till windowed hulks, forgotten death cars reared
where dark fish leapt, and gaped, and snatched the air.
Leonard Commits Redeeming Adulteries with All the Women in Town
When I take off my glasses, these eyes are dark magnets
that draw the world into my reach.
First the needles, as I walk the quiet streets,
work their way from the cushions of dust.
The nails in the rafters twist laboriously out
and the oven doors drop
an inch open.
The sleep smell of yesterday’s baking
rises in the mouth.
A good thing.
The street lamps wink off just at dawn,
still they bend their stiff necks like geese drinking.
My vision is drinking in the star-littered lawn.
When the porch ivy weaves to me—
Now is the time.
Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.
Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,
What did she want?
But it is too late for husbands.
Their wives do not question
what it is that dissolves
all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.
They uncross themselves, forsaking
all protection. They long to be opened and known
because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire
in love with its private ruin.
I open my hands and they come to me, now.
In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,
only followed, only known along the way.
And it is right, oh women of the town, it is right.
Your mouths, like the seals of important documents
break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,
the cracked edges melting to mine.
Unexpected Dangers
I’m much the worse for wear, it’s double true.
Too many incidents
a man might misconstrue—
my conduct, for a lack of innocence.
I seem to get them crazed or lacking sense
in the first place.
Ancient, solid gents
I sit by on the bus because they’re safe,
get me coming, going, with their canes,
or what is worse,
the spreading stains
across the seat. I recognize at once
just what they’re up to, rustling in their coats.
There was a priest,
the calmer sort,
his cassock flowing down from neck to feet.
We got to talking, and I brushed his knee
by accident,
and dutifully,
he took my hand and put it back
not quite where it belonged; his judgment
was not that exact.
I underwent
a kind of odd conversion from his act.
They do call minds like mine one-track.
One track is all you need
to understand
their loneliness, then bite the hand that feeds
upon you, in a terrible blind grief.
My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead
Last night, my dreams were full of Otto’s best friends.
I sat in the kitchen, wiping the heavy silver,
and listened to the losses, tough custom, and fouled accounts
of the family bootlegger, county sheriff:
Rudy J. V. Jacklitch, who sat just beside me,
wiping his wind-cracked hands
with lard smeared on a handkerchief.
Our pekinese-poodle went and darkened his best wool trousers,
and he leapt up, yelling for a knife!
These are the kinds of friends
I had to tend in those days:
great, thick men, devouring
Fleisch, Spaetzle, the very special
potato salad for which I dice
onions so fine they are invisible.
Rudy J. V. Jacklitch was a bachelor, but he cared
for his mother, a small spider of a woman—all fingers.
She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,
with a doily. The whole house
dripped with lace, frosting fell
from each surface in fantastic shapes.
When Otto died, old Rudy came by
with a couple jugs for the mourners’ supper.
He stayed on past midnight, every night the month after
he would bring me a little something
to put the night away.
After a short while I knew his purpose.
His glance slipped as the evening
and the strong drink wore on.
Playing cribbage I always won,
a sure sign he was distracted.
I babbled like a talking bird,
never let him say the words
I knew were in him.
Then one night he came by,
already loaded to the gills,
rifle slung in the back window
of his truck: Going out
to shoot toads. He was peeved
with me. I’d played him all wrong.
He said his mother knew just what I was.
The next thing I heard that blurred night
was that Rudy drove his light truck
through the side of a barn,
and that among the living
he stayed long enough
to pronounce my name, like a curse
through the rage and foam of his freed blood.
So I was sure, for a time and a time after,
that Rudy carried
my name down to hell on his tongue
like a black coin.
I would wake, in the deepest of places,
and hear my name called.
My name like a strange new currency they read:
Mary Kröger
with its ring of the authentic
when dropped
or struck between their fingers.
How I feared to have it whispered in their mouths!
Mary Kröger
growing softer and thinner
till it dissolved
like a wafer under all that polishing.
A Mother’s Hell
The Widow Jacklitch
All night, all night, the cat wants out again.
I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears
From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;
She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.
When Rudy was alive the cat was all
You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still
And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram
A doily in my mouth to still the scream.
All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.
It’s terrible, the little bleats they make
Outside my window. Girls not out of braids
Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts
Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.
The cat’s got rubbage on her brain
As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.
I try to keep the pencils out of reach.
That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach
A mile a minute. If she was a cat
I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat
And nail her up like suet, out in back
Where birds fly down to take their chance.
I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t
like anything that makes a beating sound.
Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck
With bats. But he had locked himself
In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock
Until my knuckles scabbed and bled
And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh
Behind his door. I’d
hear him pant and thrill.
A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk
Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.
Rudy Comes Back
I knew at once, when the lights dimmed.
He was pissing on the works.
The generator fouled a beat
and recovered.
My doors were locked
anyway, and the big white dog
unchained in the yard.
Outside, the wall of hollyhocks
raved for mercy from the wind’s strap.
The valves of the roses opened,
so sheltering his step
with their frayed mouths.
I don’t know how he entered
the dull bitch at my feet.
She rose in a nightmare’s hackles,
glittering, shedding heat
from her mild eyes.
All night we kept watch,
never leaving the white-blue ring
of the kitchen. I could hear him out there,
scratching in the porch hall, cold
and furtive as a cat in winter.
Toward dawn I got the gun.
