They have gone away. You can see it in the lichen spreading straight across the front walk and the tree seedlings sprouting from the gutters. The starlings have taken up residence in the hollow near the top of the pear tree; it would’ve killed him. Every few minutes something falls from the eaves and lands soundlessly in the dried leaves the wind has piled on the lee side of the house. In a forgotten corner of what used to be a garden, the sundial has tipped so far over that noon’s finger stretches halfway to the ground even in June. Come November, the whole place has sunk so deep into shadow, you can hear a screech owl’s querulous trill at four in the afternoon. Its last inhabitants rarely even think about the place any more. The clapboard warps, turns green. Even snow’s great eraser won’t be able to hide the fact of its abandonment, fallen the way a woman falls who cheats on her doting husband a single time and then spends the rest of her life in fear that he will find out, warping, turning green with jealousy at the merest hint of another woman’s interest in him. The frames don’t have to go too far off true to make the windows stick forever as they were left: all shut but one, the high sliding window above the stove, so easy to forget. But for the wind and the rain, for the white-footed mice, it’s enough. From that one omission begins the surrender to another, more impartial kind of care.
Here comes the candle
Who reads blogs on a holiday, anyway? Worse yet: Who writes in them?
Creatures with teeth, things with talons, O Daddimommigod with eyes like saucers and bellies that drag along the ground, your laughter frightens me. I eat mash in clabbered milk and feel it drip through my crop. I gobble corn and hear metal, steel against stone. You have us where you want us. What more do you want? Numbers, numbers. Wings that flop like fish on the end of a line. I clasp my two helpings of darkness to my side with great thanksgiving.
Creatures made of blood and pus and shit, things full of sickness and bad medicine, shears that show off shapely legs on which they never once have had to stand. Empty eye sockets, a dictator in designer glasses pretending to admire my beak, snip! Sorted by lot, we grow so full of sleep it’s hard to keep our backward knees from buckling. The floor isn’t something I’d want to touch with any other part of me than my armored feet: it crawls. It writhes.
Creatures without teeth, things without bones, O Daddimommigod let me hide my head in the down of your breast, so tender and plump. Hour by hour the sky grows whiter, harder. Now, even when I’m awake I drum and drum against it with my stump of a pecker. I’ve swallowed everything until I can hardly turn, I can barely breathe. My knocks are growing feebler. I’m beginning to think there’s nothing on the other side.
But wait – what’s that rumble? What new thing comes flickering along the horizon? These flying drops of moisture, so sweet! More and more of it, a wall of water. I close my eyes and tilt my head back. It strips me of dirt, of feathers, of skin, of flesh. All head and tail I am swimming upstream, one blind whip against the world.
Retired pianist
Lines fine as spider silk
that craze a surface once
adored for sleekness,
ripples where a frog jumped in,
oh flesh that sags, corners
that wander off true: with
these very claws fumbling
for the keys I have found
a way to go on without regret.
My love, oh world, I give you
pearly everlasting. Let happiness
spread like the spot in this
November sky where the sun
used to make a blazon of
your virtues. Let outlines grow
fuzzy, liberated from their shadows.
Play all the fractional notes
between white & black, hemidemi-
semiquavers in milkweed pods,
seed-clouds of goldenrod, bare
branches. Their ordnance spent,
freed of primary obligations,
the empty casings have room
for more world – rain wind snow
wakefulness sleep – & thereby,
my dear sir or madam, more
resonance. More give. More play.
Holding without having, we learn
at last how to keep.
Shall we dance?
Natalie suggested that each participating blogger follow our comma-free, one-sentence posts with additional sentences, continuing the same story line, so I did. But this is one of those stories where you, dear reader, must do all the work, supplying plot, character and motive along with the commas. You can star in this one yourself, if you like. Someone has to take the initiative around here!
Shall we play Twenty Questions the way we used to when we were small and crammed together into the back seat with almost the whole vacation behind us now & spotting license plates had begun to wear thin (though some of us had hated that game from the moment it got started) & we added a fourth category to the traditional three so Ideas were included which often of course made it impossible to solve in just 20 questions because how in the hell do you decide whether or not Democracy is bigger than a breadbox?
Or should we instead aspire to levity as on the evening of an alcohol-free family get-together on New Year’s Eve & take the questions dealt for us from decks not of our own imagining but focus our attention instead on the progress of plastic surrogates around a racetrack where the outcome seems heavily weighted in favor of those with the best memories for all the momentous events in the life of this particular colony of yeast?
And if we ever settle on a medium then shall we decide who asks whom the way one might volley for a serve or choose first move in a chess match based on the color of pawns held tight in a pick of fists?
First draft, best draft
The above dictum would hold true only for gravity-fed systems. With forced carbonation, the first draft is of course mostly foam.
*
THE FUTURE ABBESS PICKS SPILLED LENTILS OFF THE COUNTERTOP
This love
is no excuse for clumsiness. I must
start paying better attention. Or is it
simply distraction I’ve been craving?
No, No. Come here, damn you! I want
to make a plain stew with onions,
a porridge with garlic – what Esau
bought so dearly, starved & sweaty,
hot from the hunt. These small red
lentils slip so nimbly from between
forefinger & thumb! Good thing
they don’t roll, too. I picture bracelets,
a little choker with five decades of red.
One tells a rosary, yes? Would drilled
lentils listen better, fall in line?
A wheel of fortune for levelers: no
matter where I stop counting – whether
I stop – the same mellifluous prayer,
half a pair of wings. Easy does it,
sister. Don’t hold your breath. But
why not just lick my finger, forget
the clumsy thumb? Ah, I can pick up
two, three, four at once! I point.
