Andrea Hollander Budy

Still Life with Jonquils

The usual bowl of fruit, yes,
and at attention in a blue porcelain vase
wands of jonquils not yet bloomed,

gray-green buds
like translucent cocoons,
their wet and yellow wings

stirring against the thinning threads
of gray, about to give way—
the way a woman whose wrist

has been lightly touched beneath
the starched tablecloth recognizes
a man’s invitation, its promise,

as the chatter of dinner guests blurs
into nonsense and she begins to feel
the invisible tug on the knot

fixed at the body’s center
waiting
to be undone . . .

The painter knows
what not to execute, knows we bring
our own heat to the canvas,

knowing exactly how
these jonquils would look
if open.

But not letting them.

*


Woman in the Painting

Her face has disappeared. This happens
more often than you think. She sits
at a table with her hands in her lap
beside her husband, his arms
folded over one another, blue bowls
and empty glasses set out before them
and a pitcher of translucent milk.

If the woman had eyes, they would be
the hazel eyes of my mother,
her sadness exposed. If a mouth,
my mother’s, her upper lip
with the scar she hid with lipstick.
Like my mother, she would be better
at listening than speaking. Afternoons
after high school my friends would come
when their boyfriends tired of them.
They would sit at a table like this one,
white and gleaming with food,
and she would listen until it was time
for my father to return, her dark hair
pulled behind her ears, her silence
laconic and wise.

Perhaps the woman in the painting
tried to speak, as my mother did,
to her father, raising her face toward him
like the mutt she once begged for,
already cowering but finally unable
to utter a sound, language transformed
to movement, to the trembling body
suppliant before him, her pupils
suddenly large and black, tears
not yet formed but forming.

The husband’s face is opulent, his eyes
the color of olives at the bottom of a drink.
Perhaps the woman believes the man
she married is only her husband. For a while
that’s what we all think.

*


Poem in October

       After Dylan Thomas

It was my twenty-third year and heaven
broke away from my reach as I stood

at her grave. Rain carved
the morning’s stone face into the earth,

and the sky grayed and lowered
until they were one. Back by the trees

men smoked, as if they had nothing
better to do. But I knew as soon as I left

they would cover even
the roses my father, brother and I

had tossed upon her as if our wishing
could do what prayer had not.

When I finally left, I thought her
gone. I am fifty-four. I was wrong.

*


Living Room

In the cave of memory my father
crawls now, his small carbide light
fixed to his forehead, his kneepads
so worn from the journey they’re barely
useful, but he adjusts them
again and again. Sometimes
he arches up, stands, reaches, measures
himself against the wayward height
of the ceiling, which in this part of the cave
is at best uneven. He often hits his head.
Other times he suddenly
stoops, winces, calls out a name,
sometimes the pet name he had
for my long-dead mother
or the name he called his own.

That’s when my stepmother tries
to call him back. Honeyman, she says,
one hand on his cheek, the other
his shoulder, settling him
into the one chair he sometimes stays in.

There are days she discovers him
curled beneath the baby grand,
and she’s learned to lie down with him.
I am here, she says, her body caved
against this man who every day
deserts her. Bats, he says, or maybe,
field glasses. Perhaps he’s back
in France, 1944, she doesn’t know.
But soon he’s up again on his knees,
shushing her, checking his headlamp,
adjusting his kneepads, and she rises
to her own knees, she doesn’t know
what else to do, the two of them
explorers, one whose thinning
pin of light leads them, making
their slow way through this room
named for the living.

*


Giving Birth

       In time you won’t even remember the pain.
                     – All the books on childbirth

On your back, heels locked in metal stirrups,
this immense volcanic shuddering
goes on against your will
as if it were, in fact, a volcano,
and your previous life merely a village of innocents
living on the island, used to it, barely mindful,
going about their daily repetitions, looking up
at each agitation only for a moment, thinking
it’s nothing really, then returning
to their business, yanking the cord
of a lawnmower, mopping a kitchen floor,
licking stamps and sticking them one by one
onto a stack of sealed invitations.
And then again the mountain shudders.
Shudders again, this time violently.
But you are inside your breathing now, as you were taught,
and your husband’s voice, his breath, that practiced duet now real,
the holding back, the pushing, the pain holding you
in its deep claws until there is nothing else.
And then the mountain erupts—you are sure of it—
erupts and erupts, its molten liquid
pushing beyond you, out, out
of your power, out, out. You wonder
where it will empty, what it will do
to those villagers who thought they had time.
Now there’s no looking back, it’s coming,
coming, and one of them
cries out—you hear him clearly, surely
as you heard your own pure cry moments ago,
or is this your own voice, or some part of your life
so distant it’s barely attached even to memory, the way
volcanic ash showers cities hundreds of miles away,
where later the wind might shift
and a young man rising
onto the street from the metro,
brushes a bit of soot from his face.