I Watched You Disappear Read online

  I Watched You Disappear

  I watched you disappear

  poems

  ANYA KRUGOVOY SILVER

  Louisiana State University Press

  Baton Rouge

  Published with the assistance of the Sea Cliff Fund

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2014 by Anya Krugovoy Silver

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  First printing

  Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom

  Typeface: Livory

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silver, Anya Krugovoy, 1968—

  [Poems. Selections]

  I Watched You Disappear : Poems / Anya Krugovoy Silver.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  “LSU Press Paperback Original”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-0-8071-5303-1 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5304-8 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5305-5 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5306-2 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS3619.I5465I93 2014

  811'.6—dc23

  2013018692

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

  and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

  Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  To my husband, Andrew

  and my son, Noah

  Carry my spells with you and keep them in your heart;

  you’ll prosper for as long as my words live in you.

  —The Ballad of Svipdag

  And the emptiness turns its face to us

  and whispers:

  “I am not empty, I am open.”

  —TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, “VERMEER”

  Contents

  Dedication

  I

  Night Prayer

  Advent, First Frost

  Stage IV

  Vigil

  Reading “Ulysses”

  Hospital at Night

  Leaving the Hospital

  On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary

  Periwinkle

  Russian Bells

  Three Salvations

  Paper Mill, Macon

  The Dybbuk

  I Watched You Disappear

  Skirts and Dresses

  New Dress

  Sexually Explicit Lyrics, Ash Wednesday

  II

  Owl Maiden

  Maiden in the Glass Mountain

  Strawberries in Snow

  The Burned Ones

  Silver Hands

  The Flowered Skull

  The Hazel Tree

  III

  Doors

  Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est

  Perigee Moon, Loose Tooth

  My Son’s Legs

  Chasing a Grasshoppper at the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds

  Borscht

  The Overcoat

  My Father in Vienna, 1958

  Sorting Peaches

  On Our Anniversary

  Doing Laundry in Budapest

  There’s a River

  Epiphany

  No, it’s not

  Sea Glass

  IV

  Late Renoir

  Valentine Godé-Darel (1873–1915)

  Portraits in the Country

  “Aren’t we all so brave?”

  Saint Sunday

  The Buried Moon

  The Firebird

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  I Watched You Disappear

  Dedication

  Because I know that healthy people fear us,

  that they invent ways in which we differ

  from themselves, it’s to you, dear friends,

  to whom I write my poems. You,

  whom I’ve never met, to whom I type

  my frantic letters, whose suffering

  fills my inbox long past midnight,

  who read path reports like prophecies.

  Who exist in stages.

  You sit in the waiting rooms of

  faraway cities, I invent faces to match

  your histories, which regimens

  have worked and which have failed.

  I speak your names at night, a litany,

  the repetition like picking a scab

  or saying a rosary.

  To you, I dedicate these words.

  Let them stand before God

  like a sheet of flame, smoking

  your precious, flickering names.

  in memory of Paula Ford

  I

  Night Prayer

  I talk and talk and hear nothing back.

  You who are neither voice, nor sign,

  nor image. In answer to my pleas,

  not the slightest flutter of humid air

  or pause in cicadas’ raspy vespers.

  No stutter of starlight, no pillow

  slipped beneath my knees or swallowtail

  alighting on my waiting hands.

  No bird pecking up the pain in my chest

  like a handful of sprouting peas.

  The clock’s face does not waver;

  neither does matter bend.

  And what I speak remains traceless—

  like a beetle’s breath, this Amen.

  Advent, First Frost

  Something has descended

  like feathered prophecy.

  Someone has offered the world

  a bowl of frozen tears,

  has traced the veins and edges

  of leaves with furred ink.

  The grass is stiff as the strings

  of a lute.

  And, day by day, the tiny windows

  crack their cardboard frames,

  seizing the frail light. The sun,

  moving through

  these waxy squares, undiminished

  as a word passing

  from mind to speech.

  Every breath a birth,

  a stir of floating limbs within me.

  I stay up late and waken early

  to feel beneath my feet

  the silence coming.

  Stage IV

  I have no other body no other city

  —DRAGAN JOVANOVIĆ DANILOV

  Suddenly, gloved hands empty the rooms

  of my house, and I’m told

  to take only what I can carry.

