Sherod Santos

Pushing off on her back out Into the fishpond’s cold Archaic glitter, my naked wife Could not have guessed how High she rode into the noon Sky, a brightened polestar Gliding out between nothing And nothing, between a sun- Lit vacancy and its ancient, Reflected, weightless Hour unrippling back From the sedges. The just- Cut grasses fumed around her Like gasoline, a few Spent bees dozed above The compost, and in my arms The steady thrum of the mower Carried on, though I’d Shut it off to sit down And watch: but so fond of her, The water parted to take Her back from that aimless Sky, where light- Headed and slippery as a star She turtled under the still Simmering Indian summer To startle the sunfish At the margins—then punctured Back with a blow-frog’s gasp, An amazed stranger Conjured into the world By a willow shadow Spread out on the grass Like an extravagant Old World gesture no One believes in anymore. On that stalled shore she climbed Back out among the cool And slightly washed- Out leaves to towel off, Put on her clothes, and shake Her hair out in no time Which slips off into the past, Or future, into nothing But the pure unburnished hum- Drum of that moment, that place, From which we turned away Eventually and went back to work.

I. Did he think that disguise would fool me? Gathering about His balding head those filthy rags, poor-mouthing His way beside my fire, then gazing into the looking glass Of my bride’s-mind to summon up the legend I’d seen last at the ashwood threshold twenty years ago, The husband who’d upped and sailed away on a black, Oar-swept ship of war to a place he called. . . I call Destroy. “Your son will vouch for me,” he claimed, “I saw your king On foreign soil. He wore a wine-dark, woolen cape Fastened by a brooch inlaid with gold, a brooch on which A great hound clenched and throttled to death a dappled fawn.” He knew, of course, I’d given Odysseus that very cape, Had dyed its wool that royal red, had buckled its folds With that same brooch. And so, I suppose, I passed his test. The salt tears soaked my cheek. A fact he took in silently Beneath his rags, though how could I not have recognized him With his poet’s words, his poet’s unfazed self-concern So skillfully playing my emotions? The truth is, However much I loved that man in the wine-dark cape, However much I’d longed for him, I’d have settled For the man with thinning hair, the beggar-king of Ithaca. II. Having slept alone year after year in the upper story Of our high-roofed home, having awakened nightly In that rooted, rightly far-famed bed he’d built by hand Around the bole of a thickset olive tree, I soon Discovered there are two known gates through which All dreams must come to pass. The first is made Of ivory, cleanly carved, the second of polished horn; Through ivory our dreams are will-o’-the-wisps, scant Tracings on the air, through horn they’re star-signs We’d be wise to chart our futures by. It was through horn It came that night he questioned me beside the fire, The contest of twelve axes, one for each month Of the year I’d lived through twenty times for him, Housebound to the labor of my hardwood loom. The thwarted suitors watched agog, he watched them watch, Though no one saw (how could they?) how the hand That strung his bow recalled my own hand spooling out New wool, that drew on strength enough to strike An arrow through a dozen axe-helve socket rings Recalled the heart it took each night to climb back Into the vaulted tomb of our empty, tree-housed bed. III. Waiting at the doorway while I was brushing back my hair, Odysseus stood and stared across the unraked terrace Gardens trashed from last night’s welcome home. One guttering pine-pitch torch still burned, its pool Of light apotheosized to a ringing lyre—the singer’s Who had begged him calm his bloodlust, spare One pauper soul among that heavy haul of slaughtered men. He’d been every inch the hero then, spattered with gore, His forehead glistening, dripping red. But this morning, He looked to me just as he had looked before: his thin Shirt clung like onion skin to his boxer’s ropy Shoulders, his young man’s muscled chest and arms; And as before, those faraway, slightly moonstruck eyes Seemed focused on a flyspeck at the world’s end. It struck me then that, even as he stood there, steeped In the memory of all this place brought home to him, He labored at the anchor of whatever in me Refused that death his heart most longed to master. And as before, I could see it coming, his going away, Those maddened gulls scavenging after the trim black ship My harbored longings had driven out of reach.

The day of my mother’s funeral I spend clearing out her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to see not feel what had to be done, not to go on asking, not to wonder anymore. Full from scraps I’d found at the back of the refrigerator, her mongrel dog lay curled on a stone and watched me work. It was Sunday. The telephone rang, then stopped, then rang again. By the end of the day, I’d done what I could. I swept the walk, put away the tools, switched on the indoor safety lamps, and then (it hardly matters what I think I felt) I closed the gate on a house where no one lived anymore.

