The Surveyors Read online

  ALSO BY MARY JO SALTER

  Poems

  Nothing by Design (2013)

  A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008)

  Open Shutters (2003)

  A Kiss in Space (1999)

  Sunday Skaters (1994)

  Unfinished Painting (1989)

  Henry Purcell in Japan (1985)

  For Children

  The Moon Comes Home (1989)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Salter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Salter, Mary Jo., author.

  Title: The surveyors : poems / by Mary Jo Salter.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016042321 (print) | LCCN 2016048870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524732660 (hardcover)| ISBN 9781524732677 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3569.A46224 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3569.A46224 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016042321

  Ebook ISBN 9781524732677

  Cover photography by Oote Boe

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v4.1

  ep

  for Keith

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mary Jo Salter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Yield

  Bratislava

  The Profane Piano Tuner

  Pastry Level

  Aloe

  Mr. Boyfriend

  Dragnet

  Today’s Specials

  A Word from Our Sponsor

  We’ll Always Have Parents

  Vierge Ouvrante

  The Bickers

  Little Men

  Smoking the Dead Sea Scrolls

  St. Florian with Burning Church

  Advantage Federer

  Tennis in the Snow

  Part II

  The Surveyors

  Part III: from Rooms of Light: The Life of Photographs

  Paparazzi

  Here I Am

  I’ve Got Your Picture

  Dark Rooms

  Part IV

  A Vanity Table

  So Far

  Old Saw

  Drapery for God the Father

  Moon-Breath

  The Buttonhook

  Little Star, 2015

  A Woman’s Tale

  Lo Sposalizio

  The Hotel Belvedere

  An Afghan Carpet

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  YIELD

  That’s what the sign said

  below my window.

  I’d step out of bed

  to look down on the fork

  the Y had made

  in the word and the road.

  YIELD was destined

  for a field of YELLOW,

  but scrambled like eggs

  into something like DAILY.

  Was firm, was an order,

  but just meant CONSIDER.

  And consider I did.

  I stared at the sign

  that was so little needed:

  to stay or to go?

  That was for others,

  my parents, to know.

  He might leave someday.

  She might stay behind.

  I was only one side

  of the triangle.

  I’d slip back in bed,

  back into my own mind,

  and more letters wanting

  to play came to me

  alone to untangle.

  BRATISLAVA

  So I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava.

  That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive.

  A sign in italics nudges us at the station:

  Have an amazing time in Bratislava!

  That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in English

  and then Slovakian, posted above a trash can

  that stands like the only monument in town.

  We’ve heard there’s a castle, though. We need a tram.

  We take one, and it heads in the wrong direction.

  A pretty girl, cheerful and blond, straightens us out,

  and we get on and off a bus at the proper stops.

  That’s funny. Already a right place and a wrong one

  to be in Bratislava, and I am among

  the people who sort of get this, at least at the moment

  I happen to occupy, within a vacation

  in Vienna with a day trip to Bratislava.

  That’s funny. I’d assumed my travel companion

  through life would be my husband, even if

  I’d gone to Bratislava, which I hadn’t thought of

  long enough to think I would or wouldn’t.

  The spanking white castle, standing high on a hill

  we climb on foot, swigging our bottles of Coke,

  dates to the year 800 or so, but burned

  down to the ground, which tends, as we know, to happen,

  and was reconceived in one of the worst times of all,

  the 1950s, under Soviet rule.

  That’s funny. Atop embarrassing pillars, knights

  in plaster armor gaze up at the sky

  triumphantly, although what for is forgotten,

  and the sunlight they eclipse in silhouette

  is all the sillier on those phallic cannons

  between their legs, with three or four cannonballs.

  More cannonballs per man. That’s human history

  in a nutshell. Bullies unsated with all they’ve got

  and below, the blindsided masses. That’s what it is.

  And yet I’m happy, now, with my companion—

  he likes me, I like him. He has his own backstory

  of bleak encampments, battles lost, and sorrows

  best not spoken of in Bratislava

  lest we spoil our day, which so far is duly amazing.

