the sweater Mother knit her.
It’s Christmas, they’ve driven all day, and the day
before leaving I know (I’ve done it, myself)
she was running from this store to that,
one last roll of Scotch tape, Pampers, stocking
stuffers, food for the cats who will have to look
out for themselves and the baby as always
wanting to nurse at the worst
possible times. And watching the clock, Mother
already (I know, though I haven’t myself arrived
wearing the earrings my sister
last Christmas gave me) is chopping
all the onions for stuffing; the turkey
the freezer has kept for a month, thawing;
the cookies too many to eat, patient under
plastic wrap on the living room table; her fingers
so arthritic each stitch in that sweater she says
is not very good (though really it is,
I couldn’t have done it) a penance for lapses
all of us every day make without knowing, balancing
need against need, these signals
we send to each other no words could
in any other possible way bring home.
Dream
1
She’s dead, they tell you
she hasn’t returned, the boat
was out all night, the waves, the storm
you slept through, how could
you leave her with strangers, not leave word
where you could be reached,
you didn’t
give her permission to die without you,
body a leaf, a clump of grass
(pull in your tongue, it doesn’t become you)
arms peaceful as bells, each side.
2
Alive, you intend
to find her, water around you colder than fear,
grief taking you in like the mother
you should have been
you should know
she wouldn’t give up
needing you
to find her
on the sand on the island, watching them
comb their golden mermaid hair
to wrap yourself about her like a shell
tongue the sand from her hair, her cheeks,
her eyes, her white skin smooth as a pulse
to believe your love is stronger than anger.
Our Daughter, Thirteen, Says She Is Spending the Night with a Friend
Coming home from the movies, we say this
was the right choice, she wouldn’t have
liked it anyway. No
danger. No sex. So wholesome even the dogs
behaved, their tongues at the end of the fifty
mile race discreet, out of sight.
And we enter the silent house more silent
knowing this silence will last all night long,
no sudden explosions of music through air vents,
nerves we didn’t know we had
developed like shields, invisible guardians love
demands of the self so that it can keep
on giving, tangible now as moments of change
no one notices: one last bedtime
story we didn’t remark upon,
when did we last pick her up? This daughter
who won’t read the paper we left this morning
pointedly open, the nine-year-old girl in the next town
two days missing found dead. Daughter
we don’t yet know next weekend with friends
will call from a phone booth at midnight,
not say where she is, although later
the ending will turn out all right. Beginning,
each night this watching with nothing to see.
Another Dream
Of course it shouldn’t
mean anything
Roller coaster round
and simple as a snail
A simple beginner’s track
for a child at grown-up
Height, drawing me into
abandon a flag
Each time around I wave at her
incredulous standing
Next to her father
she counts them
Six times
Would you try it
Yourself now
holding my hand
Holding me back from the center
of the circle a cairn
A sign of stone
on stone
The base of a fountain
dry as fear
Snake in the center issuing
towards us farther
Than fireworks (Fourth-
of-July small pellets we light
with a match) it keeps
on coming harmless
I should be
telling you
Shame, shame this fear
of a snake
Blossoming
calm as intention towards
A single trillium flower
your father and I found growing alone
Hiking the base of Sahalie Falls
where later we married
In April the snow at our feet
waxed hard and smooth as
Trillium petals we later
etched into our own silver rings
Three-petalled trillium opening here
like certainty this
Is the flower
of God.
Déjà Vu
August, before.
This countertop, white
bowl of plums:
two purple
two green
two the small red
throat of the hummingbird.
Still life someone
else in
some other
life could have painted:
this glimpse
not of the past but the future
you, like a blossom too busy
blooming
all along
unknowing, dreamed.
No. 14. Duet
“And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, light of light,
very God of God: who for us and for our
salvation came down from heaven.”
Johann Sebastian Bach
Mass in B Minor
Poised between
idea
and action, one
God and incarnation, this
circular motion could be complete
in itself
eternal as waves
cresting
a spiral:
birds
butterflies
playful
advancing
retreating
in unum
together
voices revolving
precise as
constellations
around the north star
the point
where all
is possible
nothing
exists without
its opposite
heaven and earth
mind and emotion
lovers
in unum
knowing beyond
logic the point
between agape
and eros, reflections
of each in the other, sun
and moon, lumen
de lumine, circling
the source of creation
Eve
the reflection of Adam
Adam of God
God of who knows what and we
go on faith, trusting
Et
ex Patre
only in sound
in spirit incarnate
a promise of grace
so profoundly delicate we
prolong
our own expectations like
a pas de deux
Deum
de Deo
voices turning
back
on themselves, restraint
and abandon, who
is the leader
who the led?
