Leave It Behind Read online

  Leave It Behind

  Emily Raabe

  FutureCycle Press

  www.futurecycle.org

  Leave It Behind

  Copyright © 2011, 2013 Emily Raabe

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by FutureCycle Press

  Hayesville, North Carolina, USA

  ***

  Cover artwork, “Andover,” by Allison Gildersleeve

  Cover design and ebook programming by Diane Kistner

  Note: We follow Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) conventions for typesetting poetry; lines that do not fit on your screen will “run over” to the next line and indent by a small amount. If you find this distracting, and to better appreciate the poet’s intent, you may prefer viewing the poems in a smaller or more condensed type or “sideways” in landscape mode.

  For Norm Walker, teacher

  And for always, Paul

  Contents

  Beginning

  I.

  My Best Dream

  Darwin in the Andes

  Field Trip

  Babysitting

  The Game

  First Dead

  Route 7

  Turning Back

  The Wolfman’s Sister

  Confession

  Dancing

  Graduate School

  Giving You Back the Musée d’Art

  Wedding Poem

  Love Poem

  Elegy I

  II.

  Leave It Behind

  III.

  I Love the Animals

  Lesson for Snake Charming

  Fox Paws

  An Old Story

  Early Freeze, Fairbanks

  Elegy II

  The Doctor Only Heard One Heart

  At Seven They Say

  At Eleven They Fight

  At Twelve They Tear Apart

  Her Nightmare

  The Story

  Spring, El Portal

  Rain Is Black and White, Like aPhotograph

  Milestone

  The Hinge

  Self-portrait as a House

  A Dream of Horses

  The Other Story

  The Mirror

  Acknowledgments

  Beginning

  We passed a lean-to somewhere in Scotland,

  empty except for a pile of hay.

  The hay bore a mark left deep by an animal.

  This cow with its baby, two sheep in love, a vagrant

  looking to sleep unmolested left behind them a sign of the body,

  body in silence that shows itself

  through emptiness

  in the battened-down hay.

  I.

  Here are your waters and your watering place.

  Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

  —Robert Frost

  My Best Dream

  goes like this: two fields

  cut by a thin line of trees.

  In the dream I’m at the line

  when the storm comes in.

  I dig a ditch in the dark

  in the snow in the dream

  and get in, and then

  the animals arrive—

  long noses, soft bodies,

  raccoons maybe, deer,

  bears, all the creatures

  with night eyes

  climb into my ditch

  with deliberation, settle

  their tails, snouts, paws,

  speckled haunches

  around and over me

  so we are cuddled in

  like kit fox kittens in a den.

  There is no fear of freezing

  in this dream, no muttered

  counting off of time

  because everything is here,

  has arrived on padded feet

  with something like love

  in that it is the absence

  of distance. We rest

  warm in the sleep

  we fear to allow ourselves,

  not even on the darkest night,

  not even with the snow

  falling fast oh fast, and animals

  so unafraid that they sleep

  unfurled in your arms.

  The dream, you understand me,

  was a gift, but it came

  with a price. I sleep each night

  with my palms up

  and wake

  each morning alone.

  Darwin in the Andes

  All day today I’ve felt lucky: time is nice

  instead of a yawning tunnel, the dog sighs

  in her sleep at my feet, food is warm and eaten

  off the good plates. I know I will pay

  for this abundance when afternoon looms

  like a bony forearm thrown across

  the beginning of the moon, ill portent,

  animal dead in the road—

  no matter. This morning in my reading,

  Darwin found the Andes, climbed higher

  than his shipmates to the fossils of the sea things

  in the cliffs, lifted his face to blue

  and did not panic, as I believe he will

  in later days, journey over and infirmities

  besetting him, God too close to be forgotten

  and the creatures in a museum

  in London, packed in cotton and smelling of rot.

  Let Darwin have his day

  in the Andes, the first flush of freedom

  from salvation upon him, the world revealing

  its face in the thin air like green over the choppy sea.

  Let me have my small pleasures: love

  in the afternoon, the dog who cries to go out

  and is let out, the words that arrive

  like mysteries—like the gift of a bone-white

  shell in rock four thousand feet above the sea,

  silence leading into silence, the Englishman

  who slips his god from the Ark,

  sensing only that the wind is fresh

  and up today, feeling only the weight

  in his hands of the spiraled things

  and the ache in his legs from climbing so far.

  Field Trip

  I went to jail with my fourth-grade class.

  The trip was only meant to scare us

  from small lives of crime—our teachers

  didn’t mean to show us what they did,

  the beds like cordwood cut and stacked for cold,

  the men alone in cages who looked at us

  as though they couldn’t get enough.

  We scattered after high school, some of us

  to waiting farms and some to towns

  where we could finally feel alone.

  But one night in the backseat of a dented

  Chevy bellied to the curb on Mott,

  I realized what the men in jail had wanted:

  they didn’t want to look through bars

  at our small faces, but for us to look

  at them. What’s more, they left us carrying

  their need: when we were brought out blinking

  from the dark grey belly of the jail,

  we had been taken by desire, marked

  with it like ashes on the forehead, a smear

  of promise we could barely understand.

