A Marriage Book Read online

  For then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  —SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 29

  It is not the icing laid

  in lines over the wild cherries.

  Nor the cube of crystals

  next to the bitter coffee.

  Nor the cap of whipped cream

  sheltering the hot chocolate.

  It is your smile, sly at the eye,

  corner perked in self-love,

  that whirls me in sweetness,

  that lays me in an orchard

  in full bloom.

  TO MY DAUGHTER AT FOURTEEN IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST FULL MOON

  Men will never understand you.

  You are too deep for them,

  too rich.

  They will stand in front of you

  for hours

  with nothing to say.

  Then they will say it,

  and it will be nothing.

  Understand that males, for all their power

  and all their mind and all their wit,

  are awash in awe.

  It laps at their ankles

  like waves breaking on a beach.

  Yes, you can count on them to protect you

  when bats wake you in the night

  and you scream and scream and scream.

  But it is best to count on yourself,

  even in the matter of bats.

  Hitting them with a broom

  and carrying them out to the garden

  with their broken wings and stunned,

  high-pitched bleating,

  is a nasty business.

  But somebody has to do it.

  Don’t let him be the only one to learn

  that the bat that fills the echoing halls

  of your nightmares

  barely fills the palm of your hand.

  Like a hummingbird, it is practically weightless.

  Now that you are a woman, you can learn the truth:

  nobody likes to kill bats.

  And men, huge and blue-eyed sailors in your dreams,

  are practically weightless in the palm of your hand.

  DRIVING LESSON: TO MY SON AT SIXTEEN

  Driving a car is the least of your worries.

  It can kill you in an instant.

  A woman can wreck you

  in the rearview mirror.

  Women are like pianos.

  In the beginning you hit the wrong keys

  and nobody likes it.

  Sometimes the key cover

  slams down on your knuckles.

  Sometimes not.

  To be good,

  you have to learn how to play:

  allegro, andante, vivace, moderato,

  misterioso, grosso, profondo.

  Yet some days

  they remain out of tune

  regardless of your persistence,

  your practice.

  Your timing is bad.

  Forget harmony.

  Go play the violin.

  Go drive the car.

  CHORES

  Chores every day, no debate.

  Table set, dishes washed, garbage out.

  No car keys without gas money.

  No gas money without grass cut.

  And then at sixteen she

  drives off one Saturday night

  and doesn’t come home.

  And the policewoman’s bored reassurance

  at 4 a.m. does not reassure at all.

  And when she drives up the street

  a few minutes past noon the next day

  it takes a decade of hard work

  to figure out who we all are now.

  ACRES OF DIAMONDS

  Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.

  Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

  And if that mockingbird don’t sing,

  Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.

  An overdose?

  An overdose of what?

  Of diamond rings?

  Of glass?

  A looking glass.

  A cart rolled over.

  No more pretty baby.

  Didn’t the mockingbird sing

  for you, my daughter?

  I stand before the looking glass,

  no more pretty baby in my arms

  reaching for my worn finger.

  Now you grip the steering wheel

  to change freeway lanes.

  We thought that would add chance

  and terror enough.

  But you felt stuck, you said,

  stuck with the Plains warriors:

  Is it real?

  Is it real,

  this life I am living?

  And no way to test it,

  to prove it.

  Didn’t the mockingbird sing for you,

  my darling daughter?

  There were acres of diamonds

  at home.

  They were all

  for you.

  PRAYER

  I left my daughter alone

  like a sheep

  left alone

  with a pacing moon.

  I walked the mile to my hotel

  from her college room

  with barbed wire stretched

  through my back.

  I lay in my bed,

  an old shepherd

  exhausted with tending,

  stomach sick with the taste

  of bad water.

  Even through thick walls

  I could hear the howling

  deep inside her head,

  see her shy reflection

  in the water.

  She huddled alone in moon shadow

  against the stares of her own eyes,

  pitiless and knife-toothed.

  I did what I could—

  cobbled a rough shelter

  out of windfall,

  lit a hazy lamp,

  gave blood,

  tucked covers.

