Wet Apples, White Blood 9780773577169

Table of contents :
Contents
Prayer
ONE
Because thrift is not always a virtue
Daylight Savings
Spring
Equinox
Black Forest
Lot’s Wife
Two Rivers, Montréal, 1669
Accident at Windsor Station, Montreal, Saint Patrick’s Day, 1909
Virtuoso
X
Summer Sublet
For Rent
Shadow
Why we have lived so luckily
Dream Pockets
Sleeping Figures
TWO
Wet Apples, White Blood A CYCLE
Mary’s Milk
Mrs. A’s Vegetable Stand
Milk Muse
Mother Platypus
Instructions for the Child in the Womb
Inkling
At the Tomb of King Tut’s Wet Nurse
Angel Maker
Medea
On the Difference Between Boys and Girls
Hera
THREE
Galactopoesis A CYCLE
Wind
Urgent Care
Breather
Ultrasounds
Incident Room
Ward
Real Living
The Mend
Autumn Song
FOUR
Gestures of Living
Naming the Children
The Whelping
Katie Flower
Penguins at the Ecodome
Foreign Exchange
Day and Night
Girl in the Butterfly House
Amber Song
Goose Bay, Prince Edward Island
The Grass
Notes
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

we t a p p l e s , w h i t e b l o o d

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Kerry McSweeney and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Allan Hepburn, and Carolyn Smart titles in the series Jeffery Donaldson

Waterglass

Shawna Lemay

All the God-Sized Fruit Chess Pieces

David Solway

Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner Tim Bowling

The Thin Smoke of the Heart

What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Credo

Aurian Haller

Carmine Starnino Mavis Jones

Her Festival Clothes

Brian Bartlett

The Afterlife of Trees Before We Had Words Bamboo Church

S.P. Zitner

Ricardo Sternberg

Franklin’s Passage

David Solway

The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself

Andrew Steinmetz

The Silver Palace Restaurant Wet Apples, White Blood

Mark Abley

Naomi Guttman

Wet Apples, White Blood naomi guttman

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn-13: 978-0-7735-3245-8 Legal deposit second quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Guttman, Naomi, 1960– Wet apples, white blood / Naomi Guttman. (Hugh MacLennan poetry series) Poems. isbn 978-0-7735-3245-8 1. Breastfeeding – Poetry. 2. Mother and child – Poetry. I. Title. II. Series. ps8563.u67w48 2007

c811′.54

c2006-906255-2

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 Baskerville.

For Jonathan

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contents

Prayer

3

one Because thrift is not always a virtue 7 Daylight Savings 8 Spring 9 Equinox 10 Black Forest 11 Lot’s Wife 12 Two Rivers, Montréal, 1669 13 Accident at Windsor Station, Montreal, Saint Patrick’s Day, 1909 14 Virtuoso 15 X 16 Summer Sublet 17 For Rent 19 Shadow 21 Why we have lived so luckily 23 Dream Pockets 24 Sleeping Figures 25 two Wet Apples, White Blood a cycle Mary’s Milk 29 Mrs. A’s Vegetable Stand 30 Milk Muse 31 Mother Platypus 32 Instructions for the Child in the Womb Inkling 34

33

At the Tomb of King Tut’s Wet Nurse 35 Angel Maker 36 Medea 37 On the Difference Between Boys and Girls Hera 39 three Galactopoesis a cycle Wind 43 Urgent Care 45 Breather 47 Ultrasounds 48 Incident Room 51 Ward 49 Real Living 55 The Mend 57 Autumn Song 59 four Gestures of Living 63 Naming the Children 65 The Whelping 66 Katie Flower 67 Penguins at the Ecodome 69 Foreign Exchange 72 Day and Night 71 Girl in the Butterfly House 70 Amber Song 73 Goose Bay, Prince Edward Island The Grass 77 Notes 79 Acknowledgments

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Wet Apples, White Blood

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p r ay e r

Open to me: rest your ribs into my hands. Sing your sweetest throat on your strongest guitar. Feed me the fruits of your wholeness and draw raw waters for my thirst. Whisper in the voice of softest coinage: a million copper stars. Polish my blood and my breath with your sighs and permit me, permit me to ask you anything.

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one

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b e c a u s e t h r i f t i s n o t a l w ay s a virtue

Today, behind the golf course, where no one goes, by the abandoned barn, its hand-made silo boarded like a pirate’s eye, I stole them in bunches, grabbed branches, bent them down, ripped green wood, leaving shreds and a snow of petals. Each May I opened the screen porch of my parents’ house to sleep in that smell. I haven’t forgotten the deep violet taste of walking home in the dark with a new boy, holding hands and laughing while my neighbors slept in faded rooms and the lilacs the lilacs, leaned their cool faces toward us, a thousand panicles, night-pulse of bloom.

7

d ay l i g h t s av i n g s

Spring forward all promise, like midget daffodils liberated by my rake from last year’s ropey stalks. And yet an hour’s gone, vanished like dream-embers. Sun, light, the blue jay squawks. Fall back an extra hour to amortize the ache, that saboteur instruction we lean on every year. Beggarly days ahead: evening light contracted, some other hemisphere.

