Sound fruit

Poems by Henihan

Honors Thesis Creative Writing Program Department of English and Comparative Literature University of North Carolina 2019

Approved:

Advisor

This manuscript is submitted to the Honors Program and the Carolina Digital Repository at UNC Chapel Hill for archival purposes only. As author and copyright holder, I retain and reserve all rights to any and all publication, dissemination, and digital online display, none of which may occur without my express written permission.

—Aisling Henihan

For my parents, and for Ciara.

“This land of saints…of plaster saints.” — John Butler Yeats

Some of these poems were previously published in the following places:

Cellar Door: “Floodplain” (Fall 2018), “I saw a prickly pear cactus today” (Spring 2019), “Midsomer” (Spring 2019)

Tar Heel Verses, in the Daily Tar Heel: “Through the curtain” (Nov. 2018)

Table of contents

Merciful hour 1

I “Rich Harbour” (1938) 4 I saw a prickly pear cactus today 5 Silence 7 Waking 8 Cochlear 9 O’Hare 10 Roll call 11 Daisy 13 Raglan Road™ Irish Pub and Restaurant, Disney Springs 14 Guided imagery 15

II Colour theory 17 Irish summer 18 No one had seen the sun in sixty days 19 What would Gandhi do in Belfast? 20 Northumberland Street Interface, Belfast, 18:00 21 Sound fruit 22 Through the curtain 23 The Den 24 Bedtime at Sandymount 25 Feed 26 Antediluvian 27 power washing 40 29

III Floodplain 33 Fallen pine 34 Hometown 35 When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? 36 Collision 37 Venus, fly-trap 38 Pelican 39 Anger was the hardest 40 Fernpass 41 Night flight 42 The Zen of Plan Crashes 43 Eggshells 44 Whale fall 45 Sound unseen 46

IV I don’t want you to say my name 48 The first time I saw Lake Michigan 49 Angeline the Baker 50 Mountain fog 51 At Wilson Creek 52 Least flycatcher 53 Tightrope song 54 Hillshade 55 Midsomer 56 The water sometimes 57

To the coast 59

Merciful hour

Sure, she said, I’ve had a little life, a tiny little life, as if size had anything to do with it, as if life was a thing to measure, a waistline or a weight rather than nobs of butter and pinches of salt, a recipe less intuitive than approximate, learned behavior passed generation to generation. A little life—as if worth might be calculated, the sum of marriage and children, product of cooking and cleaning, with space left over for remainders, forgotten lovers and lost friends. As if by saying it, she could make herself even smaller than her five feet, shrink her bones into submission, into invisibility, a fraction of what she might have dreamed herself to be. Could I be freed of those rituals? Weekends unburdened by Sunday roasts, lifetimes to float down the Shannon in July. Unafraid of guilty pleasure, a glass of red with dinner any night, no excuse, no reason why. What kind of woman will I be? Somewhere my aunties are knitting me new jumpers. I want to love more than I abandon, to build more than I forsake. After all this flying, all this leave-taking, can I be forgiven?

I “Rich Harbour” (1938) for Ciara

Sensing shapes as sounds, sonic symbols— I forget the words we used to sing before sleeping, before swimming—when a sleep was like a swim, taken at least one-hour after eating. Now, I wake with fear of deep water like danger, sharks tugging at my toes, tasting blood in the water, in the lines thrown across the page. I reach across the page, abandoning the language, the signs we dreamed up, released to ether, to ending, for you.

4 I saw a prickly pear cactus today next to azaleas pink ones like the dress you wore last spring when you spent April hiding in the garden were you hiding from me I looked for you sister scratched my hands on thistles and thorns mistook a bush for a belle lost my head never found you anyway I didn’t know cactus could grow here where air is so humid too thick to swim too thick to breathe so I gasped when I saw flat green pads with big spines pink fruit swollen and spiked it reminded me of the time we went to the desert and walked the creek bed sat with eyes closed for hours I saw a snake there

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5 spooled in shade waiting and after as I shed skin where it bubbled peeled in sun I understood exactly what we were

6 Silence

Sometimes I let myself sink to the bottom, sit cross-legged and close-eyed on the seafloor, listening for it. I feel it before I hear it, so small at first, a wave building as it rushes ashore, thrusting upward as it meets sand, breaking against my body, braced for impact. I push out the last bubble in me, exhaling until I am emptied. Hollowed. Ready. It crackles underwater, being without maker, sound without origin, so loud I can only scream.

