Open Shutters Read online

  Take the disappearing ship

  As death’s vehicle!

  Distant, you remain in view,

  Still running on drops of ink.

  Glasses

  Tattooed, goateed, burly, a huge

  guy you’d expect to find in a hardhat,

  drilling a hole in the road,

  he pulls out from his T-shirt pocket

  a crumpled, quietly crafted page

  in praise of a fellow poet.

  Then steps up to the podium, slips

  his glasses on, and everything blurs.

  Sorry, he laughs, they’re hers—

  these glasses are my wife’s. I’ve met

  his wife. She’s blond, fine-boned, serene,

  with a face you’d swear was painted

  five hundred years ago by Van Eyck.

  Don’t worry, he’s chuckling into the mike,

  I’ve found my own. But his tone

  is a little disappointed.

  Hare

  At odd times, harum-scarum,

  after we haven’t seen him

  for a week or so, he hops

  from the bushes at stage right

  onto our green proscenium.

  Why do I say it’s ours?

  At best, I’m just a warden,

  standing with hands in suds

  at the kitchen window when

  he breaks out of his warren.

  Jittery, hunted vagrant,

  he leaps as fast as Aesop

  claimed his kind could leap,

  then stops still in the grass

  merely because it’s fragrant—

  a wholly interested,

  systematic sensualist,

  a silent, smooth lawn mower

  that hardly can go slower.

  Sometimes he gets ahead

  (or tries to) with the jet set,

  in a long line at the airport

  pulling his legs behind him

  like luggage, bit by bit—

  the nametag of his scut

  attached at the last minute.

  Meanwhile, I stay put

  inside the house we bought

  a year ago, a new

  woman at the window—

  but of that he has no clue,

  now pawn, now skipping knight

  on sun-squares on the lawn,

  while dreaming the old dream

  a hare has, of his harem.

  Is he in fact the same

  animal all the time?

  In my way promiscuous

  as he, how could I swear

  he’s not some other hare

  that pauses blank-eyed, poses

  as if for praise, and then,

  rather than jump over,

  inserts himself within

  a low bush, like a lover?

  Both of us bad at faces,

  mere samples of our species,

  will either of us be missed?

  The dishes in my hands

  are shards for the archeologist.

  In the Guesthouse

  1. LONG EXPOSURE, 1892

  All of them dead by now, and posed

  so stiffly, in their sepia Sunday

  best, they seem half-dead already.

  Father and Eldest Son, each dressed

  in high-cut jacket and floppy tie,

  never get to sit in the sitting room.

  They stand to face a firing squad

  behind Mother and the little girls—

  themselves bolt upright on the sofa,

  hands at their sides, their center-parted

  hair pulled back, two rows of rickrack

  flanking the twenty buttons down

  the plumb line of their bodices.

  And here, discovered alone downstage

  and slightly to the left, the boy—

  such a beautiful boy. Although

  they’ve tried to make him a little man,

  upholstering him in herringbone,

  you can see him itching to run out

  with his hoop and stick, happy because

  even at this moment, when

  nobody could be happy, he knows—

  in the tilt of his blond head, the frank

  time-burning gaze beneath his cowlick—

  that he is the most loved.

  2. FLAPPERS, 1925

  I’m in the guesthouse some days before

  focusing on another portrait:

  professional, black-and-white, composed

  to lend a spacious dignity

  to the one life lived behind each face.

  Again, the date’s approximate;

  I’m guessing from the arty look,

  the Flapperish, drop-waisted frock

  and ropes of wooden beads on the wife

  of—yes, it has to be. No more

  the poster boy for posterity,

  he’s a commanding forty. The cowlick’s

  still there (although now he slicks

  it down with something), and he still

  cocks his head to one side, a hint

  of flirtation, exasperation—what?—

  in the eyes he trains at the camera

  as if he’d give me what I want

  if only he could emerge now from

  the frame. We stare in mutual

  boldness while his wife’s long profile

  is tendered to the child between them.

  One girl: a modern family.

  I speculate a little son

  was lost to the great flu; even so,

  this fair-haired Zelda in a bob,

  ten years old, would come to seem

  enough, the image of her father.

