The Law of the Unforeseen Page 4

  holds my hands holding the long end on the left,

  short end on the right, flipping long over short,

  looped around, poked up and over the top

  tucked in, pulled down, the triangle tightened

  with thumb and forefinger—all simple, deft,

  impossible to replicate. He’s not a sad man yet.

  I’m in training for the world, for being a man like him,

  sad only when I study him in the mirror,

  girding for another day at the appliance store,

  his hands on the shoulders of his smaller self,

  prepping me first so I can see how it’s done,

  how to tie the tie in a way that allows me to breathe,

  to not fear the squeeze of being choked.

  I will, just as he has, come to live with it.

  And so I have, now that he’s gone, come to live

  with it, to tie my own tie, to accept the discomfort

  just as he did, whose reasons for sorrow were many,

  to love again the appliance salesman who turns me

  to face him as he adjusts the knot at my throat.

  ROOT BEER FLOAT

  There will come a time when, up at some ungodly hour,

  you pull from the freezer compartment the quart of vanilla,

  well-expired by now, its contents iced-over, slightly yellowed.

  You pry out two decent scoops into the tall blue-tinted glass,

  drop to your knees, fish behind the pickle jar in the fridge

  to find the one bottle of root beer, still there from the picnic in July.

  You pour it down the side of the glass, watch the foam rise

  over the ice cream, seething toward the rim, certain to spill.

  It does not spill. First you lick the froth, a speck of it

  cool on your nose. Your mother, a soda jerk as a newlywed,

  introduced you to the fine art of the root beer float.

  Your father, having survived the war, favored cherry sodas

  with a “bird heart”—so he called the maraschino marble—

  bobbing in the bubbles. He sold appliances, a business that failed

  after a year. For each customer who bought a refrigerator—

  so she told you years after he died of AIDS—

  he’d stuff the refrigerator freezer box with TV dinners

  and a quart of vanilla ice cream. Ice cream, root beer—

  you regard it as wondrous as the teachings of the Buddha.

  Still, there will come a time when you spoon out the last

  white blob, slug back the last of the root beer, rinse the glass,

  then search for and find the special ball point pen

  you’d been looking for, blue like the glass, with Vincent Van Gogh

  on the clip, a trinket someone sent from Amsterdam, and

  at that ungodly hour you drift back to the page you’ve been avoiding,

  the one you were working on with its dozen or so

  inconsequential lines about your first job out of high school

  as a cook on a fishing boat in Alaska, how lonely you felt,

  gazing out the tiny galley window at the gray sea, the immensity

  of distant mountains, how happy you were when the skipper

  fired your ass because you could not cook your way

  out of a paper bag, because the crew of four bearded men were—

  so to speak—fed up, half-joked they’d sneak down

  to the engine room where you slept in the fo’c’s’le, slept,

  even as the engine thundered all night, half-joked they’d bind you

  in your hammock and toss you over the side into the cold

  blackness of the Gulf of Alaska. There will come a time.

  It’s all inconsequential froth in a tinted glass, fizzing up,

  subsiding like your maunderings, like that mixture

  of sassafras and vanilla, how it drinks up ten or so icy minutes

  of your life. There will come a time when you open

  the fridge and find it empty, when you’re left with the airy

  froth of memory, the sweet cold of it on your tongue,

  the cold sweat of the blue glass in your hand.

  NEWCOMER

  She’s 9, black-haired, with her mother

  just off the train from Norfolk to San Diego.

  It’s mid-year at US Grant Elementary

  where she’s now enrolled. Before,

  she lived in Bremerton, near the Naval

  Shipyard. Roosevelt is the new president.

  No one has heard of Pearl Harbor,

  five years away from infamy.

  She wears the plaid skirt her mother made

  and has on her black and white Oxfords,

  polished that very morning.

  She stands before the class, introduced

  by the young teacher, Miss Cohon,

  who says Please make our new friend

  feel at home. She has traveled a long way,

  almost 3000 miles, to be with us today.

  The girl can’t bring herself to lift her eyes

  to see the 30 odd faces boring into her

  from their wooden desks. Miss Cohon bends

  to the girl staring at the gray linoleum,

  You know, we have something in common.

  I’m new too. My home is far away,

  in a city called Huntsville. You and I,

  we’re both newcomers together.

  In telling her story, the girl—now 93,

  feet slippered, knees quilt-covered

  where she sits on the cat-clawed sofa—

  pauses, her voice catching. On the wall

  behind are her sumi-e paintings: a catfish,

  a curled cat, a chrysanthemum. Two minutes

  pass before she can go on. That fall,

  she says, we came home at last to Bremerton.

  SHELL

  Waves and rocks have nicked the outer edge.

