Leafing

Autumn twilights
     I’d wander the neighborhood
trying to walk away the pain.
            It didn’t work.

Instead, I’d see toys and bicycles scattered
across the dry grass like leaves, the litter
children leave behind, and pine
to be inside.
      It was always Halloween,
scarecrows and pumpkins on the porches,
cobweb scarves draped across the shoulders of the trees,
and on each limb, a paper ghost dancing in the wind—
     all our little charms to stave off fear.

Sometimes the curtains were open and I could see them there, a family
at dinner. The polished gleam of the table, and on the wall a tapestry,
or, since this is Houston, a Mexican wall hanging,
brightly colored, heavy, maybe a poster for an art show,
something slightly avant garde, probably British—
Lucien Freud or Stanley Spencer—sisal carpets, walls of books.
I’d think I heard music playing on the stereo, Beethoven or Mozart,
nothing too unfamiliar, not an Argentine tango.

           Against all reason, I wanted to believe
they were happy, though I couldn’t give a definition.
Pain left me carved and hollowed out, empty
as a jack-o’-lantern.
Another autumn,
  a neighborhood like that one, I watched my children, a gypsy queen
and Spiderman, walk away under a flaming canopy of leaves—

Tell the truth: it was you who walked away—

(Is it my voice or yours I hear?)—

like the child of someone I once knew, a fairy child
darting into the street, treats clutched in her hand.
The car came out of nowhere. They always do.
Or the Halloween
a pharmacist in Pasadena fed his children strychnine
in some Pixy Stix. One died.
I remember the taste of Pixy Stix, a tart, powdery, orange taste,
like flavored dirt. In news reports the pharmacist was called
                   ”The Candy Man.”

        And what’s the moral
of these stories—

“Don’t take candy from a stranger, kid”?

That we can be the strangers, even to ourselves? And so can
those we love, and sometimes those we don’t?

No easy connection here, no story as a metaphor
for ugliness beneath the placid surface of the family.
Maybe some families are happy, though never
without loss and complication.
And Tolstoy was wrong—all of them are not alike.
                     Definitions vary.

I just thought of them is all, the stories.

♠♠♠

In Piazzolla’s tangos, it’s always Buenos Aires,
1950-something, a dim cafe—the Richmond de Florida, perhaps.
All the men are smoking, drinking small white cups
of thick, black coffee, while Piazzolla, master of the bandonéon,
plays a tango a la parilla, freely, without a score.
(A phrase which also signifies “the way meat is grilled just long enough
to seal it on both sides.”)
             Improvisation is like grief,
you never know
when it will take you by surprise, the way he never knows
when he’ll turn a corner near the Recoleta and see his beloved
walking away down an empty street and the melody
is the pure song of pain.
           Piazzolla will be young
only a little longer. His black hair, just beginning to recede,
to silver at the temples, is slicked back in the manner of the day,
and his eyes, too, shine black and wet, like a pond
without moonlight, though whether they fill with smoke
or with memories, no one can say.
               It is December, summer,
hot and sweet, and he is sweating now,
a thin film like milk on his upper lip. He imagines
a woman—she might be named Mercedes—floating
near the ceiling like an angel in a painting by Chagall,
except she’s no angel and the clouds
she floats above are smoke.
                  She had no mercy,
raking her red nails across his back
when she came, moaning his name, “Astor! Astor!”
It’s a scene so predictable he almost laughs.
                     Still he longs
to postpone the moment of release, to make it go on
and on the way grief can, the way in “Soledad”
he postpones the resolution of harmonic sequences
until I think my heart will break.
                It’s as though I’d found at last
the house I grew up in, found it down the side street of a dream,
behind a wall of brick and jacaranda,
                 but when I open the iron gate
I see the house was torn down or Peron has taken everyone away
and no one knows me anymore.

Is that what losing you would feel like?

