DANGEROUS WOMEN a Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty

DANGEROUS WOMEN

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Fine Arts

Jana R. Russ

August, 2008

DANGEROUS WOMEN

Jana R. Russ

Thesis

Approved: Accepted:

______Advisor Dean of the College Mary Biddinger Ronald Levant

______Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Elton Glaser George Newkome

______Faculty Reader Date Donald Hassler

______Department Chair Diana Reep ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION

I: HOME ...... 1

Dangerous Women ...... 2

Living in the Hour of the Wolf ...... 3

Cream City Bricks ...... 4

Blue Velvet ...... 6

Flying Free ...... 7

Letting Go ...... 9

The Woman and the Wool ...... 10

Baba's Robin ...... 11

Heading for the River ...... 12

Poetry Class Day One ...... 14

Suburban Landscape ...... 15

La Bella Donna ...... 16

Metastasis ...... 17

Crows in Cincinnati ...... 18

The Scent of Summer Peaches ...... 19

Rain at Four A.M...... 20

Crows Again ...... 21

iii

Legacies ...... 22

The Blue Latitudes ...... 24

Anyway ...... 25

January in Ohio ...... 26

I Am Not for Wisconsin ...... 27

Daughter ...... 28

II: DANGEROUS WOMEN...... 29

Eve’s Side of the Story ...... 30

What Judith Whispered to Holofernes ...... 31

When Persephone ate the Pomegranate ...... 32

Helen’s Mother Gives Advice ...... 33

Eurydice’s Complaint ...... 34

Helen’s Mother Gives Advice on Cheerleading ...... 35

Circe’s Bar & Grill ...... 36

The Palm Reader Speaks to Cassandra ...... 37

Penelope Gives Instructions on Weaving and Men ...... 38

Reflection on the Grave Goods of an Unknown Woman ...... 39

For Milton, a Complaint from Eve ...... 40

Woman ...... 41

III: AWAY ...... 42

Copernican Moments ...... 43

In the Garden after Rain ...... 44

The Promise of Blood ...... 45 iv

Presque Isle, Upper Peninsula, Early May ...... 46

Manzanar Relocation Camp, May 1942 ...... 47

Those Dream Houses ...... 48

The Clam Chowder Annual Music Reunion at Jim & Dan’s ...... 49

Remembering Holyhead ...... 50

Back to the First Draft ...... 51

May, in Fengdu, on the Yangzi ...... 52

The Year of Surplus Rain ...... 53

The White Horse of Uffington ...... 55

Shaolin ...... 56

About the Ghost of Li Bai ...... 58

Thinking of Clouds and Rain in Xi’an ...... 59

On the High ...... 60

Apples from Donji Vakuf ...... 62

Horse Returning Mountain ...... 63

December Evening in Tempe, Arizona ...... 64

The Dryad Fountain in Winter ...... 65

Threes ...... 66

The Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey ...... 67

Chongqing, Yangzi River ...... 68

Beomeosa Temple, 3 A.M...... 69

The House is Always White ...... 71

Lovers Always Quarrel in Bedrooms and Parking Lots ...... 72 v

Dinner ...... 73

The Patience of Cold Places ...... 74

Thistles ...... 75

I: HOME

Dangerous Women

We knew them when we saw them, the ones our mothers warned us about, sauntering down our bare suburban afternoons, their Marilyn skirts drifting upwards, lifted by the light-fingered breeze.

Oh for breasts that touched the sky at those impossible angles!

If you pulled two pins, their hair would tumble down in waves enough to drown a man’s resolve and leave him abandoned to all the saltier commandments.

(In our mirrors, we postured, practicing, while grandmothers clucked their tongues.)

When they passed, we sucked in the hot scents of Opium and Poison

And watched the boys we wanted to know watching.

Living in the Hour of the Wolf

I am tumbling in that awkward moment between the owls and larks, when sleep is held at bay by shadows of things undone and all the could-have-beens, tensed toward morning, still on guard against the nightmare and all her ponies.

I have been washed in salt-watered worry, crumpled by the daily uncertainties, a dandelion wanting the morning, hoping for coffee-sweet gossip and soft scandals not my own.

I whisper into darkness, pull my tattered icons around me, face the silver wrinkles in the river of my life and move on, always thirsty to name that well from which I dare not drink.

Cream City Bricks

The grade school on 18th Street had the same hard black brick as all the others, charcoal outside, soft and yellow inside. The hallway walls wore crayon meanderings, up the warm, wooden stair to the third grade, where Miss Schneider read us stories—gave out gold stars I coveted in neat lines next to my name on her clean white chart.

I didn’t know about the buttery insides of bricks till David, the kid with buckteeth, who died driving drunk somewhere in Saigon, threw stones at me and missed, taking golden chips out of the dark façade.

The year they sandblasted the courthouse, we went downtown on the bus every Saturday to see the next installment of gold appear, like sunrise slowly crawling over that domed horizon.

Even South Division High, where I left my illusions, came clean under the harsh interrogation of sand and steam.

But always, in a year or so, the dark effects of weathering crept back, smeared over the brick like a scum of dirt and straw that floats on new milk in the pail.

In the dairies, my uncles skimmed milk, turned cream into pale Wisconsin butter, then came home to complain of cows, low wages, and hippies in the old neighborhood bars.

I loved those Eastside bars— biker bars squeezed between the headshops and Watertower Park, where you could get three good hits of white-cross for two bucks, or strawberry mescaline on Sunday, where we learned to stay away from crazy Pete’s weed laced with dust.

By graduation I knew three dead boys, David and Pete and Michael.

Michael, all light and music, danced his motorcycle off the 16th Street viaduct. My dad, who’d never liked long hair, chanted a new lyric about murdercycles.

But I remember the vibration between my thighs on one forbidden ride and the heat of pale, creamy skin under black leather.

Blue Velvet

All because the dress was blue velvet— or was it because the song he hummed confused her? Maybe his hands reminded her of her mother’s bedspread, those quilted waves, soft, safe— how she once wore a rhinestone necklace as a crown, danced alone, prayed to her mirror for breasts.

On that night, once the sky cleared, Venus rose, winking in the curved arm of a new moon so far beyond the sunroof of that ’69 Nova.

And how could she not lie down under the indigo dashlights, under the blue eyes of heaven? Her pale arms and legs spread wide, an initiate of the backseat mysteries— chin tilted skyward, expecting stars.

Flying Free

To set the balloon free, she just opened her hand— watched that one spot of red, in a blue sky— She wanted to see it fly away, even if it was only once.

She pulled twice, tugged herself free and ran to watch it fly away. Her father’s hand grabbed at her small head, red hair. Angry, he was puffing hard blue breaths.

Her face bright red where he slapped her three times, leaving bruises with his free hand. She never could get away.

She always wanted to run away, to fly up into a warm red sun like a balloon let go by other hands— so many times hoping to fly free among blue clouds.

