No Ordinary Place (3 page)

. . . the Lord God sent them forth

from the garden . . .

Genesis 3: 23

The gates stood open for eternity behind them.

Even at this distance, the angel’s wings flared.

They thought in the hills they might quench

their nagging thirst, but day by day, they grew no nearer.

Ever since the naming, he had been insufferable.

The children, of course, didn’t get along.

She combed the naked ground in search of food,

but whatever she happened upon, they devoured

in an instant. Their hunger knew no bounds.

Nights they huddled against the cold as the animals,

newly wild, encircled with floating eyes,

and the angel’s wings hovered at the cerulean rim

of their horizon, the wilderness grown over

with a loneliness like nothing they could name.

Again she has found the darkest place,

 
where she curls

like a quiet animal, where she knows

no one can touch her.

 
I find her

the moment I’m not thinking of her,

when I’m occupied with ordinary chores.

Plaid dress, princess collar,

 
brown clip biting her hair.

I lift her up, hold her on my hip

and say,
they are not here now

 
and cannot hurt you
,

and I carry her into the light

where we can have a look at each other,

 
girl and woman,

ourselves in the face of the other.

We are in this together. I tell her,

see the rain on the window
 —

 
how it carries your sorrow,

 
how those leaves in the yard

have laid their thin bones down
 —

I place words in our shoes, and we go walking.

Silence. Mouth. Rescue. Heart.

Broken. Mend.

 
Returned,

we stand in our stocking feet, tossing

 
each word into the sky,

forgiving each other

 
over and over.

Tonight, smoke rises over Buenos Aires

where the ghost of my childhood

wanders the autumn streets

and breathes the scent of April dying.

I hear shuffling from a dark portico

and know it is my own girl-self

shadowed in a dingy dress,

feet grimed with the city’s detritus.

She has buried the memories

of those whose hands found her

in the night, and now no one

gives away her hiding place.

She is weary of holding out

her palms to strangers. She awaits

a dawning in her heart — the name

she bore when she was a bird

who combed the night and sang

the mornings open —

the name no one knows but God,

the name even she has forgotten.

The sky tosses back its long light

from street lamps and restaurants,

the sky flickers with lightning

but does not sweep the streets with rain.

The little black autos of Argentina

hold their eyes wide as a cat’s

and race through the
calles
; the colliding notes

of a tango pour like a hymn from an opening door.

Child, I am your mother. Dream the sky.

In sleep build your wings. On fallen leaves

I pen messages for you. For you

this tree have I planted.

I turned to look behind me

and saw the long road of my life.

Now I lead a secret existence.

I fill pages with all the things

I can’t tell to anyone.

They sway like tall pines around me.

The moon climbs among their branches

 
like a barefoot girl

straining for a glimpse of the sea.

Now the wind whispers

 
stories in my ear.

It says my life is not what I believed.

It says this earth is no ordinary place.

And God, that lonely child,

 
I’ve seen him

tossing winged seeds into air,

turning round and round in his bewilderment

as they sail back to earth.

Now I can’t tell heaven from an ordinary day,

or heaven from hell, or my left hand

from my right.

To all my questions come answers:

Turn around. Look closer.

See where you have already walked.

And the stars, oh, the stars —

everywhere,

everywhere now, there is singing.

 
for Cecilia

1

Ripe berry, you,

naked and damp

with birth,

we brought you home.

I held you in the crook

of my arm, your new

mouth yawning,

your mewling cry. Snow

and the frozen

stars. From what far

world did you come,

and did you bring

this loneliness?

2

Tonight the jasmine

blooms for love

of the moon.

Trees, what tears

you let fall, what bells

you toll.

3

We sleep, we dream,

and memory unfolds,

scrapes at the house. The folded,

the unfolded, the life

and the death. Owl,

give away your darkness,

become the moon

and sing.

4

These slow nights of winter,

my little soul opens

and closes her wings.

She is grieving heaven,

her dream, mourning what

has died, what

is not yet born.

5

The light said, “Rise.”

The morning said, “Choose.”

And so I rose and walked

 
to the sea,

the vast crowds of stones

already gathered.

And the sea, seeing them,

spoke. And the stones

murmured among themselves.

I understood little

but clouds changing

the sky, sea

changing the shore.

6

I fell from heaven

7

Morning grows into noon

and a woman

reads aloud. She knows

the book by heart, loves

the delicate curve

of the words,

little wrens, restive birds.

It’s my voice, that bell I’m hearing.

I stand apart, heaven-fallen,

stranger to earth.

8

Sun’s procession — a choir

of one. Moon’s manna of frost

on grass — oh, what silence!

This daily office.

This awakening to light.

It’s like I told you, sometimes I live

not wholly in this world:

you know, a person can slip through

 
the sheer fabric

of what you think this life is made of,

and just because you can’t see it,

doesn’t make it not there —

 
the smallest tear, for instance,

you step through

 
that leads

to nowhere you have ever been

and drags you toward itself,

 
like the afternoon

I stood on an empty road

made simply of earth, the scent of earth

 
rising to my nostrils,

a few stones scattered at my feet

and no other living thing I could see

to the thin line of horizon,

 
only a bird

lifting the song she had just made,

 
new, in her throat,

into the blue shell of the sky,

that seemed to call me to turn,

walk deliberately into a field of ripe wheat,

 
the solemn and golden heads

full with their own strange music, and I,

 
walking into it,

the wheat covering me above my waist,

and nothing I could see

 
but the burnished heads shining

in the sun, reaching to the sky

 
and the sky

bending down so low

they touched each other, when I knew

something was there —

a pair of yellow eyes, the wild

watching of one who had not been seen

 
for many years

and was presumed no longer to exist,

and at the moment of my thought,

 
the eyes had gone,

and there was no hollow in the wheat

to tell me it had come, that we

had beheld each other’s eyes,

and I wondered then

 
if I had seen it at all,

not another soul in the field

to tell me, too, about the eyes,

 
the tufts of fur

inside its perfect ears, the stare

 
that said it knew me

and had known me all along,

and you begin to look around, wondering

 
where you are

and if you will ever get back

to what you know as the world,

but you do somehow,

because you can’t stay there,

that’s all there is to it,

 
you must go home

and do the small things you do

that make up your life,

 
and by doing them

put the day to bed

and call forth the night

 
in its vast

and unexplainable darkness.

Birdsong

at the window.

A Tallis choir.

And just off the train

reddened with rust,

Dawn —

with its briefcase

and its newspaper.

Now you rise and search

for the poem, which is

the world,

singing itself —

wild, quick-winged,

with its memories

of night, the walking

trees, the moon

whose powerful paw

splashed light

on your forehead

as you slept.

Fence. Branch. Wind
,

you say, naming what is

out there
,

but find it, finally,

inside you,

little scarlet bird

that has trilled all night

a melody

in all its variations,

quicksilver

as a snail’s trace,

fierce as barbed wire.

Such stubborn music, this

second heart

beating in your chest.