  The smile high-cheeked and confident,

  the shining eyes, the upturned chin—

  people matter more now; they’ll die

  less often, now that the Great War’s over;

  everyone’s allowed to sit down.

  3. WHEELCHAIR, 2000

  The jumbles of grinning faces jammed

  together at birthdays and Christmases

  in color photos around the house

  don’t interest me.

  They’re merely today, or close enough;

  anybody can record it

  and does; if everything’s recorded

  nothing is.

  But puttering about, the guest

  of a ghost I now am half in love with,

  I’m drawn one day to pluck one image

  off the piano.

  A wedding. Or some minutes after,

  outside a church I’ve seen in town.

  The bride, who has exercised her right

  to veil, white gown,

  and any decorum life affords

  these days, is surrounded by the girls—

  some floral aunts, a gawky niece

  in her first pearls—

  and all the men in blazers, khakis …

  running shoes? Boys will be boys.

  Squirming, they squint into the sun:

  some amateur

  shutterbug has made sure they can’t

  see us, or we see them, and yet

  I understand now who is shaded

  there in the wheelchair.

  Dwindled, elderly, it’s Zelda—

  her lumpy little body slumped

  like a doll’s in a high chair, shoes just

  grazing the footrest.

  It must be she. However many

  lives her hair went through—Forties

  complications held with tortoise-

  shell combs; beehives;

  softer bouffants like Jackie’s; fried

  and sprayed gray-pincurl granny perms—

  in all the years (say, seventy-five?)

  since I last saw her,

  she’s come back to that sleek, side-parted

  bob, which (though it’s white) encloses

  the girl who’s smiling, pert, high-cheeked,

  despite the pull

  of gr
avity: just like her father.

  Or as he was. When did he die,

  and how? What was his name? What’s yours?

  I could find out,

  surely, when I leave here; the owner

  might well be her granddaughter.

  I could scout, too, for snapshots even

  more recent—some

  get-together with no wheelchair—

  to prove what I’m sensing: Zelda’s gone.

  Why would they think to frame this scene,

  unless it’s the last?

  But why should we care so for people

  not us or ours—recognized by sight

  alone—whose voices never spoke

  with wit or comfort

  to us, and whose very thoughts,

  imagined, every year grow quainter?

  Yet they must have felt this tug as well,

  repeatedly

  peering at someone they were bound

  to come back to, as in a mirror.

  Who says they’re more anonymous

  than I am,

  packing up after my two weeks

  in the guesthouse? I make one last study

  of Zelda’s father, lingering with

  the boy, the man,

  sealing his developing

  face in myself for safekeeping.

  Too soon to leave. But then, nobody

  ever stays here long.

  Night Thoughts

  1.

  The hunchback is curled

  all night in my shut closet.

  I am six years old.

  2.

  Dark in the cabin.

  No lamp but the blue moon of

  the computer screen.

  3.

  Pebbles on the beach:

  the waves, without swallowing,

  deliver a speech.

  4.

  I’d need a furnace

  (if I were a glassblower)

  to make icicles.

  5.

  She’s alone in bed.

  In an earlier time zone

  he dines a lover.

  6.

  A page of haiku:

  among the caught fireflies, one

  lights the whole bottle.

  Snowed-on Snowman

  “Want to make a snowman?”

  —So goes her wide-eyed question

  on a Sunday in January.

  I’ve been sweeping the kitchen floor

  and prop the broom, like a bookmark,

  against the vertical line

  that joins one wall to another.

  I check my watch: 3:30.

  The last light of the weekend,

  her last such invitation,

  maybe: she’s thirteen.

  “I’m not sure it’s packable.

  It may not be good snow,

  or enough snow for a snowman.”

  —So go my instinctive,

  unfun, nay-saying quibbles:

  I’ve been an adult a long time.

  “Could we make a snowchild then?”

  Straight-faced, without guile,

  she doesn’t seem to know

  she’s just invented a word—

  or that its snow-fresh sound

  compels the thing’s creation.

  Seize the day in a snowball

  and roll it across the yard;

  leave a paper-thin

  membrane between winter

  and a spring that’s coming up

  in clumps of grass and soil;

  roll the ball rounder, bigger,

  make a second, a third,

  then pile them, roughly centered,

  one on top of the other,

  like marshmallows on a stick.

