Also by Sarah White from Deerbrook Editions Wars Don’t Happen Anymore
to one who bends my time poems
Sarah White
deerbrook editions
published by Derbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com issuu.com/deerbrookeditions first edition Š 2017 by Sarah White All rights reserved. Page 97 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. ISBN: 978-0-9991062-0-4 Book Design by Jeffrey Haste Cover art, monoprint by Sarah White
for Reuven and Malcolm and Lisa and Owen and Lyra
The Prologue
is an opera clown who enters to explain what follows (the libretto) where no verismo— divorce, disease, abuse—no sting’s too sharp to be trotted out, provided it be sung with truth, humor and rue. I named this stream of scenes Spilled Milk before I saw that Time would bend at the end to lighten the heart’s loss, allowing gain—a blind date, a friend found. T his is for him plus both my sons plus both their wives— all five.
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Contents
T he Prologue
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I. Spilled Milk Intercalation 1. Two Children on a Porch, With Woodbine Ursa Minor Missing Boy Intercalation 2. T he Dance Language of Bees Mrs. Pegamin T hree Poems of Hair and Destiny 1. Pigtails 2. “My hair is gray but not with years” 3. Report from the Dream Museum In a Village Near a Mountain Stream T he Family Muse If, at my deathbed Remembered Visit, Albany, N.Y., ca. 1946 What do you want to be when you grow up? Tenses of a Simple Heart T he Ice Pond Intercalation 3. T his T hree Spilled Milk Poems 1. T he Woman Who Spoke in Proverbs 2. Words On a Wintry Day 3. Owen Makes a Vow T he Wisest Kid in Michigan T he Seller of Christmas Trees T he Pipe, the Plants, and the Misdemeanor: a Pantoum Of ‘72 What the Sleeper Told Me In the Morning T he Ballad Of Narayana Intercalation 4. T he Beaux On the Bridge Manhattan On the Nile Night and Day It’s a good thing
13 14 15 16 18 19
22 24 26 27 28 30 32 35 37
40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
Costume Closet
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II. A Bend In Time T he Last Day Of May 53 I Wonder, By the Witch 54 Upper West Side Love Song 55 Like a Neighborhood 56 Intercalation 5. A Ceremony of Gumbo 57 Broccoli 58 Squash 60 Beatitudes of Food 61 Night Repair 62 Intercalation 6. T he Priest Conductor 63 Rhyme Goes In and Out Of Fashion 64 Mrs. Walecki’s Weather 65 Complaint (to one who bends my time) 66 On a line From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81 67 Intercalation 7. Conjunctions 68 Peacable Kingdom 69 Marie de France’s Tale 70 An Archeologist In Amherst 72 Ideas Of Honor 73 Pointe des Châteaux 75 Tourist In the Land T hat Rains Rhymes 76 Just Our Luck 78 T he Mother Of the Groom Wears Gray 79 Wedding Photo 80 Intercalation 8. Page From a Lost Notebook 81 Rosh Hashana, 2016 83 Intercalation 9. Ventricular 85 Absence: A Sort Of Acrostic 86 Intercalation 10. After “T he Garden” By Jacques Prévert 89 Reading the Torah With You 90
Two Commentaries On the Challah Morning News, November 9, 2016 Last Maxim
91 93 94
Acknowledgements 97
I
Spilled Milk
Intercalation 1: Two Children On a Porch, With Woodbine
intercalate, transitive verb. To insert (a day, a month) in the calendar. He lays his arm along the shoulder of his two-year-old sister. “It doesn’t matter what you teach a boy,” said Winston Churchill, He believes she is the child most treasured. “. . . as long as he doesn’t like it.” She thinks her brother is the favored one.
The boy stood on the burning deck
Neither, in the future, will befriend the other’s spouse, or frequent the other’s house, until,
T he pipes, the pipes are playing
orphaned and alone, they are surprised Boys and girls together . by a picture of two children side by side
Me and Mamie O’Rourke
with long strands of woodbine all around.
