After Nineteen Years

 

 

After Nineteen Years

  

Our odometer begins to shine

like an emerald, proclaiming

we’ve been traveling all our lives.

 

                                           D. Nurske

                                           Riding West with Laura

 

 

This year the gifts will be

a clean house top to bottom

the laundry picked up

from the bathroom floor

 

a lit candle for the souls

who go and who have gone on

living or dead

without us.  And of all the small

 

things they’ve left behind,

their breathing is what I miss

most of all, how it was done

right beside us, living

 

a life.  I think or I’d like

to think (because I have

my doubts about some)

they’d be pleased at what

 

we’ve become, how we’ve

kept up on

the house and kept the kids

for the most part

 

happy as we could

make them.  We spared

the rod.  I’m glad.  I never

thought it could

 

happen.  I’m happy

it did. I’m happy it still

does.  And too, all those small repairs

along our way and if not

 

repairs, replacements: a new

fridge, roof, floor.  And those

tiles caught in their own pause

in a box, stacked 

 

and waiting to be flattened

in a pattern we don’t mind

looking at as we sit or stand

or gaze off into if the window

 

is dark.  Today, I sopped up

the trapped water under

the heat exchanger in the dryer.

Happy Anniversaries are these,

 

right?  My tiny hands on

confidence duty, assured

and humble enough to rub

or crush whatever needs to be

 

rubbed or crushed.  Taken in

or taken out. Like laundry,

I suppose.  Those whites,

the ones tumbling in the main-

 

tained dryer.  Remember when

I washed the black ink pen

in them, and now everything has

a particular age of grey

 

I don’t think they talked about

in those books, though I can’t be

sure.  Now, when they come out

of the dryer, they’ll show

 

there’s still some use in something

a little past its prime.  They can

lead a private life of wiping up

after a wash.  Clean.  Fresh. Tide

 

coming in, going out.  It might not

seem so, but everything I do,

even this, is with you.  Shouldered

and leveled, solo or

 

with the warmth of your body

close to mine.  Darkness or day.

Tumbled or just stilling, warm

and clean against our skins.

Some Accumulated Treasures of a Life

 

Some Accumulated Treasures of a Life

 

the children we were

              are omnipresent

 

I’m sorry to tell you but you can’t hear

the ocean in a clamshell, at least

not the clamshells I’ve known, dull,

flat, enough to only give tiny details of

news about what world's stuck inside:

a sealed sea alive in a belly, a neck,

and rough bearded fibers we’d take

off after we steamed them in

their own very homes.  On the outside,

the whole thing looks like the lock

you want to break, and the inside,

the use you need of it:

 

chef?     sumptuous in wine and linguine

              all steam, initially

 

digger? money, potentially, beneath  

each hole, theirs, yours, peck after peck        

me?       spooning open those airholes

              my only bounty saltwater

 

They were always so small by the time

I got to them, the shells I grew up with:

some flat and dull, some mother-

of pearl, some opalescent: mussels, clams,

scallops.  Halfs of themselves.  Ravished.

Nothing like the conchs, the whelks,

the angel wings from the Gulf.  A nautilus?  Never. 

Unless you count 

the unreachable shelf, bounty brought

back after ages away.  I always dug alone.

 

Still, there were others, of course.  Small

periwinkles stuck under the living bladdewrack

sucking on the rocks, the water, the microscopic

Once, a whole sea snail shell, empty, I held

up to my ear and had to push it almost

inside entirely.  Shh.

I waited for the news of her world.  Instead,

the gulls rioted in mock murmuration, ravenous

for the lobster boat going by, the guy

on the stern tossing off old bait. 

In the wheelhouse, my father throttled and laid

off the throttle, and, spying me

onshore, a spec-like grit under the lip

of flesh, spit and rubbed his teeth

with his tongue.  I saw a ring

of gold around his boat but the birds

soon took to moving on to their own

wandering.  I was so close I could’ve

swum up to him and then aboard,

wet and entirely penetrated

with the cold ocean.  I wanted to,

 

some of me, wanted to unpocket

all the shells, empty as they were, back

to bottom, back to being moved

this way, that way by the tide.  Flood or ebb.

It didn’t matter.  What mattered was

they’d all be crushed, being held

or smashed against the shore like that,

or the boat bottom, or the trap

of the dragging gear…whatever’s underneath,

whatever we can’t see or breathe in,

whatever we can’t imagine another creature

even needing, clams, scallops, whore’s

eggs, or maybe that naked crab

I saw just before the boat came in,

too big for all that was previous of it,

too small for what it currently was:

hear it? opportunity knocking, ears

hands reaching into the steam,

recklessly selecting.