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Movable Islands
By Debora Greger PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06422-2
CHAPTER 1
I wish I were the night that I might look on you with many eyes. — Plato
The First Movement
And when a little more time has passed, two or three hundred years, ... everything we do now will seem clumsy, and difficult, and terribly uncomfortable and strange. — Vershinin, in Three Sisters
Next door the dock starts over by itself,
grinding its gears like salt.
A letter is undelivered. In the desert
a sentry snaps awake in a night so black
he thinks his eyes no longer open,
and he feels for the iceberg
he had been sleeping on.
Slipping. The earth
curves sharply beneath him.
There is the fall he sees
the moment before it happens
that never happens.
Another morning, the whole island
tilts into the sun.
Over the next hill
an orchestra warms up.
The constant "A." The first movement,
andante cantabile.
He leans in the doorway,
half in or out,
and lifts his hand in a wave
although no one else is in sight.
The Armorer's Daughter
My father is a hard man.
When my mother couldn't give him a son,
he made the best of it, that is
he made me into what was missing.
So I polish a breastplate until
my smudged face is reflected blue-black
and my arm is stiff as a gauntlet.
I have my father's stubborn jaw
they tell me, those boys from the village
who tease, envious of my lot.
The roughened men who come for a mending,
who bring their smooth sons to be measured,
say I have his hands, too wide for a woman.
Then I think of the beetle on the stoop
whose shell shamed the finest armor.
It scuttled away when I reached down.
With his hand.
I am and am not him.
Give me the dusty wings of the moths
that dared spend the night on his workbench
and I would fly — where?
Out to the hill with the shepherd?
To the mill where the miller's son
is clouded in the finest-ground flour?
This wool-gathering angers my father,
he pounds music from metal,
a chorus of glow and chill, bend and stay.
I drop a helmet with a carelessness
I barely recognize and run into the yard,
into the road, tripping on my skirts.
Late afternoon, after a rain, already
the sun's low flame lights the edges
of everything. This world shines,
rings and shines, like his dream of heaven.
Fainted Desert
Another day knocking in the orchard —
a long-necked machine shaking almond trees
branch by branch, making the sound of someone
hitting the door, demanding entry.
But when I go to answer it, the door gives
under my hand onto a wall of heat.
Crawling out of leaves, a truck rattles to the road
just ahead of its dusty shadow.
What is hospitable about this parched landscape?
Colors present themselves as limply as waxes
left in the sun: plain brown, a little green,
a poor gold, blue that glares.
When have I not thought in these shades?
The poverty of imagination, taking what is given
as simply given. The pink Englishman,
on his antediluvian bike, wears pale,
buttoned-up layers of clothes as armor
against the weather. On what used to be
a kitchen chair in what was a garden,
his brown daughter shakes her straw-blonde hair
down across her shiny shoulders. She's winding
white yarn. Why do I detail, at such length?
It's like this that I love you, like dirt
which lies everywhere like water after long rain.
The Coloring of Experience
Against the tinny sky, scattered
on the elm's blackened branches,
the pale half-coins of its leaves
seemed a kind of wealth to the kid waiting
in the remnants of a rain for some adult
to finish with another.
I could say that while she stood squinting
in the refractable air, up in the house
a woman was suggesting to the girl's short father
that in bed everyone's the same height.
Or was using some similar line to maneuver him
down the hall. But no such grown-up
knowledge is tied to that tree,
that flat light. Just this: what I saw
when I was eight was someone else's vision
and unreportable. Still. Now I wonder
what those two middle-aged, middle-class
American tourists thought when
at Versailles both separately saw
an eighteenth-century courtier
cross a bridge no longer on the map.
Though companions, they didn't
speak of the outing for years and, when
they did, only to a third person.
Letter to My Sister
Today there is only a man and a half, and it is as still as the desert.... — Masha, in Three Sisters
On the way home I stopped
and listened to the ice
cracking in straight lines south,
lines the wild geese take.
The day turned from the sun
toward the cold that is the home of everything.
Tonight, tired of this house, this skin,
I think of the weight of darkness
on your house at the edge of the desert.
You in the old rocker, not rocking,
listening — to what?
"Wolves in the winter," your letter tells me,
"One never sees them.
How is one to sleep without them?"
One late afternoon
the wind filled your hair like a flag,
and your words blew against your face.
You crushed a sprig of sage
until the air was full of the smell,
half medicinal, half wild.
I remember that but nothing with it.
What am I looking for? Something small.
A twig to take me back. A twig to send me on.
