Henrietta Goodman
THE PETROLEUM CLUB
What if, as I first heard it, the Petroleum Club
was the Trillium Club, named for a small lily,
a birthroot unfurling its three white or pink
or deep red petals through layers of leaves
wet with snow-melt and frilled with ice?
Extraction isn’t that kind of birth—it’s more
like raising the dead, for money. Passing
a Sinclair station, my son, at five, asked,
is gas made of dinosaurs, then, why did you
get divorced? Then, into the sunset blooming
orange, is it the same time everywhere? Nature.
Love. Time. He covered everything. It sank in,
then—what had I thought fossil fuel meant?
Death under time and pressure equals oil.
At the Petroleum Club, the top of the tallest
hotel in the state, all of eastern Montana
spreads twenty-two floors below, the occasional
pumpjack nodding like a braying donkey,
or like Pinocchio, my lover, holding
an Old Fashioned, mouthing the liar’s
paradox to his reflection—I am a liar, this
sentence is false—but mostly refineries,
lit up like amusement parks, Pleasure Island.
In this glass room, I can’t stop thinking
of a true story I’d like to forget—the child
who tumbled from a window like these,
the mother who ran all the flights to the street.
And there’s the imaginary child my lover
conceived, the one I can’t stop mourning now,
even though, or maybe because, it never existed
except in his detailed, appalling fabrication.
Zeus, fearing his child would be wiser
than he, swallowed his wife. Seven wives
later, head throbbing in near-uterine
contractions, he asked for his skull to be
opened with an ax and Athena emerged,
warrior armed with helmet and spear,
split from the hemispheres of his brain.
In my lover’s story, the child is not fully-formed—
only the story is, since in the story, the child,
a boy, is never born. How many ways does
the word miscarriage apply? He loved her;
she left him, and so he imagined her death,
the child’s death—a child made of nothing
but pain and his need to give it shape.
As if nothing real, not even his suffering,
was ever good enough. And so, the tableau—
a woman, pregnant, behind the wheel of a car,
windshield shattered, glass stained not with
pigment but blood. To add color to glass
is to impregnate. To make clear glass red,
add gold. The stain lasts centuries. A beam
passing through it stabs everything in its path,
a kind of stigmata—red on the flowers,
the table, the sheets, his body, my body.
HENRIETTA GOODMAN is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the sonnet sequence All That Held Us, winner of the John Ciardi Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri. Her poems and essays appear in New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and River Styx. She teaches in the English Department at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana.