  I admire his dignity. Dignity is funny.

  Everything’s funny now, which we hadn’t expected

  to happen, either of us, after what happened.

  We’re still alive and now we’re in Bratislava.

  THE PROFANE PIANO TUNER

  I finally let him go,

  the man who’d tune our innocent piano

  twice a year or so.

  He knew his stuff,

  and for a while, that was enough:

  I’d leave the room so he could hit

  B flat again and shout, You little shit,

  Come on, you bastard, pounding and pounding it.

  Hour after hour he’d swear

  You filthy whore, Oh don’t you dare,

  you stinking, stupid bitch—

  a litany of abuses which

  he couldn’t hear, though blessed with perfect pitch.

  One day I understood.

  Why pretend I’d tuned him out? What good

  could come from smiling through profanities

  like black, ill-tempered keys

  against the white—black rage in twos and threes?

  He said when he was done:

  A perfect day! Hey look, we’ve got some sun.

  I answered We’re in luck!

  and handed him his check and watched
his truck

  back out the driveway, thinking You dumb fuck,

  not knowing I would think that. Very strange.

  My daughter, who’d been out of range

  all day at school,

  sailed in and sat down, lifted up her profile,

  and played a Chopin prelude like an angel.

  PASTRY LEVEL

  I was gazing out back

  at the lemon-gold

  sun on the cream-colored painted brick

  of the new house.

  (New again, I mean.

  I’ve told you the story—

  that it was finished just a few

  months shy of the war;

  that young families

  moved in and out before a widow

  who couldn’t care for it anymore

  signed it over to me,

  a single buyer lately

  possessed by self-

  possession.) This morning

  at my writing table, looking

  outward for a word,

  in that sun-glaze on the wall

  I saw again a baker’s shelf

  twenty years ago in Paris.

  You were there, of course.

  The average American

  four-year-old girl

  stands at forty inches tall,

  if you can get her

  to stand still.

  When you were four,

  in those ruffled French dresses

  I couldn’t help spending

  a fortune on,

  you couldn’t be kept away

  from patisserie

  after patisserie;

  you guided me by the hand

  to every window display

  that we might inspect another batch

  of little pleated

  tartes au citron,

  glistening neatly

  at the level of your eye.

  Remember when

  you, your sister,

  your father and I

  all spoke the same language?

  Because of you

  we invented a phrase—

  “pastry level”—

  to indicate the height of any

  four-year-old on the street…

  It seemed to go without saying

  we’d be strolling together

  all the rest of our days.

  ALOE

  Somewhere between the store

  where I’d bought the aloe plant

  and its home arrival,

  one waxen, prickly spear

  had been rent in half.

  Why leave a dead thing dangling

  by a string? I snapped it off.

  A pearly unguent oozed

  into my palm, as if

  I were the one bruised.

  Well, if it thought so, sure.

  I rubbed it in my skin.

  So rough: I hadn’t taken

  care in so long…And why

  hadn’t I cried for help?

  In the morning, a fresh ally

  by instinct with itself,

  the aloe had sealed up

  its broken fingertip—

  a low, but unbowed beauty

  in its handicap.

  My hand, not soft, was softer.

  Well then, healing aloe?

  Something to allow?

  MR. BOYFRIEND

  New lover, known and unknown,

  you’ve risen before dawn

  and, delicious in suit and tie,

  you lean down to the bed

  to kiss my rumpled head

  the tenderest goodbye.

  A military bearing

  adheres to what you’re wearing.

  Oh, how many years

  did I wait to know a man

  who knows he is a man

  and not a boy?—who steers

  himself through the long day

  and rides it, come what may,

  in a waft of aftershave

  and the bracing, scratchy starch

  of his dress shirt? As you march

  off to the office, brave

  and clear-eyed in your tortoise-

  shell glasses, looking gorgeous,

  I feel both safe and weak

  slipping back to your kiss

  in my sleep, and the light graze

  of your cuff link on my cheek.

  DRAGNET

  The story you are about to read is true.

  The names have been changed to protect the internet.

