Music Box
I am good at getting knots out of necklaces.
I have small fingers.
Which means I am bad at reaching an octave.
Is everything good also bad?
People think I’m not strong, but I am.
I can cook Italian like my grandmother Marie
who loved roses. Like Marie
in her nursing home in Brooklyn.
My brother drove us.
I am not good at driving. But I am good
at knowing a face even when
it’s vacant and sunk into a melting body.
I am good at bending down and whispering
who I am. Good at finding a picture
tucked away in a drawer and wondering
if it was a nurse or Marie
who put it there.
I wouldn’t want to look at it either.
It is of all of us at the pool in our swimsuits,
the sun licking our legs and making patterns
on the water. I am good at remembering.
I am a silver box shaped like a piano
and lined with velvet.
You can keep your earrings inside me,
or a folded note.
I’m a grand piano. I take up a whole room.
On the part that opens, there’s a mirror.
I am not a music box, even though
I am a box shaped like music.
The music you have to imagine.
* * * * *
Maya Miller
You should have seen how Maya looked
running across the field.
We had glimpsed a moose on the other side
of the waterfall and she said we could find him
if we took off our shoes and walked through the creek.
She ran ahead. She looked like she was bounding.
She yelled back, This is what it was like
being my friend when I was 14.
Last week, my husband visited the graves.
He could not find my father
even with the map, even when the man
from the cemetery office came and stuck
his spade down until he hit my father’s stone,
which had been buried over.
Even though I wasn’t there, I keep thinking
about the sound of the shovel hitting the stone.
We did not find the moose.
When we got up to the ridge and looked down,
we realized the way we should have gone.
When Maya was 14, her name was Maya Miller.
When I was 14, I sat on my brown-flowered couch
and dreamed of being a girl like Maya,
who always had scratches on her legs
from where the fields had touched her.
This week I read a poem that said poetry
is about telling the truth.
This week I noticed all the rhododendrons
rising up against their houses.
It is late May and this is their moment.
Supposedly we all have one,
and this may be mine.
I saw the moose across the field,
and at least I tried to find him.
* * * * *
Clever Dress
I bought a new dress. It’s called a shift,
which means it’s all one piece.
It’s deceiving because the top half is black and the bottom
is black and white plaid.
Not plaid exactly. A pattern like the static
on an old television, which people used to call snow.
Televisions had this kind of static
when you got stuck between channels.
Whenever I buy something new,
I hang it in the front of my closet,
which I can see from my bed.
I like to stare it at in the dark and consider it.
I did this last night, and I thought of the snow, and suddenly
everything was obvious.
When I tried it on at the store, I felt exactly
like myself. The skirt was short, and I was wearing
black leggings and short black boots
like the kind I had in high school.
Some things belong to you, and if you’re lucky,
you get them back.
Last night my friend called to say she hoped I wasn’t mad
so I said I wasn’t but I was.
I didn’t even know until this morning
when I woke up with a little paperweight on my chest,
the kind I used to have for my desk.
You didn’t want your papers to get scattered.
I am so talented at telling myself what is true
and then believing it that I can shock myself.
Have you ever watched a person you love
get caught in a lie, a big lie like they are not really
who they said? You know the way they rearrange their face
so it will look like the face you knew before
but you know now it never was?
Imagine that face is your own.
Imagine you think you are not mad
and then you wake up.
I also had a desk set, which looked like an open book
with a leather border around a calendar.
You could put your cup of pens to the right
and your paperweight to the left.
At first, I thought the dress was two pieces.
Clever dress.