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Popular Longing

NATALIE SHAPERO

COPPER CANYON

PRESS

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Dedication

for Meg Shevenock

POPULAR
LONGING

Man at His Bath

Man at His Bath

Six years ago, the big museum sold eight famous paintings

to purchase, for unspecified millions,

Gustave Caillebotte’s MAN AT HIS BATH.

Now it’s hip to have a print of it,

and whenever I see one hung for decoration,

I’m almost certain that this is what Caillebotte

had in mind when he broke out the oils

in 1884: some twenty-first-century bitch in Boston

catching a glimpse of a framed reproduction,

recollecting a study about how washing oneself may induce

a sense of culpability. What I remember

is he insisted I clean before leaving. That, and he was

trying to be dreamlike. He took my jaw in his hand

and said IN THE NEXT LIFE, WE’LL REALLY BE TOGETHER,

and the clamp in his voice made me almost

certain he knew something I did not. Now I eat right,

train hard, get my shots. This life—I’m angling

to remain in this life as long as I can, being almost

certain, as I am, what’s after—

I do not like money, neither for itself
nor for what it can buy, as I want
nothing we know about.

René Magritte

My Hair Is My Thing

My Hair Is My Thing

The symphony’s out of funding again, and no

wonder: all those violins, the twisted strands

and sponges—who could not think

of torture? Last week I read a novel about a man

so awful that when he died I wept

because it was fiction. I wanted it to be real

so I could watch him really die.

I wanted you to die also, and to be feted

with a lengthy, organza-filled funeral,

so that I could make a big show

of blowing it off. I decided to go out

and get a tattoo of your funeral with me not there,

but apparently it’s illegal here to tattoo

a person who’s crying. The trend now

is to be interred with beloved possessions:

pearl-trimmed gun, gold watch,

whatever you’ve got. Some people recoil

at the waste of it, but not me. These contused little

objects of wealth—they’re disgusting. I just

pray we have earth and shovels enough. I pray

we have bodies enough to bury them all.

The Suggested Face for Sorry

The Suggested Face for Sorry

You and me—we are the opposite

of twins in an old story.

When I am in pain, you don’t feel it.

If I up and retch, you never guess.

The city laid out poison

along the tunnels and tracks, meant

for rats, and one day my dog ate some.

She was fine. I’ve never been

so jealous in my life. I want to do

the things we do to die,

and then just take off sprinting

in the steep ravine. In my dream,

I walk my dog and you cross

our path and she torques at you

and rears and snaps. She senses

you are wholly bad. They say animals

can tell, like with earthquakes.

You’re supposed to scan the classifieds,

searching for a sudden spike

in the number of missing pets. That’s

how you know to prepare. Maneuver

away from shelving. Crawl

to the nearest doorframe. Get out

of California. What are you waiting for.

Lying Is Getting

Lying Is Getting

to me. The high-ups instructed me not to tell their dad

about the particulates—the last

time he caught them polluting, he made them sit

themselves down right there and eat a whole smokestack.

I keep nodding when the city insists I stick

with the story of accidents—she was cleaning

her gun, he was cleaning the recessed

sign on the front of the passenger train, they were holding

hands and had a whole plan to clean

the concrete twenty-two stories below the ledge

of the mixed-use downtown

tower. To really make it shine. The party line

is getting me good. I keep turning

my face to the flashbulb in an effort to seem like someone

with no secrets, and now when I see other people

framed and beaming, I want to know what they’re keeping

in. All those holiday moments, tacked

to the fridge or strung up with wire and eyelets. All that sin—

Five by Seven

Five by Seven

Really, when people have photographs of themselves

displayed on their walls, I just assume

they have died and it is their ghosts

who’ve invited me over, their ghosts with whom

I’m sharing a meal, making small

talk about all the bodies and trash on Mount Everest.

Oh lacquered ghosts, so high on your own

finished triptych of fetes

and feats and the corresponding assurance

you go unforgotten—let’s

go out. From the recent restaurant

boom, infer a citywide uptick in rage-ravaged homes.

People want new spots to fight, to squall

and snipe, lose their appetites, be brought

the chalkboard special, not touch it,

see it whisked to the kitchen and scraped

out back for a dog to eat, but that’s cool—dogs

have to eat, too—

California

California

We often ate late by flameless

candles and took turns choosing

how best to be disposed of.

I want to be buried. I want everyone

to be buried. I realize there’s scarcely

a spare acre left in the ground, but I just

can’t do without the indecorous

transit from parlor to plot.

I need the array of daytime headlights

jolting the arid access road,

the only remembrance that matters.

Don’t make a speech.

