Came Home to Winter by Deerbrook Editions

Also by Judith Skillman from Deerbrook Editions Kafkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Shadow

Came Home to Winter Poems

Judith Skillman

de e r b ro o k e d itio n s

published by

Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition

for my family Bernice Bloom Kastner Ruth E. Kastner Joel H. Kastner and in memory, Sidney O. Kastner

Contents I. Denounce Nostalgia 11 Prospero Sees the Sea 12 I Admire Günter’s Rat 13 T he Spree 14 Proof of Pain 16 T he Watched Pot 17 Harmonic 18 T his Potash Dawn 19 Garden of Fingers 20 Andy Warhol Circa 2017 21 When Prospero’s Big Wind Blows 24 Homesickness 25 II. Lathed 29 T he Old Laughter 30 Iphigenia 31 T he Insult 32 Crescent Moon Rising 33 T he Misanthropist 34 Mobility 37 Post Vitreous Detachment 38 T he Quaking Aspen’s First Autumn 39 Crescent 40 Came Home to Winter 41 Desire 42 Novembers 43 China Shop 44

III. You’ll Never Heal 47 Rheumatism 48 T his Rotten Carcass of a Boat 49 T he Cherry 50 Queen Anne’s Lace 51 Disassociation 53 Iphigenia in Alabaster 55 I’ll Have a Virgin Mint Julep 56 Prospero Struts 59 Nostalgic Evening 60 T he Floater 61 Tiny Animals 63

IV. T he Toll Man 67 T he Old Country 69 Your Scars 70 Miranda, Stranded 71 T he Misanthropist Dreams 72 Black Wound 74 Homesick 75 Each Tenderness 76

T he Jacarandas

Alla Prima 78 Latch 79 Star Magnolia 80 Bees Bow the Lavender 82 Quilt Moon 83

Notes 86 Acknowledgements 87 About the Author 89

“Give me your hand. Perhaps we still have a long way to go. It’s snowing, it’s snowing. Winter is a hard thing in a strange country.” —Hermann Hesse, “Evil Time”

Denounce Nostalgia Don’t talk of the past, its simple hours. Refuse to remember days before this day. Abhor fragrant memories, push them aside with your hand. If you must voice audacious pleasures, do so as an aside. Like Galileo, who muttered sotto voce, before being forced into house arrest—Eppur si muove. Invoke as presage only this: shadow cast across an open book, Maine Coon sleeping on the day bed, violin tucked inside a blue plush case. No anchor holds a ship to water when it travels from port to port. Let go of the girl who thought she discovered wild horses on Assateague Island and promised to return for them. Forget that July day you swam into the Atlantic without fear. A riptide pulled you under, your mouth filled with salt, your lungs with saltwater. T hen came the fighting, gouging out a turquoise sky. Sun between waves, the sickening thrill of another crest, its egg-white foam. Learn to loathe the year when, barely pregnant, you paraded in a Hobie Cat. Twin rudders and sail, the breath of summer in your mouth. You wore the orange paisley bikini. You were balanced like a figurehead against the wind.

Prospero Sees the Sea T hese resinous fields stretch away from my prison, rosined by wind and tendrils of my daughter’s hair, as she grows more beautiful. Nacre—that shine upon the mollusk when it’s washed ashore to die at my feet, another sign come to teach the slave his place. If I come here to drink, my throat closes and gags. Come to bathe, my skin reddens, blistered by the sun that shows me to be what I fear most— a man along in years, a father who kept a girl safe by magic. Until that day when I can burn my books—until the end of this play the gods would have with me I’ll stand and stare and feel the hours. Scoundrel, villain who wrote formulae to keep the child of a child in her rightful place, I see the waves like conches turn, and hear what others listen for when they, free to travel the globe, take from its wooden shelf the sea, and put it to their ear.

I Admire Günter’s Rat

after “Racine Has His Coat of Arms Altered”

T he way it comes into every poem and each story. Often accompanied by a swan. T he rats I’ve seen—some were pets kept by my sister’s children, white ones. Others had rope tails and haunted alleys, sewer grates. Once in the back yard a rat was found. Günter always uses simple present verbs when he discusses Racine, or when, in Cat and Mouse, the rat turns out to be an adolescent boy. It’s that way with good and bad. As if all the white feathers fell from heaven, and all the dark, reptilian members of a sect so contaminated by illness it would take a wet suit to kill a single one— as if there were no grounds where these two did not play at conversion, illusion, those parlor games in which children are seduced by a coin pulled from the ear, a fish made from the lips, or a buttercup held beneath the fragrant flesh of all that must sooner or later find entrapment inside narrow-barred cages called houses, with big-bellied creatures called men.