7 Waking

Most mornings, my mother woke me, her step on the stair stirring my subconscious, a rhythm tug- tugging me from sleep as she crossed the board that squeaked, whispering my name. Some mornings, I woke to my father’s alarm, a sturdy old Braun chirp- chirping down the hall and up the stairs on Wednesdays when he rose early for work, resetting the clock before he left to wake my mother, to wake me. Those mornings, I surfaced slowly, a stale ring latent in my ear as I stumbled downstairs, up the hall, pressing the half-shut door aside to release the beep, by then deafening, which had sealed itself inside her room: as I tiptoed, needlessly, across a wedge of light pushing through the curtain’s gap, I knew no matter how gently I brushed her arm, she would lurch to wake from her void, that perpetual vacuum where no sound travelled.

8 Cochlear

Limbo—is that what it feels like when the battery cuts and silence returns? I see the switch in her eyes, panic flickering when noise evaporates, voices cease, and she must read lips curling too quickly to make shapes of sound. In a head turned, nothingness. I plug my ears to imagine, pressing fingertips to eardrums to mask the hum of hearing. I want to ask her how to quantify silence. Is it empty there? Only she knows.

9 O’Hare

In narrow arches endless halls I sense echoes of other places I’ve known the bathroom should be there on the left opposite the shop where they sell sodas and t-shirts that say

I have been here before I was so small and now the duty free is not where I thought it would be maybe that was Philly or Newark could it have been here my sister screamed I was not listening her face flush with a devil demanding I remember how it felt to be that hard that little that lost

10 Roll call

I. Last

Sweat gathers on palms pressed to thighs to mask the quiver in my spine when new teacher calls roll, inches closer to my name, which catches in the throat, lodges somewhere between Harris and Henry. I know my turn by the pause— the kind with so much silence, so little air— and by the butcher’s knife, which falls somewhere near my neck, flush with shame. I feel her eyes search for me, desperate for assurance, but I can’t raise mine, there are so many specks in the tile, and I haven’t had time to count them all. Three beats. I will myself to lift my right hand, heavy from the effort of disappearing: here.

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11 II. First

Teacher asks me to pronounce it, strains hard to catch my whisper. Stumbles to repeat, faltering in the face of letters that obscure sound. Tries a third time, but the intonation is all wrong, her drawl erasing the soaring start, the final “g”. No, I want to shout, I am not Ashley, Anglo-Saxon meaning meadow of the ash tree. I am Aisling, Irish meaning poem, meaning vision, meaning dream. The choice, to correct or to be quiet, slips away with my silence. I nod, close enough. But having mastered me, she grows hungrier, goaded by my mother’s sin. That’s interesting. The shadow of an unspoken question falls between us, a chasm opening at my feet. She wants to know Where are you from? but she asks like this: So unique. I don’t know how to explain that in the place my parents call home, a hundred girls take this name each year. I ache for that place, where I am not unique, imagine how I would live if my mother had just called me Emily.

12 Daisy

I am on the wrong side of the ocean again when my father calls to tell me you are gone. I have barely breathed hello into the receiver when he begins to choke, the doctor voice he saves for telling strangers bad news giving way to something I have never heard before, racked and raw, his words tumbling over each other, rogue waves battering distant ships, collapsing as they break.

Between sobs, he tells me how he held you in his arms the whole way to Raleigh, rubbing your ribs for signs of the quiet bulge you had hidden for weeks, praying against all odds it wouldn’t kill you. How this wasn’t the way he wanted to say goodbye—on the red tile of a hospital floor, so far from water. For the first time in memory, we weep together, clutching our phones as though we might drown.

We stay like this for hours, between worlds. Before he hangs up, he whispers he saw something sacred in your eyes as you left, and I wonder how to thank him. It feels strange to write a love poem for a dog, but I guess this is a love poem for my father too, for the way we wept together for a dog, for the way he did all the things he swore he would never do for you, for the way he loved you, after all.