One day he tore her blue jeans and took her pride away. She couldn’t get free, couldn’t stop looking at his red hair. She was only thirteen and it hurt, inside, his hand.

She’s gotten good with her hands— good with a wink from blue eyes. She’s older now, nearly thirty. They still offer to take her away, but she knows what men will pay for a redhead. She won’t dance for free anymore.

Sometimes she remembers opening the hand. Watching it fly away, that one moment, the red balloon. Sometimes, she almost feels free.

Letting Go

Remember summer nights when the smelt ran mad? Washed on to the hard beaches of Lake Michigan by their own frantic lust and the implacable tide. We, laughing, ran about with buckets harvesting that dying bounty.

Seagulls circled overhead snatching for broken remnants. Soft gills gasped, struggled— drowning in the sharp night air. The fish never wavered.

When you weren’t looking, Mama, I dumped mine back, urged them into the darker water.

Go, I wanted to say. Leave this place.

You will not find love here.

The Woman and the Wool

—for Linda, who asked why, in the long list of those who must not work on the Sabbath, wives were never mentioned.

I have never made a rug. Never pushed steel hook through reluctant canvas or punched in patterns of ancient roses, water-deep greens and honeyed yellow. I have not cut yarn into finger lengths of black for the final fringe.

I did not know the sheep, nor the shearer. Did not watch the fleece fall in waves from the knife or see the lamb leap free and naked in the early grass. But I do know what it is to drop the burden of heavy locks that weigh down the head, of a hairshirt worn too long, of my feminine sins.

When the time came to wash the wool, I was not there. Other hands brushed and combed, shaped long rolags, pulled fibers and twisted. But I have heard the spinning wheel’s hymn and tasted the baptism of dye— the heavy scent of wet wool, of turned earth, perfume of red madder, of woad and weld, the alum acrid as Protestant guilt.

Still, the rug at the door is not my rug. It belongs to the sheep and to the spinster, to the mother of my grandmother— she whose arthritic hands, twisted and hooked, made those roses bloom on a Sunday when no work, except by the women, could be done.

Baba's Robin

Each year, under the front porch eaves, he built his nest of twigs and grass and cheery bits of red yarn that she left among the roses.

She built him a dinner table, battered tin tray nailed to a stump, where she served yesterday's bread and our unfinished oatmeal.

She set him a bath, red-rimmed, white-enamel washpan wedged high in the crabapple tree, safe from the neighbor's cat.

That spring, he came home. We used the back door, far away from tiny wings tossing bits of blue shell among the potted pinks.

Summer, he complained from the garden-- not enough worms in the compost. Frail at her bedside window she fretted, who will feed the robin and the roses?

By autumn he had disappeared. His deserted nest with faded yarn was empty, like Baba's room, holding only memory.

Winter froze the roses left at her grave. Time to light fires to keep out cold and dark. But when we cleaned the chimney trap there, among old ashes, was the broken body of Baba’s robin.

Heading for the River

On our walls ancestors gather— the wasp-waisted women, one dark hat on an unknown man. They stare down the years, like cats whose pupils pass from round to suspicious slit in a moment.

Here, the young girl in white, moving in sepia pantomime— now with bonnet and beau, next with babe in arms, on and on to the final funereal waltz. A formal dance of daguerreotypes whose names even our parents have forgotten.

They whisper in our dreams— incessant crickets cracking the quiet. We wait for you.

You can chase down the morning, wave the thin red sunlight of reason— secure as anyone can be in the Einsteinian now— but answer me this: who do we fool with our little bits of paper and the ink poured out as black as the hair of a lover, as the corruption of oil on deep water?

In the end, no matter the struggle, you will be eaten by the dark, left to sleep with stones and shadows that lick their slender fingers, reach out to pull at a battered moon, hoist it high—floating above that Stygian drift where passage is only two cents for the asking.

Poetry Class Day One

The skritch-skritch of pens breaks a thick silence; like a bunch of blind men we tap-tap our way down an unknown paper sidewalk. We're caught between Ciardi and Glaser, praying for the salvation sharpness of the pencil to erase these dull wits.

Write fourteen lines per week, he says— you can almost hear the sweat.

Suburban Landscape

It is about those people, that house where the sill is sealed fast, caulked against unpleasant potential; quiet save for the flickering shadow play on indifferent walls, the reflected blue of every evening, a cerulean ocean hangs ignored on the wall. Hydrangeas wilt in a crystal vase.

There is no light in the empty second floor; indigo silences sleep in the basement. She will put appliances through their paces. He will applaud her efforts. Neither is disturbed by the rude whispers of wind dropping from the eaves.

A woman moves quietly through a kitchen, through the melancholy curl off his pipe.

La Bella Donna

The good wife picks out the eyes, scrubs their jackets clean, and sets them to boil— potatoes for salad.

She picks out his tie, hands him his clean jacket, and watches him out the door— off to some important meeting.

The scent of his cologne lingers, mingles with the smells of the kitchen.

The white potato, solanum tuberosum. You can never tell about a potato. Slicing into them, she finds it is the perfect-looking one that has the rotten heart. And she wonders if he will be home for dinner.

Later she stirs the dish that sat out far too long and thinks of solanum nigrum— first cousin to the potato, called deadly nightshade— and wonders what sort of salad it would make.

Metastasis

—for Ruth

Can you still see me? I am dancing with the bones of my own undoing, fighting the small ancestral corruptions

of blood. How disconcerting— it’s as if I’ve found myself in trouble because some great-grandmother seduced a sacred beast.

It’s all sweat and cold in the predawn— voices a continuous crumble, hollow-bellied anxiety dreaming of the unknown silences beneath rock.

If I could, I would draw a nacreous circle around this pain; make myself a rose, furled petals pulled tight against the withering. I have become a pear, slipping in my own overripe skin.

The loose flesh in the mirror is not me, not that golden-gowned ballerina who once spun on the applause, all tinsel-haloed and believing.

Now I can see her only faintly, but she whispers sometimes in the dim before the morning— asks: will we rise today?

Crows in Cincinnati

I saw them as we left the museum crossing the park, my mind still full of dark Egyptian goddesses in feathered diadems.

Had winter trees begun to sprout strange black blossoms? We watched them spiral in, wide wings spread to catch the updrafts of dusk.

No mere murder—more like a massacre, this. The Hell's Angels of the bird world wheeling in to hang out and taunt us with their chorus of discordant caws.

Here, there, one would crowd another, and an entire tree would rise, circle in a chaos of beaks and claws to dispute the order of things.

Outcast and unpinioned below, we danced on the naked ground and cried See us! See us! But no feathers fell as alms.

Pulled away by reluctant human needs we turned and left. In the distance, softer now, I could still hear the contemptuous clamor of the crows.

The Scent of Summer Peaches

You know when the peaches are ready. You can smell it, like the last breath of summer hanging warm on the air the day before school, when Mama calls us in from the alley to pick the final fruits.

