#grace schulman

The poet reads lines about the credences of summer. The glass in his hand hides And rekindles a small fire; a delicate wisdom flares; the beauty of things cannot be exhausted.

Because

Because, in a wounded universe, the tufts of grass still glisten, the first daffodil shoots up through ice-melt, and a red-tailed hawk

perches on a cathedral spire; and because children toss a fire-red ball in the yard where a schoolhouse façade was scarred by vandals,

and joggers still circle a dry reservoir; because a rainbow flaunts its painted ribbons and slips them somewhere underneath the earth;

because in a smoky bar the trombone blares louder than street sirens, because those who can no longer speak of pain are singing;

and when on this wide meadow in the park a full moon still outshines the city lights, and on returning home, below the North Star,

I see new bricks-and-glass where the Towers fell; and I remember my lover’s calloused hand soften in my hand while crab apple blossoms

showered our laps, and a yellow rose opened with its satellites of orange buds, because I cannot lose the injured world

without losing the world, I’ll have to praise it.

Scaling ladders with buckets of white enamel, I painted the stars and the moon on my windowpanes   to hold back days and nights. I yanked the telephone and stopped the wooden clock. The weeks a lightning stroke,   desire turned to love. With my blue diamond, I sliced minutes in half and made days vanish, fooling the hours.

I became so skillful   at firmaments that miracles occurred: a bearded comet moved across the room   breeding no omens, tearing no major kingdoms   into small provinces, but there it was,   reminding us that rock may spin and flare,   lifting the senses, burning into sight.

You eased pale hands away; I saw your shoulders   recede through doorways, watched your image fail   with your famished smile. I left our room with dream-filled eyes, and standing in the sun,   I gazed at bricks and glass and saw, suddenly,   flashing in stony light, the stars and the moon.

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” —Marianne Moore

Hopper never painted this, but here   on a snaky path his vision lingers:

three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces   and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses,

lean forward on a platform, like strangers   with identical frowns scanning a blur,

far off, that might be their train. Gas tanks broken for decades face Parson’s

smithy, planked shut now. Both relics must stay.   The pumps have roots in gas pools, and the smithy

stores memories of hammers forging scythes   to cut spartina grass for dry salt hay.

The tanks have the remove of local clammers   who sink buckets and stand, never in pairs,

but one and one and one, blank-eyed, alone,   more serene than lonely. Today a woman

rakes in the shallows, then bends to receive   last rays in shimmering water, her long shadow

knifing the bay. She slides into her truck to watch the sky flame over sand flats, a hawk’s

wind arabesque, an island risen, brown   Atlantis, at low tide; she probes the shoreline

and beyond grassy dunes for where the land   might slope off into night. Hers is no common

emptiness, but a vaster silence filled   with terns’ cries, an abundant solitude.

Nearby, the three dry gas pumps, worn   survivors of clam-digging generations,

are luminous, and have an exile’s grandeur   that says: In perfect solitude, there’s fire.

One day I approached the vessels and wanted to drive on, the road ablaze

with dogwood in full bloom, but the contraptions   outdazzled the road’s white, even outshone

a bleached shirt flapping alone on a laundry line, arms pointed down.

High noon. Three urns, ironic in their outcast   dignity—as though, like some pine chests,

they might be prized in disuse—cast rays, spun leaf—covered numbers, clanked, then wheezed

and stopped again. Shadows cut the road   before I drove off into the dark woods.

By Grace Schulman

“And down and down and down," the toddler’s mother sings as he clears every ledge.

Midway we cross their path. In rain, the museum’s steps loom like the Giant’s Stairway

to Guardi’s Ducal Palace. “And up and up and up” is what I do not say

as you stagger for balance. Once I’d scaled that summit, hunted over the crowd,

and saw you below, holding two hot dogs and white roses; you vaulted, took the steps

two at a time, then three, and leaped to where we met. Your smile is broader now.

You see more. On this day of wavering, we hear a Triton blow the horn

where Giotto’s Magi open hands that rise in air: up, and up, and up.

To see in the dark the south window strew flowers

on the chapel floor, or wind peel a sand rose,

is unnamable, like joy,

like my love’s grin between a cap and a jacket.

Names are for things we cannot own.