♠♠♠

By Halloween, pecans costumed the trees
parading solemnly along the curb, and every year
a group of boys showed up
to strip them bare, to shake the branches
for a share of half the crop. They had poles
for the lower ones, but the most agile
of the boys, the skinniest, even the smallest,
would shinny up to reach the highest limbs.
He’d shake until pecans rained down like coins,
like money grown on trees.
                On the porch
my grandmother stood in her thin blue sweater,
watching to see they didn’t cheat her; then night
after night she’d sit in front of the TV—

(Favorite radio program? “One Man’s Family.”
Favorite TV show? “Father Knows Best” starring Robert Young—

cracking nuts with a silver instrument of torture,
digging the sweet meat out, swatting my hand away.
She wouldn’t let me help because I ate too much, she said.

When my father called to tell her I was born
a girl, she wept into the phone.
              ”I’m so sorry,” is what she said.

Fifty years later it’s spring again, or almost,
first clear day after a week of cold rain, and in the coffee house
a mild-faced man in jeans—an early retiree, maybe—
is chatting with two interns, green and blue scrubs
bright as spring flowers. I imagine they might be
on their way home after thirty-six hours at Ben Taub,
the place where the worst cases go. They’re almost
too tired to speak.
         But they’re wired still—
they can’t believe what they’ve seen tonight—last night—
and drink coffee to unwind, to find a space something like a meadow
between themselves and death.
         They’re still young, though not, perhaps, for long.
One of them rests his chin in his hand. “Is it supposed to rain
again?” he asks. “Is it ever going to feel
like spring?”
         The older man leans over him like a father
and smiles. “Just watch the pecans,” he says.
“When you see them leaf out, it means no more cold weather.”

            That’s something my grandmother used to say
each spring, though I didn’t believe her then, anymore
than I believe you when you tell me the difference
          between leaving and leafing is a letter.

♠♠♠

The six o’clock news gurgles its little bubbles
of pain, until the sound becomes one low hum, one sorrow
indistinguishable from the next. Except this, perhaps,
which slaps me several times across the face
to wake me up: a beautiful child, age twelve—
in three weeks she’ll be thirteen—goes out to run
one morning on a country road—not far, a quarter mile
or so, she says, and she’ll be back soon—Daddy’s making pancakes.
They’ve never let her run alone before, but after all,
she’s almost a teenager. It’s a weekday, Wednesday,
9 A.M., but she’s “home-schooled.” Imagine
how much fear parents might have to keep a child
at home like that. And those of you who hear this story
are already counting up the ironies, no doubt.
How many are allowed? More than in a novel? Less?
Thirty minutes, they go out to look—she’s nowhere
they can see. Pretty soon they’ll call the police,
and the whole town—”Friendswood,” can you believe it?—
will join together in the search. Of course, you know how
the story’s going to end, don’t you? Admit you do.
What’s going to happen has already happened, hasn’t it?
Still, the parents, tearful, will go on TV
to plead for their daughter’s safe return,
to show a video in which she’s dancing, graceful, lovely—
she wants to be a ballerina, studies with the Houston Ballet.
The police chief, nervous, sweating in the camera lights,
holds up a drawing of a stranger driving a blue pickup
that day, and one by one her friends get up to say
how sweet she is, how smart, how kind. Not was, but is.
The girl’s mother, particularly, insists on faith,
the present tense. Her daughter’s coming home.
If she were dead, I’d know it, the mother says.
Besides, God’s watching over her: He’ll keep her safe,
He’ll guide her home. If she’s wrong, I wonder
what she’ll do: curse God like Job and lose
her faith? More likely, she’ll say it’s God’s will: He has a plan
that we can’t know. And you who judge her
simpleness, call it her blind refusal even, what would you do?
       (If the girl weren’t so pretty and so smart, so talented,
       if the parents weren’t so nice and middle-class, church-going,
       the kind of parents who’ll do anything for their kids,
        if the mother didn’t have a British accent, if none of them
       were white, would we care so much what happens?
       Why does the disappearance of this child
       capture our attention unlike the others—
       and yes, I know, I’m guilty, too: I’m writing about her, aren’t I?—
       as if children didn’t die here every day, and violently? Who decides
one life’s worth more than others? Tell me that.)
And while you’re at it, score another one for irony:
the “mother” was the baby’s nanny when the “real” mother died
eleven years ago. Of course, the girl is dead.
And three weeks later—just in time for her birthday—
she’s found face down in a pond somewhere
miles from home, wearing only socks. There’s a ring,
a silver one, with her initials on it, braces
on the corpse’s teeth. Of course the prurient among you
want more details—it’s easier that way, safer,
than imagining her terror in the end—the awful moment
she knew for certain what her fate would be,
what she saw last, felt. You think I put myself
above you? My tone is a defense against the truth:
that I, and those I love, could suffer this—will, surely,
suffer something.