Depth of Field
The last of the light rusts around us.
On your chest, a book's pages
ruffle in your slow breath.
Your camera, accurate about your children's
reluctance to stand still,
would freeze this flutter and miss
the one inside, your heart's
uneven, stubborn rhythm.
The book's about a tribe whose men,
on a long hunt, hollow little depressions
in the plains and sleep there,
to wake at dawn under a sheet of frost.
It doesn't say how the man
who discovered them spent his nights.
Or what drug is making you sleepy.
There's a photo in which one of us,
crying, has run from the pose
— to be captured, blurred fist
to bleary eye, in the corner of the frame.
You didn't know your own strength
the way we did, hugged hurriedly
after a sitting, in a tangle of cords and lights.
You don't know what remains of it.
Monet, in his last, huge, hazy paintings,
depicted water lilies, details
that for another painter would have been
just background. Middle distance,
depth of field — with sky-shaded eyes
you've been scanning what's out there
but listening for something else,
somewhere inside.
Pentimento
Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. — Lillian Hellman
Across the meadow a change of cloud comes
and, looking up, you see what you can't hear,
a whiteness falling, filling the cracks
in the old scenery, icing the aviary
and the stuffed bird on a summer hat.
Someone wearing white gloves
plays the white keys of a piano,
unaware that she is overheard. Caution,
that crumpled handkerchief,
is thrown to what wind there is.
The white creatures begin to appear:
The floury hands of your mother.
The clouds of her breath around your name.
The white shoes of summer.
The white arms of the tree you loved
and fell from. The white hair
of a girl you covered with leaves
under that tree. The white breast
hidden in the white dress.
A varying hare ventures into this
softened landscape, feeling safe
from the snowy owl. This is its error.
Yours is of a different order.
These things you had forgotten
have nothing to tell you.
You open the door to see more clearly.
There is the field, green,
and dark birds breaking into flight.
The Light Passages
A day later than he said in the letter,
still humming, half-whistling
the theme of the piece he stayed on to practice,
he leaves the car at the last road sign
and climbs the fence, taking the old shortcut
through the orchard at sunrise.
He stumbles through weeds,
sending up sleepy birds,
the only sounds their stiff wings
and ice cracking on the branches
from which they have risen,
thinking not of them but of how
Beethoven, playing a new sonata for friends,
hardly touched the keys
in the pianissimo,
imagining a light passage
that the others, not deaf, could not hear.
From the porch he looks back —
the orchard, still again,
is another world, a trick of the eye,
as the house in silhouette was before.
The house, still dark inside,
is still home.
Careful not to wake his family
after all the years,
he slips through the door
and surefooted as if he had never left
goes to the piano
and begins to play.
Physical Properties
After three days of wind
compounding itself, early this morning
it knocks the power out. What hour
was it last time? Prime, and your brother,
a groggy acolyte, extinguished a candle
he'd just lit, daydreaming of more sleep.
In the poor light of that hour,
a schoolgirl — you — discovered she was
wearing one black sock, one blue,
as she fumbled for the romantic novel
buried in her bookbag. Another
winter circus, these slippages
of memory, this hold. Like an acrobat
hurtling from her horse toward the paper-covered
hoop, you feel in the dim chill
you're moving into the embrace of a man
unaware of his size and attendant strength.
Maybe, like velocity, the fear is made
as much of duration as of direction.
That girl trying not to devour her story.
What the book didn't cover —
all properties of inertia. Maybe
it's just a matter of articulation.
Iced oak leaf stubbornly shivering
on its branch. This man's elegant jointing
braced to break your fall. These words,
involuntary as breath: This is what I
want. This hour is what I want.
Bad Debts
You peel an orange for someone
who's again bitten her nails to the quick.
She ignores the gesture's fruit,
but who can miss the sharp oils released?
The air is as freighted as that
over mint fields during harvest,
something shot past, caught afterwards.
The civil voices of your parents
wafted away as you drowsed in the back seat.
Beside you lay the shell, lime-whorled,
ripe with death's salt and stink.
Against your ear, its waves matched
the waves of your blood, giving back
what you are always left, that thief
of the moment, yourself. You owe something
still to that shell just as this woman
must owe you for wandering when you did
and for coming back as if to some other room.
She offers you an orange segment
but lets you open her hand and follow
the almost moonless nails, their calendar
of tenses, because it has nothing
to do with her. It's yourself you must
pay back, blankness for blankness,
kindness in kind.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Movable Islands by Debora Greger. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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