Sophia Stid
At the Museum, I Misheard the Words:
once again I fall into my family grave. Over
and over, I hear it that way. At the museum,
a man plays guitar in a bathtub and people move
in and out of rooms. They play the same song
from different parts of the house. Wallpaper
rippling, peeling. Dark velvet. The room where
two men smoke. The room where the woman
turns over in bed. At the museum, pieces of fabric flutter
from walls to be touched, small invitations. I rub
bone-colored Korean linen between my fingers. Stiff
threads, hard as fish ribs, rasp. In the glass case,
an emperor’s robe hangs, made from this same cloth.
I can feel what I am looking at. I can feel what I am
hearing. At the museum, I read the walls:
Teachings mandated that people show respect
for their parents and ancestors through care
for their bodies. At the museum, my friend’s mother
coughs in the couture exhibit and cannot stop. Her
throat scrapes, sound bright as blood in that silent room.
A very strict precept was that one should not destroy
or discard what had been inherited. Thus, haircuts
were forbidden. At the museum, I look away—
my friend’s mother would not want me to see
her body unstopped, her body beyond the guillotine
of her practiced will. She is elegant, private, unlike
my friend, who goes to her now, placing both hands
on her mother’s shoulders, pressing her forehead against
her mother’s forehead. She says Breathe, and breathing,
waits for her mother to pick up the thread. Which she does—
frayed gasp, ragged edge, another cough—breathe, my friend
says or hums or breathes. Their hard-spun duet
reaches across the room where I am reading
about the nomadic character of things made
of threads. After what she calls the war of her
childhood, my friend did not speak to her mother
for many years. Did not invite her to or tell her about
her wedding, at which I stood beside my friend
and closed my eyes, opened them again and tried
to see with the eyes of her mother, because I was
the only one in that room who knew her mother.
No one in the museum, looking now, would know
that day happened like that. The two women are
forehead to forehead, breathing. I hear them across
the room, where I am reading about how this ancient
linen is so sheer that no matter how many times
you layer it, the light will still come through.
The Marriage Bed
for Julia
We dragged our beds outside & pushed them together on the porch
that first summer we lived & worked in the woods,
& slept there under heavy blankets beneath the cedar trees
in the cold High Sierra nights &, laughing, we called it the marriage bed—
sometimes stumbling to bed happy & drunk from bonfires
the boys lit by the river, the fires where you sang
this is my body, take and destroy it, if you please
while we were learning something different—& because
we walked home through the meadow, there were seeds
in the seams of our jeans, which we shimmied out of to sleep—
too tired to take off our shirts & bras & when we woke
our bare legs were cold & sometimes I’d find your hand
in my hair, which was long then—our jeans an alphabet
on the floorboards, dirty tangled language of the days when
we were learning how to be real & hungry, how to eat
the nights—we’d sneak into the restaurant where we waited tables
& raid the walk-in fridge, shaking cinnamon-sugar over sour-
dough toast shining with butter, burnt crusts brittle, smoky
from the broken toaster, somehow that bite between my back teeth
always exactly what I wanted—we ate on the line, barefoot,
sitting on the counter swinging our legs, holding tomatoes
like apples to our mouths, taking big cartoon bites, quiver-silk
of seeds slaking down our wrists all held yellow in liquid space,
& the avocadoes I ate with so much flaked salt you said
I’d die overnight from thirst, & so I drank long draughts
of cold creek water from a jar & there was always dirt in it
& I didn’t care, there was also mint & that whole summer
I never felt thirsty—we left wet footprints on hot granite
the days we climbed cliffs high over the American River
& held hands & said okay & jumped into the muscled water
over & over & sometimes we stood so still in the riverbed
fish swam iridescent into us, tracing our ankles
silver—that summer we learned to walk in the dark
without a light, our muscles were quick & strong & female
& always slightly flexed & we slept in the marriage bed,
where a part of me, still, is always resting—& years after,
you wrote to me, you were the first woman I had ever wanted
to be & with that bed we made an enormous space
for each other into which we will always be rising—
yours the only other body I know the way I know my mother’s—
the bodies of the women that make me ready for my life.