For years I would wonder whether

the man who attacked me—

in his memory, did the event of it

persist as a dull sort of flash? Then

he died and became himself

just a flash in the mind of the world.

Now I wonder—is he anywhere?

I don’t believe in Hell and also I don’t

believe in nothing, so that leaves only

Heaven. I have a couple

questions. It is my understanding

that the weather in Heaven

has only a single setting,

which is PLEASANT. I haven’t

spent real time in California, but friends

of mine who’ve moved there

say it’s challenging, absent the changing

of the seasons, to remember when things

took place. With reference to always

the lodgepole pine and the low-bent

needlegrass, you get confused.

Dates and sequences, even the people

involved. You can almost imagine

the whole thing was somebody else.

A Space to Train and Exit

A Space to Train and Exit

Maybe California’s just plain easier,

with the commonness

of outbuildings. Raw-looking cedar or sheet

metal walls and a runnel

of sun getting in through the roof seams.

Position the heavy bag, tighten the eyebolt,

twenty-five right hooks. Or pull up

a chair and compose your suicide note.

A space to train and exit.

The purpose of having a body at all

is to practice, to practice

the keeping alive of domestic

animals and plants. You dispense to yourself

some minerals and water. You expose

yourself to the sun and it helps

you remember to do the same for those

in your charge. If you could equip

them with all they require, or make them

require nothing, you wouldn’t

need your body at all.

Magpie

Magpie

Unusual rain of late, and a new weed

that resembles concertina wire

is threading itself through the dirt.

Seeing it makes me think of never seeing it again,

how I will miss this upstart greenness

after I lose it all and am thrown

from this home, which will be soon.

It’ll be someone else living here then, hiding

an emergency key in a bucket,

up late snaking the bath drain or early

doing sit-ups on the painted floor.

It’ll be someone else walking a mile and a half

to the store called Magpie, buying

a gift for whichever friend’s baby, rattle

or small shirt with a transit map.

The name is meant to conjure up a gorgeous, inky

creature culling treasures to bring

back, but if you really get close

to a magpie’s nest, you see it’s all trash.

Tea

Tea

I can’t get away from it.

Felted-up reenactors shoving a great fake crate of it

into the Harbor and jeering.

After the tour group leaves, they fish it

back out and towel it off,

unbutton their waistcoats to smoke.

At the nearby counter-service place, there are two

jars next to the register, and dropping bills

into one or the other is how

we affirm our commitments—why should we ever

pay decently, unless it occurs

in this fever of rivalry that passes for fun?

What are our choices and might I suggest

LESS IS MORE against MORE IS MORE?

Or IT COULD HAPPEN ANYTIME against IT HAPPENS

ALL THE TIME? Or how about THIS VIOLENCE

FOREVER UNDOES A PERSON

against THAT CONTENTION CAN ONLY

BE ROOTED IN THE RETROGRADE

VIEW THAT A WOMAN IS EITHER INTACT OR SHE’S

NOT? I always thought I’d made

peace with THIS PLANET, and yet here I am

shoving all my cash in the jar

marked ANYPLACE ELSE. There isn’t enough

money in the world.

Have at It

Have at It

When you work here for ten years, you get

a blanket. The blanket has their name on it,

not yours. I am conducting an anecdotal

survey of longtime employees, and I have yet

to find one person who uses the thing

to keep warm. M reported placing it

between her children and the dirt

before they all sat down to a meal outside.

S recounted how she’d wrestled it out

of a half-stuck bureau drawer to wrap

her beagle’s body after he died.

She’d buried the dog herself, in her bloomless

little side yard, and registered

embarrassment when the meter reader

caught her there, intoning over the body

with a hymnal. But why should she be

embarrassed? It certainly can’t be beneath us

to bless our animal dead, when all

our scientists do all day is endeavor to prove

that great apes mourn, that elephants

mourn, that houseflies mourn, that when

a fiddle-leaf ficus succumbs, another ficus

keens in its earthenware. We would like to

confirm that everyone is recognized in death.

Unseen as we are in this life, it’s all we have.

Tomatoes Ten Ways

Tomatoes Ten Ways

On a lampless arc of interstate, playing

I DON’T SPY, the nighttime game

where you say what you don’t see and wait

for someone else to also fail to see it—

are we there yet? I just want to get

back now, back to my kitchen, back

to my peeler and ladle and electric

oven where decades of hands

have worn the temperature marks

clean off the dial—it’s always a guess.