Voices
rising, falling
in unlson
kites
in the same
wind
dolphins
parallel over
the waves
butterflies stitching
together the breath of the meadow:
a movie you may have seen
where the lovers are fated never
to live
out their lives together
an echo
pagan and Christian
of what could
be, has been,
hands we extend
each to the other
per quem
omnia
facta sunt
the moment of change in
the space between fingertips
Michaelangelo saw
Bach heard
the echoes of old and new
testaments
tangible
descendit
de coelis
Botticelli’s madonna:
her robe blue as ocean
as sky, wordless
the source of all song
forever visible, over and over
the moment the gift is given.
Reunion
We could go over and over it, why it
didn’t work out: white sea
foam in the parking lot
spiraling, such
a winter storm and we
intent on getting the past
straight and out
of the way: corkscrew
breaking just after we’d bought it,
picnic we hadn’t prepared for, the rest
of the time we never would have again.
“Look,” you said
“feathers for shoulders”: foam
I tried to capture on film
pillowing
out of the rocks, the rain
stopping we said just for us
long enough. “That’s crazy,”
I said, not meaning it, knowing it
was what anyone could have said
about us, going
just so far and no more: ridge line
trail above us hidden
in trees where years
ago alone in this same
exquisite confusion I dreamed
I would take you, never
dreaming there could be chances to miss.
At the Rancho la Brea Museum, Los Angeles
“However certain our expectations
The moment foreseen may be unexpected
When it arrives.”
T.S. Eliot
Murder in the Cathedral
1
There are places the present
gathers itself like a fist and won’t
Iet go.
Choices tug: who knows
what lies ahead.
Layer on layer what could
have been, in the end
the same as what was.
Certainty
deeper than breath.
What could we ever have done
we didn’t
at least once try?
2
And we could forever
look back
this way:
Where the saber tooth leaped
on the dire wolf stuck with the stork the whole
lot of them drowned, the stories of
five hundred thousand
in bone still
volunters sift through.
Epics of femur and tibia.
Legends of ribs reconstructed.
Smaller than printers’ type, labelled,
divided: truth in the teeth
of mice, the claws of insects: language
before it was born.
3
Now you see her,
now you don’t, that skeleton
woman a trick of light
turns whole.
And back once again, relentless
illusion, truth
laid bare with deception.
Layer on layer:
the woman I was
with you, her voice
buried for years
reappearing. This moment
we hadn’t expected, resolving
the past: that we would want
to go on, the flesh
was still alive.
4
Dry, it was all on the surface: a crescent
moon shattered like glass
still of a piece: milk agate
centuries, waves bonded smooth.
Looks like something is in it, you said, and right
then it did look deep: a surprise
in the stone. Like the cut one
I’d given you first.
A souvenir impulse polished
beyond what water made natural.
Frozen, a yolk
forever breaking. A sun.
5
This is the way we live now, you say,
as if calling a spade a spade
makes it any less black,
the dirt it could shoulder
more acceptable not
pretending otherwise.
And still I would dig.
I was afraid, I said.
I said I didn’t have time.
True, all of them,
none of the good reasons hold.
But this
I couldn’t say to your face,
the oldest
one in the world: revenge.
That too.
What I never wanted, you say,
I wanted. Too much.
No other translation.
This open admission you try
not to hear. As though one of us
could in advance have known.
Inflorescence
n. 1. A flowering; flourishing. 2. Bot. a) The mode of
arrangement of flowers in relation to the stem or axis.
b) A cluster of flowers. c) All the flowers growing on a
single plant. d) A single flower.
1
Thunder again southwest unfolding, south-
east, northeast, north like yesterday these
black edges of blossoms centering everywhere, each
Day this celestial inflorescence shadowing
hills, mesas, lavender blue the desert, lavender green,
the names of color flowers better would sing —
Lupine, penstemon, larkspur, sage, here
I’m learning them all: color wheels long ago
all of our seventh-grade class had to make.
Fine gradations of tone, thin grace notes. Test
all of us failed: How many stairs to the classroom?
What color the hall? The teacher
Who taught us to see, sent home
before her own condition was visible, taut
as the canvasses she left behind.
Full as a color wheel, from
that time on centered
we always assumed, at home.
2
“If you love me, you wouldn’t have gone,” my
daughter convinces herself on the phone. A handle.