8

spring

All morning I lay staring at the wall lay as if myself a wall of barren glass. Outside, a tribe of budding trees fanning with breeze sprayed green dust on the cars. Bees knocked at my screen humming this song: all that is unseen advances to radiance as if commanding to open the trillium, forsythia the sum of the unripe garden. By noon they were gone leaving a bowl of watery moon in the freshly made sky.

9

equinox

Banging wakes me – What is the opposite of ruin? The bog at the bottom of the hill opens its dark eye, and my neighbor, restless with the will to turn soil, knocks with a shovel the snow’s tough crust. The road’s mud shoulders loose their icy shawls. Sweet peas, I hear him mutter, in the rubble of my dream.

10

black forest

Dirty dawn: a bunch of kids sit on the curb listening to the electric hum between last call and morning traffic. She’s almost sixteen – a spring breeze blows the cotton skirt between her thighs. A man she’s just met bends to light her cigarette. His apartment had been full of spilling ashtrays and bad paintings he made himself leaned against unfinished walls. A mattress lay on the floor like a slice of moldy bread. The unshaven face, the smell of something raw tilts toward her lips, and then she sees his hands delicate, lean, fluttering. Decades gone, decades married she walks a country road, reads the sky and sees his crooked smile once again – You like black forest cake, don’t you? We ate it in bed, he says, blowing out the match. Don’t you remember?

11

lot’s wife

For weeks I watched you calculate and scratch on graph paper the square footage of the van examine maps, pack and sell our books. The date you’d picked to leave for the flamingo pink apartment came, but I wouldn’t speak or look at you. Raging from the truck I ran back to our abandoned flat. What did I think I’d see? Walls scarred yellow, a lonely key? You were the one who planned it, and it burned that you’d remove me from familiar seasons. Like Klee’s historic angel, I had my reasons: ahead I saw a scroll of desert road. So, as we flew west my back was turned and from my lips flaming torrents flowed.

12

tw o r i v e r s , m o n t r e a l , 1 6 6 9

To you who blew across the ocean, there was nothing – no granite imprint, no wall to mark that little spit of land where two rivers joined (one river long-since buried). In winter we trapped, wrapped ourselves in furs and skins. In summer we came here to trade, pass as barter a child’s beaver jacket for a knife, strings of bead the colour of robin eggs or dragonflies, or white and smooth as teeth. Above you in a tree I watched, my brother and I giggling at your back’s white knobs – such things had just begun to interest me. My brother threw some acorns down; you turned to see the squirrel you thought was there, set eyes on me – an unrepentant blue. We met then and I knew I would make a savage out of you.

13

ac c i d en t at wi n d s o r s tati o n , m o n t r e a l , s a i n t p a t r i c k ’ s d ay, 1909

In the sodden winter light I went to meet the morning train, hoping to see you well and greet you with the children in my arms. I’d baked a cake and set the house in order, but when the steaming locomotive tore through wood and plaster, crashing, the station master shoving us aside, (Bougez! Bougez! he cried), I thought only of us, the ones aground. Another woman and her children died waiting for their man who, when he saw their bodies, hollered like a horse gone wild. I searched for you as best I could in the blue-capped bedlam and when I couldn’t find you headed home feeling barely saved, perhaps abandoned by calamity. I’ve wondered since if indeed you did arrive and see us chalky, scared, relieved. Did we remind you of a promise made in youth and never kept, things being what they are in life – all compromise? Once you said that misery is preferable to boredom, and when I think of this I hear that man’s desperate cry. Did you hear it too?

14

virtuoso

Unannounced, you walk into my dream wearing an artfully crushed silk jacket, as if creases could cover arrogance. As always, your grey eyes fill with sacred feeling. When you open your arms I know I will echo at your touch. I was sure I’d buried you. Why after so long have you returned, catching my eye like loosestrife on the highways’ margins? Once again, I ask myself whose rehearsal this will be and step backward. When I turn to walk away I look over my shoulder to see the bones of your face lengthening and your arms loose in their sockets, weighted by those magnificent players.

15

x

Months later I’d still find those luxuriant hairs, come upon one folded in a blanket put away for summer or in the corner of the piano room, and long to know the book she was reading, hear her foot pulse on our wooden floors the way I had sensed the smell of her bones under her dress as she took my ticket and ushered me into the chapel. That’s when her arm brushed mine. We heard the singer together but we had no names. I didn’t yet know what salve I’d use to heal where she would scar my blood, blood that has circled countless times since, or that now she’d be clouds and shadows, a novel read and given away and all I would want from her is to find who I was then, when my future was clouds, my blood so much younger, my poems unwritten.

16

summer sublet

Our children shivered when we laid them in those beds. It was a first floor railroad flat, rented sight unseen, tidy, dark, not too unclean, crowded with a grandmother’s mahogany, bags of winter coats stuffed under mattresses. We unlocked the door to the smell of coffee beans, all summer something fateful among us, like the mistake of fitting four into three. From the kitchen table we heard sirens stretch across alleys, whistling pistons, push of brakes. How many times did I trip on the hall runner? How often had I knocked that picture off the wall before stashing their smiles in a bureau drawer: only child with his mother’s burnished curls, his father’s narrow face. 17

The heat was a hand at our throats. Nights we propped open the broken sash windows with bricks from the courtyard where each evening the landlord, a man from Greece, watered his potted tomatoes and smoked his last cigarette. From the balcony the wife smiled down shyly in her flowered housecoats. Once we heard the upstairs bedsprings but mostly, late at night, scraps of marital argument blew in through the screens like elegies to our future.

