for Holding Silence

NURA YINGLING

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS] Buffalo, New York

for Holding Silence by Nura Yingling Copyright 2013 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Art, Wooden Steps to Light. First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-141-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942426 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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On Longing From the beginning I've known I'm obligated to love the world. Sick of low-level love, vanity, heart collapsed to a cave of clay, the winds of moors, sucking. Bring me my jewels and my heeled heavy boots and I'll make my way out of this tight, dark place by the light of pearls if I have to. Nothing so strong as to be helpless before desire. Weary of pushing it around on the plate, let me eat this yearning. It's meat. Potent smash and crackle like water, but not. Send time one way, death another.

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Saint Louis New Orleans Baltimore Windy nights the dead stir up the darkness within their attic shoeboxes and climb from their quiet paper squares through bundles of letters and cracked tape, slip onto the wind tunnel platform between the rattling cars of trains to board my dreams in their wingtips, an apron, a pork pie hat, a mink. Through the smeared glass of a phonebooth they watch me fumble with the wrong coins and slippery dial. A hand rests on my hair as I work by lamplight at the yellow kitchen table. During the important meeting, they shape their mouths into Os when I speak: great aunts with no handbags in their laps, my young uncle in his sad uniform staring out the corporate window. When my father comes, I understand hes only been away in a hotel trying not to drink. I want to know whats in his pockets. He often brought me an airport bracelet, small lettered beads the size of baby teeth strung onto elastic to spell the city of his latest trip. I dont want to hurt his feelings or be greedy, I ought to show him my treasured collection: SAINT LOUIS NEW ORLEANS BALTIMORE. I know I have them somewhere.

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Vacation When I was nine we went to a place that pretended to be the olden days: ladies in bonnets dipping candles, men in wigs and buckled shoes and something bad almost happened. We were at a play. A man beside me took my hand in the dark where no one could see. It was icky and hot. He whispered, You're pretty and tell your brother you need to go to the little girls' room. I didnt. I dont remember the play, just his flabby hand like a heavy bag, a sandbag packed with electric worms trying hard to move inside. Was it a compliment? Something lucky because I was cute like when the sailors whistled in my sisters favorite movie? I didnt look over when he let my wrist go when the lights came on. Some other things about the trip: the star-shaped ice cubes at the hotel, my parents mean jokes about the tourists, meaning our family was better than them, meaning the whole vacation was dumb, that they did it for us but didnt like it. It was on that trip I started my first and only collection. Pink and gold glass. The souvenir shops were filled with little vases, sugar bowls and creamers lit by butterscotch light, like church. I spent my allowance on the rose-colored ones; my brother spent his on toy soldiers, my sister on rabbits feet made into key chains. I remember driving back at night. It was raining hard and the car swerved and then it thumped, bam! into something. My father pulled over, got out of the car, and when he came back, streaming wet, he was crying hard into his hands. For Gods sake, Harry, its only a dog, my mother said and cracked shut the window shed opened to smoke. I remember, at home, unwinding the tissue from each one of my roseglass treasures and setting them on my windowsill,
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thinking that when the sun came out they might look like the golden jewels they seemed to be back in Williamsburg.

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Come Sunday The former queen of bepop is making a comeback in gospel, and the host of the jazz radio show who once caught her act with Charlie Parker cant get her to tell any juke joint stories or even play Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie without changing the words to fit Jesus. Those days before I was saved, she says were the days of the devil. Clearly, theres nowhere for the interview to go, so the host plays a piano solo: Come Sunday by Duke Ellington. It is Sunday, and though I am making spiced black beans, carnival rice and peach pie for supper, I stop and weep at the cutting board, having never heard this tune before, not as a girl crouched close by my father beside the living room RCA as he sat, tipped back in his lounging chair, eyes closed, clinking golden drink in hand, the smoke of his cigarette rising thinly up to the ceiling, then curling away like the last note at the end of those songs. Solitude, Missed the Saturday Dance, Sentimental Journey, Mood Indigo. I knew even then only love or grief could invent those melodies, the shadowed beauty of such minor keys. Now, when the spiral sound of longing dissolves cleanly into silence, I pick up the knife, resume cooking. As the guest intones her Praise the Lords, my heart bears the old familiar pain the way a church organ bears the weight of morning sunlight in the sanctuary, the resolving chord of the closing hymn.

