Only As the Day Is Long Read online

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  FOR MY SISTER,

  Mary-Ellen (1955–2017)

  Contents

  from AWAKE

  Two Pictures of My Sister

  What My Father Told Me

  Ghosts

  The Garden

  The Tooth Fairy

  Quarter to Six

  Awake

  Girl in the Doorway

  On the Back Porch

  Bird

  The Laundromat

  Sunday

  from WHAT WE CARRY

  Late October

  After Twelve Days of Rain

  Aphasia

  What We Carry

  For the Sake of Strangers

  Dust

  Twelve

  Each Sound

  Fast Gas

  As It Is

  The Thief

  This Close

  The Lovers

  Kissing

  from SMOKE

  Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl

  How It Will Happen, When

  Fear

  Last Words

  Trying to Raise the Dead

  The Shipfitter’s Wife

  Abschied Symphony

  Family Stories

  Pearl

  Smoke

  The Orgasms of Organisms

  Life is Beautiful

  from FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

  Moon in the Window

  Facts About the Moon

  The Crossing

  The Ravens of Denali

  The Life of Trees

  What’s Broken

  Afterlife

  Savages

  Vacation Sex

  Democracy

  Face Poem

  Superglue

  Cello

  Little Magnolia

  Starling

  from THE BOOK OF MEN

  Staff Sgt. Metz

  Bakersfield, 1969

  Juneau Spring

  Mine Own Phil Levine

  Late-Night TV

  Homicide Detective: A Film Noir

  Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)

  Men

  Antilamentation

  Cher

  Dog Moon

  Mother’s Day

  Dark Charms

  Lost in Costco

  Second Chances

  Fall

  Emily Said

  The Secret of Backs

  ONLY AS THE DAY IS LONG: NEW POEMS

  Lapse

  Before Surgery

  Death of the Mother

  Under Stars

  Changeable Weather

  Only as the Day Is Long

  Piano with Children

  My Mother’s Colander

  Ant Farm

  Heart of Thorns

  Ideas of Heaven

  Crow

  Ode to Gray

  Evening

  Error’s Refuge

  Augusta, Maine, 1951

  Chair

  Urn

  Arizona

  Letter to My Dead Mother

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  from

  AWAKE

  Two Pictures of My Sister

  If an ordinary person is silent,

  this may be a tactical maneuver.

  If a writer is silent, he is lying.

  —JAROSLAV SEIFERT

  The pose is stolen from Monroe, struck

  in the sun’s floodlight, eyes lowered,

  a long-stemmed plastic rose between her teeth.

  My cast-off bathing suit hangs

  in folds over her ribs, straps

  cinched, pinned at the back of her neck.

  Barefoot on the hot cement, knock-kneed,

  comical if it weren’t for the graceful

  angles of her arms, her flesh soft

  against the chipped stucco.

  The other picture is in my head.

  It is years later.

  It is in color.

  Blonde hair curls away from the planes of her face

  like wood shavings.

  She wears a lemon-yellow ruffled top, denim

  cutoffs, her belly button squeezed to a slit

  above the silver snap.

  She stands against the hallway wall

  while Dad shakes his belt in her face.

  A strip of skin has been peeled

  from her bare shoulder, there are snake

  lines across her thighs, a perfect curl

  around her long neck.

  She looks through him

  as if she could see behind his head.

  She dares him.

  Go on. Hit me again.

  He lets the folded strap unravel to the floor.

  Holds it by its tail. Bells the buckle

  off her cheekbone.

  She does not move or cry or even wince

  as the welt blooms on her temple

  like a flower opening frame by frame

  in a nature film.

  It lowers her eyelid with its violet petals

  and as he walks away only her eyes

  move, like the eyes of a portrait that follow you

  around a museum room, her face

  a stubborn moon that trails the car all night,

  stays locked in the frame of the back window

  no matter how many turns you take,

  no matter how far you go.

  What My Father Told Me

  Always I have done what was asked.

  Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels.

  The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord

  wound around my hand. Laundry

  hung on a line.

  There is always much to do and I do it.

  The iron resting in its frame, hot

  in the shallow pan of summer

  as the basins of his hands push

  aside the book I am reading.