Don’t take candy from a stranger, kid

How can her parents bear the pain, the knowledge
that will always awaken them in the dark?
We have no language for such grief.
Grief and leaf make a rhyme—
and maybe one can grow out of the other.
Hard to see how anything could grow from this.

♠♠♠

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear, etc, etc.
             So Wordsworth said, anyway,
but it’s the fear I remember most, a sick,
helpless fear of everything bigger, and everything is,
fear of the dark closet at the end of the hall
where someone might be hiding even now,
of the darkness under my bed where a bad man is
always hiding, darkness of the theater where someone’s father
sits alone in his sweat-stained clothes and stares
at the blank screen, waiting. Waiting for me.
         Fear of Linda Welch, sixth-grade bully,
who, playground rumor had it, banged a boy’s head
against the sidewalk while her mother stood by
yelling, “Kill him, Linda! Kill him!”
              I couldn’t believe
a mother could act like that, a girl be stronger and a bully.
I’ve learned by now they can.

              And what was a soul,
but a homonym for loneliness?

Still, there was one moment, at least, I had my spot of time,
beauty and fear conjoined. But that was another poem:

Childhood, a particular spring day after rain.
Mimosa, the trees shaking out their leaves—no, hair—the faint,
sour fruit of earth

              The description I gave then
wasn’t enough—it never is, I started to say, though maybe
it could be sometimes—
            that’s what I’m trying to find: what is enough.

I still remember how everything
seemed secret and blameless at once,
how I stood in the wet grass and looked up
into a lattice of trees, sun leafing through the branches
until the whole world was alive and I could see
each atom of each thing separate and shimmering in the motes of light.

Everything I was was everything, and it was me. I.
Then I sensed a hint of something else under the scent
of rain, a sweet, heavy odor like old water in a blue vase
after the tulips have been tossed aside. Impossible
to say it then.
It was beautiful and cold and I could only shiver
in the chill air of what I’d glimpsed:
that something final had begun,
and nothing I would do would make it stop.

I can say it now, can’t I? I can tell you.
It was grief I felt. And loss.
I can say it: It was death.
But not an abstraction. Mine. Yours.
Pointless to name it otherwise.
But not enough.

♠♠♠

Last week when it rained five inches in two hours,
    water filled the street, spilled
   over the curb, and the lake rose

   toward our doors, live oak and pine
 and hackberry leaves clogging the drains.
Neighbors gathered with poles to unstop them,

while Rose, Queen of Labrador, barked and bounded
  into the wild-running street, the New York Times
     brought back in her mouth like a duck.

   “Look what I found! Hey, look what I found!”
she seemed to shout, dashing from one to the other.
I used to think not joy but grief would rise like that—

a flood of tears, I’d heard somebody say—a flood. I thought,
  once started wouldn’t stop until I’d drown in grief.
     By noon the water disappeared, faint

tear-streaks evaporating in the sun, and everyone
   went off to work, happy for half a holiday.

