Cover

Title Page

Nightingale

PAISLEY REKDAL

COPPER CANYON
PRESS

Note to Reader

Note to the Reader

Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac diam dignissim condimentum.

Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Dedication

In memory of Gregory Beckelhymer

The substance is not chaunged, nor altered,

But th’ only forme and outward fashion;

For every substance is conditioned

To change her hew, and sundry forms to don

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 3, canto 6

Why do you remove me from myself?

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 6.385

Nightingale

I

I

Psalm

Psalm

Too soon, perhaps, for fruit. And the broad branches,

ice-sheathed early, may bear none. But still my neighbor

waits, with her ladder and sack, for something to break.

A gold, a lengthening of light. For the greens to burst

into something not unlike flame: the pale fruit

blushing over weeks through the furred cleft creases:

a freckling of blood. Then the hot, sweet scent

of August rot, drawing wasps and birds and children

through the month. So much abundance, and the only cost

waiting. Looking at the tree, I almost expect the sound of bells,

a stone church, sheep in flocks. But no sound of bells,

no clarion call. The church is far down in the valley.

This tree should be an ancient, revered thing placed

at the heart of a temple. Instead, it is on a common

lot, beside a road, apartment buildings, a dog

sleeping in its yard. My neighbor has come here

neither as master nor supplicant. She simply plans

to fill a plastic sack with whatever she can take:

the sweet meat giving under the press of a thumb,

covering what is its true fruit: the little pit, hard

and almond-brown, that I’ve scooped out,

palmed, and planted to no avail. A better gardener

could make demands of such a seed, could train a tree

for what desire anticipates. But here the tree grows

only for itself. And if it bears no fruit for the killing

frost, or if it flowers late because of a too-warm winter,

what debt am I owed? At whose feet should I lay

disappointment? Delight no more comforting

nor wounding than hunger. The tree traffics

in a singular astonishment, its gold tongues

lolling out a song so rich and sweet, the notes

are left to rot upon the pavement. Is this the only religion

left to us? Not one only of mortification or desire,

not one of suffering, succor, not even of pleasure.

The juice of summer coils in the cells. It is a faith

that may not come to more than waiting.

To insist on pleasure alone is a mark

of childishness. To believe only in denial

the fool’s prerogative. You hunger

because you hunger. And the tree calls to this.

But the fruit is real. I have eaten it. Have plucked

and washed and cut the weight, and stewed it

with sugar and lemon peel until the gold

ran rich and thick into jars. I have spooned it

over bread and meat. I have sucked it

from my husband’s fingers. I have watched it sour

in its pots until a mist of green bubbled up

for a crust. I have gathered and failed it, as the tree

for me both ripens and fallows. But now, it is perhaps

too soon for fruit. The winter this year was hard,

the air full of smokes, and do I know if spring

reached the valley in time? Who planted this tree?

How long has it stood here? How many more years

can such a thing remain? My neighbor reaches a hand

up into the branches, palm cupped, weighing

the leaf knots. She is looking to see

what instincts, what weathers still grow here.

She snakes her hand through the greening branches.

Up from the valley come the golden tongues of bells.

Knitted Thylacin

Knitted Thylacine

Some still claim they are

alive, though the last-known sighting

was in 1930, their skins so rare, London’s

zoology museum has only one

knitted replica for evidence, its fecal blooms

of stripes laddering a tan backside: four-teated,

pouchless; belly a dirt-streaked cream stretched

like a child’s sweater atop a hoop

of willow switches.

You can make one

from a pattern you can buy, knitting

its spotted pelt on size 2 and 4 needles, which are

quite small, circular: you have to slit the shape in two

when finished, the way my grandmother did,

slicing my father’s sweaters

through the sternum, sewing back the deckle edge

of each honeycomb and cable, as the farmers

in Tasmania taught themselves to do, lost

in the colonies of a world no white woman

would enter, and so began

to think like women, sitting before the same fire, knitting

socks and scarves and sweaters

until this work turned from necessity

to art. The first goal with knitting

is utility, and so I’m moved by the strangeness

of these yarn-pelts’

burrs and slubs, the mohair tufts

thin as a kitten’s undercoat, though you can’t knit

the cough-like bark, the shining teeth;

you can’t knit the jaw

that unhinges like a book

with a broken spine. The knitted skins

are smaller than their wiry

counterparts, delicate, soft

as the wives the farmers dreamed of, sick of work

their fathers would have said

made them soft, waiting for wives to come and make them

grow rough beards again and trim their nails

so as not to wound the thin

pink lips their fingers opened; though perhaps

for themselves they’d already kept

nails short, beards long, loving

how wet each other’s mouths felt beneath

such bristles, each like a slick surprise: the buttery sex

cut out of the sea urchin, perhaps, a toy they made

from lumps of clay and rusted sewing needles

and slipped to a friend as a secret gift, look

what I have fashioned for you, the figure

conjuring forth alternately the spines

of hedgehogs, porcupines, the teeth

of the little cat-shaped devil that lives

in the bush and cries and cries

like the mating cats that used to draw

my teenaged father onto the porch,

swinging his flashlight into the dark

until he saw two green sets of eyes,

and shot at them with the gun his father left him.

