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Blue Window

In that shadowy time before sorrow—
that twilight, October in Berkeley, the early 60's,

when I walked home along Euclid from Mrs. Runkle's
where I'd played Schumann's "Traumerei"

so beautifully, for once, I'd made her cry—
Before the missile crisis, when I sat on the bed in fear and exaltation

and thought of Anne Frank—while on the TV downstairs,
Soviet ships inched closer to Cuba—and wondered,

when they come to get me, when I hide beneath my desk,
my head in my hands, and the walls shake,

will I have told the world
how I love this life I am forced to lose?

Before Christian, my neighbor, drank developing fluid
of his death at Alta Bates took 48 hours, the poison dissolving his stomach,

and his father the beautiful philanderer told my mother,
"The divorce caused it," just failing to add, wringing

his elegant crooked fingers, "He did it for grief of me"—
before Ronnie, my neighbor, took acid and flew out a window,

and Jackie, my neighbor, drove 90 miles an hour into a stone wall
at prep school in Massachusetts, and Kwaasi, my neighbor,

talked to God and carved his arms and died at Napa,
the boys who lived around me lost, all dead by nineteen—

and before I had ever bled yet, ever got high, or
loved a boy, or played at kisses through Kleenex with Mary Lou—

In that time before my father lay in bed
all one year's end, the vast flower of his death blossoming,

and wrote, in a tiny crabbed hand, in the datebook I found years later,
"Had to increase the dosage today; Ann and Jink allowance"—

in that Christian Science household no one spoke, silence thickened around us,
to this day no one has ever said to me, "It was brain cancer,"

but last winter my husband got drunk in his rare blind fury,
ran weeping into the room and pounded the bed over and over,

shouting, "Don't you understand yet?
In the war they treated men for lice with lindane,

poured it over their heads,
they did it to your father, and now the fuckers tell us

lindane eats your brain." —In that time, that twilight,
when I walked slowly home along Euclid,

how I wanted to belong to the family I saw
through the blue, wisteria-covered window, to be their girl,

enter their garlicky dinnertime kitchen,
later, to sit on a high attic bed, legs crossed tailor-fashion,

and pick dreamily at white chenille—
I wondered, why not be anyone, go anywhere?

when light dies around the oakleaves
and white, ragged moths come out to beat against the streetlight,

why not knock at the door and say "I am yours. I am here"?

Eddie

We have no sense of the history of children
—Robert Moses

He was twelve
and big for his age,
one of those beautiful children
whose thickening muscles and long, heavy bones
promise them early to manhood.
When I read to the children
in Miss Gardiner's fifth grade,
he'd curl up on the beanbag by my feet
or lean against my arm to see the pages.
Until Brooke and JoAnne, one morning,
suddenly prickling up,
made cootie-brushing motions
and said "Eww Eddie, get lost,
don't touch us." Maybe you'd say
they were just like girls everywhere,
and who can fault them their fierce bonding.
But they were white
and this was Mississippi.
He fell to the floor as if shot
and began to cry. When I put my hand on his shoulder,
he went rigid and hard as wood,
flipped like a fish and set his back against me.

Burning

It's natural," my mother said, "It's so you can be a woman."
But shame lurked in her love. She made me burn my pads,

and when the pads were wet the middle didn't burn.
So I waited till the hall and kitchen were empty,

scurried downstairs from the fireplace,
and hid the blackened lumps, the charred rank blood, in the garbage.

I slipped past the door where my father lay in bed
all that cold rainy September, October,

or sat in an armchair swaddled in the buffalo plaid lap robe
that kept, years after, his smell, that I'd bring up close to my face

to breathe him in. My sister practiced Bach.
Komm süsser Tod, she wrote in her mottled notebook:

Komm süsser Tod, for I grow weary of my living...
And my boyfriend strained against me

in cars, fields, borrowed rooms, until the tight flesh opened.
He laid me down and laid me down till I burned and begged,

"Could we take a walk, could we go to a movie?"
And I did my homework or painted my nails, a round-faced creature.

