The Sleeve Waves (5 page)

January spreads quickly,

the way life flattens into a broad field

of snow: we are old in our mittens.

Even our cats know.

Sofia, friend, I allow you your stove,

the one you earned

and deserve. Our fortunes curve inward

like our toenails—once supple,

now brittle. It's best to stand

a little apart from the fire.

The stove assembles itself,

not in real time but in the warm

intervals between women,

the place where we can't meet,

where strawberries redden and stay

impossibly sweet.

Her teacher,

Edward Hitchcock,

took plaster casts

of Amherst's dinosaur tracks,

but could not reconstruct

their musculature,

how they moved when Massachusetts

was steamy, newly broken

off Pangaea, and yet

in Dickinson's photo

a shape is visible under her dress:

not America,

but an older landmass,

its theropods killed by a comet,

flood, or volcano. Then

came the pressure

that turned organic matter

into coal. She clearly

knew an occult route back

to those astonished

condensed creatures

fueling her planetary

distribution: inky, glittery carbon

no longer exchanging

atoms with oxygen.

How strange, how alien

to be both an energy source

and a burner. She's not quite human

to us. We're not quite human

to her,

but there are two women

in the picture. No wonder

she presses her hand

hard against Kate Scott Turner's

spine, as if to say
We were friends

in real time, which matters more than poetry,

because it leaves no trace. The print

is not the finger. The paper

is not the face.

Sylvia Plath, Bad Mom,

we love how you wet

no towels for us,

your readers. You turned on

the gas and let it run

into the vast unwholesome system

of English 101:

that's where we found you,

curled in the Norton,

and you said: Hello,

and we said: Mom.

How you hated that!

How un-sexy

to be Mom to so many

perfectly sane young

tattooed women wondering

Am I crazy?

Still you smiled

yourself blurry,

modeling swimwear

in the student paper,

giving us your all.

And we took it.

Begonias lashed

to stakes still fall,

crushed by the weight

of storms so light

they travel miles

above the turf.

Damage is reason-

proof: a spine compresses

in a dream,

and the dream's daughter

can't walk it off.

She's shorter

by a fraction.

There are eyes

in the begonias,

eyes in the thunder,

eyes controlling

the children's limbic reactions.

Have you seen me?

O to stare from a milk carton,

gone through fields

too dark to farm,

into the old forest's old

dissolving arms.

The pigeon-catchers come out to catch—

wait for it—

yes—

pigeons. They use a net

& a rusty cat carrier.

A pigeon'll fetch

“three dollars on the open market,”

says the older catcher.

The younger catcher, with dyed black hair,

says nothing. He looks

like he thinks about pigeons

all day. His eyes have turned

                        white & grey,

& they've flown away.

Sleep's smashed

to shards. Lap-

tops glow in bed after bed.

Strangers pull strangers

into their heads. And yet,

as starlings scatter,

unwired Russian grandmothers

strip to drink

what's left of the sun

after the death of Stalin,

and the collapse

of the Soviet Union.

No one pays attention

to these women but themselves,

as they harvest

vitamin D directly,

laying out a foil sheet

and roasting.

Slowly, they turn

tree-bark brown,

not to please their husbands,

but just to absorb

something profound

without reading.