Joan Murray

We thought that they were gone--
we rarely saw them on our screens--
those everyday Americans
with workaday routines,
...

1

It's mid-September, and in the Magic Wing Butterfly Conservancy
in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the woman at the register
...

Near Ekuvukeni,
in Natal, South Africa,
a woman carries water on her head.
After a year of drought,
when one child in three is at risk of death,
she returns from a distant well,
carrying water on her head.

The pumpkins are gone,
the tomatoes withered,
yet the woman carries water on her head.
The cattle kraals are empty,
the goats gaunt—
no milk now for children,
but she is carrying water on her head.

The engineers have reversed the river:
those with power can keep their power,
but one woman is carrying water on her head.
In the homelands, where the dusty crowds
watch the empty roads for water trucks,
one woman trusts herself with treasure,
and carries water on her head.

The sun does not dissuade her,
not the dried earth that blows against her,
as she carries the water on her head.
In a huge and dirty pail,
with an idle handle,
resting on a narrow can,
this woman is carrying water on her head.

This woman, who girds her neck
with safety pins, this one
who carries water on her head,
trusts her own head to bring to her people
what they need now
between life and death:
She is carrying them water on her head.
...

We old dudes. We
White shoes. We

Golf ball. We
Eat mall. We

Soak teeth. We
Palm Beach; We

Vote red. We
Soon dead.
...

Because Lena's not yet three,
she doesn't know the reason for this place.
'I like this little house. And this little house,'
she says as she loops around them
-the play-size 'houses' of the dead.
Here in Key West, as in New Orleans,
where the land and sea are nearly level,
some are set just above the surface,
and Lena leans on their 'big stone beds.'

But since Lena's not yet three,
she doesn't know what any of it means:
She doesn't know where the earth rolls away to
every night while she's asleep-
or who rolls with it-some above it, some below.
And because she doesn't know,
she moves in waves of joy
like the spirit on the surface of the waters
-before it ever thought of light.

She squeezes between two 'beds'
that are stretched out side by side-
one's bigger than the other-
and pats them, left then right,
and reunites what slipped apart a hundred years ago:
a mother-and her child of a day.
We learn this from their surnames and the dates
-but Lena doesn't read,
and there's no reason to explain.

We watch her bolt through the gate
where the men of the Maine
sail on in shipshape rows
as she splashes among their stones.
'God Was Good to Me,' one epitaph proclaims,
but Lena has no knowledge of God.
Or his goodness. Or the opposite implied
by what's said on every side
in the silent houses of the dead.

When we say it's time to go, she runs ahead again,
drops down before an upright stone,
and moves her finger across its surface.
She runs to another, repeats her motions-
as she reads its lines out loud:
The name. The date. And the other.
-And though she's still too young to read,
she reads them anyhow:
'I love you. I love you. I love you.'

-But how could she know?-How could she know
what would trump all the mansions of gold?
...

A crowd flowed onto the Suspension Bridge.
Another onto Prospect Point.
A third onto the Three Sisters Islands
—all along the railings in the gorge.
Across the river, a thousand more poured down to Table Rock.
And up the shore, a hundred others—
men, women and children—
stood by the dock at Truesdale's cottage, waiting to see me off.
There were no clouds that morning,
and so much light it seemed ten suns were whirling
as I stepped into the skiff—in a tossing sea of handkerchiefs—
and waved to them (while Russell blew a kiss)
amidst the general hurrah.

Then we set out—with Truesdale straining the tiller
against the single, headstrong sail—
and Billy Holleran, a strong, strapping boy, manning the furious oars.
The barrel rode upright behind us, bucking to run its course
—and was jerked back to correction by the stern instruction of our rope.
A quarter way out, we stopped on an island where I changed my clothes:
no hat or dress now, but a blouse left open at the throat,
and a skirt hemmed just below the knee.
I made them turn away while I backed in through the rim—
then they fastened down the lid,
rolled me to the shore,
turned me upright—
pushed me in.

Four boats now. And behind the first,
the towed barrel, weighed down with me—
yet still intractable.
And in the last, a cameraman recording every stroke
as they rowed a mile across to the Point of No Return—
where the river starts to churn,
and a sailor knows he'd better bend his back
—or else go over.
There they knocked. And cut the rope.
They must have pulled hard then to turn themselves south,
but I went north—(a half mile more before I'd reach the brink).
I careened and spun. Once it tossed me clear up out of the water.
I went unbidden—and unwelcome—where it rushed me.

I wished I could have watched from some place overhead
and heard the voices racing down the shore—
passing on the message—
dock to island, island to rock, rock to bridge:
"She's coming!"
I would have liked to see them turn their heads—
wave after wave, as each new group heard the murmur
and craned their necks to catch a glimpse.
I'd have liked to see the trolley racing down the shore,
and the incline railway rushing down the gorge
—so the ones who'd waved from Truesdale's dock
could be standing on the rocks below the Falls,
looking up—to see if anything would come.
...

for Kathy


1

My father would tie a life jacket
to a length of seaworn rope and dangle me
off the dock of the Harlem boat Club float.
A strange baptism.
Down, down into the mad rushing river,
worm on a hook, a girl of six or seven,
I am let loose among water rats, made sister
to half-filled soda cans floating
vertically home from a picnic, and to condoms
that look like mama doll socks
in the unopened infant eye.
What man would toss his child to that swill?
He who can swim across the river,
whose arms churn a feud with the current.
He thinks he can hold me from any maelstrom.
Safe on the dock, I watch my father
float on his back, from the Bronx
to Manhattan and back again.

