Poems from Five Terraces

Moth

The girl I once was
stared through grief and fever
at a devil clad in orange, some earth-arranger.
He waited beneath the pines
as they tucked my newborn’s ashes
beside my father’s grave, grim joke
or grace: Watch over her, Papa.
Papa you died in time to spare you shame.

Three weeks later milk came in,
all down the front of my new white dress.
I gave myself to scalding waters,
pounded my head on the walls of showers.
Oh I was death’s girl,
sure to poison anything I loved,
any sweet cock or baby that came near me.

-------------------- ---*

When my other children came,
a half-light dogged them. They learned to want her too,
the dead sister who made me a mother,
who made me stop, sometimes,
and go quiet in hallways, as if my arms
were full of blankets for someone who was not them,
who slept down a long corridor
in a room where curtains billowed
in watery sunlight.
Or when I
read to them at night and their sweet
bodies and hair grew sticky with summer as they
sprawled all over me, there was a moth
at the window, a soft moon-splotched moth battering at the window,
and that moth could never get in
no matter how they opened
and opened—

Marriage

I dream my husband naked in the mountains
in summer his unabashed groin
lovely to my gaze a split pomegranate.

Crimson with seeds he sprawls on a boulder
his groin a darkness a kiss
I know in my sleep pomegranate is a female metaphor

but I mean he teaches me mystery.

I don’t know anything about marriage, our son says.
Twenty years in the same bed sleeping waking
your thoughts all tangled up in each other…

Night opens her dress
the great winds of the world
arrange themselves for storm outside our window.

I pull the quilts around us closer.

That such a one as he should ever die—

He dreams I write of the bareness of winter.

Bacalao

How the flamenco singer's voice cracked
that long-ago night, when I was first a wife,
in the limestone caverns of Granada--
cracked, and broke into the no-man's-land,
the screech and quaver of the duende,
the music that happens after the voice is shattered--
He, the ancient widower of the Gypsy Queen,
held his bacalao to my lips
and insisted “taste, taste,” the fish
already spit-moistened, hard as a board,
rank with salt: what was he to me--
the evening’s entertainment drunkard consort
to a royalty I’ll never see or be?
In those white caverns my husband
lifted a beer to the tour guide
as the dancers stamped their feet and twirled,
spines like flames, scarlet ruffles
flared around them, and till long past midnight,
the widower of the Gypsy Queen
smacked his guitar and yowled.
The tour guide, the waiters,
kept muttering to us, El es muy especial,
el es un maestro del flamenco--
and he was, this man with the wail
and cracked black shoes
who, summoned, lashed, tried to outrace dawn.
My whole being seeks that magic.