Home Front
The night of our wedding, another couple pounded beers at a frat party. They slurred their love-yous, collapsed on a bed with rope lights wound on the posts.
In the morning, they ate pancakes. They talked about spring, booked a hotel, nursed their headaches and awaited the declaration. When it arrived, they threw shoes at the television, missed the President’s face by inches.
We stood in the stale-coffee air of a Midwest church, blood harelike in our legs and a blizzard coming through. We sucked in champagne like helium, and somewhere, lovers waited for bombs to explode in their rooms.
We bore the explosions of old friends in tuxedos. They passed a microphone and slurred into the black foam sponge.
Things would get ugly. Our friends would split like a wishbone: one part seething stay the course, one part turn back, thou pretty bride. It would continue this way, without exit. Shores would continue to recede with our hairlines; footage of far-off countries would loop.
The watch turned to a warning. Snow drifted onto mute cars in the parking lot, poured static into the local screens. The private companies soon rushed in to unbury us.
God bless, our relatives crooned through the cake. They drove their forks like tanks through the roses, leaving streaks of raspberry filling behind.
The Shelley Disciples
The Shelley disciples keep dirt in their kitchens, in rinsed-out hummus containers. They plant mint and basil, sometimes; they never pick the leaves. They look bruised. They fall apart at the windowsills and stay there for days.
What they say: “Who knows what to do with it?” What they mean: “We wish our mothers were here. We wish you would be our mothers.”
When we were girls, we filled a banged-up pot with puddle water and mint. We crouched on the porch, used branches to stir while mosquitos swirled, haloed us in sound.
Once, a brother came out. He played along; he tucked a napkin at his chin. But when we gave him a spoon, he laughed: “You can’t really cook.” He spat.
He grew up to be a father of girls. Remember how he raised his spoon to the cat, how it hissed and pawed it to the ground?
I was a daughter fond of families, unbodied. I would dunk my hands in paint and smear the legs and arms right from the heads. No stomachs, lungs– just heads. Moons, reaching to the edges of things.
My father boasted that I used every color: “So thorough,” he laughed. “Such a smart girl.”
He kept a box of my paper monsters because he was like any father. He has never missed what’s missing.
The Shelley disciples press books to their laps. The room creaks under the ache of desks.
And what were thou, he asks a mountain, and rivulets wet their chins. They nod and nod like lunatics or limbs in the wind.
We walk to their houses, shifting weight. We imagine the sand of snack crumbs making headlands of their mattresses. Some of us who imagine less think of books before we lay them down: how they slap our hip bones like the sea.
The Shelley disciples admire our hair, or how words about hair turn to song in their mouths. They sing of our hair spread over wood grain, of locks of the approaching storm. The notes quicken; the castors glide. Chairs catch poems beneath us.
After, they weep for their fair copies torn. We are sorry, as though for typewriter errors. We twist open, like vials of correction fluid.
They set flame to hand-rolled cigarettes. When they speak, they move like acolytes. They dream of expulsion, of snuffing out God, of women who receive men in graveyards.
We group at their elbows to hear. In this town, what isn’t a grave?
Smoke perfumes our clothes and the spike of their unshaved skin. We trace the dizzy embers when their hands float, flick cherries to their feet.
I stood at the arm of my grandfather’s lawn chair. He tousled my hair, his hand warm from a Bic. “You get prettier each time I see you,” he said. I breathed in beer, prettiness; I studied the float of ash in a half-drunk lemonade.
When the Shelley disciples talk anarchy in their kitchens, wine bloodies their teeth into the teeth of lions. The beers of men before them haunt their refrigerator doors.
We sew loose buttons, purchase hummus. We are Mary: mother of God, mother of infants dead enough before born. Some of us who imagine less sew stones in pockets, dream of water: bodies of it; steeping leaves.
The Shelley disciples speak, unbound. We brutalize. Our pens turn blades in the knife games they play in dive-bar light.
After, their doors hide empty plots. After, they sigh in kitchens.
We are Mary, whose hair drapes down from her head to her prophet’s unclean feet.
A Made Place, That Is Mine
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,
that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.
—Robert Duncan
In Bambi, the part that breaks me comes before the doe is shot. A frantic bird is told, Don’t fly, but she can’t bear waiting for the gun. She showed me what to do when you came. When you fit the needle in crackling grooves. When you poured gin in an orange juice glass.
I think of your hands breaking eggs, your fingers swirling butter pats. I was broke and ate what you made me. Can I bring you more? you said. My yes held still in an open field for you, quailed in the light. Your hands raised over the expanse.
I was broke. I took your paper: thick, expensive sheets. I made them into fat-creased birds and with a sewing kit I pricked them, put a needle through the peaks. I love them, you said. The thread came cheap as bloodshed, air.
For years, your threaded bird-heads have hung starry in the hall. At night, I run a finger in my mind across their backs. I make for them a thicket, and beyond that place, a field. It is featureless as an egg. I raise a shovel to it and break.