The Law of the Unforeseen Read online

  has powerful but as yet unknown properties. Parents, please

  supervise your children at all times. Don’t let them out of your sight!

  Around a dim U-turn, another sign with a red arrow

  warned that visitors in the House of Mystery should

  not attempt to open the Yellow Door, padlocked for our safety.

  A family from France, said the sign, had gone through

  the Yellow Door and were never seen again. We four—

  Dad, Mom, my brother and I—paused before the Yellow Door.

  A faint strip of gold light shone from below. I felt an icy draft

  on my ankles. That’s as far as we got in the House of Mystery.

  Back in the car, my head still whirled. I’d felt the dizziness,

  the vague nausea caused, I was certain, by the hidden power.

  Even at 14 I had my doubts about everything. I believed in ESP,

  poltergeists, the inexplicable. I believed in the asteroid,

  the magnetism that caused trees to lean sideways.

  How else explain the dizziness, the difficulty of walking

  upright, the urge I felt to fall on my face? How else

  explain the chill seeping from under the yellow door?

  What of the French family, who might have taken the warning

  for a joke and gone through, never to return?

  And what of the band of light? How I’d have loved to open

  the Yellow Door, to see with my own eyes the source

  of that gold glow, to feel the pull of the hidden power.

  “BARB’S HEALING HANDS”

  “Barb’s Healing Hands,” says the hand-painted sign

  I pass each day on my neighborhood stroll.

  Who’s Barb? There’s her hand-lettered phone number

  in black. Those would be her hands, I gather,

  pressed not quite in prayer, more like reaching—

  a little swollen, the fingers crooked,

  arthritic on a plywood stand propped up

  on curbside grass. Apparently, Barb does not

  paint well. The bouquet of florid lilacs

  the hands hold, faded by the usual

  erasure of sun, rain and winter wind,

  seems childlike, as if she’d turned the pages

  of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, pausing

  at Gauguin, her brush daubed in Prussian blue.

  I could use Barb’s healing hands myself.

  The world could. Every day the unspeakable occurs

  somewhere, in some far country, some city,

  prison, senate chamber, my city, my

  neighborhood. Every blessed day Regan

  gouges out Glouster’s eyes. Soldiers fire missiles

  through the windows of a family’s bedroom.

  I should drop in some afternoon and see

  what Barb charges, assuming she still lives,

  assuming Barb’s Healing Hands still massage

  those muscles knotted from living on earth.

  Her hands might revive my numb lower back,

  my bum left shoulder. As for the world’s aches,

  Barb would need, like Maioshan, Chinese goddess

  of mercy—she who hears the cries of the wretched—

  every one of Maioshan’s one thousand healing hands.

  Three: Ash

  I was fifteen, I think. Wilmington then

  was far along on its way to becoming a city

  and already well-advanced on its way back to dust.

  ~Galway Kinnell, from “Memory of Wilmington,” in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.

  THE RETURN

  The name of my grandmother’s horse

  escapes me, as most names do, finally,

  cantering into the trees of unremembrance.

  Any number of times she would tell

  of a blond girl crouched over the pommel,

  the saddle’s horn bumping her sternum,

  her hair flying, slapping her neck,

  clods and dandelions leaping as she streaked—

  Streak! Yes! That’s the name she gave

  to her chestnut filly, its forelock blazed

  with a lightning bolt—as she streaked

  across her father’s orchard, ducking limbs

  of cherry and pear, where now a freeway

  overpass curves high into a cloudless day,

  shading me in the din of traffic

  hidden overhead as if a waterfall

  might be near, or an airport runway

  and not this vacant parking lot,

  its asphalt littered with plastic trash,

  broken by dandelions outside an abandoned

  tanning salon where the orchard might have been.

  PHOTO OF THE TWINS, CA. 1897

  For the pose, they pinned white camellias

  in their hair, so despite the dark heavy gowns,

  it would have to be April in Indiana.

  They are the Savoy girls, Mert and Gert.

  Mother Amanda stands between, her small

  mouth so pinched she appears to want to spit.

  Maybe she’s annoyed by the endless wait

  for the photographer to light his white powder,

  a flash that will briefly blind her

  and propel their faces toward the future,

  to this kitchen counter, where now they gaze

  at me as if they’ve never seen a clean-

  shaved man in some kind of billed woolen cap

  festooned with the letter S. They’re aghast.

  The photographer wanted symmetry. Thus,

  Mertie’s hair topples left, Gertie’s right.

  They’d have been something near 18.

  All the evidence—the ruffled sleeves

  of their gowns, the girls’ several rings, tresses

  in pleated waves toppled nearly to their knees,

  Amanda’s gold time piece half-mooned

  from her waist pocket—points to late 1890s,

  hardly gay if judged by their somber eyes.

