Rachel Richardson

Novel unbegun, half-loaf rising, lighthouse northward and anchor south. Lemon to grapefruit, you sleep-step sidewise, turnover, pop-up, tongue in the mouth.

You were given feet but had never touched them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months. So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck, and when they cut you from me, and you were silent, and the tide in me receded, I remembered the shearwaters following the ship—the slow sweep of them riding the wind’s current. The stretch of them, hovering, cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched from the stern for hours their trailing: as if stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life. Then someone lifted you up, and there was a sound, and they laid you on me, breathing.

The first time I touched it, cloth fell under my fingers, the frail white folds softened, demure. No burn, no combustion at the touch of skin. It sat, silent, like any other contents of any other box: photographs of the dead, heirloom jewels. Exposed to thin windowlight it is exactly as in movies: a long gown, and where a chest must have breathed, a red cross crossed over. The crown, I know, waits underneath, the hood with eyes carefully stitched open, arch cap like a bishop’s, surging to its point.

Let’s say I’m Captain Cook, setting sail to drift until currents push me into a certain lane, certain highway with its humpbacked traffic bobbing along. My young aren’t strapped in the back flinging Cheerios into the crevices like a game of darts but moored in the house with my patient wife so I can seek my destiny here— And I have no destination, not the Friendly Center or aquarium—I journey only to find a usable route. I’m stewing the bones a fourth time to leach any last savor for my broth— not gumming pirate birthday cake with seafoam-colored frosting, nor placing my order at the drive-thru (no, not a Frosty, not a McRib)— Place-names are still to be scrawled, new-minted to mark this passage, its weather and bits of luck. The usable route’s a velvet highway I’ll trace to parchment—a new day, a new world, not the GPS lady recalculating— These words held in my mouth, these words a way to inscribe we are not lost in a vast expanse of lostness.

I I am asking something gone return: at least one night, her face a girl’s, just twenty, and to be married in a month, holding the dress’s hem to her lips as places are called. And I, come along too late to know her trembling, parting the curtain— let me hear her now perched on the ladder, recite “But Mama, . . . am I pretty enough . . . ?” II When Emily marries, ladies in hats drown out the proper vows —it’s what the play requires; the everyday over the sacred. Even the set is made of items found in the actors’ garages so we always see back to the bones. Here my grandmother stands at the altar with her fictional George and gossip swells in the pews which are rows of folding chairs. III Among the murmuring departed, in the cemetery, my grandmother takes her place at the empty plot. She’s the newcomer who can’t believe she’s dead if the living roam just on the crest of this hill. My grandmother in white poplin dress and hair ribbon lifts her arms in despair— Emily, untouched by the rain. IV Tomorrow her face will glow on the cover of The Shreveport Times— a gorgeous girl demanding her life. “But oh!” she cries in Emily’s voice, “I can go back there and live all those days over again . . .” V So Emily steps back into childhood though the wiser dead have told her don’t— into her mother’s kitchen, her twelfth birthday, a moment she thought she was happy. She watches now that life: mother speaking gruffly, father late to work. Dead Emily kisses the cheek of the classmate playing her mother— understanding, in that kitchen, they’d all been blind: they never knew those people they said they loved. VI My grandmother maintains her grace to the end. She is the queen of the theater; all of Shreveport melts for her smile. She holds her palms out to feel the heavy drops as the curtains close, though she knows this rain is only the sound of rain.

He started with the tune his mother had hummed in Ohio, nostalgia he’d carried for years, and by Sunday afternoon he had the words. A triumph, already; he whistled the banjo’s part. (Himself a sympathizer from the North, called copperhead, called traitor by his own kin.) Something lively, some git-up-and-git they’d wanted and didn’t he deliver— Miss Susan got seven encores the first night. That gave them their tune, their Negro walk-around— Look away, look away, look away, they sang. Vipers, that spring, spread thick on the ground.

How to get to it: the heart within the corset made of whalebone and Parisian leaded satin, winter weight. I can barely breathe. Sun filters from high windows into this dark-paneled room where my sister helps me step into the skirt, our grandmother’s grandmother’s sent-for dress, its pinprick satin buttons down my chest. We hook each hook to hold the corset flush, to anchor the bustle, as she did for her quiet February wedding, snow covering the steeple of the Seamen’s Bethel. Melville:This, shipmates, is that other lesson: fasten the locks, hold the heart within its watery chamber. When the seamstress slid the bone into the bodice and pinned each cut piece together, the satin stood upright at the sewing table. She could almost see it breathe. I am swallowed and swallowed whole. It outlasts all our vows.

I need them true to life and so I shoot them, as many as fill the field at dawn, and then fix wires to prop them as if feeding their young or bending to the river. Why make a little book when they exist life-sized, can be etched to stand high as my hip? Often have I wished I had eight pairs of hands to hold them, and another body for the gun.

A child climbs into a cardboard house, shuts its doors and windows to hold in the dark, and lies on her back inside, looking up through its cut-out moon and stars. She knows she is not looking at the sky. But she calls out, still, It's nighttime! I'm looking at the sky!