Eloise Klein Healy

and on the waves in turmoil in the harbor gulls floated like pieces of paper set adrift, little boat-like birds twirling in the wind-tossed waves that drove into the strong arms of the seawall at the apex of the bay where a statue of Sappho stands, young woman with a lyre—not looking out to sea but glancing at the curve of the seawall and the birds, those lost notes before rain

for Sappho Let my music be found wanting in comparison to yours (as it must) let me be found loving (as you were) extravagantly the beautiful let me find you and the song (forever) between us in these terrible times

My father’s dying resembles nothing so much as a small village building itself in the mind of a traveler who reads about it and thinks to go there. The journey is imagined in a way not even felt as when years ago I knew my father would die someday. The idea came up as fast as a curve in a road which opens out to an unexpected vista, and now in this journey the road gravel crunches under my tires. I miss some of the streets, get lost, get lost. I find I’m no tourist anymore and settle into the oldest human assignment. Bury your father and live forever as a stranger in that town.

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new. You redirect the conversation. A man has entered it. Your therapist has given you permission to discuss this with me, the word you’ve been looking for in desire. You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean different things when we say it. I mean the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire to enter the world with a man instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you who have children to think of, you who have put me in line behind them and mean to keep the order clear. It’s really my word against yours anymore in this new language, in this battle over how a man is about to enter this closed room of desire we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you say to me. Instead I learn a man can protect you in a way a woman only means to but never can, and my world is too new when there’s real life out there, word after word for how normal looks, each word cutting like scissors a profile of desire— a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you and the world simultaneously, say what I mean with my body, my choice to not be a man, to be a woman with you, forget the man’s part or how his body is the word for what touch can contain, what love means. If this were only about desire, you say, I’d still desire you. But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new consequences emerge when a man and desire are part of the words we hurl, you changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

for Colleen The cliff above where we stand is crumbling and up on the Palisades the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt. Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts in perfect unison against a backdrop of gorgeous blue, and for you I would try it, though I have always forbidden myself to write poems about the beach at sunset. All the clichés for it sputter like the first generation of neon, and what attracts me anyway are these four species of gulls we’ve identified, their bodies turned into the wind, and not one of them aware of their silly beauty. I’m the one awash in pastels and hoping to salvage the day, finally turning away from the last light on the western shore and the steady whoosh of waves driving in, drumming insistently like the undeniable data of the cancer in your breast. We walk back to the car and take the top down for the ride home through the early mist. No matter what else is happening, this is California. You’ll have your cancer at freeway speeds. I’ll drive and park and drive at park. The hospital when I arrive to visit will be catching the last rays of the sun, glinting like an architectural miracle realized. I realize a miracle is what you need— a grain of sand, a perfect world where you live beyond the facts of what your body has given you as the first taste of death.

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.