Leave It Behind Read online

  Giving You Back the Musée d’Art

  The show was the teeming darkness

  of video: visions flashing like starlings

  over the ceiling and walls, an overheated

  room, a set of stairs, a chair, a woman

  on a porch, blue sky through glass,

  nothing lining up for its turn but jostling

  the brain unhitched to let the world

  come in hard without mercy.

  I was sick from the teeming, staggered

  to the lobby, and had to sit with my head down

  for an hour until I could drive—

  For once let’s tell it right. You were driving.

  You were driving and the blizzard came

  as we drove south, white wind

  and double fists of snow thinning the road

  to something squeezed from a tube,

  the world nothing on either side of us.

  All the long ride home, Canada cracking

  under the weight of the freeze, Vermont

  a pinpoint swimming in black, and penitence

  already beginning to drive us apart,

  we practiced our stories, threaded our lies

  so well that for all these years

  when I described the video exhibit

  I saw in Canada—the details of confusion

  and the dark—I myself forgot that you

  were there. Finally, here: your fingers

  slipping past elastic, mouth on the back

  of my neck, a chair, a woman on a porch,

  blue sky through glass, Montreal poised

  at the precipice of a storm.

  Now that I don’t feel this, I remember.

  Wedding Poem

  That night I dreamt I killed a dwarf.

  At first, it seemed it was an accident,

  but then my dream self murmured,

  I did get away with the first two,

  so maybe this time I should turn myself in…

  I went to a party but didn’t enjoy myself.

  The space where the dwarf had been

  loomed everywhere, making a shape in the world

  of a small and absent body.

  My guilt filled the shape exactly

  and I began to hope

  that they would come for me—

  then I remembered your dark eyes secret

  in sleep, your rough palms

  pressed flat between dreams,

  and a waking fierceness rising in me whispered,

  let the dwarf stay dead.

  Let its missing body sink into the fabric of earth

  without a mark. Let good and evil shrink

  to the size of a hand—

  you have given them away.

  I woke up beside you with the truth

  inside me like a dream that follows your day.

  I will never let you go.

  Love Poem

  My godmother wants to die, when her time comes,

  by taxi. She plans to throw herself in the path

  of a yellow cab on Park—she’s confident

  the driver will never think to use the brake.

  She will be wearing her best suit, and my mother,

  her oldest friend, will be there too, to smooth

  her skirt sedately over her angled knees.

  New York City will move around her,

  traffic like water splitting around a rock

  in a river, coming back to itself

  unchanged. My godmother will lie on her corner

  in her Chanel suit, resplendent

  and splendid under the wheels of an unprotesting

  cab on its way to pick up, or drop off,

  just doing its business, which on one particularly

  brilliant autumn afternoon,

  sun working its way down the avenues

  like light unfurling in tunnels, will include

  lifting my godmother from the city she loves,

  leaving just a vast and rippled wake, catastrophe

  one thumbprint smeared and blurring.

  Elegy I

  The city existed in a fog to me then,

  streets unfolding without warning, corners

  turning into darkened alleys, subway stations

  that brought you into daylight

  blocks from where you thought you were.

  You took me to a place on a sidewalk,

  chalked a circle into the pitted cement.

  Where we met! you finally said, exasperated.

  The buildings were utterly unfamiliar, their windows blank faces.

  Were we east or west of Union Square?

  Already the child was beginning inside me.

  This was another city still, secretive

  and unavailable to mercy.

  Its streets lay in impassable shadows, its doorways

  unmarked on any maps we carried.

  I didn’t know this then. All I knew

  was that I was lost and what I was beginning

  to know: that you

  were going to prove useless

  for finding my way home.

  II.

  Leave It Behind

  I. Wolf

  The wolf comes in July.

  You open the door because you live

  in a house in a meadow

  and understand yourself to be

  more than your body: bull thistle,

  oxeye daisy, Klamath weed, fir;

  marjoram on window shelves, baby’s

  breath behind the house, small

  spots of dirt on the hands.

