Open Shutters Read online

  Yet bunions and receding gums

  have humbled me; I know my station

  as a member of their generation.

  Maybe they’d let me play the drums,

  the middle-aged Morris dancers.

  Office Hours

  Unlock the door, drop my backpack,

  turn the computer on, and the kettle;

  waiting for both to warm up, settle

  behind the unfilable disaster

  of my cabinet, and ignore that stack

  on the floor since last semester.

  What a strange job I have—supplying

  people with meter and metaphors!

  I could be trying to write poems.

  Instead, I’ve tried improving yours—

  the ones about your grandmothers dying,

  your cats, your broken homes,

  your clueless junior years in Europe;

  vainly I’ve tried to quash the onset

  of another sonnet on a sunset.

  Commencement Day should make me cheer up;

  and although today I feel elated

  a pack of you graduated

  (the few who slaved to get a summa,

  the hundreds who will die not knowing

  the proper placement of the comma),

  I must admit that, watching caps

  and gowns go by, I had a lapse

  in judgment: I was growing

  sorry to lose—well, two of you.

  Funny, clever, and modest too,

  fresh from an internship at Glamour,

  lovely Amanda would always bring—

  throughout the autumn, winter, spring—

  poems about sex last summer.

  Diane was writing a Book of Hours.

  Terse through her Terce, mutely applauding

  her Lauds, I knew my place, at least.

  Deferring to her higher powers,

  behind the grille of my desk, nodding,

  I listened like a priest.

  Sure, it was selfish that I booked

  you both for Tuesdays at eleven,

  but didn’t you find to your surprise

  (as I did) that fine-tuning even

  projects unlike as yours soon looked

  part of one enterprise,

  and to hell with “independent studies”?

  To view the whole thing as a game

  we’d dare to lose at; to focus on

  one line until it’s more than one—

  yes, you got that, and I came

  to see you as my buddies,

  who reminded me of that grand plan

  I had, I think, when I was young.

  You showed we could write anything

  at all, if we took the time to do it.

  Excuse me, Amanda and Diane,

  if I now start to get to it.

  The Big Sleep

  Two bodies in bed, each with a book.

  “Would you mind if I turn

  the light off?” I ask nicely.

  “Would you mind waiting

  just a few more pages?” he asks nicely;

  “They just found another dead body.”

  (My husband is reading Raymond Chandler.)

  “Sure,” I say. “I understand.”

  So I go back to my book.

  Mine is about the disastrous history

  of navigation, before the solution

  of the problem of longitude.

  More often, he’s reading about science,

  and I’m reading fiction.

  After a while I set down the book,

  and behind my lids I see floaters of planets

  slide and flicker—

  celestial bodies, all unlabeled,

  that could never guide me if I were a sailor.

  My husband’s the one

  with the sense of direction.

  (Yes, I’m aware

  of the gender cliché—

  but what can I do? It’s true.)

  Amazing what he doesn’t notice—

  what I’m wearing, what he’s wearing,

  half the things I notice.

  But he can’t believe I’d never dare

  to experiment with a new route home;

  that before reading this book, this week,

  I’d always confused latitude and longitude.

  For now, though, nobody’s going far.

  “Want me to read this aloud to you?”

  he offers. “It might help you sleep.”

  He reads me a few pages

  of snappy dialogue and guns

  before I stop him.

  “It’s too funny,” I say.

  “It’s too wonderful. It makes me laugh.

  I’ll never get to sleep.”

  He turns off the light—

  which may mean what it does

  in Raymond Chandler movies.

  But soon we slide, lock, side to side,

  my stomach to his back,

  like continents buckling

  over the rumpled waters,

  and in time, although no observer

  is there to report it, we probably look

  like corpses, except that he always snores.

  Sometimes I do. We wake each other up

  a lot, and apologize,

  his body and my body,

  till death do us part.

  Readings

  PART TWO

  Another Session

  1.

  You opened with the rules. Outside this room

  nothing I said inside would be repeated

  unless in your best judgment I posed harm

  to myself or others. It was like being read

  my rights in some film noir—but I was glad

  already I’d at last turned myself in,

  guilty of anxiety and depression.

  And worse. Confess it: worse. Of narcissist

  indifference to how other people felt.