  So demure the girls are, so dear, so

  unsmilingly radiant, as though they’ve glimpsed

  a forecast of the century about to dawn.

  No names on the back of the photo.

  Mert could be Gert, for all I know.

  The one on the right is the prettier,

  softer, though more forlorn. I can’t release

  my gaze from theirs. So unsettlingly direct

  are their eyes, they seem outside of time.

  That, and the strict formality of the pose,

  suggests this studio photo was their debut

  to the world, and the world, if I rightly read

  their looks, is cold—something the twins feel

  but can’t explain—not yet, not at 18.

  Maybe I read too much. Maybe the photo

  merely reflects its era—the time of taffeta,

  bustles, bowlers and steam trains, before

  the invention of the photographic grin.

  Or maybe I know too much. Know, for instance,

  of Gertie’s failed marriages, her moves

  from Evansville to Bremerton to Pasadena,

  her job there as a maid in a rich man’s home.

  Mertie, I learn from an early city directory,

  lists her occupation as “laundress.” So the photo

  shows them staring at the blank wall of their future,

  and the future is a blinding flash of light.

  Their expressions are intricate—accusatory

  but not unsympathetic, as if, somehow, they see me,

  well aware that I’ve looked too long and deep

  into their hearts, dwelled too long in the ill-lit

  rooms of their lives, and thus learned things

  they themselves, beforehand, could not have fathomed.

  Do eyes forgive? Let that be true as the camellias

  behind their ears. I want to think my
kinswomen,

  Mert and Gert, would smile, finally, or at least

  have understood—not forgiven but understood—

  my life’s work, which has been to rouse them,

  raise them from their graves, to light the flash

  that saves them, and saves the unsmiling

  radiant world, against all odds, from oblivion.

  DAHLIAS

  Endless replication of clam shells, ants,

  hyacinths in spring, the return of Orion,

  the floral design of pond ice—things never stop.

  You stand by her stone and picture

  how she rolled her hair in that tight silver bun.

  You see her on her knees among gaudy dahlias,

  tanned arms dirt-flecked, neck sweat-beaded.

  Silver strands come loose, quick-swiped back

  behind her ear—scenes you play over and over

  because they’re yours, because the sky is pale.

  You divide yourself between all-is-illusion

  and who-the-hell-cares. She ran off with a man,

  Archibald something, Wyoming, 1920-something,

  she 19 with child in tow—your father, as it happens.

  You only knew her later—her silver hair,

  freckles under her green-specked eyes.

  In loving memory, intones the stone—stock phrase

  if there ever was one. Still, it’s true, if complicated.

  The squabbling robins in the laurel hedge agree.

  So does April drizzle. Those dahlias were as colored

  as her life, just as real as your love for her.

  Real too is your father’s life, written in the Book

  of Sorrows Unspoken. The world recycles itself,

  breaking your heart and, somehow, mending it.

  BLUE HYDRANGEA

  With apologies to Rainer Maria Rilke

  When she returns from the store,

  I’ll tell her I’ve written a haiku for her,

  for the blue of a blue hydrangea.

  I lie, as she will immediately know,

  about writing a haiku. I’ll tell her

  it’s no longer possible to write

  any kind of poem about hydrangeas,

  haiku or otherwise, not after Rilke,

  who likens them to strange notepaper,

  unlike the yellow legal pad

  that suffers my failure to see the blue

  in this mass of petals arranged in a vase

  on the kitchen table. The petals are soft

  green coins, washed-out gray-green

  some might see as a kind of almost-blue,

  hazy like dusk, like memory,

  the undiscovered blue of time,

  the blue of childhood sadness,

  scribbled on strange notepaper on which

  I’ve written the longest haiku in history:

  July already?

  Hydrangea petals—mintage

  of a winter sky.

  When she sees the vase of hydrangeas,

  when I read to her my bad haiku,

  she’ll know I’ve adhered to Basho’s dictum:

  “Learn the rules, then forget them.”

  She’ll know that beauty happens sometimes

  by surprise, like summer stars gone to seed,

  like the coin of a sudden moon on the window,

  its almost-blue smudged on the hardwood table

  by the vase of hydrangeas no longer blue

  but the color of the night sky.

  AX

  1.

  The new-honed ax he swings freezes mid-stroke

  in a photo never taken. You could

  walk up to him. You could peer into his

  gray eyes, examine his peppery beard,

  his grimed, care-lined brow, sweat bright on his neck,

  muscles tensed, veins bulged, ready for duty,

  eager to relax but ready. You could

  study the hunks of green pine—a small pile

  since he’s just begun to split fifty rounds

  on this fall morning behind the mess tent

  where the reek of rancid bacon fills his head.

