Mary Jane White – Six Poems

Leaving, Our Brother- and Sister-Wanderers, Yes, All

The passengers who need to go back. But you two need not be dropped
By an expensive water-taxi again, blocks short of your destination, or to walk
A bit lost with your luggage, since the waters are high, and the bridge is low

And immovable. We will come. We will help you. We will wait for you in
The lobby of the right hotel which I know we will find unerringly, using
The right app on the phone. I could carry a light paper bag. No, it is full

Of gifts. Please, take it, you offer–who have prepared to leave it all along
With me–with the two museum tickets. Ruffin can manage a heavy suitcase,
Along with the worn backpack he never leaves behind anywhere. Tim

Can manage himself, pleased to have learned a new trick from Ruffin to do
With his phone. Tim is carrying his newest fountain pen, and leaving me
The bottle of ink sold with it. Yes, I could use it. Leaving early, we will

Be meeting the train with hours to spare, to sit crowded together, overlong,
Over a mid-morning breakfast and lunch, your last in Venice. Yes, we were
Lucky to have found you two, lost as we were and frantic, of course, the night

The restaurant we agreed on had closed. As everything does here before
Carnival, so everyone serving may have a breather before the great onslaught.
Then, there you were with Stuart, of all people, all seated by the window—

Next door. Then, you were seated by the window, on the train, and leaving.

(for Sandra Cisneros, Tim Wheat, Stuart Bernstein, and Dr. Ruffin White, January-May 2023)

When Else Was I Ever So Happy

As when you slipped, and tucked my arm under
Your own? You were laughing at slipping, and
Sparkling as any white stone, every bright stone
Edging those steps, and at every slip threatened
By all the arched bridges over each of the blessed
Canals in Venice. Yes, I agreed with you, Let’s!
Let’s stop in there! Where everything would wind up
On the floor of the paper shop, when, yes,
I turned in the narrow aisle and oh, my, my

Backpack scattered everything: sealing wax crayons
And oils at your feet, easily a fortune. No, claimed
The clerk. She had warned the owner this would happen.
We backtracked, unpacked your stock of Mexican
Paper flags to offer her. Sorry, sorry, not enough

Recompense, you said. By then we were wet to the bone,
Wet in our shoes, wet under the widest umbrella, wet
And just terribly cold, which did not keep you from
Gaiety or hilarity. Ah, but it kept you in for a day. A
Single day in Venice. How often does it come to us?
Lost, lost, lest we seize it. We seize it, and sweep up
Our friends. All your friends, you introduce to one
Another. Yes, Tim was steadier holding your camera,
Taller in framing this memento: You, with your new

Book of poems. Outside Café Florian, intent upon Tim
Capturing both titles. Verily, this result is the result of a
Decree of Napoleon. One of the lions of St. Mark’s who
Cleared the way to roar here. Was I ever as warm as you are?
And when else have I been happier to see you, than to see you

Sweep the worst of your first visit to Venice behind you.

(for Sandra Cisneros, January-May 2023, and an exact likeness in its form of WHEN WAS I EVER SO HAPPY, which appeared in Vox Populi.)

Don’t Suffer More Than You Have To

Let’s not head straight to work, but stop in for lunch,
See a few cats sunning on the serial brick doorways
Of Fort Marghera. Let’s talk about a walking brunch
Someday, through the entirety of the cat sanctuary!

I’ll try that fish dish with violet artichokes I was fearful
To order—and perhaps not like—earlier. You’ll eat
Anything and like it. Like a starving cat, like a feral
Student. Which you were—no longer caring for it.

(for Dr. Ruffin White, January-May 2023)

Then We Were Seated by the Window on the Train, Leaving

Venice for a town somewhere north to escape the noises of Carnival.
A clown on the stage set up in your neighborhood campo had held us up,

Calling two small children up out of the audience to banter with him, holding
The two of them up to a mild ridicule the crowd enjoyed—before Voila!

No, Ecco! he presented them with lemon- and mimosa-colored balloon animals,
Each twisted to their wish. We were hoping to visit a more modest festival

In Treviso. Here it was: well underway before the church with a plaque
To Victor Emmanuel, The Second, celebrating an end to the Irredente,

A year into our own Reconstruction. Or, as I have heard our war of that era
Referred to in the city of my birth and within living memory: The War of Northern

Aggression. Everyone brings his or her own eyes and ears to the present horizon.
You are remembering an earlier trip to this city with your tech-bro, Mike,

Whom you visited in Singapore. You walk me everywhere the two of you went–
Around the walls and ramparts of the old city, hardly high enough to keep

Anyone out, then along the small river of that place, where a blossoming pear or
Apple tree was the sole spring blooming in the warmth by the water. Then over

The Ponte Dante where one flows into another, larger and wider, and back under
The city center’s bridges to the island fish-market. We are not buying fish. We are

Walking past time I am tired and hungry. Until we run up on a remembered spot,
A table under colored glass, as beautiful as our zinc-came windows at home.

Refreshed, and with more time to waste, we wander all through the church of San
Francesco which Napoleon used for a stable, that then and to this day shelters

The tomb of the son of Dante and the tomb of the daughter of Petrarca.

(for Dr. Ruffin White, January-May 2023)

The Sky That Shelters the Tombs of the Son of Dante

And the daughter of Petrarca shelters you after I depart; what more can I say.
Or even do for you, or do to protect you, or amuse you, but offer you Rumi?
Why plague your heart with indecision? Let intelligence be your crown.

Let gems adorn that crown. Gather them, as you thread your way back then.
Petulantly, I wonder why I cannot ride as a mouse in your front pocket?
Impossible. To skitter where you will go next. To know why you turn this way

Or that. You become impossible to track; the stone buildings close around you,
So high no GPS works. Were you to carry me as a mouse in your pocket,
At the level of your heart, what could I see of the path before you? When I

Arrive home, the cracked, white-china, thick octagonal tiles feel cool to my feet.

(for Dr. Ruffin White, with acknowledgment to Haleha Liza Gafort for her marvelous new translations of Rumi, January-June 2023)

I Know the White-China, Inch-Thick Octagonal Tiles

Of the cracked floor of my sanitary bathroom were fired in Zanesville, Ohio,
Where James Wright last visited his father, Dudley. I know this from the architect’s
Specifications to the contractor, typed out on onionskin in the Steinway building, Chicago,

And because, in 1906, Zanesville was renowned for no less than a dozen potteries,
And for its clays dug out of the confluence of a couple of smaller tributaries of the Ohio.
Another name for The Beautiful. Something I know from James Wright’s letters. So,

When I place my foot down out of the bath, out of the pedestal tub, large enough
To harbor William Howard Taft, another president born in Ohio, all the rest floods
My narrow way, my house-pride, and my blindered focus on such trivia—with its savagery.

(at The O. J. Hager House, Waukon, Iowa, June 21, 2023)

Mary Jane White, MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NEA Fellow in both poetry and translation, lives in Waukon, Iowa, with her son about whom she has published two books, Dragonfly. Toad. Moon. (Press 53) And What It Took To Raise My Son With Autism (Gratitude Press). She has also translated Marina Tsvetaeva’s AFTER RUSSIA (Adelaide Books).