Open Shutters Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Salter, Mary Jo.

  Open shutters : poems / by Mary Jo Salter—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-375-71014-0 (pbk)

  I. Title.

  PS3569.A46224 O6 2003

  811’.54—dc21 2002030185

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-53936-6

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-71014-8

  v3.1

  For the three who make us four:

  Brad, Emily, Hilary

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Readings PART ONE

  Trompe l’Oeil

  The Accordionist

  Advent

  The Reader

  The Newspaper Room

  TWA 800

  Erasers

  Tanker

  Glasses

  Hare

  In the Guesthouse

  Night Thoughts

  Snowed-on Snowman

  Light-Footed AN INTERLUDE

  Deliveries Only

  School Pictures

  A Morris Dance

  Office Hours

  The Big Sleep

  Readings PART TWO

  Another Session

  For Emily at Fifteen

  Midsummer, Georgia Avenue

  Snowbirds

  Florida Fauna

  Discovery

  Double Takes

  Shadow

  Peonies

  On the Wing

  Crystal Ball

  After September

  An Open Book

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Readings

  PART ONE

  Trompe l’Oeil

  All over Genoa

  you see them: windows with open shutters.

  Then the illusion shatters.

  But that’s not true. You knew

  the shutters were merely painted on.

  You knew it time and again.

  The claim of the painted shutter

  that it ever shuts the eye

  of the window is an open lie.

  You find its shadow-latches strike

  the wall at a single angle,

  like the stuck hands of a clock.

  Who needs to be correct

  more often than once a day?

  Who needs real shadow more than play?

  Inside the house, an endless

  supply of clothes to wash.

  On an outer wall it’s fresh

  paint hung out to dry—

  shirttails flapping on a frieze

  unruffled by any breeze,

  like the words pinned to this line.

  And the foreign word is a lie:

  that second l in l’oeil

  which only looks like an l, and is silent.

  The Accordionist

  A whining chord of warning—the Métro’s version

  of Concert A—and we clear the sliding doors.

  People take their seats as if assigned.

  Some of them open paperbacks, like playbills,

  with a formal air of expecting interruption.

  Or as if the passengers themselves are actors

  in a scene the stage directions might have called

  Passengers reading, so that it scarcely matters

  when they turn the page, or even if it’s blank.

  Enter a gypsy boy, who lurches forward

  carrying an accordion, like a stagehand

  awaiting orders where to set it down.

  But when the doors wheeze shut, as if by reflex

  his accordion too collapses, opens, closes

  to the tune of “La Vie en Rose.” He has no shoes.

  Unlike the rest of us, dressed soberly

  in solid colors, he’s a brazen mess

  of hand-me-down, ill-fitting plaids and paisleys.

  He’s barely old enough to be skipping school,

  but no note of fear or shyness, or of shame,

  shadows his face: it was years ago already

  somebody taught him how to do this.

  To entertain, that is—and in the coin

  of the culture: an Edith Piaf song pumped

  for all it’s worth from the heartsore instrument

  the audience links with soundtracks of old films,

  as a loving camera climbs the Eiffel Tower.

  But nobody is looking entertained.

  They seem to be in some other kind of movie,

  more modern, calling for unblinking eyes

  (the actor’s oldest trick for coaxing tears)

  that no longer lead to tears. No words. Just chords

  too grand to be specified. Or is it that?

  Blank faces, maybe, standing in for blank

  faces, much like wearing basic black.

  The boy’s still young enough he plays right through

  the next stop—when he might have passed a cup—

  and now, with a shrug, he segues crudely to

  another chestnut: “Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

  My station’s coming up. I start to rummage

  furtively in my wallet, held as close

  to heart as a hand of cards (of credit cards

  luck dealt me); isolate a franc. And stand,

  nearly tumbling into him, to drop

  the object of my keen deliberation

  into the filthy pocket of his jacket,

  careful not to touch it. In a second

  I stride out from the car to my next scene

  on the platform, where I know to exit right

  and up the stairs, out to the world of light.

