|
Bookish from Birth
Sarah Blackman '02 has always been a storyteller.
She was reading and writing by the age of three, dictating stories
to her mother before she could hold a pencil.
That precocious affinity for literature evolved into
what her professors call an extraordinary facility with language,
artistic integrity and maturity of vision,
evidenced in an expansive collection of work.
Blackman won the 2002 Sophie Kerr Prize with her collection
of 10 poems, five short stories and an essay she wrote for an
independent study project. "I Said Poison" is from that collection.
I Said Poison
I.
Finally, one of us says poison.
In four months our mouse has grown
from baseboard shuffling to brazen
eye, pink palm, slanting shadow tail.
I find the fact of him in pieces;
the deliberate unburdening
he leaves heaped in corners, paper
shavings tidied from his bed and tumbled
into the hall. Once I stopped to watch
him wash. Steeple paws smoothing
the surge of his skull, palming down neck
to cup each of his own shoulders. His wrists
are naked. I have seen them bend.
II.
At night jet lag keeps me busy.
I watch the bruised wrinkles of your eye
lids, the roll of your cloistered
eyes. Here is a secret I will never
tell you: when I wrote, it was me
I pictured. My calves sturdy
and bare underneath boy's shorts.
My feet burrowing into carpet
as I slit the envelope and laughed
in the center of the room.
You should have been in
that chair by the window, legs
tucked, one foot strutted
against the table. You should
have been smoking a cigarette,
picking at your lower lip:
watching me.
On the telephone we are sexed again.
"How much longer?"
"I don't know. Soon.
How's our mouse?"
III.
This is what traps do: crack
the backbone, snap the neck, mat
fur with blood that pulps
from muscle, crush
the well oiled roll of wrist.
This is what poison does:
strips the walls of stomach,
ulcers arteries, gluts
intestine through grated teeth.
This is what is eaten: flour,
rice, the plastic coating
on the phone cord, the photo
album from which your mother
waves a nibbled stump and I
am newly eyeless, blinking a smile
at your cheek. The lining
of your bowler hat. My scarf. One
of my mittens. Some poetry. A piece
of yellow cellophane I was saving
just in case. The center of the Sunday
paper. The soles of your good shoes.
IV.
At first I didn't recognize you
with a beard, and me, six months settled
into my new skin; thin, thinner,
waving from the end of the carpeted
hall while airplanes taxied behind my halo
hair. I didn't recognize myself.
At first, I didn't know
our mirrors, my face within
and the long hall to our bedroom
littered with suitcases, shoeboxes, bags
of spine-broke books, your shirts,
your papers, your pizza boxes, your life,
the lives you'd led for six months alone.
And me, alone while you paid the cabbie,
rushing to our bedroom, standing
on one foot like a stork, holding my breath,
waiting for the first rustle, the first
shadow, the first wary surveillance
of space and change, the mouse.
V.
At dusk we walk to buy
plums the color of the sky.
I hold your hand, learning again.
Three stories up our neighbor's
curtains still shimmy in the wind.
This is their answer: Two
mice are stiffening on the rug.
Two mice are leaking commas
of blood and heavy silence. Spent,
stiffening, swung like wind
chimes by their snapping tails,
two mice are flung from a third
story window. Two mice
plummet, learn to fly.
-- Sarah Blackman
|
