Dorianne Laux

The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks. Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken little finger on my right hand at birth— I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky into stars, the stars into patterns I make up as I trace them with a broken-off blade of grass. Possible, unthinkable, the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long-gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil. I can hear Frank's dry voice combing the air for song, but what I see is his skeleton entombed in dust, wrapped in his dapper suit, his razzle-dazzle sunglasses. She sees him alive, ambling down a sidewalk, all of New York clambering into the sky behind him, cuff links winking, his dear friends waving, calling him by name like they do in the city: 800,000 people and you step outside for a smoke and see someone you know. That's how it is with death. Those you love come at you like lightning, crackle for an instant—so kissable— and then lips and all, they're gone.

She never spoke, which made her obvious, the way death makes the air obvious in an empty chair, the way sky compressed between bare branches is more gray or blue, the way a window is more apparent than a wall. She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat, smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence colored the smaller silences that came and went, that other students stood up and filled in. I leaned near the window in my office. She sat on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting while I made my little speech. February light pressed its cold back against the glass, sealing us in. She focused on my lips as I spoke, as if to study how it's done, the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem, shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow, let its petals settle on my shoulders. I looked outside to the branches of a stripped tree, winter starlings folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames shuddering at the tips. Students wandered across campus as if under water, hands and hair unfurling, their soundless mouths churning— irate or ecstatic, I couldn't tell—ready to burn it all down or break into song. When I looked back her eyes had found the window: tree, students, birds swimming by, mute in their element. It was painful to hear the papery rasp of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch color smudging her neck and temple, branching to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush collapse. I could hear her breath—smoke rising from ice. I could see what it cost her to make that leap. What heat it takes for the body to blossom into speech.

Bless this boy, born with the strong face of my older brother, the one I loved most, who jumped with me from the roof of the playhouse, my hand in his hand. On Friday nights we watched Twilight Zone and he let me hold the bowl of popcorn, a blanket draped over our shoulders, saying, Don't be afraid. I was never afraid when I was with my big brother who let me touch the baseball-size muscles living in his arms, who carried me on his back through the lonely neighborhood, held tight to the fender of my bike until I made him let go. The year he was fourteen he looked just like Ray, and when he died at twenty-two on a roadside in Germany I thought he was gone forever. But Ray runs into the kitchen: dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, pushes back his sleeve. He says, Feel my muscle, and I do.

I passed through the narrow hills of my mother's hips one cold morning and never looked back, until now, clipping her tough toenails, sitting on the bed's edge combing out the tuft of hair at the crown where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs locked into her fists, a gesture as old as she is, her blanched knees fallen together beneath a blue nightgown. The stroke took whole pages of words, random years torn from the calendar, the names of roses leaning over her driveway: Cadenza, Great Western, American Beauty. She can't think, can't drink her morning tea, do her crossword puzzle in ink. She's afraid of everything, the sound of the front door opening, light falling through the blinds— pulls her legs up so the bright bars won't touch her feet. I help her with the buttons on her sweater. She looks hard at me and says the word sleeve. Exactly, I tell her and her face relaxes for the first time in days. I lie down next to her on the flowered sheets and tell her a story about the day she was born, head first into a hard world: the Great Depression, shanties, Hoovervilles, railroads and unions. I tell her about Amelia Earhart and she asks Air? and points to the ceiling. Asks Heart? and points to her chest. Yes, I say. I sing Cole Porter songs.Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? When I recite lines from Gone with the Wind she sits up and says Potatoes! and I say, Right again. I read her Sandburg, some Frost, and she closes her eyes. I say yes, yes, and tuck her in. It's summer. She's tired. No one knows where she's been.

