Now that she is old, Helen walks on the beach
Remembering her old lovers
The temperamental merging of sea and sand
Makes her ponder men and women
Currents are wanderers
But it’s tectonic plates that are hard –
The stupid analogy falls apart
And Helen laughs and orders
Half a liter of wine on the corner.
Every woman in a silk dress
Lets her look back in time at herself –
Clavicles now are more fashionable than breasts
But Helen doesn’t mind
The past is the past.
When Helen walks home, the stars
Look down upon her between power lines
Crickets sing
The nights are getting longer
The Earth is already calling from beneath
Helen’s light but callused feet.
And peeking out from behind Earth’s shoulder is the Sun
Waiting for its chance to swallow everyone
Though the Sun will deny this and say,
“I’ll only call you home some day.”
At home Paris lies facedown on the couch
Waiting for the camphor and peppermint oil
That Helen will rub into his wide back –
Into constellations of freckles and muscle gone slack.
Love is more than cells that arrange themselves into flesh, Helen believes
But still she likes to think she has a little time left
To keep touching him.
When starting a letter to the other side,
I first want to point out that things are mostly fine
I mean, sure, there’s a war on, thousands have died
But I grew some nice boobs while you were away, Sir Robin (ha ha).
The economy you always lamented
Is somehow even deader
Than you could have imagined.
The clubs are still bad.
The roads are the worst.
The rich look like sores about to burst.
I’m penniless and getting older
My home is mostly a man’s shoulder.
I don’t mind.
You were right about my first love
You were right about what men want
The dead are never wrong.
You don’t feel dead to me, though
You’re just carbon no longer
You’re brighter than photons.
I’ve earned so many badges since I saw you last
I’m running out of space for letters on my chest
But it’s like what you always said
What unmakes the mind first unmakes the bed.
My son was playing the piano with his nanny
I walked into the room and had to walk right back out again
Made manifest to me
A message from you in precise calligraphy
Signed with a heart and that half-smile
On my little boy’s DNA
Oh, you’d love him, darling
And he you
Your beauty has so many unexpected homes
From piano keys to the way a bee drones.
There were many wounds I’ve minded.
Many times I’ve said
“What is this goddamn arrow lodged in my chest?”
My armor goes all the way to my bones, as you know
But every arrow eventually finds its way home
And when mine does I think I’ll be less afraid than some
Haven’t I always had you to lean on
When the tower falls
When the hanged man hangs
There it is, there is your face.
To paraphrase a silly movie I loved:
Dark matter, actually, is all around.
What if the tremor in my hand
Are unseen particles passing through
Having previously traveled through you.
I sat by the Washington Monument
And wanted someone to ask why I was crying
Even though I’d stuck a pair of big sunglasses on
And was doing a good job
Of pretending I had a raging cold.
I didn’t realize how nuts the years away were driving me
Tree rings like nooses, grating sedimentary rocks
Here the echinoid, and here the mollusk,
Here that crack running through
That nakedly splits me in two
(You’ve made another dirty joke in your head just now
Not clever enough to share on Facebook this time
And poured another girl more wine).
You’re damned if you don’t
You’re damned if you do
That’s why I only surrendered
An earlobe to you
My left breast
Went to someone else
My soul to the soldier –
Who never takes off his body armor
I feel it when I drape a leg across him
Before the dawn, when darkness is thickest
For God’s sake
Why do men have to be so complicated.
There are things one shouldn’t do without:
Love, friends, oyster lace, waiters that make small-talk, America.
America at dawn, with a small Baptist church
Like a dunce cap its too-big steeple
Being circled by – you guessed it – an eagle
As I stare dumbfounded with a plastic cup of coffee
Thinking “I need to come home again, finally, finally.”
My love, my love, America
Your reproachful security guards
Have a Hopper-like solitude in their eyes
Figures on a canvas together
That couldn’t be more apart.
What if all that you’re missing is on the other side
Of the particle divide?
What if dark matter is God
What if I one day learn to shut up.