Our trees hang like tired women, heavy with peaches the size of our softballs. We duck low branches, dodge the wasps that hum over splattered windfall, fill our bushels until the thin wood slats bulge and complain.

In the kitchen Mama drops each peach into boiling water only for a second— then into the sink, a cold bath. The skin slurps off like silk, exposes yellow flesh to her knife. She will fill her jars, top them with brandy, while we beg

for the odd slice. We want the sticky kiss of juice on our lips, the syrup dribbling down our throats, the heady flavor like fermented sunshine. Much later, when cold winds whistle in empty places, we go to the cellar, pick from rows of glass and color, taste peaches and late summer again.

Rain at Four A.M.

The rain wakes me. Begun in tinny patterings, like cat feet on the stair. Then heavier, a fat rain, puffing, pouring in a silver sheet off the back roof. Windows, wide open, welcome in the mist.

I wrestle with the quilt, hot and heavy with night sweat. Entangling folds of linen reach to trip me.

Come back, they whisper, to the dark safety of dreaming. Don’t leave us for the dangerous morning.

But I am already gone— facing the storm.

A wet wind slaps my skin. I drink deep of moist air, while the million fingers of rain tickle my face and run knowing hands wetly down my body. I am dancing in the downpour, sticking out my tongue to catch drops. Drops that always escape— to soak the nightshirt clinging with abandon to my breasts and belly.

Crows Again

Come Sunday morning and the crows are back, hitchcocking in the front yard, stark on the powdered sugaring of snow. Feather-robed Jesuits, cawing in conclave, they argue the finer points of bagel versus stale bread, eyeing me judgmentally through the glass.

The Irish say doors to the netherworlds open where crows gather. I believe them. Why else this weird?

Not even the squirrel cold cuts, leavings of last night’s moonlit tabby songfest, can explain such invasion One for sorrow, two for mirth. This gathering is more like hysterical laughter, but what’s the joke?

Legacies

Great-gram told stories of world travel— dancing in Kyoto under cherry blossom shadows, collecting hearts and tea cups. In New York flaunting her red-dyed curls and flapper-beaded dress, she smoked cigars for the shock value and killed the taste with whiskey, neat. Late years she spent in Sydney, singing along with the tenors from the front row of that seashell of an opera house. Later yet in the nursing home, when white curls framed her parchment face, she sang bawdy songs to the old men and flirted famously.

Grandma told stories of a Dakota farmwife. She fed seven children and fifteen field hands three meals a day, even on Sunday. When she moved to Milwaukee, she couldn’t part with her gardens, so the empty lot next door became her vegetable paradise— where she put us through weeding hell. Her mantle clock chimed like Christmas; on her glass shelves Goebel children paraded while she served us tea with brandy and studied Victorian elegance.

Mama told stories of following, cross-country, my airman father. Base to base, Georgia to Texas to Michigan, with all she owned in two tired suitcases and a cocker spaniel in the back seat giving birth. In Detroit, by daylight, she was efficiency in hospital whites. By night, in smoky jazz clubs, she’d whirl around dance floors while Daddy drank Irish coffee and romanced the waitress. By the flicker of late-night black and whites, she whispered to me about Fred and Ginger, Deanna Durbin, and her hard-lost dreams of Hollywood.

My daughters will tell stories of their mother— the smell of morning coffee over a wakeup call of Showboat blues and Madame Butterfly; trekking through the backyard jungle, stalking tomatoes and basil for sauce, green peas that we sit and eat raw; therapeutic tea parties to talk out broken hearts; of being dragged off in fantastic costume to Renaissance balls, learning set and turn and the proper way to curtsey, with hands held out for courtly kissing.

The Blue Latitudes

I want blue horizons again. Long open oceans where shimmery distance veils the sacred union of sea kissing sky.

I want gull song in slow afternoons, watching tides wash up their driftwood and fish bones and time-bleached memories,

Wrap me in hot breezes, let me taste skin slick and salty to the tongue, lie with me on white gauze.

We’ll swim in the lazy latitudes of the mind, write our history in the sand, and ignore all choices harder than adding lemon to the glass.

Anyway

Because she couldn’t have a child, she left her husband of seventeen years. She left him at a truck stop on the turnpike in New Jersey, in August. She felt no remorse. And anyway, he snored.

He, sleeping in the back of the car, did not notice for several hours, not until the sun beating on the roof made it unbearably hot. Not until he had to pee. And anyway, he thought she’d have made a crappy mother. She never buttoned his shirts right or made him breakfast. When they first met, she couldn’t cook oatmeal or eggs. But it didn’t matter anyway because she was great in bed, or at least she told him he was. She was seventeen. These were the things that mattered in New Jersey in those days, or so he thought anyway. One summer she met a different sort of man. One who wore black, even in August. Didn’t act like a child about his breakfast. Probably didn’t even snore. He just reached across the counter, touched her hand, and said,

Pour me another cup, baby. She never saw him after that, but she remembered. The truck driver who offered her a lift to Ohio and a different life, looked a lot like him anyway.

January in Ohio

The cold so sharp it freezes the air in the lung— each breath a knife, a sharp stab at the heart and no strength to fight it.

Ice cracking on the eaves creaking in the wind, singing like some sad sparrow feet frozen to the wire, until spring thaw when the lifeless little body can fall at last.

I Am Not for Wisconsin

I should have loved Wisconsin more— should have been one with the cows, tried to understand the zen of grass and grazing, the mantra of milk, the cow-pies sprinkled in the chicory like approving punctuation. When the long summer of sheep took me, I should not have pulled away from the smell of wet wool, or the lambs, or the grinding of sausage. But I am not for Wisconsin, nor could I marry Michigan—with its maple syrup and tie-dyed autumns, its forests sliced open by six-lane highways always delivering you to the souvenir shop and the carved cedar toilet paper holders of Tahquamenon Falls.

A Dakota once grabbed me, but it was only a passing fancy brought on by an appreciation of dinosaurs in the distance and the golden hair of the Corn Princess in her Corn Palace.

I had a brief fling with Virginia, too, but all we did was argue— she had a way of turning every single sunset into a political rant. Now I see her only briefly, passing through smoky parties on the way to someone else’s mountains.

You may think I am for Ohio—after all, we have lived comfortably in these separate rooms for twenty years or more, but I tell you it is never settled— tomorrow I may go to Arizona. Just pack my things, park the Amish buggies in the Queen Anne’s lace, and like a stripped-out steel mill, empty all my aspirations into the Cuyahoga.

Daughter

A poet once told me that pregnant women dream wild dreams. I didn’t. Not then— when you were safe in that watery crib, pressed beneath my ribs. I dream epics now— of you and me, how we search for and find vivid white houses. Empty, unfurnished, houses with stairs that wind up and on up past endless windows to bare-beamed attics, where walls of mirror can freeze us, hold us in suspension beneath bare bulbs above wooden boards. Never safe, these white rooms. Always so uncovered— exposed.

