1 After reading, in a borrowed house, a stranger’s National Geographic.
2 On the longest night of the year, a bulb burns in the narrow kitchen, the stove’s four small cataracts mouth their patient sighs, and the burner leaps into flame when breathed upon. And this is a stay against darkness, the voice of a kettle stretching into thin song. Later, awake, I lie beside him, my arm pressing his back’s seam. He sleeps softly; I am trying to learn this. Instead, I listen as the old accordion radiator rills and knocks.
3 Pale amphibians with blood-bright gills and useless eyespots.
4 Slips squiggling through the water.
5 Once, on a cave tour, I heard a guide claim that a human, if trapped in a cave with no flashlight, would go blind in two weeks from the strain of searching for light where none can be.
7 Of whom the studio art prof said, incredulously, She works five days a week!
8 Thus the painting’s fragility calls attention to its mortality.
9 And yet. I think of the cups I made with slick clay and potter’s wheel, shapes forming wet under the press of my hand and the smooth slide of fingers. When they dried I fired them in the kiln. After I brought them home, they clicked from the heat slowly escaping them. I slept shallowly then, and sometimes the ticking pots woke me. They seemed alive. Companionable. I’d walk back to my rented room, pant legs stiff with dried mud, fingertips scoured and glowing. Clean, clean, with my pared nails and ringless fingers. Fingerprinted clay and mud-slipped hands. Clay is a very forgiving material, one of the experienced potters told me.
12 1,932 feet; the same year FDR was elected to his first term.
13 Point your arms above your head, honey, like you’re a diver, she said, helping me into the wedding dress. Seed pearls were strewn on the boutique’s camel-colored carpet, like shells at the beach. She was practiced in this, fitting expensive gowns to the bodies of other women. I was a novice, barefoot in a borrowed corset.
14 For ritual purification after menses. Some scholars place the mikvah before the synagogue in terms of importance to the community; you can worship outside, but if you don’t have a suitable mikvah pool, nobody is allowed lawful intercourse.
16 One talent equals seventy-five pounds.
17 I explained to my lover that if we were to marry, it would have to be in South Carolina, at the foot of a sacred mountain. Otherwise, it wouldn’t take.
18 Lights flash, small and bright, on the surface.