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

  you are trying to drown.

  Remember bloodletting was medicine

  back in the day. And who did it.

  Remember to leave a window open,

  oven door closed, stones on the ground

  not in your pockets. Maybe just one

  precious in a fist, or against a hot cheek.

  Remember all the openings,

  same ones used for pushing out

  filth, lullabies, the blues, brand-spanking

  life bellowing at both ends? That’s

  what you get. And in defiance

  of all higher rulings ever handed down,

  remember who lives longer.

  Cage of Heaven

  Watching the polar bear in his enclosure,

  I am thinking of Emily Dickinson,

  her fine feet pacing the floors of her house,

  the white dress dragging delicately out

  the kitchen door and over the circular paths

  of the backyard whose perimeters

  she would not leave for decades, to the end.

  Forsaking even the church she loved.

  The dome of trees in her garden would

  have to do. Bobolinks for a church choir.

  We are all beasts born to our burdens.

  Whether by law or the rifle, sharp crack

  of sanity or a spine, enclosure is waiting.

  This white bear with his splayed paws

  parting the water like heavy drapes

  was not plucked from some wild perfect life

  but orphaned, borne by trauma into this

  or nothing. Maybe hell and heaven are both

  an existence within limits: the lesser evil.

  Do we not all have the same stones

  lining the bottoms of our minds, the same

  narrow plank of reason crossing the top

  of that chasm, same funeral when it breaks

  to send us plunging? I’ve had my days.

  Weeks, even. When I could not bear to leave

  the safety of my own trees, my choir of

  Carolina wrens. I have what she had: fleets

  of ships in our libraries to take us anywhere;

  some goodly sort of god arranging his furniture

  in our houses, that we might try out heaven;

  and poetry’s clear pools where the lone swimmer

  can feel against bare skin the ice of revelation.

  The plank has cracked for this bear

  I’m afraid. I watch him and find myself

  praying for the saving arts we all have

  to make ourselves—that on his circular walks

  through blue-painted concrete glaciers

  he is meeting angels in hats of snow.

  That when he swims and swims he believes

  he will find things heretofore unseen—

  not the fish at hand but the piercing teeth

  of risk, his polar zero at the bone.

  Insomniac Villanelle

  The chore of blunting night’s tormented edges

  Austen, Byron, Cather, Dickens, Emerson

  while cats of sentience creep out on the ledges

  demands some dull device for driving wedges

  Faulkner, García Márquez, Hugo, Ibsen

  into the ticking torment of night’s edges

  a steady, flogging tedium that fledges

  Joyce, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Merton, Nin

  tense flights of apprehension from the hedges,

  hounds spirits from the stairs, and slowly dredges

  Orwell, Plath, Queirós, Rilke, Stein

  regrets like broken glass from night’s deep edges

  and still tomorrow’s weary pending pledges

  Tolstoy, Updike, Verne, oh patient Whitman

  are cats of sentience sprawling on the ledges

  Saint-Exupéry will pass, Yeats, Zola. Austen,

  Jane—you again, Cather, Eliot, no! Byron

  this blunt and beaten night has lost its edges.

  Now there’s birdsong, daylight on the ledges.

  My Afternoon with The Postman

  The day of the cruel review, I fled

  to the museum believing beauty

  might cotton the clappers of all these

  alarm bells in my head. Beauty failed.

  I sat on a bench in the corner with The Postman.

  Who knows why they put him in that corner?

  The proudly functional blue hat. Beard

  like a spring flood. Red-rimmed eyes

  unnerving. Or no, disarming. Sympathetic.

  Critics are asses, I told him. Why make art

  for people who never make anything,

  who live only to dismember it and send

  its creators to sit in the corner like children?

  The Postman appeared content with his position.

  But artists, I insisted, we who make ourselves

  of self-critical bones, self-critical skin! This is not

  some business of rapping us on the knuckles.

  This is knowing the peanut allergy

  and making the peanut butter sandwich.

  The Postman wasn’t biting.

  I tried gossip, thinking surely every postman

  has carried a neighborhood story or two around

  in his bag: my critic’s squalid habits, his vendetta

  against my friends—these nitpickings roused

  the interest you’d expect from a dead French mailman.

  Fine, then. What kind of mail did you bring Van Gogh?

  That did it. Mostly bills. Tabac, le caviste,

  the regular gathering storm of the landlady,

  he was always short of cash. You know. Artists.

  So much for my gloomy party. I’m not starving.

  I changed the subject: He gave you the eyes of Christ.

  Not really. It’s a good likeness. Even my wife

  thought so. Augustine, now there was a critic.

  Really, those are your eyes?

  Must be. He couldn’t pay anyone else to sit for him,

  the girls who smile for a price. The faces he could

  afford were sunflowers. He didn’t know a soul

  when he came to Arles, asking me every day for news

  of the locals, even news of their cats, anything

  to keep me there on his porch to light a pipe with him.