II: DANGEROUS WOMEN

Eve’s Side of the Story

Let's not blame it on the snake, he said more than once.

I felt the room was dangerously large, made of bone, green paper, the hearts of flowers.

Should we dress formally? I wanted to know.

He gave me eight places of black lacquer dinnerware, although I’d never invited more than one at a time to dine.

Wear the rose and peach velvet, he suggested.

He served up melon, apples, seeds of pomegranates, and the light from recent stars. Told them it was all my idea.

When the final guests arrived and brought out their flaming skewers, I chose to leave. Just went out the gate. Tossed the last key in the rhododendron.

Behind me, those graveyard trees held all the unkind crows up to the sky.

What Judith Whispered to Holofernes

Move over, honey, I want to lie down. Shall I tell you of my country? You don’t know these sinful hills— nice Assyrian boy like you. But a girl’s gotta be careful.

Me, I was never meant to wash my face in clear water. I don’t drink from silver cups and, thanks anyway, but I brought my own food. Still, I’m just a sucker for purple pillows.

Sit here, I’ll rub your tired brow. See how silk lies soft across my hips? Have more wine. Show me your sword— so sweetly it slips in and out of this sheath.

Is it heavy? Thank God, I look good in red.

When Persephone ate the Pomegranate

No doubt she washed the dish. It’s what women do when lost— find something to clean, to put in order, something to hold and rock, as we were rocked by our mothers in their own sorrows.

He wouldn’t notice a clean dish, only that she’d eaten— a contract signed by ignorance. It’s a thing men know: that food, a roof, a bed, the semblance of love, is the price of a wife.

Who would have thought that six ruby seeds could taste so bitter? Sit so heavy? The wintry accusation— the stain of stale lust on cold sheets— just cold enough to freeze an entire world.

Helen’s Mother Gives Advice

I. On the first day of kindergarten she said: Walk on the left side of the road. You need to see what’s coming at you.

If they serve you cookies, don’t take the last one. Beauty is in the manner, not just the look. Don’t eat any eggs.

Never share your crayons, and don’t put anything in writing

II. On the way to summer camp she said: Wear straw hats and white gloves. A lady needs to protect her skin.

Stay out of the lake. Don’t talk to boys or strange swans (they will only tell you lies). Never get on foreign ships.

III. About high school she said: Girls can be cruel. Trust Clytemnestra—she knows how to handle men.

Stay away from Penelope—she’s too clever for her own good, and she attracts losers.

Eurydice’s Complaint

Did anyone ever ask what she wanted? Time and Stygian tide gone by, she was fine there.

So it wasn’t Elysian revels—playing slap and tickle with a fellow who’d rather sleep with his sword and who won’t shut up about the Spartan values: calisthenics, cold baths, clean socks he’d never wash for himself.

There is a dark beauty to Hell— pitch and pyrotechnics, disposable dishes. A girl could find the right bad boy there, a Plutonic lover who wouldn’t whine about kids, who’d like his meat rare, know the value of black lace.

She never wanted Delphic love songs, just an unapologetic tumble.

So let that husband go. Let him troubadour his ass through blind woods, fall among moaning maenads, and let those woodland groupies bake him cookies, eat him up.

Helen’s Mother Gives Advice on Cheerleading

Stand up on the battlements where they can see you. A man will die happy if a pretty girl notices him.

Keep your hemline out of the mud. No tears or your kohl will run, no regrets that the boy you kissed last night is being slaughtered in the quarter finals today. It is not as if we care who wins this game. The goal is not the battle, nor the war. It’s all about the husband— a rich one, well connected. Don’t forget to smile, show your teeth. Unwrap a bit of shoulder.

Play this right, and we’ll be in the big leagues next year.

Circe’s Bar & Grill

Why pigs? I want to ask her. but I know what she’ll say— It’s easier, they’re so close already.

And she’ll smile as she taps a beer for one fat fellow, watches him swill it down, foam lingering on the bristles of his chin.

He’ll mistake her interest, follow her upstairs, drawn by the way linen lies smooth over white breasts.

The boys out back watching Monday Night Football will shout at the refs, grunt at the cheerleaders, but never notice he’s gone.

Later, in her kitchen, she’ll serve coffee and BLTs, and with a little rag wipe one cloven hoof print off her pristine linoleum.

And she’ll whisper: I can’t help myself, you know. I just love them so.

The Palm Reader Speaks to Cassandra

You have no little black dresses, as you are neither little nor do you feel you look good in black. For this reason, you avoid funerals. You also avoid weddings and baby showers, both of which, in the end, lead to funerals. This you believe to be inevitable.

You always use the second stall from the door in the women’s restroom, because you think it is less trafficked, but you never wipe off the seat and you often forget to wash your hands on leaving.

You once refused to sleep with a celebrity. While you regret that now, it makes a great story at cocktail parties and poetry readings. You fear, though, that no one believes you.

You have color-coded your car keys, your sock drawer, your office files, the collars on your cats, and your kids’ toothbrushes; even though your children rarely visit any more. You think only the cats notice your thoughtfulness.

You always hurry to open the inner door of a restaurant if a man has opened an outer door for you, since you will be obligated to no man—except perhaps your last husband who everyone believes still pays your medical bills.

You have an unreasonable fear of swarthy men and large horses. Think about it.

You never lie about your age; you have, however, exaggerated your birthday for the last twelve years because when your mother or your oldest daughter calls and wants to know if it was a good day, you hate to disappoint them. They seem to believe you.

You have four pairs of black strappy shoes, but you still seek the perfect pair of knock- me-down-and-fuck-me pumps. Some days you think you look best in blue, some days in green. People tell you that mourning colors suit you, but you don’t really believe them.

You do not wish on stars or pray to gods—you ask what’ve they think they have done to deserve you.

You believe no one listens to you anymore.

Penelope Gives Instructions on Weaving and Men

First you shear the sheep. You’ll need lots of wool, so that men can’t follow what you are doing.

Always spin your own thread; go slow. Even the Fatae, Night’s own weird daughters, work for years to get to the shroud.

Set your dyes to match the living room, not the bedroom. Take time off on Thursdays or Saturdays; make your suitors move furniture: shift a sofa, hang a picture, haul away a bed.

When you warp the loom, be certain of the tension. Keep them at each other’s throats for as long as you can.

In the weaving, strive for perfection. Unravel and redo as much as you want.

And when the errant husband returns, chases the others away, asks you to come to bed, go ahead and tell him:

Yes, dear, as soon as I finish this bit of weaving.

Reflection on the Grave Goods of an Unknown Woman

Never think that she might have held that sword. What woman would trade the sweet breath of babies to live for the sweat and stain of battle. Not a warrior queen, no. Call her a beloved concubine of some dead king. Say it is his sword to which, in her grave, bony fingers still cling. And the gold at her feet must have been given by him, not taken by her own hand. Except, perhaps, for the earrings— those might be her own.

