ALICE FRIMAN

Tracing Back

In the history of reading,
there’s many a cracked heart,
lost letter, stopped clock, cut wrist.
Any cursory push through poems
or stories and you could trip
over the drownings
or the heap of crushed
petticoats fluttering on the tracks.

To the bookish, I say careful.
What’s between two covers
can creep beneath covers.
Any thief worth his prize
knows how seduction works:
ingratiation: the innocent pull
of words, that belly crawl
of language. What do you
think that first slither was
coiling the winesap,
so lovely, our girl was forced
to write it down, there
on the underside of leaves.
Hers, to sneak past the terrible
gates, hidden in the rustle
of her figgy apron: the key
to what she didn’t know yet
but would be looking for
in all her troubled incarnations.

Published in The Gettysburg Review
Pushcart Prize, 2012

Seeing It Through

Presto the magician
drops his handkerchief
and amazingly I’m looking down
seventy years. Down
as from the top of a winding stair
vertigoing to the bottom
where the child struggles to mount
crawling on her knees that first step.
And I want to say Wait
I’ll come down
carry you up
for I need you here
now that the banister is nearing
its finial and I can see
the rituals of the sky
speeding up through the almost
reachable skylight.

Honey hair and the sunsuit
Mother made from a scrap. Come.
If I hold you high, you can touch
the glass. Let the last contact
be a baby’s hand. Why not?
All things come around
replete with rage and rattle.

Published in Poetry

The Night I Saw Saturn

Crossing the Pacific, flying backward
into perpetual night, and all night
one light on in the plane, a young man
beneath, scribbling. I am looking out
the window, the glass prism that shatters
the stars, and we at thirty thousand feet
not flying up but seemingly across
and headed straight toward it—Orpheus
of the night sky—the rock that sings.

What is he writing, that man
who can’t sleep so doesn’t even try,
stuck in an inner section, unable
to indulge in a window reverie, leaning
his head as I do against the glass?

The night I saw Saturn was because
I pleaded. Before I die I want to see…
and the astronomer complied, there
on the top of Mauna Kea, and me
shivering in all the clothes I had
and hanging on because I couldn’t
see my feet, so dark it was as I set
my eye to the metal eyepiece.
Then, true to the pictures in my
schoolbooks or the planetarium’s
mockup, only luminous, radiating
more energy into space than received
from the sun. Ah Saturn, grandfather
of Love, what do scientists know
of the light that lights the pearl? Beauty’s
absolute, cold white and burning in the sky.

And now, this man, the only light
in the plane, ringed by huddles of sleepers
as if he were guardian of the oblivious
awake for us all. How furiously
he bends to his work. How lovely
the light lingering on the shock of his hair
holds him—incandescent—reflecting in rings.

Published in The Southern Review

Watching You in the Mirror

Suppose I stood behind you,
slipped my bare arms under yours
and arced them about, making you
into a four-armed god, all ministering
to your fresh-from-the-shower nakedness—
combing, deodorizing, touching
toothpaste to your brush—while you
concentrated on shaving, twisting
your mouth in that funny way you do.

Would you, compelled
by the light streaming in the window,
lift up one foot as if to dance—toes flexed,
heel down—and balancing on one leg,
glow as Shiva did in that ring of fire?

And if I suddenly bit you
the way I do sometimes, and you
unable to turn, caught in the bas-
relief of the game, how would you
read me? I have played wife
so well for fifteen years. Turban-
wrapped behind you, my name, Surya,
copper-headed daughter of the sun
who, like my father roaring in the ether,
loves to linger over skin, using her teeth
to know you. The gods say death comes only
to those who blink. Gods never blink
or shut their eyes, but shuffle the world,
growing tusks long with knowledge.

Husband, I tell you, there will be no end
to my knowing. In the reflection of my eyes,
you shall never sleep. If necessary, I will
gnaw each mirror you’re in, swallowing
it down to keep you awake and inside me.

Published in The Gettysburg Review

The Price

We were a process
going nowhere, fueled
on poetry and any old thing
to eat. Even in the bathtub, be-
tween slosh and fondle, we were Rich
and Sexton, Hass and listen to this.
Oh, but weren’t we lovely then?
You were my delirium, my
silver ring, my Mercury, all lithe-
limbed stream and glitter. And I,
young again and too much in love
to be turned into your boulder—
the mote in your eye.