18

for rent

Cupid’s season has expired. The city breathes like one who’s eaten well. Past blue tongues of streetlamps, past bicycles propped on garden rails, giant sunflowers, and the grizzled neighbor pitting prunes in his swept courtyard, you make your way. From the park across the street children shout, unwilling to come in, not caring how your luck will run – Whoever has no house now will never have one. How long since a hummingbird danced deep in your voicebox? You lust after every honeyed window, every box of dripping vines. When your gaze falls on a button in the gutter, takes in graffiti on a wall, you think of them as signs. Remember how it feels to fold a blanket one last time? Whoever you once were has come and gone. Wrong number says the phone. Whoever is alone will stay alone. Tomorrow children will wake and dance to freshly minted tunes strung like sheets across the alleys, not caring for your pleasures – a radio quartet, a book, a cup of tea. Who then will do the work, will read, write long letters through evening?

19

Tonight you slid the drapes across your window and banked a blaze to heat the belly of a stone. And when you tired of the hum of question and regret, when you felt your power leaking in a mist, you pushed yourself from the table, grabbed a hat, forgave yourself for what you own, and went to wander on the boulevards, up and down.

20

shadow

A girl studies her mother chopping the onions and talking on the phone. Without being asked, the girl folds the napkins into exact rectangles, nestles spoons into the knives’ straight backs. Even at the dressmakers’ she sits watching: pinned into a sterling sheath, her mother is an idol with silken twist around the neck. One of the ladies offers her cocoa, touches her cheek: Your mirror, she says, nodding at the mother who closes her eyes and nods with the usual smile. Sometimes the girl finds her in the cellar sorting clothes, packing the ones no longer stylish for Suzette, the country girl who’d come to care for them.

21

How cruel the girl is – pushing her away, who stands behind her in the bathroom mirror, brushing the girl’s hair straight when what she craves are Mother’s curls.

22

w h y w e h av e l i v e d s o l u c k i l y

When on quiet mornings you see us oiling hinges or pushing a slow broom along the porch’s wide boards see us stop our work to gaze down at the delicate lake – we are searching for the answer. You want to know what will happen? You will twist us in sheets and set us in dirt or burn our bones to gravel. Don’t count on keeping the house – Last summer’s shingles wear silver in the rain that trickles down the chimney and cracks the brickwork. Soon a vinegar must will seep from the eaves. Do you think we will live forever for you? Remember the tin-lined closet – even there mice leave messes in Grandmother’s linens, stitched in the thick letters of girlhood.

23

dream pockets

Looking past the clock I tread the broken stair continuously climbing my body parting air. I tread the broken stair past corridors and tunnels my body parting air a protozoan puzzle. Past corridors and tunnels a maze of glass and clay a protozoan puzzle a one-act solo play. Maze of glass and clay floating atmospheric walls a one-act solo play roaming echolalic halls. Atmospheric walls – a dreamer’s ruse of home. Echolalic halls I find the extra room. The dreamer’s ruse of home: no knob, no key, no lock. I find the extra room, I’m looking past the clock.

24

sleeping figures

This is no trompe l’oeil, bronze-cast couple on a crafted bench. No, this is Venice Beach: he sleeps stretched out – she’s slouched over, shell-bent, holding his head in her lap. They are hatted, scarved, ragged, and out cold this warm spring afternoon. What faith in the world or lack of it has led them here to be watched over by the hawkers, gazers kaleidoscope of skaters, crystal-readers, and miraculous limbless dancers? And hours after the last refugee brings down his stall, packs away the final Chinese kite or pair of espadrilles, will they be woken then by headlights, hunger, or the cooling air?

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tw o

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Wet Apples, White Blood a cycle mary’s milk

Her blue robe opened for his lips and in jealous gulps he drank like any other. What did he know? He drank for hunger drank for thirst his body part of her she his sun, he her creation. His halo shone with joy.

29

m r s . a’ s v e g e ta b l e s ta n d

Over cabbage heads and stiff rows of cucumbers Mrs. A. offers me this phrase: white blood, which illustrates how we make them ours, write them even after birth, with fluid drawn from flowering chest ducts, how we coat soft sinews with muscle and fat. A bad year, she says, dismissing the strawberries. I choose a basket anyway. They will remind me that it is mid-summer, even if I spend my days on the dark bed, nursing or trying to sleep. I know how they’ll taste: tart at the top, sweet at the tip, that mix of white and red.

30

milk muse

Morning’s palest hour wakes me – the baby takes my dripping lumen then sleeps again. I open the door to hear the tide. Nothing moves, not even the rabbit paused by the clothesline, not the beach grass, cool in the dew. The sky is close. Copernicus displaced us sending Earth adrift – no more circles, but ellipses, no crystal spheres, but planets tethered to the sun. I want to hear sky music, a concerto made of partial light and shadow, available to all who wake between two stillnesses, to climb into Orion’s outstretched arms, lean my head against his giant shoulder, and be lit within – a brand new constellation nursing the stars.