The chariot, as well, surely a token of his affection, left in memory of how she polished it for him. See her with rags and cloths? How she breathed on the engravings, rubbed until they shone just for him. She would have oiled the harness, made it ready to his hand, soft and pliant with nard and sweet oil, the same that now scents her shroud.

With such perfume she would have rubbed her own flesh, then laid herself down on cold sheets, waiting for him to come to her, like women do.

For Milton, a Complaint from Eve

Whatever possessed you, John, to write him that way? So slick, all snake-oil and sweetmeats. I have fallen out with angels now. No more green and easy days— ever since his first sibilant whisper, I have craved apple-sweet kisses. Those old roses on the marriage bower have gone all thorny for me now.

I can’t stop looking at my own reflection in mirrors of cold water, in the dark glass of puddles on asphalt.

So feed me turnovers at late suppers, French pastries, and powdered sugars No hiding behind fig leaves for me, I want glad rags and bling. I want to wander neon streets, I want to waltz with the wicked, foot it with cloven hoofers, bleed in high heels like some Cinderella stepsister come late to the ball. John, make him ply me with Boone’s Farm in the back of a Chevy. Make that serpent give me his sweetest sauce.

Woman

You gotta love her, She beats the laundry and the children. She flies with Amelia, rides with Sally Ride, but walks in pain with the little mermaid. She is a working girl and a girl working. She keyboards with Microsoft and soft guitars, and she takes no shit from Barbara Walters or Mary Kay.

She is Guinevere, Mata Hari, and Monica Lewinsky. Mother Theresa, the Pieta’s Madonna, and Donna Reed. Pope Joan, Joan Crawford, and Mrs. Roosevelt. She is Kali, Lucretia Borgia, and Saint Lorena of the knife She is the wicked witch wanting out of Oz.

She is Solomon’s cinnamon-scented Sheba, She of Ophir dripping leopards and opals, Nefertiti in golden onyx glory, and a blonde Vanderbilt in vair.

She is Hindi women screaming and leaping into flames, Cleopatra wrapped in the blood-stained asp, the Lady slinging booze, singing blues, and a bean-sidhe wailing at the door.

She is Tiamat terrifying her own, Sekhmet scorching Khemish sands, she is one pissed-off mama and a biker chick.

She is tall, small, slim, wide-hipped, wigged, wearing curlers, wearing mink, wearing out, coked-up on caffeine and late-baked cookies for the PTA, polishing Girl Scout pins, hat pins, sewing pins still pricking her mouth, leading cheers, leading children, on the leading-edge, wiping out the competition, wiping flies off starving faces while passing out bread crumbs, breading chicken, kneading bread, needing love, needing Band-Aids, strutting in fish-net stockings trolling for johns, standing in back alleys praying for abortion, protesting for choice, shopping in Nieman-Marcus and Walmart and a bag-lady dumpster down the street.

She’s a maiden mother and crazed crone, hot skin and afterglow and baby-swollen belly. And you gotta love her.

III: AWAY

Copernican Moments

The sun, fragile and cinnamon, pushes fingers of fog apart, offering rare stereopticon glimpses of garden— the unconcerned sticks of dark roses, the overachieving narcissus, hollow-bellied with urgency, struggling through cold soil. I pour a second cup, stir, lick the sugared spoon, and stare at a pristine page hoping for a frenetic genesis in the frozen clay of my brain— as if the stirring of digestion and desire could make ink pour thick and rich like coffee, and words could grope and grow like the fleshy purslane beginning to crack the sidewalk or the mint that thrust— all winter— its thin yellow fingers through the stone into the empty basement only to dangle limp, pale and blind with fatigue, to die above the washer, as brittle as sun-bleached bones lined up toward an oasis in distant untroubled sands.

In the Garden after Rain

Verbena flaunts her purple summer dress, the one with lacy edging, a bit of camisole, a sassy slip peeking from beneath the hem.

Rose campion points each bud tipped in the barest nipple of dark red, a crimson flicker in a green mouth, sucking down the blowsy summer shower.

Roses, who’ve shed a bit of pink damask, flaunt their swelling red hips. while hibiscus trumpets her humid perfume to the garishly rouged poppies on the corner.

Peonies hang their guilty heads to lie on the pavement, then burst in a shower of petals, gently curved like the small white fingers of babies.

Across the yard in the chocolate mulch, small round heads of mushroom push with determined virility toward a leaden sky.

The Promise of Blood

Wild-eyed with fear, she feels the birth. First a hoof, a white nose, then an hour or more to wait.

In the end, we pull this slick new thing into the world. Lead her up to the moon-curved udder, watch thin milk spill down the infant face as placental blood still weeps from the dam.

White rags collect that slow red flow. Barn cat washes one pale paw, sniffs, waits— as we all do once we’ve been bled— for the bounty of milk, the small mouth at the teat, the cramp of an unused belly.

Afterwards, walking the path of river-polished stones back to an empty house, the waiting bedrooms dark with their own secrets, I feel my own blood rise— a response to the night, the moon, the clench of a womb past bearing.

Thick ropy strands that trickle down my thighs, uncontrollable and unforgivably female.

Presque Isle, Upper Peninsula, Early May

Ozone morning, sharp and chill, the world caught in a not-summer, no-longer-winter Michigan moment. And the lake, fractal blue, under that clean sky, murmurs against the tea-brown humus of the shoreline.

The last autumnal evidence is crumbling underfoot succumbing to the green urgings of a new season. Could I abandon duty, desert home and job, to live in a Yooper shack, quietly like the mellow porcupine

bumbling down the road, ignoring traffic stalled behind me? Would I drift like the leaves in the puddle at the bottom of that tannin-tinged waterfall splashing devil-may-care off the hillside? Among these verdigris hills,

the Blackfoot followed deer, hard-faced Finns wrestled copper from the ground and lost the battle of summer wheat that never grew well. Their children skied to school as early as October.

Along Calumet Road, my father picked blueberries, dropped them in tin pails for later morning pancakes. In his north wood boy-time, brief summers painted watermelon sunsets into a rind of dark pine that could

stop your breath just as sure as when you hid from the black bear crunching trout bones on the creek side. Fallen firs held secret gun shapes waiting to be freed by pocketknife and shoe black. Was it easy for him to trade that Nordic green for olive drab and a lifetime of reminiscence at the VFW? If I had stayed —for more than just summers in Escanaba, playing pinball at the Patio Grill with cousins I barely knew,

watching the boats at Fayette with John who taught French kissing in a cabin tent at Shakey Lake—if I had lived these past fifty years wiping noses at Calumet Elementary or tables for the truckers at the Quick Stop on Route 42, would a simple northern morning tempt me so?