  I’ll never see him again.

  But some instinct (as the train accelerates

  and howls into the tunnel on its pleated

  rubber joints, one huge accordion)

  tells me to look back—a backward take

  on Orpheus, perhaps, in which now only

  Eurydice goes free? And fleetingly

  I catch through windows of the next three cars

  the boy repeated. No, these are his brothers—

  each with an accordion in hand

  and each boy inches taller than the last—

  who handed down to him these blurring clothes,

  and yet because the train unreels as fast

  as a movie, a single window to a frame,

  my eye’s confused, has fused them as one boy

  growing unnaturally, an understudy

  condemned to play forever underground.

  Advent

  Wind whistling, as it does

  in winter, and I think

  nothing of it until

  it snaps a shutter off

  her bedroom window, spins

  it over the roof and down

  to crash on the deck in back,

  like something out of Oz.

  We look up, stunned—then glad

  to be safe and have a story,

  characters in a fable

  we only half-believe.

  Look, in my surprise

  I somehow split a wall,<
br />
  the last one in the house

  we’re making of gingerbread.

  We’ll have to improvise:

  prop the two halves forward

  like an open double door

  and with a tube of icing

  cement them to the floor.

  Five days until Christmas,

  and the house cannot be closed.

  When she peers into the cold

  interior we’ve exposed,

  she half-expects to find

  three magi in the manger,

  a mother and her child.

  She half-expects to read

  on tablets of gingerbread

  a line or two of Scripture,

  as she has every morning

  inside a dated shutter

  on her Advent calendar.

  She takes it from the mantel

  and coaxes one fingertip

  under the perforation,

  as if her future hinges

  on not tearing off the flap

  under which a thumbnail picture

  by Raphael or Giorgione,

  Hans Memling or David

  of apses, niches, archways,

  cradles a smaller scene

  of a mother and her child,

  of the lidded jewel-box

  of Mary’s downcast eyes.

  Flee into Egypt, cries

  the angel of the Lord

  to Joseph in a dream,

  for Herod will seek the young

  child to destroy him. While

  she works to tile the roof

  with shingled peppermints,

  I wash my sugared hands

  and step out to the deck

  to lug the shutter in,

  a page torn from a book

  still blank for the two of us,

  a mother and her child.

  The Reader

  It was the morning after the hundredth birthday

  of Geraldine—still quite in her right mind,

  a redhead now and (people said) still pretty—

  who hadn’t wanted a party.

  Well, if she’d lost that one, she’d stood her ground

  on no singing of Happy Birthday, and no cake;

  next year, with any luck, they’d learn their lesson

  and not be coming back.

  My friend who tells the story (a distant cousin

  and a favorite, allowed to spend that night

  in the nursery of the Philadelphia mansion

  Geraldine was born in),

  woke to the wide-eyed faces of porcelain dolls

  and descended a polished winding stair that led

  like a dream into the sunroom, where Geraldine

  sat with the paper and read.

  —Or sat with the paper lifted in her hands

  like the reins of Lazarus, her long-dead horse

  that had jumped a thousand hurdles; shook it once

  to iron out the creases;

  and kept it elevated, having been

  blind for the twenty years white-uniformed,

  black-skinned Edwina has been paid to stand

  behind her, reading the news aloud.

  The Newspaper Room

  Sterling Library, Yale University

  Hand-towel tabloids, editorial

  bath sheets folded into the crannies

  of the walk-in linen closet of knowledge!

  Ever replenished, freshly washed

  of whatever yesterday’s forecast was—

  The Asahi Shimbun, Der Spiegel, The Swazi

  News, The San Juan Star, The Sowetan,

  La Jornada, The Atlanta Constitution,

  Il Tempo, The Toronto Globe and Mail,

  Pravda, The Age, The Financial Times

  (still fancifully tinted salmon)—

  they’re stuffed in the walls like insulation.

