My Mother Encounters Celebrities and I Misunderstand

I.

One winter before I was born
my mother stepped into an elevator.
The silent brass doors slid
together too quickly and she toppled,
landing face-first

in Baryshnikov's striped mink coat.
She told me this when I was six
and leaping, a blizzard of tulle
and breathlessness around
her rocking chair. As I remember it,

I say now, He was rude to you.
Did Baryshnikov really push you?


Short, she says, looking over
the Sunday Style section. I didn't say rude.
I said short.




photograph by Chuck Domitrovich

With a Glance at the Equator

If I am a world then the climate
is rapidly changing.

Gone now is the dodo,
gone druids, unicorns.
My coats tire of warning away
the full fire of the cosmos.

Through patches and holes
I am singed and boiled.
One of these days I will face
the sinking sun himself.

Continents drift without my permission.
There are tracks in the sea;
the great plates ride
on sandy rails
of unknown origin.
Who is he, this engineer who charts
where my heart will settle?

Icebergs bob like battleships
atop the warming ocean. Their sheer
hulls melt : cool water swells
to wash my white-hot belly.







photograph by Farley Vaughan

To the Girl I Was When I Bought This Book

The easy thing would be
to hate you: the smear
of your dull pencil is enough
to sigh my breathing.
You printed your name,

careful and proud, believing
you'd want it forever. I know
this book is brittle
from an avalanche of tissues. I know
you wanted blackberries

but planted only thorns.
These pages are stretched, bowed and tired,
this spine is nearly surrendered.
The hard part--and this
you even know--is arriving

at the endpapers, where (you
know) I will forgive you.




photograph by Signora Oriente

To the Wizard of Menlo Park

You should know it doesn’t count
If you cheated, and you should know
We know you did. Who but a time traveler
Would sweat until the filament formed;
Who but the one who has known silver dawn
Would bother to burgle one trip
To the moon? There is no sport
To this brilliance. Your fizzing chariot
Awaits in the alley:
Be gone, and leave us our fire.





more on alleged intellectual poacher Thomas Alva Edison here
watch "Le Voyage dans la Lune" here

The Ending Reconsidered*

The plan was always to be dead
Before I even hit sixty:
If bad luck and illness did not
Put me down, I’d do it myself.
This young heart is already scarred,
Every lover knew that. They knew
Not to believe that forever
Actually meant forever. Then—

You. I cannot say which moment
It was when I realized I could
Be old; one of those days, maybe,
When you spoke of a dark cabin,
Large dogs, used books. In this forest
You have unkilled me. Just know that.




*Some of my more emotionally invested readers (Hi, Mom!) have asked that I specify when what I'm writing is an assignment for my poetry workshop, and what the assignment is, so that you don't actually think I have, I don't know, witnessed a car crash after doing it in the back seat or divorced my husband, who happens to be a Greek god. So: this poem is an assignment. The assignment was to write a sonnet about death. Okay? Everyone? We clear? Good.

Wish You Were Here

'Here' is this overpriced coffee shop,
where the pumpkin-apple soup is better
than expected. Here I look
out the gray window and want to tell you things.
The trio of gruff men exchanging embraces
before climbing into their trucks. The green
fire hydrant in the middle of the sidewalk,
raised rusting letters spelling out AMERICAN DARLING.

The way the steam swirls upward
into my cold nostrils. You would track it there,
and, laughing, poke my cheek.
At the horizon, how bare branches sweep the sky
like wire brushes. The dear little white church
and its disjointed Gothic roof, parapets pointed
like punishments, visible only to God, and us,
if you were here.

33: Coming Clean

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;

I copied but did not send it.
I thought a phone call, maybe, but knew
The whirlpool words in my own mouth
Would give it all away.

There is no pressure I have not imagined:
Your teeth on my throat,
Your hair in my hand,
Your eyes on my salted lips. All these

Tide to and from my sleeping shores like trains.
And, too, the gravity
Of my own crumbling, wet face, the heft
Of your apology.

(Once you wrote me a confession, a treatise on starry unknowns.
Wrote it out in one long night,
Found it too true and threw
The whole thing away.
I know this because you told me.)





Original poem by W. H. Auden
Photograph by flickr user tomo.1981
Inspiration by you

Sunset in the Orange Groves

I know that birds have a sound;
I know that "sound" has meaning.
In the weeks before the silence, summer
flushed the blackbird city every time I passed beneath.
The fickle tree may do this yet, may stain the sky
with rocketing bodies,
but if their shadows do not flicker
on the windless dust before me,
they might as well be nested.

Gone is the whispered warning
of the wet plates fleeing the dish rack;
gone the good purpose of rain, radios.
In this new world of useless names,
only the dark feels the same.



photograph by Gero

Your Quiet House

I don’t think I ever saw you
In the sunlight. It seems somehow
It rained, was night the whole weekend.

The soft strains of your record collection
Stir in me still ghost-breezed curtains,
Cold legs. The hum of your voice
Against the floorboards in the dark, two rooms away
and properly occupied.

I left one burgundy hair in your bed and an umbrella
Shaking off in the bathtub. Did you hear
The music, the folk songs spinning
Without you? Did you wonder
How I lay, if I dreamt
On one ragdoll arm, or pressed against your pillow,
Or not at all?

At three the house was silent.
At four my veiled eyes caught your fingers' melt
Around the crack in the door, and then I slept.



photograph by Elizabeth Robinson