of the "era" in my life when these were written. The second one won something (mild).
Alaska
Up there
The pendulum swings harder.
Summer
Darkless, yawning open, rose-lit, tumescent,
Pitch in parking lots and throng at gas pumps
These sleepless ghosts in worn-teeth stancheons,
Bicycles and canoes, buckle and run
Hike and swat, swat
Children in laughing, muddy light-born everywhere
How visibilty, too far reaching,
Makes for gnashing in the night
No rest no rest, tinfoil and blanket, cardboard and eyeshades
Squint the days into twelve and twelve and try
But not too long
Until we shatter
and
Fall.
Three weeks of held-breath chocolate brown and auburn
The rich, red-spotted dying
The smell of wet, old tires
In the still, the still hovering
So close over the land, a clean, white bedsheet billowing and sprawled,
Not yet, touching down--
How big the land groans, a pallete sighing of its own creation,
an enormous swell of the new re-dreaming.
Preparation is nothing.
Termination dust.
A new white-bald sheen.
Do not be afraid.
Winter
Is this
The known-same season the whole world round;
We start the real work of our lives.
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Cayuga Lake
The starting lisp of spray on the dock,
a gray pall steeling of the sky,
an open-mooned midday rising, bluster and swell
merge water to land --slate colored
with only the lip of green on the far bank
to remind us why the sun comes out at all.
I turn inside for a straw hat, broad-brimmed
I anchor with a scarf that will not fight it’s flutter
when I turn back
outside
to a dock, boat tethered
while under, over
air and river
push and prolong
made to gather louder, tumult and ear-bloom gushing
because water has no bones
nothing to break but the quiet
It tries so hard
tries so hard
My want means nothing, has no vessel.
The only hope for success: a flood, unbeautied, detritus and stench
But not this time.
Just noise.
We,
we are the crashing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Photograph"
Prologue
Jennifer is dead. Her body was smashed up in a car wreck at ten past five in the evening on November 2, 1991, off Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway, also known as the Hutchinson Expressway, also known as the Cross County Expressway and not to be confused with the Post Road. New England is saddled with this confusing multiplicity because everything is old enough to have once been something else. Farmhouses are now restaurants; sawmills have become flower shops and parkways. Old barns turn into libraries, homes, and museums. In the 1700’s, Weston settlers tilled their fields and excavated rocks big as watermelon—the leavings of the melted Manhattan Glacier. They hoisted the rocks to the edges of their land, bordered the periphery of their holdings with these obstructions, loosening the dirt in their fields, stringing their rock walls like necklaces. They’re still there, these walls.
Jennifer was a senior at Weston High School when was killed. Her name is inscribed in a brick in the walkway of the town hall, across from the public library, down the hill from the church. In the photograph Jennifer is standing on the porch in her black-cocktail prom dress. Most people have a photo like this—girls with bare necklines leaning against trees in the backyard, girls standing with a date in front of the fireplace. In Connecticut it was common to put the girls standing in front of a Saab or a Mercedes, the car the date drove for the occasion. But Jennifer stands alone on this porch, not even a corsage on her wrist. She’s set against a backdrop of ebullient green, her body angled towards the camera as if someone took the amateur shot with a professional eye for composition. She’s a small girl, in the photo, just seventeen, with narrow arms and willowy legs balanced on black high heels, a large crown of tousled brunette hair. She has piercing deep brown eyes, a fine chin, and a delicate mouth. And she has breasts. Her breasts are cradled in the rise of the strapless cocktail dress’ bodice, cupped against the narrowness of the rest of her, like enormous tulip blooms on a narrow stalk, or an oversized cinnamon roll on a cocktail plate. And, because of the way she’s angled, about forty-five degrees away from the camera— a “side-shot”— her breasts appear to consume her. They exhaust her. Every day she has to go out into the world with those halcyon symbols of nurturance and sex, those unwanted inheritances that appeared before she was ready. Here is a photo of a beautiful young dead girl. And here is a picture of the weight she bears.
In college I had a friend who returned from her exchange trip to Russia in 1993 with scurvy. Produce had been difficult to come by while she was there. We went to one of those warehouse stores shortly after her return. It was the place where you pay an annual fee and have to get a membership card you flash at someone to gain entry. The ceilings are a hundred-feet high. You take a flatbed instead of a cart. Assembled Bunkbeds and lawn furniture are displayed beneath the three-hundred-pound boxes of the same thing in peices. Twelve-inch lattice-top cherry pies come in a two-pack. Oranges come in ten-pound bundles with a plastic handle. We made it past the electronics section, almost to the kitchenwares, then my friend suddenly stopped.
“Are you feeling sick again?” I asked. She was pale, sweating slightly.
“I don’t think so.” She said.
Someone said ‘excuse me’ as they wheeled by us with a roll top desk and four gallons of milk hitched together with cardboard.
“I have to get out of here.” Her voice was flecked with panic.
As we drove away she said, “It’s the too-muchness. I can’t understand. It’s exciting seeing all that stuff, I want all that stuff, and then I just want to . . .cry. I want to sit down and bawl my eyes out because it makes me so lonely, so sad, so something.”
So something. Oh yes, I know.
Dead Jennifer is here. She is beauty. She is frailty. She is unaccountable abundance, spilling over with the perfect offer of perfect plenty. Time can not mar her. She is listening to Def Leopard and Whitesnake while she puts on her makeup. She has recently watched Germany tear down the Berlin Wall, the Exxon Valdez list against its spill, seen the same footage of the San Francisco earthquake again and again until the twisted bridges stop eliciting awe—the same way the shuttle Challenger silently extinguished in a puff of gray. She buys blank VHS tapes at Caldor to pirate the Jaws movies she and her boyfriend rent from VideoTyme. Carl is bringing over his family’s old Beta Player to try their plan. In fact, this is what they’re doing on the night that they’re killed on the Merritt Parkway. Despite Reagan’s anti-drug ads Dead Jennifer drops acid and smokes Marlboros behind the Dairy Queen in Westport on Friday and Saturday nights, leaving waxy, bright-red lipstick on the filter ends. She has just given her lace gloves and rubber bracelets to her younger sister, the one in fifth grade, the one who wants to be Madonna for Halloween, and she can’t believe she ever liked Madonna’s music.
Dead Jennifer knows this story. She knows Nathan. She knows Raylene and Dana and Ricky and Margaret, she knows the people building the new Wal-Mart in Norwalk, the town-hall members in Wilton, the fifth grade girl who just gave her entire lunch to a boy named Justin, the woman who just stood up from her desk to realize she left her tennis bracelet at Steve’s house, the guy sitting on the Tapanzee Bridge in a traffic jam aching to move his bowels. She even knows the toll collectors on the Whitestone Bridge and the guy with the fake E-Z pass who will be arrested in the next moment because his counterfeit bar code gives him away.
She can’t turn away from any of it.
Dead Jennifer is in the very ground.
