Andrea Hollander Budy

Pigs

It is not the wolf
but his howl in the hollow wind

they fear. His mouth is a great cave
and that howl the master of it—

that sound calling like the night,
calling what is dark to its vacant center.

Straw by straw, stick by stick,
brick by solid brick, there is no way

to keep that sound from entering.
But try. Move in together, give birth,

have other kinds of dreams. Sleep
with a light turned on, with cotton in your ears.

And by the evening fire tell the stories
of your ancestors. Tell how clever they were,

how they tempted the Devil from the skins
of the innocent. How they burned Him

from those useless lives: Catholics, Jews,
witches, saints. And with fire like this.

With fire like this.

*


When You Hear His Name

unexpectedly,
long after you have claimed

it wouldn’t mean anything, you know
you have found the one name

you can never say,
never even bear to hear

even if it is now someone else’s name,
a neighbor’s child

and his mother snapping it at him
like a whip.

You try to make that sound just
a white sheet

the wind slaps
on the taut line. But you become

that line
holding everything above

the earth, stretched
house to post and back

again to house. Or you are
the post, placed

only to hold
the laundry up, keep

the line straight. You are not
the house, not a thing

someone can enter.

*


Women at Fifty

       after Donald Justice

All of their doors
Have closed and their daughters’
Rooms betray a familiar faint perfume
That says I’ll not be back.

They pause sometimes
At the top of the stairs
To stroke the banister,
Its perfect knots.

They invite other women now
Only to clean. And like queens in fairy tales
They turn their heads from mirrors
That hold secrets they’ve kept

Even from themselves,
As they look into their husbands’ faces
When their husbands say
They only look.

Women at fifty
Corner a cricket with a broom
And do not kill it, but shoo it out of the house
Into the abundant silence.

*


Firmly Married

is what he said but as he said it
swayed a little in my direction,
the hair on his neck so like
my son’s, barely there, but golden
if you bothered looking.

He was looking at me anyway
no matter what he said,
a benefit of having spoken
his excuses so I’d excuse
anything he did thereafter.

I walked away.

And afterwards I thought
how easily he’d escaped
whatever I may have taken
from that look, that he wanted
it to be my invention, the way

I used to pull my stockings up
pretending not to notice Richie
watching, when I was nineteen
and wanted secretly my first time
to happen already, but wanted it

to be his doing, this undoing
I longed for desperately,
the way this man wants
some blameless ruin.

*


Dawn

This is the name
for the moment the quiet house
shifts between night and morning.

I sit in my swivel chair
in a room with two views, waiting
to catch it, the very moment.

Behind me the moon moves slowly down.
Before me the sky lightens, and
tree sounds change from fog

to bird. At first
the sun is an orange line
along the housetops.

Then it is a white ball,
and the moon
is gone.

This happens so fast
I’ve come dawn after dawn
to slow it down, to trap it.

I want to know what it is.
Not scientifically,
but with my whole body.

I want to know the precise moment
today become yesterday;
tomorrow, today. I want to say

I’ve gone deep enough,
that I’ve borrowed nothing, that
I’ve waited. But this is difficult.

I need to know so urgently exactly how
the woman who lies awake at night
becomes the sleeper, then the dreamer,

then the dream. I want to know why
the words I am saying seem to be spoken
by somebody else.

The sun is higher than my window now
and out of sight.
It is still winter.

I have to know what it’s like
the moment that ice is not ice anymore
but isn’t yet water.