  Faces turn away from me—I’m taboo, now—

  the boat I’m set inside is crowded

  with others like myself—

  they come from their own cities.

  Cautiously, we take each other’s hands

  and trade stories. We learn

  of the lucky few who return—

  who are able to cross back over.

  And in time, their shame

  comes to be known as victory.

  We use words that once embarrassed

  us—courage, prayer, miracle.

  And always, we long for our old homes—

  we draw scarves over our faces when we weep,

  singing the songs of our ancestors.

  In this exile, no pillar of dust and fire guides us.

  Our passports have been stamped—

  our wrists and collarbones have been marked.

  Even when the old promises begin to fall away—

  when we see less clearly the gardens

  of our former lands—still, we are together, friends—

  and we know what our beloveds do not

  yet know. We can see through each other

  to the lapping silence beyond the Milky Way.

  Vigil

  Music do
esn’t drown out her dying.

  Rain, rain, two a.m., every drop

  against the road a wish, a stitch.

  I’m sitting in my nightgown, listening

  to the staccato of drops, and the Brahms

  Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Adagio.

  We are circling around her—

  all the women I’ll never meet—

  all those who can’t sleep tonight.

  Our fingers are touching.

  The violin’s lunge and stagger

  mimic her sick lungs. She lies on her back,

  gasping to bring breath to that drowned net.

  Rain in the water oak, in the cracked branch

  of the gingko that’s fallen on the electrical wire.

  God responds with a sobbing of strings.

  I can’t understand what He’s saying.

  Notes rise, then drop, like a hoopoe’s wings.

  The wire is drooping, a black rubber smile.

  The broken gingko, its pale wood, its green fruit

  scattered over the wet lawn, is not an omen.

  So we are holding her to the earth.

  She is at the center of this circle of praying women.

  Her lungs resist the air, there’s no space.

  God’s voice is red and unreadable—

  the music is a broken spell.

  The violin ascends, dives, ascends.

  Will water overflow the drains?

  Will I sleep tonight, in this cage of rain?

  God’s voice is somewhere is somewhere

  is somewhere I know it is but somewhere where

  in memory of Lori Grennan

  Reading “Ulysses”

  It’s easy to mock Tennyson. But when cancer progresses, we return to “Ulysses.” Susan, who’s dying, posts, “Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.” Which is what makes the poem elegy, and not bluster.

  Even in this cursed circle in which I dwell, we try to yield to nothing. The thin young woman opposite the room from me doesn’t want to stoop as the nurse injects chemo into a port drilled, eye-like, into her skull. She covers her face with a towel, and then feels ashamed for hiding herself. We are made monstrous by tubes dangling from our wrists, trailing behind us as we walk to the bathroom. Some require to be held up, doll-like. We know we frighten others as we nap open-mouthed, wigs askew.

  Even when the rope is round our throats, cutting oxygen from the collapsed lungs through which we can no longer breathe, we gasp and gasp. Death will claim us as we brace ourselves up on our bed rails. I laughed, once, at Tennyson, but no longer. “Though much is taken, much abides.” I believe it. Which is why I read this poem so often, and why Susan does too. The newer world does come closer. We can’t help it coming closer. Ulysses will sail the storms till he dies. And so, my dear ones, will we.

  in memory of Susan Freed

  Hospital at Night

  All visitors must go—

  only those confined to the floors

  are permitted to stay.

  In the alleys between closed doors,

  shoes walk briskly on their various

  errands, steel carts rattling

  machines from room to room.

  In the background, the TV’s

  bright chatter, its counterfeit joy.

  Goodbyes are said, too cheerfully,

  before the elevator drops.

  A woman stands at the window

  watching her husband and son

  as they walk to their car,

  the boy with a brand-new backpack.

  She stands waving,

  her arms making wide motions.

  It’s impossible for them to see her

  through the tinted glass,

  though she stands as close as she can—

  her face touching that dark barrier.

  Leaving the Hospital

  As the doors glide shut behind me,

  the world flares back into being—

  I exist again, recover myself,

  sunlight undimmed by dark panes,

  the heat on my arms the earth’s breath.

  The wind tongues me to my feet

  like a doe licking her newborn fawn.

  At my back, days measured by vital signs,

  my mouth opened and arm extended,

  the nighttime cries of a man withered

  child-size by cancer, and the bells

  of emptied IVs tolling through hallways.

  Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary—

  holding off pain with its muscular wings.

  As I step to the curb, an orange moth

  dives into the basket of roses

  that lately stood on my sick room table,

  and the petals yield to its persistent

  nudge, opening manifold and golden.

  On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary

  I’ve opened my veins to the drip of chemo,

  accepted into my blood these poisons

  that would sting the skin. The bag emptied,

  I’ve been sealed again, released from hooks

  and bells. Standing on the shaved lawn

  outside the doctor’s office, I’m free to walk

  left or right. Sunlight hums round my head

  like bees reciting the hundredth Psalm.

  Each leaf, like all live things, springs

  toward the source of its swaying. That’s

  when I feel it: this insane instinct for life.

  The world’s thick and transparent as honey.

  And the day takes my body back, simply,

  the way a mother dresses her child.

  Periwinkle

  When thou shalt pluck this wort,

  thou shalt be clean of every uncleanness.

  —APULEIUS, Herbarium (1480)

  Small low flower—

  your nectar mends my bones.

  Sown in my bloodstream,

  your stems thread my veins,

  root in my cartilage, bind my lesions—

  your hundred eyes bloom

  in tumor’s lunar grave.

  Come summer, bees will fly into my open

  mouth and build combs in my throat.

  My tongue will lick honey

  from my molars—exorcising

  the bitter sores.

  I will scarf my head in butterflies,

  and my winnowed ribs flush Madonna-blue.

  Russian Bells

  Danilov Monastery, Moscow

  I’d like to scale the cord

  in the vibrating dark,

  the way, as a child,

  I clung to a knotted rope

  and kicked myself back

  from a tree

  into the arc and blur

  of summer air.

  That’s the prayer I want.

  To open my mouth

  and ring with my Mother’s

  voice. My heart

  like a shattered peony,

  musky petal after petal

  unpeeling, pealing.

  Three Salvations

  i. Honey Salvation

  My great-uncle, the priest–bee keeper,

  must have heard the confessions of thousands

  of bees as he covered himself in the vestments

  of his profession and harvested their yield.

  Combs split open in his stung palms

  like the doors of the Ark. Glory of resin

  and clover! Gladness of pollen! Golden

  nectar, spun sleeves of the Theotokos!

  Did he chant liturgies while filling jars?

  Did the Mother mark with amber tears his death,

  shot with his wife as passing armies smoked

  the village empty, spoiling the yellow fields?

  ii. Apple Salvation

  There’s a stranger in the field of apples.

  Somebody’s hands have left a blush

  on the Staymans, have scattered half-

  rotten fruit in which wasps will b
urrow.

  Somebody’s presence has spun the sugar,

  banished bitterness from yellow cores.

  Pips have polished themselves like beaks

  of sparrows, Sweet Wines waxed tender.

  Now is the time for us to climb ladders

  and fill a crate for our family’s pleasure.

  To hear the tick tock of falling fruit.

  To lighten the bearded branches.

  Let husbands feel the round arms of their wives,

  and wives laugh in voices rich as custard.

  Let there be shouting like shaken tambourines!

  Let the musician bring his fiddle!

  iii. Nut Salvation

  In the crate of ornaments not to be touched,

  rested in cotton my mother’s golden walnuts:

  glass, thinner than egg shells, easily shattered.

  She hung them from the boughs herself.

  Real nuts, we ate on Advent evenings,

  sitting around the burning wreath, cracking

  hazelnuts and almonds, peeling tangerines.

  My father split the walnuts single-handed,

  then let us root out gnarled halves and pieces.

  Each nut, a mystery beneath its sealed shell.

  I hate mysteries, my son proclaims one day.

  And yet, he sits all season snapping nuts,

  gathering pecans from the back lawn,

  rejecting the green and black or gnawed.

  The tools—a toothed and silver hinge, a screw

  and lever, assorted picks—he places on the table.

  Some of the harvested will be rotten, some unripe.

  The best emerge from cocoons as rich as butter,

  most in shards and others whole. All of these

  will be put to use in pies and bread.

  He works quietly, entirely focused on the task.

  On the oilcloth, a pile of husks easily swept away,

  and the delight of discovery, gleaming brown

  and full of grace as a new pair of shoes.

  Paper Mill, Macon