Body That I Bring to You in Winter

There was more snow than usual
those winters, as if Nature had contrived
to complicate things for the painters,

confuse their eyes while they tried
to paint light becoming light
with the speed of the body becoming

lover—lifted from the ordinary
into radiant particles. How their bodies
must have ached as they waited

under swirling flakes to paint more
snow effects, sometimes the snow
itself, falling over trees, fields

that break down into brush strokes
when I move in close, until I can smell
the oils, feel how a body loses

heat. If I were Sisley, I’d have to stop
a minute, coax the cold from my fingers.
But I’d want to keep going. Love

cries are the same in any language.
Look: they break open like light, they go on
long after the body turns to winter.

[from Snow Effects: Poems on Impressionists in Winter (Small Poetry Press, 2000)]

Day Two of the Surge after Renoir’s Fleurs dans un vase

You could do worse than spend the day
studying flowers in a glass vase,

roses, blue drops and poppies,
a peony already beginning to droop,
some leaves half eaten by wind or insects.

That there are wars and betrayals
you could name as easily as the flowers

matters little. You notice the wall
is rinsed with clouds, like sky. The round table
has the rich brown of earth. Right now

your heart could be breaking and no one
would know. The yellow roses

at the center glow like the idea of hope,
who had, St. Augustine said, two beautiful daughters,
anger and courage. You look for the anger.

There, in the lopped stems?
As for courage—there are betrayals you could atone.

But courage fails you, and you go on studying
flowers that bear the young face
death begins with.

The Truth About Pomegranates after Chen Chun’s Pomegranate and Mallow

Even to say the word conjures the field, the sudden
opening, the black horses rising into air
while the stunned girl yields and climbs into the carriage.

The seeds come later, after his seed, after the mother
and her thousand thousand wails.

But when Chen Chun painted his pomegranates and mallow
in the fifteenth century—the fruit so delicate
it hangs like blossoms, the mallow rising like a cloud
from the marsh below—what did he know of the eternal
triangle between a mother, a daughter, the daughter’s lover?

The earth-opening story?
The mother’s bargain with the gods?
The lure of the smoke-dark bed?

If he had a daughter, he would have known a daughter’s
being taken, the family making offerings that she not return
in disgrace, childless or otherwise useless.

The fruit will fall, the mallow wilt.
Someone passing by might see the smashed pomegranate
as blood, momentarily, and think of death,
as Chen Chun no doubt intended, the silk taut
as he worked his brush, his eye so intent the sudden cry
of a girl from the field goes unheard.

Every Fifteen Seconds

Do you think she knows how deep the wound is?
I ask. My lover, who is not given to melodrama,
nods, says she’s plunged a stake into my heart,
turned it and turned it. It hurts to hear him turn
against her. Yet I can’t deny her cruelty.

If you were to talk to her, it would be another
story. Her heart would be the torn one.
She’d give you reasons you wouldn’t
remember, she’d say so many, so fast. But
there she is and here I am. And you, no doubt

thinking, Find a resolution. There’s only so much
time. I hear you. I don’t know who you are, or where,
but I hear you, the way I hear the burning
of the stars. In other words, I know there’s no
such thing as silence in the universe—

too much noise left over from what we don’t say,
what we can’t say—hurts that go so deep
they seep into our blood and make the circuit
with it every fifteen seconds—twice,
at least, since you’ve been reading this.

Room for My Daughter

My daughter said there needed to be boundaries.
There was her life, and mine, and now
they were two different houses, with different trees
shading the windows, different light.

The house where we lived as mother and daughter
has long been sold, the apple tree outside
my daughter’s window blown down in a long-ago storm,
all the gardens reclaimed and reconfigured.

The room there we meant to finish, where we stored
the dresses my daughter and I wore
to my second wedding, suitcases we used
for trips to my mother in Florida, appears sometimes

in my dreams. A friend says an unfinished house
is a good house, in dream terms, since it means
your life. In dreams sometimes I stand in this room
staring at the wedding dress, wondering whose

it was. I never see suitcases: no idea of escape,
though I did escape, ending the marriage,
selling the house when my daughter was grown.
Now that she feels the need for boundaries,

my daughter has stopped calling me or writing me.
It’s too long a history to tell here.
It’s part of the long history of mothers and daughters,
of separations that come sooner or later

and hurt, and are necessary, and never finished.
One of my happiest memories is being in my daughter’s room
while she was still sleeping, staring out at the apple tree
just in bloom, thinking only of beginnings.

Another Problem for Ethics 101

Suppose Death walks through the door
of the nursing home, dust on his sleeve,
sweat from the noon sun glittering
above his lip, eyes blinking as he readjusts
to the light of the tree-shadowed room—
Death looking so ordinary no one cries out
though there are others in the room—
two sisters, their father's ghost, and—
a complicated metal bed—their mother.

Now suppose nothing much happens.
One of the sisters smoothes the sheet
as the mother whimpers and the father
ghost goes back and forth like someone
desperate for a cigarette.

Death yawns, moving on to the next room.
The sisters sigh, indignant, irritated.
They bend to their mother, not even trying
to hide their disappointment that nothing
has changed: again Death has not taken her.

Suppose they are good daughters.

The Party

It was one of those useless arguments, politics or the state of the arts, and I watched from far enough away not to seem to be listening. The woman kept putting a hand to her throat as if she needed more air. The man leaned closer. I thought he might start making love to her right there in the middle of the elegant apartment.

Part of me wanted to stop the party to tell everyone exactly what was going on between them, but I could barely breathe, and besides, it was almost time to leave. So I watched him want her while she put her hand to her throat, one of those compulsive gestures we make when what we're about to do will open us to suffering.

I could have stopped it. I could have called out to her, told her everything she had coming from the one whose hands had been all over my body, who would soon go home and make love to me instead.

The Canvas

My mother’s face isn’t hers anymore,
as if Death were at work on the contours,
sketching the way my father
once did, stroke by stroke
down the forehead, cheekbones,
till even she’s uncertain who she is,

herself or this other, whose mind
keeps moving back in time
the way my father’s long arms
moved the air as if to sift from it
the shadows he would take
inside the portrait. To paint without

shadow, he would say, is to play at being
God. He liked spilled shadow in a portrait,
the wait messed with certainty.
He’s been dead for years, but my mother
reads of him in the newspaper,
in fabric held up close.

My father would not know her.
Crazy old lady, he would think, and sketch
a hump, a skull, loose clothes.
And she would resent him for the truth,
for using a rag or a finger to rub her mouth
closer to nothing. It’s only a mask,
she would tell herself. And then, in the dream
we all have of this, she’d lift the mask
slowly, to reveal her old beauty.
But there’d be nothing
underneath,
not even canvas.

[from Night in the Shape of a Mirror (David Robert Books, 2006)]