If Briefly

Sometimes in time’s near

unassailable sangfroid there is

a thawing

& the memory

asserts its musicality again

reminds one that it is at heart

heart’s artificer

                    *     *     *

Somewhere in Okinawa there are stairs

“My husband is the only

constant in”

are concrete stairs that lead one

(or at least led me, age six)

near straight from top to bottom of a cliff face

& they ended in a black-sand beach

                      “the only

constant in my life.

When I was young I would have thought

I would regret it, to have wrapped

myself up like a caterpillar

in a man—but if my name, like his,

is Vogelsang, then I must half recede

with him

& only half of me is Julia. And that fades too.

So call me, if

you call me, Mrs. Vogelsang.”

At that age, having lived before in Florida,

it seemed like

                      a miraculous affront

                                     that a beach

could shuffle off the purity of sand

& satisfying to have seen it after the descent

of stairs

at least three hundred, each laborious

at six

my body hardly large enough to bear

its density in time—

Knowing little, still I felt

exhilaration that a new piece of world

would stand (if briefly) out of time

& therefore out of me

if I am what I occupy of it

. . . The body hates to be discounted

in this way, says it encloses

any love the heart pretends to,

like the stairs,

a downward tedium but still the necessary

setting of the beach, as gems

are set in rings that,

though of precious metals, lack

the brilliance of the gems

& go unnoticed, though they lift

the whole from what it risks—

                    *     *     *

          “At the onset of my husband’s

impotence I thought myself in part

if not entirely

responsible, & I ascribed the blame

to our, admittedly, unsensational sex habits,

to our bed not cold, perhaps, but let’s be frank

a little bored with us. Therefore,

thirty-eight & only just confronted with

my inexperience that bordered on

extended childhood, I contemplated, then resolved

to take his penis in my mouth.

It was not lightly I decided this. I am,

perhaps, anachronistic—though no prude,

my husband & I, if you will excuse

vulgarity, fucked constantly when young

& not infrequently until this roadblock—but

it struck me somehow as

unseemly hitherto. My husband

when I told him what I meant to do

looked pleased, as though

decorum only kept him

twenty years long

from requesting it. He tried

to guide me

as I started, both his hands

like tethers not unkind to what they hold—

And he was kind to me, spoke kindly as I ran

my tongue across him, tasting faintly

of his sweat but not unpleasant. On the whole

not bad to do this, though

my faith flagged somewhat

as his prick lay flaccid in my mouth,

its stubbornness

infuriating. I could feel his disappointment,

selfish maybe but no more so

than is fair in love, for he, of course,

was not a stranger to this act.

No sense in skipping what embarrasses:

I knew at least once

in the time since our marriage he

had been with someone else, though

it had been a while by now.

She had told me, long my friend

& full of guilt. I told her

bitterness was foreign to me

(which is almost true)

that she shouldn’t

worry, though I’d rather that she not

encourage him to seek a second

tryst. Not much by then

that I could do to change what they

had done—& I believed

at that time, as I said, I was

responsible, could mend it

so he’d never feel the need

to cheat again. Can’t know now

whether I was right, though sometimes

I consider asking him—as I considered

then, but as I built my courage up

he stiffened.

And I threw

my heart into the act, as one

who plows the earth with spite for it,

his anger lightening his labor, that

the ground break open for

his putting in the seed. I will not

                  —the thick

warmth running in my mouth like

bitter salt dissolved in water,

like the ocean beautiful

though full of bloated fish.”

                    *     *     *

Looking at the ocean, it

does not at first cohere     the waves

seem merely limits that the eyes have introduced, imposed

to force a pattern

on enormity

                 which one

does not encounter often made particular

—& we are in it

where we cautiously avoid the undertow

Time made us, time

will make us till we tire of it absolutely

what we are . . . & still so thin the slightest

puncture tears this curtain

of a body off me     Then I am

as one who, secretly

a part, participant, of it

pretends to volunteer to vanish at

a state-fair magic show that claims a

charm in its predictability

                    *     *     *

             “My love

consoles me greatly

but is love no less for that

because it is an undertaking

not myself but with a bit of me

in it.”

                    *     *     *

What I can see beyond

my eyes is my invention

half as much

as it is real, if real

means anything apart from

subject to invention. Though

as makers we might

deign to praise this

still one must admit it grows

at times exhausting

to remake the world in

every sighting of it.

I suspect you know

as well as I do

that desire we might feel

sometime subjected to another’s

presence is a sort

of longing to experience the object—

And sometimes we

experience it, sometimes

that experience

is burdensome. Then we hash

the matter over, celebrate

the isolation

one cannot alleviate through

laughter, set the problem

to the side. Friendship,

unlike love, will not destroy us

therefore is not penance. But

what eases hurting also serves

& can we rightly blame

the sun for what evaporates

between the intervals of rain?

                    *     *     *

“And if my love is only my invention

that is unimportant

since to say I love him

therefore makes it so.

To be content is to be so

by choice—my friend,

when she had told me that he came

inside her crying

choked with guilt & pleasure

which we all know will intoxicate when mixed,

was simply unaware that happiness

is mine by right if I declare it,

like the moon with our absurd flag.”

                    *     *     *

In Okinawa also

—I cannot remember

where this lies in time, before

the black-sand beach

or after—I awoke

at two o’clock one morning, sick,

unable to return to sleep,

never having woken up so early,

having never understood that two o’clock

is full dark stretched

like gauze across one corner of

the earth. My father took me

somewhere with him, maybe

there was someone he had told he’d meet

& likely told me, but my memory has found

no use for it—we stood outside the car

under streetlights in a parking lot

near home, & while he spoke

with some man wholly wiped

from time I’ve known, I watched

a dozen dragonflies fly circles

underneath the streetlight,

& I knew the time of day in which I stood

was new & tried to watch the dragonflies

with desperate attention,

knowing two o’clock was something that

existed now with being’s stony smirk.

One doesn’t see

these things again.