Door that won’t open, a false room. Something
She hangs onto, knowing I left for only part
of summer, the calendar before I left marked
when I’d be home. Today
She was to have visited.
Rift between us I should have expected, two
continents so far away we can’t even rub each other
Wrong: like a storm, the stern
cargo of self-remonstration all of us from childhood back
bear, thinking we’ve been on our own.
3
Seeing it, isn’t the same as being between
doors, open from nothing
to nothing, framed free-standing in air
In a desert unnaturally flat, flat
yellow crumpled, the rug on the sand
the robes of the woman the artist in nineteen
Forty-six put barefoot upon it, the baby
disconsolate echo of her own expression,
capped in ruffles, nursery white:
Tanning’s “Maternity” turned away from the sculpture,
unrecognizable, small as genitals on
the horizon, black
Sky bearing down turbulent
as decision where choice
doesn’t exist.
4
Below this window the meadow, the young
woman who just this morning I helped sneak
over the gate to sit in the meadow, to sketch
A desert below I have every day
wakened to, rich as a soul on loan and forgotten,
returned: sunlight
Mapping space wider than inspiration, this mountainside,
legends of those here before: the one
who left three children forever, to live with the writer;
The painter whose husband for the sake of her art
chose to have none, to whom
just yesterday I sent a poem. Jenny in
The meadow below me wrapped in flowers
bright as stained glass, the small
ministrations of sun for whom it is only
Beginning — through her hands charcoal
blossoming here in the green
tradition of needles and stars.
5
Arms small around knees, small talismans
against the sky, the journey this day
interrupted, against all chance of goodbye
How many hours did she sit there alone?
Her solitude I kept returning to look at off-center
the way we see stars, blinded by moon,
That region where words cannot travel
fragile as dreams, the fine alluvium we
bring into all we do.
Her drawing I later found rolled between cedar
slats of the gate: forever the whole
circle I see from this window,
Meadow to mesas to mountains, the clouds
too big for the top edge of paper,
forever right here the center
Opening
outward, balancing this
wild exuberant gesture of sky.
Under a Night Sky
To have walked on the moon and returned
to look back up at it, saying
I’ve been there, my father
wonders how it must feel to them now:
how nothing — earth, sky — can ever
be the same, themselves
the men their families see perhaps
even tonight
like us, sitting in the back
yard, after
dinner, simply
looking up, one
of our old ways of finding each other after
I grew beyond laps and like an oversized
heart the familiar
Braille of our fingertips failed,
stories becoming
all we knew we could go by: my father
a child surviving
earthquakes in Chile,
the wrath of the plague;
my father the gymnast turned
bank clerk becoming the captain’s
steward, proving
himself
hand over hand to the top of the highest
mast, impressing the crew, his daughter
years later who
in his voice saw moonlight
singing
over the backs of dolphins around Cape Horn
where still one hundred
days from land the radio
III. Singing the Mozart Requiem
Singing the Mozart Requiem
I
“For who in the World will both mourn
and rejoice at once and for the same reason?”
T.S. Eliot
Some of us already older than Mozart was when death
tipped the job to his student it isn’t
your usual courage
Quam olim Abrahae
pro-
misisti
that every week
brings us here
Abraham isn’t
first on our minds
promises fail the rest eternal
these words plead for
hopefully many years off
knowing this
Et lux perpetua
is the twentieth century
this
Et lux perpetua
breath we
utter together
is not
going to bring
back the selves we know
we ourselves
have buried the promises
all of us once made never
to grow
old to add
layers of caution like rings on a tree
saying this
rehearsal is re-
creation a justification to families
friends time taken from keeping
up with the news the job what we say
Dona eis
we owe ourselves this
exhilaration again
unexpected we are
at this moment alive.
II
“Please, answer. To talk together is
the only way to survive.”
Wera Kuchenmeister
Letter, East Berlin
Last year where under the vow of silence
for centuries monks
built their stone walls so thick sunlight
still enters surprised
we sang.
No audience Hostias
listened, we sang
for sound itself, a rehearsal — et preces
that choir from Frankfurt out
for a day on the Rhine. Listen,
you never have heard such song.
What stone gave back Tibi
it gave
ten times over: Domini
pleas demanding
attention no god
could ignore, no grave
could not be moved by.
Where sunlight knelt down
that song rose.
It was right that the amsel ignored us.
Over our heads she fluted
back and forth with food, her nest
high on the saint’s carved crown.
Her chicks filled out rests with their drone.