Manzanar Relocation Camp, May 1942

We are only half alive in this land— betrayed by sunlight, dry boards, and sharp wire.

When did the children learn to play so silently?

Beyond, an unfeeling whiteness of mountains and the five-strand fence we cannot pass.

Where are the cherry trees? Where do the peonies tremble now?

Softly, in the cricket whispers of evening, the dusty voices of grandmothers remember the rivers of Yariga-Take, sing for the lost sons.

Those Dream Houses

When you dream of houses—of thick-walled stucco bungalows skulking across Sonoma, the gingerbread and bric-a-brac fantasies of New England, or cold French villas beside greying seas—you should dream, too, of bleached linoleum, unpolished spoons, of dry tangerines in wire baskets, the velvet dust of shelves and thumb-licked books, the strange machinery of basements.

When you walk in dreamt hallways, between undiscovered rooms where the etched light of dim lamps picks rust off iron bedsteads and lingers over the many-fingered clocks, you should dream as well of the closets— filled, as they are, with feathers and peeling sequins, hatboxes, failed prom dresses, the detritus of mousey sweaters, cedar shavings.

And when the dreaming takes you to hopeless chests never meant for a bride—where soft-edged cards of sewing needles and a grandmotherly jar of mixed buttons horde their dreams of usefulness—then, and only then, will you understand the sharp wit of broken windows, and the clean-swept floors of an unfurnished mind.

The Clam Chowder Annual Music Reunion at Jim & Dan’s

Behind the Alleghenies, hazy in the blue humidity of late summer, this house poses—betrayed by sunlight,

peeling paint flaking in a staccato breeze. A determined wild grape snatches at tires from the edge of rutted gravel,

while in the yard a croquet game runs the hazards of slope and sycamore, small child, and random cats.

Wicker rockers creak on the porch—like aging beldames who sway a gentle counterpoint to the whispers of Celtic harp, soft talk, and rhubarb wine poignant on the tongue. This house seems alive, a many-chambered organ pumping people from room to crowded room—

drawing them into the hot kitchen scents, pushing them back to the snap jig and reel of the parlor band.

We revel in the dilled white flesh of potatoes, in sesame noodles, barbeque, and vinegared greens.

We hum Wild Rover and Sweetgrass Moon to the tiny currants that wink back at us from Welsh cakes.

The sigh of an uillean pipe calls fiddlers to battle against a hefty soprano in the library.

At the window, the tea roses nod encouragement, flinging confetti petals and nudging at the cool green calm of the juniper beyond the glass.

And when the last licks of the day paint the distance with immodest violet and the house spills us out onto that porch, when we gather with a collective voice, chorusing, deo gratias, a purple welcome to the night—

each year, all year, until this moment, we are only half-alive.

Remembering Holyhead

If I should lie again in that too soft bed where the little window in the eaves watches over the endless fleet of ferries wallowing under the blued morning sun— that cold light on colder water— to silently slip across the Irish sea,

I would wake to the shrill cries of the gulls, as they spiral over the stone circles on Southstack Mountain, over sharp gorse, the dark heather, over the hard-chiseled stone of Ellen’s cross high above the blackened debris of the railyard.

I would hear the shufflings of my landlady locked alone in her little room, waiting, with her whispery tobaccoed cough, for the time to poach the eggs and fry the bread and face the day.

I would rise early and sit on the Roman wall of tight-fit stones, hauled by tired legionnaires all the way from Segontium. I would watch an old tom weave through a scramble of roses, on a day as still as the reflection in a silver bowl carried by quiet women who once washed the feet of strangers at the iron gates of St. Cybi’s shrine.

I would think of that slow walk from cloister to well, well to chapel, through half-open doors hobnailed with all the sins of unborn generations, remembering all who passed by winking at the old gods in the tympanum, all who sing the hard Celtic hymns under the soft green glow of Morris windows.

Back to the First Draft

Feeling like the deep lines of age, I’m finally moving out from under the covers, running, with words that tangle in the mind, trickle sound like rain— too fast to be captured, too loud to be ignored.

I want the crazy light falling from old books to warm my eyes; I want to blurt lines so hard and fast that synapses collapse from the weight.

But even when words come pure, like sugar on the tongue, they melt too soon, all morning frost or acid dreams, and like recycled glass I am cut by someone’s diamonds.

My fingers quicksand into the keys, and that’s me, all sucked up into a blue screen, still twisting shadows around myself like folds in the paper of night.

May, in Fengdu, on the Yangzi

Ghost city, they call it, but there are more street squatters now than there ever were people in these empty-eyed windows.

A woman wants to sell me oranges, small ones, ten for ten yuan— I buy one, and give it to a tiny boy with dirty hands who stares.

A Tibetan woman poses for me, straightening her black wool del, pointing proudly to a silver pin that fastens it—an old coin with Mao’s profile. With a sun-browned hand, she touches my pale hair, my too white skin, and we laugh.

Her hair is thick and black, wound like a crown on her head, the braids greased with butter. We hug. She chatters—

I understand nothing, but we are friends. Together we walk down the long stone wharf where weeds run, crazy quilting together the cracked paving. And I think how, by October, this will all be under water.

The Year of Surplus Rain

April, like a bride on one too many martinis, had a tendency to gush. First the skies opened a late night theater: special lighting effects, and drinks on the house.

In May the flowers did their bit. Roses and lilies cupped their petals to catch as they could, but no good. Only the willow reveled in her wrinkled toes. By midsummer moss had shinnied up the siding, and children were drawing faces in the drips leaking through window panes.

Now the grass is gone soggy, birds stoop to bathe in our footprints— for we’ve given up on shoes. Rivers have taken to the streets, roof gutters refuse the overflow, and storm drains are on strike for lower water tables.

Inside, there is rain in the refrigerator. The pillows, having soaked up all they could, now lie limp, sweating on the sheets. Even the doilies leave wet spots on the furniture.

Already in August the willows are weary of weeping. Laundry has piled up unwashed, but we’ve broken out the shampoo. we scrub each other’s backs and— applauding each fresh shower— sing and dance under the thunder.

The White Horse of Uffington

Forever broken, this curve of turf, by lines deep carved in centuries of chalk— white as if some crazed garden path circling to nowhere ran amuck among the eternal sheep.

Sheep farmers with pick and spade, from below in the valley, come as they have always come— through lavender and mustard seasons, past the iron hill fort they come up from their fields.

Fields once oxen-plowed, now stitched together by railways, pinned in the corners by roundabouts. Here Roman legions once camped, gawked at Epona’s steed, at her people come to clear the chalk.

Chalk horse steady on the hill as it has always been, year following year. Wide now, the body, then narrow necked— one tender hoof stretched out— running full tilt, forever.

Shaolin

Thin boy in yellow cotton leggings and jacket, he seems too young to have chosen the monastic, given up on life outside the red gates—out there where street vendors hustle roasted potatoes and postcards, red candles, incense, and joss money.

