Jen Stein
KeplerPassing between Earth and a star,
a slow creeping heralds a body in motion. Possibly a body in no solid-state, or acridly molten, or maybe the stillness of a body under extreme pressure with surface sculpted by wind, topiary of inviolate water, suspended in orbit. Could be some far-off moon. Could be terrestrial. Passing between Earth and a star, the transit is precisely numerically captured. As though no sisal twined to nets can catch fish. As though no palm can cross your arched back, no murmurs or rustling in the darkness. No crisped edges of butter lace cookies, no wine stain on the edge of the tablecloth. As though there did not exist the nape of your neck. I measure you by your shape outlined in moonlight passing between the bed and the doorway. Your transit is etched with photometric precision. The lens of the Kepler, the mirror of my eye. HestiaWhen we were married, I wanted to
learn to make clothing. I needed that connection to my body, a sweater of my making. I never learned to knit. I always wanted to, wanted two hands working to make things that are soft and wrap neatly around my neck, my shoulders. I wanted the magic to turn simple yarn into wearable art, into an expression of domestic affection, but where was home? I sit on a wooden chair, on a simple white cushion and I polish stones. My hands are always busy, always moving, but they make no knitted art. I can even crochet, with loops and hooks and turn a skein into any number of square things, or a hat that’s far too big to fit on a human head. (I wear it anyway.) I felt that if I could knit I could pick up the disparate threads and blend them into the square of my hearth. I would learn how to cast on and cast nets around everyone who had no hope for more. I could find stragglers and ken them into my life, my home, I could embrace you and sing gladly. But I never learned how to knit. Maybe it’s because you told me that needles are too sharp anyhow. Maybe I could prick my finger. Maybe not Hestia but a modern Sleeping Beauty, I would impale myself on a knitting needle and sleep until you woke me, when you wanted me to wake. Instead of knitting I learned to weave, to leave and wake myself. No offering bowls, no blessed hearth. I wove a coat and wore it out in autumn. Miss Maude Hires an AssistantShe lines them up in front of her, six women, each wearing their best clothes. One woman is wearing pearls and a pink sweater set. Maude admires her dark hair, parted to the side, cut jagged and uneven, but oh how it shines like brown butter. Another is wearing heels so high Maude is afraid she may trip and fall flattening the pansies in the pots set on the tables inside. Maude asks questions – why do you want to work here at Hallelujah! Hotdish! and where have you worked before? What do you want of this job? What do you dream when you close your eyes – do you see signs in the clouds? Have you ever caught yourself staring into the oven and you imagine yourself there, home there, hot but not burning? Do you know when you really, truly learned your name? The women laugh, nervous laughter, save for the one with the jagged hair and the quick-bit nails. She tells Maude she learned her name when she came home and found all the chickens and the ducks and the dog dead, and they were laid out like they were constellations and she knew then that her ex-husband was who did it because she’d left him for another man. Then she knew, she knew her name wasn’t Cathy anymore, it was Cassiopeia, Cassie, and she cut her own hair and she never saw him again. Maude accepts this as gospel and dismisses the other women. She offers Cassie the job and a mint julep. They drink sisterhood through green straws. They drown in it.
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Miss Maude Uses the North StarMaude has always wanted to be a fortune-teller
with a penny inscribed upon her ear. She envisions a woman with full skirts, layers of cotton duck and silk, tassels and coin, a blouse off the shoulders, scalloped collarbones cut in marble. She sees herself reflected by moon, flute, candlelight. She has tried to read cartography of her palms, but she can’t decipher the stones of her hands. She traced her lines reading maps she found in an old Glamour magazine using witchery her grandmother would’ve said. Her life line is long, wavy, it shows she is untamed. Her heart line makes whorls, it wends. Is she insatiable? Is she a minx, a ravisher? Her hands are warm, strong enough to knead dough, they splay sticks to winds, capture roly polys beneath milk vetch pods. Where is her fate line? Maude cannot unjoin the twinning can’t peel life from viscera and what is that? A smudge of dirt or chocolate mousse, dried blood maybe, there beneath the fat pink pads of fingertip, the permanent indentation on her ring finger arcing lines from knuckle to bone, wrist to wonder, an oubliette of twelve years pressed, counted as rosary beads fallen on the floor. She closes her magazine. She closes her eyes and sees the North Star, etched behind her eyelids. It leads her to the kitchen, her hand to spatula, whisk and forgiveness. Grateful, she blossoms into plum cake. Tell Me About the Rainwhen I can’t feel
my shoulders when I can’t walk the aching smell dampened pavement hot made new mist gathering at my ankles discarded stockings next to the bed rumpled sheets blanket slung over a desk lamp chair book when I am becoming a passive verb to be I watch the window tell me about spring and the heat nestled in your collarbone when you come in let me run my fingers from neck to cheek the beaded moisture you gathered as you moved from work to home will settle in the whorls and eddies of my stilled fingerpads. Trailheadthere’s a soft cadence
bound in the leaves a homily of gnashing so small, a sibilant whisper a call of distant rain without water, a living hum as larval caterpillars denude the branches of their ephemera. Potawatomi State Park, 1987We scaled the bluffs believing ourselves gazelles.
It never occurred to us to bring a rope. At ten, my fingers were small and my limbs compact. I found handholds and scooped out the worms, I made room for grasping and hoisting my weight upward, propelling myself as hydrogen split from the air. You climbed ahead of me, feet scrambling on lichen and dead leaves. I reached a hand to find a stone or a root to anchor and found your hand. Breath stopped. I turned wood. Your dead green eyes stared at me and you considered. Every muscle tensed. When I lost my footing I became a marionette on your string, 80 feet above the rocks. I hung slack-tight in that moment as your fingers bound my wrist like twine. You said, “Do you love me?” What squirrel doesn’t look up at the rattle of a cottonmouth clacking his approach and feel fear nee love? I loved you I said and I meant it. Love to buy my fluted body life. I said I loved you and I meant it and as puppet-maker your eyes brightened, you hoisted me easily before I was made to kneel to prove my profound gratitude. Walk-in ClosetsThe closet is a walk-in.
It is strewn with sweaters and starched linens, shoes on stand-up wire racks. Your jackets. I am derelict in my duties because wrinkles have crossed the creases of your trousers. I know I live: where else would you find a mirror in which to see yourself? |