3

The Harlem Boat Club is the man place.
My father slips down twice a week to shower,
on weekends plays a sweaty game
of four-wall ball. Outside in the garden,
I wander six years old among lilies
of the valley, Queen Anne's lace,
the shoreline irises and great climbing rose
that began as someone's potted plant.
Elmer, the muscular black cat,
drags a water rat to the front door. I follow inside
to the boat room, run my hand along
the lean flanks of polished rowing sculls,
then up the stairway, pause at the wooden roster,
the names with gold stars dead in some war.
Then the sweat smell of the lockers,
the place where they held a party
to welcome the Beatty brothers home from Korea.
Off to the side, three men
stand naked in the steamy, tiled shower.
Quiet, I sit down on a bench
beside a girl my own age, who has also come
to pretend she doesn't notice.

4

Still my close, though distant, friend,
who sat with me in the men's locker room,
whose father had a strong right arm for handball,
whose mother and mine, embarrassed
in their forties, had pregnancies,
who accompanied me through puberty
up and down the Harlem shore,
Kathy, in your Brahmin home in Brooklyn,
you say you want to rid your sleep of those
dirty years along the river. But stop for a moment,
stop trying to make the river pass genteelly,
for there'll be no weaning from those waters.
Instead come back with me and watch
the sun glint off the rippling surface,
bearing the shore -hugging flow of turds and
condoms north to the Hudson.
You conjectured it all came from cabin cruisers
on some far-off glory ocean.
Kathy, would you have even looked
if you had known it came from humble tenements
on our Highbridge hill?
Could that one reflection
have darkened all your plans to sail?
...

It wasn't his ugliness that startled me. It was mostly
that he hadn't been expected, and when I flipped on the porch light,
he was eating from the cats' bowl, and when I tapped
the frost-edged glass, he looked up, the way the cats do,
and then he waited through that moment
of not knowing what was next—
as if I were Peter at the Gate, and it could go either way.
I tried to squeeze his opossum shape, his oversized
head and pointed snout, his dull black eyes and wormy tail
into the tidy image of a cat that I'd brought to the door with me.

But even though we gave it our best,
we realized, almost right away, that it was impossible,
and we had to pool our efforts and do what was
expected: I had to pull the door open—even though
the threat it made at that point was less than a child's bluff—
and once it had been done, he had to back away from the bowl,
giving up the incomprehensible gift he'd just come upon,
and slink down the steps—not quickly, mind you,
because he guessed, dumb beggar, I wouldn't pursue him,
only leave him to his hunger and the dicey scraps of winter
as the stars did in December when he came.

But it wasn't as if I could lift the kitchen window and throw
a nickel or a dime to him and watch him go away happy—
the way we did back in the City,
when the beggars—that's what my mother
called them—would come in winter
to sing in the backyards below our apartment windows
with their clear bright faces and beautiful voices
and the mystery of the coins ringing down from above,
rolling and skipping, and them bending and scraping
and tipping their hats and going away,
even though we weren't rich either.

No, he was more like the ones we'd come upon
in the places where we were forbidden to go,
the ones our mothers called bums—the wild-eyed
grizzled ones, lying on their slit cardboard boxes
under the bridge ramps even in winter,
or raving along the tracks with their hands down their pants
because of the lice, or pissing in an alley as we ran through
and slowly turning midstream to call after us—
Have you got a nickel or a dime?—the ugly
ones, the ones who had no songs, the ones
with nothing to give us.
...

Would it surprise the young men
playing softball on the hill to hear the women
on the terrace admiring their bodies:
The slim waist of the pitcher. The strength
of the runner's legs. The torso of the catcher
—rising off his knees to toss the ball back to the mound?
Would it embarrass them
to hear two women, sitting together after dinner,
praising even their futile motions:
The flex of a batter's hips
before his missed swing. The wide-spread stride
of a man picked off his base. The intensity
on the new man's face
—as he waits on deck and fans the air?

Would it annoy them—the way some women
take offense when men caress them with their eyes?
And why should it surprise me that these women,
well past sixty, haven't put aside desire
but sit at ease and in pleasure,
watching the young men move above the rose garden—
where the marble Naiads
pose and yawn in their fountain?
Who better than these women (with their sweaters
draped across their shoulders, their perspectives
honed from years of lovers) to recognize
the beauty that would otherwise
go unnoticed on this hill?
And will it compromise their pleasure,
if I sit down at their table: to listen to the play-by-play
and see it through their eyes?

Would it distract the young men—if they realized
that three women laughing softly on the terrace
above closed books and half-filled wine glasses
are moving beside them on the field?
Would they want to know how they've been
held to the light—till some motion or expression
showed the unsuspected loveliness
in a common shape or face?
Wouldn't they have liked to see
how they looked down there—
as they stood for a moment at the plate—
bathed in the light of perfect expectation
—before their shadows lengthened. Before they
walked together up the darkened hill—
so beautiful they would not have
recognized themselves.
...