  I was limping myself,

  silent as an empty bell.

  In the moonlight through the window

  I see my gray beard rise and fall,

  rise and fall

  with ancient syllables

  laying me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If she should die before I wake

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  amen

  amen

  amen

  FOR A RESCUED DAUGHTER, AN ARTIST, COMING UP FOR AIR THROUGH WATER

  Everyone knows where the waterline is.

  Below feels like home,

  but humans die there. Drowned,

  it is called. And dead it is.

  But soft, floating death, like living fish,

  or flowing muslin folds, or sleep long longed-for.

  Water mitigates gravity,

  eliminates needs like bathrooms

  and beds and cooking and cleaning

  and loving and hating.

  Above the waterline lies rough air,

  one rasping breath after another, wind,

  steep hills, and thin, gasping mountains.

  Yet you breathe on,

  for your husband, sons, and

  one taut canvas after another.

  Like a phase change:

  Watery blood and skin and hair

  transmuted to watery blue-green paint,

  watery paint becoming shadows

  and the shadows of shadows.

  Amid the daily clamor of puffing

  swimmers and climbers,

  a divine talent, ascending.

  BACKSCRATCH BOY

  Your righteousness

  is mighty as a king’s.

  Your anger lasts the time

  an egg cooks.

  Your smile charms cobras

  and cataracts.

  Your indolence is a jungle

  in which butterflies live whole lives.

  But we can scratch each other’s

  backs for hours,

&
nbsp; like monkeys quiet in the trees

  or baboons squatting

  in the grass.

  Your hands salve

  old wounds in my back,

  while I find in yours a billion

  nerve endings that all shriek joy.

  A WILD WOOD

  This rangy son across restaurant

  eggs and toast is twenty-one.

  He breaks me up as jokes

  slip from his tongue like crumbs.

  And when he hugs, his arms float

  wide as wings, an unobstructed

  heart wide open chest to chest.

  But I hear the rumble in his gut.

  His eyes sweep the floor like brooms

  with dreams and fears.

  Outside this sidewalked town

  and college by a lake

  lies a wild wood. Inside live

  hairy hogs that bite and

  won’t let go.

  It is time for him

  to feel those teeth

  that drag you to the ground,

  against which you must

  battle for your life.

  TROUBADOUR SONG

  It happened the way the troubadours

  said it would—through the eyes.

  His arm emerged from the window

  of a small plane. She remembers

  the sun-illuminated hairs, the woven veins.

  Later, he saw her across a room.

  He could not look again, nor speak.

  Now she marks her textbooks

  with his photograph,

  reading in the company of his eyes.

  Touch too has come, and strategy.

  He conspires to escape to visit her,

  a thousand miles for a single day.

  She asserts her need to study.

  But the eyes have opened

  the windows of two souls,

  across a runway,

  a table, a room, half a continent.

  Children will have those eyes.

  MORNING OF THE WEDDING

  On our early morning walk, the dog,

  unwell, eats grass.

  A tug labors a barge toward a splash

  of sunlight on the lake.

  Four cormorants fly by my shoulder.

  Gulls carry on their obnoxious calling.

  August 22, 1992. August?

  No more than any other month.

  Yet in the peace of early morning light

  among the ripe raspberries of this

  particular late summer season,

  with the clap of horses rising the hill,

  the world is changed forever

  by these two courageous children.

  Kneeling and touching an old gold ring

  and making it burst into flame before us

  with a few quiet syllables

  from their bursting hearts,

  mathematics and grammar implode.

  Two become one,

  I do becomes we are,

  and infinity, that shimmering abstraction,

  twists into a particular

  double helix.

  The splash

  of sunlight on the lake

  winks at me three times,

  and smiles.

  MIDNIGHT CALL

  A friend took his from a silent skid on ice,

  his daughter’s brain waves a straight line.

  Another heard his message on the news.

  Tonight a distant moan rings our sleep.

  Our son, neck broken, climbed for help,

  his wife wrapped in the car’s crushed cab.

