Willard - In the Salt Marsh

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 2004 by Nancy Willard All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Clouds. Clouds.

Apples., Choosing a Stone, The Wonderful Lamp, and An Accident, The Hudson Review; Little Journey and Rooms, Image; The Wish of the Brother with a Swans Wing, Lapis; Breakup on the Hudson, The Massachusetts Review; In the Salt Marsh, At Tivoli Bays, and The Snow Arrives After Long Silence, The New Yorker; The Ladybugs, OneEarth; The Drowned Man, River City; Love in America, Witness; The Training of the Retriever, Yankee Magazine.
The poems in The River That Runs Two Ways appeared in a limited-edition book of that title published by the Brighton Press in San Diego. They accompanied panoramic photographs taken in the Hudson Valley by Eric Lindbloom.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the National Council of Teachers of English for permission to reprint The Way She Left Us, previously published under the title The Journey, in College English, vol. 61, no. 1. Copyright 1998 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted by permission of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Willard, Nancy.
In the salt marsh : poems / by Nancy Willard. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-53253-4
1. Salt marshesPoetry. 2. I. I.

Title.
PS 3573. I 444 I 55 2004
811.54 DC 22
2003065887 v3.1 For Eric, who called me to the salt marsh

When I paid for my flowers, six white roses, the florist, Mrs. Abdoo, said, Is this your saints day? She admired the gown Id made in secret. It brushed my knees, a white cotton dress Id wear for everyday after this wedding with no priest to bless us, without my father to give me away. Id give myself away to my first love, photographer and grandson of the best harness maker in Uppsala who sailed to the New World and Detroit, where few loved the sleek flesh and loyalty of horses clop-clopping toward death. Flesh is a poor investment.

What blessed weather for your day, said Mrs. Abdoo, putting a small box in my hands. A wedding gift. Open it together. The white house of the justice of the peace in Mabbettsville, New York, smelled of fresh paint. His wife opened the door.

A black-and-white TV played Nixons face. Behind her, I caught sight of an old man in bedroom slippers, sweeping the kitchen floor. She asked if wed brought extra witnesses. We need one more. She called to the mailman. He agreed to serve.

My love and I sat on the sofa, waiting. The justice changed into his marrying clothes: a tie printed with small basset hounds, a navy vest, and chocolate wing-tipped shoes. Two continents away, we strafed a shore Id never heard of. Cut to the president: We seek no wider war. The justice said, Turn that thing off. His wife switched off the sound.

Do you take this man My love and I gave promises and rings. Nixon kept making faces: Love wont save you! Outside, we opened our first gift: this picture. Our Lady of Good Voyages holds her son. Her other hand offers a model ship the Santa Maria looked that small to God. We stopped for gas. Outside I found a phone.

Mama, Im married. Papa, I love you both. Were on our own.

Its true. I invited them into my home, four thousand ladybugs from the Sierras. I paid for their passage.

I paid for their skilled labor. I was desperate when I read the notice in a mail-order catalog showing flea zappers and organic devices for vaporizing mold. Are pests killing your trees and shrubs?Ladybugs are the answer. They arrived, famished and sleepy, in a muslin bag slim as a pencil case, or a reticule for opera glasses, or very small change. For once in my life I read the instructions for sending my private army into the world. The ladybugs will want a drinkafter their long journey.Sprinkle the sack before releasing them. I shook handfuls of water over them. Drops big as bombs pounded their shelter, a mass baptism into our human ways.

They did not buzz or beat their wings, but as the warmth of my house woke them, I saw a shifting of bodies, of muscles rippling, like waves adjusting themselves to a passing boat. Do not release the ladybugs during the heat of the dayor while the sun is shining. Under the full moon I carried my guests to the afflicted catalpa waving its green flags. I untied the bag. I reached in and felt a tickling, a pulsing of lives small as a watch spring. I seized a handful and tossed them into the branches. They clung to my hand for safety.

Their brothers and sisters, smelling the night air, hung on my thumb, my wrist, and my arm sleeved in ladybugs, baffled, muttering in the silent tick of their language, Where are we? What does she want of us? Do not release too many at one time.A tablespoon of ladybugs on each shruband a handful on each tree should keep thempest-free. Keep on hand, always, a small bagof ladybugs in your refrigerator.Do not freeze. I have made my abode with the ladybugs and they have chosen me as their guardian, because the meek shall inherit the earth, because I found one at rest in the porch of my ear, because I did not harm the one that spent the night under the deep ridge of my collarbone, or the one that crossed my knuckles like a ring seeking the perfect finger.

Sir, your scalp turns shy, yanked into light, veiled by hair so thinned by months of chemo it lies like grass beaten flat by the wind or the feet of trekkers climbing away from the gardens, the woods, the glad streams toward the summit where lives seen only in part lie clear as cities asleep under the gaze of pilots ordered to bomb them. Today you bustle us to this place you have always wanted to see: the butterfly forest in the conservatory, where the captives do not know they are captive, so lush is their prison: hibiscus and roses and passion vine, the air warm and moist to keep the blood moving in these cold-blooded vamps taking their ease in a spa, their silken kimonos fluttering. The zebra longwings surround us like a sprinkle of flying masks. The viceroy, brown with mildewy spots, closes his dull book but opens for the patient reader; the painted ladies flicker their shadows like tongues tasting good gossip and a ghostly kiss on the cheek.

They ride on our shoulders, our hair. When we leave, even you shake off ghosts whose lives are half over. The eccentrics, the shy, the perfectly groomed in their tails and cloaks, even the bright ones we would love to wear in our cold world want us to carry them.

Oh, ancient lady, I hope you are streaking to heaven in new sneakers, your best broom in your hand. If you were a tree, you would shade Gods house, but your ashes are meeker than unrisen bread under the cloth stitched with a topaz cross. When the priest pulls it away, you do not change into a door or a dove or a plateful of light.