Songs of the Runaway Bride
~Tess
i
I saw him coming as light flows
over a roof through smoke.
His walk was a chain of ladders.
I thought I could come to the top
of what he saw, but the rungs
fell from my feet. So the air
makes a home of us.
All night the water muffled
the stair. Sleep ran like a fiber
through the streets.
I made ready for the bells
and the rooms anxious
to be fed, for the dynasty
of a limited memory, the polka,
the formal solution with an edge
of panic. Together and together—
the exact coffin of pleasure
crookedly in the blood.
ii
There are ceremonies even the dead regret.
And your hand, which must be
offered first. Regardless,
there is an etiquette
that accepts. We had been accepting
a long time. I am a witness
out of that persistence. The days
were like that, standing
and lost as you, the too serious girl
locked in the yard.
iii
This travel backwards
stirs an opposite sleep,
the dream confessed to insure
my return. Your name
grows cruel in that clearing
near the bandstand. The lake
you built to resemble a heart
has new temptations, nets,
days repeating trees
you thought stood still.
Husband, all night I slept on your neck
and a man went through my dreams
and was not you. With a knife
I sliced the yellow dress
he mistook for me, until it was ribbons,
until it was rags. How did I come to this
crouching in sharpest grass?
I am deadly white. Painted floors
have struck your head. What I know
of it, your bloodshot eyes
from November to Christmas.
iv
I was glad they saw it, those
of his house, though I thought him
dead at first, doubled
on the lawn. His face.
I could have carried you alone
out of that openness.
There is grief also in things intended.
They saw you could not stand
from there, the sound of the grass,
how the difference had filled you
further than anyone could have
said, and we carried you,
like a room looking up,
into the house, into its stairs.
Away from this I am wife
and another breathing.
My forehead as field
or cliff, the rain
a tin rushing outside
the window, so close,
your closed eyes, the bed
descending in a shaft of wideness
meant for me. Yet not to be sure
who it was you called, breaking
from words you came alone to,
but that: it was not me.
v
He was counting the cows. I watched
from a clump of scrub oak.
"Now," I thought, "we're even."
But the joy he took riding among them
while they tossed and ate
reached past me. His arm
gave blessing in their keeping. After me,
the house took in its leaves.
My grandfather's hat came floating
over the vines. I wore a ribbon
from the attic. The wagon
with its iron wheels struck the air
and I stood in the yard, opening
where the road passes like sleep
overheard, its stones sparking, the horses
falling away before the woods. My hand
waving, waving and the necks
of the black horses nodding in a milk of sunlight.
vi
Ample cotton and over it
an apron, your crossing from barn
to house, the snow, the men
held near fences, near horses, the porch
not figuring in this, nor the well.
Your glare, grandmother, a shadowy pucker
below your hand in salute.
I approach by the side path, the rain barrel
and smokehouse, the solitary
chopping block. Above your work
some excess in the upper arms, a flapping
or myself enclosed, the glove-skin
of the squirrel pulled free between us, hot
and blue, steam flaring
even from the emptied fur.
Will you believe she gave in
for that? not the house fired
to a crust, nor its beds
aflame around the days of your childhood.
In the glow we saw the chimney
come mumbling towards us
through a stairway, its cats
ashes where the saddle
crashed. None of this. No,
nor Jacob, the portrait, burning after her,
the quilts stacked like cordwood
in the attic. Only for this, fan,
red fan, you gave your mother
and how she sat
rocking like an ocean, keeping the heat
going for the sake of the gift, to be
used, if not wanted, a sharpness
as though to say, "I am only waiting
to get out of this."
vii
Refinement, rule to be saluted and
robbed, how you dulled yourself
like a song scraped
on a stone. Soon the ships
did not know you. They whined
at their anchors below
the gulls in the harbor.
Not to call the fish
a scar to its water, but what comes
together in a single light.
Hands, lips, eyes
walk out of me. So the river
burns after us in a cry
that closes after trees, the banks
go dark.
The field thickens with stars.
It is a sign that again the land
has forgiven your hands.
Once I could speak under the dirt roof.
Today I bent on the gulf
of a dream. "Wild things sleep here,"
you said, and again the possum chased
by the best hound into the second chamber,
both sodden with breath, never to be
seen again. The boat set loose
on the lake with a provision
of fire. A horse shelters with me, or
how the light twitches on the hand-dug shelf.
Mary, he calls me Mary
and I answer, though it is her name
unfolds the dead, my face
a pardon. "Your neck, so
like hers." All this a sleep.
None of these quilts has met
that hill or kneels again
in her, in me, little father, our kingly air.
ix
I told you out of a dream
a train was rushing into a station
where everyone must get out.
At the last moment an overpowering
significance rescued the landscape.
Refusals, the alarms of the passengers.
When the station arrived
they had vanished
and the train went on
without them-a strange intensity.
x
We looked at the same place on a stone.
It was a habit we believed in.
All the time, the stone
had its own heart. All the time,
the earth was a sea
of stones. I saw myself
sailing; I saw myself in the stone
go sailing.
xi
If absence deserves, as you say it
does, a voice which blinds itself
and recovers, let me complete
the assurance: a mouth pointing into
the water you cast like grain
into more water. Take
the ring from my hand: set it
on the table. In the next room
a tenderness we served together
rises from the fresh sheets.
There is more but it is bittersweet
and calls me back, leper-tongued
saying without arms
"moja ! moja !" mine, oh mine. |
