Read That Said Online

Authors: Jane Shore

That Said

 

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Epigraph

New Poems

Willow

Priorities

Fortune Cookies

Chatty Cathy

Danny Kaye at the Palace

My Father's Shoe Trees

Last Words

Pickwick

Gratitude

A Reminder

American Girls

Mirror/Mirror

Gaslight

Staging Your House

Where to Find Us

Rainbow Weather

Eye Level

Witness

The Advent Calendar

A Letter Sent to Summer

Noon

Home Movies: 1949

Fortunes Pantoum

The Lifeguard

Sounding the Lake

Eye Level

The Minute Hand

A Clock

Pharaoh

Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze

The Russian Doll

Anthony

Thumbelina

High Holy Days

The Game of Jackstraws

Tender Acre

Wood

Persian Miniature

The Glass Slipper

Dresses

A Luna Moth

The Island

Music Minus One

Washing the Streets of Holland

Monday

Learning to Read

Best Friend

The Sunroom

The Holiday Season

The Slap

The House of Silver Blondes

Music Minus One

Meat

Workout

The Wrong End of the Telescope

Missing

Postpartum, Honolulu

The Bad Mother

The Sound of Sense

Holocaust Museum

The Lazy Susan

The Combination

Happy Family

Happy Family

Crazy Joey

Mrs. Hitler

The Uncanny

The Best-Dressed Girl in School

My Mother's Space Shoes

Evil Eye

Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium

Reprise

Shit Soup*

My Mother's Mirror

Happiness

A Yes-or-No Answer

A Yes-or-No Answer

The Streak

My Mother's Chair

The Closet

Possession

Trouble Dolls

The Blue Address Book

Dummy

Shopping Urban

My Mother's Foot

Keys

Trick Candles

My Father's Visits

Unforgettable

Dream City

Body and Soul

God's Breath

On the Way Back from Goodwill

Fugue

Scrabble in Heaven

Gelato

Acknowledgments

Footnotes

Copyright © 2012 by Jane Shore

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shore, Jane, date.

That said : new and selected poems / Jane Shore.

p. cm.

ISBN
978-0-547-68711-7

I. Title.

PS
3569.
H
5795
T
53 2012

811'.54—dc23

2011036907

Book design by Greta D. Sibley

Printed in the United States of America

DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MUSIC MINUS ONE
®
is a registered trademark of MMO Music Group, Inc. MMO Music Group has not in any way sponsored, approved, endorsed, or authorized this book.

They inflict on us a tremendous silence.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Some Reflections on
Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel”

New Poems
Willow

It didn't weep the way a willow should.

Planted all alone in the middle of the field

by the bachelor who sold our house to us,

shoulder height when our daughter was born,

it grew eight feet a year until it blocked

the view through the first-, then the second-

story windows, its straggly canopy obstructing

our sunrise and moonrise over Max Gray Road.

I gave it the evil eye, hoping lightning

would strike it, the way a bolt had split

the butternut by the barn. And if leaf blight

or crown gall or cankers didn't kill it, then

I'd gladly pay someone to chop it down.

My daughter said no, she loved that tree,

and my husband agreed. One wet Sunday—

the rainiest July since 1885—

husband napping, daughter at a matinee

in town—a wind shear barreled up the hill

so loud I glanced up from my mystery

the moment the willow leaned, bowed,

and fell over flat on its back, roots and all,

splayed on the ground like Gulliver.

The house shook, just once.

Later, when the sun came out, neighbors

came to gawk; they chain-sawed thicker

branches, wrapped chains around the trunk,

their backhoe ripped out pieces of stump

and root as if extracting a rotten tooth.

I'm not sorry that tree is gone. No one

ever sat under it for shade or contemplation.

Yet spring after spring it reliably leafed out.

It was always the last to lose its leaves

in fall. It should have died a decade ago

for all the grief I gave it, my dirty looks

apparently the fuel on which it thrived.

It must have done its weeping in private.

But now I can see the slope of the hill.

Did my wishful thinking cast a spell?

I was the only one on earth who saw it fall.

Priorities

Sleeping alone in my Madison Avenue

Upper East Side seventeen-by-seventeen

fourth-floor walkup one night thirty

years ago, I heard people arguing

through the plaster and brick wall dividing

my brownstone from the one next door.

I'd hardly given my neighbors a second thought

except those I'd occasionally see in the hall

retrieving mail, struggling up narrow stairs

with grocery bags, or leashing their dogs.

 

I used to amuse myself by matching up faces

with the names above the intercom buttons

in the vestibule downstairs, but I never

stopped for anything more than chitchat,

never thought about the people living

in the adjacent building until the night I hear

a woman crying loud enough to rouse me,

and a deeper voice, a man's, whose words

I can't make out but whose angry bellowing

bullies me awake. Perhaps they're actors

 

rehearsing a play, or he's her drama coach

and she's practicing her lines from the scene

where the man and the woman fight.

I'm thinking I should dial 911 when—

through the white noise of my hissing radiator—

he shouts, “You've got to order your priorities!”

like a therapist on an emergency house call,

which works. She's whimpering like a dog.

There follows a clearing of the moment's

throat, a sponging of tears, a charged silence,

 

as if now they're making love and all before

was foreplay. And I'm in bed with them.

How many times have I had to listen—

half attracted, half repelled—to strangers' thumps

and moans in the hotel room next to mine?

Their dramas? The next morning, sharing their

elevator (too bright, too small) to the lobby,

I have nothing to be ashamed of. But I'm feeling

that same tongue-tied strangeness I used to feel

with a one-night stand the morning after.

Fortune Cookies

My old boyfriend's fortune cookie read,

Your love life is of interest only to yourself.

Not news to me. A famous writer

once showed me the fortune in his wallet—

You must curb your lust for revenge—

slapped over his dead mother's face.

 

After finishing our Chinese meal

at that godforsaken mall,

eight of us crowded around the table,

the white tablecloth sopping up

islands of spilled soy sauce and beer,

the waiter brought tea and oranges

sliced into eighths and a plate of fortune cookies.

 

We played our after-dinner game—

each of us saying our line out loud,

the chorus adding its coda:

“You will meet hundreds of people...”
“In bed.”

“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him...”
“In bed.”

“You have unusual equipment for success...”
“In bed.”

And those with more delicate sensibilities,

new to the group, blushed

and checked their wristwatches.

 

We divided up the bill, and split.

A few left their fortunes behind.

The rest slipped those scraps of hope or doom

into pockets and pocketbooks to digest later.

Maybe one or two of us got lucky that night

and had a long and happy life in bed.

On the ride home, I absent-mindedly

rolled my fortune into a tight coil,

the way you roll a joint, and dropped it

into my coat pocket,

 

and found it yesterday—

oh, how many years later—

caught between the stitches of the seam,

like one of those notes

wedged into a niche of the Wailing Wall

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