  I do as I am told, hold his penis

  like the garden hose, in this bedroom,

  in that bathroom, over the toilet

  or my bare stomach.

  I do the chores, pull the weeds out back,

  finger stink-bug husks, snail carcasses,

  pile dead grass in black bags. At night

  his feet are safe on their pads, light

  on the wall-to-wall as he takes

  the hallway to my room.

  His voice, the hiss of the lawn sprinklers,

  the wet hush of sweat in his hollows,

  the mucus still damp

  in the corners of my eyes as I wake.

  Summer ends. Schoolwork doesn’t suit me.

  My fingers unaccustomed to the slimness

  of a pen, the delicate touch it takes

  to uncoil the mind.

  History. A dateline pinned to the wall.

  Beneath each president’s face, a quotation.

  Pictures of buffalo and wheat fields,

  a wagon train circled for the night,

  my hand raised to ask a question,

  Where did the children sleep?

  Ghosts

  It’s midnight and a light rain falls.

  I sit on the front stoop to smoke.

  Across the street a lit window, filled

  with a ladder on which a young man stands.

  His head dips into the frame each time

  he sinks his brush in the paint.

  He’s painting his kitchen white, patiently

  covering the faded yellow with long strokes.

  He leans into this work like a lover, risks

  losing his balance, returns gracefully

  to the precise middle of the step to dip

/>   and start again.

  A woman appears beneath his feet, borrows

  paint, takes it onto her thin brush

  like a tongue. Her sweater is the color

  of tender lemons. This is the beginning

  of their love, bare and simple

  as that wet room.

  My hip aches against the damp cement.

  I take it inside, punch up a pillow

  for it to nest in. I’m getting too old

  to sit on the porch in the rain,

  to stay up all night, watch morning

  rise over rooftops.

  Too old to dance

  circles in dirty bars, a man’s hands

  laced at the small of my spine, pink

  slingbacks hung from limp fingers. Love.

  I’m too old for that, the foreign tongues

  loose in my mouth, teeth that rang

  my breasts by the nipples like soft bells.

  I want it back. The red earrings and blue

  slips. Lips alive with spit. Muscles

  twisting like boat ropes in a hard wind.

  Bellies for pillows. Not this ache in my hip.

  I want the girl who cut through blue poolrooms

  of smoke and golden beers, stepping out alone

  into a summer fog to stand beneath a streetlamp’s

  amber halo, her blue palms cupped

  around the flare of a match.

  She could have had so many lives. Gone off

  with a boy to Arizona, lived on a ranch

  under waves of carved rock, her hands turned

  the color of flat red sands. Could have said

  yes to a woman with fingers tapered as candles,

  or a man who slept in a canvas tepee, who pulled

  her down on his mattress of grass where she made

  herself as empty as the guttered fire.

  Oklahoma.

  I could be there now, spinning corn from dry cobs,

  working fat tomatoes into mason jars.

  The rain has stopped. For blocks the houses

  drip like ticking clocks. I turn off lights

  and feel my way to the bedroom, slip cold

  toes between flowered sheets, nest my chest

  into the back of a man who sleeps in fits,

  his suits hung stiff in the closet, his racked

  shoes tipped toward the ceiling.

  This man loves me for my wit, my nerve,

  for the way my long legs fall from hemmed skirts.

  When he rolls his body against mine, I know

  he feels someone else. There’s no blame.

  I love him, even as I remember a man with cane-

  brown hands, palms pink as blossoms opening

  over my breasts.

  And he holds me,

  even with all those other fingers nestled

  inside me, even with all those other shoulders

  wedged above his own like wings.

  The Garden

  We were talking about poetry.

  We were talking about nuclear war.

  She said she couldn’t write about it

  because she couldn’t imagine it.

  I said it was simple. Imagine

  this doorknob is the last thing

  you will see in this world.

  Imagine you happen to be standing

  at the door when you look down, about

  to grasp the knob, your fingers

  curled toward it, the doorknob old

  and black with oil from being turned

  so often in your hand, cranky

  with rust and grease from the kitchen.

  Imagine it happens this quickly, before

  you have time to think of anything else;

  your kids, your own life, what it will mean.

  You reach for the knob and the window

  flares white, though you see it only

  from the corner of your eye because

  you’re looking at the knob, intent

  on opening the back door to the patch

  of sunlight on the porch, that garden

  spread below the stairs and the single

  tomato you might pick for a salad.