Cooking is important. It prepares us

for how to sustain each other

in the emptiness ahead. A bread

for sharing, braided with strips

of garbage. A novel kind of starchy pie

baked over one tea light. Children,

today was sent here by the future

to beg you to think of this place

like a body—it might be yours

for now, but it is only a matter of time

before it buckles and kicks and ousts

you and sinks, like the very

body it is, right back to the ground.

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

So sorry about the war—we just kind of

wanted to learn how to swear

in another language, and everyone knows

the top method is simply to open

fire and listen to what people yell.

And now here’s God again with His hand

crank, lowering the sky to make more room

for Himself. And now here’s the high-rise

we build to brace back, this series of holes

for bathing and mending and parboiling

roots and undecorated fucking in the style

of the times: one person half-braying,

the other admonishing KEEP IT

DOWN—I DON’T WANT THE WAR TO HEAR.

It for Me

It for Me

Don’t worry. Wars are like children—

you create one, offer scant

effort, then call it botched as the years

accrue, go off and make

a new one with somebody else.

A chance to finally get it right.

People love stories of tyrants

expiring in prison, as though an entire

reign of thrown roses and feasts

on command might be somehow erased

by the precast concrete, the drain

in the center of the floor.

But it’s not like anyone gets some ideal

death—handshakes all around

and then snuggling in velvet, saying

THAT’S IT FOR ME! What matters

is what you do with your best

years. No one can take that away.

Sunshower

Sunshower

Some people say the devil is beating

his wife. Some people say the devil

is pawing his wife. Some people say

the devil is doubling down on an overall

attitude of entitlement toward

the body of his wife. Some people

say the devil won’t need to be sorry,

as the devil believes that nothing

comes after this life. Some people say

that in spite of the devil’s public,

longstanding, and meticulously

logged disdain for the health

and wholeness of his wife, the devil

spends all day, every day, insisting

grandly and gleefully on his general

pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly

considers himself to be an unswayed

crusader: effortlessly magnetic,

scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of

the devil’s several advanced degrees,

a luminous autodidact. Some people

say calm down; this is commonplace.

Some people say calm down;

this is very rare. Some people say

the sun is washing her face. Some

people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

Green

Green

I saw an image of Cleopatra being delivered

to Caesar in a rolled-up rug, just falling

from the rug, and at work I began to be worried

that others, and especially those in supervisory roles,

viewed me as green. Temperamentally inexpert.

I tried wearing crisper shirts, but it didn’t help.

So of course when all my friends began

to die, I found at last a means of proving

myself through inattention to their passing.

I refrained from sharing remembrances,

that time we pulled B’s ruined tooth

or when L and I hiked out to the obverse

side of the Hollywood sign. When colleagues

sought to console me, I offered only the stoic

rejoinder DEATH IS A PART OF LIFE.

I underwent my yearly performance assessment

and was prompted to name a task at which

I excelled. I responded TRULY KNOWING

THAT DEATH IS A PART OF LIFE, and when

they requested I then articulate a plan

for the coming year, I said SPEAKING LOUDER

WHEN STATING THAT DEATH IS A PART OF LIFE,

AND PERHAPS APPENDING AN AMPLIFYING

GESTURE. I returned to my desk and removed

my heels and capped my pen and called B’s mom

and told her about the tooth. She recounted

for me his younger years, mud covered or up to his

shoulders in the cold ocean. She said he had been

ready to die, that through his suffering he’d sworn it

several times. Though also he’d said several

times that he wasn’t ready. It was tough to know.

Totally under the Water

Totally under the Water

He knew, he said, he was dying

when for two straight weeks he dreamed of

trying to switch on a swing-arm

lamp that wouldn’t switch on. In baths

I’ve never gone—as they do in the movies,

to demonstrate crux and contemplation—

totally under the water, but if

I did, I would ponder the woman

flooring it into the cinderblock

wall from fifty feet away. I don’t think that image

comes from the movies. I think it comes

from the future. The future, with its color

palette of airport whites and its

unrushed glance, its involute

beckoning. I see it. I can see it. At least

somebody wants me.

Long Wedding

Long Wedding

Through it all—the usher’s nod, the Pachelbel,

the thousand psalms, the joke misplacing

of the rings—I waited for the pause

to acknowledge the few scattered uncles

and friends too ill to attend. I waited for the silence

and the KEEP THEM IN YOUR THOUGHTS.

And keep them in my thoughts I did—I thought

of them so much that I missed all the dancing, all

the sling-back twirls, the forced displays

of riotousness, the cake. I missed all the children

being instructed not to touch the begonias,

and the paper lanterns almost catching fire.