  Consolation, too—which is odd,

  because here, if you read them, are a hundred

  windows open onto the howling

  miseries of the day. How many

  get skimmed by even one cardholder

  in a week? And even when they are,

  what wisdom rubs off when The Daily

  Mirror’s mirrored on the thumbs?

  The one-night newsstand of the mind,

  always bored the morning after, stares

  blankly at the warning “To Be

  Removed After Six Months.” Removed

  to where? To microfilm? Recycling?

  The World Wide Web? The fireplace? And if

  we know and hardly care, why is it

  we’d feel bereft if there remained

  in the universe not one such room,

  relic itself of a lost age

  when people hand-carved wooden shelves

  with useless, newsless decoration?

  Why should we relish solid proof

  these pages are our days that turn

  away to leave the past in ashes,

  most of it local and unread?

  No, she does no harm in her armchair,

  that woman curled in a ball, for whom

  the whole world is Le Monde.

  TWA 800

  Months after it had plummeted off the coast

  of Long Island, and teams of divers scoured

  the ocean floor for blasted puzzle pieces

  to hoist and reassemble like

  a dinosaur (all human cargo lost,

  too shattered to restore to more

  than names), I heard my postcard

  to friends in France had been delivered at last.

  Slipped in a padded bag, with a letter

  from the U.S. Postal Service (“apologies

  for any inconvenience caused

  by the accident”), and sea-soaked but intact,

  it was legible in every word

  I’d written (“Looking forward

  to seeing you!”) and on the stamp I’d pressed

  into a corner: “Harriet Quimby,

  Pioneer Pilot.” Under her goggled helmet,

  she was smiling like a hostess at

  this fifty-cent anecdote, in which the most

  expendable is preserved and no

  rope’s thrown to the rest.

  Erasers

  As punishment, my father said, the nuns

  would send him and the others

  out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.

  Punishment? The pounding symphony

  of padded cymbals clapped

  together at arm’s length overhead

  (a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers

  powdering their noses

  until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

  was more than remedy, it was reward

  for all the hours they’d sat

  without a word (except for passing notes)

  and straight (or near enough) in front of starched

  black-and-white Sister Martha,

  like a conductor raising high her chalk

  baton, the only one who got to talk.

  Whatever did she teach them?

  And what became of all those other boys,

  poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?

  My father likes to think,

  at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

  chalkboard from whose crumbled negative

  those days were never printed,

  but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

  gladly forgot themselves. And that he still

  can say so, though all the lessons,

  most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell

  this out) it must be half the boys themselves,

  who grew up and dispersed

  as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.

  Tanker

  On the horizon

  One toy tanker pitches south

  Playing hide and seek.

  Broad as a fan, each rust-pocked

  Leaf of the sea-grape. />
  —from “Fort Lauderdale,” by James Merrill

  Almost a tanka—

  Which (to remind the reader)

  Allows a haiku

  To glide above two submerged

  Lines of seven syllables.

  In my living room

  Seven years after your death,

  As a tape gave back

  Your suave, funny-sad voice, I

  Suddenly understood it.

  “Toy tanker,” of course!

  You’d pruned the tanka’s final

  Syllables to five.

  No one but you would have made

  a bonsai of a bonsai.

  The tanka I cite

  Is the Mirabell of three:

  A toy trilogy.

  Florida: last stop before

  The grandeur of Sandover?

  You played hide-and-seek—

  Hoping a few fans might take

  A leaf from your book.

  Glimpsed behind the geisha’s fan:

  Your quick smile, eyebrows lifted.

  Some people make real

  Tankers that can transport oil,

  Do the heavy stuff.

  Your father was one of them.

  He greased your way: God bless him.

  Why count syllables

  When half the world is hungry?

  You had no answer,

  Planted another sea-grape

  In bright rows, ornamental.

  How many poems