  The wolf wears the costume

  of a man, blue jeans and a shirt, but is

  nettles and bloodwort,

  beetles clacking, caws in the digger pines,

  water pooling red as rust.

  The wolf takes his costume off

  and ruins your house,

  meadow grass watching you run

  with what looks like a dog at your back.

  II. Forest

  run through the thickets the river

  to houses that buttress the hill

  the blacktop to flag down a car I keep pushing

  and dragging you pulling your arms

  to make you run faster and almost

  the blacktop the houses the yellow

  of rescue I’m grateful and say so

  you turn and fall backwards

  just turning to check on the

  breadcrumbs spun into

  the forest your loosening fingers

  house yawning with sugar

  eyes counting your knucklebones

  moon on its side

  your small brother watching

  the dull steel of morning the grinding

  and grinding he rattles the bars

  and shouts at your braids standing out

  in the wind for gods sake

  stop running stop running lie down

  III. Meadow

  One winter the meadow behind

  the little green house filled with beasts.

  The snow in the high country

  emptied the peaks, and coyotes came down

  to look for their meals in the space

  between frozen ground and snow.

  They slept in tight bunches but ranged

  winter mornings close to the house.

  This was the winter of fires

  in the stone fireplace, quick jig

  to the outhouse, open tumblers

  of jaegermeister at four pm.

  We thought we might finally be animals

  because we felt the outside world.

  Then we began to wake before dawn

  bristled by voices running like water

  blue shadows heaped in the meadow

  something like the cover of night

  ringing the house, thick fur

  standing up at the neck, noses

  cocked for scent. We thought

  it might be the animals, watching. />
  Night to us was coco in a mug, blood

  running tender under the skin.

  What did we know about anything?

  Beyond the thin green walls

  of the little house, a thump and toss

  of brown, a flash of white escaping.

  IV. Flight

  She would like to lie down under the silken weight

  of a man and not feel fear.

  She would like to walk into the falling cape

  of twilight alone.

  She agrees it was like lightning: eighteen years old

  and raised on myths;

  reading after how she learned it, leaning in to love

  the wings that took her.

  No: it was like falling in the dark over a stone,

  hidden until you trip.

  Women, she knows, can sometimes be hurt

  and learn to live easily again.

  She will never live again without a dog to watch her

  or, uneasily, a man.

  V. City

  I knew before I knew because I smelled him:

  wet wool under the stairs

  behind me, sticky locks, flat mailslots, nothing

  for me there and he with his cheek

  on the wall like a child,

  fists tucked under his tipped-down chin.

  I used to think (when I thought of what

  it might have been like for you)

  of jumping from the high rock over the river:

  long enough in the air to regret the leap,

  but then the landing

  in the cool green pool, the quick swim to the edge,

  the limbic system already on to other things.

  But gripping my blunt and useless

  keys in the company of my own adrenalin-scented

  dark-eyed man, I realized it wasn’t like the river

  at all, and then I knew

  what went on and on for you, the moves

  from getting out unharmed to getting out at all

  to simply maybe living;

  and so I ran and I was saved, and only later did I think

  about your message, which is something

  I have been waiting for—

  don’t the dead ones always signal to those they left behind?

  I was looking for peace like the flat of a sheet I could snap

  over my head, or a light in the kitchen

  that would not shift, something settling like hayseed

  to let me know that you were fine, but instead

  I got this one word: run! the way it must have felt

  to have the angel bring the news:

  filled to the rim with a blazing sight so absolute

  and so unwelcome

  that it doesn’t seem to have a proper name.

  VI. Field

  Then one day, it was amazing, she escaped. Yes, sometimes it is like that. She got up from the broken-down ferns and shook her lovely shoulders back and ran, yes, she ran, faster than the dark wolf, faster than the stories they would tell about her later, her red hair burning behind her—that’s how fast she ran, you see, so fast her hair caught fire, and her feet turned into wings, and her beautiful fingers flew up and away and she ran beyond the neighbor’s house (which had been her goal, get to the house and he won’t—) but no need, no, never anymore for the neighbor, or the men in windbreakers who dug up her garden, or the harnessed dogs that knew to go to the river; no, there never was a need for any of them, and they just stayed on in the city and never came—no, never came at all—and she ran until she was gone, not tired, just gone, and you may not know this, but I will tell you: the papers got it wrong—she did get away and she stayed there.