I missed the plastic chimney glasses, emptied

of their cocktails, being set on a table and swept

down into a bag. I missed the part where they

honeymooned in Lisbon. I missed it

when they bought the house with the mudroom

and the mansard roof. I missed it when they retired

somewhere placid. I missed their birthdays, every

year, and then I missed it when they died

and were buried in the dirt with their jewelry on.

I was still sitting there at the rented table,

in front of a single charred onion on a skewer,

thinking of all the guests who had to decline,

thinking of them in hospitals, attended to by loved

ones who had little to say aside from

I HATE HOSPITALS, but whose tenderness

still carried through. I was thinking of the times

I have attempted to exit my body. I was thinking

of how I’d had nowhere to go. I was wishing

for a smaller body hidden within my body,

a smaller site to which I might retreat.

I was wishing for a canny escape not only

from what is around us, but also from what

is pitiless and ambulant and tacky and can lodge

one layer beneath the surface layer of our very

skin. Only under that is where we are.

The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports

The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports

Brims and booze and paneled

rooms and paintings

titled GO MAN GO and PHARAOH

What explains

Have we coevolved with waste

and are we here

to be its forward vessel

How long until science

admits that we are worthless

except as carriers

Instinctively we nurse it, we pass it

down, we’re done

You Missed a Spot

You Missed a Spot

In movies, a noblewoman is always pointing

her ecru fingernail at a single

unexceptional floorboard, hissing at the servant

girl YOU MISSED A SPOT.

It’s supposed to be a peak humiliation—

the more acute the act of cleaning, the worse.

The more acute the working. The more acute

the ferrying of worth from one colossus to the next.

We’re like bees, just trying to eat,

and in the process conscripted into transport.

Did you hear the snowdrops are having a baby.

We don’t even know what a baby is.

Weekend

Weekend

Some people despise doing laundry, but I don’t

mind it, and I think we can all agree it feels so good

to engage in something you don’t

mind. To have a neutral feeling. My only two childhood

memories are hearing the song EVERYBODY’S WORKING

FOR THE WEEKEND and seeing the bumper

sticker THE LABOR MOVEMENT: THE FOLKS WHO

BROUGHT YOU THE WEEKEND. I gathered

the weekend is the portion of life that is understood

to matter. Now that I’m grown, I know that just means

sex. THE LABOR MOVEMENT: THE FOLKS WHO

BROUGHT YOU SEX. Though of course

there are other things to be enjoyed. I DON’T WANT

TO BE PITIED said my neighbor, after explaining to me

she hated her children—not children in general,

but just her own. Her idea of a weekend

is not being pitied. Is someone else having about her

a neutral feeling. Our neighborhood is overrun

with garbage, and the summer makes it reek,

which ruins the otherwise neutral

feeling I have regarding the sun and the sense

of it on me. It’s not that I think of myself as my own

child—it’s more that I think of my body

as an animal that, having been bred with abandon,

requires a human steward, like those dogs unable

to birth without assistance, without someone

snapping on gloves and boiling the kettle

and cleaning the cotton sheets like I’m doing now,

clipping them up to dry in the sun. It feels so good.

Stoop

Stoop

All I can think, when I catch the dog out by the stoop

with a rat in her mouth, is I THOUGHT IT WOULD

NEVER HAPPEN TO ME—

that’s what the rat, I say

to myself, must be saying, having surely borne witness

to how many other rats gnawed on by how

many herders and hounds and yet fancying, all

that time, herself immune. And don’t get her started

on the thorniest part—how the fact that it happens

so frequently means her misery’s nothing

special, how the moment of her truest trauma is also

the pinnacle of her own commonness, and it’s juvenile

to cry for the everyday—so get over

yourself, I say

to the rat, who squeaks each time the dog

bites down, sounding just like those rubber chew

toys, which I suddenly understand are made to make

the noise of something getting killed—

Flowers Would Have Killed You

Flowers Would Have Killed You

The river is heavy with phosphorus and scum.

It causes liver damage if ingested.

I don’t know exactly whose runoff it is, but so long

as they’re taking press photos with prizewinning

children and donating sizable

sums to the ballet, I take no issue. River’s yours.

Once I saw a guy struggling to talk his way out

of some base thing he’d done, and his underwhelmed

companion said to him FLOWERS

WOULD HAVE KILLED YOU? Now I say it

all the time. The councilman announces he’s sorry

for taking advantage of the district’s trust,

or the paper issues the mother

of all retractions, and I’m right there at the window,

readying myself for the knock and the spray

of larkspur and tea rose. You shouldn’t have.

The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight

The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight

is in the expression PUT A LITTLE

DAYLIGHT between you and what’s

troubling, set out moving,

distance yourself from the pharaonic

shade of the household names and the power

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