And it could have seemed that day out of time
the rest of the world was elsewhere: Quam olim Abrahae
missiles arriving hours from us
were not waiting burial, peace promisisti
talks were not breaking down,
riding back on the bus thinking next year
the amsel will nest,
this choir will sing somewhere else.
Stones will once again keep their silence.
Sunlight will kneel in grave silence.
This is what I must say I believe.
III
“After silence, that which comes next to
expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Aldous Huxley
Three months without sun, his mission
locked in Antarctic ice, my Chilean cousin
survived hearing
Mozart, the only composer he found
really sane, the only to balance
promise and
memory — Requiem
wordless this
region of ice and clouds, Abraham’s mountain,
admitting our own
helplessness once
again we begin.
“Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche, “
my cousin quoted Neruda
driving to mining camps, fishmg towns, children
not knowing sacrifice by not
knowing anything
else, the name
“Allende”
red on walls around schools, banks, private
gardens hidden below
jagged glass set in cement.
IV
“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying . . .; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”
W.H. Auden
Yes, I can be tempted and some
days I say
All right, art is not
after all moral, this Requiem
as we sing it has nothing to do with the world
we in our distances try
to imagine: threat
in the hands of Victor Jara
voice of Garcia Lorca still
Chile and Spain remember: as though
silence were not
also loudly political and this Requiem
no common eulogy
in this time
in this twentieth century
this inexorable push to a common extinction
the tests of courage placed
on us
the tests we place on ourselves.
V
“In the midst of winter I found
within my heart an invinable summer.”
Albert Camus
As far beyond definition as beauty,
beauty profound as grief
these are not words we use easily,
shields for defense, these melodies circling
towards a moment where every
note
balances time
and our knowledge of time
Benedictus
my father
eighty, for whom each day is a blessing
my mother
already surviving all those back home
Benedictus
the child
I was I can only begin to remember
not needing ever
to know what it is we should live for
Qui venit
this autumn without
rain each
day a few more leaves
Lux aeterna
turning until
every tree in town celebrates
sunlight we hardly feel we deserve
Requiem
holding our breath
each leaf on each tree poised for the least
wind.
Notes
Pilgrim Pumpkin
- “Aquí mismito te dejo
hecho un copikoe mi corazón”The moment I leave you, my heart will turn into a copihue (bell-shaped, scarlet blossom, the national flower of Chile); from the folk song “Chile Lindo” - “my small college sent to bear goodwill”The time is 1963. The college is Cornell College, Iowa — which was participating in a student exchange program called The Experiment in International Living.
- “Lo mismo cómo hacemos
en los Estados Unidos”The same as we do in the United States - “All / Saints’ Day mass pilgrimage”Hallowe’en is not celebrated in Chile, but November 1 is a national holiday devoted to decorating family graves.
Singing the Mozart Requiem
I
- “Some of us already older than Mozart was when death
tipped the job to his student”Mozart was in the process of composing the Requiem, a funeral mass, when he died at age 35. One of his students, Xaver Sussmayr, completed it from sketches Mozart had left. - “Quam olim Abrahae promisisti”Which thou didst promise of old to Abraham (from the Offertorium)
- “Et lux perpetua”And perpetual light (from the Introit)
- “Dona eis”Give to them (from the Introit)
II
The setting of this section is Kloster Eberbach, an eleventh-century monastery in West Germany.
- “Hostias et preces, Tibi Domini”Sacrifice and prayer unto Thee, O Lord (from the Offertorium)
- “amsel”blackbird
- “missiles arriving hours from us”Summer of 1983. U.S. Pershing missiles were being shipped to West Germany for installation.
III
The setting of this section is Chile, 1963, before President Salvador Allende was elected to office. My cousin, a dentist who had traveled with the Chilean Navy to Antarctica, was showing me the countryside.
- “Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche.”I could write the saddest poems tonight.
IV
- “Victor Jara”One of Chile’s most popular poets and folk singers. In September 1973, in Santiago, he and 6,000 others, mainly university students, were held prisoner for three days by the military, who were engaged in overthrowing the constitutional government of Socialist President Salvador Allende. Large numbers of students were killed. Jara’s fingers were chopped off with an axe, and he was then machine-gunned to death.
- “García Lorca”Federico Garcia Lorca, one of Spain’s most prominent poets, disappeared and was later found murdered during the Spanish Civil War, in 1936. He was 37.
V
- “Benedictus, Qui venit”Blessed is he who comes (from the Benedictus)
- “Lux aeterna”Eternal light (from Agnus Dei)
- “Requiem”Rest (from Agnus Dei)