31

m o t h e r p l at y p u s

Hush under river, coiled in hidden burrow sleeps on bedgrass the mother of paradox, dawdled and dry. Here currents pummel mud walls. Two withered riddles cling to her chest-pelt: curved seahorses, grub-ugly, color of shrimp paste. They lick at loose flags of milk unfurled in her fur. Red heat fills blind eyes.

32

i n s t ru c t i o n s f o r t he c h i l d in the womb

Because the child knows in its soft bones the details of his mother’s day a pregnant woman must avoid funerals and mourning, ravaged bodies persons crippled by disease and poverty. She should surround herself with peacocks and watch carp glisten like coins deep in warm ponds. For beauty let her study pearls and jade, for strength flying geese and racing dogs. Above all shun the sparrow’s meat or the child will be dissolute and without shame.

33

inkling

She hardly remembers that first ache when the buds on her trunk began to puff like pastry first right, then left. She worried they wouldn’t match and rubbed them both to make them grow. It turned out one was larger, one slightly turned, like feet. Now at night she kneads small circles to be sure nothing’s lurking no knot or nub hiding in those fleshy layers.

34

at t h e t o m b o f k i n g t u t ’ s wet nurse

Nothing left of his mother Even his father’s a lesser myth But in Saqqara I am found engraved Seated with the small prince On my lap, his dog beneath my chair. A reed and feather head dress Hides my hair. Behind us rows Of counselors, generals and slaves. Do you think you have discovered Something new about power? I will tell you: I am Maia, I was his. We were never cartouche stiff, we Always had perspective. See the way He leans into my chest and away From the heavy crown that comes. See how I’m the one he trusts – just a woman, A servant who fed the body of a god.

35

angel maker

A tooth for every child, they say. By now I should have the boneless gums of the babes that milk me – They come to me, each solitary bean wrapped in its mother’s sighs, its father’s rages, each with a warm caul, head-fur low or lush, nose-knob, mouth-gap, each a soft bone-ream – they send a servant with a parcel asking nothing – nothing of the pine board, the straw pallet, hand me a basket of rags, a small purse. I am to feed them. As they use me, curl each tendril finger around my own, I hold them not as their mother – that door to Earth’s illusion – but as a bridge, hold them and guess: the dented pate, the weak suck, the smell of the nape, (sulfur, yeast, raw cream) sometimes a deeper damp – the loaf drawn too soon from the fire, a twig too wet to kindle.

36

medea

Before he traded her in for the new model – the princess daughter of an unused land – (she who melted under the poisoned crown) Jason watched his only wife give suck to their younger son. In the oil lamp’s gold her skin gleamed like the fleece that bound them. She smiled from their bed, not remembering yet how on the way to Colchis, to save the ship he’d sent the dove ahead to be crushed between those stone cliffs. How tender, he thought, ignorant of how milk can sour can curdle the heart so that a lost woman will fit a knife between her breasts, lancing the abscess of love.

37

on the difference between boy s and girls

In years to come will your grandmother lie to you say your sister was frail – only a girl – that your mother’s milk ran in rich rivers from her good breast but flushed only poisoned tiger sweat from the other? How many years will it take before you understand how she weakened on the bottle how she starved so that you could thrive on your mother’s beautiful milk so that you could be another gun for the fathers?

38

hera

I dreamed peacocks and eagles, sable-wings sweeping my thighs like a full head of hair. That bastard child was brought to suckle me, his tongue a thousand snakes stinging. I woke too late and pushed him but he’d stolen immortality and I – already I had come to see him as a little me, my Heracles, who caused my righteous milk to salt the heavens and lilies to spring in Earth’s garden: ringing. Ringing their creamy bells.

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th r ee

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Galactopoiesis

a cycle

wind

If the throat is the haunt of the soul breath is the soul setting out If wind inhabits branches breath is a ghost headed home If each breath mingles with meteoric winds then strains back through hushed galaxies of every wakened cell do we become One, suppressing the striving self to unite with the greater – I live by breath and not belief, yet when I hear “Breathe down to your toes, fill your body with Prana,” I feel a salty rush coursing my viaducts like star dust scouring the milky way. As if mind’s gesture, breath floods the body’s marbled halls, the lungs’ blue sponges, lobes, fissures, veins and nodes

43

coral groves that arch and sway the ocean of the throat half closed, how a clam might sing between its tidal valve or a fish breathe, gills aflame.