There is no point in revealing
Only the safe, taut, irreproachable parts of oneself
The parts that ripen and grow heavy
For someone else’s pleasure
Before peaking and bursting and spilling
In a quick, ineffectual rain
Pounding the sidewalk in vain.
But there is equally no point
In thinking the elaborate, unreadable, too-personal patterns
Of your pain are worth someone else’s time.
We all walk through our own labyrinths
Just a few of us smart enough to carry string.
I’ve failed at everything I wanted
And I am so relieved.
On your birthday I want to be together again
The others’ birthdays are all vague to me
Hahaha, I say, I’m bad with names and dates, you guys
And start getting drunk in too much of a hurry.
An old fortuneteller said the whips of hell been chasing me
But it was when I was extra good that you took off your belt
What the hell do those bitches know anyway?
Slavic women swear by them – which would explain a lot.
They say you throw some impressive shadow, babe,
Giants can’t help it if all their gestures are grand
That’s why your ladies-in-waiting carry poison in their rings
While you let your pets sharpen their teeth on your throne.
Power is power, was it the heat of your whisper in my ear –
Or just summer creeping up the back stairs again?
Those grass stains never did come out of my jeans
My mother has her own score to settle with the delivery man.
I’m a big girl all the way, but I bite the pillow at night
It was you who taught me that some stories must wait to be told
Those seeds of the future you brought me on your tongue –
I kissed the red clay ground and still wait for them to grow.
Baby, do you remember, stars dropping like recon units from the sky
You and I, the hood of the car cooling, transferring energy to us
I didn’t know this kind of beauty was even possible
Let alone that it was a product of the laws of physics.
You didn’t know your strength, I didn’t know my weakness
We got by alright. Killer, painter, singer, soldier, moneychanger you were
Scientist, dreamer, reaper, slaver, shaman and winemaker
And me in your lap, braiding roses and rattlesnakes into my hair.
Baby, on your birthday, it was always you who gave the gifts
Some I wanted, some you pressed into my hand anyway
And when your sleazebag accountant said the balance was due
I put my hair up and decorated the sidewalk with my bags
I had a dream I was in the backseat with Nabokov
Hot leather stuck to my bare legs
Your smile in the rearview, those expensive teeth
Asking – Darlin, will you spring for the gas?
Rules are only for children and good Protestants
You said when I saw you last, teetering on the stair
I had that funny walk and I have it still
Ain’t no room inside me for a bigger affair.
Thank God for the side streets
Exhaling fog this time of year
Letting me step off the boulevard
And giving me a place to drown
My memories of Adelina.
This landscape is like a video game
I interact with it
Pull mysteries from it
Like silver fish from the blue sea.
Beneath each tile, each rail, each snail
I suspect there is a chance
To trigger dialogue
That would lead me back.
Better the white
Better a blank
Hopeless and upright
All edges gone
Nothing to snag.
It was Adelina’s husband
Who turned out to be
The snake in the garden.
Husbands are awfully keen on me.
He was walking along the shore
Back from a war
A crushed hummingbird in his jacket pocket
On his chest a tarnished locket
Of Adelina’s soft red hair.
“Sweetheart, you better beware,”
He said in a voice as thick as winter jam,
As heavy as glaze ice on a wing.
“Ever want something other
Than a silver spoon in your mouth?”
He said. “You’ll be gone before the month is out.”
“I will not be your man, nor will I be your love.
Honey, you’re just butter to a knife.
Honey, you’re honey, and you stick to my fangs.
If I don’t hold you down, you are everywhere.”
I was on vacation,
I was daring and fierce
I was full of an angry joy
There was salt in my braid from the waves
That teased and bit the shore.
I said, “You’ve been gone a long time.
Do you think there are places on you not good enough for my tongue?
Do you think the back of my throat and you can’t be good friends?”
“Keep asking, keep asking those questions,” Adelina’s husband said.
So it went.
The barmen in the stone halls winked at me
I got in everywhere like smoke and read poems for free
I didn’t let love and her twin sister, pain,
Sit down at my table.