T he Spree T he river turned, a long fish of scales. T he cabin wood of the yacht newly rubbed with oil, table set with crystal and caviar. A whole salmon, smoked and open-eyed, hills of baguettes, goat cheese, and remoulade. T he laughter of guests echoed against a shoreline so pastoral we could park at any dock and be invited in to live the rest of our lives as husband and wife, our half-grown children left behind as in a fairy tale. I recall the sudden exit we made from the stern as, between close banks, the ship almost touched shore. T he specter of decadence leaned against the moon and that almost-planet plummeted into the river causing panic in the small crowd all dressed and perfumed, polished to conform one to another in the German accent that rattled my past. 14

An open door, the whisper of water against my skirt, land-bound far from our hotel, how you held me close and said I would be forgiven for my sensitivities.

Proof of Pain T hey asked for a passport, an ID to go along with the slow change of my person. T hey wondered why, and some proposed in the fashion of thought how and where the accident flowered in nerve and vein, when it happened, how many teeth were lost to the deep reaches of sleep. I procured a memory, a medic, a house—anchors rusted, coated with barnacles, isopods, lichens, and lice. My lips moved with words as inside a shell, creature flesh gone. Was it the train that leapt the tracks, the girl swept under a truck at nine on her new pink Schwinn? Was it the tetanus shot, given so many times?

T he Watched Pot It would be cliché to say it never boils. Cliché and blatantly false, for some have seen the ocean in a pot: its foam-waves, the machinery of full moon pulling gull wings into froth. T he story goes my mother was alone in hospital—left alone because she wasn’t screaming like the others do when a body comes from between their legs. T he cleaning woman swabbed the floor with her mop—a scene of such contentment one would hardly guess my birth imminent. She asked, as if by way of making conversation, Excuse me, would you get the doctor? I think I’m in transition. And, there beneath fluorescent light the cleaning woman put her pail down on the black and white tiled floor, reached over, and helped my mother into a sitting position. My mother cut the cord with a pair of efficient scissors. As for blood, the hardly-any-of-it got wiped up quick, before the doctor had a chance to see anything other than a beaming Madonna, a cherub, and a neat ward.

Harmonic April. Scents of flowering plum. Every wad a flower, each note a ghost come to remind you of the viola, its lower register. You want to know why he tried you with his guilt so many times in restaurants, and you wouldn’t listen, as if it were a set of flageolets turned loose from his mouth, the eerie taste of his Winnipeg past, his frostbitten ear oscillating with frequency, order, wave. To hear the human voice— an overtone driven to become a boarder of the mind after passing—his, others, you need to place your finger exactly on a fretless neck, reach higher or lower until you find the fundamental and its octave, hurtling once more into the world as father and daughter, neither knowing how to pierce the other’s armor.

T his Potash Dawn Come, but come much too early, arrive with your toxins that turn the sky yellow as our sun rises above the tree that fell last summer on a windless night from drought. Come already, I know your face more than sound—the birds dying to catch up on news, puffed up, full of sleep, feathers catching a quick beak. C’mon into this—how else to say— chronic pain, this age, the crown of grand motherhood tarnished. Lust synthesized: old lovers, new husband, new husband, old lovers. Wheeze me out of the house midafternoon, blowsy as laundry strung on a line, for the shower, the chores, the stretch of muscles tight with spasms and that curve where discs— non-surgical—bulge against nerve, bent anew as with the wrench my father wielded, when he had a door to fix, and later the vise on his workbench, teeth clenched, uttering curses for lack of oil, as I watched my child-self grow up to the lip of the wood. 19

Garden of Fingers T he pinky protrudes from snow, little nail raised like a question mark. T he first—index of music, keeper of the mouse hole— slips from dirt. Triple-jointed, clean-clipped, ready to anchor that crab sidling up to the fingerboard. How renounce the middle one? Symbol for f, f ’ing, m’f, f ’er, an etcetera of notes gone flat or sharp from lack of practice. T he fourth could still make a d, or g— if only there were frets. I kneel before the thumb buried in its keel of land. T his one holds the urge to encircle and kill.

Andy Warhol Circa 2017 His gun series silk-screened by underlings who work at Factory B, a sequel to the Campbell’s soup machinations: M16, AK-47, Glock. Beheadings as kitsch. Ritual killings and bombings on TV as screen tests, looping until you click the remote on your lap. No distance between you and this carnage, its canon an automatic you keep just in case. Art and terror up for sale at Christie’s. All schisms favor comic books, super-heroes, editions. Marilyn’s face belies her suicide. Vesuvius? You get up, go to the fridge, grab a Coke. * You get up, go to the fridge, grab a Coke. T he aura of celebrity—how to acquire? A gloss of liner, red lip stick, add photo shop, and voila. Medieval burnings of girls, their funereal pyres— really? In serial murders, some clue becomes prophetic, contains the key to all. T hese days it’s all you can do not to hear Whasup, Glam, slang of an era that prides itself on civility, while pregnant moms travel to Vancouver to find out: boy or girl. If the latter, abort. Urine test proves nothing. Gotta know the thing’s sex. *