  Ugly shell. No one, not even me, would

  bend on this wind-slapped shore to pry it out

  of sand. Uses: soap dish, small ashtray, cup,

  scoop, spoon, scraper, knife. Or a boat to the moon

  for a Haida girl, born, I’ll guess, near Juneau,

  circa 1830. I picture her digging clams

  on the beaches of Douglas Island

  where she lived with her Wolf Clan.

  That would be before the Jesuits

  took her Indian name, baptized her

  as Catherine, solemnized her marriage

  to a Québécois trader in the employ

  of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Loving

  certain unpretty things, as I do,

  beautifully ugly things, she’d have loved

  my shell, admired it, played with it

  a while, then flung it into the waves.

  The interior glistens as if lacquered

  with moonlight—a pearly nacre the clam

  extrudes to adorn its hinged apartment.

  Outwardly, it’s a homely dwelling.

  Holding it up to the evening sun,

  enough light—just enough—enters through

  the calcium carbonate layers,

  through the lustrous inner cowl—to reveal

  a mountain range at twilight, haloed

  by a thin line of clouds, all seen as if

  from across an expanse of water.

  Inside the shell, the sun illumines

  a wonder of bright imperfections:

  specks of sand, they may well be, or flakes

  of mica, suspended in the matrix, aglow

  when I turn the shell, some appearing as stars

  above the mountains, some below as the fires

  of a village from a vanished age.

  IMMIGRANTS

  I’ve spent entire days lost in the warehouses

  of dust, searching the archives, imagining my ancestors

  boar
ding ships for America, leaving the coal mines

  of Cornwall, only to end in Wright County, Iowa,

  in an untended graveyard wedged between a corn field

  and the Union Pacific line, their stones toppled,

  their names scrubbed by a hundred fifty winters

  to an indecipherable blur.

  I leave them in their moldering beds to stroll the garden,

  drawn by a rufous hummingbird needling the feeder,

  his head a burst of copper in the angled morning light.

  I love how he bobs among the squash blossoms,

  barging into one yellow mansion, then another,

  insatiable, as I am, at times, impatient to say

  the unsayable, wondering what difference it makes

  to the finches bickering in the laurel hedge.

  I go out again at dusk. He’s still there, levitating

  among the blossoming beans, seeking a droplet

  from each white beaker. Then he’s gone,

  leaving me with my ancestors and their beards,

  bonnets and gold timepieces. Farms failed.

  Over in Illinois, the Savoys upped stakes,

  arriving by train at Puget Sound, dumbstruck by the girth

  of doug firs and hemlocks bejeweled by April rain.

  William, Josie and the new baby, Birdy, trundled toward

  a logging camp near Bremerton, bouncing in a wagon

  to the end of a mud-gummed road. Might they not have

  passed thickets of wild rose? Might they not have seen

  those same flashes of copper, startled by the furious

  whir of hundreds of rufous hummers, themselves

  migrants from Mexico? I want to think so.

  I want to think Josie, exhausted from the journey,

  said to her baby, That’s honeysuckle, sweetheart,

  as their buckboard came within hearing

  of the rasp of whipsaws, the scream of a steam whistle,

  and the crash of a felled cedar in this, their new home.

  VIEW OF RICHMOND BEACH

  What I love is the rasp of small waves,

  the sound of the Sound, that slap of flat green glass,

  and to scale the bluff and read the names on graves—

  Lund, Weiss, Baby Matsue, lost in uncut grass.

  A cloud turns rosy like Anders’ plastic flower.

  Sister, lover, father—flowers meant to nullify decay.

  Comes a time our ordinary star will lose its power,

  the lighthouse light will flicker, life will sail away.

  There’s a cheery thought. The bluff sheers off at my feet.

  My sons once ran on that sand, threw shells

  and skippers. Crows tumble like tatters of a burnt sheet

  to roost down-beach where they cast their spells.

  Dark comes on. Far out, a ferry glitters its way

  to Vashon Island, bearing the last light of day.

  ASH

  That small word came to you by some odd

  synaptic path. A meteoroid skipped off

  your atmosphere, some bit of stellar shrapnel

  from so far away “far away” means nothing.

  It might have been the thread of fire

  just over the ridge, caught in the corner

  of your jaded eye, extinguished

  by the time you grabbed its tail.

  That led to other kinds of flare-ups:

  a conflagration of roses out back,

  bursting overnight, gaudy and heartbreaking

  for reasons reasonable to you alone:

  you were there. By Wednesday

  they had fallen, one brown petal after another,

  like burnt potato chips on the lawn.

  Like ash. Then there was the heat you felt

  at thirteen, lying on the dock,

  nettles of lake water singeing your back.

