Suzanne Cleary

FOR THE POET WHO WRITES TO ME WHILE STANDING IN LINE AT CVS, WAITING FOR HIS MOTHERS PRESCRIPTION

for Russell Jackson

 It’s nothing that you flat out say, Russell, but your email

 reminds me that six months into pandemic, five months

 into quarantine, CVS remains open 24 hours, its harsh

 blue-white light steady, as nothing in nature is steady,

 those long fluorescent bulbs still dive-bombing lumens

 so that midnight is bright as 8 a.m., or 4 a.m., or 2 p.m.,

 or 7:30 p.m. You can see that I struggle to carry

 one thought to the next, these long days. I spend hours

 on the Internet, becoming expert on the height of actors

 from Hollywood’s Golden Age, on the 25 Cutest Photos

 of four-year-old Princess Charlotte. I now know

 that Elizabeth Bishop was a bit taller than I am,

 a bit heavier. Her clothes would be too big for me,

 as no doubt her shoes. Russell, what is it that supposedly

 concentrates the mind wonderfully? Samuel Johnson said it,

 in Boswell's biography, which I have never read and never

 will. I know my limits. Lately, I think that I know little else

 worth knowing. My only advice for your poems, Russell:

 wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday."

 Did you know that song is no longer copyrighted? Five years ago,

 U. S. District Court Judge George H. King ruled

 "Happy Birthday" is Public Domain, the 1935 patent applied

 only to the melody and specific arrangements of the tune,

 but not to the actual song itself. When Judge King writes

 actual song, he means lyrics, but I hear him saying

 song is something beyond the reach of law, beyond reach

 of language. Song is like a kernel of light, inside of things,

 steady. Russell, be like CVS. I don’t know what this means,

 be like CVS. Russell, dare to say what doesn’t make sense,

 then wait patiently to see the sense inside of it. Be like CVS.

 Be like the bewildering variety of toothpastes, decongestants,

 hair conditioners. Be like orange Velcro knee braces,

 like spools of pastel ribbon that hums, pulled across a scissor.

 Be like the aisle of bare shelves where the cleaning products stood,

 where the white metal shelves now display only how each shelf,

 with a simple ingenious hook, fits into the frame.

 I’m telling you nothing that you don’t already know, Russell.

 Be like whatever accepts the horrid light, and shines in it.

 Be like the 8-ounce can of lightly salted cashews, for which

 you are newly willing to pay $12.99, as you stand in line

 waiting for the blue-gloved hands to hold out to you

 the small white bag, which is not for you,

 except in that you are the one

 who will carry it where it must go.

(from The Moth magazine, The Foward Book of Poetry: March 4, 2021, and in The Odds, 2025)

CRUDE ANGEL

 My angel is the crude angel at the door

 of Our Lady of Perpetual Light,

 the angel who waits outside the church,

 at the top of three flights of black marble.

 Its thick wings appear to sprout

 from a granite tarp,

 as if the sculptor abandoned

 the angel's body, the bowed head

 with featureless face,

 so as to fathom the angel's hands:

 folded in prayer, a prayer-fist

 like a flame arisen from stone

 as the Savior is said to have risen.

 My angel's blocky wrists rest

 upon a gown with folds so broad,

 so flat, it is hard to tell if my angel

 kneels or sits, or if, beneath the gown,

 my angel stands,

 its body broken in some way

 that the faithful understand

 themselves to be broken.

 My angel drags itself to the door

 of this church it will never enter.

 Nor will my angel rise into the air,

 my angel exhausted by the weight

 of the stone of which it is made,

 as we are exhausted by the stone

 of which we are made,

 we who love the angel's heavy,

 useless wings, wings

 that make us imagine

 rising, on nothing

 one can see with the eyes.

(from Crude Angel, November 2018)

ITALIAN MADE SIMPLE

 tells the story of Mario and Marina,

 and by the end of Chapter 1, I've got it:

 the r is a d, and Mario and Marina

 will fall in love, he an American

 planning a business trip to Italy,

 she an Italian teaching English

 in a school in centro, downtown,

            which I take to mean Wall Street,

 maybe Tribecca or Nolita.

 For the first lesson, they meet

 in Marina's ufficio, where they repeat

 the half-dozen Italian phrases for hello.

 Both of them remain patient,

 cheerful, even, in the face of their task.

 They name every single blessed thing

 on the desk. What good fortune it is

 they cannot yet say, so many small things

 here before them: the pen, the paper, and

 the pencil, too, the newspaper, the lamp.

 Marina pronounces each word slowly

 while Mario watches her lips, repeats.

 What is this? Marina asks in Italian.

 What is this? and Mario, under a spell,

 answers, although he cannot yet

 be said to understand these words

 that are little more to him than sounds,

 air blown through the shapes

 that Marina's lips make his lips make.