Today, twenty-five years later,
the trees outside my window
once again dandle their darlings,
tossing in the blue air spring’s
green adorables, knowing
full well the coming sacrifice,
the shriveling end. And I wonder
if when these trees are gone,
the future will be able to read
the invisible ink ground into
their pulp, pressed into their paper,
saying After, there was blank.
Then there was inconsolable.

Published in The Gettysburg Review

Depression Glass

It must have been October, right after
the annual hanging of the winter drapes
and the ceremonial unrolling of the rug
from its summer sleep behind the sofa.
Gone were the slipcovers, leaving
the upholstery stripped down to warm
arms again, and the little living room
transformed into a mother hug of all
she labored for—the luxury of bastion
and snug, the thick stability of thick
pile, purchased with how many
on-her-knees hours of scour and rag.
The whir of the sewing machine at night,
and all those stretched nickels.

My sister would say this never happened,
or if it did, it wasn’t this way, or if it was,
I never cried, or if I did, how could I—
so young—know what was to cry about.

A room like that, in the Snow White
haven of the dwarves’ house, and I
no more than four, rowing a cardboard
box across the rug, its flowered sea
lapping at my hands that were my oars.
When suddenly, there was my father
dancing to the radio or some crazy song
of his own making, flapping his arms
and yawping like a great enchanted
gull of happiness having nothing to do
with me. Or her. And I saw as through
the glass layers of the sea what he’d
been before I came in my little boat
grinding its vast engines of responsibility,
dragging him under, changing him into
someone other than the drowned beloved
I’d be trying to make it up to all my life.

Published in Prairie Schooner

Otma Rood

Shackled to that name, by fifteen
she knew the rest the stars dished out
would stack up equal: a mother-in-law
who cooked forty years for the railroad,
raising eight perfect kids to boot. And Joe,
shot dead in the grocery that Friday night
late August, figuring receipts.

Go to Ten Mile Creek. Look there
for what she was, mud-trailing skirts
in her daily crash through woods,
racketing trees with a peeled stick,
mouthing the words she chewed on each day
of her life to suck the bitter out—same as
the creek hid under its breath, lugging rain
to the long brown thirst of the Arkansas.
Even Joe—sweeping, marking tins—knew
how poetry can settle young on a girl
who labeled herself cashed-in ugly
each time she had to write a check.

Take the turnpike east out of Tyler
where Ten Mile still runs cold
past Kissy Rock, then follow on foot
to where it eddies and stalls, twisting
back on itself to lap at the roots
of the giant sycamore, sucking out
the footings, the underpinnings,
not stopping until the whole white body
drops into its mouth at last. Do you see
how the tree leans back and away, pulling
at its roots the way a woman would
who recognizes the unlucky label
of her name on the underside of love
and knows she has to get away, but can’t?

Here Otma Rood must have walked
and stopped to lean. And maybe it was here
she saw it. A bird? Who can tell.
A dive of color then a swoop. Or make
it night, late August, when the wild sky,
risking theft, unhinges all its fire.
And she, widow now and womb pregnant
with the only shot at freedom
she would ever have to give a name to—

Juanita. Proxy. Shooting star.

Published in Shenandoah
James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry

Vinculum
for Richard

Do not look at me again like that: between us
is too stripped down to the bare wire of what we were.

The look, umbilical—that cord I thought discarded
in some hospital bin fifty years ago come November.

How strange to find it once more between us,
still beating and so palpable we could

cross over and enter into each other again,
seeing our old selves through new, first eyes.

Plucked from a drumroll of autumns, that one
was ours—autumn of my twenty-third year, autumn

of your final fattening, taking up all the room,
worrying the thinning walls. The rope that seethed

from me to you and back again—our two-
way street—and you, little fish, hanging on

past your lease in a time of narrowing dark,
which you can’t possibly remember, but do.

And it comes to me: that look must be what love is,
which is why we’ll not speak of it nor hunt it down

in each other’s eyes again, for you’re too worldly
to admit, without wincing, what happened happened.

