How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  no recollection of a house filled with so much light.

  The trees outside, so bright with rain. So much depends.

  Here begins my life as no one’s bad daughter.

  4

  Walking Each Other Home

  By the Roots

  Crouched in the garden

  knees to elbows, fists to the earth,

  wrenching weedy orchard grass

  from the mud-soaked roots

  of my tendered corn,

  ripping the soil that feeds me,

  feeling its outrage, I am

  all of a moment tearing out

  the hair of the world. Memory runs

  through me like hot water: My brother

  is nine. I am seven, loyal as oxygen

  but still near enough his size

  that our fights want to go

  to the death. Our parents

  reflect, too late, on the charms

  of the only child. We two

  are hell-bent, knees burnt raw

  by the grass, our fists to earth,

  my knuckles twined in his hair

  cannot stop pulling: dear God

  the terror in that helpless crave for

  wounding the one you couldn’t live without.

  My First Derby Party

  He says I am old enough now to stop hating horses.

  This Kentucky friend, youngest of eight, who started

  school in shoes that had already been to first grade

  twice. I was luckier, newly shod at each summer’s end.

  For the purchase we always drove to Lexington, past

  all the mansions, fists tucked into my sweaty armpits,

  scowling from the back seat at the training center

  where horses had a swimming pool all their own.

  Important horses, according to my mother. No child

  in our county, white nor brown nor gritty from setting

  tobacco, was important enough for a swimming pool.

  We had the Licking River and snapping turtles.

  How I despised those rich foals tossing their manes,

  running the length of a birthright on green bluegrass.

  Our schoolyard was gravel. We brought it home when

  scrapes with our authorities embedded it in our knees.

  Some girls dreamed of currycombs and power

  clenched between their thighs, had secret names

  for the thoroughbreds they’d have one day. Not me.

  I looked up blueblood, connected blood and grass.

  On school day mornings, on Derby Day at the starting

  gate, we sang one song. Children with tobacco-stained

  hands, Louisville ladies in fancy hats: we all stood

  together to reconcile ourselves to the state of our birth.

  And now the friend who’s traveled these same miles

  with me is having a Derby Party. For our juleps

  I pick mint from my arid garden, where I’ve tried

  for years to cultivate the greenness of Kentucky.

  The sun shines bright. I squint at the sky, consider

  how far I’ve run without bloodline or contract.

  We will sing one song for my Old Kentucky Home,

  revising the words as needed. Weep no more, my lady.

  We gather to watch the run for the roses on television

  at five thirty sharp, tape-delayed to erase the time

  we’ve lost. Shoulder to shoulder we watch the shining

  muscle-bound haunches straining under the whip.

  It ends with a great gold cup in the owner’s hands,

  a victor with neck bent low by roses he can’t even eat,

  our glasses raised: freeborn, field-stained, I wonder

  at my old envy for the well-shod mansion slave.

  Snow Day

  The blizzard came and went last night as we slept.

  The woods were first to wake up

  as their own black-and-white photograph.

  Next a rabbit: revealed

  as the history of its many

  indecisions along the lane.

  Black ponies on the hill:

  round-bellied shadows of creatures

  that stood just yesterday

  in their own breakfast.

  The pasture: a toboggan slope.

  Children who wait like fence posts,

  on other days, for the school bus

  now howl their demon love for speed,

  calling me to join them.

  Nothing is what it was.

  The mailbox sports a white toupee,

  compensating for a certain

  internal emptiness.

  The mail won’t come today.

  All professions called on account of weather.

  Every identity canceled. I have no choice

  but to set down these words,

  wrap my long limbs in the cloak

  of a perfect disguise,

  walk down the lane,

  steal into life as a ten-year-old

  leaving footprints: traces of my escape.

  Six Women Swimming Naked in the Ocean

  An even dozen, as it happens,

  changeable as the lunar egg

  and milky like that, breasts

  that have waxed and waned

  answering the tides and tugs that

  rule the world: men and children.

  These bosoms have heaved

  with passion and impatience,

  but here in the midnight ocean

  they just float

  like jellyfish. Lifebuoys. Bottles

  flung out with no message inside.

  We tumble and crash like so much

  sandy laundry, sing out names,

  keep an eye on each other

  by means of our headlamps,

  twelve shiny melons. We

  have been called so many things,

  have come from so many places.

  Earlier in the beach house we were all

  such different people—modest, illustrious,

  or provisional—forgetting we had this

  standard equipment to bind us.

