Stag's Leap (2 page)

    Telling My Mother

Outside her window, a cypress, under

the weight of the Pacific wind,

was bending luxuriously. To tell

my mother that my husband is leaving me…

I took her on a walk, taking her fleshless

hand like a passerine's claw, I bought her

a doughnut and a hairnet, I fed her. On the gnarled

magnolia, in the fog, the blossoms and buds were like

all the moons in one night—full,

gibbous, crescent. I'd practiced the speech,

bringing her up toward the truth slowly,

preparing her. And the moment I told her,

she looked at me in shock and dismay.

But when will I ever see him again?!

she cried out. I held hands with her,

and steadied us, joking. Above her spruce, through the

coastal mist, for a moment, a small,

dry, sandy, glistering star. Then I

felt in my whole body, for a second,

that I have not loved enough—I could almost

see my husband's long shape,

wraithing up. I did not know him,

I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him,

and I've told my mother. And it's clear from her harrowed

sorrowing cheeks and childhood mountain-lake

eyes that she loves me. So the men are gone,

and I'm back with Mom. I always feared this would happen,

I thought it would be a pure horror,

but it's just home, Mom's house

and garden, earth, olive and willow,

beech, orchid, and the paperweight

dusted with opal, inside it the arms of a

nebula raking its heavens with a soft screaming.

    Silence, with Two Texts

When we lived together, the silence in the home

was denser than the silence would be

after he left. Before, the silence

was like a large commotion of industry

at a distance, like the downroar of mining. When he went,

I studied my once-husband's silence like an almost

holy thing, the call of a newborn born

mute. Text: “Though its presence is detected

by the absence of what it negates, silence

possesses a power which presages fear

for those in its midst. Unseen, unheard,

unfathomable, silence dis-

concerts because it conceals.” Text:

“The waters compassed me about, even to

the soul: the depth closed me round

about, the weeds were wrapped about

my head.” I lived alongside him, in his hush

and reserve, sometimes I teased him, calling his

abstracted mask his Alligator Look,

seeking how to accept him as

he was, under the law that he could not

speak—and when I shrieked against the law

he shrinked down into its absolute,

he rose from its departure gate.

And he seemed almost like a hero, to me,

living, as I was, under the law

that I could not see the one I had chosen

but only consort with him as a being

fixed as an element, almost

ideal, no envy or meanness. In the last

weeks, by day we moved through the tearing

apart, along its length, of the union,

and by night silence lay down with blindness,

and sang, and saw.

    The Last Hour

Suddenly, the last hour

before he took me to the airport, he stood up,

bumping the table, and took a step

toward me, and like a figure in an early

science fiction movie he leaned

forward and down, and opened an arm,

knocking my breast, and he tried to take some

hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,

and then we stood, around our core, his

hoarse cry of awe, at the center,

at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,

the worst was over, I could comfort him,

holding his heart in place from the back

and smoothing it from the front, his own

life continuing, and what had

bound him, around his heart—and bound him

to me—now lying on and around us,

sea-water, rust, light, shards,

the little eternal curls of eros

beaten out straight.

    Last Look

In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into

his eyes. All that day until then, I had been

comforting him, for the shock he was in

at his pain—the act of leaving me

took him back, to his own early

losses. But now it was time to go beyond

comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,

still, like the first ocean, wherein

the blue-green algae came into their early

language, his sea-wide iris still

essential, for me, with the depths in which

our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,

on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland

nectar of our milk—
our
milk. In his gaze,

rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-

emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:

he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,

and he gave me the gift, he let me in,

knowing he would never once, in this world or in

any other, have to do it again,

and I saw him, not as he really was, I was

still without the strength of anger, but I

saw him see me, even now

that dropping down into trust's affection

in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,

and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,

and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the

passenger seat in a spiral like someone

coming up out of a car gone off a

bridge into deep water. And two and

three Septembers later, and even

the September after that, that September in New York,

I was glad I had looked at him. And when I

told a friend how glad I'd been,

she said,
Maybe it's like with the families

of the dead, even the families of
those

who died in the Towers—that need to see

the body, no longer inhabited

by what made them the one we loved—somehow

it helps to say good-bye to the actual,

and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,

first, to have been able to love,

then, to have the parting now behind me,

and not to have lost him when the kids were young,

and the kids now not at all to have lost him,

and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have

lost someone who could have loved me for life.

