I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day, and: Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys, and: Conversation with Glass and Joist, and: Fluvial, and: Love Story, and: Elegy at the Strandline

Abstract

I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day, and: Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys, and: Conversation with Glass and Joist, and: Fluvial, and: Love Story, and: Elegy at the Strandline Molly Spencer (bio) I Talk Myself through the Facts of Each Day Here is a peachfat in my hand. This meansit must be August. Here is a child, new fruitand soft, calling me Mama,climbing up into my lap. I can't see the singingblackbird, but I hearits tin song so I believeit is near, the way I believe in the pier—that it will holddespite the water's prodigious gray lull and pull—and the way I believea single word can rescue. A word like spandrel. A word like thigh. This tablewhere I sit all through the slant [End Page 132] amber afternoon—it is a tableI choseagain this morning. When you said, Sleep,I almost believedI could. Be still. [Here, say somethingabout a peach over-softening, or a child lengthening, or the verb to climb, which means to go up by clinging] The facts of each day come to restall around me, fallen,rust petals of the ditch, lily. Conversation with Lace Thong and Car Keys She is in the kitchen bent overIn a blue lace thong when he comesThrough the door blows by her forgot my keys he says She says ohShe is standing up now having foundWhat she was looking for she forgets now what it was Down the hall the thunk of a drawerOpening the broken music of his handsRunning over its contents did you find them She says yes he says good she says [End Page 133] Blows back through the kitchenThe keys jangle their little found song gotta goHe says bye she says bye To a door already latched shut she saysTo the ringing quiet I guess I'll get dressed now It was seam tape she needed no it wasA pair of shears she slides into her jeans then she Snips the loose thread at the crotch Conversation with Glass and Joist From her side of the bed she says tell meThis is years ago now he says what Do you mean she saysTell me something WhatAnything Then the palpable glassOf his silence and her words falling From it like stunned birds then the sinkingOf a broken dusk down into night By now the towers have fallenThere is a baby In the next room nuzzling sleepAnd her body [End Page 134] Has learned the meaning of bothCollapse and endure by now She is accustomed to being the lastOne up in a house That settles and shiftsIn the night the sigh and snap Of a joist slackeningFrom its nail she says To the glass to the fallingNight did you hear that Fluvial All night I hear the river askingto cross me and I say, Fine, cross me. I can't deny the downstreamwaters inside me, the sediment, or the light that shreds as the current weaves.So yes, I will wade out past the shallows,sifted, I will walk into the rusted bladeof the river, which resists me, and go essentially nowhere.Let me say it, then, [End Page 135] that I am stone. And have tired.That I have woken in a glittering, spring-fed coldand called it cold. See how the river has honed my coarseedges, dragging me along, then unhanding me to settle in its bed,veined and woven. I am not sorry to rest here amidthe alluvial, colorful hardnesses. Love Story Now you are four in a boat.Cut of heartwood. Love bears down,a slow storm. This is in the time of no oars.Past the point of endless questions, one more story before bed. Onlychipped songs, birds and complaints, lispof wave against gunwale. Love a low rollingprayer of gray and gray and gray. [End Page 136] This is in the time of finish your homework,hang up your jacket...