  You still see, under your splayed elbow,

  through wet lashes, a prismatic world.

  You still see the down on her arm, small

  swellings through her thin green suit

  pressed against the boards.

  That’s when, as night fell, you understood

  the ache of life. She grabbed your wrist. Wow,

  she said. Shooting star! You missed it. Years travel

  quicker than tonight’s grain of iron sparking

  off the ridge. Her name—Meredith—leaps back

  with the plash of ducks paddling in the dark.

  She’s that half-second flash of fire returned

  from space deep in your aging brain, rendered,

  as she has surely ended, as you will end, as ash.

  COFFEE

  We hike with mugs to a nearby creek,

  there to smell and drink the light, pass the time

  we have left together, one last hill to climb

  that will show us where we’ve been. We speak

  or, rather, joke about who’ll go first, is the soul

  a cloud, or what about that morning a brown bear

  caught us in the act? You’re the more aware,

  the one who sees the rapids ahead, the goal

  not to get there but to go there. Love, you

  were always better at fending off the pressure

  of regret, disillusionment. You see pleasure

  in morning rain. How would I go on? How do

  I—or you—stand alone in willow shade, a place

  where we kissed, no longer face to face?

  Four: Presence

  Crows do not reserve their vocal discourse for one another;

  sometimes they talk directly to us.

  ~Lyanda Lynn Haupt, from her book Crow Planet, p. 79

  THE PATH

  Last night’s rain brought down

  needles from the big pine,

  quilting the path to the river

  whose heavy breathing is not so much

  like music — more like wind

  rasping in the aspens.

  Leaves glitter with river color—

  the air sweet from pine pitch.

  Patches of hillside orange

  flare and smear on the current

  blended with blue afternoon.

  A heron glides upstream

  toward the deeper tones of evening.

  On the far shore, in a hemlock snag,

  a pair of cedar waxwings loop

  back and forth to feed on mayflies,

  whose wings are flakes of light

  rising and falling over the river.

  POETRY CLASS

  I wish I’d liked her more. She’d stand heron-still in the hall,

  her Goth-black hair damp, inky, lank on her spindly shoulders.

  She’d greet me with a pursed smile, erase it and hold open the door.

  In the early weeks she’d sprawl in her back row chair, yawn,

  check her phone, text a friend, watch—or appear to watch—

  sparrows dart about in the camellia tree out the classroom window.

  Now and then she’d fish for something in her bag.

  A string of badly tattooed stars wandered up her forearm.

  Two lip rings and eye shadow failed to highlight the natural wonder

  of her kelp-green eyes. She rarely spoke. Her soft flat voice

  muffled some anger, some sadness she had packed away

  in her private attic. Her poems of exploding roses or crows

  without beaks were edgy, hard to follow, as if she could care less

  if people understood. Still, she’d come to class with copies,

  read them in her almost audible monotone, then face the predictable

  bewildered silence, broken when one of her two allies

  said, “Whoa! Cool!” Or when a non-ally piped up: “Uh, I’m lost.”

  I’d add something like, “Well, it’s rough but, as always, it depends

  where you go from here. I see promise.” To my surprise,


  she’d revise, even when not requested. And the poems got crisper,

  stranger, more obliquely and less directly personal, sometimes

  blackly funny, as when she likened a boy she once dated

  to Gandhi in one stanza, Al Capone in the next. She’d vanish

  for two weeks, then appear again with a new piercing and,

  I was startled to see, a bright smile, as if some good thing

  had lifted her to a new level of confidence or consciousness,

  accompanied by what I saw as a breakthrough in her poems,

  in particular one about bats asleep by day in their cave,

  protected, keeping each other warm, mother bats nursing their young,

  and then, at twilight, so she wrote, “they gush into the sky

  like an alphabet.” I didn’t comment when she read it to the class

  but looked her way at the end of the conference table,

  clicked my tongue and clenched my fist—my silent way

  of saying Yes! This one sings! At the end of the period,

  I said, “Genevieve, the term’s almost over. We need to talk

  about your missed assignments.” “I know,” she said,

  “but not today. I gotta take my boyfriend to the clinic.”

  Her boyfriend stabbed her to death that weekend

  in an apartment across town. I didn’t learn this news

  till the start of the new term. Alone in my office, I read

  copies of her earlier work. Those about her boyfriend

  now became tragic, prescient with hints. Later poems showed

  a young person diving into language, in love with consonants:

  Bs, Vs, the hard C of cave, the fire of the letter R.

  I’ve visited her grave. I did not speak to Genevieve as if

  she was a secret lover and could hear my pained confession.

  Roethke did that in “Elegy for Jane.” Still, I’ve kept a folder