Sandra McPherson

They so liked breast milk; Joanne fell asleep & leaked, the ants woke up, made the sweet climb. Others were surprised to find acidophilus, Soledad cleansing her inside sex — they made their way across her ivory sheets while she napped. Ah, the little guys were rejected by our sisters. But still, I feel sad that in my new lodgings there are no more glossy arrowheads to follow, sprinkle with baking powder, make a pretty cayenne path for over the once-food-strewn sill (they scent our past). They can carry their groceries bag-free: & ants shop in the honey cupboard, thirst like black hair being washed in a sink. Car-waxed black traffic jam — that’s actual jam, strawberry. Once my curatorial staff. But let them go on strike. Those embodiments of intention; they don’t sit around playing cards; perhaps they never play, never horse around. Hard-to-see-in-the-dark jet numbers on the radio dial. Perhaps there is no laughter in their chasm. Serious: but they’re able to stand up on hind legs — a darling trick. I want to give them a little inkwell. A beachball. The number of communal legs alone exceeds the stars underground. They could be an orchestra. A single one looks in the mirror & sees a note. A quarter note. So many instincts massing as one. If I miss one little lover, do I miss them all?

“What can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait?” said James McNeill. Did he look down from neutral heaven on the dealer wearing flannel plaid, adjusting to my denim chair, to make the arrangement, pocket my check in black and smudge and white? The agents said they could easily find it if I had no carbon. FBI with their silk knots and sober suiting just like the famous oil though on different body parts. I could be Mrs. Whistler, but I was the dupe, eyes lowered, the menswear pair noble shadows, tracking down the evil and clever eBay forger (not the original cormorant-tousled Martinez I thought I was purchasing with his true (M) mark from his 19th-century hand). Inspectors with their pointed interrogations — they were way beyond clues — who when they left would form, and be, long shadows at each end of day. Make shapes you might assume would fall from mountain goats in frightening terrain. They reported answers they knew all along. Thigh-high in paintings, I thought to wade out with my honest eyes so little notorious, from mistaken tonalists, expressionists, Society of Six ... The crook posed in tartan, I fine-tuned to the agents; he talked ordinary — that was my best judgment. So what? He warmed, and got richer in, my denim wingback. I thought of Anna’s stern profile; and were they profilers? And as they shook my hand good-bye, I said, Do your wives collect anything? What do you think? they implied.

This water flows dark red from alder tannin: boot-stain river between white rocks. An ouzel, flannel-feathered, sips the current up. Mossgatherers spread their patches across a dry, flat turnaround. They seem embarrassed, want to shelter in the dark. A coyote running in broad day; stumps ruffling with sulphur polypores woodsy to the tongue, woody to teeth. Early yellow leaves paste river to its bed; blackberries drop, the last, many out of taste and strictly smudge. Puddles loop in the road: Bottomland— the foolhen waits there for the fool gun, gray throat-down free in a burst, the pose, the afterslump. Carcass beside spirit. O come to my hand, unkillable; whatever continues, continue to approach.

We are dropping one and gaining two—. The things I cannot do include to sleep, to calm the spillway of the blood, to face an auditorium, wishing it were churchy pillbox hats— recital mothers’— with no sense of Vogue or the Baroque. I’ve other pills to tramp on grief, estrange pain, and hatch the part of waking that is dreams, double one dose to un-depress and to write less and less a chronicle of anxiety. I spot-treat a spate of addiction in this faint dusk world of peach sky and plum leaflets— a woman in her prime, pilled together.

The child I left your class to have Later had a habit of sleeping With her arms around a globe She’d unscrewed, dropped, and dented. I always felt she could possess it, The pink countries and the mauve And the ocean which got to keep its blue. Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach, Which you had never had to do, you took A bare-walled room, alone, its northern Windowscapes as gray as walls. To decorate, you’d only brought a black madonna. I thought you must have skipped summer that year, Southern winter, southern spring, then north For winter over again. Still, it pleased you To take credit for introducing us, And later to bring our daughter a small flipbook Of partners dancing, and a ring With a secret whistle. —All are Broken now like her globe, but she remembers Them as I recall the black madonna Facing you across the room so that In a way you had the dark fertile life You were always giving gifts to. Your smaller admirer off to school, I take the globe and roll it away: where On it now is someone like you?

I accompany this life’s events like a personal journalist: “Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon ...”; or “Despite inauspicious beginnings, this was to be their happiest year.” Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true. And how could we foresee an answer to that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts. I am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse is a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich at the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars. Shouldn’t we refuse prediction that the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable as this child’s hope is, it will break tomorrow?

for M.H. Friend, remember how you showed us beasts love beauty? We were wading in your lake with bluegills and you said, Be careful, you will lose your beauty marks To their little jaws. We were a delicacy. From us they purchased The darkest part of the skin, only what contrasts on us. And it was more than a pinch or sting, It’s a sensation of hunger That makes us spring off the bottom and swim out deep And safe. “No blue stripes on cheeks; no red on fins; Old individual’s belly coppery red or brassy.” As others see you, I think these indicate, Who would have you all one shade then wouldn’t have you. At your full table later, over muskellunge and lemon, We read in the book the fish that liked us Has certain maxillaries “wholly wanting.” Your gourmet bluegill: It lives in the eye of the beholder, it swims the vitreous Humor, would eat even your blind spot! But we think we can paddle out there until all Goes dark, and we are wholly desirable, and too much.

1 White lather on black soap— Maria’s gift. It reminds me Of when a woman died And they handed me her ring. Then they left to divide the roots for her. Daylight went down there shining. By accident, cleaning the hearth Of a house to leave it for good, I learned how to see A star come out: work My hand into the ashes. 2 “You’ve thrown a chestnut hull into the fireplace again,” Said Colette’s mother, “My clean ashes!” Naughty Colette had soiled the washing ashes Of applewood, poplar, and elm. Stretched over the big cauldron In the washhouse, hemp cloth held the ashes The washwoman poured a jug of boiling water on. They smelled almost sweet as the lye Filtered into the mass of linen. The air darkened with blue clouds. In the smoking lava layer of ashes, A few cinders of chestnut hulls, The tannin’s yellow stain. 3 Look for something You’ve been every day of your life. You said it was “lonely.” I’m certain it is also “clean.” My body’s big years diminish soap. My grandmother, whose diamond it was, Had a stone in her tub. I rubbed it on my feet As later I walked, Building little hoofs, All summer shoeless on creek gravel. That black bar of stone In the widow’s clean house, That volcanic pumice skips Over most hard places But softens at least one. 4 Once there was a downpour of rain They took as a judgment. It confused her billowing, steaming skirts. Another time—those times were hard— The executioner let go the twisted hemp From her neck sooner than he should Because the flames reached his hands. Nor would I, if I’d had to live then, Put my hands into the fire Those three hours it took to reduce her. But after, I’d scrub all over With the ashes of the still warm Black heart of the witch.