Dorianne Laux - Only As the Day Is Long: New and selected poems

ALSO BY DORIANNE LAUX The Book of Men Facts About the Moon Smoke What We Carry Awake The Poets Companion:
A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
(with Kim Addonizio) Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. Copyright 2019, 2011, 2006, 2000, 1994, 1990 by Dorianne Laux All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W.

Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Book design by JAM Design Production manager: Lauren Abbate The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Laux, Dorianne, author. Title: Only as the day is long : new and selected poems / Dorianne Laux. Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2019] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018038026 | ISBN 9780393652338 (hardcover) Classification: LCC PS3562.A8455 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.54dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038026 ISBN: 978-0-39365-234-5 (ebk.) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS FOR MY SISTER, Mary-Ellen (19552017) Contents If an ordinary person is silent, this may be a tactical maneuver.

If a writer is silent, he is lying. JAROSLAV SEIFERT The pose is stolen from Monroe, struck in the suns floodlight, eyes lowered, a long-stemmed plastic rose between her teeth. My cast-off bathing suit hangs in folds over her ribs, straps cinched, pinned at the back of her neck. Barefoot on the hot cement, knock-kneed, comical if it werent for the graceful angles of her arms, her flesh soft against the chipped stucco. The other picture is in my head. It is years later.

It is in color. Blonde hair curls away from the planes of her face like wood shavings. She wears a lemon-yellow ruffled top, denim cutoffs, her belly button squeezed to a slit above the silver snap. She stands against the hallway wall while Dad shakes his belt in her face. A strip of skin has been peeled from her bare shoulder, there are snake lines across her thighs, a perfect curl around her long neck. She looks through him as if she could see behind his head.

She dares him. Go on. Hit me again. He lets the folded strap unravel to the floor. Holds it by its tail. Bells the buckle off her cheekbone.

She does not move or cry or even wince as the welt blooms on her temple like a flower opening frame by frame in a nature film. It lowers her eyelid with its violet petals and as he walks away only her eyes move, like the eyes of a portrait that follow you around a museum room, her face a stubborn moon that trails the car all night, stays locked in the frame of the back window no matter how many turns you take, no matter how far you go. Always I have done what was asked. Melmac dishes stacked on rag towels. The slack of a vacuum cleaner cord wound around my hand. Laundry hung on a line.

There is always much to do and I do it. The iron resting in its frame, hot in the shallow pan of summer as the basins of his hands push aside the book I am reading. I do as I am told, hold his penis like the garden hose, in this bedroom, in that bathroom, over the toilet or my bare stomach. I do the chores, pull the weeds out back, finger stink-bug husks, snail carcasses, pile dead grass in black bags. At night his feet are safe on their pads, light on the wall-to-wall as he takes the hallway to my room. His voice, the hiss of the lawn sprinklers, the wet hush of sweat in his hollows, the mucus still damp in the corners of my eyes as I wake.

Summer ends. Schoolwork doesnt suit me. My fingers unaccustomed to the slimness of a pen, the delicate touch it takes to uncoil the mind. History. A dateline pinned to the wall. Beneath each presidents face, a quotation.

Pictures of buffalo and wheat fields, a wagon train circled for the night, my hand raised to ask a question, Where did the children sleep? Its midnight and a light rain falls. I sit on the front stoop to smoke. Across the street a lit window, filled with a ladder on which a young man stands. His head dips into the frame each time he sinks his brush in the paint. Hes painting his kitchen white, patiently covering the faded yellow with long strokes. He leans into this work like a lover, risks losing his balance, returns gracefully to the precise middle of the step to dip and start again.

A woman appears beneath his feet, borrows paint, takes it onto her thin brush like a tongue. Her sweater is the color of tender lemons. This is the beginning of their love, bare and simple as that wet room. My hip aches against the damp cement. I take it inside, punch up a pillow for it to nest in. Im getting too old to sit on the porch in the rain, to stay up all night, watch morning rise over rooftops.

Too old to dance circles in dirty bars, a mans hands laced at the small of my spine, pink slingbacks hung from limp fingers. Love. Im too old for that, the foreign tongues loose in my mouth, teeth that rang my breasts by the nipples like soft bells. I want it back. The red earrings and blue slips. Lips alive with spit.

Muscles twisting like boat ropes in a hard wind. Bellies for pillows. Not this ache in my hip. I want the girl who cut through blue poolrooms of smoke and golden beers, stepping out alone into a summer fog to stand beneath a streetlamps amber halo, her blue palms cupped around the flare of a match. She could have had so many lives. Gone off with a boy to Arizona, lived on a ranch under waves of carved rock, her hands turned the color of flat red sands.

Could have said yes to a woman with fingers tapered as candles, or a man who slept in a canvas tepee, who pulled her down on his mattress of grass where she made herself as empty as the guttered fire. Oklahoma. I could be there now, spinning corn from dry cobs, working fat tomatoes into mason jars. The rain has stopped. For blocks the houses drip like ticking clocks. I turn off lights and feel my way to the bedroom, slip cold toes between flowered sheets, nest my chest into the back of a man who sleeps in fits, his suits hung stiff in the closet, his racked shoes tipped toward the ceiling.

This man loves me for my wit, my nerve, for the way my long legs fall from hemmed skirts. When he rolls his body against mine, I know he feels someone else. Theres no blame. I love him, even as I remember a man with cane brown hands, palms pink as blossoms opening over my breasts. And he holds me, even with all those other fingers nestled inside me, even with all those other shoulders wedged above his own like wings. We were talking about poetry.

We were talking about nuclear war. She said she couldnt write about it because she couldnt imagine it. I said it was simple. Imagine this doorknob is the last thing you will see in this world. Imagine you happen to be standing at the door when you look down, about to grasp the knob, your fingers curled toward it, the doorknob old and black with oil from being turned so often in your hand, cranky with rust and grease from the kitchen. Imagine it happens this quickly, before you have time to think of anything else; your kids, your own life, what it will mean.