Open Shutters

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry

Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Salter, Mary Jo.
Open shutters : poems / by Mary Jo Salter—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN
0-375-71014-0 (pbk)
I. Title.

PS
3569.
A
46224
O
6 2003
811’.54—dc21      2002030185

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-53936-6
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-71014-8

v3.1

For the three who make us four:
Brad, Emily, Hilary

All over Genoa

you see them: windows with open shutters.

Then the illusion shatters.

But that’s not true. You knew

the shutters were merely painted on.

You knew it time and again.

The claim of the painted shutter

that it ever shuts the eye

of the window is an open lie.

You find its shadow-latches strike

the wall at a single angle,

like the stuck hands of a clock.

Who needs to be correct

more often than once a day?

Who needs real shadow more than play?

Inside the house, an endless

supply of clothes to wash.

On an outer wall it’s fresh

paint hung out to dry—

shirttails flapping on a frieze

unruffled by any breeze,

like the words pinned to this line.

And the foreign word is a lie:

that second
l
in
l’oeil

which only looks like an
l,
and is silent.

A whining chord of warning—the Métro’s version

of Concert A—and we clear the sliding doors.

People take their seats as if assigned.

Some of them open paperbacks, like playbills,

with a formal air of expecting interruption.

Or as if the passengers themselves are actors

in a scene the stage directions might have called

Passengers reading,
so that it scarcely matters

when they turn the page, or even if it’s blank.

Enter a gypsy boy, who lurches forward

carrying an accordion, like a stagehand

awaiting orders where to set it down.

But when the doors wheeze shut, as if by reflex

his accordion too collapses, opens, closes

to the tune of “La Vie en Rose.” He has no shoes.

Unlike the rest of us, dressed soberly

in solid colors, he’s a brazen mess

of hand-me-down, ill-fitting plaids and paisleys.

He’s barely old enough to be skipping school,

but no note of fear or shyness, or of shame,

shadows his face: it was years ago already

somebody taught him how to do this.

To entertain, that is—and in the coin

of the culture: an Edith Piaf song pumped

for all it’s worth from the heartsore instrument

the audience links with soundtracks of old films,

as a loving camera climbs the Eiffel Tower.

But nobody is looking entertained.

They seem to be in some other kind of movie,

more modern, calling for unblinking eyes

(the actor’s oldest trick for coaxing tears)

that no longer lead to tears. No words. Just chords

too grand to be specified. Or is it that?

Blank faces, maybe, standing in for blank

faces, much like wearing basic black.

The boy’s still young enough he plays right through

the next stop—when he might have passed a cup—

and now, with a shrug, he segues crudely to

another chestnut: “Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

My station’s coming up. I start to rummage

furtively in my wallet, held as close

to heart as a hand of cards (of credit cards

luck dealt me); isolate a franc. And stand,

nearly tumbling into him, to drop

the object of my keen deliberation

into the filthy pocket of his jacket,

careful not to touch it. In a second

I stride out from the car to my next scene

on the platform, where I know to exit right

and up the stairs, out to the world of light.

I’ll never see him again.

But some instinct (as the train accelerates

and howls into the tunnel on its pleated

rubber joints, one huge accordion)

tells me to look back—a backward take

on Orpheus, perhaps, in which now only

Eurydice goes free? And fleetingly

I catch through windows of the next three cars

the boy repeated. No, these are his brothers—

each with an accordion in hand

and each boy inches taller than the last—

who handed down to him these blurring clothes,

and yet because the train unreels as fast

as a movie, a single window to a frame,

my eye’s confused, has fused them as one boy

growing unnaturally, an understudy

condemned to play forever underground.

Wind whistling, as it does

in winter, and I think

nothing of it until

it snaps a shutter off

her bedroom window, spins

it over the roof and down

to crash on the deck in back,

like something out of Oz.

We look up, stunned—then glad

to be safe and have a story,

characters in a fable

we only half-believe.

Look, in my surprise

I somehow split a wall,

the last one in the house

we’re making of gingerbread.

We’ll have to improvise:

prop the two halves forward

like an open double door

and with a tube of icing

cement them to the floor.

Five days until Christmas,

and the house cannot be closed.

When she peers into the cold

interior we’ve exposed,

she half-expects to find

three magi in the manger,

a mother and her child.

She half-expects to read

on tablets of gingerbread

a line or two of Scripture,

as she has every morning

inside a dated shutter

on her Advent calendar.

She takes it from the mantel

and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,

as if her future hinges

on not tearing off the flap

under which a thumbnail picture

by Raphael or Giorgione,

Hans Memling or David

of apses, niches, archways,

cradles a smaller scene

of a mother and her child,

of the lidded jewel-box

of Mary’s downcast eyes.

Flee into Egypt,
cries

the angel of the Lord

to Joseph in a dream,

for Herod will seek the young

child to destroy him.
While

she works to tile the roof

with shingled peppermints,

I wash my sugared hands

and step out to the deck

to lug the shutter in,

a page torn from a book

still blank for the two of us,

a mother and her child.

It was the morning after the hundredth birthday

of Geraldine—still quite in her right mind,

a redhead now and (people said) still pretty—

who hadn’t wanted a party.

Well, if she’d lost that one, she’d stood her ground

on no singing of Happy Birthday, and no cake;

next year, with any luck, they’d learn their lesson

and not be coming back.

My friend who tells the story (a distant cousin

and a favorite, allowed to spend that night

in the nursery of the Philadelphia mansion

Geraldine was born in),

woke to the wide-eyed faces of porcelain dolls

and descended a polished winding stair that led

like a dream into the sunroom, where Geraldine

sat with the paper and read.

—Or sat with the paper lifted in her hands

like the reins of Lazarus, her long-dead horse

that had jumped a thousand hurdles; shook it once

to iron out the creases;

and kept it elevated, having been

blind for the twenty years white-uniformed,

black-skinned Edwina has been paid to stand

behind her, reading the news aloud.

Hand-towel tabloids, editorial

bath sheets folded into the crannies

of the walk-in linen closet of knowledge!

Ever replenished, freshly washed

of whatever yesterday’s forecast was—

The Asahi Shimbun, Der Spiegel, The Swazi

News, The San Juan Star, The Sowetan,

La Jornada, The Atlanta Constitution,

Il Tempo, The Toronto Globe and Mail,

Pravda, The Age, The Financial Times

(still fancifully tinted salmon)—

they’re stuffed in the walls like insulation.

Consolation, too—which is odd,

because here, if you read them, are a hundred

windows open onto the howling

miseries of the day. How many

get skimmed by even one cardholder

in a week? And even when they are,

what wisdom rubs off when
The Daily

Mirror
’s mirrored on the thumbs?

The one-night newsstand of the mind,