Read an Excerpt

I

Yield

That’s what the sign said

below my window.

I’d step out of bed

to look down on the fork

the y had made

in the word and the road.

yield was destined

for a field of yellow,

but scrambled like eggs

into something like daily.

Was firm, was an order,

but just meant consider.

And consider I did.

I stared at the sign

that was so little needed:

to stay or to go?

That was for others,

my parents, to know.

He might leave someday.

She might stay behind.

I was only one side

of the triangle.

I’d slip back in bed,

back into my own mind,

and more letters wanting

to play came to me

alone to untangle.



Bratislava

So I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava.

That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive.

A sign in italics nudges us at the station:

Have an amazing time in Bratislava!

That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in English

and then Slovakian, posted above a trash can

that stands like the only monument in town.

We’ve heard there’s a castle, though. We need a tram.

We take one, and it heads in the wrong direction.

A pretty girl, cheerful and blond, straightens us out,

and we get on and off a bus at the proper stops.

That’s funny. Already a right place and a wrong one

to be in Bratislava, and I am among

the people who sort of get this, at least at the moment

I happen to occupy, within a vacation

in Vienna with a day trip to Bratislava.

That’s funny. I’d assumed my travel companion

through life would be my husband, even if

I’d gone to Bratislava, which I hadn’t thought of

long enough to think I would or wouldn’t.

The spanking white castle, standing high on a hill

we climb on foot, swigging our bottles of Coke,

dates to the year 800 or so, but burned

down to the ground, which tends, as we know, to happen,

and was reconceived in one of the worst times of all,

the 1950s, under Soviet rule.

That’s funny. Atop embarrassing pillars, knights

in plaster armor gaze up at the sky

triumphantly, although what for is forgotten,

and the sunlight they eclipse in silhouette

is all the sillier on those phallic cannons

between their legs, with three or four cannonballs.

More cannonballs per man. That’s human history

in a nutshell. Bullies unsated with all they’ve got

and below, the blindsided masses. That’s what it is.

And yet I’m happy, now, with my companion—

he likes me, I like him. He has his own backstory

of bleak encampments, battles lost, and sorrows

best not spoken of in Bratislava

lest we spoil our day, which so far is duly amazing.

I admire his dignity. Dignity is funny.

Everything’s funny now, which we hadn’t expected

to happen, either of us, after what happened.

We’re still alive and now we’re in Bratislava.





Pastry Level

I was gazing out back

at the lemon-gold

sun on the cream-colored painted brick

of the new house.

(New again, I mean.

I’ve told you the story—

that it was finished just a few

months shy of the war;

that young families

moved in and out before a widow

who couldn’t care for it anymore

signed it over to me,

a single buyer lately

possessed by self-

possession.) This morning

at my writing table, looking

outward for a word,

in that sun-glaze on the wall

I saw again a baker’s shelf

twenty years ago in Paris.

You were there, of course.

The average American

four-year-old girl

stands at forty inches tall,

if you can get her

to stand still.

When you were four,

in those ruffled French dresses

I couldn’t help spending

a fortune on,

you couldn’t be kept away

from patisserie

after patisserie;

you guided me by the hand

to every window display

that we might inspect another batch

of little pleated

tartes au citron,

glistening neatly

at the level of your eye.

Remember when

you, your sister,

your father and I

all spoke the same language?

Because of you

we invented a phrase—

“pastry level”—

to indicate the height of any

four-year-old on the street . . .

It seemed to go without saying

we’d be strolling together

all the rest of our days.