R Y L E R  D U S T I N

T O  M A K E   C O L O R

 

Every morning, my grandmother cleaned the Fisher stove

in the back of our trailer, lifted ash in a shovel, careful

 

not to spill the fine gray dust. Precious, she said, her breath

smoking in the cold. Precious in winter’s first lavender

 

not-quite-light—and you could smell it, the faintest acrid hint

of ash, a crispness calling you from bed. You could watch her

 

cap it in a chicory coffee can to stack among others, back bent

from a long-gone fever. For the garden in spring, she said.

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-Originally in The Laurel Review and American Life in Poetry

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F I R S T   S T A R

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It is here, in the empty lot across from K-Mart, dusk falling on the cusp of summer, that you realize you love her. She has asked you to teach her to drive, you lied about having a license, and your mother’s Metro is not cut out for this, the way she kills the clutch again and again as you brace your bodies against the dash, laughing. You are not cut out for it either—how she cracks jokes with the boys at your lunch table, eyes huge, hair black as volcanic glass. You cannot ease the ache her body makes in yours no matter what you do, even when you are making love behind her mother’s leaky apartment, or lying in the damp grass after, watching geese sign their mysterious arrow overhead. Soon her father will vanish again, her mother remarry and take her to Georgia. On the phone she’ll talk about pills she’s started and a man she met at church, voice fading in the sound of traffic. But blink now and you are back in the empty lot—blink and you are in the brimming grass, wet, watching the geese neck ever on. Tell her again they have needles in their noses, like compasses, guiding them to where they must go. Say you can see Sirius, the first star, though you know she is already sleeping like something crash-landed, unfathomable, from an even deeper distance—her breasts below the coat you both share, her wrists so defenseless that the world, for the first time, frightens you—and you begin, in that light, to know what it is.

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-Originally in The Bellingham Review

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L I G H T   Y E A R S

 

It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.

            —James Salter

 

It’s late November, sister, and the stars are hard and high

outside my one wide kitchen window,

 

blazing above the snow-sheathed maple

from distances so deep they are described in terms of time—

 

the time it takes the ghost of light, the fastest thing,

to reach us.

                        A faint song

reaches through my wall—my neighbors, two music majors

work frozen fingers on the Steinway

they had shipped from Sacramento.

 

Sister, it’s sixteen years now since we met—

since our father leaned his forehead

on the corner of the kitchen cabinet

and told the truth of you

then drove Allie and me to your trailer by the ragged field in Albany

where your hands, like reflections

coalescing in settling water,

                                                             shone out and mirrored mine—

wild veins, long fingers, knucklebones too big for wrists.

 

I try to imagine the waiting room

where you ran into our aunt, the receptionist

who looks just like you—how you both stared

while the phone lines rang and rang.

I try to stitch together the full story, the family secret—

Dad seduced after the war, chased away by your mother

and her mad family—how he disappeared for years to drink

in the dark loft above the service station, pumping gas.

 

He was in love again the summer you saved me

from acne and a broken heart, setting up your guest room

for me to write.

     You woke the house one night to watch the Perseids—

your daughter grumbling, your son just two. Even the neighbors

brought their telescope, Juan cursing and cracking a beer

while we laughed on the damp deck, looking for the lost,

the wayward stars.

 

That summer I learned to laugh like you—

to laugh so hard the tears came burning out

and stung the sores on my face, to scream

as I played with your children,

        tripping

over the baby gate, breaking plates

and spilling garbage, banging the corners of walls

as we ran through the house Dad had left and rented to you.

 

When Grandma passed, Allie took the Steinway,

though only you could play. She didn’t understand

what that piano would have meant to you,

how you gave lessons to the neighbor kids for years.

 

But listen—

I can hear the starving students playing,

hands almost in harmony,

                                          laughing when they get it wrong.

 

I remember family as what you taught me—

 

the dented doors, your daughter’s fractured toe,

even Dad’s belated, clumsy kindness.

The rampant damages of love.

 

      We stood under the stars

that last Thanksgiving, listening

while everyone said it’s best the piano went to Allie.

You and yours would have scarred it

in some superficial way.

 

Sister, they were right.

They were wrong anyway.

 

-Originally in Iron Horse and The Best of Iron Horse

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I N   T H E   B O N E S

 

The finback had beached a long time ago—

        storm-scattered ribs,

       vertebra polished by sand,

knucklebones caged in black grass.

 

All winter, as we fell out of love in the old barn,

                        I read the long story of whales—

 

how they were land-scavengers once, like small raccoons

who hunger drove into the sea—

 

                        while you dreamed beside me

                                    and wind worked the eaves into a song.

                       

Mornings I walked past pines

           growing stunted in sandy soil, head cocked

to hear the moaning made by the bones.

 

   The last thing they said: a vestigial hip

 clicking on stone—

 

how the body wanders, writing its loss

from home to home,

how the bones hold hard to this history.

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-Originally in Gulf Coast

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T H E  M O V E M E N T   O F   F I E L D S

 

I want to run my eyes along you

and collect you as a pool fills

with the image of a drowned bird,

 

as the field beyond this ruined farm

swells with the shape of wind—

 

~

 

Sight is the mind making sense

of the world’s raw hunks and filaments—

 

sketched-in guesswork of occipital lobes,

fusiform gyrus drawing out the differences

between one nose and another, one cheek

into the stark relief of a friend’s face,

 

visual cortex showing where a ball isn’t yet

but will be after the instant

its image flickers up the optic nerve.

 

We read this together

then stand on the dock

watching waves lacerated by light.

 

~

 

One theorist thinks language came

through sight, not sound,

 

that learning to read

the signs of our prey in the wilderness

filled us with symbols:

 

hoof, hair, bent fern.

 

Something can mean without being.

Something can imply—

 

~

 

If it’s true, the first signs we learned

was left by fleeing things—

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every mark a mark of escape,

every print the shape of what’s gone.

 

And so we call these words a passage,

Latin for pace.

 

With language, movement—

absence, loss—became legible.

 

~

 

The night we met

was pink gin, your grin, limbs lifting

in neon and fog.

 

The words you wrote me

are black ash in snow.

 

Your body, when you’re gone, goes on

in my memory—diving into dark surf,

towing something silver away.

           

~

 

It was easy for God to make blind life

and the first seeing thing

was only a little harder.

 

But the second seeing thing—

 

to make something

that could look into something

looking into it.

 

~

 

Downtown glows at dusk.

Our hands clasp in my car.

 

As we glide below bright lamps and billboards,

you fall asleep, which is familiar to me—

 

though I can’t see

where you go when I watch you.

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-Originally in New South