The Brooklyn Rail

Triptych

1.

It is after midnight and I walk to the high school soccer field to find
a dark dark enough to look up at the full moon, risen now.  There is
a man in my mind so far away he is like  another  moon, but left out
of the sky. I hum the song  about two people  yawning and swaying
in the empty subway car. I hum  the  other  song,  the man’s wistful
growl  making an  aesthetic  out of  not doing well. The sky is black
with clarity,  as in a  haiku.  My feet in the summer grass.

 

2.

If  I  live  another   hundred   years,  would  I  see   in   your   children’s
children  the  traces  of  what  is  before  me  now?  The  way  you turn
over each quarter to see the state that is represented there. The way
the air  around  you  smells  of  peppermint  and sweat.  The way you
turn  words   toward   their   droll   meanings,   throwing   the    picnic
blanket at the  trunk  of  the  tree  after  I tell you to throw it into the
trunk of the car. The way weariness glazes your  face  after  you have
spoken too much or others have spoken too  much.  The  way you  lie
down anyplace, on the  airport  floor  or  on  the  park  bench, to  shut
your eyes, tender as a figure secreted in a sonnet. The way  you  sing
with   a   nervous   beauty,  the   way   you   walk. A  hundred  years, a
thousand: the future as suffused with you as the present. 

 

3.

The critic is right: in each of the famous sonnets  there are in fact two
poems.  There  is  the  poem  you  read,  its  characters  and  emotions
clear  as   on   a   stage.   And    then   there   is   the   poem  you  slowly
apprehend, materializing like  a  haze  on  the  page,  like  a phantom,
outraged and keening. The figure on the  stage  keeps  exclaiming  its
love  for   the   beloved,  but  the  phantom  at  the  margin  knows  the
beloved  is   false,   that   the   beloved   is  always   false.  This  is  each
sonnet’s philosophy of love. And this, too, is  love  as  I  know  it.

Nets

1.

They are my home. After I have been with  them,  days  later,  when
I am back where I have to be, things return  to  me,  like  the  things
you unexpectedly find in  coat pockets.   The times  of  day  the  dog
gets her Pimobendan, Enalapril, and Lasix. The pulsing green light
of his hearing aid, charging on the kitchen counter.  The  afternoon
shadow in their room when she  sits  in  the  corner,  fingers  moving
from bead to bead in prayer.  Their voices,  hundreds of  miles away
from here, listened for, heard low. When  the  fisherman  cannot  go
out to sea, he mends his nets.

 

2.

He does poorly on the memory test.  The  doctor  wonders whether
he might want to try an antidepressant.  Or  maybe  it is  just  eight
decades of silt  in the  mind,  wearing  the mind  down to  mumbled
asides about the video clips  he  watches  online, the  things  on the
news, the gossip he hears from people in the old country.  There is
toast and coffee.  There is basketball, baseball, and boxing. But he
will not walk the dog.  He will not go to  church.  He  chooses  what
he   wants,   quietly  but   adamantly.   The  roses  in  the  side  yard
blossom.  The lemon  tree is full.  Bees  teem  in  the lavender.  The
potato vines sprawled on the trellis bloom  white as handkerchiefs.
As if anyone or anything has a say in any of this.

 

3.

They cut out the old knee and  replace it  with  a  new  one.  Her  days
become the pills she must take, the name of each drug a bleak string
of  consonants  and  vowels.  The   pain   is   relentless,  throwing   its
shoulder against the  boundary  of  every  medication.   The  seam on
her knee is a length of red wire, cooled by a blue  sleeve  of  icy water.
But the pain is also the pain  of  binding,  of  coalescing.  Weeks later,
when I go back home after  taking  care  of  her,  the  plane goes  over
land scarred with rifts and  fault-lines. Proud flesh—the  name given
to what has been torn, healed, hardened.

 

4.

The family that used to own the house came, pointed out the  things
that had changed, and told us about the  decades  they  had  lived  in
it.  We have been in the  house  for  forty  years  but  even that didn’t
take away  the  persistent  freshness  of  what  they  still  recognized.
This is the room where.  This is the part of  the  yard  when.  This  is
the window that.  And so, when I  am  old  and  dream  of  our  house
shrunken to a shadow box that I fill  with  a  trembling  hand, this  is
where I will place the minute  black  piano,  this  is  where  I  will  put
the   tiny   sewing   machine,   this   is  where  I  will  put  the  bowl  of
oranges, this is where I will hang our  coats,  and this  is  where I will
return the parents sleeping like gentle monuments on their bed.