Poems for New England in mid-October:
When the storm began, the window was matted with water. I was reminded of the museum with my mother, of late childhood, of impressions of French women. Past the window pitch pines blew. We kept the screen door latched, otherwise it would bang around. Boiling water for tea in a pasta pot. The house would be closed in two weeks’ time. They’d board the windows up.
From the house on Nellie Road, we could see but not hear the ocean: only the space heater, which we turned to 85. The plug grew hot. One of the things I feared was fire. We slept in fleece blankets with earplugs in, as if there was something not to hear. Only the space heater, the wind, the sounds of our breath.
In the morning, as if there were something to fear, I woke anxious again. I imagined a golden liquid swirling inside me, pooling at the base of my spine. When all the liquid had collected there, and nothing else had happened, and I felt no differently, I got out of bed. We were expecting rain, and H hadn’t seen rain in a year. A big drought out there. Big fires, too, and that’s why she had come east, to breathe a little easier. Easy, when putting your thawing hands into the outdoor shower. Your mouth open to the water. H ran naked across the deck, towel flapping open. The wind wasn’t violent, just strong.
Off season: Great Pond’s empty parking lot. Hatch’s closed. We picked up a single English cucumber and two ears of corn at the market, where the only thing that was different were the bottles of sanitizer left out. Later, my fingers tasted chemical.
Then we had nothing to do so everything we did was slow. I wondered about being happy, or unhappy. If I had a wood-lined cabin on the sea. Arranging purple-streaked clam shells on a stone step. We walked down the road at Hiawatha and H copied the outlines of pitch pines with her body: see how squiggly they are? She tells me the bark is stronger that way, interwoven, she shows with her fingers. So windy out here come winter. Imagine the house on Nellie Road in a real storm. Imagine the lonely house. How its mugs tremble as they hang from their hooks.
We walked at Nauset in the marsh. I didn’t know the names of any of the plants. Just red and green on all sides. No one owns the view, H told me. It wasn’t true: a family had asked us if we were looking for the path. No, I wanted to say, we’re looking for the place where the estuary opens to the ocean. The view was theirs so we turned around. The bay was the panting mouth of an animal that day. At night, the fog so thick. Down the dunes, a coyote bounds away. I touched the water only briefly. I was frightened again – of the ocean, of death, of all this clinging fog. Of men who never came but I thought would, every time. If we couldn’t find our way back up the dunes, what, we dig a hole. It would rain all night. I showered alone outside, the door open to the forest. Still no men came. Outside the power lines hummed. When the rain came down. I had never heard them do that before. Of all the things it could be called, Corona discharge.
H making rice pilaf so we could stop eating late season corn with butter and English muffins with butter. I swear we go through a pack of Kerrygold every four days. The salt and vinegar chips my grandmother ate until she died. One of the very last things. That and sliced bananas, and ginger ale through a straw snipped halfway, to fit the can. I let the taste of vinegar sink into my tongue. It smells like the ocean out there, obviously, though sometimes I mistake it for the lower Austrian sheep farm, old milk on clothes and seeped into wood and hay and trampled shit. H drinks half and half with her tea. I never drink the PG Tips from the cupboard. That stuff makes me overly excitable.
I take a shelled bean from her mouth – they need more time to cook – and chew it. She puts her hands around the new shape of my face. Peach, she calls me.
Memorizing the Louise Glück poem. Repeated quietly in the bedroom with the door closed when H is talking to a woman she is starting to miss. Just because there had been these few lines: I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way / caskets of figs and olives / Earth was given to me in a dream / In a dream I possessed it
H had strange dreams every night we were in Cape Cod. She woke befouled by them. Someone telling her I am not proud of you. The next night she was pregnant. I knew I too wanted to be told I am proud of you. Which meant I am not disappointed in you, which simply meant you are enough. The worst of clichés; I couldn’t believe I still needed to be told that. It goes like this: What I realize is that when you look at me, I’m special, so when you look away, I’m not special anymore. Thus I spend all this time trying to understand where I went wrong. How I lost the person’s glance. I think about the years I might have spared myself. I had felt special – once, twice, this happened – and then the women went away, and I ran for them, holding, I tried to reconstruct it. It was never there, or barely. I see that so clearly now. Did no one say what I needed to hear? Did I not say it to myself? And so tied up with these men. They went to men so I thought I wasn’t enough. I thought and thought and wrote and wrote, and in the end, it was that fucking easy to understand.
I had slept dreamless and heavy in fleece blankets that belonged to Toby’s granddaughters. Tiny people I loved for a while. I hadn’t seen them in months. Shirley had learned to walk, then to run. Bow legged toward the ocean. Your dreams can make your whole day strange. I wondered what I was dreaming of. I had a hunch I was befouled by them too.
It should have been a good way to start the week, plunging your body into an ocean without waves. It was, in most ways, a beautiful way to start the week. I had this line in my mind the whole time: the sand seeping up cold below and the sun seeping down warm above and me in the middle, trying to hold them both at the same time.
We talked of processing, mostly. Which meant how do you see the world and how do I see it. Not who is better or who does it better, though I was the one struggling in a way that bothered me, so it was clear that H was doing it better. Some days this fall I cry about things like: feeling bad, self-judgment, forgiveness, and compassion. Twice it happened in the car; once while H drove, once while I drove. Driving makes me cry, that’s all I said. Her hand to my shoulder. Otherwise deprived of intimacy, of the tenderness of other people. Yes. I missed the bodies of other people. Seven months now since we went inside. And there had been the bodies of so few other people, and so infrequently too. Hard to compute, H says. We play an old recording from April 2nd, what the air sounded like then in New York City. There are birds in the foreground, and in the background, can’t you guess, sirens. Eighteen seconds of morning birds and sirens.
Lily Meyersohn is a narrative nonfiction writer and prose poet based in Providence, RI. Her bestselling audiobook, "Exit Interview With My Grandmother," was published in May 2020, and other essays and prose-poetry have been published in Entropy, Peach Mag, Little Pharma, and elsewhere.