13 Raglan Road™ Irish Pub and Restaurant, Disney Springs

Let grief be a falling leaf at the dawning of the day. — , “”

In this authentic place, strangers wearing Mickey ears and fresh sunburns wander past my great-grandparents, whose gray faces stick to humid walls, a grainy photograph from the family album enlarged ten times, blurred into anonymity by drops of condensation. Tourists drink Guinness and complain half-heartedly about the heat, clapping in time with the diddley-eye and watching girls from Kerry high step while waiting for what Yelp calls the best fish and chips in central Florida. I watch Mum search the walls, recalling long-dead people, long-lost places. A chipper, quite like this one, that her uncle gambled away decades before, reincarnated here by his son, who won’t touch a drop. I want to ask her what happens when we transplant memory. What we sell to survive. Instead, I study the pictures, look hard for the nose, the ears she says are her mother’s mother’s, but even when I step close, I can’t see myself here. After another beer, Mum will tell me this is better than what she came from, and the 4.4 star Google rating will suggest two thousand strangers agree. But when I drift to sleep that night, I will visit their graves—the small churchyard in Stillorgan, a path slick with moss, and in the shadow of two oaks, a dozen stones marking what remains of us, chiseled names already fading.

14 Guided imagery

A memory brought back to life in slow motion: my father’s arms stretch to the sky, molding shapes in clouds heavy with storming, while my sister hops across honeycombed rocks, honey ice-cream dripping down her toes, and Mum balances, eyes closed, on columns so ancient only giants remember— the shock of sun beams through lenses blurred by morning rain, sway of the rope bridge latent in my legs, now bent to the sea, which will carry me home, where, with the kettle on,

I almost believe I’ll see them again, the ones who’ve left me, waiting on the shore.

15

II Colour theory

The blue I see is not the same as the blue of my ancestors, insular Celts who Caesar called barbarians. Their blue was woad ground then daubed on cheekbones, a charm for strength in war. Romans’ blue was dead pigment, sign of mourning, curse. I will never know caesisus, blue-gray like green. My blue is not the same as yours— how can I put a name to it?

17 Irish summer

On the first day, ghosts swarm the sea front from the earliest hours of morning, haunting a promenade no one walks fifty weeks of a year. Now, a séance— schoolkids, skin translucent from months of mist, gather at the shore, transforming with the first ray, this first hint of June. In the blue hour, they shape-shift, already pinking in the beams, shedding jumpers to riot barefoot in shorts and togs, clambering over rocks without a care for their mothers, chasing waves only to tumble, headfirst, into frosty wake, displacing watery memory of holidays past to make way for this day, in case it is the only day. They conjure ice-creams, circuses, constructing whole sand-worlds of their own making, making-believe and building castles on the strand line, losing time to the tide which they fight, unrelenting, screaming as though they have never seen this sun, a long-forgotten uncle returned from warmer climes with the promise of another life, across the sea.

18 No one had seen the sun in sixty days

And this sun—it could almost be Spain, if I closed my eyes and forgot the debris of the lough, islands of abandoned things, cigarettes and bottle caps and Tayto.

It felt so good to splash in seaweed shallows, to eat ice-cream and collect sea glass, to inhale the brine of a rocky shore until all I could taste was sea, sea, sea.

It was the last I saw of summer.

19 What would Gandhi do in Belfast? 10 August 1976

In June, I watch a grown man shake with the burden of an August afternoon forty years past. I watch him exhume each coffin he has carried: a baby, weeks old, another nephew, a niece, and forty months later, their mother, ruined by despair, each a needless death and he, the survivor, the pallbearer, the grave tender. He pulls them out of the ground just to show me, to relive a story he has told ten thousand times. Resting against his shovel, amongst the mourning and the dirt and the gaping graves, he weeps. I watch him buckle under the coffins’ weight, watch him rest each one back in its place, carefully burying himself alongside them.

20 Northumberland Street Interface, Belfast, 18:00

Here on this unholy ground we build our church at the breaking place the buffer space the line that marks yours and mine mined with good words and homemade bombs that still reverberate here when the gates shut sealing you in your coffin and me in mine wee children sent to bed so adults might argue in peace well we do as we’re told we make our beds and curse Jesus-Mary-and-Holy-St.-Joseph- we build this church on land no man owns on rubble and rock where memories waste away stockpiled in urns and counted on plaques we build our monument to the wasted years the stolen lives the lives we wish we hadn’t lived we build to forget the sounds of our prison doors broken down kneecaps shattered and petrol catching gates clanging shut each dusk forever we worship the rules we live by still how could we live without them

21 Sound fruit

A scavenger hunt: Sainsbury’s, West Belfast. The parking lot, first clue: Páirceáil do thuismitheoirí le páistí. Stick mums hold stick babies’ hands. The rules are as clear here as the schoolyard. Each aisle, a lesson. Sometimes I forget what I’ve never learned: common words (circeoil), stolen words (tae), words stretched around themselves to fit English forebears. Folláine, well-being. An aisle where vitamins make one hearty, wholesome. Sound. Is there another place like this? Where words are planted, never flower. Are read, never spoken. Torthaí folláine. Sound fruit. A silence that feels like an echo.

