Bridging
1.
Let it be early, before the birds begin,
and the night sky still
rashed with stars. Let the children sleep
while he packs the car for the drive back
to the house you’ve come to terms with, a day’s drive
from here, a day and the edge of one night,
which is where you are now, standing
with your mother in the driveway while the men
carry the children — one, two, three dream-soft
bodies — settle them into their seats, tuck
them in snug under blankets. When they wake
you’ll be hours from here, having crossed
a body of water deep enough to swallow
whole towns, wide enough to spawn legends
of mothers reaching shore without their children,
of children seen as islands from the shore.
2.
You’ve been trying to get this right — August
evening, ten o’clock and the sky
still rinsed with light. Inside the house,
the shadows have their way, ink brimming
into the contours of life, bone-black
shapes of table, lamp, eventual silhouette
of your father, backlit in the window as you sit
together remembering, in the hushed tones
dusk and the end of summer
seem to ask for, other Augusts far
from here, but not so far you can’t
reel them back in if you each offer
scraps for the piecing —
It was the rowboat, wasn’t it. It was
raining. No,
it’s your daughter
3.
in the back seat saying, Tell me a story. When I was a girl
it was always summer. The sand
stayed warm past dark and the lake, too.
There was a small boat moored
to a large rock. There was a family there,
a picnic, a transistor radio
promising storm. There was a house on shore
they never went back to. The father
grew into tall pine, the mother made
of her body a sail. The brothers built a fire
of driftwood and sticks. The gulls
bickered, wanting the scraps. The girl
is still there hovering
over the scene, outcast, witness, wavering
angel — whether to be water,
whether to be bridge.
4.
Look back and everything stands
for something. The sable scrawl of trees
for the scar a stone left in your skin, curved
flank of the dune for the sand-strewn
bed you woke in then. The islands emerge
from the dark like children wandering
out of the room of their sleep into a kitchen, cusp
of morning. Hog Island, Les Cheneaux —
say their names and they begin
to mean something, edges shifting,
edges making themselves known. A sigh
from the back seat returns you
to the brink of dawn breaking —
cinder, stone, plum, shell, wound. The crest
of the bridge behind you now, and soon
the hunger begins in earnest.
* * * * * * *
The Day Has Brought You Everything You Need
Shapes of your life climbing up out of night —
a doorway, a stack of books. And all the gaps
that dreams leave (how finally the bird
had nested, how somehow you were the bird).
A side yard where peaches redden
like girls becoming women, a key
that opens a door to a house where you live.
Where the floorboards hold.
Where the roof has not flown off and left you,
and water falls from faucets every time you turn them on.
You hardly know what to do with these riches.
See yourself as a softness turning
with the earth. See the children in their beds
breathing, metronomic.
Your parents are alive.
Your husband was not on the lost plane.
It will rain all day next Wednesday.
The day has brought itself to you like an offering,
has stretched its muslin light across the stars.
The stars are still there, waiting.
Night will come again, a mercy.
The infection went away, the jasmine’s blooming,
yesterday, Mary called.
Her voice opened doors all through you.
It is the season of stone fruit, of prodigal flesh
come home, whose warmth unfolds down the length
of a tender trap — the body you’ve learned
to live in, its subtle bars, a window scuffed
with years and small storms.
The way it lets the light in, even so.
* * *
“Bridging” — From the forthcoming If the House by Molly Spencer. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
Note: “The Day Has Brought You Everything You Need”: The title is a line from Joanna Klink’s poem “Vireo.”