Autumn Songs in Four Variations
Stellar’s Jays
There’s one of them, beak upright
and crown, black as a demon’s eye.
There’s another on the branch above, a lookout.
He’s singing to her as the forked alders
sway like sea grass. Meanwhile
the birds barely settle, their blue wings
rising this way and that for balance.
It is November, love, and the Jays are hungry.
Winds have knocked over the feeders
and I’ve stopped setting out suet but still they come—
like little nudges, little threads tied to my thumb.
Soon the mountain passes will fill with snow
and my diligence with the seed will matter
just as these hours with you matter.
How can I keep you safe, knowing
each wayward tree could fall?
Where each evening’s breeze rattles the panes?
Where a Stellar’s Jay calling to the horizon means everything?
The Scarf of Maria Callas
Your night lullabies are the songs
of Callas from my youth.
She was beautiful and nearly blind.
Fall in the city was dangerous, but I still wandered
to clear my head past the bums picking up spent butts
and fingering the mouths of wine bottles.
The pavement stuck to my shoes and trash
stopped up the gutters. I’d pause awhile
near the alley of a restaurant where I’d hear
her albums spin nightly. She’d be singing
Rossini operas as the busboys
clattered the dishes into the steam washer.
You should have seen the housecats
from the neighboring apartments clustering in that back alley,
swishing their tails as they waited to lick the plates
clean while Callas sang. They’d mewl
over leftovers in time to each note.
Then the crescendo of the orchestra
would drown out the city and I imagined
Callas on stage, draped by an orange scarf,
her eyes on some familiar ghost.
Systole
And my recurring dream? It’s sepia-toned
of my first night as a paramedic—my first call.
The spiraling lights of our ambulance made the man,
dying, look ghoulish, like a funhouse clown.
I couldn’t bear to look at his face as the chest compressions
made him jerk like an inflatable cushion
while the engine’s idling motor kept time with us.
It was a kind of song and dance, my hands on his ribcage
and the deep breath from the Ambu bag into his,
whistling back into my face with each push.
The way you’re breathing now in your sleep.
Reprise: A Prayer for What Remains to Be Said
The maples are slightly green and the sun
eats through the sheers. Here we are,
on a carpet with the world of toys splayed before us.
I’m reciting the alphabet and your eyes
are wandering to the window where Stellar’s Jays
are tearing at a squirrel’s corpse in a tree branch.
There are things that you do not yet understand:
how Stellar’s Jays look after each other—
which is a kind of love, that there can be song
in a city eating itself from the inside, that memory
is what remains to be said but it cannot be set
to the strings of an orchestra or passed
from one mouth to the next like a breath.
There is no space wider than that of grief,
there is no universe like that which bleeds.
May you never inhabit that universe. May you have
the world of toys. And may you hear, in these letters
I sing to you, the rustle of leaves and the possibility of opera,
softly over the tumult of everything.
In Defense of Small Towns
When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,
once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells
of Fall were boiled down beets and potatoes
or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel
as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station
split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action
happened on Friday nights where the high school football team
gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room
for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,
we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between
brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups
and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned
to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck
with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.
But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked
and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could
ride on a bicycle and see clearly, the outline of every leaf
or catch on the streets, each word of a neighbor’s argument.
Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me
slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam
or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up
with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,
staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls
against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?
Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is
I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn
and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks
at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body
idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,
to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers
open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,
to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though
the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.