Only As the Day Is Long Read online

  exposed as you spit on him. “Now you’re going to get it,”

  he hissed through this teeth and you screamed, “Get what?”

  As if there was anything anyone could give you.

  If I could write you now, I’d tell you

  I still see your face, bone-white as my china

  above the black velvet cape you wore to my wedding

  twelve years ago, the hem of your black crepe skirt

  brushing up the dirty rice in swirls

  as you swept down the reception line to kiss me.

  “Now you’re going to get it,” you whispered,

  cupping my cheek in your hand.

  Awake

  Except for the rise and fall of a thin sheet

  draped across your chest, you could be dead.

  Your hair curled into the pillow.

  Arms flung wide. The moon fills our window

  and I stand in a white

  rectangle of light. Hands crossed

  over empty breasts. In an hour

  the moon will lower itself. In the backyard

  the dog will bark, dig up his bone

  near the redwood fence. If we could have had

  children, or religion, maybe sleep

  wouldn’t feel like death, like shovel heads

  packing the black earth down.

  Morning will come because it has to.

  You will open your eyes. The sun

  will flare and rise. Chisel the hills

  into shape. The sax player next door

  will lift his horn and pour

  music over the downturned Vs of rooftops,

  the tangled ivy, the shivering tree,

  giving it all back to us as he breathes:

  The garden. The hard blue sky. The sweet

  apple of light.

  Girl in the Doorway

  She is twelve now, the door to her room

  closed, telephone cord trailing the hallway

  in tight curls. I stand at the dryer, listening

  through the thin wall between us, her voice

  rising and falling as she describes her new life.

  Static flies in brief blue stars from her socks,

  her hairbrush in the morning. Her silver braces

  shine inside the velvet case of her mouth.

  Her grades rise and fall, her friends call

  or they don’t, her dog chews her new shoes

  to a canvas pulp. Some days she opens her door

  and musk rises from the long crease in her bed,

  fills the dim hall. She grabs a denim coat

  and drags the floor. Dust swirls in gold eddies

  behind her. She walks through the house, a goddess,

  each window pulsing with summer. Outside,

  the boys wait for her teeth to straighten.

  They have a vibrant patience.

  When she steps onto the front porch, sun shimmies

  through the tips of her hair, the V of her legs,

  fans out like wings under her arms

  as she raises them and waves. Goodbye, Goodbye.

  Then she turns to go, folds up

  all that light in her arms like a blanket

  and takes it with her.

  On the Back Porch

  The cat calls for her dinner.

  On the porch I bend and pour

  brown soy stars into her bowl,

  stroke her dark fur.

  It’s not quite night.

  Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.

  Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent

  moon, a pink rag of cloud.

  Inside my house are those who love me.

  My daughter dusts biscuit dough.

  And there’s a man who will lift my hair

  in his hands, brush it

  until it throws sparks.

  Everything is just as I’ve left it.

  Dinner simmers on the stove.

  Glass bowls wait to be filled

  with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley

  on the cutting board.

  I want to smell this rich soup, the air

  around me going dark, as stars press

  their simple shapes into the sky.

  I want to stay on the back porch

  while the world tilts

  toward sleep, until what I love

  misses me, and calls me in.

  Bird

  For days now a red-breasted bird

  has been trying to break in.

  She tests a low branch, violet blossoms

  swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies

  straight at my window, beak and breast

  held back, claws raking the pane.

  Maybe she longs for the tree she sees

  reflected in the glass, but I’m only guessing.

  I watch until she gives up and swoops off.

  I wait for her return, the familiar

  click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee

  and scan the room, trying to see it new,

  through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.

  Books piled in a corner, coats hooked

  over chair backs, paper plates, a cup

  half-filled with sour milk.

  The children are in school. The man is at work.

  I’m alone with dead roses in a jam jar.

  What do I have that she could want enough

  to risk such failure, again and again?

  The Laundromat

  My clothes somersault in the dryer. At thirty

  I float in and out of a new kind of horniness,

  the kind where you get off on words and gestures;

  long talks about art are foreplay, the climax

  is watching a man eat a Napoleon while he drives.