  Ruined, we were not to be the mother

  leaning in to watch her child breathe,

  but instead the blood that takes a left

  turn at the heart and makes a circle

  for the grateful, dazzled brain. I hoped

  you saw my foot rise up

  to slap the glass or heard him call out,

  guessing at my name. I wanted you

  to sit up later in your darkened room,

  to see again that crappy Chevy rocking
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  on its metal hips, knowing

  you can see, the way a woman late

  at night might leave her shades

  undrawn, and then pretend to be alone.

  Babysitting

  We thought it was gross, and funny, and said we’d never babysit in that house again, and anyway the twins were brats and there was no tv. Lila was the prettiest in our class, like in the Billy Joel songs we agreed were written just for her. She got a locket for her birthday from her boyfriend, who hung it on her neck on the bus ride home while we watched from sticky plastic seats. He kissed her after, gently. We called Mr. Ellison perv, and felt sorry for the twins, whose dad was such a dork. We didn’t think of Lila in the darkened car, wearing the locket that marked her Lucky, waiting for Mr. Ellison to move his hand, hoping he thought it was resting on the seat, her bag with her math book in it, anything but the thing that he was teaching her. We told it at slumber parties, not having yet discovered what it is to have been picked, the dark space that opens up between the choosing and the way you choose to tell, the way your life can separate into two halves and never come back to you, the flush of confusion to be lucky, to be chosen, to be these things and also feel this way.

  The Game

  My brother the pitcher was skinny and anxious, dangerous without ever meaning harm. On Saturdays, we took our places on the lawn with my father. My job was to represent the batter, which frightened us both. My father remained unreadable under his Charlotte Indians hat. The ball was smooth, as hard as a stone. My brother wanted to control it. His desire narrowed the distance between pitch and hit until, inevitably, the target was struck. I walked it off without talking about it, following my father’s instructions. I tasted the sting on my skin, then a low ache that entered my body and claimed a place in my life. Each failed pitch made my brother angrier, his good intentions leaving him like light out of a window. Each bright mark from contact made me love him, in bewilderment, more.

  First Dead

  In the end, it wasn’t Buster or the cornering school bus that killed the Foster’s dog, but the milkman, his rounded toy-truck just big enough to drop a bouncing retriever in its tracks, tongue still out for barking and the good taste of the morning chase. Danny found the dog by the spot where we waited for the bus, its coat dust over gold, one maroon trail snailing from its open mouth. We eyed our own small mutt, who would not smell the dead, who pressed close when we boarded the bus then lay by door, my mother said, until we got home. By then we were full of the small injustices of the day, the Foster’s dog forgotten, bagged and driven to some dark building, replaced by a succession of labs who all died by bloat from stealing at the compost pile. Pearl survived our childhoods, grew deaf and blind and trembled when she walked, loved by then only by my mother, who put ribbons around each soft ear the day the vet came whistling with his black satchel down the long dirt road for the dog.

  Route 7

  The policeman pulled us over on old Route 7, just miles from home. He held his flashlight forward in two hands, the shock of yellow in our father’s station wagon like the lines that sometimes fall through cloudy days and pitch the Little League game into a left-field finger of light. Then my sister sleeping in the back seat woke up screaming, and even after we didn’t get arrested or have to call our parents, and got to keep our shoes on standing under the hot moon while the policeman pored over the seats and crickets called just off the road, she cried and wouldn’t explain herself. Danny drove the rest of the way slowly with his backbone hunched, his week-old old license shoved back in his jeans. In the driveway, Rachel finally answered me—I dreamt we were old. We were at Danny’s funeral—then went into the house through the fritzing electric front-porch light.

  Turning Back

  The grandmother, for example, has stilled her motions so close to zero that her arms no longer work to feed her. Young nurses spoon food into her mouth at meal times. In the yellow afternoons, she lies as still as a blanket stretched tight on an empty bed. Yet when the emergency comes—pneumonia or the stroke—she panics and comes back. Afterwards she is always these two things: furious, and hungry.

  The Wolfman’s Sister

  Though cast as lady or grotesque,

  as hectic membrane in the flesh,

  she would not be neither-nor.

  —Alice Fulton

  I was the child wrapped in a red cloak,

  knuckles on my shoulders

  turning me to face the forest.

  A slight push, only a tiny one

  to set my feet on the path,

  unwind the string, re-gather

  the breadcrumbs, and get it right

  this time; or this: to be the girl

  he wanted, but the prayers held

  not together in that light.

  When I was twelve I tried to disappear,

  to slip away without notice

  into smooth, resistant bone.

