Anecdote of the Jar, or A Gift from My Dead Californian Housemate, and: Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin

Anecdote of the Jar, or A Gift from My Dead Californian Housemate

I capitulated his ghosts were humming in the attic after he’d conceded there was no attic.

I cradled his teacup Rottweiler named Magic and sang her the blackbird songs:

All your life, all your life. Take these broken wings. And the other one, Pack up all my care and woe.

Once he’d surrendered his broom handle, early morning knocks on the spirits’ floorboards,

I thumbed his crosses and crystals with tenderness, acknowledged the voices when they instructed him

to leap naked off the pier. I even led the rescue copters astray in the dead of night. (Bye, bye, blackbird—)

All of this after he agreed to bequeath me his jar. Windowsilled with its sisters full of rainwater

and moth-eaten endearments, the jar he said sat brim with lush left-alones and ordinary lightning.

Everyone warned me about California and its crazies, so I’m driving this jar back to Tennessee,

where grandmothers ban housecats from nurseries and during sun-showers the devil beats his wife.

Like nothing else, this jar, a legacy of my housemate once he was forever out of hand, the moon in.

Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin

Sick as a dog in Sète, I don’t tell Sonja who’s hell-bent on seeing Valéry’s grave.

I snap in half these fishing-town gimcracks, souvenir shell rings and whistlers, objets d’art

for our winding footpath, anything to distract myself from pain sharp as sea change.

Ahead she traces scars on headstones, dried funeral rosebuds like pill cups flush with salt-spray.

At these cliffs, where scores of stone Marys overlook the Mediterranean, surrender feels right—

give up your dove, your angel, whatever lightness helped you get here. Watch your white wings turn to sails.