♠♠♠

When Dimmesdale is dying, Hawthorne tells us
Pearl at last feels grief and is transformed, her tears

the pledge she would grow up amid human joy
and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world,
but be a woman in it. … Towards her mother, too,
Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.

          What was she to be, then,
besides a kind of seventeenth-century Isabel Archer,
the richest heiress in the New World, if not
a messenger of anguish?
             Hawthorne would have her
tamed of all her wildness—as if passion and sympathy could not exist
together—would have her all softness and virtue,
the dutiful daughter and wife and mother Hester would have been
without her sin.
        Though Hester has
her suffering and her wisdom, her belief that someday
man and woman will stand together
            on a surer ground
of mutual happiness,
            Hawthorne, because he is the author
and authority, cannot let a sinful woman
be a prophet(ess).

     For now, I must imagine Pearl is on the Continent somewhere—
Germany, perhaps—embroidering a tapestry by the fire,
two large red hunting dogs dozing at her feet. It’s winter
and she’s cold in this vast baronial hall. Soon she’ll call the serving girl
to tend the fire—she wishes they could have
a conversation, but her German’s still quite rough,
and anyway, the maid’s barely thirteen, a child
really, just up from a village near Nordlingen—
what could they talk about? Loneliness, perhaps?
Instead she’ll write a letter to her mother so far away—
there’s no news from Rudolf at the front, but the snow
is very deep and I am worried but try not to dwell on it;
the baby said her first word today—Tod,
I thought she said, but how could she know
the word for death?—and thank you for the little dress
you sewed, Mother, you take such delicate stitches.

But sometimes she feels a kind of rage come over her,
remembering Salem and the stares and jeers, children
calling her witch-baby, all for her mother’s disgrace! Imagine
the baby’s first memory: not her mother’s smile but the bright red
letter etched between her breasts. And the mother,
who loved denial more than she loved anything, even her child.
And the child, how she hated that look on her mother’s face,
the space she opened around herself as if no one
were pure enough to understand her suffering.
But it’s when she’s lying in her husband’s arms Pearl hates
her mother most, hates her for whatever it is
that holds her back, that makes her think carnal love
is sin, for whatever made her mother think, too,
sometimes, that Pearl was the devil’s child. “But I am your child,
Mother!” she had cried, “I am your Little Pearl!”
even though her mother looked as if she didn’t know her.
How much she’d wanted
to ease her mother’s pain, but something, she doesn’t know what,
kept her away.

            But maybe that’s my own invention,
my twentieth-century version of what we find so hard
                       to forgive.

The day we decided
to take my mother to a drying-out place
she’d been drunk for days, sprawled across the couch,
a black triangle of hair visible beneath her pink nightgown,
the too-sweet, sour smell of unwashed genitals.
When I told her where she was going, she cried
and said, “But you just got here—I wanted a chance to visit.”
I’d only come to do my duty,
to put her away, and told her so,
told her she was going
and she had a choice—she could get dressed or not.
She did, and passed out in the back seat.
My cousin—more like her son—drove my father’s new Park Avenue,
and when he had to brake hard at a stoplight,
she rolled onto the floor.
Passed out, dead weight, she was too heavy to be moved—
and Barry and I began to laugh, we could not contain our pain,
our hilarity, as we tugged and pulled and grunted
and struggled to lift her, laughing, in tears.

My father never said a word, never moved,
just glared at us from the Buick’s front seat.
I hated that she’d come to this, that I had,
taking her against her will.
           My mother.
She was my mother. I wasn’t hers.
And my father?

     It was only childhood.
In the photograph album, there, in full sunlight,
my father holding me up looks like
he’s holding … something. When did I learn
to distrust the world, its love
and shame? I wasn’t even looking.

The story, whatever it is, is always grief.
Something else might grow there, though—
Imagine unabashed joy!

I think we have to learn that we can hate,
even, especially, the ones we love.
That’s our impurity.