  Railing against myself, making a list

  of everything (I thought), I’d left a fault

  unturned: the one of needing to be praised

  for forcing these indictments from my throat.

  For saying them well. For speaking as I wrote.

  2.

  Not that the goal was chalking up demerits.

  Indeed, I hoped you were basically on my side.

  That’s how I interpreted your nod,

  your pleasant face (at first, a little hard

  to judge behind that beard), your intelligent

  air of listening further than I meant.

  And never falsely, just to raise my spirits,

  but because you couldn’t not be interested.

  “You writers!” When the outburst came, I started

  out of my chair. (I’d had a habit then—

  feet on your coffee table. Never again.)

  “This is real life. You don’t live in a novel.

  People aren’t characters. They’re not a symbol.”

  We stared, stunned at the other, stony-hearted.

  3.

  Once or twice a week, for a year. But ten

  years ago already, so that today

  those intimate, subtle, freeform sessions shrink

  to memorized refrains: “You seem to think

  people can read your mind. You have to say”—

  itself said kindly—or that time you accused me

  of picturing love too much like “Barbie and Ken.

  Why does it have to be all youth and beauty?”

  Therapists have themes, as writers do.

  (A few of mine, then: the repertoire includes

  clocks, hands, untimely death, snow-swollen clouds.)

  Like it or not, I picked up more from you:

  No showing off. In failure, no surprise.

  Gratitude. Trust. Forgiveness. Fantasies.

  4.

  The last time I saw your face—how far back now?—

  was when I took my daughters (I still don’t
>
  know what possessed me) to a “family restaurant.”

  Dinosaur portions, butter enough to drown

  all sorrows in, cakes melded from candy bars …

  Having filed you away for years and years,

  suddenly I was nervous, my life on show.

  I’m still married, thanks. Husband’s out of town.

  But there was no talking to you across the aisle

  where, by some predestined trick of seating,

  your brood in its entirety was eating

  (their dinners, I suppose, were just as vile)

  with backs to me, remaining as they must

  faceless to patients even from the past.

  5.

  Killed instantly. That’s what a mutual friend

  told me when I asked how it had happened.

  Good, I said, I’m glad he didn’t suffer—

  each of us reaching (not far) for a phrase

  from a lifetime stock of journalists’ clichés

  which, we had learned, provide a saving buffer

  within our bifurcated selves: the one

  that’s horrified; the one that must go on.

  Killed in a bicycle race. I’ve scrapped the Wheel

  of Fortune, the Road of Life. No, this is real,

  there’s no script to consult: you’ve lost your body.

  Still having one, I pace, I stretch, I cough,

  I wash my face. But then I’m never ready.

  This is the sonnet I’ve been putting off.

  6.

  And also this one, in which your fancy bike

  hits a concrete barrier and you fly

  over it into fast oncoming traffic—

  the obituary’s formula for one man

  driving a truck, who didn’t even have

  time to believe the corner of his eye,

  until the thing was done, and he must live

  always as if this nightmare were the one

  deed he was born to do and to relive,

  precisely the sort of person you would trust

  in fifty-minute sessions to forgive

  himself, to give himself at least two years

  of post-traumatic whatsit to adjust

  to thoughts of all those people left in tears.

  7.

  Only once did you confide a story

  from your own life. (And only to illustrate

  how long “people” take to overcome a shock.)

  An accident—you broke your neck? Your back?

  Shameful I don’t remember—and for three

  years you’d take a detour to avoid

  the sight of it: that swinging, high red light

  somebody ran, that road that crossed a road.

  A run-through of the sped-up, drawn-out second

  of terror before your second, actual end.

  Swinging past the turnoff to your clinic

  today, I saw I’d never choose to drive

  that street again; would steer around the panic

  rather than fail to find you there alive.

  8.

  Notice—but you can’t—I don’t write your name.

  People aren’t characters. Here’s my concession

  (small) to that view, and your need of privacy

  which, I suspect, went beyond your profession.

  When I knew you—no, you knew me—I’d missed the easy

  truth we had acquaintances in common.

  (A good thing, probably, I’d been too dim

  to ask you; you too classy to let on.)

  Nor did I find the public facts in print

  (age 53, father of three, an active

  member of his church) until you’d long

  been dead. That July I came and went.

  You reached me in a place I don’t belong—

  seventeen months later, Christmas Eve.