 By Chapter 4, simple Italian leads Mario

 and Marina to the window, to the words

 for street, hospital, bicycle, child,

 where simplicity threatens to abandon

 these two people who are just trying

 to live, an idiomatic expression

 for to make money. No, says Marina.

 That is not a child. That is not a girl.

 a woman, a car, etcetera. Mario loves

 the word eccetera, which he figures

 will save him lots of time. When their time

 is up, Mario and Marina walk to the door,

 at exactly the same moment say la porta.

 The next moment, they laugh. Eccetera,

 eccetera. Because I cannot live

 in the simple present, where Italian Made

 Simple begins, I read ahead.

 In Florence, on his business trip,

 Mario buys for Marina a gold bracelet.

 A gold bracelet Mario buys for Marina.

 Mario for Marina buys a gold bracelet.

 He does not yet understand that Marina

 already knows that he loves her,

 that she has loved him since Chapter 5,

 Familia, wherein Mario showed quick

 concern for her ill niece. Mario, alone

 in Florence, on the far side of his voyage

 through the definite pronouns, the prepositions,

 the baffling procession of possessive forms,

 Mario sits at a cafe, drinking

 the beverage he ordered by mistake.

 When the waitress sets it brightly before him,

 Piacere, Mario says, ever gracious.

 Mario, at the end of my textbook,

 of your slow, sometimes laborious story,

 how will I live without you?

 You do not yet know that the final lesson

 finds you and Marina deciding to marry,

 to live in Rome, yet here, in Chapter 20,

 Firenze, still you sip and savor.

 You open your dictionary.

 The small table at which you sit

 is called tavolino, just as you had thought,

 and you smile to yourself,

 now that you are lonely, now that you know

 you know by heart,

 the meaning of every single blessed thing.

(from Beauty Mark, BkMk Press, 2013)

ECHOCARDIOGRAM

 How does, how does, how does it work

 so, little valve stretching messily open, as wide as possible,

 all directions at once, sucking air, sucking blood, sucking air-in-blood,

 how? On the screen I see the part of me that always loves my life, never tires

 of what it takes, this in-and-out, this open-and-shut in the dark chest of me,

 tireless, without muscle or bone, all flex and flux and blind

 will, little mouth widening, opening and opening and, then, snapping

 shut, shuddering anemone entirely of darkness, sea creature

 of the spangled and sparkling sea, down, down where light cannot reach.

 When the technician stoops, flips a switch, the most unpopular kid in the class

 stands off-stage with a metal sheet, shaking it while Lear raves.

 So this is the house where love lives, a tin shed in a windstorm,

 tin shed at the sea's edge, the land's edge,

 waters wild and steady, wild and steady, wild.

 (from Trick Pear, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007)

ANYWAYS

For David

 Anyone born anywhere near

       my home town says it this way,

           with an s on the end:

                "The lake is cold but I swim in it anyways,"

           "Kielbasa gives me heartburn but I eat it anyways,"

       "(She/he) treats me bad, but I love (her/him) anyways."

 Even after we have left that place

       and long settled elsewhere, this

            is how we say it, plural.

                 I never once, not once, thought twice about it

            until my husband, a man from far away,

       leaned toward me, one day during our courtship,

 his grey-green eyes, which always sparkle,

      doubly sparkling over our candle-lit meal.

            "Anyway," he said. And when he saw

                 that I didn't understand, he repeated the word:

            "Anyway. Way, not ways."

       Corner of napkin to corner of lip, he waited.

 I kept him waiting. I knew he was right,

      but I kept him waiting anyways,

           in league, still, with me and mine:

 Slovaks homesick for the Old Country their whole lives

           who dug gardens anyways,

      and deep, hard-water wells.

 I looked into his eyes, their smoky constellations,

      and then I told him. It is anyways, plural,

           because the word must be large enough

       to hold all of our reasons. Anyways is our way

 of saying there is more than one reason,

      and there is that which is beyond reason,

            that which cannot be said.

                 A man dies and his widow keeps his shirts.

           They are big but she wears them anyways.

  The shoemaker loses his life savings in the Great Depression

       but gets out of bed, every day, anyways.

           We are shy, my people, not given to storytelling.

       We end our stories too soon, trailing off "Anyways . . . ."

 The carpenter sighs, "I didn't need that finger anyways."

       The beauty school student sighs,

            "It'll grow back anyways."

      Our faith is weak, but we go to church anyways.

 The priest at St. Cyril's says God loves us.

          We hear what isn't said.

      This is what he must know about me, this man, my love.

 My people live in the third rainiest city in the country,

      but we pack our picnic baskets as the sky darkens.

 We fall in love knowing it may not last, but we fall.

            This is how we know home:

      someone who will look into our eyes

           and say what could ruin everything, but say it,

                regardless.

