I’ve Been Walking It All Back
1.
—the given part
& the made. I don’t really believe in
the mulligan. Ditto the wrong turn.
So walk not as retract so much
as retrace. A map of the tributaries,
say. Maybe I stepped out of the room.
Maybe misheard the key phrase.
Maybe I slept late that day. Like the child
yesterday inconsolable in my palm: she knows
something has been lost, but she doesn’t know
its name.
2.
& maybe I was wrong to sit with her in it—
her sadness that was making her strange
to herself was like a boat & we bobbed along, quiet
awhile, then pointed our cameras at the sky,
which I explained to her was the same sky,
thinking of Creeley & of you reading Creeley,
& we practiced articulating ourselves by the clouds.
When do we first worry
ourselves burdens? & how long
before she starts telling me she’s sorry
for what she feels? My friend couldn’t stop
tonight, which is her way. Whole afternoons like that.
Last summer, in the curtained-off corner at the specialist
she was answering the nurse’s questions, trying
to quantify her pain & I was tying up the back of her gown
when I finally heard it—how one sorry means
she’s embarrassed & differs from the sorry
that means she’s afraid.
3.
About an hour now
the birds have been at it. This summer dawn
chorus, same as it ever was, that might outlast us
all, that certainly should, that I wish I could
name. The singers, I mean. A friend who knows
birds once told me they’re all saying the same things:
good morning or good night & in between
it’s all fears & hungers. Me, I keep rehearsing
my answers to questions no one’s asking.
4.
We do it alone—that’s what you’d say
& maybe you’re right. The borders around my lives
just gone a little blurry. Or, like tectonic plates
slipping one under the other where they meet.
& in the pages I’ve been turning these days
to figure out where exactly & how & which
direction, what wind—nevermind,
wiser versions of me say, listen:
better anything else.
5.
So I watered the garden,
which smelled of rain, though it hadn’t, & ogled
the night’s new fruit, the waist-high flowers
someone else planted that I’ve never seen
elsewhere. The buds will close back up
in a few hours, but for now they cluster
beautiful purple stars. Bellflower, I think,
& I like how the name’s almost redundant,
how it sings its own praise. In a few days
I’ll step with my friend into the river, keep still
as I can so as not to tip our light craft.
I’ll sit in the back & watch her shoulders,
my job to match the rhythm of her stroke
&, when she tells me to, steer
us back into the current.
BETH MARZONI’S poems have recently appeared in Mississippi Review, McNeese Review, Northwest Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the co-author, with Monica Berlin, of No Shape Bends the River So Long (Parlor Press, 2015).
Midwest Review 