That Said (15 page)

of broken glass. And we never knew

who they were, or how many,

or for how many months they had been

watching us, the spectacle we'd become.

Because that's what we were to them—

two animals in a cage fucking:

arms and backs and muscle

and flanks and sinew and gristle.

My sister is doing her exercises,

working out in my husband's study.

The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke,

its heavy breathing like a couple making love.

 

She's visiting from Iowa

where the cold weather is much worse.

 

When she was ten, I'd hear her

strumming her guitar through the bedroom wall.

She'd borrow my albums—my Joan Baez, my Dylan—

and sing along,

shutting me out, drawing me in;

imitating my hair, my clothes,

my generation.

 

I used to feel sorry for her

for being eight years younger.

 

She opens the door a crack, and surfaces

in earphones, and wearing pink bikini panties

and a lover's torn T-shirt.

Strapped to her hands are the weights

that weighed her suitcase down.

Her thighs are tight, her triceps shine,

her body is her trophy.

 

The night she arrived, we sprawled across my bed,

her cosmetic bag spilled open,

and she shadowed my eyelids violet,

demonstrating the latest tricks,

the way I used to make her up

on those nights she watched me dress for dates,

watched me slip into my miniskirt,

my sandals, my love beads.

 

Now she's no longer in love with me,

and eyes me pityingly,

triumphant, her expression the same as mine

when I watched my mother

examine her face in the magnifying mirror.

 

She's got to keep in shape.

She's a performer, it's her business

to look beautiful every night.

 

Sometimes, when she begins to sing,

men in the audience fall in love.

 

She's warming up in the shower;

the tile walls amplify her voice.

Safe, for once, under temperate rain.

 

Like a dress handed down

from sister to sister,

in time one body will inherit

what the other has outgrown.

For Elizabeth Bishop

 

That afternoon on the Bay of Fundy,

as the car plunged in and out of the cobweb fog,

everything was in the process of erasing

or being erased.

At low tide, the tidal bore's puddle-raked mud flats

looked like a bolt of brown corduroy

running down the coast.

Later, when the sun came out, the puddles

turned into shattered mirrors, long shards,

blue sky and clouds lying in pieces on the ground,

as though the heavens had fallen down.

 

Stopping at a gas station for directions

and a Coke, my husband and I heard the local joke:

“You go from Upper Economy, to Middle, to Lower,

to Just Plain Broke.”

 

The next day, on Cape Breton, pressed for time,

we wanted to drive the entire Cabot Trail

in a day. If we started at dawn

and drove clockwise around the coast,

we'd end up at dusk where we began.

The road linked town after coastal town,

each with its prim white clapboard church

starched stiff as a christening gown.

Azure woodsheds, chartreuse barns,

stilt houses shingled gray or shingled brown,

matchbox houses two stories high

painted the same pea green, ochre, or peacock blue

as the boats docked in the harbor below.

In Nova Scotia—nowhere else in the Maritimes—

fishermen paint their houses to match their boats!

 

It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,

everything scaled down, “smaller than life.”

In Belle Côte, four wooden fishing boats

bobbed single-file gosling-style

in the middle of the harbor

while real full-size fishing boats

bobbed, tethered to the dock.

Were they a practical joke

or a winter evening's woodwork?

Those little boats looked too
serious
to be toys.

 

And that dollhouse stuck on a pole—

a whittled-down version of the gabled house

looming up behind it—

was really a mailbox!

No mail today. No one home.

Everyone seems to have vanished,

leaving their toys behind.

 

We counted more scarecrows than farmers

working in the fields.

No solitaries crucified on broom poles

meditating over a quarter acre of corn,

these posed in groups, in gay tableaux,

whole families of scarecrows

watching their gardens grow.

We drove past a family of scarecrow men

lovingly dressed in their Sunday best—

workshirts, overalls, and stovepipe hats.

Great-grandfather, Grandfather, Father, and Son

holding hands like a row of paper dolls,

passing on the deed to the farm

to the last son, the current one, the heir,

stretching out his hand to thin air.

 

A few miles up the road

a scarecrow child was dressed for winter

in dungarees, sweater, mittens, and a scarf,

standing between his scarecrow mother and father,

whose broomstick arm stuck out

in a permanent gesture of waving hello—or goodbye—

depending on the direction

you were driving to—or from.

 

That day, I was wearing an Indian cotton skirt

printed with huge vivid flowers.

A bee flew into the open window of the moving car

and tried to pollinate my skirt.

 

Given the modest scale of things,

whose idea was it to build

“the largest lobster trap in the world,”

a wooden scaffolding the size of a cathedral?

How many weathered traps had we seen

stacked by the side of the road?

A lobster trap?—it was a tourist trap!

Inside, a little gift shop

sold the usual array of junk:

lobster ashtrays, lobster key rings,

and foot-long lobster-claw combs.

 

Not nearly as grand, the crafts museum

masqueraded as a souvenir stand.

We arrived just before closing.

The curator had just taken out her teeth.

Tight-lipped but cheerful, she led us

through a room jammed from floor to ceiling

with antique spinning wheels.

It was like strolling through the inside of a clock.

She sat on a low stool, carding raw wool

into clouds that she proceeded to spin,

pumping her treadle like an organ pedal,

demonstrating, for at least the hundredth time that day,

one of the lost arts of the district,

kept just barely alive by her

and a few elderly lady volunteers.

Down the road lived her Micmac counterpart—

the last of her tribe who knew how

to weave baskets from sweet grass and porcupine quills.

 

Crayoned signs read,
PLEASE DON'T TOUCH!

the swatches of Scottish tartans and coats of arms,

and the bagpipe, a droopy octopus.

Don't touch the yellowing scrimshaw,

the tiny ivory- and bone-handled tools

that tatted feverish edges on doilies and handkerchiefs

also on display. Don't touch the battered toys—

dolls, locomotives, decoys, and the love letter

whose frilly signature's a faded sepia lace.

In a separate glass case, a missionary's

English-Micmac dictionary, and a pair

of beaded moccasins with stiff enormous tongues.

Of course, you can't touch
them!

Or the sand-encrusted gold doubloon

shipwrecked off the coast like the rising moon—

lost, all lost, and then recovered.

These children's faces printed on a milk carton—

a boy and a girl

smiling for their school photographs,

each head stuck atop a column

of vital statistics:

date of birth, height and weight, color

of eyes and hair.

 

On a carton of milk.

Half gallon, a quart.

Of what use is the body's

container, the mother weeping milk or tears.

 

No amount of crying will hold it back

once it has begun its journey

as you bend all night over the toilet,

over a fresh bowl of water.

Coins of blood spattering the tile floor

as though a murder had been committed.

 

Something wasn't right, they say,

you are lucky.

Too soon to glimpse the evidence

of gender, or to hear a heartbeat.

 

Put away the baby book, the list of names.

There are four thousand, at least, to choose from.

No need now to know their derivations,