Open Shutters Read Online Free PDF Page A

arrested wave
    engraved upon the sky’s
    absorbent paper … wait,
    that thought
    was Hokusai’s.

Shadow
    The name of my neighbors’ black Lab is Shadow.
    He stands on the deck in back of their house
    like a figurehead fixed on the wrong direction.
    The house—across the street, at the corner—
    I view from one side, as I do the dog.
    Shadow faces astern while the prow
        leans into the morning sun.
    Whenever I wake, my first sight is Shadow
    already at military attention.
    His profile’s imperial, nearly Egyptian.
    Turning in bed, I stare out the window,
    unaware of my room, as if the glass
    were my eyes, and what I see out of it
        is freighted as a dream.
    But no, this is the day’s first emblem
    of the real, because it
is
real: a black
    dog that doesn’t know I’m looking
    as he looks out over the back yard thinking
    at whatever level he’s thinking,
    while I lie in silence, starting to grasp
        whatever it is I feel.
    There’s something cheering about him, something
    comic in his erect, respectful
    salute to the day; and a call to sadness—
    though I resist this, not wishing to greet
    my own life with less gratitude
    than a dog chained to a post. What is it
        about his silhouette
    that lends the whole neighborhood the flat,
    deluded air of a stage set—like
    a backdrop whose painted simplicity
    of House and Tree only seals the fate
    of the characters in the tragedy?
    Besides, what’s the tragedy? I’m all right,
        and so, I think, is Nancy,
    who now steps out to the deck in her robe,
    unhooks Shadow’s leash. He follows her in.
    I know what will happen next: she’ll emerge
    briskly in work clothes, and back the car out
    past the woodpile, the trash cans, the basketball hoop,
    her late summer garden; I’ll watch her turn up
        the street to disappear
    on the hilltop, seeming to tumble off it.
    No tragedy. She’ll be back at three.
    Yet the thought was
there
just a moment ago,
    barely within the range of my senses:
    an equal consciousness
    of how little I understand that the life
        one has is one’s only life
    and how well I understand it; and how
    most of the time one functions better
    forgetting. Do I want to function?
    It’s humbling to think that human ears
    are duller than dogs’. I rise and dress,
    and for better or worse the darkness curls
        behind me, like a tail.

Peonies
    Heart-transplants my friend handed me:
    four of her own peony bushes
    in their fall disguise, the arteries
    of truncated, dead wood protruding
    from clumps of soil fine-veined with worms.
    “Better get them in before the frost.”
    And so I did, forgetting them
    until their June explosion when
    it seemed at once they’d fallen in love,
    had grown two dozen pink hearts each.
    Extravagance, exaggeration,
    each one a girl on her first date,
    excess perfume, her dress too ruffled,
    the words he spoke to her too sweet—
    but he was young; he meant it all.
    And when they could not bear the pretty
    weight of so much heart, I snipped
    their dew-sopped blooms; stuffed them in vases
    in every room like tissue-boxes
    already teary with self-pity.

On the Wing
    You fly to my table with unbuttoned sleeves.
    You look like an angel with unbuttoned sleeves.
    Where have you been? Did you run from a fire?
    Here, share my meal with unbuttoned sleeves.
    Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff’s in my coffee.
    You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.
    Don’t say it yet. That’s not what you mean.
    I know you too well with unbuttoned sleeves.
    How many years since I first loved your face?
    You could have set sail with unbuttoned sleeves.
    Clothes make the man. Our bed’s still unmade.
    Please pay the bill with unbuttoned sleeves.
    Unbutton me back to our first nakedness:
    I have no name at all with unbuttoned sleeves.

Crystal Ball
    “Here’s a story for you,” he said. He slid the paper
    off his chopsticks and snapped them, making two from one.
    Then folded a red accordion