And I, too conscious of my failed attempts
to fire into language what’s beyond words, could not

bear it. Which leaves me holding the bag once more
of foolish thoughts. I know, I know, the universe

has neither edge nor center nor crown, but I want
to think that past Andromeda and out beyond

a million swirling disks of unnamed stars, that cord
we knew, that ghost of an eye-beam floating between us,

arcs in space, lit up like the George Washington Bridge
pulsing with traffic, even after both stanchions are gone.

Published in The Georgia Review

Visiting the Territories

Come, brush the clay
from what’s left of your good suit
and lie down here with me.
In the splinters
of what you are, in the marrow’s residue,
surely there are traces of your bride.
Don’t be afraid. Make believe I’m asking
you to dance. You always loved to dance.
Show ’em how it’s done in Brooklyn, you’d say,
whirling me out to the ends of your fingers,
pulling me back.
Now I’m pulling you
back, not to redraw the lines or rummage
in the ragbag of our forever after,
but because I need you. Come.
Our first apartment, a high-rise called
The Dakota, remember? A big joke
for two New York City big shots like us
who couldn’t find the Dakotas on a map
if we had to. Birdland, that we knew, Basie,
Embers East, Oscar Peterson, and Dinah un-
dressing the blues in pink. Dizzy, healing
the world with his horn, holding the whole
damn ball in his cheeks. Who’d not reconvene
his dust to remember that?
Come. Apt. 4-C.
Five-and-ten-store dishes and all we own—
a mattress, Scrabble, and a window fan
rattling its dark inklings. Maybe if you lay
down next to me the artless bones, I could find
the true history of the Dakotas before the broken
treaties, the Badlands, and what happened next.

Published in The Gettysburg Review

Art & Science

In chemistry, what’s severed
looks to latch on to any other
severed thing: orphaned electrons
zizzing in your wires race to embrace,
swirl a DC-do-ing, re-form their rings.
Chemistry likes adherence, every tick
its tock. Split an atom. What a noise!

Then is it not passing strange
when molecules into proteins make
and muster into muscle, teeth, bone, knee,
that when this vast multitude jostling
under skin wakes, it wants to be alone?

What did Greta Garbo have on me?

Outside my window the great poplar
tosses her leaves hand to hand like
so much change as if she were rooted
to a corner waiting for a bus. How antsy
she is for all this autumn fuss to be over.
Who knows but that November rains
whet the appetite for cold: the annual
jettison of gold to stripped-down shudder
and pause. The air holds its breath. Listen.
One red dot on a bare branch, singing.
In here, the violin’s one note at a time.

Published in Poetry

Getting Serious

Today I started looking for my soul.
Yesterday it was my keys. Last week,
my brain which I couldn’t find, it being out
looking for me, now that I’m getting so old.

First I thought my soul would have gone
back to Greece where she grew so tall and straight
she thought she was a column. Or back to camp,
being forever twelve and underdeveloped.
Perhaps, being careless, I left her during the 70s
in bed with God knows whom. Or could be
I buried her with my mother—my head not being right—
but that was my heart.

So I went to where I know
I saw her last. Radio City Music Hall.
I’m six, my feet barely brushing the floor,
and the Rockettes start shuffling out, long-
legged and perfect as paper dolls kicking up
down in a wave. One body with seventy-two knees
chugging like pistons going back in a forever mirror,
same as in Coney Island’s Fun House or on Mama’s can
of Dutch Cleanser. And my heart flexed in me, a sail,
and I swear I saw it flying out of my chest
spiriting away my giddy soul, ears plugged and tied
to the mast: I can’t hear you I can’t hear you.

Published in Ploughshares
Best of American Poetry, 2009

Mrs. Beasley’s Supper
“Woman Sees Jesus in Microwave Oven”
—supermarket tabloid

She never considered herself
worthy. But there He was—
no bigger than a dashboard doll
riding the revolving plate.
Redeemer. Pin of the pinwheel.
The groaning axis of this world
lit up and acquiescent
as the potato He sat on—
all eyes shooting out His love.

Fixed to His purpose
under last week’s gravy-
spattering of stars, He spun
in slow motion, weeping out
her guilt, unknotting then knotting
the long thread of her shame
into the hair shirt of His Passion.