44

urgent care

We wait our turn, the baby and I in the hard orange chair, he still in my soft lap. Fish-out-of-water, his breaths are quick and shallow, as if through layers of tar. He’s pale with secrets, but I hang on to what I know: twenty-one pounds, thirty inches, eight good strong teeth. I cup the back of his head where curls meet neck and hug him to the shield of bone between my breasts until his name is called. I give his history: pneumonia, four weeks ago. Hospital, three days. No asthma. The nurse times his inhalations, though we both can see he’s drowning. Behind the curtain, a steel counter where the doctor, stethoscope poised, listens for crackles. I hold the baby while she waves green steam beneath his nose, listens again. X-Ray, she says, so he’s strapped

45

into the Plexiglas cylinder shouting his arms at me. Soon, against the wall of light, the valleys of his lungs stuffed with gray-white clouds, white where black should be, like a negative negative, or breasts packed with fatty cells and ready milk. We’ll have to admit, she says. Defeat, I think. This time, the car trunk holds a bag with what I’ll need: toothbrush, sweatpants, earplugs.

46

b r e at h e r The methods of formation, disposal and control of amniotic fluid are not really understood. – Dr. Gordon Bourne

The words are used up but I’ll try: He flew out – an eruption – hot gush lavishing my thighs, burning wet. A flash in the pan, a seed from a pod, a fish from the sea, a bright planet stirring his own galaxy, burst out in the magma wash, funnel of tears tunnel of blood. Then the black placental clots flushed in the long ache of our first night. I don’t remember the cry, the first, the breath that closed his heart’s holes. I see only his body slick with vernix, fresh as a damp lilac, blue digits like unopened clusters, as he lies on the roof of his former home, destroyed as surely as Pompeii. The foetus swims for weeks or months in amnion’s mystery syrup. Part water, part urine, no one really knows. Twin survivors of the usual miracle, we were cut in two, turned inside out. I put him to my breast and he bit down hard, pulling the golden sap, first honey of his life.

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u lt r a s o u n d s

Subrosa, amoroso, single shiver of my flesh restless shadow, flicker spirit, silhouette caught in a flash. Tough muscle, tender echo, tissue goblin, holy ghost little skiff in brackish waters, tethered to the braided mast. Hieroglyph homunculus, a percolating pulse of flame ambiguous circumfluous, I do not even know your name. Horses thunder, trains à banjo, throbbing bone and humming thrum mysterious celebrity, you’re coming home, you’re coming home.

48

incident room

A moonless night and my breasts are full. We crowd into a tiny room, home of a large rag doll used to explain surgery. Its torso layered in Velcro: scarlet heart indigo lungs, yellow liver, purple appendix. The IV-man’s needles and gauze come in a two-part plastic tub, like a manicurist’s. He strokes the baby’s inner arm, prods for blue piping while the nurse, the aide, and I hold him. Each time IV-man tries to stick, the vein collapses – Crap, he says, you think you’ve got ’em and they disappear. Baby screams. Maybe you should leave says the nurse. He thinks you’re going to save him. I am. I will. See saw, marjorie daw, Jackie shall have a new master .... Too tired to fight, he stops, but still they find no vein. Another doctor appears. Fluid drips in. Worst part of the job, says the nurse. After they’ve stuck him, wrapped him, bathed him, changed him, after they’ve drawn blood from his finger, mucus from his nose, after they’ve scratched his forearm,

49

listened again to his muddy chest, pounded his ribs to loosen the mucus, I climb under the tent, its precious air cool and moist as ferns or a September beach. The pull and suck of surf fills our ears. My breasts are hard as bulbs. I cradle one and he sucks without gusto, his gaze wavering. With milk’s familiar burn, clouds descend. That longing hour. On the slope of the hill where I work, someone set a bed – a thousand daffodils – for his beloved, their yellow-green blades just now shooting into spring: bulb after bulb, out of earth, into air. Green are the lungs of the earth.

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wa r d

Three shifts, each with its strangers. I fling for sleep on the slippery cot and wake each time the door opens to a new language: they take vitals, give meds. In his tent the anxious sleeper trips alarms that bring white masks. Trained for emergency, they strive to mix kindness with method, chanting a cheery singsong as they check tubes, change fluids and sheets. I try not to mind the rupture of people doing their jobs, laborious care. Each meal time, two trays: for him mush toast and Jello. For me some soothing institutional meal I always swallow, down to the rice pudding. The nursing mother gets her own tray. But his food stays untouched. He sleeps unevenly while I zip around channels – sad Albanians bunched in makeshift mountain tents, Anna in Siam: her lilac satin skirts splash across the screen as she waltzes with the king. She hopes to sway him, make him

51

see, even slaves, even wives, have rights. But he fulfills his Darwinian destiny: one hundred and six children and five on the way. He sings his facts of life: A girl is like a blossom, with honey for just one man; but a man is like a honey bee who gathers where he can. Because the baby sleeps hours in his damp cocoon, I pump my milk for his sake and for mine. Cold comfort of the plastic flange hugs my brown nipple, the machine’s susurration another sterile wind. Once I had a tabby who sang to me from the back of his throat for sixteen years. How we kept company. Each month I made his food, freezing small portions as for a child. His vocabulary of moods expressed itself in postures – hat, bun, snake – and games he taught us. When he stopped eating I kept him going for weeks, feeding fluid with a needle under the loose skin of his neck, until one night I came home to shit, vomit all over the rugs. We found him sleeping in a corner, a little heap of soiled fur. He could barely stand. We made our pact then. The next day

