Unfastened

Poem 4 July 23, 2007

When the slacker at American Cleaners
refused my pinned pants because down the street
they’d turn over faster or when the night waiter
brought just one slim soup

(I must tell you
I and my pants are small)

when the woman at SewFit said Monday soonest,
and went back to haggling over lace, I went home hungry
asked my husband for money, cried into a bag of chips

A car door
swung open on an empty street
like two grackles fighting in a mulberry tree
holds little
to no hope for sympathy.

and crumpled my note from the IRS, wiped the tears and kept rowing

until a stream appeared
a stream of soup flowing
under the trees, a stream of grackles, glistening wings
a shore full of pins, a shore lined with berries and
rusted out car doors and misty figures
that look like me waving me on

Summmer 2007: New Mexico and Austin

Mayakovsky and Weather Warnings July 16, 2007

January 15th, 2007

I’ve been reading a little book of Mayakovsky’s early poems. Outside, a rare Austin ice storm threatens. And I wonder if we had more severe weather if Texas would have more poets, poets who call out to the audience: “All of you, filthly, in galoshes or without/will clamber onto the butterfly of the poet’s heart!” Or poets who contemplate suicide by shotgun or the embrace of a locomotive’s wheel. The house won’t get warm, and I’m reading Mayakovsky, Mayakovsky before he bought the communist dream, Mayakovsky consoled by indolent clothes while the sky cries loudly. Of course, he is beautiful and sinister, photographed in shadows, isolated even from other poets. Mayakovsky has no poem for Akhmatova. No poem for Pushkin that I have found, though his concern for horses reminds me of The Bronze Horseman, where Yevgeny, reduced to a lone beggar, is whipped like a horse in the street, and reminds me of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, an animal who suffered the same fate. In Austin, the memory of horses has nothing to do with a human recognition in a horse’s tear. Here, we have two or three days of Russia a year when the sky stops suggesting the endless frontier, when the fiddles stop singing, and the rain turns to ice, and suddenly it feels possible to write.

Jim Lehrer Responds

Jim Lehrer responds; he’d love to come to tea. I’m now faced with decisions — tea sets, finger foods. I imagine Earl Grey, crustless cucumber sandwiches. I imagine Jim Lehrer would like a scone. More importantly, I imagine what he might report while I sit rapt and sipping. I won’t ask him big questions about PBS. I know Jim Lehrer is doing his best. Instead, I will defer to him on topics, though small, that control my life: the relative effects of progesterone cream, vinegar as a weed killer, the expanse of women’s rib cages over the decades. I will ask about Texas, and perhaps Jim Lehrer will consent to cover birthing armadillos.

Jim will then ask that I call him Jim and tell me it’s common for women my age to want something more. On the day I was born Lederberg announced a hypnovirus that could stupefy the world; when I turned one, hurricane Camille hit the Southern coast. The very next year, Verna7 was launched, and on my tenth, Double Eagle II, the first balloon to cross the Atlantic, landed in Miserey, near Paris. Like most, my birthday, he will admit, had thus far been full of scheming and loss. The next year two planes crashed above the Ukraine. Other years, other crashes. When I blew out twelve candles, Azaria Chamberlain disappeared. Don’t feel guilty, Jim will say, you’ve searched your whole life. When I was your age, I made a list. It may sound simple, but this was it: on one side of a page I wrote the date, on the other I wrote my important events. If moisturizing your arms lifts a brick from your heart, if you kill two roaches with a broken broom, if you pack your own bags at the grocery store, if your candidate wins the run-off, write it down. And if it all seems irritating or irrelevant, you’d better find something else.

With this advice, our meeting could certainly end. But Jim will lean forward, rest his hands on the table, tap his fingers, and tell me this is how he thinks. The truth is in fiction, he’ll say, you know that. You know if a sergeant calls you Tex, you answer, and later you make your own show. At some point, you lift your own brick from your chest; the day you turned one, busses lined highway 90, bumper to bumper, all the way to Woodstock. In Mississippi, 248 people died. Anyhow, you were happy.

Again, it could end, but like a dream that pulls back into sleep, Jim Lehrer and the promise he brings will stay put on a painted stool, unhurried. We’ll listen to Patti Griffin, wash dishes; he’ll sigh for me when he sees the lawn. He’ll lend me some money if I ask. And, finally, when the moment comes, as I know it will, when he’s called away, I’ll reach for his hand; he’ll pull me into a hug, smelling of vaguely bergamot and starch. With perfect manners, he’ll give his thanks and invite me to tea in Washington or Virginia. Of course, I will say I’ll come.

Of course, I will see him to the door, and watch wistfully as he pulls away. And at night I will tape a map to the wall and mark all the places I’ve been in blue and those I desire to go in red. On a lined piece of paper, I’ll write this year, 2005, as the year I ate black-eyed peas and waited for luck that came.

Nostalghia

February 11th, 2007

Lost in the rain, you step into a church -
a hundred candles; and a sparrow flies.
A circle of women knit a prayer shawl.
You remind yourself it’s not you who died.
In your heart, all four chambers are working-
no quivering pools - no fear that your lungs
will tire, give out. In perfection,

the Europe of gardens and fountains,
exists somewhere very far away; the mirrors
of childhood hold funny faces.
Left alive, with love, you’re ready to confess,
you’ve had enough of this strange vacation:
every sight looking back at you.