The Carrying Read online

Page 4


  collect them, pin their glossy backs

  to the board like the rows of stolen

  beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,

  where the waves broke over us

  and I still loved the country, wanted

  to suck the bones of the buried.

  Now, I’m outside a normal house

  while friends cook and please

  and pour secrets into each other.

  A crow pierces the sky, ominous,

  clanging like an alarm, but there

  is no ocean here, just tap water

  rising in the sink, a sadness clean

  of history only because it’s new,

  a few weeks old, our national wound.

  I don’t know how to hold this truth,

  so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down

  in case, later, no one believes me.

  FULL GALLOP

  The night after, I dream I chop

  all the penises off, the ones that

  keep coming through the walls.

  Tied in sweat-wet sheets, I wake

  aching, how I’ve longed for touch

  for so much of my bodied time.

  In the shower later, I notice new

  layers I’ve grown, softness love tosses

  you after years of streetlights alone.

  I will never harm you, your brilliant

  skin I rub against in the night,

  still, part of me is haunted—

  a shadow baying inside me

  who wants to snap her hind leg

  back, buck the rider, follow

  that fugitive call into oblivion.

  DREAM OF THE MEN

  At the beach that was so gray it seemed stone—

  gray water, gray sky, gray blanket, and the wind

  some sort of gray perpetual motion machine—

  we gathered like a blustery coven on the blanket

  from Mexico woven with white and gray threads

  into a pattern of owls and great seabirds. Then,

  they came: the men. Blankets full of them, talking,

  talking, talking, talking, and our mouths were sewn

  shut with patient smiles while they talked about

  the country where they were from; their hands

  like slick seaweed were everywhere, unwelcome,

  multicellular, touching us.

  A NEW NATIONAL ANTHEM

  The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National

  Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good

  song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’

  red glare” and then there are the bombs.

  (Always, always there is war and bombs.)

  Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw

  even the tenacious high school band off key.

  But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call

  to the field, something to get through before

  the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas

  we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge

  could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps

  the truth is every song of this country

  has an unsung third stanza, something brutal

  snaking underneath us as we blindly sing

  the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands

  hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do

  like the flag, how it undulates in the wind

  like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,

  brought to its knees, clung to by someone who

  has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,

  when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly

  you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can

  love it again, until the song in your mouth feels

  like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung

  by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,

  the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left

  unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,

  that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,

  that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving

  into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit

  in an endless cave, the song that says my bones

  are your bones, and your bones are my bones,

  and isn’t that enough?

  CARGO

  I wish I could write to you from underwater,

  the warm bath covering my ears—

  one of which has three marks in the exact

  shape of a triangle, my own atmosphere’s asterism.

  Last night, the fire engine sirens were so loud

  they drowned out even the constant bluster

  of the inbound freight trains. Did I tell you,

  the R. J. Corman Railroad runs 500 feet from us?

  Before everything shifted and I aged into this body,

  my grandparents lived above San Timoteo Canyon

  where the Southern Pacific Railroad roared each scorching

  California summer day. I’d watch for the trains,

  howling as they came.

  Manuel is in Chicago today, and we’ve both admitted

  that we’re traveling with our passports now.

  Reports of ICE raids and both of our bloods

  are requiring new medication.

  I wish we could go back to the windy dock,

  drinking pink wine and talking smack.

  Now, it’s gray and pitchfork.

  The supermarket here is full of grass seed like spring

  might actually come, but I don’t know. And you?

  I heard from a friend that you’re still working on saving

  words. All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe

  being kinder to others, to myself.

  Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold

  as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before

  I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

  Am I braver than those birds?

  Do you ever wonder what the trains carry? Aluminum ingots,

  plastic, brick, corn syrup, limestone, fury, alcohol, joy.

  All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another

  is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting

  at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

  THE CONTRACT SAYS: WE’D LIKE THE CONVERSATION TO BE BILINGUAL

  When you come, bring your brownness

  so we can be sure to please

  the funders. Will you check this

  box; we’re applying for a grant.

  Do you have any poems that speak

  to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.

  Would you like to come to dinner

  with the patrons and sip Patrón?

  Will you tell us the stories that make

  us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

  Don’t read us the one where you

  are just like us. Born to a green house,

  garden, don’t tell us how you picked

  tomatoes and ate them in the dirt

  watching vultures pick apart another

  bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one

  about your father stealing hubcaps

  after a colleague said that’s what his

  kind did. Tell us how he came

  to the meeting wearing a poncho

  and tried to sell the man his hubcaps

  back. Don’t mention your father

  was a teacher, spoke English, loved

  making beer, loved baseball, tell us

  again about the poncho, the hubcaps,

  how he stole them, how he did the thing

  he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

  IT’S HARDER

  Not to unravel the intentions of the other—

  the slight gestur
e over the coffee table, a raised

  eyebrow at the passing minuscule skirt, a wick

  snuffed out at the evening’s end, a sympathetic

  nod, a black garbage can rolled out so slowly

  he hovers there, outside, alone, a little longer,

  the child’s thieving fingers, the face that’s serene

  as cornfields, the mouth screwed into a plum,

  the way I can’t remember which blue lake

  has the whole train underneath its surface,

  so now, every blue lake has a whole train

  underneath its surface.

