Two Bowls of Milk (2 page)

those bones:
hammer, anvil

and
stirrup
. Words that conjure

machinery, weight,

horses, that morning her leg

caught and the mare dragged her

for miles. From the first,

each word she’d learned

a hoof just missing her

temple. It is all pain,

the reddish shell the side

of the head cups, and hears

itself, hears itself.

Tamarack, shamrock,

black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:

Very shade-intolerant. Branches brittle and breakage

frequent
. Limbs under water. Black ash:
Neither as strong nor

hard as white ash wood
. Black hawk falling. Squirrel call. Teeth against

teeth against hunger. Variations of predation. What’s swallowed

still warm in the throat. I don’t want the names of vegetation

in my mouth, only his tongue, his different speech. Variations

of flight and flighlessness. Crows are rooks, but rooks

are sharper and still blacker. Nettles can make healing

teas. Bluebells by the river ringing someone’s

gone too far.

Hills are islands, waiting. Mountains

will wait longer. This valley

was once a lake, until we made it land. See how the rain

against the windshield turns to fishes.

Each puddle a premonition. The woman’s face

is clearer there. When I peer in,

the trees shift. The sky is bluer

than the sky and when I look deeper there is the sun.

Any rain is enough to make all the colours

come out. The fuchsias sting my eyes

and the bees shine. The lawn teems with drops

that might be diamonds, might be frogs.

The first time I ran inside and shut my house. The second

I let it all wash over me. The third time I went looking

where the clouds were and weeks later

waded back with minnows in my boots.

Between storms: a segment of train track. A red

block with the letter O. A mouse the colour

of bread mould. An ace of spades. Three steps going down

and who knows how many underwater.

I keep a canoe on the back porch just in case.

Each morning I listen for the lap against the bedposts.

Each morning I imagine my legs floating down the steps,

my hair seeping back from my face.

Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty

and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are

is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat

and the columbines open for the same water differently.

Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,

the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red

rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.

The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings.

When the first drop falls, she is there

to meet it. The underside of her arm is a fish’s belly,

her mouth a rain gauge. She is the watermark

and the water rising.

Her rusted car. Where the road was, a river the colour of asphalt.

A rag doll is growing heavier beside her boat. Beneath,

a catfish looms. Farther down, street signs

and streets, yellow lines down the centre.

Two-thirds of the earth is composed of water,

not counting floods. I’m more water than this world is.

Maybe that explains the shift of my organs

during sleep, the glass beside my bed.

The curve of the boat’s hold

is the shape my hand makes

when it wants something. How quickly

my palm fills when I stop asking.

Are two bowls of milk. They are round

and white and have nothing to do

with the moon. They have no implications

of blindness, or sight. They wait

on the doorstep like bowls

or like things that closely resemble

bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not

foreshadow cats. There are two

because two hands set them out

and each wanted to hold something.

Milk because not water. The curve of

milk against the curve of bowl.

I’m out in it. The water’s ruddy

with the seepage of needles

fallen from towering fir. Ice

floats thinly in it, and slush,

and patches of snow farther

back in the trees I came from.

It’s shallower there. Here reaches

midway to my knees, here

where the path was last week.

My parents have hung back

in soggy boots, but mine

can take it. I might go farther

still, not around the lake,

as we planned, but into.

The water’s clear white, flat,

under slivers of ice a duck broke,

landing. It laps at the brown rubber

of my boots, cedar trunks.

When was I not out there?

If I leave here, where will I be?

When the first wasp would not stop flying near me I sat still

and let it stay. All thin legs and yellow, it did not find my skin

but the silvered mouth of the Pepsi can. It crawled inside

and then another joined it there. I let those two

fill themselves while I finished my greasy knish and thought

how I would soon not be here and how painful

not wanting anyone. One wasp staggered out

and flew, and then the other, and in Manhattan

they were two cabs on their way in one direction. Inside,

what I had loved most: the folds of the woman’s scarf

in Vermeer’s portrait, their depth of shadow,

how the fabric came so close to itself without touching.

I’ve been told she is not pregnant, but regard:

I mean not only look at her but hold her in esteem,

because her heft of belly cannot be attributed to style

or the way her bluish smock rucks up

under her breasts. She would not otherwise hold

the letter at that height, above the swell,

to protect her child from grief. She would not let

the windowlight fall over all that new weight, fall

on the cold within. I would not say a man has written,

the lover from a wide distance,

husband, unsuspecting, coming from the colonies,

father or her brother who will not help.

It might be her mother:
come to me
.

Or the girl she giggled with when thinner,

now with one at each breast.

It’s long since she was singular and stood

with her forehead warm against the glass, her waist

to the ledge with no flinching tenderness.

Soon she will be forced down and open

and then what rooms will let her and the other in?

Take care, she’s not herself these days

or ever was. To let go of an emptiness

so large, to look upon and love it, how could she not

require the light? The panes divide her and divide.

Because Vermeer looked into a room and saw a map was lit,

I now find it possible to sit here: my shutters flung to sun on brick

on the apartment across the street, where the man rocks

before the blue-draped lamp. Light falls on my pictures

of salal and fern still growing elsewhere (home is not this frozen

sparrow on the porch, an icicle across my sight)