  9.

  I’d got there early, casually saved a front

  pew for the whole family with some flung

  mittens and hats. (In gestures we assume

  the shoulder-to-shoulder permanence of home.)

  Shouldn’t we come more often? “The Power of Love”:

  our sermon. A list called “Flowers in Memory of”

  on the program’s final page. I was feeling faint.

  Your name. Your father’s name? Something was wrong.

  I knew it was you. The church was going black.

  Head down: my first anxiety attack

  since the bad old days. Your face at the restaurant.

  My plate heaped up with food I didn’t want.

  Keep the head down. People would be saying

  to themselves (and close enough) that I was praying.

  10.

  Revise our last encounter. I’d rather say

  it was that day a decade ago we made

  a formal farewell: I was going away

  on a long trip. If I needed you, I said,

  when I got back, I’d be sure to give a call.

  You stood up, and I finally saw how tall

  you were; I’d never registered how fit.

  Well, all we’d done for a year was talk and sit.

  Paris, you said. Then, awkwardly, Lucky you.

  Possessor of my secrets, not a friend,

  colder, closer, our link unbreakable.

  Yet we parted better than people often do.

  We looked straight at each other. Was that a smile?

  I thanked you for everything. You shook my hand.

  For Emily at Fifteen

  Sirens living in silence, why would they leave the sea?

  —Emily Leithauser

  Allow me one more try,

  though you and I both know

  you’re too old now to need

  writing about by me—

  you who composed a sonnet

  and enclosed it in a letter,

  casually, with family news,

  while I was away;

  who rummaged in convention’s

  midden for tools and symbols

  and made with them a maiden

  voyage from mere verse

  into the unmapped world

  of poetry. A mermaid

  (like Eve, you wrote—a good

  analogy, and yet

  your creature acts alone)

  chooses to rise from wordless

  unmindful happiness

  up to the babbling surface

  of paradox and pain.

  I whose job it’s been

  to protect you read my lesson:

  you’ll wriggle from protection.

  Half-human and half-fish

  of adolescence, take

  my compliments, meant half

  as from a mother, half

  one writer to another,

  for rhymes in which you bury

  ironies—for instance,

  sirens into silence;

  and since I’ve glimpsed a shadow,

  forgive how glad I felt

  when I set down your sonnet

  to read your letter again

  with only silliness in it,

  the old tenth-grade bravado:

  “Oh well, I bombed the chem test.

  Latin’s a yawn a minute.”

  Midsummer, Georgia Avenue

  Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns

  crowned by the crepe-paper party hats

  of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book;

  an afternoon in late July to read it,

  or read the middle of it, having leisure

  to mark the place and enter it tomorrow

  just as you left it (knock-knock of woodpecker

  keeping yesterday’s time, cicada’s buzz,

  the turning of another page, and somewhere

  a question raised and dropped, the pendulum-

  swing of a wind-chime). Back and forth, the rocker

  and the reading eye, and isn’t half

  your jittery, odd j
oy the looking out

  now and again across the road to where,

  under the lush allées of long-lived trees

  conferring shade and breeze on those who feel

  none of it, a hundred stories stand confined,

  each to their single page of stone? Not far,

  the distance between you and them: a breath,

  a heartbeat dropped, a word in your two-faced

  book that invites you to its party only

  to sadden you when it’s over. And so you stay

  on your teetering perch, you move and go nowhere,

  gazing past the heat-struck street that’s split

  down the middle—not to put too fine

  a point on it—by a double yellow line.

  Snowbirds

  Profiles framed in the window’s

  glare of Florida sun,

  two friends, both snow-capped widows,

  are sharing a cinnamon bun.

  Are they economizing?

  Fearing their waists can afford

  just half of that white icing?

  Neither one says a word

  while they divide with a knife

  the whorling galaxy

  of their treat, like girls at tea,

  starting to play at life.

  Alike impeccable

  in Keds and peds and pleated

  tennis shorts, they’re seated

  at their accustomed table—

  or what feels customary

  now that they needn’t worry

  about filling another’s mouth;

  now that they don’t fly south

  anymore, or north, or provide

  eggs for anybody.

  And yet our cares die hard.

  One woman is still ready,

  unasked, not looking up,

  to pour a long white stream

  from a tiny pitcher of cream

  into the other’s cup.