Exchange Student

She misses
the slowness of things, the small
room built only for tea.  Pungent
steam.  The certainty of it.  Here

there are too many closets,
the bed is soft and high.  Not
the sweet mat made of rice chaff
rolled out each night, rolled back

when the light returns.  At home
doors slide away, walls disappear
into other walls, and the landscape
enters:  bird, cloud, tree, mist

sifting the daylight.  Here
everything seems to happen
at once.  Except in the Eastern wing
of the city museum the day

her host family took her,
where the white-gloved curator
unrolled the ancient scroll—
in order to see one scene

he had to roll away another. 
And later how she stood
before the Western still life:
a palpable bowl of fruit, a slim

paring knife on the oil cloth like
the one her mother’s mother used,
a single lemon, its thin peel curling
off the table and beyond the frame,

tenuous as the sloughed skin
of a garden snake.  She could almost
smell the tartness of that yellow,
almost hear summer wasps

shifting into that room,
into that air she could breathe.

- first published in The Georgia Review

Beginning and Ending
with Lines from Shakespeare


Whoever made us believe that all the world’s a stage
must have known we’d drive as slowly as the car would go
past the aftermath of the accident, one young man holding
another man’s head above the reddened pavement,

a woman still in the passenger seat holding her shoulder,
another, her hair in pink plastic curlers, pacing
that brief space between the cars, her eyes crazy,
her little boy in her arms, her girl trying to slow her

down.  Whoever made us believe must have known
we would save that scene, however brief, save
even the sky’s cumulus relief of gray against gray against gray,
that, against our wills, we’d take it all home

and play it again when we were most alone,
waiting by a telephone in a hallway,
praying him home, praying that other day’s images away,
not wanting to see anymore the quick white bone

jutting through the man’s leg as he lay
with his head in the other man’s arms, not wanting, over and over,
to hear that ambulance racing to save not only

him.  We believe we are more important than they,
that this cannot really happen to us.  This is a game, we insist,
the next car we hear will be his pulling in,
this only a stage
and all the men and women merely players.

-from Budy's collection, House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993)

In the Sixth Year of My Father’s Illness

I wonder if he remembers the jay
that flew into the living room window

that first day he introduced himself
to the neighbor he’d known forty years.

It lay upon the crushed
pine bark we spread the previous May

around the roses where the roots were smooth
and thornless, that jay so blue and too beautiful

to move, he said.  And it stayed beautiful
even as the ants paraded in and out of its head,

removing little bits to their underground country.
Afterwards its body lay still

and still beautiful, as if death had not yet
occurred to it, its feathers

blue as the sky it once knew so well,
that sky it mistook

for the real thing.  Some truths
we cannot learn.  Some we forget, 

as my father did, who yesterday
introduced himself to me.

- first published in Runes

Poem in October
               After Dylan Thomas

It was my twenty-third year and heaven
broke away from my reach as I stood

at her grave.  Rain carved
the morning’s stone face into the earth,

and the sky grayed and lowered until
they were one. Back by the trees

men smoked, as if they had nothing
better to do.  But I knew as soon as I left

they would cover even
the roses my father, brother and I

had tossed upon her as if our wishing
could do what prayer had not.

When I finally left, I thought her
gone.  I am fifty-four.  I was wrong.

- first published in POETRY

The Other Life

The life you wish you had lived
inhabits the lavender scarf
you lift now and then

from the dresser drawer.
Like perfume, it invades
every room in your house

with possibilities
until your body is filled--
that body

anyone can touch.
It holds on tight
the way on an autumn afternoon

the fig tree loses
only its leaves and not
the fruits that have turned

in on themselves
like tiny fists.
Must you give up

this life, whose doors
you have dreamed open?
Though you have parted

its curtains, worn
its moonlit glow?
Haven’t you earned

this grief that makes you
unable to breathe
anything else?

These are the days you linger
at the dinner table eating
nothing, the other life

wanting you only
to want it,
to keep it known,

an initialed handkerchief
without an owner.
It is palpable        

as that tiny mahogany chest
made to hold letters
you wish you’d received,

or that diary whose empty pages
have already yellowed.
Or your heart which beats

only in the other life, the life
you covet and protect,
the one you invent and invent

because it invents you back.

- from Budy's collection, The Other Life
(Story Line Press, 2001)

© All Copyright,  Andrea Hollander Budy.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.