Mary Ruefle

Women who lie alone at midnight because there is no one else to lie to Women who lie alone at midnight at noon in the laundromat destroying their own socks Women who lie alone at midnight: Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates Women who lie alone at midnight as the first furl of starlight pearls the moon with nacre Women who lie alone at midnight sending a postcard bearing the face of a bawling infant who cries “I am for the new” Women who lie alone at midnight reciting the names of shoes Women who lie alone at midnight spurting unjustified tears, the kind that run sideways never reaching the mouth, the kind you cannot swallow Women who lie alone at midnight singing breast away the burden of my tender and afterwards burp Women who lie alone at midnight obeying the laws of physics Women who let their dreams curl at the end Women in a monastery of flamingos Women who die alone at midnight contributing to the end, to lost time, to the rain and flies, seeing the bird they saw trapped in the airport surviving by the water fountain What’s more, try it sometime It works

Nothing curves at sea, and the men there die abruptly, in imitation of the fact, except when the ship rises higher than necessary and then they must drop suddenly but for a long time, so that their deaths appear natural in the end, and the women sweeping the coutyards pause, thinking the dust to be the cause of a specific dryness in the mouth. They leave half of a pastry to harden on a plate. They leave all of the lemons and figs in bowls. They leave fuschia splattered on the stone steps leading down to the bay. They carry their brooms with them, keep sweeping the air, cleaning it back to the sea. They sweep the sand from the shore, feet standing in neat little rows of foam. Each at the edge of something when the foghorns remind them: they will not clearly remember it, they will not altogether forget it. They will wait for something to emerge, like a man at sea carving his children from soap. One woman will start the rumor that the sea is deeper than necessary: Tell her, when has anyone ever come back for one day’s effort on earth?

Having been blown away by a book I am in the gutter at the end of the street in little pieces like the alphabet (mother do not worry letters are not flesh though there’s meaning in them but not when they are mean my letters to you were mean I found them after you died and read them and tore them up and fed them to the wind thank you for intruding I love you now leave) Also at the end of the street there is a magnolia tree the white kind that tatters after it blooms so the tree winds up in the street Our naked shivering bodies must be at some distance missing us    come back come back they cry come home put down that book whenever you read you drift away on a raft you like your parrot more than you like me and stuff like that (dear father you always were a bore but I loved you more than interesting things and in your honor I’ve felt the same about myself and everyone I’ve ever met) I like to read in tree houses whenever I can    which is seldom and sometimes never The book that blew me away held all the problems of the world and those of being alive under my nose but I felt far away from them at the same time reading is like that (I am sorry I did not go to your funeral but like you said on the phone an insect cannot crawl to China) Here at the end of the street the insects go on living under the dome of the pacific sky If Mary and Joseph had walked the sixty miles to Bethlehem vertically they would have found themselves floating in the outer pitch of space it would have been cold no inns a long night in the dark endless and when they began to cry the whole world would think something had just been born I like to read into things as I am continually borne forward in time by the winds like the snow (dear sister you were perfect in every way like a baby please tell brother the only reason we never spoke was out of our great love for each other which made a big wind that blew us apart) I think I am coming back I feel shoulders where a parrot could land though a tree would be as good a place as any You cannot teach a tree to talk Trees can say    it is spring but not    though bright sunlight can also be very sad have you noticed?

Who won? I said. The game’s tomorrow, he said. And I became the snail I always was, crossing the field in my helmet. But I’d given it my all, while the plane arced on its way to a landing, when I overheard the woman behind us say I was gathering wildflowers to make a wreath to lay on my mother’s grave when my son fell off a mountain in Italy

I was born in Speckled Eggs Garden. I will die on Broken Egg Farm. I’m hopping between them now, I consider everything to be friendly and nothing dubbed. I am a chick with legs and yellow hair. Oh Lord Almighty, creator of all things beautiful and sick, who prefers another life on top of this, who are you to judge? When Adam and Eve vanished solemnly into the dark, shrouding themselves in the forest, I was timid and nibbling and stayed behind, betrayed only by the plucking of my beak upon the ground you so graciously provided (thanks). I did noth with the best, I am nothing now, do ye noth with me or not? Hear me now before I break O Lord of the Margent, Lord of noth and straw and all things sent far, cheerio, sincerely, I sleep on one leg too!

God put his finger on my sacrum and he lifted me, he set me in the center of the universe, the curious desire of my chronically lonely life. It was cold and dark and lonely and I was scared. There were no accessories. I burst into tears over nothing. What would Jimmy Schuyler do? wwjsd ? And as quietly as the sound of Kleenex being pulled from a box, I sneezed. And morning, that goddess, as if she were slightly deaf, barely lifted her head off the horizon before laying back down. And a rose opened her portals and the scent ran up an elephant’s trunk, or tried to. Such a long way for everything to travel! From here I look like a front moving in An icy purple light a poet would say belonged to a perfume stopper belonging to his mother. When it was her nipple. You know, neither in the past or in the future.

I The teacher said inner truth and the chalk said like a fresco inside the earth that no one has ever seen and one day decides to be discovered and begins to breathe— do you know what that means? II The child broke the chalk. The mother said be strong. The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf. III A detective has just drawn a circle with a piece of chalk, a private circle from which the victim will eventually look up, not at random, not at will, but when it calls to her, the chalk, the crushed bones of sea creatures who ringed the earth when it was under water. IV A man sits in the bath house in a deep tub of fizzling yellow water that surrounds every hair on his body and makes it stand upright. When the attendant comes, she will clean the tub by moving her hand slowly around the ring, like a snail. V An atoll is a ring of coral protecting a tureen of plankton. It is easy and Japanese to be sad knowing something is going to pass. He put the ring on her chalky finger. VI Long after chalk had passed out of use, carpenters still felt for it in their pockets and looked aimlessly at the sky. VII The cathedral was roofless. It began to snow inside. A half broken pillar in the nave grew taller.

A bride and a groom sitting in an open buggy in the rain, holding hands but not looking at each other, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the marriage to begin, embarrassed by the rain, the effect of the rain on the bridal veil, the wet horse with his mane in his eyes, the rain cold as the sea, the sea deep as love, big drops of rain falling on the leather seat, the rain beaded on a rose pinned to the groom’s lapel, the rain on the bride’s bouquet, on the baby’s breath there, the sound of the rain hitting the driver’s top hat, the rain shining like satin on the black street, on the tips of patent leather shoes, Hokusai’s father who polished mirrors for a living, Hokusai’s father watching the sky for clouds, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing rain over a bridge and over the people crossing the bridge, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing the rain for hours, Hokusai’s father rubbing a mirror, the rain cold as the sea, the sea cold as love, the sea swelling to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.

A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights. As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window, cupping it around the wind. He’d been assured this is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you put your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breast in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.

On a mountain flat with snow a blue cloud paints a last touch of life. There’s endless harm in trying a dead body on for size. The gentleman stands out in every detail, except color. He considers his life of a madness that breaks unexpected (one boy had a sweetheart he wore her hair round his finger it kept it from falling off with the rest) or comes also if he composes it (lift one eye shut, put rifle butt in the slack jaw of soldiers decomposing). He fell in love like a woman in the folded arms of a drying sweater: touched one shoulder and a whole platoon was affixed with smiles. Teeth already loose falling from their envelopes thick folded letters in a dead white mist.