  And once unbound, to carry us away.

  Courtship Dance on Playa Luria

  The tourists’ bikinis touch down like witless butterflies

  trying to suck nectar from the blazing sand

  while the feet of the blanket vendors trudge across it

  on thick black soles they have cannily cut from tires.

  Blankets she has seen. But never this one on his shoulder,

  woven color on color, luminous birds. Nuptial plumage.

  He sees her looking.

  Gazing across the field of torpid sleepers

  into her eyes, he squares himself against blue sea,

  snaps out his arms, opening wide the blanket.

  She glances away.

  Too late, he’s caught her. Now with every turn

  of her head he throws open the feathered wings again,

  dares her to imagine these wild colors in her bed.

  She inhales through pursed lips:

  ¿Cuánto es?

  His mouthed response:

  Treinta y cinco.

  Too much: she tosses her head to the side.

  He counters:

  For you only thirty.

  She looks away. Then back.

  Barely moving her lips, offers fifteen.

  He hangs his head, colorful feathers offended.

  She shrugs, reaches into her bag where all he asks

  and more is hiding, pulls out a book instead,

  inciting his fevered passion:

  For you, twenty-five!

  For you, I am prepared to lose everything.

  She opens the book, shows him

  her doubtful profile, the shape of his loss.

  Suddenly there is motion. Through one narrowed eye

  she watches the sunburned matron, flagging spandex,

&n
bsp; owl-eyed shades, swooping out on scalded feet

  toward her suitor. The gray curls nod: Thirty-five only!

  Clutching her gravid bag, the wallet extracted,

  sincerity takes all. This dance is done.

  I was the one. For whom he would lose everything:

  left to imagine even now those colors on my bed

  as he slips the bills in his pocket and leaves me forever.

  Will

  Who will peel these red hearts,

  Roma, San Marzano,

  that have to be slipped

  by the hundreds from their skins?

  I will, she says. My mother-in-law is

  ninety, her bones the slimmest threads

  to stitch a body heels to skull, a tenuous

  seam of spine. The everyday apron

  that swaddles my curves

  hangs from her neck toward the floor

  like a living-room drape. Here

  in my kitchen, the little red hen: I will.

  The heartless tomato massif

  looms in bowls and colanders.

  As reliable as geology and erosion:

  the will of her hands, the motion

  of mountains, the ocean of marinara

  in our cauldron. She is rock, and I am

  weather, dancing from stove to pantry and

  back, conducting our creation with my wand

  of steel spoon, reading our crystal ball

  of steamed canning jars where our family

  secrets of thyme and salt will meld with

  the elements of one more growing season.

  Time slips away from us, comes back: I see

  her steadfast, and my apology breaks over us

  like an egg. I’ve held her here, she should go

  have a rest. She only shrugs: I’m Italian.

  Everything she is, I’m not. But can see

  what I will spend these hours becoming.

  I dread a summer to come, the curtain

  falling on her stories that held us together:

  mothers and fathers, country people bound

  to me by a thread, no common blood

  but the hours we’ve stood in labor. How

  will I know then what I’m worth?

  And how will I stitch this seam for another

  wife or child of a child while we move

  other mountains, fill kettles in some

  kitchen yet to come alive; how will I stand

  holding my bones in a careful stack, skull over

  spine, knees over ankles, a body well over

  all its own secrets of birth and desire;

  how will I slip an apron onto that

  hipless atelier, take up the knife and give

  myself to the sacraments of a household

  now unknown to me. How do I know

  I will.

  Creation Stories

  The Christmas she was five, I stayed up

  until first light making boots, of all things,

  the very pair the brave girl wore

  in her storybook. She wanted no other thing.

  Leather and needle-punctured

  palms, inventing skills I didn’t have,

  cuffing and embroidering, cursing

  an illustrator whose tools were ink

  and fancy while I had rawhide:

  well, that was the year of the boots

  worn everywhere but bath and bed.

  A story made real. The year she believed

  in Santa Claus, she said, Because

  no regular person could do that.

  Years later, she longed for the jacket

  all the cool girls had. My ways and means

  couldn’t stitch that one together. I hoped

  a luxury denied might be the travail

  a brave girl pressed in her memory book,

  instead of the rest: my long-held breath

  for those years we had to go it alone

  without support, the miles from family,

  the making of her everything in the place

  where life had nailed us down to nothing.

  Now she is a mother herself.