I was exceedingly well-paid
In trinkets and honey and beds.
The thin skin of rabbits hugged my fingers
Until the day I ran into Adelina
With her outstretched hand –
So fine that I took off my gloves
And almost by accident
Felt the pulse of her pale wrist.
“He says you’re a poet –
I came to see for myself.”
The smoothness of her face
Was mathematically impossible.
Free of the locket her hair
Burned like a sunset-dipped halo.
I wanted to say that I wasn’t a poet
Not until this very moment.
We met in bars and talked for hours
Talked until the stars dissolved
Until the weathercock gave us the side-eye and crowed.
Adelina loved books and freedom,
Stitching saints’ medals into collars
Drawing fate on espresso foam
Wearing a chain with bells on a thin ankle
Splashing her cheeks with champagne at dawn.
She took me riding in the forest
It was so quiet we heard bluebells ring.
We lay on the tombs of old kings
High above sea level
And told stories
And imagined the marrow of the old bones beneath us
Leaking, weeping with desire.
Wasn’t it good to be alive?
Adelina’s kisses plump and rich
Breasts to fill a good brandy glass
She tasted like syrup squeezed from moss
And laughed at my metaphors.
She twisted my braid around her neck
Said I was killing her.
Like a shadow I’d crouch at her feet
When it was time for her to go.
“Promise me, promise
That you will be good and famous.
It will be my reward
In this life of wearing yellowed lace.
I didn’t marry well
Though you might disagree
With that last bit.”
One day, Adelina’s husband came
Boots thudding, joints groaning in the evening cold.
He invited me to speak as adults.
He pressed bluebells into my palm
Shredded and melted from his body heat
These sorry gifts
He said Adelina made her choice
He said her curiosity was satisfied
Never come between a man and his wife
Be generous to beggars, pray at night.
I threw the petals into my drink
I got so drunk, but I could still think.
Only one remedy for that
I let him lead me by the hand
To the cellar.
He spat on his fingers and promised to be gentle.
Still I cried, my “no, no” very slowly giving ground
To my “yes, yes.”
He said I had an ass for tearing
Flesh for weighing, too expensive,
Like a stack of veils at a silk merchant’s.
I slapped him for it
But my hand trembled.
I pressed the trace of his mouth on my collarbone
Like a button buried beneath my skin.
Then ran to stand in the light of her windows
Just to stand in those pale, flat rectangles
Imagining they were a magic circle.
Adelina leaned out of the window once
Shook her head, made the sign of the cross
Shrugged. Her hair was like rays of a departing sun.
She turned away and soundlessly closed the shutters.
In my mind’s eye I saw her take down a book
And cross her legs by the fire.
I saw the way pleasure at beauty curved
The corners of her mouth upward.
I vowed that my words would find her.
I vowed to one day be in there with her
Invited in from the cold.
I took the speediest train going north
Tearing through the countryside too fast
To let my eyes focus. It was a mercy.
Still I felt the dead kings rise
To wave a bone-creaking goodbye.
I came under the stone arch of my home
My children rushed out, hugging my skirt
They said it had been too long.
I handed out rose wafers, seashells,
Salt crystals like crowns,
A song I took from the pulsing throat of a nightingale,
Drops of frozen dragon blood set in gold,
Blinking doll eyes, ticking clock hearts,
A rainbow soft as sorbet.
I bought my way out of their recriminations
Flossed their teeth with silver spiderwebs
And put them to bed.
I walked into our garden
My husband was grilling raw meat
Sprinkling lemon juice and cursing his hangnails.
He fed me with his own rough fingers
Traced the insides of my mouth
Undid my blouse
Listened to the irregularities of my heart
Asked me about the south.
I said, “Why does this heart stumble and burn?
Why do I feel as though
It was me you laid down on these coals?
When does it stop?”
“Never,” he said, and smiled into his beard.
“You’re an artist now. You belong to it.”
Natalia A. 