Test proves nothing. Gotta know the thing’s sex. As Warhol played with Elvis’s image, he appealed to your prescient stigmata— the homoerotic. Gun, knife, holster, shadow. How does pornography provoke, through boredom, some climax with the Other? Is imagined sex better than real? Slim decades later, you learn the one thousand shades of trans-gender. Can your nephew be him, returned with a stare and bare autism, a need to live in the virtual world? His wan complexion the prop you admire for its violent anonymity. * For its violent anonymity, death’s the victor. Unresolved presence, penetrating absence. Marilyn’s memory— a fugitive add-on to her absence. Warhol’s dollar bill, his cans of tuna, dime-store knock-offs of the Last Supper confer benighted blessings, honor. A chance to think yourself unique, and better than mere sequence or mechanization. As pharaohs painted their sarcophagi with gold, Warhol’s life became a fast train. When he had cash, he wanted receipts—I have to spend it. Another death, how chic. Jacqueline in mourning, Marilyn, again. *

Jacqueline in mourning, Marilyn, again— in sequence—years still see them. Vanity Fair for fodder. Movie stars, your holy altar, where you go to worship. Pagan monies there. Out in the street, Polaroid of the homeless. Repetitions. Doorways. Like him, you want to crop your melancholy. It’s great to buy friends. (Whassup?) If you look like a rag . . . but you’ve got fifteen dollars in your pocket. His wheel: commodity. Get rich quick. Factory B employed stars, worker bees, Dali, and death’s counterfeit—sleep. Stills in dream appear on your black ceiling. His gun series, silk-screened by underlings.

When Prospero’s Big Wind Blows Petal snow falls from the only trees left by the seas constant paring away of land—ornamentals fruitless, caged by the inner groves where I found and freed her. T he storm comes thundering. Miranda, as in a painting, stands pensive at the sea-marge, looking for a way to know more than two men. Her Victorian dress billows. If only I could behave as a bird whose magic knows no bounds, that peacock spreading its feather-fringed eyes that see more than my male angel, my cherubic age. Still more magic must be written, even if it keeps me from the rest my deranged body needs. Mind obsessed with words— their useless cure. All these spells I invented to keep my daughter unhappy enough to stay here. I must go on trilling, an unlucky pecker stuck to the tree that locked the spirit Ariel to grubs, maggots, rot, and sap.

Homesickness In the kitchen I have water, bells, a candle. I have a man in the living room reading from a screen he holds in his hand. Outside the sun lights paper birches. A sky of ultramarine brushes the rooftops in this town so small everyone knows the mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s DUIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, the young woman with fetal alcohol syndrome. Upstairs I have a bed, a quilt, a book. Light shines through cotton curtains. My bad dreams may come true, or sleep could leave me with just the shadows under my eyes and the sin of overstatement, as when the kettle blows its top, or the idea of tomorrow ushers in another yesterday.

II.

Lathed T he smallest Matryoshka doll— made from one piece— an innocent cooped up in the bodies of her forbears, remains as she is. If you would believe in the onion, you know about nests, their reluctance to let go. Like a rose made of wood, the youngest remains surrounded by the shells of her siblings. Fractals, encryption, carving knives and chisels, none of this changes the smallest doll, with her red hood, dark bangs, and eyes made up like a movie star. Now do you remember your own little homunculus? It was an infant, non-opening— the one most often lost from the set, only to return in your dreams. You may still envy her double nature, this one turned by machine on its axis, this singleton cut, sanded, and crafted by recursion. 29

T he Old Laughter Gnawed at you—you, a child— and the grown ups privileged to stay up late, eat chocolates and tortes. To bicker, use tactics and games. T he old laughter was a torture for no reason other than the shame you felt, when, tears stinging your cheeks, you’d fling yourself down on the mattress, an army style fold-out cot. How could they be blind to you? How could they, so courteous during the afternoon, be changed into the same angels as those who dismembered Raphael while the night wind chuckled around their shoulders?

Iphigenia “T he girl had vanished, but on the ground beside the altar lay a deer . . . ” —Iphigenia at Tauris I’ve watched her eat clover, stems dangling from her loose lips. Mouth pulling at the earth as if it were a teat. Nuzzling summer earth, stopping to scratch a flank with the most delicate leg. Inhaling hydrangeas and dahlias, quaking aspen leaves, and apples. She must have been hungry when she went to her death. Willingly, it is said, she agreed to pay her father’s price. On behalf of the oracle our parched grounds flower with weeds. A daughter must be fed no matter what the cost.