Stag's Leap: Poems

Now I come to look at love
in a new way, now that I know I’m not
standing in its light. I want to ask my
almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not
love…

where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does …

Meanwhile the planets
orbited each other, the morning and the evening came

… a flurry
of tears like a wirra of knives …

like the face of a creature looking out
from inside its Knox…

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.

(from "Known to Be Left")

Approaching Godthåb

So much had become so connected to him
that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,
flying, for hours, above the Atlantic
still felt like being over his realm.
And then, in the distance, a sort of land —
rows and rows of tilted, ruched-back
pyramids and fangs of snow —
appeared, and along its bitten hems, in the
water, hundreds of giant, white
beings, or rafts, nuzzled the shore,
moon-calves, stoats, dories, ships,
tankers green-shadowed cream, a family
of blossom-tree icebergs, his familiars — never
mine, but once contiguous to what I felt was almost mine,
they were like the flowers a boreal storybook
king would give his queen, hoarfrost
lilies. It struck cold awe to my heart,
now, to look at who I had been
who had thought it impossible
that he or I could touch another.
Tu wit, tu woo — lhude sing
goddamn, cuckoo, to look back
and see myself living, vowblind, in cloud
cuckold land. The glacierscape called it
up, the silent, shining tulle,
the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems
and corollaries, that girl who had thought
a wedding promise was binding as a law
of physics. Now, I stood outside
the kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera,
the emerald-sided frozen plenty,
as if, when he took his stones and went home, he took
snow, and ice, and glaciers, and shores,
and the sea, and the northern hemisphere,
half of the great blue-and-white aggie
itself, I sat on the air above it
and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.

Tiny Siren

And it had been a year since I had stood,
looking down, into the Whirlpool
in the laundry nook of our August rental, not
sure what I was seeing — it looked like a girl
brought up in a net with fish. It was
a miniature woman, in a bathing suit,
lying back after the spin cycle —
the photograph of a woman, slightly
shaped over the contours of a damp towel.
I drew it out — radiant square
from some other world — maybe the daughter
of the owners of the house. And yet it looked like
someone we knew — I said, to my husband,
This was in with the sheets and towels.
Good heavens, he said. Where?! In
with the sheets and your running shorts. Doesn't it
look like your colleague? We gazed at the smile
and the older shapely body in its gleaming
rainbow sheath — surprise trout
of wash-day. An hour later, he found me,
and told me she had given him the picture
the day they went running together
when I was away, he must have slipped it in
his pocket, he was so shocked to see it
again, he did not know what to say.
In a novel, I said, this would be when
the wife should worry — is there even the slightest
reason to worry. He smiled at me,
and took my hand, and turned to me,
and said, it seemed not by rote,
but as if it were a physical law
of the earth, I love you. And we made love,
and I felt so close to him — I had not
known he knew how to lie, and his telling me
touched my heart. Just once, later
in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if
a deck were tilting under me —
a run he'd taken, not mentioned in our home,
a fisher of men in the washing machine.
Just for a few minutes I had felt a little nervous.

What precision of action
it had taken, for the bodies to hurtle through
the sky for so long without harming each other.

(from "Crazy")

The Shore

And when I was nearing the ocean, for the first
time since we'd parted —
approaching that place where the liquid stillborn
robe pulls along pulverized boulder —
that month, each year, came back, when we'd swim,
first thing, then go back to bed, to the kelp-field, our
green hair pouring into each other's green
hair of skull and crux bone. We were like
a shore, I thought — two elements, touching
each other, dozing in the faith that we were
knowing each other, one of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousness,
magnetic in reticent mourning. His first
mate was a husky pup, who died,
from the smoke, in a fire. Someone asked him,
once, to think from the point of view
of the flames, and his face relaxed, and he said,
Delicious. I hope he can come to think
of me like that. The weeks before he left,
I'd lie on him, as if not heavy,
for a minute, after the last ferocious
ends of the world, as if loneliness had come
overland to its foreshore, breaker,
shelf, trench, and then had fallen down to where
it seemed it could not be recovered from. Elements,
protect him, and those we love, whether we both
love them or not. Physics, author of our
death, stand by us. Compass, we are sinking
down through sea-purse toward eyes on stalks.
We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive. Doing it —
it — with him, I felt I shared
a dignity, and inhuman sweetness
of his sisters and brothers the cieberg calf,
the snow ant, the lighthouse rook,
the albatross, who once it breaks out of the
shell, and rises, does not set down again.

And it
entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard by me, untouched by me,
but known by others, seen by others,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him.

(from "September 2001, New York City")

What Left?

Something like a half-person
left my young husband's body,
and something like the other half
left my ovary. Later,
the new being, complete, slowly
left my body. And a portion of breath
left the air of the delivery room,
entering the little mouth,
and the milk left the breasts, and went
into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father's corpse,
and the smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother's ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. My then husband made
a self, a life, I made beside him
a self, a life,gestation. We grew
strong, in direction. We clarified
in vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
still — we made, with each other, a moving
like a kind of music: duet, then solo,
solo. We fulfilled something in each other —
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfect what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.