  But when the flash comes you haven’t

  thought that far ahead. It is only

  the simple desire to move into the sun

  that possesses you. The thought

  of the garden, that tomato, would have

  come after you had taken the knob

  in your hand, just beginning to twist it,

  and when the window turns white

  you are only about to touch it,

  preparing to open the door.

  The Tooth Fairy

  They brushed a quarter with glue

  and glitter, slipped in on bare

  feet, and without waking me

  painted rows of delicate gold

  footprints on my sheets with a love

  so quiet, I still can’t hear it.

  My mother must have been

  a beauty then, sitting

  at the kitchen table with him,

  a warm breeze lifting her

  embroidered curtains, waiting

  for me to fall asleep.

  It’s harder to believe

  the years that followed, the palms

  curled into fists, a floor

  of broken dishes, her chain-smoking

  through long silences, him

  punching holes in the walls.

  I can still remember her print

  dresses, his checkered taxi, the day

  I found her in the closet

  with a paring knife, the night

  he kicked my sister in the ribs.

  He lives alone in Oregon now, dying

  slowly of a rare bone disease.

  His face stippled gray, his ankles

  clotted beneath wool socks.

  She’s a nurse on the graveyard shift.

  Comes home mornings and calls me.

  Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.

  And I still wonder how they did it, slipped

  that quarter under my pillow, made those

  perfect footprints . . .

  Whenever I visit her, I ask again.

  “I don’t know,” she says, rocking, closing

  her eyes. “We were as surprised as you.”

  Quarter to Six

  and the house swept with the colors of dusk,

  I set the table with plates and lace. In these minutes

  left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep

  and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say

  if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,

  this man I’ve learned to live with, afraid

  of what he doesn’t know about me. That I’ve finished

  a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself

  for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish

  as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me. Missy,

  this is what’s become of the wedding you swore you’d come to

  wearing black. That was in 1970 as we sat on the bleached

  floor of the sanitarium sharing a cigarette you’d won

  in a game of pool. You said even school was better

  than this ward, where they placed the old men

  in their draped pants, the housewives screaming in loud

  flowered shifts as they clung to the doors that lined the halls.

  When we ate our dinner of fish and boiled potatoes,

  it was you who nudged me under the table

  as the thin man in striped pajamas climbed

  the chair beside me in his bare feet, his pink-tinged urine

  making soup of my leftovers. With my eyes locked on yours,

  I watched you keep eating. So I lifted my fork

  to my open mouth, jello quivering green

  against the tines, and while I truste
d you and chewed

  on nothing, he leapt into the arms of the night nurse

  and bit open the side of her face. You had been there

  longer, knew the ropes, how to take the sugar-coated pill

  and slip it into the side pocket in your mouth, pretend

  to swallow it down in drowsy gulps while

  the white-frocked nurse eyed the clockface above our heads.

  You tapped messages into the wall while I wept, struggling

  to remember the code, snuck in after bedcount

  with cigarettes, blew the blue smoke through barred windows.

  We traded stories, our military fathers:

  yours locking you in a closet for the days it took

  to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat

  pulled over your head; mine, who worked

  his ringed fingers inside me while the house

  slept, my face pressed to the pillow, my fists

  knotted into the sheets. Some nights

  I can’t eat. The dining room fills

  with their chatter, my hand stuffed with the glint

  of a fork and the safety of butter knives

  quiet at the sides of our plates. If I could write you now,

  I’d tell you I wonder how long I can go on with this careful

  pouring of the wine from the bottle, straining to catch it

  in the fragile glass. Tearing open my bread, I see

  the scar, stitches laced up the root of your arm, the flesh messy

  where you grabbed at it with the broken glass of an ashtray.

  That was the third time. And later you laughed

  when they twisted you into the white strapped jacket

  demanding you vomit the pills. I imagined you

  in the harsh light of a bare bulb where you took

  the needle without flinching, retched

  when the ipecac hit you, your body shelved over

  the toilet and no one to hold the hair

  from your face. I don’t know

  where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth

  those nights you tongued me open in the broken light

  that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern

  found us and wrenched us apart, the half-moon of your breast