Only fifteen, but he can walk the perfect patterns, lay his soft cloth shoes in the hollowed stones where Tang feet danced the forms for the Taizhong emperor. In those glory days, the brothers stood, just thirteen monks, and broke a rebel army with their simple staffs and gardener’s spades.

The real warriors are gone these several hundred years. All that is left are shadow fighters, training in big compounds of glass and steel outside the red walls far from the curved pagodas with their pointed roofs that fend off the demons.

No blue tiles out there, no bronze incense burners, no gold-plated Buddhas for the big schools— just little boys in black silk, red silk, blue or green silk.

No saffron cotton like real monks wear, no emperor anymore to grant that right.

The only mystery is what feng shui rubs off from the temple here on Songshan, to the new schools where wisdom and wushu can be measured in renminbin.

Even poor dead Puyi, that last emperor, who spent his final years in a common garden, was younger than this monk when they forbid him to see his city again.

But in the White Horse Temple, one young Shaolin is still moving quietly among the elderly cypresses, passing American tourists without pausing, stepping over the threshold, to enter the Hall of Righteous Men.

About the Ghost of Li Bai

Was it you I saw, old reprobate, under the red lacquer beams of the fourth tier of Yellow Crane tower? Did you walk by the carvers of seals, the seller of painted fans—the one who wrote your poem for me in a strong hand that wavered at the strange western lines of my name? When the wind chimes whisper in a saffron breeze at the Dragon Pond, are you there? Did you hear me read your name in the Hall of Stones? You refused to write, they said, because you could not do better than Cai Hao’s poem on nine cranes returning; then you carved your name on his wall to show approval. For your humility, they built the Deferral Pavilion, where you sipped iced wine and laughed at dancing girls. Now I sit here in the shade and write these words. Invoking your brush— I have no shame. I wonder, how does the yellow loess wind that sweeps from Qinghai feel to you now? Have the charcoal burners and the red taxis made the dust of Wuhan any blacker? What do you think of the neon crane that flies each night over Chang Jiang Bridge? Are you watching me now as I agonize over poetry again?

Thinking of Clouds and Rain in Xi’an

The sky is rinsing her clouds out, a cool drizzle that washes dust from my mouth.

I cannot see the old city wall, only the white streaked tiles of the university, the gardens below where you and I once watched the night and all the yellow twinkle lights lining the roof ridges.

Somewhere a man is singing— a plaintive sound, in a Chinese dialect that I don’t understand.

Beneath my window, roses droop in the rain, but pomegranates open thirsty throats—their blossoms sharp orange against a grey sky. Like a bird in a bamboo cage, I have no place to be.

A woman sheltered by a wide straw hat sweeps the water out of the street, emptying puddles that only refill.

Outside the gates, blue-glazed roof tiles of the old mosque tilt over closed market stalls where we bought silk, drank tea, and laughed when you were last here.

On the doorframe, my red paper wishes drip their colors like sorrow onto pavement.

On the High

On a gilded Oxford morning when reborn sunlight frosts this city of neogothic spires, I head up the High on a pilgrimage to the coffee shop. There, lost in the indulgences of espresso, I see the old woman waddling toward me: stretched and patched blue sweater, pink crocheted cap covered in rainbow spangles, tattered layers of plastic bags clutched in her cankerous knuckles.

Her voice is rich with Eastern Europe. You are an American. I can tell, you walk proud. Me, too. We are comrades, she says. She lived in America, in Altoona, she beams at me, on her uncle’s farm. All dead now, all gone.

Now she sells poetry books on the High. Her drawings of fine thin vines wander across thick paper covers, chase irrelevant words that stagger down her Xeroxed pages. Only four quid, but I have no coin left Find me by the river. I draw my leaves by the Isis. Come buy my book tomorrow. I promise I will seek her out, though I know I won’t.

And I am suddenly reminded of the old man, coughing on a street in DC, in a ragged pea coat that didn’t cover his skeletal wrists, blue vein tracery on his parchment skin, his hand stretched out to no one in particular. I had no coins then, either. Gave him my burger by way of penance. Never found him again.

I watch the old woman move away toward St. Mary’s where the early sun just cresting the copper rooftops gives her fringe of gray hair, wisping out of the edges of that outrageous cap, a halo of silver.

Apples from Donji Vakuf

Zenaida, a teacher, wants to take the books. I can understand this— but there are too many and the snipers on the road target slow movers, women heavy laden.

She takes, instead, all the apples from a tree in front of where Kafedzic’s house used to be. She wanted Kafedzic’s cat, as well— but it hissed and would not come.

On the ride to Rijeka, in a rusty bus leaking oil, she shares the last apple with Hana, a girl in a blue scarf, whose father, a math professor, was taken from Sarajevo the month before.

Neither of them smiles, but they eat that apple down to the core, and they eat the core, the seeds, eat even the stem. I cannot understand this— no matter how I try.

In Rijeka they tell us that this is the way of things. Books, cats, even apples—go and come and go again. We try to understand.

Horse Returning Mountain

There are no horses here, only goat boys fishing with string nets, a woman washing clothes, brown murk of the Yangtze soaking into her blue trousers, and a few unconcerned goats snatching ferns from the cliff face.

Three red characters painted on rock name this place: horse, return, and mountain.

No horses, though. Just a row of sampans on a gravelly beach. No roads, no trails. Not like Emerald Gorge where holes in the granite walls recall huge beams that held ancient walkways, wide enough for wagons and whole teams.

A horse might wander from up there. Leave his master stranded in Double Dragon town where he stopped for a cup of tea and some little potatoes grilled on bamboo skewers, the ones women still sell to tourists at the water’s edge.

A horse could go down, looking for tender ferns and long grass, down to the river where the goats play with the garbage washed up to catch on brush.

And maybe some fishing boy would find that horse among his goats. Ride him back to town, get a string of coins for his trouble. Square-holed Imperial coins his children's children's child would swap someday, on the riverbank, for three American dollars.

Maybe he painted the three red characters there. On the mountainside, just above where goats graze.

Goats are never lost. They know their boy will come to chivy them back up the path, crowding the tourists who tromp toward mountaintop temples to stare at the hundred Bodhisattvas of white jade, and gilded wood, and paper mâche.

December Evening in Tempe, Arizona

The summer grass is brown; winter grass has not yet sprouted. There are two sides to December here, warm and even warmer. Stars, white and distant, cold as Ohio snow, flicker over the corner park and a late night ballgame. Kids run bases under the hard orange glare of halogen and their coach. Even the palms are wilting.

Someone wrapped garland around an aging saguaro. Gravel lawns up and down the street turn pink under chili-pepper twinkle lights. Next door, a blow-up snowman leans toward a herd of blinking wire reindeer and a flat-tired Chevy in the drive.

The only ice for hundreds of miles floats in my lemonade.

