Halfway
Midlife, midsummer, and an infatuation
with the idea of leisure as I watch
the paper white moths fan against the dark
door’s louvered glass and trees rustle in preamble
to an afternoon storm’s erotic tempest.
There is pleasure in the slack grins
of playground swings, a neighbor’s dog
warming his mottled belly on sunned brick,
clouds that burl as if with mammalian feeling
as they caravan across the sky. Had my loneness
outlived its purpose? An illness appeared
as if in answer. Vertigo, fever, fog in thought.
Terror in the long staircase between words,
syntax no banister. Years before, lost
at King’s Cross, tugging my suitcase like a stubborn
pet, summer dress wrinkled, dishabille—
everyone had hurtled on past as I stood
under the giant clock, its gilt gaze the pupil
of an aging empire or an infant god.
Now I was moored in bed, wondering
what kind of animal was my body, its purpose
and ease dispatched to districts unknown,
its wakeful hours a dialogue with pain.
Asleep, I often dreamt of sleep, an orange
cat named Marmalade, banter at the tables
of friends. I dreamt I wrote a letter
to the child I once had been, and to the older
woman I might still become—with assurance
that I no longer owed a debt to anyone, no debt
to joy—whether it appeared as unexpected
as the woods’ lady slipper, its flag of fuchsia
spread over molding winter leaves,
or as two silhouettes in a shared
window where the days might undress
and redress, folding quietly, one upon the other.
Death itself might be akin to conversation
with that one lover or the closest of friends:
event, held aloft, turned subject to thought,
examination. In midlife, a harvest moon drew
taut the string between sea and horizon,
and I began to learn what kind was my animal,
wherefore the latecomers’ train—
what specie of choice might remain
along my hands’ meridian line.
Callas, 1954
Back in Athens with your mother, you took bread and wine
on a Eucharistic spoon from long bearded priests: religion
makes formal the desire for transformation.
A yearning to purify, escape the body. Or New York City,
where your mother realized she was no longer in love. You,
the subplot, daughter and sister of beautiful
women busy with heartbreak’s intrigue. Finding your talent,
you honed its talons under a stairwell in the dark: religion
makes formal the desire for transformation.
Perfecting the instrument of voice, you became prima donna
assoluta of audiences in Venice and Verona, but demurred roles
you judged suited to a lithe girl, someone
appearing in a narrow bodice without shame. Avoirdupois,
the regality of your large pale body, flower of flesh,
what became enemy. One year, in seclusion,
you lost a hundred pounds, emerged as svelte as Hepburn.
‘Opera is the battlefield,’ you opined as you took audiences,
husband, lovers: art makes formal the desire
for transformation. Beauty a devouring god. Halved, you sang
bel canto until your voice winnowed, collapsed. After the final
tour, you took a house in Paris in which stairwell
echoes let you feel the famed vibrato—as an old colonel, asleep
by open window, runs through a grassy clearing in his dream.
Tenancy
I am duchess of it, this rented apartment,
each misshelved book and errant plant—
each ship deck slanted floor and leaky
faucet, these fourteen balky windows
(from some unlicensed postwar cousin
back in the day), light switches wired
all the wrong way—like fetishists, turned
on when they’re meant to be turned off.
But it is my unmade bed and 1982 stove.
And from my desk I hear the city hum
with dog diplomats, throatily negotiating
biscuits or treaties, rush hour horns’ blazing
impatience, a leaf blower’s attempt at anger
management. I can see the Silvios’ robin egg
grotto for Mary; Gerard’s plump terracotta
Buddha; and the Smiths’ inflatable snowman
daily losing his stature this warm December,
assuming child’s pose by noon—as if to prostrate
himself to the seasonal demand for bustle,
ribboned bundles, and nutmegged cheer.
And I am here, on a second floor, where I can
strut naked behind a shut door, close the blinds
and drink my own nine-dollar wine
in eight hundred square feet I lock and call
mine: petite redoubt, drafty bunker, green
zone of quiet. Early mornings, I sit in one
of two large chairs with my dogeared books
and itinerant ghosts—generations who shadow
my page, those who hardly knew an afternoon’s
rest, a week to read, loaf, or be (for themselves)
undressed. These spare unshared rooms, these
unpledged hours an estate, an inheritance.