—for Logan and Renée Jenkins Unlike almost everything Else just surviving here In summer, poison flowers Flourish in this sweltering Heat, tangling like blown Litter in fences around The trailer parks and motel Pools, and turning the islands Pinkish-white between Divided lanes of freeway, Where all day long against The burnished hubbub of U- Haul trucks and automobiles, Off-the-road vehicles and Campers, the oleander shakes Its brightly polished pocket- Knives, as at the motorcade Of some ambassador hurrying Through a village of the poor. And every day by late after- Noon the overwatered lawns Around the shopping mall Still burn off brown, their Pampered opulence upbraided By the palms’ insomniac Vision of one ineffable apoc- Alyptic noon. But the smell Is somehow sweeter than That makes you think, a dry Lemon-sweetness, as if some- Where nearby wild verbena Has been forced to leaf By a match held up to each Bud—and the silo-skyscraper Holiday Inn at the famous Resort “Where the Horizon Ends” could almost be that Match the way the heat Sloughs off it like after- Burn. And yet, because Of the way the sun in- Tensifies everything, one Always has the feeling there Is much less here than meets The eye: the halcyon blink Of a shard of glass, a Lear- Jet wafted into vapor out On the tarmac’s run, the way Common quartzstone gives Off heat which seems to come From inside itself, and not, In fact, from that more- Than-imaginably-nuclear sun Which every morning starts Up so illusionless, and every Evening slow-dissolves On the blue and otherwise Planetary hills, like a Valium Breaking up on the tongue.

An emerald dungeon’s blacklight glow glimmered in the deeper reaches where my son and I could hear the slub of water riddling through the muck. We’d stumbled on it following a stream, his first cave made stranger still by a chill that closes on the goblined heart of a boy inflamed by stories where gnome-clans hoarded underground bone-shard, mandrake, monkey gland, and eel. And so, grave Hansel paying out his last scraps of bread, he inched inward looking back and gathering himself as he devolved step by step along the wet-ribbed walls, the omphalos seepage of a subterranea that dreamed us into its kingdom come, where like some secret dreams make known the burnt-punk smell of marijuana cluttered up the air, and just beyond, just close enough to see, a spur of light that like a dwindling eyemote disappeared. Then the sound a human soul makes as it slips out from the throat. Composed in darkness, my son’s hand closed on mine. I bent to whisper we could turn back now, but his voice was there before me saying, “Something’s here.” And something was, something that in that instant rose, and moved off from us, or drew up close. In either case, my son came to me almost weightlessly at first, then hungry for what was filling up my arms, the startled, upriding bodyweight of a boy I’d never before felt rock so solidly into the place I was, blind and hunkered in the earthen air. I held him only a moment there. We didn’t speak. And though the wheeze of his breathing must’ve stopped my ears, for weeks to come, settling him back to sleep at night, or waking him from some troubling dream, I’d hear the soft concussion of an outsized heart- beat I could not decide was mine, or his, or the stranger’s I had brought us to. Or if what happened would happen again, years from now, when he is grown, and I have grown newly strange to him.

24. In the last photograph of my sister, she is sprawling in the shade, or what shade’s left, on the converted toolshed’s whitewashed steps. It appears that she has finished for the day, an oil color of some tall sea pines, backlit by twilight off the water behind, her lifelong childlike forest-fear subdued for the moment by a filtered-through, delaminating blue loosening the fretwork of branch and crown. The oversized sweater she always wore is stippled with paint, and her face has the slightly moonstruck look (backlit, as well, by a thin gilt wash too finely filtered for the camera’s lens) of someone who’s stayed up reading late a novel whose story could be her own. Moments before, she’d lifted the painting toward the sun, squinting as she did, imagining—what? we’ll never know— the fading context into which she stared. Then, unpinning her hair, and leaning back against the shed, she yawns once and closes her eyes as if nothing weighed on her thoughts that day, her shoes kicked off, and an unlit cigarette cupped in her hand. And at just the instant the shutter clicks, the shadow of a dog (or a child?) appears at the far right edge of the picture. To think: how once she might’ve been amused by this, this perspective from which we’d frame her life (the perspective from which our own deaths hide) with who she’d been, was, and was tempted to be. 25. And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each were an event unto itself, as though each inscribed some legible scratch on the frail wax cylinder that kept alive a voice from the ever-receding past .... My sister at thirty or thirty-one: stripping off table varnish while her daughters nap on a folded towel beside her. In the archangel section of the plaster cast gallery, she holds her breath until the security guard stops looking her way. Standing beside the photomat, staring at a strip of pictures, her look of puzzlement slowly gives way to a look of recognition. In the middle of the night—I was eight or nine at the time—I wake to find her patting my head, because she has just had a bad dream. Visiting hours over, she returns down the hall to her hospital room: head down, shoulders stooped, her hands clasped behind her neck. (That same morning, when she started to cry, she somehow managed to distract herself by repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs.) Overjoyed to be finally going home, then, mid-sentence, falling silent at the thought of it, as though her mouth had been covered by a hand. A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window. Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers. One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She doesn’t take the car. By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city— a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after all these years, she’s about to take the great journey of her life.

In the American schoolyard where we lunged headfirst onto the rocky ground scrab- bling for a ball as if for love, the crossed chalk- line still electrified our tough boyish hearts, and no one much cared for such exotic gods as loomed up out of the Palatine Hills in the required guidebooks dumped in heaps behind our makeshift goal. We knew what we knew. Sweatstains darkened our blue school shirts while our fathers’ fighters strafed the mock- ups in the practice fields, never far enough from town it didn’t thunder all day through the blackened cottages’ stony stares locked up tight behind their shot bolts; nor through the evening, either, when drifting home, stripped to the waist, we’d dance feet-chalked across the marketplace like young, uneasy gods, a little drunk on our shame, our power.