To the Girl Who Taught Me How to Cry

To the Girl Who Taught Me

How to Cry

Eyelids then are cellar doors

and the anterior of skulls, the sockets,

are bone walls of a bulkhead

long ago closed, padlock

a copper rust.  That frame

and sill’s in every course of rot

and absence, but with some dim

tremor and shaky hand

we're made to crack open the door

and listen to the most clichéd

haunted scrape, made to step into

a dusty spider web’s fog,

and part the waters.

Because we always lived in

an old house we knew

our cellar hole was dug

by hand one hundred

and twenty years before I was

born.  For some reason

there was a cement, waist high wall

on the north side and the one

bulb in the room that spewed

a squat wattage

made the canned carrots

and wax beans look like little

headless and armless sentries,

dolls all orange 
all torso in yellow

or green bib-overalls.  With

a little imagination their rusty

lids could be that slack lack after a five day drunk,

the stubble gone thick

as my mother’s cold pudding

afternoon words.

It was in that old vegetable dark,

with voices above us in the kitchen,

the crash of glasses, the buzz

of crude laughter, that Carrie told me

her father had shot his girlfriend

and that she was sure he’d go to jail

even though he’d blacked out

and couldn’t remember a thing.  She was sure

she and her brother and sister

would have to move closer to

where the prison was—and she cried

because she loved her grandmother

who would be left behind

in a house older than the one

we crouched beneath, older than this dirt

cellar's rank of last fall’s potatoes

whose sprouts were eyes seeing

in the dark, feeling for the light, sprouts

she and I rubbed off and let fall

at our feet like we were barbers.

Today I’d say I would know her

face anywhere—all these thirty plus years

of passed water since we went

into the dark to get supper

while over our heads coffee brandy

and gallons of milk went down

smoother than tea, smoother than news about moving

away, or why, smoother than one eye closing a second

before the other one because some lash,

some dust (I'd swear) was stuck to my eye and she,

when we were in the light again, showed me

how to pull my top lid over my bottom lid

hold it hold it with a pinch,

enough to make me cry,

enough to float it all out so that it would lie

exhumed on the cheek, brushed away

before the door closed completely behind us
and she saw more
than that splinter or
dust or hair.