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sitting in the vet’s lot, holding the still-warm body wrapped in a torn towel, we cried a little over what we’d done – murder, replaying over and over that final insufficient cry – cry of the poisoned moment, edge of the dark dawn. Wearing the plucky, white-gloved mouse on his tie, the specialist visits, gingers possibilities: cystic, tuber – a list of – osis. He counsels biopsy. Without a specimen, he says, we’ll never really know. Ambition can be good, I think, but not this. I’d rather trust in prayer, though I do not pray. A bishop comes, the envoy of a friend: I hold the baby while he prays for us: “Our father,” he chants, voice hushed and grainy above the gusting oxygen, “Hallowed be thy name.” It’s the prayer of Earth, Heaven, Trespass, Bread, Evil – important nouns all. Faith in this life or the next, scholars are equivocal, though they recognize its Jewish roots – praise, petition, yearning. Who knows but words could heal? He ends by rubbing three small crosses

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on the baby’s forehead, one on his chest, “forever and ever, Amen.” Omeyn. Om. O, O and O, then flies to catch a plane, leaving a prescription of psalms: 16, 46, 91 and the reassurance that sickness brings us closer to God. I, the godless one, but never clever enough, do I seek wings for shelter, fortress, tower, sign of signs? I who have always been fearful but should not fear, who always feel death near and will surely die, I thank the gods, my stars, my lucky luck that we are here, not slaves in Egypt or Siam, not carrying babies – even sick ones over mountain tops in the shivering spring sun. May winds keep me, take my breath away.

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real living

At home, high in her spindle bed, his sister’s eyelashes beat full and dark as crow’s wings. She fears volcanoes. No volcanoes here, I sing. Her hands explain: this is our house, she says, holding up a right finger. And here, she stabs the air with her left, is the volcano. But in real living, she assures, it’s farther. Her father’s at the ward; my turn home. The third night, and they want more: more tests more probes, more time to see how serious, some underlying cause, as Doctor says. Lying under blankets, my daughter turns from me toward the wall, as she always does, to find her sleep, the volcano cradled in the stem of her, the green core we cannot see. When I wake my breasts are wet, hard as heels yet tender, eager to get to him in the plastic tent with its tubes and ticks. Fog presses fields and houses, a panorama bathed in milk-glass. It wraps patches of morning news around trees, signs, the girl waiting

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for a yellow bus. Driving by the still bare woods I see redbud threading its pink veins through brush and remember the surprise of its wide summer hearts. I arrive to find the room lit bright, the therapist pounding the baby’s chest like meat or dough. At first afraid, the baby’s grown compliant – or just pliant – and lets himself be thumped and turned and thumped again while the man sweet talks in a hoarse whisper, “There you go, Bud.” Buddy. Friend. Budding friend. Flower shell, flower before the flower. Sweet curl of bud unblossomed.

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the mend

I never thought shroud, exactly, but veil or tent. That plastic curtain under which he breathed the air he needed. There he floated, flat behind that watery sheath like a nautilus lustering its secret pearl. In time the sleeping curse became the cure we waited for: under skin, under the muscle ring and bony sheath that sheltered his lungs’ hollows, beneath subclavian caves where bronchiae branched into inverted trees, their blue leaves burrowed deep, exchanging gases – Earth’s mirrored greenery – below the murmur of the visible, disease retreated, mystery from beginning to end. Our voices drew him and he began to churn, his color rising with the cream and peach of spring.

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He remembered pleasures: breastmilk, banter, call and coo, grasping the bars of his raft, laughing and throwing plastic chicks for us to catch. We wandered down open halls to the lonely toy room, the oxygen tank rolling beside him, canula up his nose. The nurses clucked and reached for him, everyone’s boy, until they were ready to give him back: strike camp, pull up the stakes, fold the tent, remove the red flag of contagion from his door.

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autumn song

In fall he blooms new legs, ambling the uneven seam between our dusty driveway and the street’s smooth blacktop. Behind our house parched milkweed pods knock against the glass, white silk tufts spilling, their flue and fluff drawn up by wind’s smooth breath – But always a few stay behind, do not fly, unwilling to be borne: the extras, the remnants stuck to the rasps of open husks. Holding hands, we venture up the street, past giant sunflowers fanned on dry stalks like Busby Berkeley girls. What law shapes their slanting? Too closely grown? Weary Old Sunflowers, what hand so planned your dancing: sun’s disc, sun’s ray, a congregation mumbling prayers earthward. The boy tips back his gilded head, drinking the syrup of autumn light. He is juiced with freedom fitting in the world like a kernel in its cup, a bulb in its bed, a tooth in its new pink collar. These are the last days of feeding – each morning

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I wake full of milk, each morning he takes one suck, then pulls away, laughing. The joke’s on me – damp flower on my shirt. Soon even the body will forget: only the heat and sweat of sex with its yearning rush will bring a small wet pearl to the nipple, like conception’s sting. Above us crows collect in branches, then scatter into chase and chaos and complaint. We stop to watch them twist and dive in their aggrieved fashion, but then a swell of sound mobs the rim of air, a din that makes our ears swim and soon we see – a skein of geese unraveling its ragged V across the mid-day sky their necks a glory of departure: So long. So long. The air’s gone still, is burnished with their passing, so when the crows renew their own corrosive cries I feel them sharper in my chest, while the boy drops my hand and points: “Caw,” he answers, “Caw” and smiles – he’s got this bird pegged. And saunters on, his shadow long before him.

