Half-Hazard Read online

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  More Advance Praise for Half-Hazard

  “When Kristen Tracy’s dazzling Half-Hazard arrived in the mail, I had been reading the critic John Berger and thinking about his claim that to deliver the true ambiguity of experience requires the most demanding verbal precision. Berger writes about authenticity in literature, and here it is, poem after authentic poem, as thrilling a read as I’ve had in a long time. Here is an unmistakable talent, someone with the verbal dexterity of a Sylvia Plath, who finds ways to stay alive amid the difficulties of love and loving. ‘The things / we kiss good-bye make room for all we kiss hello,’ she concludes in ‘Field Lesson,’ just one of the many memorable moments in this first-rate debut.”

  —Stephen Dunn

  “What animal grace in these poems of the human stumble and dance on the road to becoming human. These songs of lively observation are wise and wiser. Watch out for laughter as it rides the ocean of tears that slams at the shore of all of us ragged inhabitants, animal and human, right here, in these poems. There is no ducking the political. From ‘What We Did before Our Apocalypse’: ‘Underneath the table … / we all held hands and prayed. We watched an old man insult / nearly everybody and then let him fondle the nukes.’ This first collection of poetry by Kristen Tracy is a keeper.”

  —Joy Harjo

  “There’s a serious, addictive playfulness to the poems in Half-Hazard. The comic-inflected, subversive voice of this debut makes metaphors strike with the lightning of one-liners and turns of phrase turn transformative. Kristen Tracy writes with a sense of sustained invention that, poem by poem, gathers into a vivid, figurative fabric.”

  —Stuart Dybek

  “If you’re a rabbit or cow or mouse or human, beware this book—there is risk here for all who breathe. The cure? Embrace this book, for Kristen Tracy’s curiosity and resilience, her appreciation for the collision as well as the near-miss, her affection for the hangers-on as well as the thrivers, will engage you if this sounds at all like who you are or want to be—‘Love hears me coming and waits / on every stair’—and why wouldn’t it?”

  —Bob Hicok

  HALF-HAZARD

  Also by Kristen Tracy

  Books for Tweens

  Camille McPhee Fell under the Bus

  The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter

  Bessica Lefter Bites Back

  Too Cool for This School

  Project Unpopular

  Project Unpopular: Totally Crushed

  Books for Teens

  Lost It

  Crimes of the Sarahs

  A Field Guide for Heartbreakers

  Sharks & Boys

  Death of a Kleptomaniac

  Hung Up

  HALF-HAZARD

  POEMS

  KRISTEN TRACY

  Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Kristen Tracy

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Winner of the 2017 Emily Dickinson First Book Award established by the Poetry Foundation to recognize an American poet over the age of forty who has yet to publish a first book.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-822-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-873-0

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934511

  Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker

  Cover art: McLoughlin Bros, The Circus and Menagerie Picture Book (1890), courtesy VintageLithoArt.com

  for Alan Tracy (1977–1980) & Sheriann Tracy (1980–1995)

  This all could have been so different.

  Contents

  I

  Good-Bye, Trouble

  Presto

  What Kind of Animal

  YMCA, 1971

  Cannibals and Carnivores

  To the Tender

  Local News: Woman Dies in Chimney

  Urge

  Sometimes This Happens

  Bountiful, Utah, 1972

  Vampires Today

  Vermont Collision

  Urban Animals

  Unofficial Lady Bible

  Undressed

  Circus Youth

  II

  Good-Bye, Idaho

  Stamps

  Half-Hatched

  An Analogy

  Local Hazards

  Yesterday

  When Fate Is Looking for You

  Having It?

  Contemplating Light

  Breaking

  About Myself

  Assignment: Write a Poem about an Animal

  Happy Endings

  Teton Road

  III

  Half-Hazard

  Gardening on Alcatraz in July

  What We Did before Our Apocalypse

  State Lines

  Rain at the Zoo

  Field Lesson

  Fable Revisited

  Taming the Dog

  Tell

  The Unavoidable Pigeon

  Hanging Up

  Hepatoscopy

  Autobiography

  Waiting for Crocuses

  How could she have known that statistics show convincingly that when a bear attacks, the victim who fights back is likely to fare better than the one who plays dead?