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Ursa Minor
T he infant bear is born amorphous, a ball of matter on the floor of the den. Mother Bear, according to a French maxim, licks the cub to give it form. If she does it poorly or not at all, her offspring will be, as they say, mal léché, never to make friends, thrive in school, or fall in love. When I was newborn I waited on the floor for hours, then rolled away to find another den, another tongue.
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Missing Boy
(New York, October, 2012)
Cops are combing the boroughs, prowling sullen streets. T hey flash their brights, and radio a voice he’ll know: Avonte, it’s Mom. You’re safe. Run to the lights. Avonte Oquendo Perdido is like a phrase in Esperanto. His eyes, in the photo, are those of a faun that can’t explain, although it knows. T he search is on for a gray and white shirt, black sneakers and jeans. Today, they question the rains, tomorrow, the snows. Months later, an answer roils the salt water. O river, rivero!
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Intercalation 2: The Dance Language Of Bees
T he foraging bee, writes Karl von Frisch, begins to perform a kind of "round dance”…
Our summer home had a chimney. It buzzed and swarmed, smelled of honey.
She starts whirling around, constantly changing direction, turning now right, now left…in quick succession, describing one or two circles in each direction…
I slept in a room with a hearth. How nice! A child and a chimney.
…those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, with outstretched feelers . . . the dancer herself, in her mad wheeling movements, appears to carry behind her a perpetual comet’s tail of bees.
T he oldest, exhausted worker-bees dropped down through the flue. Logy, dun-colored, dying, they crawled from the hearth onto the rug where my bare feet often found them.
During the thirties, Frisch, unable to prove pure Aryan ancestry, was classified as a mischling, one-sixth Jewish. He came under further suspicion for continuing to hire assistants, even some women, with still higher proportions of Semitic blood …
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It was my mother who pulled the stinger from my foot, my mother who mixed a soothing paste of baking soda, my mother I overheard to say how uncanny it was that the bees in my room never stung me!
Accused of practicing “Jewish Science,” he was forced to retire from the Munich Institute of Zoology. Every Autumn, the Bee-Man scrubbed inside our chimney, removed the wax and honey. After the war, the bomb-ravaged Institute was rebuilt and Frisch was reinstated. He continued his research into his eighties. His account of “the dancing bees,” greeted at first with derision, has been widely accepted.
Every Spring, the swarm returned as memory returns to the house, the chimney, the swarm, and the stings.
Frisch said honey bees can always find a food source with the help of their dance, even if they must detour around an intervening mountain.
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Mrs. Pegamin
Not her face. Just her name remains as I wake, and the place— an upstate New York attic where secretly I let someone into my hideout—the husband of Sadie the maid. I was ten. Where was the widow, my mother? I don’t know. T he man and I spoke in a code of what we did—none of it violent, all of it mild as these things go—though it marked me. It wasn’t him I met last night but Mrs. Pegamin, who said I should not write this down in my native tongue. Nor should I set the poem close to home.
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Three Poems of Hair and Destiny
1. Pigtails My grandfather lived in Jamaica (once in the British West Indies) where a family nanny tried, in her wisdom, to arrange my straight, unruly hair into triple pigtails like the sweet, beribboned sprouts her granddaughters wore; “like the pickaninnies,” Mother said. All three of my thick plaits failed. T hey fell this way and that like palms after a hurricane, leaving the nurse indifferent— no, pleased— to see the white girl’s embarrassment. Recalling now my pale, freckled skin, bright eyes, the Anglo angle of my nose, I think a sleek pair of braids could have saved me by twinning me with Margaret O’Brien, Judy Garland’s co-star, an American darling.
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2. “My hair is grey but not with years” (The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron) Women pay coiffeurs for a streak of white. I get mine free. It doesn’t age me. I am thirty, content to wear the evidence that something has gone wrong— a marriage, a thyroid disease, the tremors, lost weight, eyes protruding from my face. “Nor turned it white in a single night . . .” First, streaks, then, strands, then, the whole mass whitened like my name, my children’s name, like lace veils, bolts of silk, fresh snow, spilled milk.