Then he would take his spoils back down to the house where,

for curiosity’s sake, he skinned them:

slicing the pelts up through the belly, soaking the remnants

in formaldehyde, trying

to get the shape of the animals just right

on his mother’s table, knowing

what they should look like but unable

to duplicate it, not even knowing

what their last expression should be, that of pain

or of desire, for they’d died in both, as his mother

sat in the dark with a farmer

my father had to call uncle.

While an ocean away men sat

in their strained circles and pulled

one strand of yarn through the back loop

of another, trying to approximate

their sisters’ stitches, sending samples in their letters

home, telling their mothers, I am different now;

telling their sweethearts, I am changed,

but keeping secret their stories

of a tiger that would steal your soul

if it found you, which is why

they called it a devil, for the way

it slept under the porch; for the way it would cry,

sounding like a lover, a brother, a friend, a mother,

sounding like an ache that can never be satisfied: how

could they say they’d never heard it, these men

knitting and knitting the same dream over?

Of course they heard the cry. It broke them in pieces.

And when they woke,

they slipped out of bed, gathered their lights,

and rushed into the dark to seize it.

The Cry

The Cry

A man can cry, all night, your back

shaking against me as your mother

sleeps, hooked to the drip

to clear her kidneys from their muck

of sleeping pills. Each one white

as the snapper’s belly I once watched a man

gut by the ice bins in his truck, its last

bubbling grunt cleaved in two

with a knife. The way my uncle’s rabbit

growled in its cage, screamed

so like a child that when I woke the night

a fox chewed through the wires

to reach it, I thought it was my own voice

frozen in the yard. And then the fox,

trapped later by a neighbor, which thrashed

and barked as did the crows

that came for its eyes: the sound

of one animal’s pain setting off a chain

in so many others, until each cry dissolves

into the next grown louder.

Even if I were blind

I would know night by the noise it made:

our groaning bed, the mewling

staircase, drapes that scrape

against glass panes behind which

stars rise, blue and silent.

But not even the stars

are silent: their pale waves

keen through space, echoing the dark

the way my father’s disappointment

sags at my cheek, and his brother’s angers

whiten his temple. And these

are your mother’s shoulders shaking

in my arms tonight, her thin breath

that drags at our window where

coyotes cry: one calling to the next

calling to the next, their tender throats

tipped back to the sky.

Four Marys

Four Marys

Madonna del Parto, ca. 1460, Piero della Francesca

Are the drapes drawn open or being closed?

Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped

in the hands of a little angel, a little man really,

in shades of plum and mint green that frame

the birthing tent’s opening for a girl

who retreats into or emerges from the dark.

It isn’t clear: the perspective is such

that if I cover the painting’s

top half with a hand, Mary steps forward;

if I cover the lower, she shrinks back,

her blue bodice split at the bulging seams

to show the pear-white cut of her linen shift,

the great weight of the child she is about to bear

and later bury. And even if I didn’t believe

the child would rise again, I would believe the artist

had seen such fear paint a girl’s face

when the eldest women in the village

were called for help, and fresh straw brought in

if there wasn’t a bed, and hot water, and rose oil to rub

over the hips, and vinegar and sugar water

to drink, and hog’s gut and a thick needle

to sew her up with later. Even if I did not believe

in Mary’s joy, I would believe in her pain, the quick flick

of her thoughts turning to the sister, or the cousin,

or to her own mother who’d died giving birth,

the baby, too, not making it, for the birth

was in winter: ice so clogged the village’s

deep ruts that the midwife’s cart slipped

into the soak dike, splitting the wood wheel

in two, and by the time the woman could walk

the steep hill up to the villa, the mother had torn,

and in the rush to save her, no one worked

quick enough to cut the cord wrapped

around the baby’s throat. Or the baby came out

strong and fine, but died two years later

when it stumbled into a fire, or was bitten by a rat

and sickened and starved, or caught the fever

that spread through town when all the animals

were stabled inside the houses for winter.

