Silence. There was a lot of silence from the people. Potchikoo interpreted their silence as awe, and for sure, he felt the awe of it too. For the statue of himself had all of his unmistakable features, including the fantasy of his favorite part of himself at its most commanding. Those who were religious shook their heads and quickly left. Those who weren’t, but who had good taste, left as well. That left only the pagans with bad taste to admire what they saw, but that was enough for Potchikoo. He considered his project a success. During the years of quiet happiness that followed with Josette he never mislaid his hat, as there was a place to hang it right beside the door.
The Butcher’s Wife
The Butcher’s Wife
1
Once, my braids swung heavy as ropes.
Men feared them like the gallows.
Night fell
When I combed them out.
No one could see me in the dark.
Then I stood still
Too long and the braids took root.
I wept, so helpless.
The braids tapped deep and flourished.
A man came by with an ox on his shoulders.
He yoked it to my apron
And pulled me from the ground.
From that time on I wound the braids around my head
So that my arms would be free to tend him.
2
He could lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth.
In a contest, he’d press a whole hog, a side of beef.
He loved his highballs, his herring, and the attentions of women.
He died pounding his chest with no last word for anyone.
The gin vessels in his face broke and darkened. I traced them
Far from that room into Bremen on the Sea.
The narrow streets twisted down to the piers.
And far off, in the black, rocking water, the lights of trawlers
Beckoned, like the heart’s uncertain signals,
Faint, and final.
3
Of course I planted a great, full bush of roses on his grave.
Who else would give the butcher roses but his wife?
Each summer, I am reminded of the heart surging from his vest,
Mocking all the high stern angels
By pounding for their spread skirts.
The flowers unfurl, offering themselves,
And I hear his heart pound on the earth like a great fist,
Demanding another round of the best wine in the house.
Another round, he cries, and another round all summer long,
Until the whole damn world reels toward winter drunk.
That Pull from the Left
Butch once remarked to me how sinister it was
alone, after hours, in the dark of the shop
to find me there hunched over two weeks’ accounts
probably smoked like a bacon from all those Pall-Malls.
Odd comfort when the light goes, the case lights left on
and the rings of baloney, the herring, the parsley,
arranged in the strict, familiar ways.
Whatever intactness holds animals up
has been carefully taken, what’s left are the parts.
Just look in the cases, all counted and stacked.
Step-and-a-Half Waleski used to come to the shop
and ask for the cheap cut, she would thump, sniff, and finger.
This one too old. This one here for my supper.
Two days and you do notice change in the texture.
I have seen them the day before slaughter.
Knowing the outcome from the moment they enter
the chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel.
Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness.
But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.
When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.
You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.
That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher
that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell
a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw,
and yet it is well known how thorough he was.
He never sat down without washing his hands,
and he was a maker, his sausage was echt
so that even Waleski had little complaint.
Butch once remarked there was no one so deft
as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved
in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.
How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web
of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant
when I told him I felt something pull from the left,
and how often it clouded the day before slaughter.
Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.
The Carmelites
They’re women, not like me but like the sun
burning cold on a winter afternoon,
audacious brilliance from a severe height,
living in the center as the town revolves
around them in a mess. Of course
we want to know what gives behind their fence,
behind the shades, the yellow brick
convent huge in the black green pines.
We pass it, every one of us, on rounds
we make our living at. There’s one
I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,
her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,
and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.
I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,
scarred like the moon in her observance,
shaved and bound and bandaged
in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,
muttering for courage at the very hour
cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto
turns to me with urgency and power.
Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue
smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,
and the buried structure shows,
the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,
freeze to acid in the strange heart.
Clouds
The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded
on gin. One bottle in the clinkers
hidden since spring
when Otto took the vow
and ceremoniously poured
the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew
down the scoured steel sink,
overcoming the reek
of oxblood.
That was one promise he kept.
He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips
in the meantime. I know
now he kept some insurance,
one bottle at least
against his own darkness.
I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.
From the doorway the clouds pass me through.
The town stretches to fields. The six avenues
crossed by seventeen streets,
the tick, tack, and toe
of boxes and yards
settle into the dark.
Dogs worry their chains.
Men call to their mothers
and finish. The women sag into the springs.
What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?
With a headful of spirits,
how else can I think?
Under so many clouds,
such hooded and broken
old things. They go on
simply folding, unfolding, like sheets
hung to dry and forgotten.
And no matter how careful I watch them,
they take a new shape,
escaping my concentrations,
they slip and disperse
and extinguish themselves.
They melt before I half unfathom their forms.
J
ust as fast, a few bones
disconnecting beneath us.
It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.
Not in this language.
Not in this life.
I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.
But these clouds, creeping toward us
each night while the milk
gets scorched in the pan,
great soaked loaves of bread
are squandering themselves in the west.
Look at them: Proud, unpausing.
Open and growing, we cannot destroy them
or stop them from moving
down each avenue,
the dogs turn on their chains,
children feel through the windows.
What else should we feel our way through—
We lay our streets over
the deepest cries of the earth
and wonder why everything comes down to this:
The days pile and pile.
The bones are too few
and too foreign to know.
Mary, you do not belong here at all.
Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.
Let everything be how it could have been, once:
a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.
But this is the way people are.
All that appears to us empty,
We fill.