  3

  AGAINST BELONGING

  It’s been six years since we moved here, green

  of the tall grasses outstretched like fingers waving.

  I remember the first drive in; the American beech,

  sassafras, chestnut oak, yellow birch were just

  plain trees back then. I didn’t know we’d stay long.

  I missed the Sonoma coast line, the winding

  roads that opened onto places called Goat Rock,

  Furlong Gulch, Salmon Creek. Once, when I was

  young, we camped out at Russian Gulch and learned

  the names of all the grasses, the tide pool animals,

  the creatures of the redwoods, properly identifying

  seemed more important than science, more like

  creation. With each new name, the world expanded.

  I give names to everything now because it makes

  me feel useful. Currently, three snakes surround our

  house. One in front, one near the fire pit, and one

  near the raised beds of beets and carrots. Harmless

  Eastern garter snakes, small, but ever expanding.

  I check on them each day, watch their round eyes

  blink in the sun that fuels them. I’ve named them

  so no one is tempted to kill them (a way of offering

  reprieve, tenderness). But sometimes I feel them

  moving around inside me, the three snakes hissing—

  what cannot be tamed, what shakes off citizenship,

  what draws her own signature with her body

  in whatever dirt she wants.

  INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP

  More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

  of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

  almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

  their cotton candy–colored blossoms to the slate

  sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

  that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

  and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

  the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

  the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

  growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

  to the strange idea of continuous living despite

  the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

  I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

  unfurling like a fist, I’ll take it all.

  WOULD YOU RATHER

  Remember that car ride to Sea-Tac, how your sister’s kids

  played a frenzied game of Would You Rather, where each choice

  ticktocked between superpowers or towering piles of a food

  too often denied, Would You Rather

  have fiery lasers that shoot out of your eyes,

  or eat sundaes with whip cream for every meal?

  We dealt it out quick,

  without stopping to check ourselves for the truth.

  We played so hard that I got good at the questions, learned

  there had to be an equality

  to each weighted ask. Now I’m an expert at comparing things

  that give the illusion they equal each other.

  You said our Plan B was just to live our lives:

  more time, more sleep, travel—

  and still I’m making a list of all the places

  I found out I wasn’t carrying a child.

  At the outdoor market in San Telmo, Isla Negra’s wide iris of sea,

  the baseball stadium, the supermarket,

  the Muhammad Ali museum, but always

  the last time tops the list, in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge,

  looking over toward Alcatraz, a place they should burn and redeliver

  to the gulls and cormorants, common daisies and seagrass.

  Down below the girder that’s still not screened against jumpers,

  so that it seems almost like a dare, an invitation,

  we watched a seal make a sinuous shimmy in the bay.

  Would you rather? Would I rather?

  The game is endless and without a winner.

  Do you remember how the seal was so far under

  the deafening sound of traffic, the whir of wind mixed

  with car horns and gasoline, such a small

  speck of black movement alone in the churning waves

  between rock and shore?

  Didn’t she seem happy?

  MAYBE I’LL BE ANOTHER KIND OF MOTHER

  Snow today, a layer outlining the maple like a halo,

  or rather, a fungus. So many sharp edges in the month.

  I’m thinking I’ll never sit down at the table

  at the restaurant, you know that one, by the window?

  Women gathered in paisley scarves with rusty iced tea,

  talking about their kids, their little time-suckers,

  how their mouths want so much, a gesture of exhaustion,

  a roll of the eyes, But I wouldn’t have it any other way,

  their bags full of crayons and nut-free snacks, the light

  coming in the window, a small tear of joy melting like ice.

  No, I’ll be elsewhere, having spent all day writing words

  and then at the movies, where my man bought me a drink,

  because our bodies are our own, and what will it be?

  A blockbuster? A man somewhere saving the world, alone,

  with only the thought of his family to get him through.

  The film will be forgettable, a thin star in a blurred sea of stars,

  I’ll come home and rub my whole face against my dog’s

  belly; she’ll be warm and want to sleep some more.

  I’ll stare at the tree and the ice will have melted, so

  it’s only the original tree again, green branches giving way

  to other green branches, everything coming back to life.

  CARRYING

  The sky’s white with November’s teeth,

  and the air is ash and woodsmoke.

  A flush of color from the dying tree,

  a cargo train speeding through, and there,

  that’s me, standing in the wintering

  grass watching the dog suffer the cold

  leaves. I’m not large from this distance,

  just a fence post, a hedge of holly.

  Wider still, beyond the rumble of overpass,

  mares look for what’s left of green

  in the pasture, a few weanlings kick

  out, and theirs is the same sky, white

  like a calm flag of surrender pulled taut.

  A few farms over, there’s our mare,

  her belly barrel-round with foal, or idea

  of foal. It’s Kentucky, late fall, and any

  mare worth her salt is carrying the next

  potential stakes winner. Ours, her coat

  thicker with the season’s muck, leans against

  the black fence and this image is heavy

  within me. How my own body, empty,

  clean of secrets, knows how to carry her,

  knows we were all meant for something.

  WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE

  was how horses simply give birth to other

  horses. Not a baby by any means, not

  a creature of
liminal spaces, but already

  a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,

  scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way

  to another horse and then suddenly there are

  two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.

  You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying

  a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two