22 Through the curtain for Evelyn Spencer (1926-2012)

Stooping to kiss her goodbye, I brush cheeks pebble-smoothed by cold cream, catching my lip on coarse curls the color of sea foam, inhaling the must of four-seven-eleven mixed with sleep and Fisherman’s Friends, the uneven breath, the rhythmic puff of oxygen clouding my ears. I try to memorize the texture of her nails digging into my palms as she rubs my hands, squeezing like she will never let go, until she does, releasing fingers raw red with pressure, waving me away from her chair by the window with I’ll be seeing you soon, love. Looking back, I see her pull opaque eyelet aside, peering through cataracts blurred and yellowed by years as my mother loads bags, shuts the boot, and in that last glimpse, I see a thing never meant for me—one tear, leaking from her left eye.

23 The Den

It started with a fox. Fancy, we called him, and we imagined he was ours, as though he had never known a mother or another home, as though he was a pet, or a creature we had seen in Zoo, when really he was a nuisance burrowing under the garden shed to make a den there, chewing through the rotted fence and leaving droppings on the porch. We first saw him scurrying around the garden on the day after my birthday, which is the longest day of the year, and every evening after that, we waited for Fancy in the fading hour, used his habits to tell the time (bedtime in twenty), and when Grandad caught us watching, he went out with a bucket and stick to scare him away but the fox wouldn’t leave, only burrow back under the shed. Well, Fancy was actually a she and being a vixen by no fault of her own, she went and had ten pups in the garden, and when Grandad found them, he called Fancy a wanton woman and a whore and left milk out to help build her strength. She left as a soon as she could, took all her pups with her, and we cried missing her so Grandad was sorry he called Fancy mean names and said we could have her shed all to ourselves. We brought blankets and a tea set and our pink rotary phone and we made our den there, camped from morning till night, waiting for her, until we grew tired, and forgot.

24 Bedtime at Sandymount

When it got too loud, as it often did on evenings when the sun hung in the sky long after lights out, I’d lie awake watching sister and cousin stir from sleep, waiting for the chorus of whimpers that meant they might cry. With the first tear, I’d scoop them from their bunks, taking one fat fist in each of mine and whispering we’ll play a game now. The best hiding places were ones where they could hide together, like the big wardrobe in Grandad’s room where the din was muffled by moth-eaten coats and they could curl around each other, resting tired heads on odd shoes, old shirts blankets they chewed while drifting back to sleep, and when I’d find them on the count of fifty, I could crawl in too, sing them soft stories, and we could stay until the shouting stopped.

25 Feed

The green spoon in my hand moves mechanically from an open jar of yogurt to her mouth, casting shadow in new hollows of old cheeks, shrunken and jaundiced from drink. She trembles with the effort of pressing her lips to make a barricade, banishing food. Darting up and down, her eyes avoid my gaze, resting only on sacred things—the crucifix opposite her bed, the birch outside the ward window. Wrestling my tongue, I retract the spoon, say nothing, watch her sunken face and wonder about the woman I saw in a family album last night, the woman with long chestnut hair and white gogo boots who rested that face on my grandfather’s shoulder, balancing my father on her hip, laughing at the wind that whipped her jacket. As a child, I studied that yellow picture and imagined my grandmother in a bottle, shrunken and rolled up tight, trapped in a glass castle, a message cast out to sea. Is there something in the cycle? I lift the spoon once more, as though reaching is all it might take to shrink the gulf between us. As though all it might take to fix this is a good feed. Does she want to live? I squeeze the pot, let the cool of purple plastic warm against my skin. Without thinking, I lick the spoon clean, savoring the sweetness of the cream, until I finally see her, seeing me.

26 Antediluvian

Before the flood, we were creatures of habit, bound by the rules we thought meant progress: a house a bit bigger, a wife a bit fatter. It was easy to imagine the world like a bubble, stretched thin, never burst. Each day more beautiful than what came before, each day borrowed without thought of interest.

We sought good views over high ground, built cities on the shore, forgetting all our mothers had carried. I wish I could tell you it was worth it, to live as though gods had no thought of earth. I wish I could show you I was better for it, better than it, that I knew what it cost to plant sweet corn in sand.

