Andrea Hollander Budy

Goodness

As my husband set the table for breakfast,
I stood at the kitchen counter in my pink chenille bathrobe,
its pockets worn through, waiting for the toast to rise,

and realized that this, too, I would lose—
this moment so routine
it would soon disappear into the daily machine of our lives

like the beautiful pebble I dropped on the beach
and moments later couldn’t find.
As good as it was to be home in this good house

with my husband humming something familiar,
the tea already steeping, the juice poured, even the butter
waiting in its porcelain plate on the table,

there was nothing I would remember it by, and I knew it.
If the phone had rung with bad news about my father
even the way the sun angled onto the rug would have brought

the bad news back again each time,
and I could never have worn the bathrobe again.
Is this why Anne Frank’s diary matters?

At another place, another time,
the life of a thirteen-year-old girl would have disappeared
into a box in the upstairs closet,

a few pages of it read, perhaps, by her grown-up son, and then
because he had to drive his daughter to school
and pick up the paper on the way, he would have closed it,

promising himself to someday read the rest, then whistled
down the stairs in his herringbone vest and jacket
to where his daughter waited in the sunlit hall.

*


The Hunters

Dressed in their green spotted drabs to blend in
with trees, my brother and his new friends, then
nineteen, erected their dark tents and dug
a latrine, then gathered twigs from the edge

of their camp and the driest leaves, and at
twilight all of them assembled, then bent
their heads for a moment over their Tang
or their coffee or tea, and one boy sang

a little prayer in the unarmed quiet
(at night sometimes my brother still sings it),
and even the air began to settle
except for the occasional rattle

of insects and in the nearby distance
mortar fire from Da Nang, insistent.

*

Wound

When you asked if I wanted to see
and I said yes, you opened your robe,
lifted off the gauze, and exposed
a barbed wire fence cut
through a field of snow.
The snow wasn’t white exactly
but used or forgotten, the air
hardened by winter so that
to breathe was to choke.
And along its black length
that separated into two
your past and your future,
that fence was streaked
with indecipherable detritus
as though some small animal
had been dragged from its life into it
and died there, its clots of fur
still frozen in the barb.
This is your chest, I told myself,
not some deserted pasture
flattened by winter over
what is lost or missing.
I should have closed my eyes
or pictured the ocean instead.
Twenty-seven years after your death
I still can’t turn away. I shut my eyes
and see your chest stitched closed.
If only poems were the only places
to know such cold.

*


Delta Flight 1152

After the first drink, you can be
what you’re not. It’s so easy, all you must do

is answer this man’s questions with truths
you’ve just invented—on my way to the annual meeting

of master magicians, or to a conference of physicists
or international bankers—and your life is enviable,

new. Tell him you’re sad because you’re on your way
to your sister’s wedding and you’re in love

with her fiancé. Wipe your eyes,
sigh, mention almost under your breath the baby

you had to give up, the job. You’re the one
who introduced them, you couldn’t stop yourself, he would come

to your desk at the office. How lonely he was,
how young. But if you reveal the afternoon

of lunch on the rooftop, how for you
it wasn’t enough, there’s certain danger

this man, his drink finished, ice diluted
in the bottom of his plastic cup, will lean too far

into your invented life. He’ll offer his handkerchief.
You’ll finger his embroidered initials. He’ll touch your arm,

hand you his card. His voice unsteady,
he’ll tell you to call him at home—you,

an only child on her way
to see the ocean for the first time. You, who have managed

to live a moral life, whose troubled heart has never
surrendered, now with your wild and dangerous

lies, you could turn toward this stranger
and open.