  III.

  I Love the Animals

  So why do they keep charging me in my sleep?

  Giant flies with human faces crowd

  the air in the kitchen—I battle hard with a rolled-up

  Times, but the flies fight back,

  bumbling me toward strips uncurling

  sticky from the ceiling, a rising

  buzz and shoving, then the mercy

  of awake in bed. Last night’s dream closed

  with tiny fuel-efficient cars, us racing

  to get in one ahead of the mice,

  who had swelled to pony-size and angry,

  cramming themselves into every available space.

  Of course you were there too, and when I dreamt

  about our dog dying in the road outside

  the house or hit in stopped-motion by the

  passing truck, crying to be helped from pain

  and I woke up in agony, you were there

  too, stitched into the lexicon of outsized

  truth that dreams deliver—your body opened

  at its side with its crazy seams showing,

  possible here to fear the one you love

  —and both as real as dreams in which

  the cage of fancy holds the real disease,

  the latch for leaving smooth and hot, so real

  that if your hand closed on it dreaming you’d step

  through and, waking, find yourself in a new place,

  the rules dismissed, the path home sewn with brambles,

  and something buzzing, faintly, gone.

  Lesson for Snake Charming

  Thus follows the question: is snake charming an art, and if so, how is it acquired?

  —Ditmars’ Reptiles of the World

  The Naja is wrenched awake again, time and repetition

  doing nothing to knit her threadbare nerves.

  The glass caps balanced on her lidless eyes

  fail to keep the world from entering her slightest dreams.

  It’s not the music—with her tongue to the breeze

  she can hear the nervous heartbeat of a hesitating mouse,

  so what could music mean to her? It’s the body in motion

  that pulls at her like a thousand strings hooked

  in the keels of her scales, marshalling her every move.

  Tortoise-colored, short-toothed serpent, Naja naja

  of tales, as furious as if the first time thus disturbed—

  this footpacked dirt, these frightened, lascivious faces,

  smell of grease from last night’s meal. The jerky movements

  catch the hemstich of her sight, making her sick

  from a sensation of reeling, an animal transfixed by the bit.

  Her ribs spread out like shells releasing

  the muscle within, her flattening hood a death’s head

  embroidered on a lady’s square. The crowd convulses

  as she opens to the trace his body makes in the air.

  Her jaw aches for the doubled unfolding

  of bones, the mute give of skin under her teeth.

  The man throws a rooster and she strikes,

  her point of fury safe behind the fluttered dying

  in the puffs of dust. Then he is still

  and she can’t find him, the confidante

  to Cleopatra drained to torpor, a fine hand

  closed on this exactitude of wanting

  and dust: butcher birds like dark priests

  praying at the plate and the man who bends to spit

  in the dirt, the marvelous charmer of snakes.

  Fox Paws

  Because I’m a total color-whore, I noticed the palate first in this piece—

  grading thirty-seven art school essays in my living room,

  I’ve been drinking since the middle of the pile; do they all

  come high to my class? I know the three painters

  who snack through the seminar, the ones I thought

  were getting all my jokes, are actually thinking things like,

  what if you were reading a book, and you opened it,

  and the pages were blank, but you kept on reading anyway

  cracking themselves up while I preen myself

  at the far end of the table like the Sally Fiel
d of higher education.

  Anna K. reminds me of my Mother god I hate that bitch.

  Monday nights are Coco, reading from her freewrites—

  a tiny blush and then the spanking scene with her girlfriend

  on the roof of the dorm, or the three-way

  on the folding couch while the band plays on in the kitchen.

  Arden wears a hand-made pieced fur toga

  and has a project going to knit every hour

  she’s awake for a year. She drags the yarn-mass

  behind her like a filthy pet, lets us know the day

  she can no longer fit on public transportation.