So many people died, so many people

were supposed to die, it’s hard to conceive

of how the mothers survived their grief,

and how they named their next, living baby

after the dead one because the name, at least,

was good. It’s hard to know whether I should read

the deepest grief or resignation or both in the line

from Mary Shelley’s 1818 notebook, the year

her daughter, Clara, died, two weeks

after Mary had given birth to her. Woke this morning.

Found my baby dead, all the little black scratching pen

could add to paper, and the rest was blank,

and then there were months, and then

there was Frankenstein. Piero della Francesca

painted an embroidery of pomegranates

into Mary’s birthing tent, symbol of fruitfulness

and the underworld, of a mother’s grief

and of her rage to get her child back, the daughter

both dead and alive to her, as Mary knows her own child

is both dead and alive to us. A winter fruit

for the winter birth of a rich woman

whose house wanted to ward off a grueling

delivery, and so whose midwife would feed her

pomegranate seeds to sustain her, a fruit

the midwife herself would eat only once, as payment

from the duke for the son she finally ushered

into the world for him. Such a strange, leathery

skin, though the color was bright

as blood on fresh linen, and who could have expected

those glistening cells packed inside, wet prisms

in the ruby eye of a ruby insect, or the heart

of a god who takes what he wants

and never gives it back. The midwife took the fruit home

and split it with her husband and tried not to think

of the bed of the girl she’d just left, its stains

that looked almost black in the dawn light,

and how the girl’s skin had turned bluish, the fragile spring

she’d require to spend alone in bed away from the duke

and healing. How can Mary not look

downcast before these curtains that threaten

to close on her, to open? I have no doubt

of seeing the animal today, Mary Wollstonecraft

Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother, wrote,

meaning birth, meaning Mary, the little animal

she never saw grow up, because Wollstonecraft

died of an infection days after giving birth.

But before that was told she could not nurse

her infant daughter for fear the corruption

would spread through her milk, though she stayed

at Mary’s bedside the final three days of her life.

And Godwin stayed beside her, who, because he loved

his wife, believed her genius could survive

any truth, and so published a memoir later

detailing everything: Wollstonecraft’s affairs,

her daughter’s illegitimacy, her attempts at suicide—so that

in 1798 the index of the Anti-Jacobin Review would publish,

under the heading “Prostitution,” See Mary

Wollstonecraft. Two towns over from his Madonna,

in a church in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca

painted a fresco of Mary Magdalene, her curled hair wet

with the tears she used to bathe Christ’s feet,

her body a swollen green swathe of dress, the red cape

folded to accentuate the pendulous belly

and thick thigh, the Magdalene bristling

between arch columns that frame her, one

painted slightly forward, the other behind

her body, so that we do not know in which direction

Mary is headed, nor what she is, really,

her almond eyes glittering out at us, her halo chipped,

over centuries, away. It is wonderful

when time accentuates something of the truth

already within us: the frank look, the unabashed

leg with which the woman kicks off the covers from the bed

of the man to whom she is not married; the neat,

round muscle of his shoulder pressed against hers

in the dark, his body over and over coming alive

under her hands, a dream or a nightmare

Mary Shelley once had of Clara.

All this time, she told her husband, their daughter

had not been dead at all, only cold, the little body frozen

and waiting to be attended to. And so we rubbed

it before the fire, and now it lives, she told

Shelley in the conversation recorded

in her journal, and cried awhile, and went to bed.

Then woke again the next morning, and remembered.

The midwife, walking back down from the villa

three summers later, having attended the birth

of the duke’s new, less delicate wife, hums a song

to herself that she hummed to the baby

she just left, a girl this time, no pomegranates

for payment; a girl who will, if lucky, inherit

her mother’s strength and her plainness, both traits

the midwife believes might protect her from

and in the birthing bed. She’ll grow up,

the midwife thinks, and marry, and have children

herself, some less or more like her, sons

with obdurate natures, perhaps, or a daughter

who inherits her curly hair, perhaps the sturdy thighs

of a woman like this shopkeeper kneeling now by a store

in the Piazza Grande to retrieve a shower of euros

from someone’s coin purse. The woman stands, straightens,

and I see her mouth thin to a not unpleasant line

as she looks out at me, calculating, perhaps,

the time until lunch as she tugs at the waist

of her linen pants. The yellow pleats sag, slack

at her belly. The weight from a pregnancy

she never lost, perhaps, or the thickening

that comes to anyone, in the later part of life.