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3. Report From the Dream Museum (for Susan Matthews) First, the calico cat I had been painting became a silver tabby, then a gray stairway resembling one I was descending last Sunday when you said you liked my shorter hair, which I deplored— pink scalp visible under white wisps, not a look for persons of my age and gender. T he museum became a school, T he stairs, a test, T he silver cat grew ever hungrier. More was revealed than I remember. I may or may not relate this to a doctor.
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In a Village Near a Mountain Stream
we had a neighbor, a composer a little older than my mother. I craved his attention, he, the attention of my brother, Bill, home from Yale for the summer, noodling on the piano, winning smiles from the musician, who ignored my studious renditions of Für Elise and T he Happy Farmer. It wasn’t fair. I, not my brother, had learned to read the scores, knew about Satie, our neighbor’s mentor years before in France, about his famous cronies: T hompson, T homson, and Cowell. One thing everybody knew: the neighbor, as a volunteer ambulance driver, had been injured, lost one digit from one hand. I often saw him move his nine good fingers fluently along the keys. I did not see him place them on my brother’s knee one summer evening. Bill told me of recoiling from the gesture. I imagine them together—old man and young—mute, confused, each having thought he knew the other. In a village near a mountain stream, I studied a musician and his fortunes, learned a man could have a wife and children, a country home, a choral piece performed
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at Tanglewood, memories of Paris and Satie, and not be satisfied. Satie himself wasn’t satisfied to be Debussy’s friend and write T hree Pieces in the Form of a Pear. I don’t go to the village any more. True, the rushing music of the creek is still a pleasure. But barriers prevent the visitor from bathing in its impure pools, as we children used to do.
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The Family Muse
Pity the Muse in our house: Mother’s paintings hidden in the attic like clandestine Jews. a seldom-tuned piano, refusing the arpeggios of “Clair de Lune” a teenage boy reciting “Gunga Din” complete with Cockney sounds—You ‘eathen, where the mischief ‘ave you been? . . . I ‘ope you liked your drink, and he dies— me laughing, lurching from the room, vowing to become a poet and show my own book to my brother, who would never look: “Poems make me feel like a boob.” But wait. Once, he and I took a class and shared a set of soft pastels. He fashioned me an easel I could balance on a table and it all went well.
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T he Muse—that floozy friendly with Debussy— saw what we could do, us two, and was so surprised she swooned and dropped her harp.
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If, at my Deathbed
you seem glum, I plan to sing the Norwegian national anthem. Not that we are Norwegian. I learned it from a teacher who was not Norwegian either but, for her own reasons, taught her seventh graders Ja,vi elsker: Ja means Yes. Elske, Love, Landet, Vannet, For og Mor, Land, Water, Father, Mother. We learned one verse— enough to bid farewell to you, my dears, to waters, lands and parents I have loved, enough to say “T hank you, Miss Babcock: Ja!”.
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Remembered Visit, Albany, NY, ca. 19 4 6
Jesse Van Antwerp, gentle dowager, poured Darjeeling for my mother, and proposed that I, freed from the tea table, commune with knick knacks in her drawing room. One beguiling item on her wall: a small silk panel with a scene of Chinese mountains and, suspended in the azure skies, a line of intricate, illegible signs. My hostess smilingly confided that a guest from the Far East had revealed the meaning of the characters: V E N I DA H A I R N E TS A R E T H E BE S T. T he drawing room has disappeared. So has the brownstone home and all of State Street as it was. T he silken mountains remain under the silken skies.
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What do you want to be when you grow up?
I wanted to be beautiful and wise— I wanted adjectives. Other girls chose nouns— —a nurse, a nun, someone in uniform, but I feared, if I became a noun, I’d be a bad one— Nurse? Bad. Poet? Worse. Instead, I planned to take a job, not too hard, maybe as a wise museum guard— T hen I’d quit and try something harder, like beautifully walking dogs. I might get good at that, then quit again and try to model or to swim the Channel, though I’d need different adjectives for that. And I forgot to mention happy. I was thinking it might come with the first two. (T his was not wise.)