    Stag's Leap

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine

looks like my husband, casting himself off a

cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

His fur is rough and cozy, his face

placid, tranced, ruminant,

the bough of each furculum reaches back

to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up

and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,

unwieldy. He bears its bony tray

level as he soars from the precipice edge,

dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart

leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from,

I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet,

and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape,

a ground without a figure.
Sauve

qui peut
—let those who can save themselves

save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone

tiny being crucified

on a fallow deer's antlers. I feel like his victim,

and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched

legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he

throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his

faithfulness, as if it was

a compliment, rather than a state

of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he

feel he had to walk around

carrying my books on his head like a stack of

posture volumes, or the rack of horns

hung where a hunter washes the venison

down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,

leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old

vow have to wish him happiness

in his new life, even sexual

joy? I fear so, at first, when I still

can't tell us apart. Below his shaggy

belly, in the distance, lie the even dots

of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots

clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their

blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

    Known to Be Left

If I pass a mirror, I turn away,

I do not want to look at her,

and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes

I don't see exactly how to go on doing this.

Often, when I feel that way,

within a few minutes I am crying, remembering

his body, or an area of it,

his backside often, a part of him

just right now to think of, luscious, not too

detailed, and his back turned to me.

After tears, the chest is less sore,

as if some goddess of humanness

within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.

I guess that's how people go on, without

knowing how. I am so ashamed

before my friends—to be known to be left

by the one who supposedly knew me best,

each hour is a room of shame, and I am

swimming, swimming, holding my head up,

smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,

like being naked with the clothed, or being

a child, having to try to behave

while hating the terms of your life. In me now

there's a being of sheer hate, like an angel

of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got

her one shot, pure as an arrow,

while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums

bit the flesh no one seems now

to care to touch. In the mirror, the torso

looks like a pinup hives martyr,

or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,

full of the milk of human kindness

and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.

But look! I am starting to give him up!

I believe he is not coming back. Something

has died, inside me, believing that,

like the death of a crone in one twin bed

as a child is born in the other. Have faith,

old heart. What is living, anyway,

but dying.

    Object Loss

The banjo clock, suspended in thirty-weight

dreaming marriedness, for a third of a

century, doesn't come down easy from the wall,

rusted to the hook, then it lurches up,

its gangle throat glugs. Big-headed, murmurous,

in my arms it's like a diver's bell,

Davy-Jonesed. When I lean it by the back

door, it tocks, and ticks, it doesn't even

cross my mind I might wish to kick it.

Using his list, I remove his family

furnishings, the steeple clock,

the writing-arm chair, the tole-and-brass

drawing table—I had not known

how connected I'd felt, through him, to a world of

handed-down, signed, dated,

appraised things, pedigreed matter.

As I add to the stash which will go to him,

I feel as if I'm falling away

from family—as if each ponderous

object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were

the scenery of the play now closing,

lengthy run it had. My pitchfork

tilts against the wall in the dining room,

web thick in its tines, spider

dangling in one cul-de-sac…

What if loss can be without

dishonor. His harpoon—a Beothuc harpoon—

and its bone and sinew and tusk and brine-wood

creel I add to the pile, I render

unto Caesar, and my shame is winter sunlight

on a pine floor, and it moves, it sways like an old dancer.

    Poem for the Breasts

Like other identical twins, they can be

better told apart in adulthood.

One is fast to wrinkle her brow,

her brain, her quick intelligence. The other

dreams inside a constellation,

freckles of Orion. They were born when I was thirteen,

they rose up, half out of my chest,

now they're forty, wise, generous.

I am inside them—in a way, under them,

or I carry them, I'd been alive so many years without them.

I can't say I am them, though their feelings are almost

my feelings, as with someone one loves. They seem,

to me, like a gift that I have to give.

That boys were said to worship their category of

being, almost starve for it,

did not escape me, and some young men

loved them the way one would want, oneself, to be loved.

All year they have been calling to my departed husband,

singing to him, like a pair of soaking

sirens on a scaled rock.

They can't believe he's left them, it's not in their

vocabulary, they being made

of promise—they're like literally kept vows.

Sometimes, now, I hold them a moment,

one in each hand, twin widows,

heavy with grief. They were a gift to me,

and then they were ours, like thirsty nurslings

of excitement and plenty. And now it's the same

season again, the very week

he moved out. Didn't he whisper to them,

Wait here for me one year? No.

He said, God be with you, God

by with you, God-bye, for the rest

of this life and for the long nothing. And they do not

know language, they are waiting for him, my

Christ they are dumb, they do not even

know they are mortal—sweet, I guess,

refreshing to live with, beings without

the knowledge of death, creatures of ignorant suffering.