Autumn, Mist

1
This morning I took the wine from the sill
glazed perfectly in ice. It smoked down my throat,
mist across autumn fields I left in Maine
thirty years ago. I asked the mirror
if this is what it means: another room
known by the heart, the Charles below
accepting everything. The city I saw on postcards
was a lie. Those shots from above, all light.

Father, my face is yours,
the way I last saw you flickering
in the doorway, tired as your eighty acres
of salt marsh and scrub pine.
Meaningless to say you were right;
the night my feet failed on the stage
of a Park Square bar, I knew it.
The men didn’t look up from their drinks.

This morning tracing wrinkles from
nose to chin, I imagined them folding forever
into darkness.
Fields, dance floors—same thing—places where
soil or rhythm breaks down, where we turn
to meet ourselves.


2
It was such a simple act,
the most precise.
The fingers on the razor
might have belonged to someone else.
Over the bed, the crack in the ceiling
like the border of a country
I could never quite recall. Water rushes
in pipes, the drain needs fixing.
In the dark, it doesn’t matter.
My dancing shoes, worn down at the heels
lean against each other in the closet.

Jacques will creep
up the stairs, shoes in hand, tired
from waiting tables. He steps so lightly
as if his late return is a matter of concern.
He should always be serving, always be leaning
over candles, eyes mauved in strained circles.

He’ll bring rolls in white paper
as always. Tomorrow, he’ll unpin the print
from the wall, Picasso—a woman ironing,
everything falling in blue gravity,
so tired, as if she desires only to sink
from the weight of her body.


3
And, perhaps, the body
really is a gift, this small beating
in my ribs a reasoned rhythm. Once, a woman
at the museum reminded me of a harp. Her supple spine
defined a frame. She was so tense, I could see wires
as if at any moment she would become music
or break. The way moonlight broke itself
in our window when as children
we sisters cut each other’s hair.
Mary and I found a moth trapped in butter—
wings
a purple diagram of stopped motion.



Lost Fugue for Chet

Chet Baker, Amsterdam, 1988

A single spot slides the trumpet’s flare then stops
at that face, the extraordinary ruins thumb-marked
with the hollows of heroin, the rest chiaroscuroed.
Amsterdam, the final gig, canals & countless

stone bridges arc, glimmered in lamps. Later this week
his Badlands face, handsome in a print from thirty
years ago, will follow me from the obituary page
insistent as windblown papers by the black cathedral

of St. Nicholas standing closed today: pigeon shit
& feathers, posters swathing tarnished doors, a litter
of syringes. Junkies cloud the gutted railway station blocks
& dealers from doorways call coca, heroina, some throaty

foaming harmony. A measured inhalation, again
the sweet embouchure, metallic, wet stem. Ghostly,
the horn’s improvisations purl & murmur
the narrow strasses of Rosse Buurt, the district rife

with purse-snatchers, women alluring, desolate, poised
in blue windows, Michelangelo boys, hair spilling
fluent running chords, mares’ tails in the sky green
& violet. So easy to get lost, these cavernous

brown cafés. Amsterdam, & its spectral fogs, its
bars & softly shifting tugboats. He builds once more
the dense harmonic structure, the gabled houses.
Let’s get lost. Why court the brink & then step back?

After surviving, what arrives? So what’s the point
when there are so many women, creamy callas with single
furled petals turning in & upon themselves
like variation, nights when the horn’s coming

genius riffs, metal & spit, that rich consuming rush
of good dope, a brief languor burnishing
the groin, better than any sex. Fuck Death.
In the audience, there’s always this gaunt man, cigarette

in hand, black Maserati at the curb, waiting,
the fast ride through mountain passes, descending with
no rails between asphalt & precipice. Inside, magnetic
whispering take me there, take me. April, the lindens

& horse chestnuts flowering, cold white blossoms
on the canal. He’s lost as he hears those inner voicings,
a slurred veneer of chords, molten, fingering
articulate. His glance below Dutch headlines, the fall

“accidental” from a hotel sill. Too loaded. What do you do
at the brink? Stepping back in time, I can only
imagine the last hit, lilies insinuating themselves
up your arms, leaves around your face, one hand vanishing

sabled to shadow. The newsprint photo & I’m trying
to recall names, songs, the sinuous figures, but facts
don’t matter, what counts is out of pained dissonance,
the sick vivid green of backstage bathrooms, out of

broken rhythms—and I’ve never forgotten, never—
this is the tied-off vein, this is 3 a.m. terror
thrumming, this is the carnation of blood clouding
the syringe, you shaped summer rains across the quays

of Paris, flame suffusing jade against a girl’s
dark ear. From the trumpet, pawned, redeemed, pawned again
you formed one wrenching blue arrangement, a phrase endlessly
complicated as that twilit dive through smoke, applause,

the pale hunted rooms. Cold chestnuts flowering April
& you’re falling from heaven in a shower of eighth notes
to the cobbled street below & foaming dappled horses
plunge beneath the still green waters of the Grand Canal.

From Collected Poems of Lynda Hull. Copyright 2006 by the Estate of Lynda Hull. All rights reserved.