  I’m thinking back to that old show, Dragnet,

  starring Jack Webb, before the World Wide Web

  was possible. I’m thinking about the “data dragnet”

  the talking heads have been talking about

  on TV today. There was congressional oversight.

  There was bipartisan agreement

  and I have an alibi. I was at home

  when it happened. When I turned on my laptop,

  when I answered my phone. OK, I admit it,

  I wasn’t at home, not right then, not that minute,

  but there’s bicameral oversight

  over my sidewalk, and both of their videos

  confirm I was only taking out the trash,

  even if nothing now is the trash,

  it’s all permanent, but here’s the good news,

  we’re training young people, but never enough,

  in computer science to sift through the stuff

  we thought we deleted, and meanwhile we’re all

  going to live longer and longer, thanks

  to advances in medicine, and the universe

  will go on expanding and we’ll be so advanced

  in years that all that we say will be gibberish.

  I just thought of something unnerving, though.

  Your robot will know you—a robot who sounds

  just like Jack Webb. What a terrible actor.

  I don’t mean robot, I mean avatar,

  your cyborg twin, your remotely piloted

  vehicle, your 3-D sort-of friend

  who will never be bored by who you are

  or by what you don’t understand.

  TODAY’S SPECIALS

  Why did I come tonight?

  Too late: I’ve handed my keys

  to some boy valet, polite

  to the point of insolence.

  He’s so young, I’m so old—

  really, why take offense

  or even take the time,

  the precious time, to reflect

  that I was once like him,

  appalled at the parade

  of the hair-sprayed and the bald?

  I tip him, scan the crowd,

  and advance toward the cliques

  of nerds, cheerleaders, potheads,

  jocks, and Jesus freaks

  I’d felt awkward with, and forty

  years on, at last are peers:

  yes, this is my party.

  It’s mid-June, and bright tents

  are erected to shield our kind

  against the elements,

  which hardly could be milder.

  A faint breeze stirs the scents

  of sunscreen, crab cakes, beer,

  cut grass, and gasoline.

  I think I’ll get a drink.

  I begin to cross the lawn

  (ducking that guy I dated

  once or twice, and did he

  see me? Do I seem…dated?)

  and spot, beside the wine bar,

  a whiteboard with Today’s

  Specials in black marker.

  Why do I trust my eyes?

  I can’t read at this distance.

  I’m nearer now—and surprise,

  here’s what it really says:

  In Memoriam. What

  genius arranged for this?

  How thoughtful and horrible.

  Different hands have come

  as they once did at school

  to diagram the sentence

  of those who lef
t us first.

  More like taking attendance:

  names, dates, an excuse

  for absence when it’s known—

  cancer, accident. Who’s

  that, Bob Rogers? Bob.

  My funny, uncle-faced pal,

  pride of the Drama Club,

  who tended to land the role

  of banker or judge because

  he had a middle-aged middle?

  Dead at thirty-seven.

  He probably looked the same

  as he had at seventeen,

  while most of us lived to stare

  for decades at the stage

  makeup in the mirror

  that gave back our true age.

  Bob Rogers. I played your kid.

  Our names met on a page

  in playbills kept awhile,

  tossed away—just as I turn

  now from the other special

  names for today, and scout

  for anyone to talk with

  to drive the wisdom out.

  A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

  Tell me it is not a work of art,

  the one where the little boy in the backseat of his father’s car

  looks up at a rocket being fired from the desert out into space,

  all combustion and speed

  while he remains only a little boy, and he says simply, softly,

  “Whoa,”

  a drawn-out “whoa,” as you might say to a horse.

  Meanwhile, the rocket keeps going up,

  and the astronaut, viewed at a thrilling, almost vertical angle

  as he climbs the sky with his astronaut buddy,

  looks down at the ever-tinier car traversing the empty landscape,

  the really cool car the astronaut envies

  from the vehicle he is now propelled in

  but cannot steer, any more than the boy can—

  no, neither of them gets to drive—

  and looking down at the car, the astronaut says simply, softly,

  “Whoa.”

  These are the two words written by the ad man—