Through an open window comes the sound of Bing Crosby singing carols. A woman yells Cállate! Pare ese ruido! A baby begins to cry.

The Dryad Fountain in Winter

Poised in that supple moment, her hardened face, her dry arms stretching over thick green water, blank gaze fixing the brittle lattice of frozen rosemary, the shadowed tracery of leafless vines, one wisp of concrete hair plastered to the tearless cheek, her unvoiced whispers rustle in the dusty stalks, in the resolute crunch of thorn and dead grasses. Ignore the broken-nosed cupid, forgotten in the debris and dusty bread of circumstance. Wait while cold stone walls whittle away levels of day. Blush with the embarrassed sunlight falling behind the hills.

Is there a promise somewhere in these long nights? Who sings to your cupped hands in the dark moon days when the last sparrow has flown?

Threes

These are the three white things— the seeds blowing over concrete, the cataract eyes of old men, the caryatid holding up the sky.

These are the three red things— the poppy field at dusk, the blood that rolls off the needle, the gang graffiti sprayed on ghetto walls.

These are the three yellow things— the rue blossom that brings abortion, the urine-scented asylum, the butter on the burn.

These are the three black things— the crow on roadkill, the flies on Third World faces, the trigger held by despair at two a.m.

The Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey

Morning, thick and white, pours like milk over the silence, beads like gossamer in the wet grass, in the corners of stone.

Saintly faces, gray and dusty with years, ignore us from the tympanum.

The queue stretches, street to door to grave—nothing more than bone dust under cathedral floor— noble strains interred in stone, interrupted by hard walls.

We are wordless, silent shuffling, tracing numbers and names worn by the fingers of centuries.

The little man in red, a docent, himself a grotesque, hurries us out back into the light, into the living day.

Chongqing, Yangzi River

Chongqing is dusty. Humming hotel girls, with buckets of Yangtze-brown water and haphazard mops, paint wet patterns on worn tile floors. A boy on a bicycle carries a sack of long beans bigger than he is.

Through blue-tinted windows, the hard sun and the grey sky turn almost cheery, and clothing on drying poles waves to us like the children climbing on statues yelling in broken English: hello, hello, hello!

We peel the shells off salty tea eggs we wash down with warm, sugared milk. Then outside, on the balcony, we practice Tai Chi to the amusement of old ladies who shuffle by below on once-bound feet.

Down the thousand stone steps of the wharf, peddlers chase us like sparrows after corn. You need map, very good, very cheap. Our boat wallows patiently in the brown muck and trash of the river, framed by distant beautiful hills.

Beomeosa Temple, 3 A.M.

A line of single stones make a path to the dharma house where the monks chant. Drum echoes fade into the mountains, a bamboo clacker strikes the hollow wooden bell. A gentle gong answers.

I sit behind Buddha’s hall, in the scent of sandalwood, candlelight, in whispers of prayers.

Water sings down the mountain, spilled by bamboo into a hollow stone basin. A woman washes her hands, speaks to me.

I know no Korean. She knows no English. I put my hands together; I bow to her.

The left hand is Buddha; the right hand is man. I am comfortable sitting on the stone.

She steps out of her shoes at the temple door, slips inside. The worshippers are women, or very old men. The chanting is slow.

Male and female voices together, the drum, the gong, the sound of water.

The gray linen of my robe no longer scratches. My hips are stone.

I am thirsty; I am not thirsty. The others sleep on heated floors. I watch the sky lighten above the pines, above the beasts turned into boulders. My feet now rest on the first stone.

The House is Always White

I still think of those houses, with their white sideboards, thin wooden tables, and the glass in the windows all beveled, reflecting clouds. But there was water in the basement. It came up over the wire shelves loaded with canned goods, bottles of bleach, and discarded board games of our childhood. We could no longer see the workbench, only the wrenches swaying like silver seaweed on their the pegboard, clinking underwater like the bells of a drowned city. There were rows and rows of hooks, too, but no matter where we hung the keys, they turned to rust. Even our carpets were not just green, they were made of moss. Men came, took apart the stairs to drain it all out, and when it was all gone we moved as well. The new house was also white, big rooms, more furniture, and quite nice, except for the plates and cups that had cracked, not much, just a little chippage at the edges. I was so embarrassed I could not offer the salad around. Never mind, the men said, and they carried in new lumber and several yards of pipe. In case this one floods, too. No one wanted to stay. Some had reserved hotel rooms, but I wouldn’t hear of it. We have many beds, I told them.

And we did. Comfortable, even if a bit worn. All with coverlets of watered silk, olive green, dark like the sea. Still, they left without saying goodbye.

People just can’t deal with change, I thought. Blame global warming, Republicans, the Book of Revelations, or the sinking of the Titanic. I don’t believe any of it myself.

Lovers Always Quarrel in Bedrooms and Parking Lots

You said I tasted of strawberries, called me sweet. I think I taste

of mint, acerbic and raw, but there is something else I must say:

we are not the fixed stars we saw in their orbits last week.

We are only random bursts of light, a glitter like broken glass

on asphalt, the sharp argument of cold water over rock. We are

the silver locket emptied of pictures. Do I exist in silence, hung alone in your white-walled gallery fleshed only in shadows? You fail to mention the hollow place to the left of your pillow. If this were a B-movie,

I would have to throw something expensively noisy now: a Liz Arden jar or perfume, perhaps the Chanel, break something on these silent tiles, against the chill back alley wall of your discontent.

Dinner

He asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t, but I wanted to watch him eat. I wanted to sit across the table, let words spill like wine between us, drop like pebbles into deep water. I wanted to see him touch the cup, make small smiles around the knife and fork. I wanted to hold my own thoughts, reflected in crystal, poised at the edge of a plate, waiting for a hand on the back of the chair, his fingers at the nape of my neck.

The Patience of Cold Places

In the white latitudes, sky and snow meet in a blue moment of silent distance. There, under the weight of chill northern air, a bird or a bear is the same, just a pin prick of movement in a far land. There, beneath the rime of old ice, the wetland holds its breath, tight-furled buds of cottongrass are swaddled in delayed snow melt, and the dry moss waits. No one counts calendar days. There is an absolute faith in the snow goose who will come when she comes.

Thistles

You are all the same to us, solitary, standing above us, planning your silly lives. . . . —Louise Glück

You can argue the finer points of hoe or hand trowel, thrust reluctant fingers into our prickly intentions and pull, but this means nothing to us.

You seek solace in the docile flowers, the whispers of the wood violet, the reverie of roses, the sunflowers hanging guilty heads burdened by future generations, but we will not be silenced. We are blue voices repeated, rising: from the last white taproot, from each silky seed thumbing a ride on the wind.

Blind weeders of tame gardens, you are all the same to us. We are the savage daughters of an unnatural mother. We crowd the columbine, bite bare ankles, tangle your thyme. We wear purple.

You are never safe from our sharp critique.