  Across from me a fifty-year-old matron folds clothes,

  her eyes focused on the nipples of a young man in

  silk jogging shorts. He looks up, catching her.

  She giggles and blurts out, “Hot, isn’t it?”

  A man on my right eyes the line of my shorts, waiting

  for me to bend over. I do. An act of animal kindness.

  A long black jogger swings in off the street to

  splash his face in the sink and I watch the room

  become a sweet humid jungle. We crowd around

  the Amazon at the watering hole, twitching our noses

  like wildebeests or buffalo, snorting, rooting out

  mates in the heat. I want to hump every moving thing

  in this place. I want to lie down in the dry dung

  and dust and twist to scratch my back. I want to

  stretch and prowl and grow lazy in the shade. I want

  to have a slew of cubs. “Do you have change for

  a quarter?” he asks, scratching the inside of his thigh.

  Back in the Laundromat my socks are sticking to my

  sheets. Caught in the crackle of static electricity,

  I fold my underwear. I notice the honey-colored

  stains in each silk crotch. Odd-shaped, like dreams,

  I make my panties into neat squares and drop them,

  smiling, into the wicker basket.

  Sunday

  We sit on the lawn, an Igloo

  cooler between us. So hot, the sky

  is white. Above gravel rooftops

  a spire, a shimmering cross.

  You pick up the swollen hose, press

  your thick thumb into the silver nozzle.

  A fan of water sprays rainbows

  over the dying lawn. Hummingbirds

  sparkle green. Bellies powdered

  with pollen from the bottle-brush tree.

  The bells of twelve o’clock.

  Our neighbors return from church.

  I bow my head as they ease

  clean cars into neat garages, file

  through screen doors in lace gloves,

  white hats, Bible-black suits.

  The sm
ell of barbeque rises, hellish

  thick and sweet. I envy their weekly

  peace of mind. They know

  where they’re going when they die.

  Charcoal fluid cans contract in the sun.

  I want to be Catholic. A Jew. Maybe

  a Methodist. I want to kneel

  for days on rough wood.

  Their kids appear in bright shorts,

  bathing suits, their rubber thongs

  flapping down the hot cement.

  They could be anyone’s children;

  they have God inside their tiny bodies.

  My god, look how they float, like birds

  through the scissor-scissor-scissor

  of lawn sprinklers.

  Down the street, a tinny radio bleats.

  The sun bulges above our house

  like an eye. I don’t want to die.

  I never want to leave this block.

  I envy everything, all of it. I know

  it’s a sin. I love how you can shift

  in your chair, take a deep drink

  of gold beer, curl your toes under, and hum.

  from

  WHAT WE CARRY

  Late October

  Midnight. The cats under the open window,

  their guttural, territorial yowls.

  Crouched in the neighbor’s driveway with a broom,

  I jab at them with the bristle end,

  chasing their raised tails as they scramble

  from bush to bush, intent on killing each other.

  I shout and kick until they finally

  give it up; one shimmies beneath the fence,

  the other under a car. I stand in my underwear

  in the trembling quiet, remembering my dream.

  Something had been stolen from me, valueless

  and irreplaceable. Grease and grass blades

  were stuck to the bottoms of my feet.

  I was shaking and sweating. I had wanted

  to kill them. The moon was a white dinner plate

  broken exactly in half. I saw myself as I was:

  forty-one years old, standing on a slab

  of cold concrete, a broom handle slipping

  from my hands, my breasts bare, my hair

  on end, afraid of what I might do next.

  After Twelve Days of Rain

  I couldn’t name it, the sweet

  sadness welling up in me for weeks.

  So I cleaned, found myself standing

  in a room with a rag in my hand,

  the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go.

  And like an old woman near the end

  of her life I could hear it, the voice

  of a man I never loved who pressed

  my breasts to his lips and whispered

  “My little doves, my white, white lilies.”

  I could almost cry when I remember it.

  I don’t remember when I began

  to call everyone “sweetie,”

  as if they were my daughters,

  my darlings, my little birds.

  I have always loved too much,

  or not enough. Last night

  I read a poem about God and almost

  believed it—God sipping coffee,

  smoking cherry tobacco. I’ve arrived

  at a time in my life when I could believe

  almost anything.

  Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood

  hatless in the rain and the whole world

  went silent—cars on the wet street

  sliding past without sound, the attendant’s

  mouth opening and closing on air

  as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps

  erased in the rain—nothing

  but the tiny numbers in their square windows

  rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds

  gliding by as I stood at the Chevron,

  balanced evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle

  gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain.

  And I saw it didn’t matter

  who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.

  The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty

  of the Iranian attendant, the thickening

  clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood

  finally, after a semester of philosophy,

  a thousand books of poetry, after death

  and childbirth and the startled cries of men

  who called out my name as they entered me,

  I finally believed I was alone, felt it

  in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo

  like a thin bell. And the sounds

  came back, the slish of tires

  and footsteps, all the delicate cargo

  they carried saying thank you

  and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car

  as if nothing had happened—

  as if everything mattered—What else could I do?

  I drove to the grocery store

  and bought wheat bread and milk,

  a candy bar wrapped in gold foil,

  smiled at the teenaged cashier

  with the pimpled face and the plastic

  name plate pinned above her small breast,

  and knew her secret, her sweet fear—

  Little bird. Little darling. She handed me

  my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt,

  pushed the cash drawer in with her hip

  and smiled back.

  Aphasia

  for Honeya

  After the stroke all she could say

  was Venezuela, pointing to the pitcher

  with its bright blue rim, her one word

  command. And when she drank the clear

  water in and gave the glass back,

  it was Venezuela again, gratitude,

  maybe, or the word now simply

  a sigh, like the sky in the window,

  the pillows a cloudy definition

  propped beneath her head. Pink roses

  dying on the bedside table, each fallen

  petal a scrap in the shape of a country

  she’d never been to, had never once

  expressed interest in, and now

  it was everywhere, in the peach

  she lifted, dripping, to her lips,

  the white tissue in the box, her brooding

  children when they came to visit,

  baptized with their new name

  after each kiss. And at night

  she whispered it, dark narcotic

  in her husband’s ear as he bent

  to listen, her hands, fumbling

  at her buttons, her breasts,

  holding them up to the light

  like a gift. Venezuela, she said.

  What We Carry

  for Donald

  He tells me his mother carries his father’s ashes

  on the front seat in a cardboard box, exactly

  where she placed them after the funeral.

  Her explanation: she hasn’t decided

  where they should be scattered.

  It’s been three years.

  I imagine her driving home from the store,

  a sack of groceries jostling next to the box—

  smell of lemons, breakfast rolls,

  the radio tuned to the news.

  He says he never liked his father,

  but made peace with him before he died.

  That he carries what he can

  and discards the rest.

  We are sitting in a café.

  Because I don’t love him, I love

  to watch him watch the women walk by

  in their sheer summer skirts.

  From where I sit I can see them approach,

  then study his face as he watches them go.

  We are friends. We are both lonely.

  I never tell him about my father

  so he doesn’t know that when I think of his—

  blue ashes in
a cardboard box—I think

  of my own, alive in a room

  somewhere in Oregon, a woman

  helping his worn body into bed, the same body

  that crushed my sister’s childhood, mine.

  Maybe this wife kisses him

  goodnight, tells him she loves him,

  actually means it. This close to the end,

  if he asked forgiveness, what could I say?

  If I were handed my father’s ashes,

  what would I do with them?

  What body of water would be fit

  for his scattering? What ground?

  It’s best when I think least. I listen

  to my friend’s story without judgment

  or surprise, taking it in as he takes in

  the women, without question, simply a given,

  as unexceptional as conversation between friends,

  the laughter, and at each end

  the relative comfort of silence.

  For the Sake of Strangers

  No matter what the grief, its weight,

  we are obliged to carry it.

  We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength

  that pushes us through crowds.

  And then the young boy gives me directions

  so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,

  waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.

  All day it continues, each kindness

  reaching toward another—a stranger

  singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees

  offering their blossoms, a Down child

  who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.

  Somehow they always find me, seem even

  to be waiting, determined to keep me

  from myself, from the thing that calls to me

  as it must have once called to them—

  this temptation to step off the edge

  and fall weightless, away from the world.

  Dust

  Someone spoke to me last night,

  told me the truth. Just a few words,