Lifesaving 101 I am afraid I will have to save someone and won’t know how anything could happen to anyone at any time including having to save someone. So I worry all the time, not for the welfare of others, but for my own sorry ass should someone collapse in my presence or fall at my feet with multiple wounds incurred while shopping at a Target. The woman trapped in her burning car could be me, and if I were there, watching, pulled over on the side of the road after debating, for a fleeting second, whether I could just pass me by, I’d weep, I’d feel a great, bursting love in my heart, but could someone else rescue me, please? I’ve read instructions for saving over and over, but can never remember them to save my life except that the inexperienced should just call 911, but what if you’ve forgotten your cell phone? The poor, pathetic inexperienced. The more they worry, the further out they drift at sea until marooned on the rocky shore of their own sorry selves, unreachable by anything save their own two hands settling at last on the place where it hurts.
Ode to Pink Say you like it and you are instantly frivolous, more frilly, more sweet, more cheerful than anyone ever expected. Maudlin, too, if mauve enough, threatening to bog any conversation with tears. I like the sound of pink, its spunk, the way its bounces right back to you while other words reach away. When you say it, you’re a little bit younger than you were a second ago. Listen to hear the faint oink in pink, recalling the palest of pigs from snout to curly tail. But pink is so much more than a pig-ment. It’s the underside of crimson leaves, the vaulted roof of a throat, the swoop of defiant magenta in older women’s hair. Dial it wholesome and phrases like “Goodness!” and “Heavens!” pant from your mother’s lips. Dial it brighter and giddiness jets high arcs before shopper’s remorse sets in. Turn it more and a strip club’s GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS pulses through windshields on the prowl. Those of us who believe in pink know nothing can be too pretty, that there’s no such thing as overjoyed, that salaciousness isn’t neon but simmers in the palms on the wheel. Rose or beige? Peach or coral? Champagne or persimmon? Don’t overpink it. Be kind. Be good. Be granite. Show plenty of gum when you smile.
The Heist When buying another sweater, I don’t want to talk with the clerk. This is not the time for pleasantries, to ask about her little boy or how her sister is doing. Can we make this quick? I want to say as I press my soft heap down and fiddle with my purse to find the shabby wallet that has opened so many veins. When she asks, “Have you found a winner?” I smile, and say “I have,” relieved she doesn’t acknowledge that I was just here yesterday. I watch her extract the hanger, fold my item with quick, deft, flops, steady her gaze at the computer screen to calculate what I owe. Inside my coat, I am dangerous, I am not to be believed, my fleece gloves a wadded weapon in each pocket, thick scarf burgling my breath, every second a drawn-out countdown to when she asks if I’d like my receipt in the bag. Yes, please, I say, only pretending politeness when I just want to get the hell out, hurry past the display racks, toss my loot in the car. Once there, I’ll linger in the driver’s seat, feel the pang of familiar truth: that it’s impossible to break even between full and empty, rich and ravaged, thrill and regret, but at least I’ll have one more.
Ode to a Lost Bracelet
Oh, silver cuff bracelet
with your single turquoise stone,
cloistered in soft pools of underpants
in my mother’s underwear drawer,
I thought you so exotic
when she’d fish you out
from that sea of unmentionables
and let me admire you
under the curious light of the kitchen.
This is from Mexico
I’d think to myself, with no evidence at all,
except for my mother’s half-musing
that maybe a boyfriend bought you there.
Boyfriend, maybe, Mexico
the words swirled in my mind
as I edged you onto my wrist,
wanting, as always, more than my mother
could give me: the turquoise-and-silver all of you,
and that scrap of a glamorous story
spreading out on the wax tablecloth.
I wanted a bigger life for her
than her suitcase of ladylike wishes
turned into a suitcase of woes
when she’d visit her carping mother-in-law
just a couple of states away.
But, in my heart, I knew that I knew
all I needed to know,
that your blue flickered with yellow
and the ghost of my mother’s arm
clung to me like a powder
when I entered that gateway of scratches
inevitable in nudging you on.
I felt her there, cuffed with me,
not in bondage but in longing
for all that couldn’t be had,
the undulating sigh of her muscles
riding on top my own.
My shame is that I lost you
when she at last turned you over to me
and I was too young, too rooting,
too reckless of everything.
Where are you now, my C-shaped friend,
too kind to box anyone in,
your mute mouth open to
Gone, Gone, Gone,
your mottled eye bottomless with Never?
The Fallen
On the bike path,
the leaves are down
on their luck,
they are crumpled
like paper bags.
Some hunch as if trying
to right themselves
after a staggering blow.
One poses like a mollusk
caught in a still pirouette,
all husk with nothing inside.
So beautiful
these little deaths
riding the helms of my sneakers,
none of them wanting to give up
the ghost,
all the color of sand,
pine needles curved
around them
from their own
precipitous fall.
The other day,
I almost stepped
on a small, dead frog,
its legs still shaped in a frog kick,
doing the thing that made it a frog,
the thing that it did best.
I forgot it, and only remember it
now, its frog shape stamped on my brain,
like the platform surrounding
the bike path bench
so brown with leaf stains
it looked like a slaughter.
*****
Janis Greve teaches literature at UMass Amherst. She has published poetry in The Florida Review, New Delta Review, North American Review, and The Berkshire Review.
