They’re women, not like me but like the sun
burning cold on a winter afternoon,
audacious brilliance from a severe height,
living in the center as the town revolves
around them in a mess. Of course
we want to know what gives behind their fence,
behind the shades, the yellow brick
convent huge in the black green pines.
We pass it, every one of us, on rounds
we make our living at. There’s one
I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,
her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,
and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.
I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,
scarred like the moon in her observance,
shaved and bound and bandaged
in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,
muttering for courage at the very hour
cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto
turns to me with urgency and power.
Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue
smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,
and the buried structure shows,
the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,
freeze to acid in the strange heart.
The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded
on gin. One bottle in the clinkers
hidden since spring
when Otto took the vow
and ceremoniously poured
the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew
down the scoured steel sink,
overcoming the reek
of oxblood.
That was one promise he kept.
He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips
in the meantime. I know
now he kept some insurance,
one bottle at least
against his own darkness.
I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.
From the doorway the clouds pass me through.
The town stretches to fields. The six avenues
crossed by seventeen streets,
the tick, tack, and toe
of boxes and yards
settle into the dark.
Dogs worry their chains.
Men call to their mothers
and finish. The women sag into the springs.
What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?
With a headful of spirits,
how else can I think?
Under so many clouds,
such hooded and broken
old things. They go on
simply folding, unfolding, like sheets
hung to dry and forgotten.
And no matter how careful I watch them,
they take a new shape,
escaping my concentrations,
they slip and disperse
and extinguish themselves.
They melt before I half unfathom their forms.
Just as fast, a few bones
disconnecting beneath us.
It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.
Not in this language.
Not in this life.
I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.
But these clouds, creeping toward us
each night while the milk
gets scorched in the pan,
great soaked loaves of bread
are squandering themselves in the west.
Look at them: Proud, unpausing.
Open and growing, we cannot destroy them
or stop them from moving
down each avenue,
the dogs turn on their chains,
children feel through the windows.
What else should we feel our way through—
We lay our streets over
the deepest cries of the earth
and wonder why everything comes down to this:
The days pile and pile.
The bones are too few
and too foreign to know.
Mary, you do not belong here at all.
Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.
Let everything be how it could have been, once:
a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.
But this is the way people are.
All that appears to us empty,
We fill.
What is endless and simple,
We carve, and initial,
and narrow
roads plow through the last of the hills
where our gravestones rear small
black vigilant domes.
Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars
deep in this strange earth
we want to call ours.
My four adopted sons in photographs
wear solemn black. Their faces comprehend
their mother’s death, an absence in a well
of empty noise, and Otto strange and lost.
Her name was Mary also, Mary Kröger.
Two of us have lived and one is gone.
Her hair was blond; it floated back in wings,
and still you see her traces in the boys:
bright hair and long, thin, knotted woman’s hands.
I knew her, Mary Kröger, and we were bosom friends.
All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.
Otto was for many years her husband,
and that’s the way I always thought of him.
I nursed her when she sickened and the cure
fell through at Rochester. The healing bath
that dropped her temperature, I think, too fast.
I was in attendance at her death:
She sent the others out. She rose and gripped my arm
and tried to make me promise that I’d care
for Otto and the boys. I had to turn away
as my own mother had when her time came.
How few do not return in memory
and make us act in ways we can’t explain.
I could not lie to ease her, living, dying.
All graves are full of such accumulation.
And yet, the boys were waiting in New York
to take the first boat back to Otto’s folks
in Germany, prewar, dark powers were at work,
and Otto asked me on the westbound bus
to marry him. I could not tell him no—
We help our neighbors out. I loved him though
It took me several years to know I did
from that first time he walked in to deliver
winter food. Through Father Adler’s kitchen,
he shouldered half an ox like it was bread
and looked at me too long for simple greeting.
This is how our live complete themselves,
as effortless as weather, circles blaze
in ordinary days, and through our waking selves
they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.
So I took up with Otto, took the boys
and watched for them, and made their daily bread
from what the grocer gave them in exchange
for helping him. It’s hard to tell you how
they soon became so precious I got sick
from worry, and woke up for two months straight
and had to check them, sleeping, in their beds
and had to watch and see each breathe or move
before I could regain my sleep again.
All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.
Otto brought one sister from that town
they never talk about. His father shook
one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air
behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.
