Open Shutters Read Free

gown,
    and any decorum life affords
    these days, is surrounded by the girls—
    some floral aunts, a gawky niece
        in her first pearls—
    and all the men in blazers, khakis …
    running shoes? Boys will be boys.
    Squirming, they squint into the sun:
        some amateur
    shutterbug has made sure they can’t
    see us, or we see them, and yet
    I understand now who is shaded
        there in the wheelchair.
    Dwindled, elderly, it’s Zelda—
    her lumpy little body slumped
    like a doll’s in a high chair, shoes just
        grazing the footrest.
    It must be she. However many
    lives her hair went through—Forties
    complications held with tortoise-
        shell combs; beehives;
    softer bouffants like Jackie’s; fried
    and sprayed gray-pincurl granny perms—
    in all the years (say, seventy-five?)
        since I last saw her,
    she’s come back to that sleek, side-parted
    bob, which (though it’s white) encloses
    the girl who’s smiling, pert, high-cheeked,
        despite the pull
    of gravity: just like her father.
    Or as he was.
When did he die,
    and how? What was his name? What’s yours?
        I could find out,
    surely, when I leave here; the owner
    might well be her granddaughter.
    I could scout, too, for snapshots even
        more recent—some
    get-together with no wheelchair—
    to prove what I’m sensing: Zelda’s gone.
    Why would they think to frame this scene,
        unless it’s the last?
    But why should
we
care so for people
    not us or ours—recognized by sight
    alone—whose voices never spoke
        with wit or comfort
    to us, and whose very thoughts,
    imagined, every year grow quainter?
    Yet they must have felt this tug as well,
        repeatedly
    peering at someone they were bound
    to come back to, as in a mirror.
    Who says they’re more anonymous
        than I am,
    packing up after my two weeks
    in the guesthouse? I make one last study
    of Zelda’s father, lingering with
        the boy, the man,
    sealing his developing
    face in myself for safekeeping.
    Too soon to leave. But then, nobody
        ever stays here long.

Night Thoughts
1.
    The hunchback is curled
    all night in my shut closet.
    I am six years old.
2.
    Dark in the cabin.
    No lamp but the blue moon of
    the computer screen.
3.
    Pebbles on the beach:
    the waves, without swallowing,
    deliver a speech.
4.
    I’d need a furnace
    (if I were a glassblower)
    to make icicles.
5.
    She’s alone in bed.
    In an earlier time zone
    he dines a lover.
6.
    A page of haiku:
    among the caught fireflies, one
    lights the whole bottle.

Snowed-on Snowman
    “Want to make a snowman?”
    —So goes her wide-eyed question
    on a Sunday in January.
    I’ve been sweeping the kitchen floor
    and prop the broom, like a bookmark,
    against the vertical line
    that joins one wall to another.
    I check my watch: 3:30.
    The last light of the weekend,
    her last such invitation,
    maybe: she’s thirteen.
    “I’m not sure it’s packable.
    It may not be good snow,
    or enough snow for a snowman.”
    —So go my instinctive,
    unfun, nay-saying quibbles:
    I’ve been an adult a long time.
    “Could we make a snowchild then?”
    Straight-faced, without guile,
    she doesn’t seem to know
    she’s just invented a word—
    or that its snow-fresh sound
    compels the thing’s creation.
    Seize the day in a snowball
    and roll it across the yard;
    leave a paper-thin
    membrane between winter
    and a spring that’s coming up
    in clumps of grass and soil;
    roll the ball rounder, bigger,
    make a second, a third,
    then pile them, roughly centered,
    one on top of the other,
    like marshmallows on a stick.
    And human, for all that:
    remarkable how little
    skill it takes to make us
    believe in, fall in love with,
    this lopsided Galatea
    (and why do we say it’s male?
    Why do we feel that poking
    a tarnished candle-snuffer
    for a pipe in his mouthless head
    will finally clinch the matter?).
    Dressed, at last, in every
    cliché we can think of—scarf
    wrapped against