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gestures of living

I After the birth a woman lies, a broken egg, her body sorrowing and sore, stunned with nameless rage. This animal has found her. With her teat she must shove out his cries. Her sweat on his cheek his tears in her eyes. II Maybe sex is prayer two bodies riding to the crush of dazzle’s core – a bath of lymph, an alchemy of stars, until comes down a silver sheath, velvet tent – contentment, and everything is ours.

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III Like faith, milk is repeatedly found repeatedly lost. The gut’s desire creates desire in the breast, the child voiding glands that always answer more and more – a never-ending wish fulfilled, like waves that stretch the shore.

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naming the children

Syllable by syllable we made them in gutters, out of string and shell – cupping up her Ray from rain the Ch of churn and chain to end with Halleluiah’s el. For him, the ancient scribe, a buzz behind the teeth then bursting son of Ra – a head of sand and hay eyes, sea grapes in the reef. We borrowed and we stole, and wove them into song that loosened from our tongues like water from a stone – those names they’ve come to own.

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th e wh e lp i n g

Mo-cha, the neighbor’s bitch has littered seven fine pups. We cross the street to see them nuzzle her trunk – a pulsing wave of browns – while she surrenders. This parvenu pooch showed up last summer – red-haired, toffee-eyed, part setter part anyone’s guess – and hung around the patio with Pancho, a chocolate lab. Before anyone could say offspring, she was fat and wouldn’t go home. We think we’ve missed the main event – confinement’s fin – until she rises, scattering her whiny brood, bearing down for more: the runt squeezed out like a question mark. She breaks his blurry caul, chews indifferently the purple cord while the blind mutts stumble, rooting for her seven dugs.

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My daughter’s face is a mix of concentrated earnestness and joy, her skin a glass of milk. She admires this last muggy muttling, feels sorry when his mother grudges him a lick, his siblings won’t share. In barely a week, when Mo-cha snaps at her puppies, as if they were the cat’s kittens, my six-year-old, once no longer than a twig, will reach to pick him up, cup the velvet heartbeat to her neck so that the spit of his tail trembles on her shoulder while he gums and licks her chin, and to him she will whisper, Oh my little baby.

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katie flower

Ember that ever flushes never drowns, grazing on the carnival of gravel, feeding off the green plush walls of your rarely cleaned aquarium – a small glass box in which you wander, swivel, waver, flashing your flesh like a skirted girl doing cartwheels on the lawn. Even so you often risk survival by darting to the top with a harbinger of bubbles. Anticipating your arrival, up leaps the cat, an equal flame, who’d drink you out of house and home, and if you merited the trouble might swallow you whole, but instead greets you as his double: the two of you a pair of golden foes flirting at the surface of the water, tracing a whisper of Xs and Os.

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pe n gu i n s at t h e ec o do m e

Behind the amphitheatre’s glass walls they skive off frozen ledges – so many synchronized scofflaws – into sub-zero waters. They plunge so happily each in turn, wings squelched fin-like against their ribs, muscling under this pseudo-ocean, then stutter up the rocks again like a phalanx of toddlers. Me first! they must be shouting, silently, in black and white, ignoring our cries and flashing lights.

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foreign exchange

Our visitor, a ten-year-old from France, studies her agenda every night as if she’ll find a chink between the dates. Each day her face draws tighter below the dark visor of her bangs. Chocolates, plush toys, a spring bouquet – nothing will assail the sour wind that trails across the guts’ dust bowl. How to soothe and move her from malaise she has no word for? When finally one night she sobs – each heave crushed deep – she shrugs away my hands. A moon forlorn, spun out of orbit, she will not join us, and when she touches home at last she’ll keep us undiscovered, undisclosed, hidden like a pebble in her fist, like the cedilla tucked under the c of her name.

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d ay a n d n i g h t

I He eats oatmeal, shovels rounded spoonfuls into his mouth. His cheeks are smooth his teeth are short and clean. When he’s done he shoves the bowl away. Finish your milk, she says. I’m going to kill you, he answers. She tickles his thigh. Where’s my sword? He jumps off the chair and returns: Defend yourself! he shouts brandishing a cardboard tube and pointing skyward, Muscle is stronger than cloud. II In the middle of the night even as she ushers him back down the hushed and narrow hall, her hand between his shoulder blades whispering that nothing will come from the dark to hurt him, her words fall like crumbs in a tangled forest. In bed he cries stay with me and whimpers when she lets go his hand to steal away, leaving him to master the dust that haunts his marrow.

