SCHOPENHAUER & HIS MOTHER

When Mother, the famous novelist,
pushed me down a flight of stairs,
I took it as a kind of sign
to reconsider my affairs.

In posterity, I told her,
she'd be remembered just through me.
Her laugh was cruel, and so was mine--
it seemed we laughed identically.

OXFORD, APRIL 2005

Everything was perfect then.
I forced myself to fall in love.
I spent hours at the Bodleian
with the poet from Bromsgrove

while heavy rain undid the river
and dreams of God obscured my sight.
Nothing was repeated, ever.
The fountain basins filled with light.

PORTRAIT

She sits in her car with the windows rolled up, slumped
between the seatback and the door. It’s the end
of October, but the sun still beats the windshield
into a blinding sheet of light. She notices

the mountains, blue and hulking, in the distance,
like a child’s drawing of a monster,
pinned to the wall of a cubicle. A sandwich
sits beside her on the passenger seat, untouched,

wrapped in tinfoil, inside a paper bag. She’s listening
to public radio. A four-hundred-year-old symphony
is playing. It’s easy to forget, for just a moment, that these

are her legs in black polyester pants, that these are her fingers
with their ragged nails and paper cuts, that her job
is contained within that fortress they call a building, that happiness
lies perhaps a hundred miles north or east of here.

On her way home she’ll make a left at Torrey Pines, drive past
the rundown bungalows, fifteen-mile-per-hour
school zones, guard dogs so thin you could count their ribs, and

she will remember suddenly her body: her hands
on the steering wheel, her back against the leather seat.

STRANGERS

She tries to forget the anxiety of leaving the house,
tries to busy herself with other things, the
water spots on the silverware, the dog whining to be
let out, the weekly grocery list: a quart

of milk, a dozen eggs, new bags for the vacuum cleaner. She tries
to remember what her neighbor told her once:
The years you suffer are the best; the years you’re happy
teach you nothing. What

is she afraid of? The young mother
and her gaggle of boys taking turns
pushing each other in the shopping cart? The man
waiting in line for his cappuccino and
a double-shot half-decaf skinny latté
for his wife? She can feel their eyes

on her already, judging her,
her hair (unstyled), clothes (baggy jeans and
shower sandals left over from college), the way she holds

the muscles of her face while talking to the store clerk,
inquiring about the price
of tomatoes, a can of beans. Her sister

would have her believe it’s a form
of narcissism, this obsession with appearances, her flaws and imperfections.

She knows better: she’s learned to gauge
the cruelty of those eyes like
little hooks catching on the back of her sweatshirt. They
can see what’s underneath (the flimsy

t-shirt soaked with sweat), the contents
of her pockets (a wadded tissue,
a stick of gum). She knows how much they hate her—
loathe her—for being
so bold to take up space in their world.

CONVALESCENCE

The rain has been heavy, intermittent, dull
against her bedroom window. Outside
the wisteria on its slender trellis reminds her

of an image she saw once
in leaded glass. What is sacred
is now utterly and immediately
so, flaunting its beauty
redeemable in light, the thick gold
afternoon sun like fingers braiding
and unbraiding the vines, refracted

blue, aquarium blue, Mary’s color, salt sea-
light pattered on the floor when you step
inside the chapel, color of water moving
and changing over crude slabs of stone. This

is what it feels like to be well, or
almost well—to know again the sacrament
of hope, like a penitent, and know,
at once, she made the world her hell.


DISTANCES

Gently, she lifts the shell of the dead insect
from its resting place on the carpet beside
her desk, deposits it

into the wastepaper basket and resumes
her work, taking pen in hand, as though
nothing had happened. And nothing has,

not really, in the world. She already knows
the endless distances of things, of people
from each other and themselves, knows of loss
and the stillness that follows. The silence.

She knows of dishes drying on the kitchen
counter in the sun, the hollow blast
of sirens along the expressway, the neighbors’
garage light blinking on when a night jogger
flits past on his way home. She knows

that everyone lives somewhere else and leaves
their bodies to carry on the tasks of life
and rain comes in fits and starts
and children kick a muddy soccer ball in the front yard
or take their piano lessons wishing to be outside
on sunny days. The distances are there,

in their music, and change comes slowly,
if at all. In the evening after the children
have gone to sleep, through a window she can see
the small blue flicker of a television set.