READING THE DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE ON THE 4TH OF JULY
for Rob
It is a tradition in this family, to gather after lunch on the 4th
under a pavilion built on the flat roof of an old boathouse.
There, five generations of the owners of an Adirondack camp
pass a copy of the Declaration from person to person around a table,
taking turns reading aloudWhen in the coursea designated passage,
it becomes necessary for one peopleand hand it to the next.
A fifth generationthese truths to be self-evidenttoddles, unsteadily,
about the floorall men are created equalwith her sippy cup.
Massive logs braced with tree limbsevinces a design to reduce them
under absolute Despotismhold up the roof.The history
of the present KingIts overhang and the railingsis a history
of repeated injuriesframe the forest undulating around a lake
pocked with islands.obstructing the Laws for Naturalization
of ForeignersWind crinkles a patch of water. A wooden Chris Craft
motors by setting the waterplundered our seas,to sloshing
harderdestroyed the lives of our peopleunder the boathouse.
Across the lake, through a dip in the trees, two ridges fade
circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleledinto the mist.
In the foreground, the long arm of a pine entreats. A hemlock’s limbs
dangle downdeaf to the voice of justiceand the occupants
of this landscapethese United Colonies, are and of Right ought to be
Free and Independentpass the past and who we are, and how we came
to be, into the present, Jefferson’s languagewe mutually pledge to each other
our Livesmarrying with theirs, his words inhaled into their bodies.
Then, 56 names, each signer, are tolled, one by one, around the table,
many signing away their lives with that stroke of the pen.
Button Gwinnett. Lyman Hall. George Walton. William Hooper. Joseph. . . .
The names linger in the air.We are here.
Listen to my feet and I’ll tell you the story of my life.
—JOHN “BUBBLES” SUBLETT
This is what you’ll need. Tap shoes.
A hardwood floor, unvarnished, unwaxed.
Maple and oak are least likely
to splinter. And air, plenty of air. It’s the air
under the floor that makes the stage a drum
to carry a message the way drums did back home
when the deep bass of your heel
strikes the ground, followed by the little clip
of your toe, the side of your foot sounding
like it’s clearing its throat, or whispering,
making a sneaky slide before
the ball of your foot snares the melody.
And a screwdriver, small, to loosen the taps,
so the sound is not so crisp.
Forget the smiles.
This is not the time for smiles.
And keep your arms out of it.
This is not show tap. It’s the story.
Play it for keeps. For real. This means
no hips. Legs should hang from the hips
as from a skeleton, or a man
at the end of a rope,
the feet swinging
from loose ankles, the better
to let the spirit out. See
how light the body is unburdened
by the soul, how it skims the floor
like a dragonfly searching
for its beat, for the voice
buried within the beat, for the spot
on the drum that gives that dead-type
tom-tom sound. And Fuh-DAP! Hit it!
Eyes front, so no one suspects.
Lay down your iron! Talk.
Show boom-dah-dee-boom nothing
DIGgitey-boom above the hips! This
is about time, tickety-bloo-ka-SHUCK,
passing, and not passing. This is about
staying alive, you “spittin’ out the verbs,”
tapping to be heard, tapping
on the lid of the earth, pretending
shaff-da-boom you’re whistling Dixie.
Early April. Ice cold and drained of color
as fingertips cut off from oxygen.
Heading south on the Henry Hudson
the road bends, and through the mist
and skeletal tangle of tree trunks and branches
a bridge appears, erased
and returned by the windshield wipers.
Suspenders thin as harp strings
hike the horizontal span to paired catenaries
so much the color of the day they look
drawn in pencil on the sky, their swooping volume
(four feet in diameter and made of enough
miles of wire to crank us halfway
to the moon) reading like paper pouring
through a watercolor, like the silence in music.
Water, cliffs, sky, birds flicker in the X’s and V’s
of its unsheathed piers and towers, the girders
soaring up through space singing
with the economy of a poem
held captive by its form, claiming
no more of the heavens and earth
than necessary to do its job. Looked at
from outside the car, the landscape’s palette
of grays and browns, and our black umbrella,
frame the steel bridge drifting
into clouds draped like angel hair
over the leafless trees feathering the Palisades.
To anyone on the New Jersey side
Manhattan must look the same, the bridge’s
thrust anchoring into clouds
masking the 179th Street anchorage, a picture
of just how ghostly the connection
between Manhattan and America is.
To the figures on barges plying the river,
and on the restored brigantine materializing
under power from the white breath of the Hudson’s
mouth, who see the bridge more nearly dead on,
the toy cars and trucks skimming its motion
east and west must seem to drive
off the world. The fog descends, snuffing out
all trace overhead of the third dimension
and civilization (except for the baffled
roar of traffic), and the penciled bridge fades,
as if time had wound backward to the blank page
in Othmar Ammann’s sketch pad, leaving
boats under way out on the sepia water
fetched up in the 1920s. Only a red lighthouse
for just such conditions guarding Jeffrey’s Point
close by the downstream flank of the bridge
glimmers, an artifact from our century’s childhood,
(freshly painted and well maintained
as any childhood), not even ankle high
to the bridge, barely three humans high,
its bell silenced, its lens gone.
My husband and I sit in cones of electric light
reading in down-filled, chintz-covered armchairs
in our pretty little parlor in our pretty second home.
The tinnitus of crickets and the hiss of the sprinkler system
seep through screened doors and windows.
Thousands of miles away people are drowning.
In droves. For days. They stuff rags under their doors.
They perch on rooftops screaming, to us, to high heaven, to
anyone. The water is rising. They dog-paddle into our parlor
exhausted. They are dying. The wind
is roaring. They are the size of pixels. They can’t be heard.
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 fills the room.
Last night my husband dreamed we were standing in water.