I might have been a thief, a liar, but water can’t choose. When the rain came,

I was swept out to sea like any other cheat, any other sinner, caught in a ruby tide. At the start, there was much wailing and weeping and

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27 gnashing of teeth. We cursed our children for singing, then took new names: damned, doomed, condemned, beloved. In grief, I grew backwards, traded legs for fins, lungs for gills, skin for scales, I called it survival. Forty days was not penance enough, and though with each morning I pray for sun, still sky hangs heavy with sorrow.

Here there is no ark, no dove. Only floundering at first sight of soil, the ache of treading water and knowing I will never belong to land again.

28 power washing 40 where water was there are fish lying bloated on the interstate undisturbed in rot mouths agape they stare it takes two men to lift the hose to clear bodies into ditches a plague erased flood-borne detritus unholy burial far from sea

~~~~ far from sea unholy burial flood-borne detritus a plague erased into ditches to clear bodies to lift the hose it takes two men they stare mouths agape in rot undisturbed on the interstate lying bloated there are fish where water was

III

Floodplain

River’s many tongues taste each door she tumbles past on the way to low ground, rushing from headwater to slough in search of shore. Twisting as she piles against herself, millions of gallons, and hungrier by the hour, she licks windows, eaves, recalling flavor nearly forgotten, salt of earth, old lover’s kiss, more sour with time. She gulps streets to satisfy a savage thirst for soil, reclaiming land which has always belonged to her—she who gives and takes, sweeping in her retreat, the hubris of our hand pulled out to sea on her falling tides, leaving only residue: water line on the wall, scrap of paper in the tree, alluvial muck.

33 Fallen pine i. hanging from half-height a splintered crown snapped by wind broken at the neck ii. rocked from shallow roots shattered supine on the path cast sideways in storm

34 Hometown

There’s not much to love about the land I grew on. Not much can grow, but hogs and scrub, pine trees and Trump towns. It’s hot. Hard. Flat. Sandy. Humid in summer. Humid in winter. Full of tourists all the time. One mosque, one synagogue. About two hundred Baptist churches. And not the kind with clever signs. The Baptists on this land have no sense of humor.

There’s not much to love about the land I grew on. And so much has changed since I last went home. A hurricane tossed a tree on my favorite diner. And my neighbors sold twenty acres of forest to a clear-cut developer. The Rite-Aid that got held up five years ago is a Dollar Tree now. I have three friends dead of heroin. Two in jail for life.

No, there’s not much to love about the land I grew on. But the water—that I love.

35 When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo?1

Sadly, the American Dream is dead. Our country is in serious trouble. The US is a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. And it’s going to get worse.

Our country is in serious trouble. How stupid are our leaders? It’s going to get worse. We need a cheerleader.

How stupid are these politicians? We have all the cards, but we don’t know how to use them. I really thought Obama would be a great cheerleader. How is he going to beat ISIS?

We don’t even know we have the cards. When was the last time you heard China is killing us? You think you have a problem with ISIS. You have a bigger problem with China.

No one talks jobs, and no one talks China. Our politicians don’t understand the game. I beat China all the time. All the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border?

Our politicians will not bring us the promised land. China has our jobs, and Mexico has our jobs. Some Mexicans, I assume, are good people. I think I am actually a very nice person.

I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created. And we will do very well, folks, very, very well. Does my family like me? I think so, right? I will never build in an ocean.

And I promise, I will never be in a bicycle race.

1 All text from Donald Trump’s Presidential bid announcement, 16 June 2015.

36 Collision

Do stones skip in salt water? I ask because I didn’t grow up throwing rocks and when I read a skipping stone spends 100 times longer in the air than it does on the surface of water I remembered something about the composition of salt. Float on. I can taste it. But I see no stones here.

37 Venus, fly-trap after Brigit Pegeen Kelly