 (from Trick Pear, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007; Southern Poetry Review, Spring/Summer, 2003)

CHEESE-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

 For Jo Ann Clark

 At first, it had seemed such a good idea,

 to open your home to the creamy, the crumbly,

 the stinky, the blue, to open your home to this new life,

 the life where you open your mouth not to talk but to taste,

 to find, the third Friday of every month, the box,

 heavy yet compact, its corrugated wings opening

 onto another box, shiny and white, taped to its top

 a gold-edged card identifying the cheese by name and story,

 to find at your door, dependably, a new reason

 to live in your body, to love your body:

 the Venetian Pecorino, coated with black pepper

 providing a distinct bite with a little heat,

 the Netherlands' Extra-Aged Farmer's Cheese, described as

 the dairy world's equivalent of a Rembrandt or VanGogh,

 the description, true, sometimes a tad overripe, still,

 it seemed such a good idea to learn, to know, to savor

 what at first you could barely discern, say,

 the Belgian Goat Cheese, fruity, slightly herbed,

 its texture chalky yet creamy.

 What could this cheese not teach you

 about contrast and balance, risk and poise?

 But now, each time you open the door, there is another cheese.

 Now, Month Six, you doubt you can keep pace with it.

 It is likely to outrun you, even the cheese that is not runny,

 even the aged cheese. You doubt your capacity for pleasure,

 your appetite for knowledge, your appetite itself. You doubt yourself worthy

 of the gentle buffalo-milk cheese called Bishop's Blessing.

 And how, by the way, does a month pass so quickly?

 Do not ask for whom the cheese tolls. It tolls for thee,

 in Pomfret, Vermont, where a raw-milk organic cheese ripens

 in one of the few copper cheese vats in the United States,

 a vat that, given the chance, would sing like a steel drum,

 call everyone in Pomfret out into the street

 to dance in a long, swaying line,

 except that you doubt people dance in the street in Vermont,

 where, it is said, there are two seasons: winter and roadwork.

 Maybe you should live in Vermont, where nights are long and cold,

 where the cheese is mostly local, and you doubt people say much about it.

 You doubt anyone would approve

 of the gold-edged card that boasts of the subtle nut flavor,

 its complex finish redolent of a cove north of Pomfret.

 Redolent, you turn the word over with your tongue, your mind.

 Redolent of a cove is enough to make you sign on for another year,

 for isn't this what you want, what you have always wanted,

 to bite into life so deeply you can taste where it began?

 Isn't that desire what brought you here, somewhere south of Pomfret?

 (from Southern Poetry Review, Volume 46, Issue 1; Beauty Mark, BkMk Press, 2013)

GLORY

 My husband and his first wife once sang Handel's Messiah

 at Carnegie Hall, with 800 others who also had read

 the ad for the sing-along, and this is why I know

 the word glory is not sung by the chorus,

 although that is what we hear.

 In fact, the choir sings glaw-dee, glaw-dee

 while it seems that glory unfurls there, like glory itself.

 My husband sings for me. My husband tells me they practiced

 for an hour, led by a short man with glasses,

 a man who made them sing glory, twice, so they could hear it

 fold back upon itself, swallow itself

 in so many mouths, in the grand hall.

 Then he taught them glaw-dee, a distortion that creates the right

 effect, like Michelangelo distorting the arms of both God and Adam

 so their fingertips can touch.

 My husband and his first wife and 800 others performed

 at 5 o'clock, the Saturday before Christmas,

 for a small audience of their own heavy coats,

 for a few ushers arrived early, leaning on lobby doors.

 But mostly they sang for themselves,

 for it is a joy to feel song made of the body's hollows.

 I do not know if their marriage, this day, was still good

 or whether it seemed again good

 as they sang. I prefer to think of the choral conductor,

 who sang with them. He sang all the parts, for love

 not glory, or what seemed to be

 glory to those who wandered in

 and stood at the back of the hall, and listened.

(from Keeping Time, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002)

ON HIS DEATHBED THE ACROBAT TELLS HIS DAUGHTER TO BUY LAND

 I see now

 it was never the sky

 I wanted

 though for years I perfected

 leaps and dives, arching, curling

 tucking my chin hard into my chest

 to spin free

 far above my shadow.

 Now I see

 it was always the earth

 its mysterious pull

 I was celebrating.

 It was always to return

 to the earth's hard bargain, on two feet

 my arms spread like wings.

 There are enough birds, Edith.

 The air is full of seeds

 far better than we can ever be--

 invisible, merciful.

 When I watched you pass the hat

 I wanted to crawl into our wagon

 and lie with my hands crossed over my chest.

 I wanted to count the potatoes and flour

 and find for once enough.

 I wanted to melt my father's gold watch

 and buy you a horse

 and shoes of thin leather.

 Remember I never asked you

 to walk on your hands.

 I respected your fear of heights,

 of the fireworks we set off

 at the end of the show.

 The hard-packed earth at the center of town

 where the people gathered,

 their thin shoulders touching,

 that was my passion.

 Remember before each trick

 it was the red earth

 I rubbed into my palms.

 (from Keeping Time, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002; Sotheby's International Poetry Competition, 1982, Third Prize)

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