  No regular person. She knows the work

  of a life is the making of things a child will

  not believe we could have made. Because.

  Meadowview Elementary Spelling Bee

  The first graders fall

  in a slow, rolling wave

  as if before a firing squad,

  the first full row swept empty:

  brave-enough soldiers but new

  to the business of books, they are

  cannon fodder for beam and prowl.

  The second graders behind them

  stand frozen before the artillery,

  hopeless when the time comes

  and he tries to slip through the

  gates as Tim. And easier, alas,

  never in this world so hard.

  A sole third grader survives,

  stammering through comrade

  as all of her mates fall away.

  The fourth graders quake,

  their squadron unequipped

  for siege or attrition. They fall

  to stealth, survive by guile

  but are no match for ingenuous.

  In the end it comes down

  to the proletariat facing off

  appropriation, no surprise—

  but I am on tenterhooks for one

  small laborer in this camp, word-smitten

  since the days before her milk teeth:

  She claims her trophy, ecstatic with glossolalia.

  Blow Me—

  away. Like the globe of

  dandelion haze on the stalk I put

  in your hand the first time you stand

  up by yourself in the grass.

  down. Like a hurricane

  shredding the roof I only want

  to keep in one piece over your head-

  strong adolescence.

  over. Likely as not I am

  already stepping aside, blinking

  at your improvised inheritance,

  feat beyond replication.

  out. Like the candle

  that lit your way into this dark house

  ablaze now with your occupancy. Our bond,

  the same as our breathing, out and

  in.

  After

  The morning of the shattered leg

  began as a small adventure with my children:

  our maritime campaign of languid

  tide pools, hardscrabble crabs, slippery rocks,

  translucent fish darting wild from our shade

  as we wreaked our careless catastrophes,

  poking fingers into pink anemones just to see

  them curl up into fists of composed trepidation.

  After the slick sudden shock, dull crack

  of bone collapsing inside its case

  of flesh; after the slow crawl back

  through the first months of my mending

  we curl on the bed, my youngest and I,

  reading of runaway bunnies while she

  remembers it all again and again. Ocean-eyed

  she asks what I will be able to do after this:

  Will we skate on the ice next winter? Will I

  ever again be the mama who held her tight

  on the sled and howled with her when the world

  was a fast blue whistle? Yes?

  I say yes. I pretend my courage has tentacles

  that still reach for light as they did before, before

  careless chance took its poke at me. Say yes, but feel

  curling tight in my chest the anemone of after.

  Walking Each Other Home

  My friend lives on this road

  the same as me, two hollows down,

  two gladed mountainsides,

  briar patches that go without saying,

  fields in pumpkin or hay or fallow.

  Once,
we can never forget, a bear.

  And once for too long a season

  a road-killed deer whose return to dust

  we both watched, the ragged pelt

  dried to leather, the shipwreck of rib cage.

  My friend alone saw the bear, and

  told me of it, the winter of her chemo.

  I was the one to see the deer

  fresh struck, and had to find words,

  though even now I can hardly bear

  to say how I watched hooves beating air,

  reaching for some blind heaven.

  Between us, we know this map by heart.

  I walk from my house to hers

  and then together we speak of things—

  or don’t, we are often quiet—

  all the way back home to mine. Or she

  walks here first, collects me for her return.

  Either way, this is the road where we live.

  Always we walk each other home.

  And always we walk some of it alone.

  5

  Dancing with the Devil

  Thief

  I read Dickens by dim lamplight

  casing the joint for plots. This

  will not be a holdup, no clearing

  out whole cash drawers into my bag—

  just a shoplifter’s itch: I’ll take

  the convict benefactor, the woman

  who knits rebellions, into my pockets.

  Woolf, I read in my room

  behind a locked door where she

  commands me to empty out everything

  like airport security: Nothing!

  Walk naked through the passage,

  but quick as life I swipe her

  badge, make off with her authority.

  Emerson, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, H.D.

  I read with my face

  planted, belly to earth,

  leavings of the infinite

  composting in my rib cage

  sun and rain on my back

  bringing up a pelt of new grass.

  Dancing with the Devil: Advice for the Female Poet

  Remember about being quiet.

  Canny, rowdy, quick, hitting

  any nail in the vicinity of its head:

  these could be the death of you.

  Observing all posted speed limits:

  that could be the death of you.

  When the choice is speak now

  or forever hold your peace,

  remember how “peace” comes around

  in time to feeling like this crocodile