Paisley Rekdal

The Wolves

It was the week of asking. Asking 
to watch her eat. Asking if she understood 
the doctors’ questions. Asking her 
to explain the difference again between 
wanting to die right now, 
and dying later. 
The tumor making certain answers 
unquestionable. I watched her point 
to the incense dish from which 
someone swept all the ashes up. Asking 
if she recognized us. Because that 
is what the living want: thinking 
it is a sign we have been loved. 
But the answer was a summer 
drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which  
a wolf slept, suckling her cubs.  
Some deaths are good 
and it makes them hard to grieve. 
She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her
to die, too. That was important. But first
we wanted her to remember. 
From the bed, a finger pressed 
into its pile of leaves. Gray haunch, 
unmovable ashes. I didn’t want to disturb 
their tableau, she told us. And drifted off. And
we did not know the meaning behind this. 
The wolves must have looked so comfortable 
to her: wordless and in this wordlessness
perfect. Did she want to go there, too. 
I could point to the image and say, my father 
must be in there, my uncle. Or: the wolf 
is you, you are still the mother, 
as if necessary to name that self 
at the end of its world. An animal cry,
memory. That was our selfishness.
As death was hers. She insisted upon it. 
And why not. It was good for me 
to get a chance to know you,
she said, who had known me
my entire life. Then the pills, a small 
handful, crushed into juice.
She was happy then. We all were. Or
said we were. What 
is the difference now.

From Nightingale, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

Driving to Santa Fe

Quick swim up 
through the headlights: gold eye
a startle in black: green swift glance 
raking mine. A full second
we held each other, gone. 
Gone. And how did I know
what to call it? Lynx, the only possible 
reply though I’d never seen one. The car 
filling with it: moonlight, 
piñon: a cat’s acrid smell
of terror. How quickly the gray body 
fled, swerving to avoid 
my light. And how often 
that sight returns to me, shames me 
to know how much more this fragment 
matters. More than the broad back 
of a man I loved. More than the image
of my friend, cancer-struck, curled 
by her toilet. More than my regret 
for the child I did not have which I thought 
once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing
beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs 
stirring the dark. And if I keep 
these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? 
A flight, a thunder. A shield of light 
dropped before the eyes, pinned 
inside that magnificent skull only time
would release. Split back, fade
and reveal. Wind 
would open him. Sun would turn him
commonplace: a knot of flies, a ribcage
of shredded tendon, wasp-nest
fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, 
gone. Even now, I thumb that face
like a coin I cannot spend. If something in me 
ever lived, it lived in him, fishing the cold
trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying
when he died, which is a comfort. 
I must say this. Otherwise, I myself 
do not exist. It looked at me 
a moment. A flash of green, of gold
and white. Then the dark came down again
between us. Once, I was afraid
of being changed. Now that is finished. 
The lynx has me in its eye. 
I am already diminished.

From Nightingale, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

Telling the Wasps 

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps
the evening you died. Not things that fly
from earth to the underworld bearing sweetness
on their wings: grief made me bitter
and so in bitterness I went to seek
what roots among the mud and leaves, hanging 
its home in ashes. I wanted to believe 
this world would be our only one: 
what other streams could run more cold, 
what trees bloom with darker fruit? 
I was happy here once, as were you. 
I wanted to stay and grieve in the failing world 
where we were human together.  
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering 
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed 
on broken reed hums its numb refrain, 
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps. 

From Nightingale, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.