It was quiet when I found her, nestled among the longleaf pine. I wasn’t looking for her, I didn’t even believe she was real, she was a myth, a many-headed monster, seven green mouths gaping up from the salted bog, a place only dead things grow. It was an accident, I didn’t know she called that place her only home, that those sixty square miles were her whole world too. I took her for a sweeter sister, didn’t notice the trap, didn’t even realize I was detonating a mine until it was over. She didn’t make a sound, even as I brushed, so softly, against her flat, heart-shaped lips, aching, not even as I crawled, so gladly, into her womb, not even as her emerald jaws snapped shut around me, worlds caving in without warning, sly teeth meshing to seal me in the lobes of her tomb, no, not even in the moment I betrayed her did she make a sound. She was merciful, even though they said she wouldn’t be, even though I wasn’t owed mercy, not from her, she, a thing more animal than human, more alien than alive, so wild and so beautiful—I didn’t expect her to be beautiful, but she was, she was daughter of Aphrodite, cousin of Medusa, she was a monster, a man-eater, and she was merciful. Dying was slow, but it didn’t hurt, I fed her willingly, let her consume me, drawing me into herself to grasp nutrients the soil denied her, sating a hunger no one else could. No one else could understand why she’d snapped, but I did, because I had snapped too, once, I had survived, too, once, and it became my instinct, as it was hers, and those mutations over generations became her DNA, she, Venus, goddess of love, the great seductress, Venus the Celestial, Venus the Purifier, Venus the Changer of Hearts, the victorious, the mother, the myrtle, lucky Venus, with seven lucky mouths shaped to survive, shaped just to fit mine. She kept me in that dark place, breaking down my feet and then my calves, moving up my thighs to my hips, along my waist, my breasts, to the spot my collarbones meet, leaving only my head and my heart, a husk of chitin, and on the tenth morning, we were birthed again.

38 Pelican slips across shores murky with shadow, with phantom ships beached in the night. Far from streetlight, wingtips skim ocean’s surface, caress black waves’ crest, and as pale belly brushes echo of moon, body heaves skyward leaving only a soft V, a mirror shattered on the wall.

39 Anger was the hardest

I told myself I am not an angry person but I knew

I was lying to both of us when I said forget about it

I knew because I saw you waiting for the bus home reading On the Road and first I thought what an asshole and then I saw you leaning against her like you had never blacked out and pressed yourself into me while I looked into your eyes and saw nothing I could ask to stop oh it bubbled in my belly like bad coffee acid in my gut

I gave it other names like tummy ache and a little anxious but the deeper I buried it the more it burned and finally I knew it by the fire I felt in my face when you looked right past me when I knew you were forgetting it

I felt a snap in my sternum pressing hard against my heart and I was not sad or just fine really I was angry like white hot in my fingers every muscle in my body gasping for air eyes ready to burst right out of their sockets and roll across the street to rest at your toes so you would have to meet my gaze so you would have to see me and it was hard to feel terrifying like I was hurting hurting you from afar and I wanted to but I knew you never thought twice about me anymore.

40 Fernpass

Snow sticks as I climb into cloud, street lines blurring under piles of powder, greying beneath passing wheels. I drove two hours the wrong way to find this place—forged of collapse, of mountain tumbling from summit to base, land remade in the image of loss. Romans once marched this route, single lane snaking upward, no shoulder, twisting as it soars to new heights, the weight of deep earth forgotten. Now, trucks overtake buses at high speed, no thought of the drop below. I was so young when I faced four demons here, and four years on, I fear so much more: this choosing, this what next, this who next, this where am I going. Nausea builds with each switchback, battling memory for space to breathe. In panic, I find myself back where I never want to go, seventeen, on the precipice of knowing. Again, my mouth grows bitter with mistakes, I wish

I could stop asking the same questions, stop begging for different answers, I choke on my past, it burns like bile, I wonder how my lungs have filled with fluid when I am so far from water, I just wanted to make my mother proud but now all I can think is how shallow breath becomes. The less I see the more I know: even brake lights fade, even shapes vanish, I don’t want to die here, so much undone, so many unseen peaks.

41 Night flight

It is like this some nights, when cloud cover sinks close to earth, moulding its mass to the contours of land, lake, so dense it obscures even star, moon, trapping strange light to give the city a second day, yellower, hollower somehow. Underneath, the sky hangs heavy, but as the plane climbs, shrinking houses in its leap to the heavens, I pass through cloud, feel release as sky expands again on the other side, widening to fill my gaze. Here, not one inch of earth cracks through the canopy, and light bubbles only from below, staining pockets of cloud with the echo of stadium light and street light and traffic light, mundane and manmade, reminders of another world, of what lies beneath.

42 The Zen of Plane Crashes