And he was out there, Rudy J. V. Jacklitch,
the bachelor who drove his light truck
through the side of a barn on my account.
He’d lost flesh. The gray skin of his face dragged.
His clothes were bunched.
He stood reproachful,
in one hand the wooden board
and the pegs, still my crib.
In the other the ruined bouquet
of larkspur I wouldn’t take.
I was calm. This was something I’d foreseen.
After all, he took my name down to hell,
a thin black coin.
Repeatedly, repeatedly, to his destruction,
he called.
And I had not answered then.
And I would not answer now.
The flowers chafed to flames of dust in his hands.
The earth drew the wind in like breath and held on.
But I did not speak
or cry out
until the dawn, until the confounding light.
New Vows
The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.
I cast my hood of dogskin
away, and my shirt of nettles.
Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.
The trick was in living that death to its source.
When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.
Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire.
Now shadows move freely within me as words.
These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
And I can’t tell you yet
how truly I belong
to the hiss and shift of wind,
these slow, variable mouths
through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.
The Seven Sleepers
Fooling God
I must become small and hide where he cannot reach.
I must become dull and heavy as an iron pot.
I must be tireless as rust and bold as roots
growing through the locks on doors
and crumbling the cinder blocks
of the foundations of his everlasting throne.
I must be strange as pity so he’ll believe me.
I must be terrible and brush my hair so that he finds me attractive.
Perhaps if I invoke Clare, the patron saint of television.
Perhaps if I become the images
passing through the cells of a woman’s brain.
I must be very large and block his sight.
I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.
I must insert myself into the bark of his apple trees,
and cleave the bones of his cows. I must be the marrow
that he drinks into his cloud-wet body.
I must be careful and laugh when he laughs.
I must turn down the covers and guide him in.
I must fashion his children out of Play-Doh, blue, pink, green.
I must pull them from between my legs
and set them before the television.
I must hide my memory in a mustard grain
so that he’ll search for it over time until time is gone.
I must lose myself in the world’s regard and disparagement.
I must remain this person and be no trouble.
None at all. So he’ll forget.
I’ll collect dust out of reach,
a single dish from a set, a flower made of felt,
a tablet the wrong shape to choke on.
I must become essential and file everything
under my own system,
so we can lose him and his proofs and adherents.
I must be a doubter in a city of belief
that hails his signs (the great footprints
long as limousines, the rough print on the wall).
On the pavement where his house begins
fainting women kneel. I’m not among them
although they polish the brass tongues of his lions
with their own tongues
and taste the everlasting life.
The Sacraments
1 Baptism
As the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,
stopped at the sun’s apogee
and stood in the waterless light,
so, after loss, it came to this:
that for each year the being was destroyed,
I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.
The keen knife hovered
and the skin flicked in the bowl.
Then the sun, the life that consumes us,
burst into agony.
We began, the wands and the head crowns of sage,
the feathers cocked over our ears.
When the bird joined the circle and called,
we cried back, shrill breath
through the bones in our teeth.
Her wings closed over us, her dark red
claws drew us upward by the scars,
so that we hung by the flesh
as in the moment before birth
when the spirit is quenched
in whole pain, suspended
until there is no choice, the body
slams to earth,
the new life starts.
2 Communion
It is spring. The tiny frogs pull
their strange new bodies out
of the suckholes, the sediment of rust,
and float upward, each in a silver bubble
that breaks on the water’s surface
to one clear unceasing note of need.
Sometimes, when I hear them,
I leave our bed and stumble
among the white shafts of weeds
to the edge of the pond.
I sink to the throat,
and witness the ravenous trill
of the body transformed at last and then consumed
in a rush of music.
Sing to me, sing to me.
I have never been so cold
rising out of sleep.
3 Confirmation
I was twelve, in my body
three eggs were already marked
for the future.
Two golden, one dark.
And the man,
he was selected from other men,
by a blow on the cheek
similar to mine.
That is how we knew,
from the first meeting.
There was no question.
There was the wound.
4 Matrimony
It was frightening, the trees in their rigid postures
using up the sun,
as the earth tilte
d its essential degree.
Snow covered everything. Its confusing glare
doubled the view
so that I saw you approach
my empty house
not as one man, but as a landscape
repeating along the walls of every room
papering over the cracked grief.
I knew as I stepped into the design,
as I joined the chain of hands,
and let the steeple of fire
be raised above our heads.
We had chosen the costliest pattern,
the strangest, the most enduring.
We were afraid as we stood between the willows,
as we shaped the standard words with our tongues.
Then it was done. The scenery multiplied
around us and we turned.
We stared calmly from the pictures.
5 Penance
I am sorry I ruined the oatmeal
which must remain in the bowl. Sorry
my breath hardened on the carpet and the slashed fur
climbed, raving, off the wall.
I am sorry for the ominous look, for using tears.
Sorry for the print on the page,
for wearing the shoes of a dead woman
bought at a yard sale.
She still walks, walks
restlessly, treading the mill. I am
sorry I could not lift out the stain
with powerful enzymes, with spit, with vinegar.
Sorry I pickled your underwear
and froze my hands to the knob
so that you had to turn me to gain entrance
to the kingdom without spots or wrinkles.
I am sorry I have failed so I am not allowed
to leave the table, to which my knees are strapped.
Sorry I cannot leave you behind. For you are mine.
You are everything. And I am sorry.
6 Holy Orders
God, I was not meant to be the isolate