  Our mother fed me sweets

  and tiny cakes, filling my mouth

  and kissing it shut, sighing

  in my ear, so take dominion, take—

  So I became a still life

  in a glass bowl and then a window

  to be looked through, landscape

  as far as the eye could see. I traveled

  deep inside of it, but the woods

  rose up and became a corridor lit

  with footfalls each night and every

  night, forevermore—my cloak slips

  from my shoulders and it sighs a red

  fall brother can’t you see that

  I am burning?—think of ashes

  in the dispassion of the morning,

  a cool grey coating over grass; and when

  you kneel to sift it through your hand

  like sand, it gives up nothing,

  not a whisper or a chip of bone,

  just particle and drift already gone.

  Confession

  I walked into a James Turrell piece. I stood in it,

  I say it here: once I made my little sister sit

  in dog shit, I pick my nose most days, I took off

  my shoes and slid across the museum floor

  in my socks, over the black tape line to the

  blue blue blue of the double box glowing

  like a nightbird diner. Once I got high

  in the afternoon just to read the giant MOBIL

  sign when the sun went down and the neon

  came up in the sky. I wasn’t alone, by the way,

  not to excuse myself, but my companions

  were all artists and should have known better.

  Everybody knows that poets have no

  boundaries. I did once steal a boyfriend’s letters

  to read the one that called him cold “except

  your body, which you can’t help.”

  There was a camera, and we took turns

  posing gravely in the blue. I held

  your hand so we could go together.

  Once I killed a kitten because I thought

  they always landed on their feet, but

  I was three so I’ve forgiven myself for that one,

  as well as the fact that I do always take

  the front seat in the car. Do I think I’m better

  than everyone else was a fair enough question

  put to me by a man on a flight to Alaska

  when I opened a book during the summation

  of his plan for a Manhattan commuter helicopter.

  The Turrell piece was in a museum in Napa.

  I still have the picture. You and I

  are silhouettes with our arms out, pasted up

  on blue like something you might see

  out the window of a plane if angels existed,

  featureless happiness glowing at its edges.

  I left you after I promised you I never would,

  and I met James Turell and did not tell him

  I’d been in his work. So here it is, although

&nb
sp; I have to say we passed the guard on our way out,

  flushed faces and laces flapping, and she smiled;

  she knew human nature as well as anyone: we are made

  to promise things to one another under the firm duress

  of wanting, promises we drop like coins

  in every puddle, expecting a return;

  promises we never meant to keep.

  Dancing

  We were all night at a party

  in a warehouse by the docks

  where you danced Big Bird Walks

  and Oscar Rises from His Can,

  dipping me low while the floor

  rose up and night reaching forward

  spun us so all I could see

  was the blur your body made

  leaving one place for another

  the way an animal smells footprints

  in the snow, understanding

  everything about the heel

  and toes that left the mark—

  the story of the rough pad,

  the broken nail,

  if it was hungry or old—

  understanding everything

  but where the animal

  who left the mark, the beautiful

  animal, went afterwards.

  Graduate School

  For a while, it’s the funniest story you’ve ever heard, funnier than Nicole trying to climb off the plane over Texas jacked up on champagne and valium and the handsome steward as he laid her down but this one is told by your lover, the one who slept with his professors and so now is sleeping with you, who nights is smoking in your bed with a single-minded joy that could never be American, moody over vagaries in Hegel in a way that could never be American, and sexual in a way that, as far as you can tell, is entirely not American. The story? He was eighteen, his first trip to America, was working as a greeter at the gates of Disneyland. He went to the bathroom for a cigarette and in the next stall over, someone was grunting on their toilet, loudly urging on the effort like a dog with a bone, so he looked and saw, beneath the bright red short pants puddled on the floor, the two gigantic plastic feet in Mickey’s yellow shoes. Later you will find out he does lines off the head of Foucault on the hardcover edition of Discipline and Punish and that the men who followed him from bars were acting on a solid hunch, and he will say that he can never live in America because of the death penalty—which is very different than a harmless Mickey taking a dump, and far more permanent—and then he will say the lines “I want to be with you but never in the same apartment,” so you will pack your bags and go back to America where you will fall in with a banker from Connecticut who will hurt you in ways your European could never have imagined, having not grown up with that particular American dream of being given all you ever wanted by parents who regret you; but all of that is later, is arriving but not yet, for now you are in a bar in Europe and a man is telling the funniest story you have ever heard, and you are thinking how he will come back to your lonely flat and transform you all night long, how he will speak to you in languages you don’t understand, until, dazzled, you forget yourself what it means to come from a country where your grandparents came as children to escape starvation, that kills its criminals and pays good money for men to dress as Mickey Mouse. You won’t understand his story until much later, when you hear that he has moved to New York on the dime of a university and you think of his America being Mickey taking a shit, and finally you ask yourself why he didn’t just speak to you in English, and why it was so important to say Goethe right, and then you think of him, eighteen in America, shaking hands with Americans in brightly colored polo shirts and shorts and how sometimes it is not enough to want the right thing, not when you are hungry or alone, not when you are offered something you didn’t even know you needed until the moment it is given, and after that you let your mind go blank and you take it.