  —Attacked! John Long, ed.

  Goodness won’t protect you; if you’re too good you will die, but then it can be seen as a kind of reward.

  —Kathryn Davis, Hell

  HALF-HAZARD

  I

  Good-Bye, Trouble

  I fell from a Bible. A half-blonde tease.

  With a good good start, I struck out

  God-filled and thrilled to claim a spot.

  Here? Where? There? I touched grease,

  dough, steels. Raised my low country hem.

  Up. Up. I met the butcher, the baker,

  the transmission maker. What next? Girl-girl

  sin? Boy-girl err? No. No. Trouble came.

  Pure purr. He led me off a hat-flat roof.

  All swish. He spun me near a slippery crag.

  And I let him, let him. It wasn’t all bad.

  Trouble makes trouble and soon Trouble went poof.

  It’s not sin or err I live down now. Wow. Wow.

  But his act, so thought
less, like a bull mounts the cow.

  Presto

  At the magic show I always wanted the tiger

  to reappear. Did I have a pea-sized brain?

  The beast was in the box. And it was impossible to tell,

  but I thought the tiger looked blue, as blue

  as a little girl who has lost her purse with money inside

  for milk. I wanted someone to tell the tiger

  it could lead a completely different life if it stopped

  being so good at performing the trick.

  But who listens to me? The tiger was replaced

  by a lion with a caramel-brown face.

  It had a new trick. It opened its mouth and received

  a man’s head. He put it in sideways

  and it came out wet, hair sometimes sticking

  to the cat’s fat tongue. Bright bulbs

  lit up the lion from behind. Its big fur

  held the light as it balanced

  all four paws on a milking stool.

  It stayed steady, mouth open,

  so a man would not die,

  not in front of us.

  What Kind of Animal

  Atop his mower my father chewed the yard

  while I hid with my trembling rabbit

  in the garage. I wasn’t perfect,

  one day she got loose. Fox,

  dog, tomcat, it wasn’t clear what found her.

  Behind the raspberry bushes, days away

  from having her first litter, my pet bled

  like a machine. Fully dismantled.

  Prey versus predator. I couldn’t stand the story.

  What kind of animal has that kind of heart?

  When our chickens finally lured a weasel,

  to keep them safe, for days I fed the beast

  a small dish of food. Lunch meat. Cereal.

  Popcorn. But it wasn’t enough.

  Not even close. Among the ravenous,

  I am a sock, a sneeze, a plastic spoon.

  YMCA, 1971

  It took a quarter to keep the lights on—

  that was all the machines knew. And so

  my mother emptied her purse for change

  while my father tried to resuscitate a man

  on the tennis courts in the dark. But the man died.

  The paramedics called the heart attack massive,

  a widow-maker. My parents had just wed,

  neither one knew how to play tennis well,

  it was something they would pick up together.

  Years later, after their son died,

  after they divorced, this is the one story

  where their two sides continue to match.

  They say it felt like it was another ordinary day.

  They fed the dog, then walked into

  the damp indoor air, onto the invisible stick of the courts.

  My father was poised to receive my mother’s serve,

  when a woman cried, my God, my God,

  I don’t know what to do—the buzzer sounded that time

  was up on the lights, everybody dropped their rackets,

  and began running in the dark

  toward the white glow of the fading man’s clothes.

  Cannibals and Carnivores

  The power of a mouth lies in what it will not eat and people don’t like piranhas—not because of their exaggerated teeth, but because we fear their determination to eat even themselves. Or so the animal expert believes, standing on a riverbank, his rubber boots pressing down the grass. And so, he says, the Indian tiger is revered by the natives, of course: her spirited stripes, padded feet. And the valley dwellers do not hunt her, because she will eat their flesh, but not her sister’s or her own children’s. She, like us, looks at the chain the universe has her by and nods.

  To the Tender

  Midsummer, and along came a hapless jay—

  blue and wobbling—flight feathers nothing more

  than pins of white. It arrived at the nest’s edge

  unready, which was only half the problem.

  Crows perched in the oak across the street, alert,

  aware of all the world’s worst secrets. Naturally

  I rooted for the blue jay. Oh, but this was life.

