Helen Wallace's Poetry

After Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts
After Bishop’s “One Art”
Black Dirt
Epilogues for a Brother
Jane Deals with Infidelity
Trappings

After Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts

Auden’s right about disaster, the way it often finds us
in the ordinary. I could duplicate the angle of the broom,
the pattern of renegade dirt evading the pan, the smell
of Pop Tarts burning in a toaster. Everyone you loved
was busy living — checking e-mail, cleaning gutters,
slicing red tomatoes on a plate. Our days stack one by one
upon such rituals, familiar acts that shim our fragile world
to something, if not balanced, almost holy.
So how were we to know your last breath, sent out
like a good dog to fetch, wouldn’t come back?

Grief is too easily misperceived. Even now the void
you left could suck the churning sphere right down
with it, at least jam phone-lines and traffic, unleash
a small monsoon, meteor. Perhaps it has. Catastrophes catapult
daily; who names the cause of chaos in the world?
Your mother folds and folds the white sheets
but see how her corners don’t line up, and your father,
out raking leaves, notice his grip on the rake, how tightly he tries
to hold on, while the leaves, the leaves keep falling.
And over there, look, your black dog, crazed for a buried bone.

After Bishop’s “One Art” ^{The art of losing isn’t hard to master…
Elizabeth Bishop}

though hoarding’s even easier to do.
The little things acquired over time
all become a subtle part of you.

Save something every day. Admit the true
significance of concert stubs, labels off fine
wine. Hoarding’s so much easier to do

than craving what you carelessly threw
out: a napkin with a scribbled line
of verse that showed a vibrant part of you

lost along the way. Why master losing?
Who are we without minutiae to remind
us? Hoarding’s even easier to do

with lavish goods: the fake jewels
too gaudy to wear, the pink china
stuck in a box…or envy…fear…parts of you

you quickly stash away. Oh, there are things you’d
gladly lose, like longing, that sad-eyed
bitch. She hoards your scent. She’s part of you.
It’s doubtful she’ll ever leave your side.

Black Dirt

We’re more than we can sink our teeth into
      though sometimes just that’s
enough. Ours is the pit and the fruit
      and the black dirt deeper than both.

But savoring is the body’s state of praise —
      you taught me this. You with your probing
turn of phrase found me waiting at the table.
      Even now, after almost twenty years,

we should toast that sanctifying moment
when everything dissolves on our tongues
in a wash of brilliant red. Don’t think
we leave too much unsaid,

the whole world’s chanting desire:
the gingko, maidenhair tree,
loses her leaves like a woman lets her hair
down on a love. Feel the flush

of words. Taste them as the hummingbird
tastes jewelweed in a brambled field,
so sweet it makes his red throat tremble.
And the fern, there, beneath the pine,

see how it dances for a touch known only
as wind? Don’t think too much is left
unspoken. Listen. Everywhere
the world’s ripe and hungry.

Epilogues for a Brother
^{for Mark Pruitt, 1960-1985}

1. Rewriting the Last Flight

You do it like the hero in the movie: eject
just before the plumed crash, your white chute

floating like milkweed toward some grassy
field. And there, a girl, her black dog,

maybe tossing pebbles in a stream
or gathering fistfuls of daisies,

drops her wicker basket on the ground, and races
for the sun's pearled glare.

She finds you in a puddle of silk, dazed, bruised
barely but enough to need her soft shoulder

as you hobble to her house for soup
and the buoyant rest of your life.

2. Minghun Bride: Afterlife Marriage

Assume the rest of your life doesn’t happen.
Take this burnt offering of cash,

and to cruise the netherworld, a paper model
of a Cessna SE. Like those along

the Yellow River Canyon seeking dead wives
for dead sons to bury them side by side,

I, too, would offer gold, 10,000 yuan: a dowry
for the dead, if you, brother, wanted a bride.

Who’s to say desire won’t outlive us?
In the Loess Plateau the poorest parents weave

the wives from straw, trusting the chemistry
of dirt. There’s wisdom in a match like that.

Jane Deals with Infidelity
^{for JM}

She cuts his ties in half,
hangs them over chairs, towel rods,
the door knobs he cocked silently
while she lay watching in the dark
wide awake.

She cuts them to a raw, sharp edge,
they fall from her fists
like tongues, smooth as silk
though she knows they are not.
Like whispers they are beautiful

and false. In each design she finds
a hidden pattern: a checked past
delicately woven that shimmered undetected
for years. A flaw that ran the full length
of him. And so she cuts them up

mid-phrase, drapes them from the couch,
kitchen drawers, window sills that trap
the evening breeze. At times she sees
them move, hears them mouth the same
cool lies:

imperfections, they claim, are not flaws;
they add to the beauty of the fabric,
and mixture of texture
is desired. Durability,
they swear, is not affected.

Trappings

We’re packing up the attic where boxes bulged ten years in
mold and dust. They don’t contain the gin they advertise. We
wish they did. Instead they’re full of books we never read, old
hats, macramé belts, ceramic bowls we made in seventh grade,
misshaped, fragile with pocks. They remind us of what we
used to be, which may not be all bad, since even we are not
our former selves. Each seven years all skin cells are replaced.
Sloughed off with strands of dry hair, and toenails we trim and
softly drop, or thoughts shoved through cortex, then lost in our
graying bubble wrap. Our teeth, too, yellow, fall out. And sex,
that hot commodity, we give with little more than bump and
grind. So what’s with all the obsolete loot we can’t convince
ourselves to leave behind? Like this — the box of wind-up toys
that terrorized our cool, neurotic cat. Look, the monkey drum-
ming with a stick, the alligator with the snapping jaw, that
quirky dog that squats before each flip. Grab the lava lamps and
clarinet, bottle rockets, peace signs and rugs. For now, despite
what each of us was taught, it's better to take than give away.
Our bodies may have mastered letting go, but even them we’ll
box some final day. Just in case. Besides, you never know.

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Helen Wallace's Poetry

After Auden’s Museé des Beaux Arts

After Bishop’s “One Art” The art of losing isn’t hard to master… Elizabeth Bishop

Black Dirt

Epilogues for a Brother for Mark Pruitt, 1960-1985

Jane Deals with Infidelity for JM

Trappings

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