I am afraid of many things, of deep fat fryers and flying in small planes, of subways and salamanders, of forgetting my name, of drowning. I am training myself to swallow swords, to twirl flaming batons and juggle knives, to eat hot dogs with my eyes open. Each day, I set an obstacle: lose your homework. Fall off your bike. Crack each knuckle. Chew on ice. I don’t know how to change my face. But I am learning to walk unblinking through fire, and never count the cost. If I find no sanctuary here, I will christen myself, anoint no priests.

43 Eggshells

In a day’s motion, sometimes I forget I am a dancer. Somewhere between the morning bus and the afternoon shop, I lose track of my body, how it feels in space. How it stretches when I wake. How it twists as I stir sugar into black coffee. As though I am not a sort of miracle, a few trillion cells of choreographed blood, bone, muscle, tissue. In a single note, a glimpse of myself in a passing window, I am struck at the knees with wonder, a strange wash of joy I cannot explain, and I drop a whole carton of eggs in aisle 12 to move. Without thinking, my body reminds me how to point toes, to do things I thought I had forgotten: to jeté across the curb, to pirouette in the hall.

To heed the song in me. On my knees, I read eggshells like tea leaves. Nothing feels the same.

44 Whale fall

At dawn, she wanders from her pod, seeking solace in deep water. Alone in open ocean, she gives in to the urge to fly, to breathe air free of spray. A final breach, a farewell, though there is no one near to watch the wake settle, to hear her last exhale. Does she weep? This dying is quiet: no song. Only sinking, frozen, until she reaches the place some call “abyssal.” Unfathomed. Of course, I am imagining this. No human has seen it. We move too fast to guess months from years, and we know so little of the sea floor. But I have read how a body like hers can feed the forever dark for decades, how in dying she gives life to another. An ending, a beginning.

45 Sound unseen

When the time comes, you must teach yourself to echolocate. To move using only a mouth, an ear. Can you hear oleander from pine? Sense the character of rooms? Few know how to make a map. How to collage texture—concrete, carpet, cork. It takes courage to toss sound into the blankness before you. To wait, breathless, for its return.

In each new doorway, let clicks cascade from your lips, locate a plush chair there, an oak cabinet on your left—stuffed with silver trinkets, which shake when you step— and in the far corner, between the fire and the window, nothing. Darkness preaches that absence is as keen a tyranny as presence, that fullness can feel like loss.

You will know cotton from silk by the way each rustles: a whisper, a resounding shout.

46

IV I don’t want you to say my name

I want you to sing it, the way I learned to: breath from the belly exhaled hard (ah) in a rush (sh), released (lin) with a ring (ggg), so soft it melts as it rolls, a stream meeting river, seeking ocean, insatiable. Pay attention: I’m trying to tell you I’m made of water.

Close your eyes, forget the letters. Stretch your tongue to form unfamiliar shapes, hold each syllable before you let it tumble, let gravity carry you down.

48 The first time I saw Lake Michigan

I pressed both hands to the stained glass of the twenty-ninth floor, felt windows shake with a northern wind, felt myself shake with a new song, inhaling as wind became breath, as I forgot myself, as the whole world teetered on the shore, as the whole world toppled into water, steel blue and blistered with whitecaps, so much larger than I ever knew, so fearsome I was sure it would swallow me whole until my mother said are you ready and I awoke, pulled my palms from the double-panes and stared at the smudges my fingers made, ashamed but alive.

49 Angeline the Baker for Bruno Louchouarn (1959-2018), with gratitude

I am dread, full of anticipation, knowing the day he can play no longer will be any day now. Tomorrow, perhaps, day after next, one of these will have been the last day I heard Bruno play, play as only he knew how: with bright eyes closed, chin to chest, clutching his bow and forgetting all else, where he was and where he was going. Even now

I am haunted by yesterday, the way he held that fiddle, a life raft in the rapid rising, the flash flood surging, pulling him under as he reached for shore, as he wept I want to live, his bony socked foot tapping the bed foot to keep time, kicking wildly to signal the end.

50 Mountain fog

At dawn, thick vapor rolls over ridges, descends into blue valleys, drowning first sunlight. Mist settles on lake’s surface, sticks, a spider’s web.

Like ghosts, leafless beech lurk beyond my sight, soften into milky song.

51 At Wilson Creek

We keep quiet company. Whisper to hear birdsong, so much louder on Sundays. Alert to crisp twigs, dead pine needles brittle underfoot. First rain drop, reverberating through the canopy. In shadow of sweetgum, we give praise for things heard, not felt: drill of woodpecker, grunt of squirrel. Clap of hands flung apart, caught again on the other side of the tree, on our way to the water.