She crumpled at the knee.

What did she care of wattage
or rebate from Sears?
She pressed both hands to the glass.
He pressed His to His heart
the way He must have in the womb,
lighting the dark squeeze
of infinite space. Homunculus.
Bullion. Fishhook of God
zapped in the humming electrons
of the two million years it took
to make Him. And the eighty years
of pink rollers and patience
it took to bring Him home.

Born blind and spun dizzy,
we stumble into empty space,
clutching the paper tail of the donkey,
groping for connection, then hoot
at where the others end up—
dangled from a lampshade
or out the door. Another headline
for laughs at the checkout.
Another ballerina twirling
on a jewel box, one more joke,
one more rubber chicken from God.

That night—lipsticked
and all fluttery—Mrs. Beasley
put on her best blue dress,
popped a paper daisy in a vase,
then fished out the bottle of Muscatel
to savor a sip with her chop
and baked potato. Who’s not blessed?

Published in Boulevard

Design

As of last inspection, all my ghosts
are present and accounted for
and, it appears, happy
as if the terrible airlessness
agreed with them. When I ache to connect
they seem amused at my foolishness,
stuck as I am in the old game of breathing.

Time is the culprit, flapping about me,
demanding to be used. While they,
on the other side of that door,
have traveled far beyond
the stopped watch dangling off the bone.

They ride a bigger clock. Earth’s
round and around, pony on a track.
The Jurassic, washed away
by the Cretaceous, the Miocene
by the Pliocene. Each age, each century,
sloshed off in the grand soak and swirl
of spinning cycles. While I, peering out
the narrow windows of my sight,
know only one year at a time: one more
ragged spring hosed down and drained away.

Oh House of Shining Windows that is the sky,
of course they are happy. The stuff
that was Mama, soldier of scour and rag,
made Queen in the royal army of clean-up.
While the pit bull that was my father,
runs, vindicated at last, snarling,
nipping at the heels of thunder, pulling down rain.

Published in Shenandoah

On Deck

April in Georgia and the dogwood
droops peevish. Ten in the morning,
95 in the shade, and the pond—
where a friend swears he once saw
a beaver slap his tail—gags on mud.

But weather or not, new shoots
of kudzu inching across the ground
look for a sapling to mount, while
birds, as if demented, keep up
their eggy songs of love. Funny
how wooing goes on no matter what.
Or where. Just yesterday, never
mind the UV rays taking advantage
of peepholes in the ozone, we walked
our flesh outside—me with my droop
and advancing state of crepiness, and he,
formerly known as sweet young thing,
bifocaled now and balding. Think old—
Adam and his girl come home
lugging their baggage and their deaths
but still hand-in-hand courageous
despite their once-upon-a-time bitter
dish of apple crumble, only to face
on their return to nakedness
the white oak’s shudder and groan,
the April poplar turning away its leaves.
Damn sun suckers! Little Puritans!

Maybe in November, when light’s
absence squeezes the day from both ends
and all last-ditch efforts of October’s
in-your-face glitterings are flattened underfoot,
those leaves will look back, not on their spring
but on their final frippery, and what smug
joy it was. That defiance. That withering HA!

Published in The Georgia Review

Red Camellia

The bush has reaped her reward:
she cannot hold up her arms. A salute
to her location at the corner of the house
where the sun is beguiled to stop all day,
and the wasp tending its cells under
the shed roof swoons at the riot of red
multiplying in its compound eyes.

March has finally given way,
and spring in Georgia, primed
with lascivious plumpings,
has sent word: we’ve little time.
The camellia has waited all year
locked in her thin verticals
for the sun’s first hot speech.
Now she answers—one voice
blowing from two-hundred mouths.

Love, I want to talk camellia talk,
quick, before summer’s endless
conscription in a green uniform—
that stifling march into fall.
Speak to me. Be my sun, my day star.
Look into my eyes until I’m lost to sight,
then juice me up red and barbarous:
a phalanx of redcoats, a four-alarm fire.
I’m tired of pork roasts and ease
in an easy chair. Bring me one more
season. A reason. Bring it in your hands.

Published in The Georgia Review