♠♠♠

In the dream about grief I stand in your house,
someone playing Schubert in another room,
half-hidden, faraway. Doors open
on a deck overlooking a blue bay, the blue of jays’ feathers
flashing overhead, flashing
through the tops of pines ringing a rocky coast,
and the trees’ clean scent rings, too, rings in the air
like church bells in a distant village. August, late afternoon,
white sun striking a match
on the water. But this isn’t a dream
about the outside, it’s a dream
about the inside, where the trees are.

Inside your house everything is pine—the walls
and floors, every door frame and window frame, even
the long table on which you lay the thick white plates,
place red tulips in a blue crockery vase,
that same blue again.

Someone could make a coffin from pine
like that, fresh-cut pine—a plain, simple box—
and I want to cry out,
           Oh, take it apart!
But when I look, there’s no coffin
there, only the ghost of a feeling
that you and I will be apart.
Suddenly I’m weeping.
            And, yes,
someone goes away for a long time.
How I pine for you then!

But when you come back—or is it I who return?—
it seems no time has passed between us,
though somehow the house is mine now,
this very room where I sit writing at a long pine table,
its pine floors, its shutters open to the evening, dusk
the color of weak tea steeping.

      And later, when I tell you
the dream, you say the trees could be inside me always.
Keep the pine on the walls, you say, to remind you of loss,
of longing. Pine for yourself, and for those you love
and have to leave, have to let go. They will be
the trees inside you.

So maybe this is how it happens, I say, how pain
grows fainter and fainter like an old scar,
or the dying notes of Schubert’s “Quintet in C,”
a thicket of secrets standing in the silence
after the music ends.
           And the secrets?
His grief, I think, and all his longing. What he knew
or sensed or feared would be. An early death—
though it’s always early when it’s yours—
late fame, or none, the loss of one who meant the world
to him. If only he could be buried next to Beethoven!

          A plain pine box.
Someone could be making it even now.

Years ago I played a parlor game with poets:
Which would you choose, someone asked,
to be famous in your lifetime and forgotten later,
or to be unknown in life, esteemed in death?
Oh, and alive you wouldn’t know that fame would come,
alive you wouldn’t know a thing.
               So many clamored
for fame after death, I couldn’t tell who told the truth.
And what did I say? I thought
they wanted me to choose that, too,
but I couldn’t quite decide—maybe I’d rather
hold love in my arms and stroke it, a faithful dog
who looks at me in adoration. It’s both we want, of course—
it’s always both—to be adored in life, adored in death.
Though what we really want, and desperately, is not to die at all.
                            Fat chance.

And Schubert—two months later dead at thirty-one—
never heard the quintet played—no one did, for over twenty years.
I can believe now nothing stays
the same, that nothing’s static, and Schubert knew that too—
it’s in the music, the last music, the way nothing is resolved there,
neither music nor longing nor grief—not even joy—
just seen from different angles,
the long outpouring of notes becoming other notes,
keys shifting into other keys,
like the play of light and dark across a landscape,
and everything changes so subtly
you might not even notice. “Opus Posthumous.”

           And maybe apart is just a part
of what we all must be, not a violent severance
of two syllables.
        Say it’s just a space
between two equals—no little a for one here,
bigger part for more there, but each a part—a space
that can be crossed.
        Say it’s a gap
between two syllables, two words, that can be closed.
Between the two of us. And others. Sometimes it can.
Say that. Say apart is one word after all,
or two words joined.
        Say secrets
whisper in my dreams like leaves, wind whistles
all night through their branches.
                Awake, alive,
I know there are some things I’ll never know
and maybe some I will.
           In dreams—awake, asleep—
I feel us face to face again, as if no time has passed.
That’s when I turn to you and say,
I see how new leaves grow from grief, from leaving,
how tears are the rain that waters them.
Yes, you say, and the trees,
do you hear them, how they’re sighing?
Listen, you tell me, listen,
            we are making a shelter inside you.