The water was rising. It was clear. It was potable.
But it was rising. It was reaching our mouths.
We interpret his dream as empathy.
But that’s just a dream. We, of course, can swim.
Join us.
Two hundred feet away the sea kisses and kisses our shore.
From another time zone, ping, through the ether, my daughter
makes contact. “If you’ve heard the news, we’re safe.” News?
Safe? I’m on West 14th Street, New York City, a squiggle of paint
out of Bruegel, rush hour rushing around me in its rush-hour tempo.
I climb into a cab to go home, and climb into the news.
Paris! Under attack! 352 wounded. 99 critically. Body count 129
and rising. ISIS! Broadcasters are in their nonstop coverage voice.
Hollande declares it is an act of war! Outside, we glide by the gleaming,
well-lit targets of Madison Avenue, laden with prayers to mammon.
I lean over the front seat the better to hear.
“My daughter is there! My daughter!” I tell the driver.
He turns up the volume. Drives faster, as if that would help.
The shopwindows blur. Inside, I’m checking my phone for maps,
looking for the red teardrops marking the attack sites.
Check the address of my daughter’s hotel. Dear god, it’s
in the Marais! It’s near the concert hall! One of the restaurants!
The radio says the rampage began about 9:30 p.m.
Nine-thirty? That’s when her son, our grandson, would be
settling down in a youth hostel near the Île de la Cité,
his first night alone in Paris, an American suburban kid
on his first night alone in a city anywhere.
She would have been boarding the train for Beaune,
but I know she didn’t. I know she reached her son.
There is that “we” in the email. Did she miss the train?
Did she hear the gunshots, the sirens, before the train left?
I can see her dropping everything, running through the dark,
running hard, running south down the rue Amelot,
right on the rue du Chemin Vert, running and running,
left onto the Boulevard Beaumarchais, to rue Saint-Antoine,
legs pumping, heart pounding, the fear not for her life,
not of where the next bullets might come from,
but fear for her son. No other thought. No other.
All over Paris people are running, running with one thought,
to find their loved ones. All over the world, we run beside them.
What some of them find will rip open the heavens.
WATERCOLORS WITH
SOUND EFFECTS
The clouds have been streaked all day with sky,
the sun falling in odd slivers on the bluff,
in glittering shards on the water, spotlighting
sails crossing it, heightening, for long minutes,
the yellow clumps of daylilies, splayed
against the unlit marsh behind them.
Near seven o’clock the clouds opened and sunlight
spread over the seascape like the fourth movement
of Sibelius’s First. Birds burst into their languages,
the sun unbottling all they needed to air
to settle tribal scores, before nestling into sleep.
Their notes kept time to their wingbeats—the gulls’
slow guttural squawk and glide, the swallows’
busy tittering, the goldfinches’ throat-stopping
rollercoaster dives and tweeting ascents.
The egret with its hesitant, cautious jerk
makes not a sound tiptoeing about the inlet
with the conviction of a spy. Rabbits
perform their bedtime rituals, oblivious,
licking their paws, scrubbing their faces,
nibbling the bugs out of their haunches.
The osprey, out of sorts all day with its mate,
does not budge from its sulk, or its refuge
atop the mast of a Laser tied up at the dock,
both far and near enough to keep an eye on the nest
without walking out on his mate completely.
The sky begins emptying its color into the next
time zone. The pond fills like a mirror
doubling the wetlands, pulling the sky and clouds
to its surface so perfectly one can’t tell clouds
from sandbars, birds flying over it
from their reflection. Lights coming on
across the pond mingle with fireflies.
Beyond, a sloop heads into the harbor
under power, crossing the still air, unheard,
its single sail set for stability.
We sit opposite each other in easy chairs, reading,
our feet touching on the hassock. From Public Radio’s
wallpaper of music, a story emerges.
We look up. Our eyes lock. We watch the story
play in the other’s eyes, see each word
come at the same time.
Night swallows the walls. The story ends.
We don’t move. Floor lamps next to our chairs
cast us in separate spheres of light. Is this
how one of us will die? Our eyes coupled?
How the one who lives on will couple
only with death, the way the prey and the wolf
look, for a long moment, in each other’s eyes,
acknowledging the story, acknowledging
the minute the prey turns and runs,
the compact between them changes?
We return to our books, floating in the lamplight
like celestial bodies, a Bach partita supplying the ether.
It’s a double bed. Also known as a full. They measure 54" x 75".
You may not be familiar with them.
They predate Queens, which predated Kings,
and were themselves an upgrade of twin beds
for married couples, as seen in 1930s movies.
They were thought to be healthier for you,
and also less likely to give moviegoers ideas.
Back when the old man was a young man,
he brought me to spend the summer with his mother.
My bags were put down in the guest room,
the one with twin beds. What a row that caused.
“Mama! We are married! We want to be in the same bed.”
“Sonny! That is not healthy! You won’t get your proper rest.”
(I should hope not.) He won, but the war wasn’t over.
Every morning at breakfast she would look grim, and say,
”Sonny, you don’t look like you are getting your proper rest.”
What we were getting was entirely proper
now that we were married. And we remained healthy.
Bear in mind, I’m his age-appropriate woman, or close enough
to know the names of the TV shows he watched as a kid,
and also to have danced to Lester Lanin, and now
to have a tummy fat enough to make him worry
it’s a disease. I tell him the disease is called
old age. He doesn’t believe me.
We do not use Viagra. Make of that what you will.
As we shut down our laptops, perhaps the new safe sex,
and go into a cuddle, naked as the day we were born—
and the only way to sleep in a double bed
when the old man is 6'5" and 195 lbs.—his skin
is still as soft as the day we first coupled.
We turn out the lights, and the rest, oh, the rest,
you with your eye to the keyhole, it is so sweet.