52 Least flycatcher for Bruno

Around each eye, a halo of white. Dusky breast, yellow belly, two wingbars,

I know you. Know that grey head rounded to earth in search of insects, tossed back in search of company, che-bec, che-bec— a call I’ve waited for, known in the flash of an olive back lengthened in flight, in gnarled feet pressed to the lowest branch in prayer, forty-nine days gone and here you are at dawn, perched on my porch, only inches away. I fight every nerve in me to keep still, to stop myself from reaching for you, so much smaller in new life. I never dreamed such a form could be yours, the smallest and grayest, but I remember your voice—che-bec, che-bec.

53 Tightrope song

In the wake of February, I tend to the simplest things. I pay my rent, water my plants, call my mother three times a week. And though it stings, every Sunday I do a charcoal mask for blackheads on my nose. These things

I had neglected are the things I love best now. I have thrown away all the sentimental bullshit I hoarded, four roses you gave me three years ago (which I had dried, and hung over my door like a charm). I know it’s good for me, because my skin is better than ever, and since I last saw you, I have dreamed only of gray monsters and women. Is this the love song you wanted? There is so much silence now in the way I do things you once did for me: killing spiders, cleaning out the food trap. I know it’s silly, maybe it is petty, I never said I was better than this. I have walked the line so long I forgot what grass felt like underfoot, so cool, so close. Now I am doing the only thing I can do, all you never thought

I would—I am buying my own flowers, building my own fires. I am going to Australia, if it kills me. I won’t fall apart over you.

54 Hillshade

At the front end of April, it is almost beautiful here. I had forgotten what it felt like: pollen yellowing the land, setting sinuses ablaze, coaxing redbud to bloom overnight, waking woodpeckers to drum an old courtship song. Stopping under the oak on my way home, I waste hours, so plentiful now I can swim the Haw past seven. I feel a lightness I had lost—how easy it was to fall in love with strange, soft hills that held history foreign to me, that didn’t smell of sea or make myth of mountain. Here, in the middle, just a few weeks of ending, it is hard to recall what humidity will feel like.

55 Midsomer

There is nothing tentative in the way she launches herself into depths that don’t belong to her, no timid toe to test how cold it might be this morning, no warning before her hands pierce glass, displacing minnows with fingers, shoulders, then hips, toes scrunched at the rush of blood that feels like sin. At her touch, the ocean opens easily as morning glory, stretching out to bare its insides, the order of petal-stamen-pistil traded for the chaos of cracked oysters coating the sea floor, crabs scuttling in shadows of fish that glide above, obscuring sun, blind to scavenging, scavenging to live. The water parts neatly as her hair, which takes a new form under water, haunting her head, swirling around the eyes kept wide open in the back of her brain, next to the stamps and secrets she collects, little souvenirs of sacred spaces, the hollow place between collarbones and the first lie she ever told. Her mother warned her not to change her name or go swimming in her jewels, lest a shark sneak up and eat her alive, and here she is: running her fingers through mud, sifting shells, dragging her belly like a bottom-feeder, praying to St. Antony and scavenging for lost things she’ll never know again, how pine smells after rain, the sting of red ants, her nana’s voice, vinegar. All this, for an earring she threw away.

56 The water sometimes

I know a place where sea kisses sky. Where water stretches from her dark bed to brush cloud’s shoulder, where he shivers at her touch, carving ripples on the surface.

Men of science call this the offing—the sea seen from shore. But I know heaven is only three feet from earth. And I feel it in the water sometimes.

57

To the coast

I am drawn like a salmon upstream, against my will, against water’s nature, upstream, a place equal parts beginning and ending, arrival, departure. I hurl myself up waterfalls and over boulders, fighting each molecule of water that cries stop now, you are killing yourself. My body says I must go there,

I must see it again—but the body lies, the body lies, and I don’t want to die here, in gravel, in freshwater, so far from salt. I come alone to spawn, alone to wither. Will my children feel this too? This call home which is also a call to finish, to trade one life for another. In the Columbia’s blind fervor for the shore I see something of myself again—anadromous being, pulled by the magnet in my belly I cannot name, I gasp, gills open, propelling my body out of water onto cold sand, into new worlds, no grief, no giving. Rolling in the tide line, I memorize the sensation of shedding scales, of learning how to breathe for myself again.

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