Also by Sarah White from Deerbrook Editions

Wars Don’t Happen Anymore

to one who bends my timepoems

Sarah White

d e e r b r o o k e d i t i o n s

p u b l i s h e d b yDerbrook EditionsP.O. Box 542Cumberland, ME 04021www.deerbrookeditions.comissuu.com/deerbrookeditions

f i r s t e d i t i o n© 2017 by Sarah WhiteAll rights reserved.Page 97 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

ISBN: 978-0-9991062-0-4

Book Design by Jeffrey Haste

Cover art, monoprint by Sarah White

for Reuven andMalcolm and Lisa and

Owen and Lyra

7

is an opera clown who enters to explain what follows(the libretto)

where no verismo—divorce, disease, abuse—no sting’s too sharp to be trotted out,provided it be sung with truth, humorand rue.

I named this stream of scenes Spilled Milkbefore I saw that Timewould bend at the end to lighten the heart’s loss,allowing gain—a blinddate, a friend found.

T his is for himplus both my sons plus both their wives—all five.

The Prologue

T he Prologue 7

I. Spilled Milk

Intercalation 1. Two Children on a Porch, With Woodbine 13Ursa Minor 14Missing Boy 15Intercalation 2. T he Dance Language of Bees 16Mrs. Pegamin 18T hree Poems of Hair and Destiny 19 1. Pigtails 2. “My hair is gray but not with years” 3. Report from the Dream MuseumIn a Village Near a Mountain Stream 22T he Family Muse 24If, at my deathbed 26Remembered Visit, Albany, N.Y., ca. 1946 27What do you want to be when you grow up? 28Tenses of a Simple Heart 30T he Ice Pond 32Intercalation 3. T his 35T hree Spilled Milk Poems 37 1. T he Woman Who Spoke in Proverbs 2. Words On a Wintry Day 3. Owen Makes a VowT he Wisest Kid in Michigan 40T he Seller of Christmas Trees 41T he Pipe, the Plants, and the Misdemeanor: a Pantoum Of ‘72 42What the Sleeper Told Me In the Morning 43T he Ballad Of Narayana 44Intercalation 4. T he Beaux On the Bridge 45Manhattan On the Nile 46Night and Day 47It’s a good thing 48

Contents

Costume Closet 49

II. A Bend In Time

T he Last Day Of May 53I Wonder, By the Witch 54Upper West Side Love Song 55Like a Neighborhood 56Intercalation 5. A Ceremony of Gumbo 57Broccoli 58Squash 60Beatitudes of Food 61Night Repair 62Intercalation 6. T he Priest Conductor 63Rhyme Goes In and Out Of Fashion 64Mrs. Walecki’s Weather 65Complaint (to one who bends my time) 66On a line From Shakespeare’s Sonnet 81 67Intercalation 7. Conjunctions 68Peacable Kingdom 69Marie de France’s Tale 70An Archeologist In Amherst 72Ideas Of Honor 73Pointe des Châteaux 75Tourist In the Land T hat Rains Rhymes 76Just Our Luck 78T he Mother Of the Groom Wears Gray 79Wedding Photo 80Intercalation 8. Page From a Lost Notebook 81Rosh Hashana, 2016 83Intercalation 9. Ventricular 85Absence: A Sort Of Acrostic 86Intercalation 10. After “T he Garden” By Jacques Prévert 89Reading the Torah With You 90

Two Commentaries On the Challah 91Morning News, November 9, 2016 93Last Maxim 94

Acknowledgements 97

I

Spilled Milk

13

intercalate, transitive verb. To insert (a day, a month) in the calendar.

He lays his arm along the shoulder of his two-year-old sister. “It doesn’t matter what you teach a boy,” said Winston Churchill,

He believes she is the child most treasured. “. . . as long as he doesn’t like it.” She thinks her brother is the favored one.

The boy stood on the burning deck

Neither, in the future, will befriend the other’s spouse, or frequent the other’s house, until, T he pipes, the pipes are playing

orphaned and alone, they are surprised

Boys and girls together.by a picture of two children side by side

Me and Mamie O’Rourke

with long strands of woodbine all around.

Intercalation 1: Two Children On a Porch, With Woodbine

14

T he infant bear is bornamorphous, a ballof matter on the floorof the den.Mother Bear, accordingto a French maxim, licks the cubto give it form.

If she does it poorlyor not at all, her offspring will be,as they say,mal léché,never to make friends,thrive in school, or fall in love.

When I was newbornI waited on the floorfor hours, then rolled away to find another den,another tongue.

Ursa Minor

15

(New York, October, 2012)

Cops are combing the boroughs, prowling sullen streets.T hey flash their brights, and radio a voice he’ll know: Avonte,it’s Mom. You’re safe. Run to the lights.

Avonte Oquendo Perdidois like a phrase in Esperanto.His eyes, in the photo, are those of a faunthat can’t explain,although it knows.

T he search is on for a gray and whiteshirt, black sneakers and jeans. Today, they question the rains,tomorrow, the snows.Months later, an answerroils the salt water.