  And human, for all that:

  remarkable how little

  skill it takes to make us

  believe in, fall in love with,

  this lopsided Galatea

  (and why do we say it’s male?

  Why do we feel that poking

  a tarnished candle-snuffer

  for a pipe in his mouthless head

  will finally clinch the matter?).

  Dressed, at last, in every

  cliché we can think of—scarf

  wrapped against the cold

  of himself, a wide-brimmed hat

  shielding his unshelled

  almond eyes and carrot

  nose from a burning snowlight

  ruddied by low sun—

  he’s readier than she

  (reverting, herself, to pure

  put-upon type, the impatient

  teenager) to pose

  for a snapshot side by side—

  each soon to disappear,

  him shrinking as she grows.

  But not before Monday morning.

  Slipping out to hunt

  the rolled-up paper, dreading

  along with it the widespread

  old news of Sunday’s snow

  gone smudged, a little yellow,

  I find instead a fine

  life-dust on everything:

  snow on the snowman’s hat

  (whose brim serves to define

  the line between what’s molded

  by us, and snow like that);

  snow too light to burden

  his rounded back or shoulders,

  or mine, the shoveler’s;

  snow like breakfast crumbs

  I nearly brush from his scarf

  before I catch myself.

  Inside, I stamp my boots

  and call upstairs. You’re late,

  I usually say; you must

  eat your toast, it’s getting cold;

  how can you take an hour

  to decide which jeans to wear?

  In a corner, the forgotten

  broom still marks the place

  of yesterday in the room.

  “Come down,” I call up again.

  “Come see the snowed-on snowman.”

  Light-Footed

  AN INTERLUDE

  Deliveries Only

  for Sarah Marjorie Lyon, born in a service elevator

  Your whole life long, you’ll dine

  out on the same questions:

  In your building? On what floor?

  Was it going up or down?

  They’ll need the precise location—

  Seventy-ninth and Lex?—

  as if learning it could shield them

  from the consequences of sex.

  Wasn’t your mother a doctor?

  Didn’t she talk him through

  how to do it? And then you’ll tell them

  how your father delivered you,

  that only after your birth

  did he think to reach in her bag

  and dial 911.

  He held you up like a phone

  and was taught how to cut the cord.

  What about proper hygiene?

  When did the ambulance come?

  Waiting, you were the siren,

  squalling in a rage

  behind the old-fashioned mesh

  of the elevator door:

  a Lyon cub in her cage.

  Didn’t your parents worry?

  Hadn’t they done Lamaze?

  But you’ll only shrug at your story:

  That was the way it was.

  School Pictures

  Nobody wants them, not even Mom. And Dad

  always pretends they fell out of his wallet.

  Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.

  Maybe it’s trick photography, like an ad.

  We combed our hair. When did somebody maul it?

  Nobody wants them, not even Mom and Dad.

  No self-respecting kid would wear that plaid.

  She looks so Eighties in that whatchamacallit.

  Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.

  Say cheese at 9 a.m.? Jeez, we were mad.

  But we meant to please the public, not appall it.

&nbs
p; Nobody wants them. Not even Mom and Dad,

  homely as they are, have ever had

  a girl you might mistake for Tobias Smollett.

  Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.

  We could try to call it art, the latest fad,

  but could we find a gallery to install it?

  Nobody wants them, not even Mom and Dad.

  Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.

  A Morris Dance

  Across the Common, on a lovely May

  day in New England, I see and hear

  the Middle Ages drawing near,

  bells tinkling, pennants bright and gay—

  a parade of Morris dancers.

  One plucks a lute. One twirls a cape.

  Up close, a lifted pinafore

  exposes cellulite, and more.

  O why aren’t they in better shape,

  the middle-aged Morris dancers?

  Already it’s not hard to guess

  their treasurer—her; their president—him;

  the Wednesday night meetings at the gym.

  They ought to practice more, or less,

  the middle-aged Morris dancers.

  Short-winded troubadours and pages,

  milkmaids with osteoporosis—

  what really makes me so morose is

  how they can’t admit their ages,

  the middle-aged Morris dancers.

  Watching them gamboling and tripping

  on Maypole ribbons like leashed dogs,

  then landing, thunderously, on clogs,

  I have to say I feel like skipping

  the middle-aged Morris dancers.