Willard - The sea at Truro: poems

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 2012 by Nancy Willard All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies. www.aaknopf.com/poetry Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. constitutes an extension of this page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Willard, Nancy.
The sea at Truro : poems / by Nancy Willard.1st ed.
p. cm.
This Is a Borzoi Book.
ISBN 978-0-375-71224-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-95979-9
I. Title.
PS3573.I444S43 2012
811.54dc23
2012008015 Jacket photograph by Eric Lindbloom
Jacket design by Linda Huang v3.1_r1 For Eric and James True mysteries are hidden in the light. Jean Giono

Is this the right house? Shabbier than last time but when was that? Two weeks ago? Two months? Have they forgotten me? The doors unlocked, left open for me or somebody else who fawns over them, a con man after their money (do they have any?), who listens to their stories (have I forgotten them?) over and over again. How still the house sounds. They sit on the screened-in porch, silent as after hearing bad news or an embarrassing remark.

They pay me no mind. Is it supper already? When I follow them inside, when I sit at the one place left for a stranger, nobody looks at me. Nobody passes me the plate of cold cuts. They have not spoken for weeks but they know I am here. And now, in voices dipped from a pool of still water, they say inane things, talking away at each other, small talk, though not small, I think, as I listen to whats left unsaid, as I let myself into their lives again, as I turn transparent and they grow stronger, noisier, telling each other whats on their minds, their words filling me up til I know what theyll say before they say it. They talk openly now, glad that Im listening.

They open their hearts. I leave my self at the door. Outside, darkness falls but so what? By their voices I know them. I take out my pen and write their story.

The night after the service, his sister appears to him. She is gathering her paintings for the show her gallery promised: seascapes like bowls of broth, moons like Camembert wheels, chunked off and eaten.

Her lifes work! She asks his opinion of this one, that one. She says, Nobody calls me. He says, How can they? Youre dead. She shakes her head: No. The next night he sees her adding the last brushstrokes to green grapes lounging on a white platter. They walk among the paintings, each with its title and price.

She says, Nobody answers my calls. He says, They cant hear you. No breath, no heartbeat. No coming back. She shakes her head: No. The third night she stands at the foot of his bed pleading.

She begs him to take the paintings. Maybe he will have better luck. Her death? They dont speak of it. She says, Take the days as they come, the nights as they go. Dont forget me.

The two of us running up Fifth Avenue, Michael, a long leap of a lad in his black church clothes and his brothers brogues, and his hair flying, and me with my brimmed hat hooping down the steps of St. The two of us running up Fifth Avenue, Michael, a long leap of a lad in his black church clothes and his brothers brogues, and his hair flying, and me with my brimmed hat hooping down the steps of St.

Pats til its cocked on the winds head, bent on blowing me clean out of my senses. Oh, why did I let that boy go? God himself loved the sight of us. I would be the blue light in his eye, the left one, the farseeing one, the one hes rubbing now, maybe.

At midnight I saw, in our empty street in Poughkeepsie, the stretch limo sent by the prelates of poetry to carry the poet to his distant home. I am sure that a man whose poems honor things that do not run on time, dogs, poems, the weather in Poughkeepsie did not ask for a limo. He spoke his poems.

To five hundred people who came to listen, his voice said, I am speaking these words for you alone, you who understand the misunderstood dog, the silence that separates salt and pepper. Straight as a candle he stood, his light not a hard gemlike flame but a pilot light putting us at ease. We sat in front of his words and warmed ourselves. He thanked us, he said goodbye, and those who invited him urged him outside to a quieter space, and fed him and wined him at the long table of distinguished guests and sent him home in the dark corridor of a stretch limousine, which I saw, and opened our front door to see it better as it whispered past me into the dark.

He lay curled in his mothers pumpkin belly when a bullet entered his thigh. The bullet was innocent, the thigh thinner than a noodle.

They stuck together and made the best of it. His mother, sitting on the porch rocking, never saw who shot her, or the starling behind her, or the squirrel over her head. Heard no cry from within, felt the sleeper twitch, and settle down. And he was born with the sign of his times upon him, a scar almost invisible, gift of one who never saw what he hit, a soldier who slept through the action and who, to this day, does not know who hurt him.

Ten years into her life, she asked for a bicycle. Im sorry. Im sorry.

We just got the news: no more bicycles till after the war. Ration stamps, blue and red tickets for sugar, butter and shoes, Papa away for the duration, my bed not slept in, me curled up on the floor if bayonets shattered my bedroom wall theyd never skewer me, marshmallow child, camouflaged by blankets. My sister asked for a hammock. Hammocks were not rationed. Our mother bought the basic model, a string shawl you might hang in the hold of a ship so slow youd think yourself motionless as the equator, rocking from sleep to death, from death to sleep and back, or in Manila among the coconut palms. I thought of first grade and Sylvia Chang and her fleecy coat, blue as a clear sky and her mother who never spoke in the dark rented rooms they lived in, and the thin leaves of the books she read, paging from back to front, the words on each page like tracks left by shadows.

They tied my fathers legs to horses. One horse ran this way, one ran that way. They played the National Anthem. He wore his uniform. Did your mom tell you that? No. They made us watch.

I thought of GIs, the dead washed up on beaches. Each night our mothers heel flattened the cans we saved to makewhat? Bullets? Guns? Six years into my life, when my turn came to wish, I called for Kool-Aid, which Id never tasted. When Mother slit the paper pouch, the water bled sunsets, and shaved rubies braided their way to the bottom like a crazed hourglass wanting to kill time. My mother surrendered the sugar, a months rations spreading in ghostly plumes, heavy and peaceful like sleepers dead to the world, losing themselves in the slow sweet water.

Some things should never be written down. Whatever this was, with its arms and skirt, crowned and winged and all-seeing, it was no mere grazer.