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With You With you it should always be September, the kind of sea-grey day to match your sweaters and your eyes. You're talking again about lost chances, indecision, a pale and remote woman, women. Mostly women. I tell you they are only girls, unreal as the springs you romanticize, some deep season you think you missed between your watery Long Island boyhood and an idea for a poem. You say you were born on the hottest day of the year at dawn exactly a quarter of a century ago. Growing dim in your smoke and the steam from your coffee you fade and vanish but I talk just the same, for the sake of conversation, for the sake of the occasion: how I like my hair cut short, how I run two miles every day, how I wonder if we ever could have, had things been different, been lovers. All these bright colors I wear for summer disappear in this morning light. A balloon, a cloud, ribbons, fog, cancel each other like consecutive thoughts, like you and me. Unable to be remembered or created, the gestures we seek to imagine dissolve, as simply as our bodies would have, into each other, if such a thing as that had ever been.

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Baby Laundry Once, all the things in the baby laundry warming on the line in the morning sun were angels to her, prayer flags, wings, the apparent destinations of light. They washed her through with a clean peace while her perfect child, their reason for being, napped in the fresh-as-laundry hours. Fluffy diapers, gowns the size of a fathers hand, the christening dress and embroidered slips. Folding was a ritual of order and silence: a spiritual practice, incense of air and Ivory Snow. After the second child arrived, the baby things had yellowed and no amount of bleach or sun would whiten them. She stood still after pinning them up, at a distance, for a time she could not trace, to watch the blowing arcs of cloth, the way they flew and tangled in the line. Now the wash can hang in the rain for days. Pulled down at last, it spills into the basket, stiff from weather, thin from too much washing. She no longer folds not that it's difficult she could do it in her sleep but that the shadowy hills of fabric, their map of stains and loosening threads have caught her eye, changing and shifting every time she pulls out whatever is needed at the moment.

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Halloween Eve Something has kept the colors from peaking this fall maybe the night's dry hard winds or these hot bright days. All the leaves, though, keep falling. We can see further into the woods, and the leaf pile is high safe for the children to jump in, good for a fire if it would only rain. Today I have to carve the pumpkins, finish making the children's costumes. The tinfoil sword isn't strong enough, the angel wings need rubber bands. They want frosting witches on the party cake, they want to know what I'm going to be. All right I tell them and I don't know yet. When I was a girl I always felt most myself this time of year. Summer demanded its quota of fun, winter, its armor of wool and Vicks and spring, even then, was another trick, the bare world filled anew with blooms like a school gym festooned with crepe, staged for a prom I couldn't attend. But this fall is crumbling around me before I can taste its golden wine or reach its breathless pinnacle of light. Blank and dumb, I mix the sugar and water for icing and cut two eye holes from a sheet.

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Peacock This morning, driving to town, I had to swerve on the steep hill by the Everett place to miss a peacock in the middle of the road a male, gorgeous and ludicrous in the dawn light, strutting his useless colors for no one's benefit, or maybe for mine. I didn't know the neighbors kept peacocks. I could have been killed, unaware the road had turned to glass overnight, but the old knowledge of letting loose the steering wheel, pumping the brake and guiding the car, smooth and easy, back on course, saved me again as it has every winter. Out on the highway, I joined the others who travel these same miles to work, and watched their cars that, only yesterday rolled past fields warmed to gold, inch their way over black ice, windshields flashing ghost faces, gloved knuckles tight on the wheel. Now bumper stickers that proclaim I Drive 93 So Pray For Me stop being a local joke, now dawn most fully becomes herself, cold and empty of sentiment, laying down her hard sheen only on unforgiving things: gravel, asphalt, metal, cars. None it it surprised me not the sudden arrival of winter, not the jeweled bird posing in my path. It's as if I've been waiting to hit the brake on ice to see how far I'd slide, to feel the pressure inside my thighs of studded rubber bearing down into ice. Once I might have shared the secret of staying loose behind the wheel, of riding a skid and drinking the dawn like good gin, its bite becoming in one lucid instant

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intoxication pure as desire. Now, instead, I pretend to offer the highway prayer my fellow travelers demand and keep the image of the peacock for myself alone.

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Step One
In the dark hallway of the secret walk-up between the sour mattress and TV squealing its sick jokes, wrung from torment, the twisted sheets, sobs so loud animals fled A thread of light, needle-thin, appeared No not seen but sensed and illuminated my soul for what was time enough to see But no timeless the horror I was bearing as if it were a suckling infant wound in a tar black blanket of grief Beneath the busted ceiling light there on the filthy wall-to-wall I lay down that swaddled nightmare, grabbed hold of the slim rope of Light, looked up and started climbing out.

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