  He made you look like Socrates.

  Lonely men mistake kindness for a philosophy.

  People think genius thrives in tortured isolation.

  Lonelier ones can mistake contempt for kindness.

  You’re suggesting I’m lucky to know the difference.

  For example, that painter friend of his who kept promising

  to visit! Vincent wagged his tail like a dog for that man.

  Gauguin, we’ve all heard about that. His tormenter.

  I was the one to fetch him from the hospital, after

  the incident. I took him for a good dinner.

  So I’m asking, was it criticism that did him in?

  Critics are flies. They buzz. They vanish, unremembered.

  But the hate mail. You would know—did anyone say

  he had no business making stars so fierce, or trees

  so pointed, the whole thing uncomfortably much

  too close to the truth of the mess we’re in?

  They didn’t have to. They just didn’t buy his paintings.

  No one had to be told not to buy a painting.

  It’s different now. Critics tell millions of people not

  to buy our work, who mostly weren’t going to buy it

  anyway. The artist risks unending humiliation.

  Also unending love, but that is not the point.

  I have to ask, then.

  Madame, what could I tell you

  more than one hundred years after all

  the postmen I knew in Arles, all the women,

  smiling or otherwise, throwing water on<
br />
  alley cats, the cats themselves, the stars

  and trees such as they were and also of course,

  the artist: gone entirely.

  Look at you looking into the eyes of a stranger

  for the consolation of his quiet ear.

  6

  Where It Begins

  Where It Begins

  Winter is for women—The woman, still at her knitting . . .

  The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

  —SYLVIA PLATH

  It all starts with the weather. Comes a day when summer

  gives in to the slenderest freshet of chill, and just like that,

  you’re gone. Wild in love with the autumn proviso. Trees

  will light themselves ember-orange at the hemline, starting

  their ritual drama of self-immolation. The honkling chain

  gang of geese overhead fleeing warmward-ho, chuckling

  over their big escape, you see it all. But you will stick it out.

  Through the woodsmoke season that opens all hearts’ doors

  into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink

  at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling, brushstrokes of

  snow on branches—this is the whole world calling you to

  take up your paired swords against the coming freeze. The

  chromosomes plied by all your thin-skinned forebears can

  offer no more bottomless thrill than the point-nosed plow

  of preparedness. It begins on the morning you see your

  children’s bare feet swinging under the table while they

  eat cold bowls of cereal. You shudder like a dog hauling up

  from the lake, but can’t throw off the pall of those little

  pink-palmy feet. You will swaddle your children in wool.

  It starts with a craving to fill the long evening downslant.

  There will be whole days of watching winter drag her skirts

  across the mud-yard from east to west, going nowhere. You

  will want to pin down these wadded handfuls of time, to

  frame them on a 24-stitch gauge. Ten to the inch, ten rows to

  the hour, straggling trellises of days held fast in the acreage

  of a shawl. Time by this means is domesticated and cannot

  run away. You pick up sticks because Time is just asking for it,

  already lost before it arrives. The frightful movie your family

  has chosen for Friday night, for instance. They insist it will be

  watched, so with just the one lamp turned on at the end of

  the sofa you can be there too, keeping your hands busy and

  your eyeshades half drawn; yes, people will be murdered, cars

  will be wrecked, and you will come through in one piece, plus

  a pair of mittens. It’s the same everywhere. Your river is rife

  with doldrums and eddies: the waiting room, the plane, the

  train, the lecture, the meeting. Oh, sweet mother of Christ, the

  meeting. The-PTA-the-town-council-the-school-board-the-bored-

  board, interminably haggled items of the agenda. Your feet

  want to run for their lives but your fingers know to dig in the

  bag and unsheathe their handy stays against impatience, the

  smooth paired oars, sturdy lifeboat of yarn. This meeting may

  bottom-drag and list on its keel, stranded in the Sargasso Sea

  of Agenda, and you alone will sail away on your thrifty raft of

  unwasted time. You alone, to swaddle the world in wool.

  Strangely, it also begins with the opposite: a hankering to lose

  time. To banish all possibilities: the shattered day undone, the

  bitter tea leaves of old regard, the words forever pushing ahead

  of each other in line, queuing up to be written. Especially those.

  Words that drub, drub at the skull’s concave inner wall. Words

  that are birds in a linear flock, pelting themselves all night long

  against the windowpane. Nothing can stop the words but this

  mute alphabet of knit and purl. The curl of your cupped hand

  scoops up long drinks of calm. The rhythm is from down inside,

  rocking cradle, heartbeat, ocean. Waves on a rockless shore.