O river, rivero!

Missing Boy

16

T he foraging bee, writes Karl von Frisch, begins to perform a kind of "round dance”…

Our summer home had a chimney. It buzzed and swarmed, smelled of honey.

She starts whirling around, constantly changing direction, turn-ing now right, now left…in quick succession, describing one or two circles in each direction…

I slept in a room with a hearth. How nice! A child and a chimney.

…those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, with outstretched feelers . . . the dancer herself, in her mad wheeling movements, appears to carry behind her a perpetual comet’s tail of bees.

T he oldest, exhausted worker-bees dropped down through the flue. Logy, dun-colored, dying, they crawled from the hearth onto the rug where my bare feet often found them.

During the thirties, Frisch, unable to prove pure Aryan ancestry, was classified as a mischling, one-sixth Jewish. He came under further suspicion for continuing to hire assistants, even some women, with still higher proportions of Semitic blood …

It was my mother who pulled the stinger from my foot, my mother who mixed a soothing paste of baking soda, my mother I overheard to say how uncanny it was that the bees in my room never stung me!

Intercalation 2: The Dance Language Of Bees

17

Accused of practicing “Jewish Science,” he was forced to retire from the Munich Institute of Zoology.

Every Autumn, the Bee-Man scrubbed inside our chimney, removed the wax and honey. After the war, the bomb-ravaged Institute was rebuilt and Frisch was reinstated. He continued his research into his eighties. His ac-count of “the dancing bees,” greeted at first with derision, has been widely accepted.

Every Spring, the swarm returned as memory returns to the house, the chimney, the swarm, and the stings.

Frisch said honey bees can always find a food source with the help of their dance, even if they must detour around an intervening mountain.

18

Not her face. Just her name remains as I wake, and the place—an upstate New York attic where secretly I let someoneinto my hideout—the husband of Sadie the maid. I was ten. Where was the widow, my mother? I don’t know.T he man and I spoke in a codeof what we did—none of itviolent, all of it mild as these things go—though it marked me.

It wasn’t him I met last nightbut Mrs. Pegamin, who said I should not write this downin my native tongue. Nor should I set the poem close to home.

Mrs. Pegamin

19

1. Pigtails

My grandfather lived in Jamaica(once in the British West Indies)where a family nanny tried, in her wisdom, to arrangemy straight, unruly hair into triple pigtails like the sweet, beribbonedsprouts her granddaughterswore; “like the pickaninnies,” Mother said.

All three of my thick plaits failed. T hey fell this way and thatlike palms after a hurricane,leaving the nurse indifferent—no, pleased—to see the white girl’s embarrassment. Recalling now

my pale, freckled skin, bright eyes,the Anglo angle of my nose, I think a sleek pair of braids could have saved me by twinning me with Margaret O’Brien, Judy Garland’s co-star, an American darling.

Three Poems of Hair and Destiny

20

2. “My hair is grey but not with years” (The Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron) Women pay coiffeursfor a streak of white. I get mine free. It doesn’t age me. I am thirty, content to wear the evidence that something has gone wrong— a marriage, a thyroid disease,the tremors, lost weight,eyes protruding from my face.

“Nor turned it white in a single night . . .”First, streaks, then, strands, then, the whole mass whitenedlike my name, my children’s name, like lace veils, bolts of silk,fresh snow, spilled milk.

21

3. Report From the Dream Museum (for Susan Matthews)

First, the calico cat I had been paintingbecame a silver tabby,then a gray stairway resembling oneI was descending last Sunday when you said you liked my shorter hair, which I deplored— pink scalpvisible under white wisps,not a look for persons of my age and gender.T he museum became a school,T he stairs, a test,T he silver cat grew ever hungrier.

More was revealed than I remember.

I may or may not relate this to a doctor.

22

we had a neighbor, a composer a little older than my mother. I cravedhis attention, he, the attention of my brother, Bill, home from Yale for the summer, noodling on the piano, winning smiles from the musician,who ignored my studious renditions of Für Elise and T he Happy Farmer.

It wasn’t fair. I, not my brother,had learned to read the scores,knew about Satie, our neighbor’s mentor years before in France,about his famous cronies: T hompson, T homson, and Cowell.One thing everybody knew: the neighbor, as a volunteer ambulance driver, had been injured,lost one digit from one hand.

I often saw him move his nine good fingers fluently along the keys. I did notsee him place them on my brother’s kneeone summer evening. Bill told meof recoiling from the gesture. I imagine them together—old manand young—mute, confused, eachhaving thought he knew the other.

In a village near a mountain stream, I studied a musician and his fortunes,learned a man could have a wife and children, a country home, a choral piece performed

In a Village Near a Mountain Stream

23

at Tanglewood, memories of Paris and Satie, and not be satisfied. Satie himself wasn’t satisfied to be Debussy’s friend and write T hree Pieces in the Form of a Pear.

I don’t go to the village any more. True, the rushing music of the creek is still a pleasure. But barriers prevent the visitor from bathing in its impure pools, as we children used to do.