Poems From: Way Of Whiteness
TAKING A LANGUAGE
I hear them, my husband and son, practicing
sounds in French I have almost forgotten.
La famille. Leurs mots. Deux, trois.
I don’t join them. I have enough to do.
Every day the same steps to another day,
blinds pulled until the metal slats slide
to a tidy line above the window.
One bed made at a time, one side at a time,
my arms not long enough
to cross the space between us.
I have grown impatient with slow
progressions—with touch that may not lead
to love, the time it takes
to wait for the ends of sentences—and yet
in high school we couldn’t even complete
a simple Latin sentence as
we followed our teacher through each
person of a verb, singular, amo, amas, amat,
plural, amamus, amatis, amant, present, past,
future perfect conditional. We didn’t know
where we were going. I had no idea
in that class I would meet the boy whose
tongue was the first to reach to mine.
It took our entire sophomore year to translate
Caesar’s accounts of the individual
customs of the tribes, the Helvetii, Belgae.
All Gaul was divided into single parts.
Evenings facing a new grammar,
nights in the back seat of a Chevy,
years before we were proficient
in the language of the country of love,
before we had entered
a French cathedral, to find the pattern
of small stones lined
to lead the devout to a state of prayer. Placing
the left foot one stone in front of the right,
heel and sole on stone,
one does not notice the rose window above
until, with an accidental glance,
light explodes, wheeling
spheres within spheres,
mother, child, man, innumerable
facets of glass. I had forgotten.
And below, a smaller window
where shoemakers bend to their task,
piercing the tiny holes lined in a row
to draw the laces through,
one, two at a time.
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(First appeared in Poetry)
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COLOR ANALYSIS
A fiftieth birthday gift.
Swatches of fabric held to my face.
I am a “Summer,” am told
I mustn’t wear winter, clear, sharp
colors of gems: rubies, sapphires, emeralds,
onyx. No mining black rock
for me. No snow, no black
branches of a naked tree.
Nothing too strong, definite,
I am semi-precious: amethyst, aquamarine, colors
of sky. I am probably an air sign.
Think of breezes, says my color counselor.
Then what are these wiry black
hairs that sprout in my blond eyebrows?
The dots of scarlet on my legs?
Pure white patches on my arms,
rents in the fabric of so many summer tans.
Flecks and cracks of shadow and blood
weaving now, my body.
I am told to have nothing to do
with the press of bright yellow, liquid greens
that rush the landscape in April and May.
No ooze of apricot.
Autumn would overwhelm me.
Crush of dark berry fruit.
Brown. I must not even think
of earth. Have nothing to do with rust.
To what season, then, am I linked,
apparently forever, floating
rootless on pale air? Am I simply
to sway here on wisps of gray,
pale cloud, a little gasp of pink,
fading lavender as the sun’s face sinks?
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(First appeared in Poetry)
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PERENNIAL
We are alone in your car driving across
northern California hills greener than
any I have seen outside of England, yet
we aren’t even talking about the green
swimming beyond the windshield, we are
talking of Italy, our love affair
with the Tuscan hills, brown and gold
hills with their spiralling vines,
grapes, and swallows over the olives
shading the red dirt as we sweep
across these green spring hills where
you live with your wife and babies,
you I would have loved if life
had just twisted in another direction,
the way the alley off the main piazza
in Pisa, where you lived the first
year you were married, turned a certain
way, so you learned to find the market
with the open stalls where they sold
the lemon yellow peppers you loved,
the sweet lemon peppers you ate
that year you lived in Pisa. How
you relished them plain, sliced,
whole, steamed, raw, in salads.
The car twists and we crest over
another hill different from the one
back a way and yet the same green.
I loved you once. But never did.
All those years commuting together
and we never touched. Until the night
before I was to move away, with friends
around us in the restaurant, you pressed
your mouth on mine so the shape of
my mouth after that was never the same.
And I love my long-time husband,
and your wife now is, I know, much
better for you than I could have been,
than you would have been for me.
These hills, so many, almost alike,
green after green. Maybe one summer
we’ll meet in Italy, maybe we’ll rent
a farmhouse with room for our children.
When I go home to my husband, how
can I fit these greens into our car?
I left a winter overcast sky, gray mud.
But now, after flying back, and
driving home, everything here too
as far as I can see has turned green—
lime, moth, juniper, cypress, mesquite
foaming lace over the grasses so soft,
moist, I want to lie down in the field.
And as we talk of the mail that came
while I’ve been gone, the native sweet
acacia, huisachillo, blooms a sudden
start by the road, gold as the little
Tuscan peppers, sweet, crunch, home.
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(First appeared in The American Scholar)