Read Online That Said by Jane Shore - Free Book Online Page B

corner
of broken glass. And we never knew
who they were, or how many,
or for how many months they had been
watching us, the spectacle we’d become.
Because that’s what we were to them—
two animals in a cage fucking:
arms and backs and muscle
and flanks and sinew and gristle.

Workout
My sister is doing her exercises,
working out in my husband’s study.
The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke,
its heavy breathing like a couple making love.
    Â 
She’s visiting from Iowa
where the cold weather is much worse.
    Â 
When she was ten, I’d hear her
strumming her guitar through the bedroom wall.
She’d borrow my albums—my Joan Baez, my Dylan—
and sing along,
shutting me out, drawing me in;
imitating my hair, my clothes,
my generation.
    Â 
I used to feel sorry for her
for being eight years younger.
    Â 
She opens the door a crack, and surfaces
in earphones, and wearing pink bikini panties
and a lover’s torn T-shirt.
Strapped to her hands are the weights
that weighed her suitcase down.
Her thighs are tight, her triceps shine,
her body is her trophy.
    Â 
The night she arrived, we sprawled across my bed,
her cosmetic bag spilled open,
and she shadowed my eyelids violet,
demonstrating the latest tricks,
the way I used to make her up
on those nights she watched me dress for dates,
watched me slip into my miniskirt,
my sandals, my love beads.
    Â 
Now she’s no longer in love with me,
and eyes me pityingly,
triumphant, her expression the same as mine
when I watched my mother
examine her face in the magnifying mirror.
    Â 
She’s got to keep in shape.
She’s a performer, it’s her business
to look beautiful every night.
    Â 
Sometimes, when she begins to sing,
men in the audience fall in love.
    Â 
She’s warming up in the shower;
the tile walls amplify her voice.
Safe, for once, under temperate rain.
    Â 
Like a dress handed down
from sister to sister,
in time one body will inherit
what the other has outgrown.

The Wrong End of the Telescope
For Elizabeth Bishop
    Â 
That afternoon on the Bay of Fundy,
as the car plunged in and out of the cobweb fog,
everything was in the process of erasing
or being erased.
At low tide, the tidal bore’s puddle-raked mud flats
looked like a bolt of brown corduroy
running down the coast.
Later, when the sun came out, the puddles
turned into shattered mirrors, long shards,
blue sky and clouds lying in pieces on the ground,
as though the heavens had fallen down.
    Â 
Stopping at a gas station for directions
and a Coke, my husband and I heard the local joke:
“You go from Upper Economy, to Middle, to Lower,
to Just Plain Broke.”
    Â 
The next day, on Cape Breton, pressed for time,
we wanted to drive the entire Cabot Trail
in a day. If we started at dawn
and drove clockwise around the coast,
we’d end up at dusk where we began.
The road linked town after coastal town,
each with its prim white clapboard church
starched stiff as a christening gown.
Azure woodsheds, chartreuse barns,
stilt houses shingled gray or shingled brown,
matchbox houses two stories high
painted the same pea green, ochre, or peacock blue
as the boats docked in the harbor below.
In Nova Scotia—nowhere else in the Maritimes—
fishermen paint their houses to match their boats!
    Â 
It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,
everything scaled down, “smaller than life.”
In Belle Côte, four wooden fishing boats
bobbed single-file gosling-style
in the middle of the harbor
while real full-size fishing boats
bobbed, tethered to the dock.
Were they a practical joke
or a winter evening’s woodwork?
Those little boats looked too
serious
to be toys.
    Â 
And that dollhouse stuck on a pole—
a whittled-down version of the gabled house
looming up behind it—
was really a mailbox!
No mail today. No one home.
Everyone seems to have vanished,
leaving their toys behind.
    Â 
We counted more scarecrows