  After the jay fell from the Scotch pine’s terrible height,

  it righted itself in the grass and, like a skin-kneed child

  after her first bad spill on a bike, cried out for help.

  I set down my rake and shepherded the bird

  toward my spindle tree. Hopping from

  low branches, it pressed toward the center, tucking itself

  into my tree’s sturdy heart. For two days

  the parents swooped down to feed it.

  Thankfully, the crows never came, though

  I kept my eye on them. I knew their game.

  Pirates. Gangsters. Extortionists. Thieves.

  But even if the world is half bad, it remains

  half good. While some of us sleep, our hearts

  lie open, turned to the tender, dreaming up ways

  to thwart the crows. Yes, a hapless jay stumbles

  into our lives believing it can fly, and we—knowing

  what we know—do what we can to make it so.

  Local News: Woman Dies in Chimney

  They broke up and she, either fed up or drunk or undone,

  ached to get back inside. Officials surmise

  she climbed a ladder to his roof, removed

  the chimney cap and entered feet first. Long story short,

  she died there. Stuck. Like a tragic Santa. Struggling

  for days, the news explains. It was the smell that led

  to the discovery of her body. One neighbor

  speaks directly into the microphone, asks how a person

  could disregard so much: the damper, the flue,

  the smoke shelf. He can’t imagine what it was she faced.

  The empty garage. The locked back door. And is that

  a light on in the den? They show us the grass

  where they found her purse. And it’s not impossible to picture

  her standing on the patio—abandoned—the mind

  turning obscene, all hopes pinned on refastening the snap.

  Then spotting the bricks rising above the roof

  and at first believing and then knowing, sun flashing its

  God-blinding light behind it, that the chimney was the way.

  Urge

  If a pig walks out on you—

  a literal teat intact, pink-necked pig—

  don’t abuse yourself by asking,

  What went wrong? You can’t expect

  a pig to care. What sparks

  that insistent desire to have

  a one-to-one relationship—

  be it bovine or ursine or swine?

  I got too close. The rumor mill

  spread the story that I caught a pig

  and did the unthinkable. Lesson learned.

  In the twenty-first century, far away

  from Broadway, people still clap

  for more. They want each

  questionable curtain to be raised.

  Demand. Demand. Demand. If it’s

  meant to happen, if love is your

  disease, go follow the hoof-pocked road.

  Sometimes This Happens

  A thin piece of ice covers the drinking trough

  and for reasons only a cow can know,

  she refuses to push her tongue through and drink.

  And so my father breaks the ice with a shovel

  and scoops off the slush, and the cow thankfully

  lowers her head to drink. Is she thankful?

  Shit is caked to the back of her hind legs.

  A cough rolls from her throat, pushing

  steam out of her mouth. Her pregnant belly

  hangs below her. A hundred other cows

  stand in the trees with their brown faces

  turned away. This cow dr
inks alone

  because something is wrong. My father caught her

  chewing on a piece of fence. He’s worried

  that she’s swallowed a strand of wire.

  This is the third cow he’s seen that will die this way.

  The metal will worm its way through all four stomachs.

  He doesn’t know why a cow would do this.

  He pats her side, rubs his gloved hand across her

  frost-covered spine. Snow drops from the low clouds

  and lands on our coats. A cow will never eat the snow.

  This one lifts her head from the drinker, tossing the hose

  onto the ground, spraying an arc of water over

  our heads. A calf means money. We want her

  to live long enough. She swings her unapologetic body

  away from the tub and walks toward the other cows.

  Her hooves are dark and slick and as she moves she stumbles,

  the weight of her steps smearing the half-frozen ground.

  Bountiful, Utah, 1972

  Life began all wrapped up in the Lord.

  Until I found the word sycamore

  on the tip of my tongue.

  It was my own perfect alveolar ridge.

  It was twenty-five years of ordinary discoveries—

  hot pans, wet towels, the absolutely round eyeballs

  of the man next door. I took in odors

  and was disturbed. I cut my finger

  and let it drip. Just like that, I let go of the past

  and the past’s people. They walked life’s short plank

  and fell out of their clothes. I teetered