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g i r l i n t h e b u t t e r f ly h o u s e

Girl standing, girl of honeycomb and flint, willow-girl, girl of thick wishes and balsam lashes, I watch you for the thrill of your waiting, your stillness flushed against the sun-squeezed air. Outside, barges glitter downriver, but here I watch you pious as a steeple, patient as a coat rack, like a novice at her first dance, wait for one Painted Lady to fold you in its tea-stained scarf, for one Swallowtail to skim your shoulder, or settle on your hat, quiet as ash. Trapped in a glass room, I watch you watch them plow the heavy air, dust muscles bolting between lobelia beds, courting dung and rotting fruit, ignoring you. Don’t you know – dazzling one – they can smell desire? As I smelled you, our first morning, your feeble body swaddled tight as any worm’s, how your insect eyes followed us with all their muscle: I’m here and I see you.

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amber song

Ambers are embers of resin Trickles of tar gone hard Smell pitch in these dubious jewels Gems ignited from timbers A body of fire remembers Crushed in the arms of the sea Forests of whispers are calling Follow the trees to their kingdom Listen to memory’s fire – the tears of the trees in the sea.

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g o o s e b ay, p r i n c e e d w a r d i s l a n d

I Stopped at the edge of a docile sea – iron sands singing under feet – a human family on holiday greets the mild water of the Gulf’s wide maw. With her toes our daughter pokes the foam, tempts it to chase, then scuttles from its flaming kisses. Holding hands between us, our son teeters into surf, breakers blasting in his eyes, a cold wet climbing up his cotton shirt. Days pass on this short beach parenthesized by flat red rocks, smooth pools in which dull water drowns. Sometimes on the impossible horizon, like the level’s ether bubble, a ship slides out to sea or up the river’s throat. Business or pleasure, who can say? We follow the tide line and gather wide kelp belts, sea grapes, wood, tangle, grass, bend for shells and sea glass, utter special sounds for rare blue bits or those whorled periwinkles worn through to beads. From these treasures angels on the sand: halos, hair, robes, and wings from glass and stone, shell and weed.

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We sort and make, our travel an excuse for art, our art the reason for our travel: no tracking spouts, repairing nets or setting traps, no picking gulfweed to mulch a garden plot. Still, some ancient cells in us retrace the quest that sent us spiraling away from Eve, from drought, disease, or mobs, something recalls the awe of continental crossings. This must be how gods were made – travel needs an anchor: bone, feather, stick, stone. And so art – necessity parading as desire, a scrimshaw of survival: what they felt at what they saw. II Evenings we make a habit of tramping through long grasses and down the short red cliffs to see the reddened lip press against Atlantic’s cup. We hope for the mythic flash – le rayon vert – but each day something stops it: Fog, clouds, atmosphere? Until one evening, waiting, we gather driftwood and dry weeds and build a small fire in the hush. The sky, a bird closing its eye.

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When it’s time to stare, we stare, risking sight to watch the horizon’s honeyed stripe. Later we will wonder whether, if, we really saw it, but now we look on to the end: that green refraction of the bowing sun, that fidget, flicker, wave or waver, green flash, flashing. Gone.

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th e g ra s s

The problem is they didn’t tend their garden – my mother’s speaking of a broken marriage where neglect was a betrayal of its own: not just the fallen trellis but the vetch, shrubs unpruned, the gate rusted ajar. In steaming fields fireflies call Take me! I’m yours! frogs and crickets shout in chorus of temptation. A wonder we don’t run into the grass at once; its sweet extravagance and blowing seed, crazy mint and climbing roses: our garden must leave some wild spaces, thriving weeds whose names we’ll never know. Just grease that gate, close the back door softly. Now show me your hands, dirt in the creases.

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notes

Galactopoiesis derives from the Greek radicals for ‘milk’ and for ‘making’ – poesis – also the word for ‘poetry’ – and is the medical term for the continued secretion and production of milk. Lactation is a constant creative act dependent upon the baby’s demand, with supply increasing as the baby grows and the quality of milk changing according to the growing child’s needs. “Instructions for the Child in the Womb” is adapted from Hu Szu-Hui’s A Soup for the Quan (1330). “On the Difference Between Boys and Girls” was inspired by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mother Nature, in particular by a photograph of a South Asian woman with her four-month old twins, one of whom died soon after the picture was taken. “For Rent” is a modified glosa on Rilke’s “Evening in the Park,” inspired by P.K. Page’s dazzling collection “Holograms.” The quotation in “Goose Bay, Price Edward Island” is from Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano.”

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acknowledgments

My thanks to the editors of the following journals and anthologies in which versions of these poems first appeared: Catskill Mountain Region Guide, Connecticut Review, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, Georgia State University Review, The Malahat Review, The Marlboro Review, Oberon, Rattapallax, River Styx, Sad Little Breathings and Other Acts of Ventriloquism, and The Southern Poetry Review. “Naming the Children,” “Day and Night,” “Galactopoiesis,” “Katie Flower,” “Penguins at the Ecodome,” and “Goose Bay, Prince Edward Island” were published in an electronic chapbook in The Drunken Boat 5, issue 3–4 (Spring/Summer 2005), http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/. Thank you to the many friends who have read these poems over the years, but especially to Julie Bruck, Karlen Chase, Bonnie Krueger, Eileen Moeller, Martha Rhodes, Margie Thickstun, Cammy Thomas, and Daniel Tobin. Many thanks as well to Kerry McSweeney for his suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge the following institutions for their support: The Canada Council, The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Yaddo Corporation, and Hamilton College.

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