Open Shutters by Mary Jo Salter Page B

fifty-cent anecdote, in which the most
          expendable is preserved and no
                   rope’s thrown to the rest.

Erasers
    As punishment, my father said, the nuns
          would send him and the others
    out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
    Punishment? The pounding symphony
          of padded cymbals clapped
    together at arm’s length overhead
    (a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
          powdering their noses
    until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
    was more than remedy, it was reward
          for all the hours they’d sat
    without a word (except for passing notes)
    and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
          black-and-white Sister Martha,
    like a conductor raising high her chalk
    baton, the only one who got to talk.
          Whatever did she teach them?
    And what became of all those other boys,
    poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
          My father likes to think,
    at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
    chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
          those days were never printed,
    but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
    gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
          can say so, though all the lessons,
    most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell
    this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
          who grew up and dispersed
    as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.

Tanker
        
On the horizon
        
One toy tanker pitches south
        
Playing hide and seek.
        
Broad as a fan, each rust-pocked
        
Leaf of the sea-grape.
        —from “Fort Lauderdale,” by James Merrill
    Almost
a tanka—
    Which (to remind the reader)
    Allows a haiku
    To glide above two submerged
    Lines of seven syllables.

    In my living room
    Seven years after your death,
    As a tape gave back
    Your suave, funny-sad voice, I
    Suddenly understood it.

    “Toy tanker,” of course!
    You’d pruned the tanka’s final
    Syllables to five.
    No one but you would have made
    a bonsai of a bonsai.

    The tanka I cite
    Is the
Mirabell
of three:
    A toy trilogy.
    Florida: last stop before
    The grandeur of Sandover?

    You played hide-and-seek—
    Hoping a few fans might take
    A leaf from your book.
    Glimpsed behind the geisha’s fan:
    Your quick smile, eyebrows lifted.

    Some people make real
    Tankers that can transport oil,
    Do the heavy stuff.
    Your father was one of them.
    He greased your way: God bless him.

    Why count syllables
    When half the world is hungry?
    You had no answer,
    Planted another sea-grape
    In bright rows, ornamental.

    How many poems
    Take the disappearing ship
    As death’s vehicle!
    Distant, you remain in view,
    Still running on drops of ink.

Glasses
    Tattooed, goateed, burly, a huge
    guy you’d expect to find in a hardhat,
          drilling a hole in the road,
    he pulls out from his T-shirt pocket
    a crumpled, quietly crafted page
          in praise of a fellow poet.
    Then steps up to the podium, slips
    his glasses on, and everything blurs.
          
Sorry,
he laughs,
they’re hers—
    these glasses are my wife’s.
I’ve met
    his wife. She’s blond, fine-boned, serene,
          with a face you’d swear was painted
    five hundred years ago by Van Eyck.
    Don’t worry,
he’s chuckling into the mike,
    I’ve found my own.
But his tone
        is a little disappointed.

Hare
        At odd times, harum-scarum,
    after we haven’t seen him
                   for a week or so, he hops
        from the bushes at stage right
    onto our green proscenium.
        Why do I say it’s ours?
    At best, I’m just a warden,
                   standing with hands in suds
        at the kitchen window when
    he breaks out of his warren.
        Jittery, hunted vagrant,
    he leaps as fast as Aesop
                   claimed his kind could leap,
        then stops still in the grass
    merely because it’s fragrant—
        a