In Oakland Cemetery
After Mary Szybist
You asked where to meet and I told you there
so we could be as alone as the dead are. I was sure
I saw two ghosts bounding first with a sound then
silence in the leaf litter and didn’t run then though
I should have. Turn right I said until I appeared and
didn’t I? All night we pinched black gnats
from our skin that glowed in the orange lamplight
as we sat at the black angel’s feet like cowards
with too much living to do. I got sick from looking
at you too long so didn’t and that night
we fucked ourselves numb. That year Mary
called in from the coast reading of so and so
descending from a bridge and her voice floated easy
on the dead like a damp breath, like the mother
who hovered above so and so with wings
in a different ending must have. I hung on
the draws of breath clung to each sound slipping
from her throat like the slow wind of a line reeling back
with a catch but couldn’t conjure the fall. A killdeer twirled
nearby in her broken-wing act though she had no so or so
to descend to. Maybe I’ve the story all wrong. Who knows
who’s mothered in another life. Mary knew
the angel intimately too, had seen her eyes
gone smooth from a hundred years of sun
and snow, touched where they must have once been,
saw her face sedate the way one who longs to escape
her body long enough becomes, her neck slant
and awful, the whole black-bronze mass of her scaled
like a dirty fish. Her thumbs were broken off
and what are we to glean from angels
without working hands? No one
paid mind to the grave of the mother
rocking her baby at the cemetery’s edge
we passed when we took the back way home.
The fact was there was a brink and
we crossed it. I knew a mother who watched
a man’s hands push her son’s body into a wall
like a drawer slid back where it belonged. How
can one have faith in anything after something
like that. I asked Mary if she believed
in ghosts and aren’t they the same as angels
she countered. I was sober years later when I learned
they were, of course, a pair of does, not ghosts,
their white tails glowing as they leapt over the graves.
I know because it was dusk when I saw them
again and everything proves does are more
social than we thought. Who knows
how long those two got on, if they were lucky
to make it through winter. It was breeding season,
wasn’t it, and they were running from something.
The Wedding
Scraps of the bright wet day
leaked through the barn door crack, baring
the long burnt slats years had loosed
into a thousand little backs bending away
from themselves, she noted down there
in the stables, and the lone slash of light
on the stone wall that warmed with its
flashing there, the milky bit she stood inside
paling indistinguishable from the lace
of her veil like the feathertail of the betta fish
flicks its thick graces through water,
waiting to be called. She tried to track
a pattern in the ribboning the way
she would the marbled swarms of light
darting inside the spiraled stairs
in the spire they’d climb soon after,
where down the hill Justice sat
in Fonte Gaia with her scales slung
across her lap, a sword held slack
from her wrist, her look soft and loose
and glum, where a pigeon’s feet gripped
chiseled ridges of her hair to balance
as it swelled, preening, filthy, its red eyes
flickering next to a marbled Mary
suckling indefinitely two infants she heard
called flanking angels (not the wolf
who suckled the twin boys, her eight
full teats dressing the wet slots at the ends
of squat necks) while God pulled Adam
to his feet in relief and Adam was
thusly created, marking the high point.
Outside grasses flapped.
From below she watched ankles shuffle up
the foyer’s wooden planks in herds,
imagined collars on the corn seedlings
circling the barn like a new rash, marking
the shoots’ proof of their faculty to do
what they’re meant to and which she photo-
graphed the day before as evidence
of something, she was sure, and among them
a blackbird inert on its post. In the anteroom
the dame’s rocket limped. The peony
splayed open, its yellow pit a target
toward which nothing lurched,
how could it in that heat. Lodged
in the wall between them a muddy cup
held four swallows squawking over
their sun-stiffened cliff as their mother
shot through the loft, twisting quick
in swirls like a hummingbird drunk
on a winter binge before dropping down
to silence their bleating for a few holy moments
before being swallowed back out by
the sunlit westward opening. The floors
muffled the harp’s clean plinks cueing
the beginning and her father reeled her
from where she sunk in the gray light,
her face already spent from the heat.
She couldn’t remember what he said
in the pause just before her head broke
the horizon where he waited opposite
the aisle they forged after the rains that day,
only a memory of feeling like it all went on
without her.
There was no fountain
the day they married. Only a light so warm
it hushed their wild mouths vowing
in the fog of it, and the young corn’s
measured bursts, and the fit of water beat out
from the sky, and the belts of wind
that slapped the bright heads in her hand
clean off their necks, and the blackbird, in-
different to it all on its post outside, a red blot
branded on its wet black wing.
CAITLIN ROACH is a queer poet from Southern California. A finalist for the 2022 and 2019 National Poetry Series, her poems have appeared in Narrative, jubilat, Tin House, Colorado Review, Best New Poets, The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, the essayist José Orduña, and their two sons.