  Sometimes it starts terribly. With the injury or the accident, a

  wrecked life flung down like an armload of broken chair legs

  on your doorstep. Here lies the recuperation, whose miles you

  can’t see across, let alone traverse. Chasm of woe uncrossable

  by any bridge, here lies you. And in comes the friend bearing

  needles of pale bamboo—twin shafts of light!—and ombré

  skeins in shades that march through the stages of grief, burnt

  umber to gold to dandelion. She is not in a listening mood, the

  friend. Today she commands you to make something of all this.

  And to your broken heart’s surprise, you do.

  It begins with a circle of friends. Always there is something

  beyond your beyond, the aged parents and teenager who crack

  up the family cars on the same day. There is the bone-picked

  divorce, the winter of chemo, the gorgeous mistake, the long

  unraveling misery that needs company, reading glasses and

  glasses of wine and all the chairs pulled into the living room.

  Cast on, knit two together girlfriendwise. Pick up the pieces

  where you can, along the headless yoke or scandalously loose

  button placket. Knitting makes the talk go softer, as long as it

  needs to be. Laughter makes dropped stitches.

  It begins with a pattern. The riveting twist of a cable, a spiral,

  a ladder, eyes of the lynx, traveling vines. A pattern hallooing

  to you from your neighbor’s sweater when you’re only trying

  for small talk, distracting you until sheepishly you stop and

  ask permission to memorize the lay of her sweater’s land. Once

  it starts, there’s no stopping. In your sturdy frame of double-

  pointed needles you cultivate the apical stem of sock-sleeve-

  stocking-cap. From a seed of pattern everything grows: xylem

  and phloem of ribs, a trunk with branches of sleeves, the skirt

  that bells daffodilwise. You are god of this wild botany. You

  may take the familiar map in hand, look it over with all best

  intentions, then throw it away and head for uncharted waters

  where there be monsters. There you’ll discover a promised land

  of garments previously undevised: gloves for the extra long of

  hand, or short, or the firecracker nephew with one digit missing

  in action. Sweaters for the short-waisted, the broad-shouldered,

  your best beloveds all covetous of the bespoke, looking to you

  for the bliss of a perfect fit.

  And a perfect color. It starts there too. An eye has hungers of its

  own: the particular green of leaves overturned by the oncoming

  storm. A desert’s russet bronze, mustard of Appalachian spring,

  some spectral intangible you long to possess. Or a texture. There

  are nowhere near enough words for this. Textures have family

  trees: cloud and thistledown are cousin to catpelt and infantscalp

  and earlobe. Petal is a texture, and lime peel and nettle and five

  o’clock shadow and sandstone and soap and slither. Drape is the

  child of loft and crimp; wool is a stalwart crone who remembers

  everything, while emptyhead white-haired cotton forgets. And in

  spite of their disparate natures, these strings can be lured to sit

  down together and play a fiber concerto whole in the cloth. A

  lamb’s virgin fleece can be sp
un with the fuzz of a lush blue hare

  or a twist of flax, you name it, silkworm floss or twiny bamboo.

  Creatures not known to converse in nature can be introduced

  and married on the spot. The spindle is your altar; you are the

  matchmaker, steady on the treadle, fingers plying animal with

  vegetable, devising your new, surprisingly peaceable kingdoms.

  Fingers can read; they have secret libraries and illicit affairs.

  Twined into the fleece of a ewe on shearing day, hands can

  read the history of her winter: how many snows, how barren

  or sweet her mangers. For best results stand in the pasture and

  throw your arms around her.

  Because really it starts there, in the barn on shearing day, with

  the circle of friends assembled. One fleece shorn all of a piece,

  flung out on a table surrounded by help at the ready. All hands

  point toward the center like an introverted clock, the better for

  combing the fleece. Fingers can see in the dark to pull out twigs

  and cockleburs. Fleeces rolled and stacked look for all the world

  like loaves of bread on a bakery shelf, or sheaves of grain or any

  other money in the bank: the universal currency of a planet where

  people get cold. On shearing day all ledgers will be balanced; the

  sheep are woolly by morning and naked by night, as barrows fill

  and warmth is bankrolled in futures. Six women can skirt a fleece

  in ten minutes, just enough time to run and collect the next, if the

  shearer is handy. It starts early, this day, and goes long.

  It starts in the barn every morning of the year. The sheep are

  both eager and wary at the sight of you, the bringer of hay,

  reaper of wool, as you enter the barn for the daily accounts.

  You inhale the florid scents of sweet feed and mineral urine,

  and there they stand eyeing you every time, on blizzard nights

  or mornings of spring lambing when you hurry out at dawn

  to find dumbfounded mothers of twins licking their wispy

  trembling slips of children, exhorting them to look alive. The

  sloe-eyed flock mistrusts you fundamentally, but still they come

  running when you shake the exquisite bucket of grain, money

  that talks to yearlings and chary wethers alike, loudest of all

  to the ravenous barrel-round pregnant ewes that gallop home

  with udders tolling like church bells. In all weather you take

  their measure and send them out to pasture again. Willingly