Sally Keith
Far and Away
Upstairs in the café, which once had a long bar with stools, where you could plug in your computer and work with a good view of the frozen foods, if not also the line for express checkout, sometimes you would see people you knew.
*
Long ago, far away, somewhere I loved, was loved, or where I loved once—
*
A mother watching her child and the swimming instructor watching Amor model a perfect flip-turn each time she arrives at this end of the pool.
*
To tack, to turn, to add, to get, to put yourself
So as to speed along
Really fast.
There, sailing once
The glasses flew off and got lost—
No recovery.
*
The café remodeled meant the bar had been removed.
Now there is a locker bay for picking up your orders from the internet.
*
Sac, halo, bubble-wrap.
Thistle, comb, column, rod.
*
The weight of a moth,
Is relative to the petal
upon which it stops.
*
I lost the word “inertia”
For months on months of time.
*
“What does your husband do?” said the man I had met taking out our trash.
I had had come to rely on him to tell me whether or not the truck would arrive, which, otherwise, I found overwhelmingly mysterious.
“He works at home,” I said, in Spanish, simultaneously imagining my wife, at that very moment, lying in bed, fast asleep.
*
Loaf and whorl, whorl and loaf.
Harbor, shelter, house, home.
*
The Spanish teacher explains four ways to specify a person you are going to meet: the meeting is by coincidence, the meeting is for the first time, the meeting is to see an old friend, or the meeting is one in which two people travel from different points. Because I keep confusing the verbs when I practice telling stories in the past tense, the teacher suggests that the meeting idea be altogether left out.
*
I drive the babies up over the hill to school, the sun mostly up, though still not hot.
They want the windows open and sing out from their seats.
*
To be honest, we often avoided meeting the old couple on purpose.
The woman had lost her memory and constantly repeated herself.
*
Over the pool long reams of weatherproof fabric have been cut for shade.
Purple mountains laid out on a storybook sky.
If I breathe on my left, a dream; if I breathe on my left
As I stretch the arm underneath, breathe, and kick the opposite foot,
Not so much buoyancy but an as of yet
Undiscovered
Me.
*
If you are going home to meet the man who delivers water, my teacher suggests, you might say you are going home to wait for the man who brings water.
*
“Fish fish”
one of the boys
will repeat
as if he learned
the sound
overnight.
*
It wasn’t that the woman kept repeating herself, but that we did not know how to act in the generosity of his not acknowledging the repetition. As time passed, I came to delight in, if not even crave, the experience of crossing their paths—the babies, for example, made her so happy; I cannot explain my pleasure in watching her reach one finger, as if across a unsurpassable stretch of emptiness, out to touch them—
*
“Of ten nuts, how many will a squirrel remember?” Amor asks and, admittedly, I don’t know if this is a fact from the internet, a joke, a podcast, or a story she has told me and I forgot. I do not ask.
*
“Oh look, honey, babies,” she says.
He nods his head and never says,
“Look, we have been through this before.”
Neither does he roll his eyes, neither does he hurry her off.
“They are so cute,” she starts.
“And they know it.”
“I hope you are saving your money.”
“Who is going to Harvard? And who is going to Yale?”
“How long have you lived in this building?”
“They are so cute.”
“And they know it”
“Where is your husband?”
*
A woman rolls a queen-sized mattress without any sheets out the front door of her house.
The bushes grow so that when she turns the corner you cannot see what will happen next.
*
Long ago, far away, somewhere I loved, was loved, or where I loved once—
*
Reading Emilio Jose Pacheco’s “El Pulpo,” picking out in Spanish all the /o/ sounds (helecho, hongo, jacinto), which in English—a fern, a mushroom, a hyacinth—don’t quite work, I begin to suppose it’s possible to feel the idea of an image, now the octopus—that dark god… between rocks no one has seen, while holding the /o/ sounds elsewhere, underneath.
*
Sometimes our neighbor, though not on purpose, will ask her last husband question differently: “Where is their father,” which is easier to answer. At least. This doesn’t imply us and, also, we don’t know, we really don’t—maybe Texas, maybe not.
*
“I feel there is so much going on with biology,” I overhear the barista relay to her friend, considering the bad possibility of an animal becoming extinct just in the moment you decide to study it.
*
I am at the café table, where the bar used to be, looking into the face of my neighbor who doesn’t yet recognize me. He is the one we constantly see ushering his sweet, shuffle-footed wife, most likely 92, if I remember right.
*
The pair of sequined wings from across the back of the hoodie worn by the mother of our boys the first day we ever met flash in my mind.
*
Long reams of time with neither image, nor memory, nothing but an embarrassing preoccupation with what one day might be—
*
The moment my worry over finding the husband of the elderly couple alone shifts to the possibility that, also, he is in physical pain, I see him lean down, lift a pant leg, and adjust a bandage that I am sure only a doctor could have administered.
As he stands back up, she is arriving; it’s like watching two cogs connected by the increments you can’t help but admire in a chain. She must only have been in the bathroom, back behind the locker bay. She shuffles in a line.
*
Amor, a moor.
A harbor, a shelter.
*
The two meet, lock arms in a motion that simultaneously lowers their heads to an angle.
They focus on the stairs leading them down to the underground garage and sail for home.
Sally Keith
Sally Keith’s fourth collection of poetry, River House was published by Milkweed Editions in 2015; she is the author of The Fact of the Matter (Milkweed 2012) and two previous collections of poetry, Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Dwelling Song (UGA 2004). Recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she lives in Fairfax, VA.