The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

The Grace of Accuracy

84 Debra Allbery The Grace of Accuracy AfTeR veRMeeR 1. Woman Holding a Balance Still the map surprises. What’s near now, what’s newly distant. Nothing finds me here, no letters, none of my usual dreams. Overcast warps through the leaded glass of our bedroom window, the morning light presses into a porcelain cup on the sill. My husband’s eyes move beneath his lids as if he were reading. Last night I dreamed him standing on a ladder in the rain, trying to clear out some leaf-clogged gutters, while below his father muttered advice to the ground, hand raised in an irritated benediction. Then my husband lifted a small doll by one heel from the eaves, brackish water draining from its joints, its open eyes. Is it ever how we’ve imagined? I wake up lost, then watch the dawn’s dim shadows take on weight, and the room becomes every other room where I have lived, the window any window I’ve looked through. Outside, the threadbare browns of early winter, the frost-stunned grass, The Grace of Accuracy 85 tiny tremors of wind. The inanimate take on life for a moment, then are revealed: a scrap of writing paper, a discarded glove. Sympathy—the word hung in a glass charm from a gold bracelet I wore when I was a girl. What is mine now is only what I keep to myself— a clutch of secrets like the tightened mass of another life inside me, a phantom fullness I can never name, a quickening. And yet in marriage what isn’t given away? Without looking back, I can see his sleep, the way the worn light finds him, darkness folding itself away like a heavy drape. And in his dream, perhaps, is my own hand, resting on the clean edge of a table. 2. Girl Asleep at a Table The inside-out of waking, my blue-lipped dream just breaking up: a banquet, your late entrance. The guests’ eyes lifting, turning a question toward me. I saw your shadow leaning in the doorway. You bowed to me with an absurd flourish. Something wrong with your smile, the shape of your teeth. This morning in Greyfriars churchyard an old man limped toward me, apologizing for his outstretched hand. See my head keeps bleeding, he said, and my hands. My hands are broke. He turned them over and over as if in wonder, his wet-dog smell roping itself around me, and I backed away— 86 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy not frightened of him, just angry at my own wants. I mumbled sorry and hurried out the gates. His scent ghosting around me, rising from the cobbles. I lost myself in the market, all the damp vendors and their cold flowers. A blind man took my wrist—You’re happy today— and I couldn’t answer, held by his unfixed stare. Home now, by this fire, I can’t get warm. Still, it’s enough to be inside, to just sit still here at this table and lean my head against my hand, feel how it feels to lean, to rest against something. As sleep hovers, touches, enters. Always, always, it murmurs, a breath from your grave.You used to palm the word, play shell games with it. Now, love, it’s no mystery. Close your eyes. The room is the same inside me, then falls away. Crosshatch, spindle. Just blind lost light. Only my own hands holding me up. 3. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter The calm passes overhead like cloud shadow, darkens the eggshell walls. Outside, spring’s rainlight, the pale new medallions of leaves caught in the wind’s strumming. The closer I come to my confinement, the more I shawl my past around me. Three months now he’s sailed. I pull The Grace of Accuracy 87 old boxes down, finger trinkets from my childhood— a tiny pin shaped like a beetle, a twig in a sealed jar once filled with river water. Its green still dusts the glass. And in a box of letters, one stamped and addressed to my grandmother, labeled To be opened when I am grown up. How strange to deliver this to myself twenty-five years later—how strange to me, my own young hand. The letters curled back into themselves, small fists, ferns still furled. I write of a flood. Simple...