Legacy
Annemarie is nearly six. It is too early
in her life for the rain to remind her
of anyone, of a conversation that ends
in privacy, two people alone together
at a window blurred by warm breath,
by hours of sad talk, by the rain.
But she knows the crayons will run and smear,
that the butcher paper will turn to mud
if she leaves her art on the balcony
beside her slide, her plastic house.
Instead she's left a tooth in her meat loaf,
softly spitting a bite back to the plate,
knowing enough to mask her mouth demurely
with the napkin. Her smile is plainly
lacking when she lowers the veil,
though brighter somehow, like the one
grinning jack-o'-lantern on a porch
of carved snarls, the leering pumpkins
empty-headed and aglow, lit from within
like impressionable four-year-olds,
who follow Annie through sandboxes
and party games, pinning the tail
to Jeremy or Bruce; they follow her
anywhere, into the privacy of secret names
and imaginary friends, into trouble.
She is nearly six, though seven or eight
depending on the room, the age
of her playmates; she is always oldest.
And so her mother says, Such a good tooth
for a seven-year-old, then retrieves it
from the half-chewed bite. She rinses it
in the sink, hands it back to her little girl
and explains the tooth fairy, how she's different
from Snow White but just as pretty.
At the end of her prayers Annie shoves
the tooth beneath the pillow, finds a quarter
in the morning. It's from fairy land,
her daddy says, a piece of moonlight
for a pretty girl. Make sure you save it
for a dark night. Her mother waits for later,
when her husband's gone to work; she presses
the quarter in Annie's palm. Don't worry
about the nights, she says. Save it
for the rain, for that first remarkable rain
when you're alone, your hand in his,
the window a steamed mirror.
When he looks at you without listening,
when no one is listening: call me.
***
Copernicus
I didn't handle it well, a sudden friendship
in the Copernicus Room high above San Francisco
with a beautician from Stockton. She was in town visiting
her father, whose left leg had been removed at the knee.
"Diabetes," she said. "What are you having?"
We sat and watched the bay darken like an angry face,
talked over drinks about his stubborn refusal
to give up cigarettes, how he kept his extra shoe
on the nightstand beside his bed. And then,
like a severed head, sincerity made its appearance,
scaring the hell out of both of us. I didn't intend
to tell her that my father was whole but absent
("wholly absent?" she said), or that I'd dreamt
for years--a recurring nightmare--of slicing off my hand
while spreading mustard on a piece of bread.
"What kind of bread?" she said. The light began to change
just then, the strange copper light that seems to smother
the headlands before passing from Alcatraz to Angel Island,
a fast retreating shadow we stopped talking to watch,
sunlight traveling toward us, then vanishing. The fog
closed off the bay, left the bridge a pair of rusty towers,
cables dropping into silence, a silence that seemed
solid as stone, a cliff of chalcedony. I imagined the clouds
stiffening like egg whites, a confectioner's dream
creeping slowly toward the city. And how do we measure
the world, I thought, with what we see, or what we know
is there? "Another beer, please," she said, "and some nuts."
She was ordering for me, pulling her chair a little closer.
"Look there," she said tapping the glass. Forty floors down
and two miles out, a small tug had popped free of the fog
and was chugging toward a circle of sunlight on the bay,
the one spot of bright water. She held her breath
until it got there, then broke into applause.
"He made it!" she said, and drained away her rum and coke,
patted my arm and picked her purse off the floor.
"You'll never hurt anyone," she said, but I didn't get it.
"Your dream . . . You're scared you're going to hurt someone,
it's a symbol." Then she scooped the ashtray--made of flesh red
carnelian--off the table into her purse. "A souvenir," she said,
and left. My beer arrived a few minutes later,
along with a fresh bowl of nuts. It was the Carnelian Room
I later learned, when I told my sister what had happened,
not Copernicus. "CarNEELian," she said, as if what mattered--
as if what I needed to get right--was where I'd been.
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