These are instructions for the wrangler.
—FRANK BIDART
“The Third Hour of the Night”
Sometimes in my black dress, I move
westward in wheat fields with infants
or shotguns. The canvas on the wagons drawn so taut
lightning bugs keep older pig-tailed girls like me awake at night.
I’ve never really lived a hard life.
Never rode a railcar to nowhere—
I’m an impostor from the future.
How far, how fast can my horse go? Many moons, fewer miles.
I traveled here because I thought
you homesteaders could help—
given your petticoats—with seasoning cast-iron skillets, with blacksmithing, with cobbling
and bronzing
miniature, uneven pairs of shoes, their buckskin laces.
I know these are a spoilt girl’s wishes. I may be
green and weak, but I’m not dumb.
Yet, have I gone back too far? The men here, all romantics—they wear
suspenders.
Oh, and how the night is clear here, the sky bright with it—
In my time, we’ve lost most vision of the stars.
Me? I’d love to get impressed. I text
LOL to everything.
I mis-belong—can’t speak for us all, but—
Shh—
All you pioneers, stand still—I press
the button to pause you
for a moment:
Your washboards caked with baking powder, a watchman stares down the wagon circle, a woman hunched over
the rabbit stew overcooking on the fire—
I almost press play, but instead rewind.
In an unlocked trunk, I find a brown bible, a carpenter’s pencil
some man of yours whittled. I loop
my name,
the dash, the question mark inside.
REFLECTION ON FIRST SEASON OF A MARRIAGE
Never get a husband. They never will make cheese plates without a fuss. Get a dog
with thumbs.
Sometimes when my husband does the dishes, I rampage. I rampage when
for some reason the glasses look
dirtier than before a washing or I remember
a loneliness. I shape that loneliness into a broom. I use it to sweep
away happiness,
a state that can often lead to complacency, and also to fly off
the broom’s handle inside me.
We maybe all are holograms,
a reputable scientific journal proclaims, and I tell the husband so after dinner.
But why does this particular projection have small consciousness
that wishes
to sit in a straight-backed chair and recall reciting “Friends, Romans, countrymen” in
high school and this
little hologram goes to market and this little hologram hits zero
stoplights all the way home?
Also, as a projection, I wonder at my own need
to touch. Is light drawn
to light? Desire light?
Why should this little light become inconsolable over the silliest—
Oh, why is there so much of me
in me?
Maybe this is easy
science: Each hologram an imagining light thought to construct,
in which one furry projection drinks from the toilet, one projection sprouts leaves
that fall annually and never improves
at leaf-retention, and my husband—
an invisible who may not exist in the kitchen behind me
if it weren’t for his singing.
SLEEPLESS IN INDIANA, I CONTEMPLATE THE AGE-OLD ARTS
Dog that won’t stop barking and all I can think:
I don’t know anything about stars—
not what they’re called or how they form, but how
we turn stars into stickers to surprise
our children and assure them You are better
than normal children.
On boat decks, sailors cry out Orion!
and they see a man,
but they’ve only drawn stick-figure self-portraits
of fire and longing.
I tried to sketch
my face one night with stronger brow lines,
higher cheekbones, but it was all nose, scaly
water moccasin: a viper me.
I paid someone who drew me in
red with big hair, gaunter—
the way he drew me made me
see how lonely he thought I was. I rolled
that portrait with wax paper and a rubber band,
look at it during the Lenten season.
That same spring or summer on the back of a boat, I caught a sunfish, baited him
with gum. I didn’t like unhooking him—
tore his lip. Astrologists
shape stars into fish, take cracks at
decoding futures. Palm-reading hocus-pocus:
on