I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—
a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.
They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.
Proud Hilda hides his picture
in a drawer with underskirts.
Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain
my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men
have gifted her with more impressive things.
She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.
I came upon a sentimental locket,
embossed with words, initials interfixed
within the breasts of dour, molting swans.
Proud Hilda cracked it open,
smiled, and clicked it shut.
How many men had begged her heavy hand
I do not know. I think I loved her too
in ways that I am not sure how to tell—
I reached one day to gather back her hair:
wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear
and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone
that swung a cold light from the polished lobe.
Tall Hilda took my hand in hers and kissed
the palm, and closed that mark inside my fist.
She lived alone and thickened in that town,
refusing company for weeks on end.
We left food at her door; she took it in;
her dull lamp deepened as the night wore on.
I went to her when everything was wrong.
We sat all evening talking children, men.
She laughed at me, and said it was my ruin.
My giving till I dropped.
Live blood let down the drain.
I never let her know how those words cut
me serious—her questioning my life. One night
a slow thing came, provoked by weariness,
to cram itself up every slackened nerve;
as if my body were a whining hive
and each cell groaning with a sweet, thick lead—
I turned and struck at Otto in our bed;
all night, all night the poison, till I swarmed
back empty to his cold
and dreaming arms.
At first we all wondered what county or town
she had come from. Quite soon it was clear to us all
that was better unquestioned, and better unknown.
Who wanted to hear what had happened or failed
to occur. Why the dry wood had not taken fire.
Much less, why the dogs were unspeakably disturbed
when she ground the cold cinders that littered our walk
with her run-to-ground heels. That Waleski approached
with a swiftness uncommon for one of her age.
Even spiders spun clear of her lengthening shadow.
Her headlong occurrence unnerved even Otto
who wrapped up the pork rinds like they were glass trinkets
and saluted her passage with a good stiff drink.
But mine is a good word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski.
Scavenger, bone picker, lived off our alleys
when all we threw out were the deadliest scrapings
from licked-over pots. And even that hurt.
And for whatever one of us laughed in her face,
at least two prayed in secret, went home half afraid
of that mirror, what possible leavings they’d find there.
But mine is a good word, and even that hurts.
A rhyme-and-a-half for a woman of parts,
because someone must pare the fruit soft to the core
into slivers, must wrap the dead bones in her skirts
and lay these things out on her table, and fit
each oddment to each to resemble a life.
I thought I saw him look my way and crossed
my breast before I could contain myself.
Beneath those glasses, thick as lead-barred windows,
his eyes ran through his head, the double barrels
of an old gun, sick on its load, the trigger held
in place by one thin metal bow.
Going toward the Catholic church, whose twin
white dunce caps speared the clouds for offerings,
we had to pass him on the poured stone bridge.
For nickels we could act as though we’d not
been offered stories. How these all turned out
we knew, each one, just how the river eats
within its course the line of reasoning.
He went, each morning, to the first confession.
The sulking curtains bit their lips behind him.
Still those in closer pews could hear the sweet
and limber sins he’d made up on the spot.
I saw a few consider, and take note—
procedural. They’d try them out at home.
And once, a windless August, when the sun
released its weight and all the crops were burned,
he kept watch as the river thickened. Land
grew visibly and reeked to either side,
till windowed hulks, forgotten death cars reared
where dark fish leapt, and gaped, and snatched the air.
When I take off my glasses, these eyes are dark magnets
that draw the world into my reach.
First the needles, as I walk the quiet streets,
work their way from the cushions of dust.
The nails in the rafters twist laboriously out
and the oven doors drop
an inch open.
The sleep smell of yesterday’s baking
rises in the mouth.
A good thing.
The street lamps wink off just at dawn,
still they bend their stiff necks like geese drinking.
My vision is drinking in the star-littered lawn.
When the porch ivy weaves to me—
Now is the time.
Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.
Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,
What did she want?
But it is too late for husbands.
Their wives do not question
what it is that dissolves
all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.
They uncross themselves, forsaking
all protection. They long to be opened and known
because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire
in love with its private ruin.
I open my hands and they come to me, now.
In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,
only followed, only known along the way.
And it is right, oh women of the town, it is
right
.
Your mouths, like the seals of important documents
break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,
the cracked edges melting to mine.