  At his birth we learned to listen

  with our spines for broken

  sounds like these.

  On his wedding day we felt

  her bones knit with our own.

  Tonight, car lights race across the ceiling,

  each one a phone, each phone ringing.

  Without complaint, we answer.

  We answer. We answer.

  CHRISTMAS PRAYER, SANTA FE, DECEMBER 25, 1993

  The ER nurse glances up.

  Is my son sleeping?

  Yes. And his wife?

  Yes, she is sleeping.

  You should too.

  Outside, dawn stretches its golden arm

  through a saddle in black mountains,

  Sangre de Cristo, blood of Christ,

  rounded, strangely female.

  I walk and walk in the cold.

  A grove of juniper and piñon

  opens before me, a roadside chapel.

  I pray.

  I praise the east for the sun,

  rising again in our lives.

  And the trees of the eastern mountains

  for their strength to hold the tumbling car

  in their arms. I thank the trees.

  I praise the west for the Jemez Mountains,

  born of fiery calamity, and the village

  riding her sturdy shoulders

  a thousand years.

  I praise the north, St. Vincent’s hospital,

  its sharp, clean edges outlined in light

  against soft mountains.

  I praise the south, for the road that brought me

  here, praise the builders of roads,

  and the snowplow drivers who worked

  all night that I might safely arrive.

  I praise my grandfather below, who practiced

  surgery on vagrant children in Vienna that my son’s

  wife may walk again today.

  Praise his strong jaw, his pipe, the sharp

  scalpel in his warm hands.

  I praise the bowl of sky

  filled with clouds of living breath

  from my lungs and theirs,

  the same moist smoke since life began.

  Are they sleeping?

  Yes.

  Will they recover?

  That is up to gods

  like these.

  ON A YOUNGEST DAUGHTER’S ACCEPTANCE AT THE COLLEGE OF HER CHOICE

  A red door opens toward a cornfield.

  Rows of stalks bear heavy golden heads.

  Cribs and bins wait empty to be filled.

  God made the weather and blue-green water.

  Parents work night and day

  to bring home every golden child.

  So much poetry is about storms,

  bruised fruit, locusts eating everything.

  This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.

  ON COURSE

  At dawn, our youngest daughter

  rises for her summer job.

  Now I’m the intruder as she races

  through morning rites, bed made,

  dishes to the sink, newspaper splayed.

  In a month she’ll live away at school

  and for the first time in three decades

  the pressure inside this house will equalize

  with the shade under outside elms.

  After the door slams, sudden stillness.

  Ice tumbles to the freezer tray like calving glaciers.

  A cardinal whistles through two panes of glass.

  I listen, steady, like a captain at the helm,

  white beard signaling the wisdom of the course,

  storms abating, grandchildren reaching

  for my knees, my logbooks.

  ONCE IN THE SIXTIES

  after William Stafford

  When she walked toward me

  radiant with pregnancy,

  we laughed as if shaken

  by some unseen wind

  propelling our van

  those long camping miles.

  Children grew like wildflowers,

  so obvious, green and yellow,

  quick out of the ground.

  We remember their firelit

  faces from old photographs,

  their unexpected humors congealing

  around the campfire.

  We barely had time to wonder at their beauty,

  grades, spou
ses, children

  and we are camping again,

  under dark pines,

  near lapping water.

  PART THREE

  And Still She Blooms

  IN HER GARDEN, SHE

  I am thinking she

  does not know how to be happy.

  Looking up over my book, I

  expect familiar clouded brows,

  earth heavy on her shoulders,

  family boulders in her pockets.

  Then she rises from her garden.

  I see sunflowers bow toward her hair,

  pea blossoms steal up her thigh,

  sky blue forget-me-nots simulate her eyes.

  As she stoops again to dig,

  clumps of roses,

  brilliant all season,

  reach low to brush her glove.

  My eyes visit her like hungry butterflies.

  We feed, grateful, as if such

  beauty could just happen here,

  so quiet, in front of our house.

  TWO KNIVES

  She spends whole days cutting

  vegetables, I cutting meat.