What is endless and simple,
We carve, and initial,
and narrow
roads plow through the last of the hills
where our gravestones rear small
black vigilant domes.
Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars
deep in this strange earth
we want to call ours.
Shelter
My four adopted sons in photographs
wear solemn black. Their faces comprehend
their mother’s death, an absence in a well
of empty noise, and Otto strange and lost.
Her name was Mary also, Mary Kröger.
Two of us have lived and one is gone.
Her hair was blond; it floated back in wings,
and still you see her traces in the boys:
bright hair and long, thin, knotted woman’s hands.
I knew her, Mary Kröger, and we were bosom friends.
All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.
Otto was for many years her husband,
and that’s the way I always thought of him.
I nursed her when she sickened and the cure
fell through at Rochester. The healing bath
that dropped her temperature, I think, too fast.
I was in attendance at her death:
She sent the others out. She rose and gripped my arm
and tried to make me promise that I’d care
for Otto and the boys. I had to turn away
as my own mother had when her time came.
How few do not return in memory
and make us act in ways we can’t explain.
I could not lie to ease her, living, dying.
All graves are full of such accumulation.
And yet, the boys were waiting in New York
to take the first boat back to Otto’s folks
in Germany, prewar, dark powers were at work,
and Otto asked me on the westbound bus
to marry him. I could not tell him no—
We help our neighbors out. I loved him though
It took me several years to know I did
from that first time he walked in to deliver
winter food. Through Father Adler’s kitchen,
he shouldered half an ox like it was bread
and looked at me too long for simple greeting.
This is how our live complete themselves,
as effortless as weather, circles blaze
in ordinary days, and through our waking selves
they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.
So I took up with Otto, took the boys
and watched for them, and made their daily bread
from what the grocer gave them in exchange
for helping him. It’s hard to tell you how
they soon became so precious I got sick
from worry, and woke up for two months straight
and had to check them, sleeping, in their beds
and had to watch and see each breathe or move
before I could regain my sleep again.
All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.
The Slow Sting of Her Company
Otto brought one sister from that town
they never talk about. His father shook
one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air
behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.
I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—
a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.
They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.
Proud Hilda hides his picture
in a drawer with underskirts.
Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain
my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men
have gifted her with more impressive things.
She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.
I came upon a sentimental locket,
embossed with words, initials interfixed
within the breasts of dour, molting swans.
Proud Hilda cracked it open,
smiled, and clicked it shut.
How many men had begged her heavy hand
I do not know. I think I loved her too
in ways that I am not sure how to tell—
I reached one day to gather back her hair:
wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear
and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone
that swung a cold light from the polished lobe.
Tall Hilda took my hand in hers and kissed
the palm, and closed that mark inside my fist.
She lived alone and thickened in that town,
refusing company for weeks on end.
We left food at her door; she took it in;
her dull lamp deepened as the night wore on.
I went to her when everything was wrong.
We sat all evening talking children, men.
She laughed at me, and said it was my ruin.
My giving till I dropped.
Live blood let down the drain.
I never let her know how those words cut
me serious—her questioning my life. One night
a slow thing came, provoked by weariness,
to cram itself up every slackened nerve;
as if my body were a whining hive
and each cell groaning with a sweet, thick lead—
I turned and struck at Otto in our bed;
all night, all night the poison, till I swarmed
back empty to his cold
and dreaming arms.
Here Is a Good Word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski
At first we all wondered what county or town
she had come from. Quite soon it was clear to us all
that was better unquestioned, and better unknown.
Who wanted to hear what had happened or failed
to occur. Why the dry wood had not taken fire.
Much less, why the dogs were unspeakably disturbed
when she ground the cold cinders that littered our walk
with her run-to-ground heels. That Waleski approached
with a swiftness uncommon for one of her age.
Even spiders spun clear of her lengthening shadow.
Her headlong occurrence unnerved even Otto
who wrapped up the pork rinds like they were glass trinkets
and saluted her passage with a good stiff drink.
But mine is a good word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski.
Scavenger, bone
picker, lived off our alleys
when all we threw out were the deadliest scrapings
from licked-over pots. And even that hurt.
And for whatever one of us laughed in her face,
at least two prayed in secret, went home half afraid
of that mirror, what possible leavings they’d find there.
But mine is a good word, and even that hurts.
A rhyme-and-a-half for a woman of parts,
because someone must pare the fruit soft to the core
into slivers, must wrap the dead bones in her skirts
and lay these things out on her table, and fit
each oddment to each to resemble a life.
Portrait of the Town Leonard
I thought I saw him look my way and crossed
my breast before I could contain myself.
Beneath those glasses, thick as lead-barred windows,
his eyes ran through his head, the double barrels
of an old gun, sick on its load, the trigger held
in place by one thin metal bow.
Going toward the Catholic church, whose twin
white dunce caps speared the clouds for offerings,
we had to pass him on the poured stone bridge.
For nickels we could act as though we’d not
been offered stories. How these all turned out
we knew, each one, just how the river eats
within its course the line of reasoning.
He went, each morning, to the first confession.
The sulking curtains bit their lips behind him.
Still those in closer pews could hear the sweet
and limber sins he’d made up on the spot.
I saw a few consider, and take note—
procedural. They’d try them out at home.
And once, a windless August, when the sun
released its weight and all the crops were burned,
he kept watch as the river thickened. Land
grew visibly and reeked to either side,