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And beautiful? One morning, I awoke— I was grown-up. I was beautiful. Everybody was.
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Tenses of a Simple Heart
I am a French major; she, a housekeeper. I am eighteen; her age, uncertain. Flaubert hides her hair under a muslin bonnet drawn with a greyish Norman palette. In Chapter One she occupies a simple and imperfect past— untold years when she ate her bread alone, banked the fires and nodded off clutching her rosary, while I assured myself I could never be like Felicity or so I thought until I started Chapter Two and the Master threw me back to what preceded, something she HAD had. Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour
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like ANY other, any woman, any time she discovers bliss and ruin: hers in the pluperfect; mine in what was then the future.
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The Ice Pond
Vines thrive along the path. Leaves glisten and ruddy stems swell with treacherous oils. T he boy who woos me leads the way to a luminous pond. We swim through its reflections—trunks, rocks, ferns, patch of sky. I don’t know the boy very well, don’t know my shins have grazed the glossy vines, and water won’t wash off the toxins at work. I will marry the boy. I will marry the boy, not supposing I will be happy, only that he’ ll be happy enough to keep me. I am supposing wrong. T he vines tender their toxins everywhere, spreading over the woods like lesions over my skin. I don’t walk the path any more but my tortoiseshell cat stalks among the leaves, returns with oily paws, steps on my sheets and papers, poisoning lines I write. T he lines I write are poisoned, all the more when another girl follows the boy to the pond, immune. T he vines leave her alone. Virulent oils don’t take to her skin. I want to be gone, want the pond to lose its memory of me as others move through its reflections, glad I am gone. I think they wish I didn’t exist.
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As if I didn’t exist, my cat runs off and doesn’t come back. T hose who find it take it in and name it for its mottled coat. Turtle climbs the nearby vines, not the same kind. Its paws are clean. So are my shins most of the time, but when they are poisoned the lesions are more virulent, toxic, and strange. Virulent, toxic and strange is the scene I dream: the boy woos me again—me or the other girl. We all swim in the pond, through rocks and ferns. I think I don’t exist. I must be dreaming their wish. I’m not the girl I was, but drops of oil remain on my skin. T hey won’t be gone until I have shed it all. One day, I will shed my skin—every cell. I will have no mind, no dream of the pond where I swam as a girl. It was cooler and more luminous than any I had seen before the boy began to woo. A shame—the wooing, a shame all I thought to want was to be safe, as if a safe girl, or a girl readily poisoned, would be anything to a boy.
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All I was to the boy was a shame, which dwindles when the grown woman regards the girl—who is nineteen and needs to be wooed, who will be slow to understand that the boy is not the man she wants, slow to learn where in the world she wants to go besides the ice pond—as cold as it is lovely and the way to it is through familiar woods where old vines thrive along the path.
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Intercalation 3: This
A man had a certain wife, and, after ten years, exchanged her for another. T his is the day that the Lord hath made
It was all perfectly legal.
T his is the rooster that crowed in the morn. . Handing his new wife a photo album and an X-Acto knife, he said . . . T his is the Number One Train to South Ferry. Stand clear of the closing doors. “Here’s a book of our life from now on. If you like, you can remove all her pictures . . . but please leave everyone else’s.” T his is a singular demonstrative pronoun. T he new wife found she could not eliminate every trace of her enemy without including the children posed on their mother’s lap. “T his is my letter to the world.” T he pages of the album were riddled with holes. T his is Sarah Bernhardt’s portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. T he man came home, inspected the pages, and went out to search for his children.
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T his is much darker than it looked in the shop.
He entered a bookstore where the children were browsing, but did not recognize them away from their mother. T his is not an exorcism but an intercalation. T he woman, restless after completing her project, took the knife and went out. T his is your final warning. Soon the town, pitted with craters, gave off a porous light like the surface of the Moon.
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