It's tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff, the strong silent type, having to laugh it off—pain, loss, sorrow, betrayal—or leave in a huff and say No big deal, take a ride, listen to enough loud rock and roll that it scours out your head, if not your heart. Or to be called a fag or a poof when you love something or someone, scuffing a shoe across the floor, hiding a smile in a muffler pulled up nose high, an eyebrow raised for the word quaff used in casual conversation—wine, air, oil change at the Jiffy Lube—gulping it down, a joke no one gets. It's rough, yes, the tie around the neck, the starched white cuffs too long, too short, frayed, frilled, rolled up. The self isn't an easy quest for a beast with balls, a cock, proof of something difficult to define or defend. Chief or chef, thief or roofer, serf or sheriff, feet on the earth or aloof. Son, brother, husband, lover, father, they are different from us, except when they fall or stand alone on a wharf.

and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate ballet above the clashing pirouettes of heavy machinery. They hum with life. While inside rumpled sacks pure white maggots writhe and spiral from a rip, a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips a living froth onto the buried earth. The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch, rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges, a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh. And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening, husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening and shifting within, wings curled and wet, the open air pungent and ready to receive them in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts, a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents soundly sleep along the windowsill, content, wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass. Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create—our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation's industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

The heart shifts shape of its own accord— from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent, the corn dog stand. Or the heart is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead wait, paging through magazines, licking their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks through a door into a maze of hallways. Behind one door a roomful of orchids, behind another, the smell of burned toast. The rooms go on and on: sewing room with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles, room full of file cabinets and torn curtains, room buzzing with a thousand black flies. Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke, a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt. Heart makes a wrong turn. Heart locked in its gate of thorns. Heart with its hands folded in its lap. Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake. It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down. Bored, it watches movies deep into the night, stands by the window counting the streetlamps squinting out one by one. Heart with its hundred mouths open. Heart with its hundred eyes closed. Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel, heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence. Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked in devoted rows, their dusty spines unreadable. Heart with its hands full. Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history's lists, things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart. Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal. Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues. Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe. Heart with its feet up reading the scores. Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster. Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club, banging on the lid.

The neighborhood cringes behind windows washed in magnesium light, streamers fizzling above the shingled rooftop of the apartments across the street where teenaged boys with mannish arms throw cherry bombs, bottle rockets, wings and spinners, snappers, chasers, fiery cryolite wheels onto the avenue. Paint flakes off the flammable houses and onto brave square plots of white grass. Rain-deprived vines sucker the shutters. Backyard dogs tear at the dirt, cats run flat out, their tails straight up. What's liberty to the checkout girl selling smokes and nuts, greenbacks turning her fingers to grease? The boys insist on pursuing happiness, their birthright: a box of matches, crackers on strings, sparklers, fountains, missiles, repeating shells, Roman candles, Brazilian barrages. We peek through blind slats to where they stand around a manhole cover, the gold foam of Corona bottles breaking at their feet, young up-turned faces lit by large caliber multi-shot aerials. We suffer each concussion, the sulfer rush that smells like fear, each dizzy, orgiastic display that says we love this country, democracy, the right to a speedy trial. We're afraid to complain, to cross the spent red casings melted on asphalt in the morning's stunned aftermath, to knock hard on any door, and find them draped like dead men over the couches, the floor, hands clasped behind their heads prison style, shoulders tattooed, dreaming the dreams of free men in summer, shirts off, holes in their jeans.

for Richard Before the days of self service, when you never had to pump your own gas, I was the one who did it for you, the girl who stepped out at the sound of a bell with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back in a straight, unlovely ponytail. This was before automatic shut-offs and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank, I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas backed up, came arcing out of the hole in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts, belly and legs. And I had to hurry back to the booth, the small employee bathroom with the broken lock, to change my uniform, peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin and wash myself in the sink. Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt pure and amazed — the way the amber gas glazed my flesh, the searing, subterranean pain of it, how my skin shimmered and ached, glowed like rainbowed oil on the pavement. I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall, for the first time, in love, that man waiting patiently in my future like a red leaf on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty that asks to be noticed. How was I to know it would begin this way: every cell of my body burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me a nimbus of light that would carry me through the days, how when he found me, weeks later, he would find me like that, an ordinary woman who could rise in flame, all he would have to do is come close and touch me.