Psyche

Psyche

The photos of the boy were taken first

in play, but when one

emerged in the darkroom’s

bath of her son’s back stained

in palladium whip-

stripes like blood, she began

to pose him: the red scarf noosed

at his collar’s

hollow, thin neck bent, one

red thread wrapped

in a cut’s lash

brightening his throat. Ghastly,

she’d tell anyone

who looked, thinking

if she could photograph

such fears they wouldn’t

come true. And so she had

her son submerge himself

as if drowning

in the bath, stand

by the forest’s edge at dusk, his small

shape lost among the white

ash branches. No more,

she told herself, though more

always came to her: the imagination

for pain, it seemed,

was endless. Make me

scared, she commanded

her son, and he did: this boy,

skirting some tragedy

she sensed inscribed

for them both, whose skin

she’d stroked, nibbling

the tears off his baby

cheeks, and once—

kissing the crown of his head

still bathed in birth-blood—

almost tasted.

Had she always contained

such menace? In the day,

her boy was gorgeous,

joyful. But the camera’s

eye caught something

else: the plum bruise blooming

from a spider bite, his teenage

legs stripped, spread bare

on the carpet. How

those plush scarlets flushed

against his kneecaps. She loved

that photo best

of all, the unflinching bones

her camera found, his big feet splayed

as if the ankles

had been broken. How

could she have known his illness

lurked inside except

her camera found it, reached

across time to devour

the just-budded

calf muscles, the long,

lean tendons of his legs?

The sweet spot,

she called her work

when light hit her son

just right. Magic,

her son once said.

He does not call it magic now.

The Wolves

The Wolves

It was the week of asking. Asking

to watch her eat. Asking if she understood

the doctors’ questions. Asking her

to explain the difference again between

wanting to die right now

and dying later.

The tumor making certain answers

unquestionable. I watched her point

to the incense dish from which

someone swept all the ashes up. Asking

if she recognized us. Because that

is what the living want: thinking

it is a sign we have been loved.

But the answer was a summer

drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which

a wolf slept, suckling her pups.

Some deaths are good

and it makes them hard to grieve.

She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her

to die, too. That was important. But first

we wanted her to remember.

From the bed, a finger pressed

into its pile of leaves. Gray haunch,

unmovable ashes. I didn’t want to disturb

their tableau, she told us. And drifted off. And

we did not know the meaning behind this.

The wolves must have looked so comfortable

to her: wordless and in this wordlessness

perfect. Did she want to go there, too.

I could point to the image and say, my father

must be in there, my uncle. Or, the wolf

is you, you are still the mother,

as if necessary to name that self

at the end of its world. An animal cry,

memory. That was our selfishness.

As death was hers. She insisted upon it.

And why not. It was good for me

to get a chance to know you,

she said, who had known me

my entire life. Then the pills, a small

handful, crushed into juice.

She was happy then. We all were. Or

said we were. What

is the difference now.

Tiresias

Tiresias

She knew, before her daughter did,

that they would need a different body.

And so she saved up for the surgeries,

as soon as her daughter began to cup

her urine in a plastic funnel to pee

the way she’d seen her father do,

before he died. As soon as she’d begun

to pluck her lashes out at school, as soon

as she’d had to buy a dress suit

from the boys’ store to placate her daughter

into attending a family wedding. It wasn’t coyness

that had made her daughter want to hide

the breasts that swelled, causing the girl

at night to cry. And if she herself cried

to find locks of her daughter’s shorn

brown hair curled under the bathroom sink,

she excused these tears by saying,

I’m only sorry you never asked

for help, to hide the fact it was

not lack of usefulness but loss

which daily terrified her. She looks

like you, friends said to compliment

their closeness, and over the years

she wondered at those similarities:

the strong jaw and slim hips inherited

from her own father; her full breasts thin now,

slack from the weight she’d lost (Stress,

her therapist had warned her), aware

of the looks the two of them generated

in the grocery store, at the movie theater.

Boy or girl, her child would always be

attractive, she knew, relieved to think at least

he’d be, in that strange way of beauty,

anonymous. Though anonymity was never

what her daughter wanted. It is not

what she wants, either, pulling back

the sagging lids of her eyes, imagining

the breast lift, tummy tuck: she could

have gotten them all, lying next to her daughter

in matching hospital gowns, both of them

working to unearth something beautiful

from this flesh that, daily, betrayed them.

And now, after her diagnosis, she wonders

why she never asked. To remove

the breasts entirely, cut out the slick

dark bag of womb, stitch out from fat

and labia some length of skin

she’d learn to call a penis—

She imagines standing, naked,

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!