Then the spider chrysanthemums my father had saved,
chopping and burning savage-thorned blackberry creepers,

hauling railroad ties, shoveling dirt, all one August
terracing the whole matted, tangled, weed-choked hill

of a backyard singlehanded—the spider chrysanthemums
my father had saved, separating out the long, bedraggled,

all-but-smothered stems that I loved best of flowers
because they grew wild and spilled like white curved

feathers of seabirds across the rainsoaked earth
of the backyard's next-to-bottom terrace...Such a struggle against cold:

my father dying, my mother grieving, my sister tranced,
my boyfriend gaunt and drenched, climbing the balcony railings

to knock on my window; And myself in that big white house
those silent hours: crouching, watching how the pads would open out

petal after petal, their rich earth salt smell peel, layer after layer.
I could poke them with the fireplace tongs, layers peeling. One would catch

fire, then the next, first the toilet paper swaddling, then the edges, last
the blood lump, hot coal, glowing, wet, stinking, not stinking.

Admit it, I liked the smell of my blood.

At the Beginning of the Century
It All Seems Nearly Over Already

Through Alabama that afternoon and into Mississippi—

Tuscaloosa to Gordo, Columbus to Okolona,
then on up to Pontotoc—all we passed was clearcut
clearcut: red clay hills, eroded gullies, trash timber

piled by the sides of the road—then a car that had swerved
and crashed on the sudden curves near Gordo
(how many folks in that battered, filthy Chevy?)

and a small child on a blanket, ashen and unmoving,
a woman stroking its hair, staring off into the pine trees,
skinny men and children clustered in the ditch,

a man directing traffic, his blaze orange cap and belly—
then ambulance, firetrucks, sheriff—then later
a hand-painted sign nailed to a scrawny sweetgum:

     Even So Lord Jesus Come The Day Is Evil

Light. Olympic Valley, California
          in memory of Zdenek Sirovy

You bring your grief to the mountain. Lay it down.
The shaggy mules'-ears dance in this clear light
and the shadow ofeach long leaf joins in the dancing.

Blue lupine, speckled alyssum
sending off sugar and heat, the poppies' furling gold—

what do they know of desolation? How could the ragged daisies
stop plunging in the wind,
or dust and day relinquish their bright unfolding?

The pine mat manzanita, low mariposa lily,
a junco's click and trill,

or that skinny brown horse in the stableyard,
one ear cocked,
softly whickering, shifting his haunches,

and all the light you will ever need.

A Story About the Lovers and the Lake Bed
          On the bottom of Chewalla Lake.
which has been drained, an iron bedstead ...

Then we lay down on the bed
as the waters began to rise.
All night he turned to me and turned to me.
First the faint salt smell of marsh grass
entered our hands, blossomed like stars
from the tips of our fingers. Then fish
began to slither along the channels
of our bloodstreams. Oh the lake came back to life,
calm, green, muddy; I stroked the small hairs
at the back of his neck. Current swirled around the legs,
water rose, lapped us, with a shift and bob
the bed slipped free, then we were floating,
floating, slow waves licking. Along the pines we drifted
until our bleached bones sighed,
turned over in their sleep.
One white egret lifted from the trees.
One blue heron cried beyond the splotched and speckled leaves.
The bedsprings blackened. We fell between the fingers...

Ann Fisher-Wirth lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she teaches poetry and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi.   She is the author of William Carlos Williams and Autobiography:  The Woods of His Own Nature and of numerous essays on American literature.  In 2002-2003 she held the Chair of American Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden.  Her work has been published in  in The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Organization and Environment, The Yalobusha Review, ForPoetry.com and eleswhere.

Click here to read more poems by Ann Fisher-Wirth in ForPoetry.com
Click here for Ann Fisher-Wirth's University of Mississippi's home page.
Click here to read Sarah Maclay's review on Blue Window

Praise for Blue Window:

Many American poets have written what gets called 'the autobiographical lyric.' Very few poets have written it with such fierce and stinging accuracy.  Ann Fisher-Wirth is, stylistically, a realist and a modernist.  Like William Carolos Williams...she can be a little headlong, perhaps a little ruthless, and that quality gives this book, which also has the virtues of tenderness ant attentiveness, its steel and its nerve."

—Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, author, most recently of the collection
Sun Under Wood.

ForPoetry