Cynthia Zarin

i early morning The rain, gray god with its huge hands has shredded the roses, and clapping, kept us up all night, the bridge washed out, the troll waiting to gobble a goat. How long has he been there, wet and cold, impatient, starving, his coat rent with welts and matted with mist? Father, thundering, his voice full of  bracken and leaves, leaves that in the autumn clogged the gutters.Who goes over the bridge? Who goes there?

for Max Ritvo I Three weeks until summer and then—what? Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine, fin de siècle, fin slicing the water of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver, then receding as if we hadn’t seen it, sultan of so long, see you tomorrow. Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal who swims too close—too close for what? The needle swerves. Our element chooses us. Water fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus, hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters. II If I could make it stop I would. Was it the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time? The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon, glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces. In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays, why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach, its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering, its metronome time bomb tsk tsk— when is giving up not giving in? III ( child’s pose ) When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get smaller, or did the world get larger? In the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue roses, white stained red—adolescence is to overdo it, but really? Thirty stories up, our birds’-eye view is the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head, wings beating, too tiny and too big to see, your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones daring the air, marionette running on the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’ freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change. Let me go from here to anywhere. IV That’s it for now. And so we turn the page your poems standing in for you, or—that’s not it, what’s left of you, mediating between what you’d call mind and body and I, by now biting my lip, call grief, the lines netting the enormous air like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch “as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts and catch on air.”Pace. Your trousers worn to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip prongs barely holding them aloft, the past a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking at before and after, but there is no after. V Or is there? For once, when you rock back on the chair I don’t say don’t do that, forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air— Every departure’s an elopement, the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles, spoon mirror flipping us upside down. Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights blazing, when one light goes out they all go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter branches a candelabra for the spiders’ silvery halo of threads. What a terrible business it is, saying what you mean. Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.

Between the bent boughs of the splayed sumac the silver owl rests his head. The perimeter left by your absence is long to walk in one day. The angel in her credenza of extreme beauty dogs swim the river I look for my heart by the lamp where the light is skitter in the wet black leaves

This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers, of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me. It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs, inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.