THREE WORKS
BY THERESA BOYAR
================
USED TO IT
It's what he was talking about
our first month in Monterey, the orange
Celica skimming amoeba curves of highway,
swooping along the mouth of the bay.
I hope we never get used to it.
Used to the sea lions and salt air, craggy
hunks of rocks we balanced on to feel
like we were somewhere dangerous and lunar.
We wanted it to always feel new.
Sea-mist rained on us with its chilled message
from below, drowned lungs and shadows.
We couldn't fathom it, surrounded
as we were by what the postcards
hyped as purple carpet, humps and hills
of the land beneath like sleep-curled
limbs blanketed with violet.
Inland now, we're crutched by mountains. Here,
tour guides lead the elderly, the infirm
into radon mines promising regeneration.
Bones glowing in the darkness, damp caves
of risky healing for the desperate. A neighbor tells me
of the cemetery nearby and her face doesn't change
when she gets to the part about the number of graves
filled with children, filled during an influenza epidemic.
The shutters quake and in the garden, small pockets
of soil sink and rise, moved by something within the earth.
It would be easier if we were used to it. We'd accept
without surprise the crushed daisies, the bent pole
beans, the clinging fingers of clematis
snapped by unseen forces while they're still
translucent, thin and green.
================
KUNISADA'S MOON
At first, her arms thrown up, fingers
curled as if casting a great spell.
The impossibly slow arch of a reversed
C, her back. The tiles beneath her slick as water.
He sits on fat pillows, ignores the butterflies
in her robe, twitches at the heat
implied by her hands. The other woman hides
her laughter behind a simple robe,
a downward tilted head. The moon
does not reflect in the water. It seeps
into view, a fourth face, beyond the lake.
Then you see the patterned sash
in the magician-woman's hands.
She's unfastening the bamboo blinds.
You say, she's only lowering the blinds.
================
UNSTABLE
The first time I heard the word unstable
was in reference to a neighbor's sister
who had come back from her doctor
disappointed in his refusal
to surgically seal every pore of her body.
She was tired of sweating.
Unstable. I envisioned horses
fleeing from the woman's skin.
Unstabled, darting in every direction, her voice
breaking while she tried to summon them
back inside, all around her white fences
that kept moving further
away from her center.
I liked the invisible trail of it, the way
her mind trotted out of its field
to graze for a while in mine.