  He looks familiar, this living statue,

  far from County Antrim, now just outside

  of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Well he should.

  He smelled the bodies an hour before

  he saw them, arrayed in rows neatly near

  the rail line, most, but not all, blanketed.

  So goddamned young, he thought, like George,

  his son, somewhere in the Kentucky hills,

  traipsing with the cold, exhausted 13th Illinois.

  2.

  As it must, the ax head flashes downward,

  hard, glancing off the slick bark of the round.

  Again you stop the frame to consider

  the fate of your great grandfather’s grandfather,

  this lean weaver who lied when he enlisted,

  said forty when the truth was fifty-five.

  By now he’d heard too much the din of war—

  the clatter of caissons, the snort and shit

  of horses, the silence and sudden shrieks

  of limbless men, their curses so appalling,

  so loud he more than once had covered his ears.

  His sergeant, a Maine man not yet twenty,

  had barked, You, private. Two cords. Do you hear,

  Irish? Go, man!, then tossed the hickory-

  handled ax on the ground. Several pickets

  galloped by, their horses seething. One yelled

  Nashville! Action in Nashville, you fresh fish!

  3.

  The ax head skids off the edge of the round,

  slices through the leather of his brogans,

  embeds itself well into his right foot

  between the big and second toe, some four

  inches in, severing bone and tendons,

  ending, for him, the Civil War three months

  from that morning he volunteered.

  You think of what he might have had inscribed

  on his stone when, in Anderson County,

  Kansas, 1884, still hobbled,

  having outlived three of four children,

  he died in a dusty town called Lincoln.

  He could have had Into the bosom of Christ

  chiseled into the granite, or such like.

  Or nothing more than his Scots-Irish name

  and dates to encompass a mere arc of time.

  The top of the stone broke off long ago.

  It leans against the base so that Thomas

  is no longer joined to Harkness. The sum

  of his life thus reads: “He was a soldier

  in the Union Army.” The sum of his life.

  Why that? Surely this sojourner must have

  wondered what he’d got himself into,

  here in America, roaming from upstate

  New York, there to marry Eliza, then

  on to the textile mills in Queens, and by

  1855 a shoemaker in Illinois,

  now here at rest in Centerville,

  next to Margaret, his surviving daughter.

  The ax has gone to rust, just as his stone

  will fall away to pieces, chunks, gravel, grit,

  and at last to dust, its inscription

  reduced to a whisper in the elms.

  POTATOES

  He came to me on one of those mild,

  late winter days, my gloved hands gripped

  on a hoe handle handed down from someone—

  Aunt Philomena, it might have been,

  or Ted Strickler, both gardeners, both gone.

  Sweating, I’d flung my jacket on a limb

  of the plum tree, went on breaking clods

  with the nicked hoe blade until I was stopped

  by the odor of cinnamon and pine.

  I’d backed into the rosemary bush,

  releasing its tang, releasing too my fat
her.

  He appeared as he had in his last year—

  cheeks papery, ashen, eyes dull, thin scruff

  of beard no longer white but yellow.

  He told me he was okay, said I needn’t worry

  or feel sorry. And just as when he lived,

  having lost by then his sense of taste and smell,

  he laughed, went on and on about how much

  he loved my potato wedges—salted, roasted

  with rosemary, daubed lavishly, as always,

  despite my frown, with mayonnaise.

  MY FATHER MOWS THE LAWN

  Slacks rolled, tee-shirt speckled green,

  sweat-stained in the heat of July,

  he’d push the mower through the knee-high grass.

  Thankless task, after a day at his cubicle,

  now home to the rectangle we called our yard.

  I offered to help. Nah, he said. Exercise.

  I’d hear him curse when the blade

  cracked against a rock or bit into an object

  hidden and rotting in the weeds.

  Again I see him crouch, extract from the reel

  a wet black thing twined in dandelions.

  Without a word he chucks it high

  into the summer afternoon. I watch it spin,

  shedding bits of earth, flapping like a wounded crow.

  When I catch the chewed, un-seamed baseball,

  he claps his hands, dances around the mower

  and whoops, What a grab in deep left field!

  We go to extra innings. This game is tied!

  I toss back the ball. He’s turned away already,

  straining, muttering, wrestling the mower’s wooden

  handles like a man who’s had it, who knows futility

  and puts his whole being into its resistance.

  TYING A TIE

  I must be twelve or so. We face the bathroom mirror,

  me in starched white shirt, trying not to squirm,

  faint frown on my face. He in sleeveless tee,

  his chest hair abundant, still dark, the last dots

  of shaving soap on his chin. He calls the knot a Windsor,