Rebecca Hazelton

ELISE QUA ELISE

1

No matter the now of it, in the beginning

                        there was willingness

and there was a long summer

                        turning the black paint on the fire escape

                                    to tar sucking at our shoes

                        in a greedy love, don’t go, don’t go,

            and the roofs turned the rare rain

                                                            to steam

                                                 to air again,

and there was no meaning in any of it, just the ordinary

            prayers and hands,

                                    just songbirds competing

                        with traffic noise,

her, standing in my doorway,

                        explaining how my life

                                                was no longer solely mine,

how sometimes skin and skin and the air through lips

                                    bring us to each other

                        in one form, then another,

                                               

and my quarrel wasn’t with her

            but with God

            or whomever.

That summer was a drought, the city was parched,

            the lake low on the shore and the gardens abandoned

                        to what could grow without care or love

except for the secret tendings

                        of illegal sprinklers in the dark hours,

and in that summer the few trees outside

                        our apartment complex were still

                                                and a blight took them out

                                                and then a chainsaw.

2

When I said my life, I meant my husband

            how she’d wifed him one night

after a party I’d left early.

Despite this new information

history and the greater world

            continued, the first plane

hit and the radio announcers jabbered

                        confusion, a mistake, a freak

accident but then it wasn’t

and we watched the live feed

of one body,

two, darting through the smoke to the ground below.

Later, we would try to cast the memory

            from a mold of acceptable rhetoric, from received sources,

from cooler heads, the moment

                        never replayed

            because the bodies had families

            and the bodies had carried in them something

            other than body

and if we didn’t name it

            we could avoid mistaking it.

3.

In her mouth

                        a mistake        

took wing, her brandy and champagne

                                    channelled down

one arm, crested one breast, and we listened to the rattling

                        call of buildings under threat,

progressed

through the colors

of alarm, took our shoes

                        off and passed through

                                    invisible rays

and let strangers press our underwires

                        for hidden sharps and nails

for months

to years until the fear felt

                        familiar and earned.

I divorced. She married.

There were postcards,

then there weren’t, there was talk

                        of arrest and there was talk

of drugs and then there was no talk.

Across the rooftops the curls of vapor.

Across the smoke the silhouettes falling.

                        The birds against the mechanical.

                        The mechanical bird against the flat gray.

So she said it was a mistake, our bodies’

                                    collision, no different

from other accidents, and so I said

                                    it was a mistake, our bodies’

                        collision, and in other years

                        there were other accidents,     

                        and we each put a footnote

                        at the bottom of the history.

4.

The problem with a history is the memory

won’t square, the house leans

                        to one side with the pressure

of ghosts, and all the rats

                                    flood out,

            breaking the drought

                                                with their rolling bodies.

There was no great love

                                    between us. I’ll never know

if the body she was in held the brighter thing

                        I looked for,

                                                but I have my doubts.

One summer, another, ended with dark descending

            and all through the parks the fireflies

synchronized, though one man giving another man

            relief by the empty swingsets hardly noticed,

                                    though a roman candle

spattering in the hands

                        of a drunk and laughing girl running

            lit nothing out of the ordinary

                        and sputtered out, leaving

only the same stars

                        in the same patterns as before

among them the red lights

                                    of travelers sleeping

with only slight fear

            far above, and her below

                                    the earth somewhere

I’ve never visited, her name

                        returned to her at last

from the mouths of others

                        who passed it back and forth,

fraying its edges,

                                    myself among them.

Rebecca Hazelton has been published or is forthcoming in Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review and others. She was the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Creative Writing Institute, and also received a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She teaches creative writing at Beloit College. Her book, Fair Copy, won The Ohio State Press/The Journal Award in Poetry and is forthcoming in fall.