Four Marys

--Madonna del Parto, 1460, Piero della Francesca

Are the drapes drawn open, or being closed?
Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped 
in the hands of a little angel, a little man really, 
in shades of plum and mint green that frame
the birthing tent’s opening for a girl 
who retreats into or emerges from the dark. 
It isn’t clear: the perspective is such 
that if I cover the painting’s 
top half with a hand, Mary steps forward; 
if I cover the lower, she shrinks back, 
her blue bodice split at the bulging seams 
to show the pear-white cut of her linen shift, 
the great weight of the child she is about to bear
and later bury. And even if I didn’t believe
the child would rise again, I would believe the artist
had seen such fear paint a girl’s face
when the eldest women in the village 
are called for help, and fresh straw brought in 
if there isn’t a bed, and hot water, and rose oil to rub 
over the hips, and vinegar and sugar water
to drink, and hog’s gut and a thick needle 
to sew her up with later. Even if I did not believe 
in Mary’s joy, I would believe in her pain, the quick flick 
of her thoughts turning to the sister, or the cousin, 
or to her own mother who died giving birth,
the baby too not making it, for the birth 
was in winter: ice so clogged the village’s
deep ruts that the midwife’s cart slipped
into the soak dike, splitting the wood wheel
in two, and by the time the woman could walk
the steep hill up to the villa, the mother had torn, 
and in the rush to save her, no one worked 
quick enough to cut the cord wrapped 
around the baby’s throat. Or the baby came out 
strong and fine, but died two years later
when it stumbled into a fire, or was bitten by a rat
and sickened and starved, or caught the fever 
that spread through town when all the animals 
were stabled inside the houses for winter. 
So many people died, so many people 
were supposed to die, it’s hard to conceive
of how the mothers survived their grief, 
and how they named their next, living baby 
after the dead one, because the name, at least,
was good. It’s hard to know if I should read
the deepest grief or resignation or both in the line
from Mary Shelley’s 1818 notebook, the year 
her daughter, Clara, died, two weeks
after Mary had given birth to her. Woke this morning. 
Found my baby dead, all the little black scratching pen
could add to paper, and the rest was blank,
and then there were months, and then
there was Frankenstein. Piero della Francesca
painted an embroidery of pomegranates 
into Mary’s birthing tent, symbol of fruitfulness 
and of the underworld, of a mother’s grief 
and of her rage to get her child back, the daughter
both dead and alive to her, as Mary knows her own child
is both dead and alive to us. A winter fruit
for the winter birth of a rich woman 
whose house wanted to ward off a grueling 
delivery, and so whose midwife would feed her 
pomegranate seeds to sustain her, a fruit 
the midwife herself would eat only once, as payment
from the duke for the son she finally ushered 
for him into the world. Such a strange, leathery
skin, though the color was bright
as blood on fresh linen, and who could have expected
those glistening cells packed inside, wet prisms
in the ruby eye of a ruby insect, or the heart
of a god who takes what he wants
and never gives it back. The midwife took the fruit home
and split it with her husband, and tried not to think
of the bed of the girl she’d just left, its stains 
that looked almost black in the dawn light, 
and how the girl’s skin had turned bluish, the fragile spring
she’d require to spend alone in bed away from the duke
and healing. How can Mary not look 
downcast before these curtains that threaten 
to close on her, to open? I have no doubt 
of seeing the animal today, Mary Wollstonecraft 
Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother wrote, 
meaning birth, meaning Mary, the little animal 
she never saw grow up, because Wollstonecraft 
died of an infection days after giving birth.
But before that was told she could not nurse 
her infant daughter for fear the corruption 
would spread through her milk, though she stayed 
at Mary’s bedside the final three days of her life.
And Godwin beside her, who, because he loved 
his wife, believed her genius could survive 
any truth, and so published a memoir later 
detailing everything: Wollstonecraft’s affairs,
her daughter’s illegitimacy, attempts at suicide, so that 
in 1798 the index of the Anti-Jacobin Review would publish, 
under the heading “Prostitution,” See Mary 
Wollstonecraft. Two towns over from his Madonna,
in a church in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca 
painted a fresco of Mary Magdalene, her curled hair wet
with the tears she used to bathe Christ’s feet, 
her body a swollen green swathe of dress, the red cape 
folded so as to accentuate the pendulous belly 
and thick thigh, the Magdalene bristling 
between arch columns that frame her, one
painted slightly forward, the other behind
her body, so that we do not know in which direction 
Mary is headed, nor what she is, really, 
her almond eyes glittering out at us, halo chipped,
over centuries, away. It is wonderful
when time accentuates something of the truth
already within us: the frank look, the unabashed
leg with which the woman kicks off the covers from the bed
of the man to whom she is not married; the neat,
round muscle of his shoulder pressed against hers
in the dark, his body over and over coming alive 
under her hands, a dream or a nightmare 
Mary Shelley once had of Clara. 
All this time, she told her husband, their daughter
had not been dead at all, only cold, the little body frozen 
and waiting to be attended to. And so we rubbed 
it before the fire, and now it lives, she told
Shelley in the conversation recorded
in her journal, and cried awhile, and went to bed. 
Then woke again the morning, and remembered. 
The midwife, walking back down from the villa
three summers later, having attended the birth 
of the duke’s new, less delicate wife, hums a song 
to herself that she hummed to the baby 
she just left, a girl this time, no pomegranates 
for payment; a girl who will, if lucky, inherit 
her mother’s strength and her plainness, both traits
the midwife believes might protect her from
and in the birthing bed. She’ll grow up,
the midwife thinks, and marry, and have children 
herself, some less or more like her, sons 
with obdurate natures, perhaps, or a daughter 
who inherits her curly hair, perhaps the sturdy thighs 
of a woman like this shopkeeper kneeling now by a store 
in the Piazza Grande to retrieve a shower of euros 
from someone’s coin purse. The woman stands, straightens, 
and I see her mouth thin to a not unpleasant line
as she looks out at me, calculating, perhaps,
the time until lunch as she tugs at the waist 
of her linen pants. The yellow pleats sag, slack
at her belly. The weight from a pregnancy 
she never lost, perhaps, or the thickening 
that comes to anyone, in the later part of life. 

From Nightingale, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.