They stick.
Proposition
1. Wren, light at the end of my tunnel, listen: I’m tired of this hobo life. Let’s build a nest.
2. It’s a beautiful morning, crisp as the flesh of a winesap.
3. With contrails of jets & the horns of the crescent moon, I am drawing a blueprint for a house made entirely of paper.
4. We will live neither in the shadows nor under a microscope.
5. I’ll fix silverfish for supper, baked with artichokes.
6. We’ll use glowworms to read the fine print on every surface.
7. Paper is the final frontier. You can’t do this with pixels!
8. Come, it will be fun! The wind won’t blow.
United
We are united in the way we light out for the territory, waving our little flaps of foolscap. We believe in the separate good to be made from the common plunder. We serve blind growth, worship the holy tumor, the severed tit. Tempests boil over in every teapot. Drain your cups & turn them over, boys! Now wait while the invisible hand works its legerdemain. Under one dome you’ll find an entire legislature in session! And under another, I swear, that tricky little pea.
We are united in our love of private parts. We all stretch our feet toward the same fire, party of the first part and party of the second part, originally separate blossoms modified by Manifest Destiny into rays of unearthly light, spokes of a wheel, teeth on a cog. It all fits. Here comes the honeybee, my friends. And here comes the world’s distraught suitor, mumbling She loves me, she loves me not…
We are united in the way we put our sweaty palms together beneath our chins: for prayer, many of us; some for friction against the sudden chill; a few to rub in ointment or saliva. We have hundreds of channels, a thousand points of refracted light & in every one there looms the shadow of the swatter, ah, my fellow flies!
Three mornings, A.D. 2004
November 3
Clear sky, bright sun, high whistles of cedar waxwings gleaning wild grapes from the treetops. With the news of the election swirling in my head I am walking, walking. Last night’s rain pools in the makeshift cups of broad, curled oak leaves that have not yet learned how to lie flat against the ground. The ridgetop gleams with a hundred thousand miniature lakes, each with its separate sun & a plan for evaporation. If there’s anything else to see, I don’t see it. When I get back to the house, my boots are soaked.
November 4
Crawling in the dirt under my house to wrap the heating ducts in fiberglass. I wear a face mask against the dust: a hundred and fifty years have passed since rain last fell on this patch of mountaintop soil. I worm my way as far up as I can, bending and twisting into positions I’d never attempt with a lover, hug pipes to stretch ribbons of duct tape around rolls of insulation. Strands of pink fiberglass worry their way through my clothes like porcupine quills, turn my eyes blood red. I’m filthy. I itch all over. When I crawl back out into the cold drizzle, I pull down my face mask and take several deep breaths, then drain my bladder. I get my dad to help me beat the dust from my clothes. Where there’s smoke, they say, there’s fire. I’m not so sure.
November 5
A dried stalk of common mullein rattles in the stiff breeze, seeds loose in their pods like teeth in the belly of a rat. This wind leaves nothing alone, scouring the field, roaring on the crest on the ridge. In every direction I can hear new squeaks and moans from snags freshly toppled into the limbs of the living, there to rub and chafe throughout the long winter. Overnight, most of the oaks lost their leaves except for the scattered clumps where squirrels had made their summer nests. Now this fine mesh of branches against the sky, this lovely empty net can’t hold a thing. Right there where the two planets – Jupiter and Venus – had been shining side by side like a cat with mismatched eyes, now there’s only a large dark cloud with a rose-colored belly. It keeps right on going. The sun comes up.
The anatomy of perception (conclusion)
6.
We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting. (Pascal)
But we are all fish
out of water,
giddy with oxygen.
Who can tell
the smell of ozone –
electric & wet – from
the taste of
their own fear
when the storm comes?
the commercial fisherman:
we entered the sound on a rough sea
in pea-soup fog
cut the motor & listened
for the buoy clang
the captain swears he can feel
the change in the swells
but that too could be
a kind of listening
men don’t talk about
their instincts much
we’re supposed to be impervious
to gauge to ogle
but looking makes everything
smaller than it is
the world
recedes
& if something can kill you
you need to find it
magnify it
keep it close
every pore in my body listened
for that buoy its dull echo
sweeter than a church bell
over the hiss of the waves
Who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I crave immersion in the medium of grace.
I think of whale song more alluring
than any Lorelei, seals & walruses
whose ancestors heard the surf
pounding in their temples. Otters,
already so much more playful than
their bloodthirsty cousins on dry land.
I think perhaps our destiny is not
to be sucked out among the stars – vacuum
without sound – but back in the water,
sonorous & shining. Like Jesus
inscribed in the cursive alpha:
shoal. Implausible feast.
The storm approaches.
As pressure drops,
the ears fill
& pop & the heart
works harder.
Just like
when kisses land
lightly as
a fisherman’s fly
on the skin – creek
or lover –
& the trout in
the bloodstream
rises,
takes the hook.
7.
The least movement affects all nature; the entire sea changes because of a rock. . . . Impenetrability is a quality of bodies. (Pascal)
Yesterday morning, from the trees
up on the ridge, a cacophony of rusty hinges.
Startled by something, it stills, turns
into an immense rustle of wings.
A thousand blackbirds lift, pivot,
drift high across the field like
a cloud of smoke.
This morning, walking through the fog
on top of the same ridge, I am stopped
by a yellow sugar maple leaf
dangling from an invisible strand of silk
six feet off the ground.
The slight breeze is enough to make it
flip, flop, fly. The forest drips.
These are not metaphors for anything.
Science says, a body at rest,
a body in motion. But only
such abstract bodies really make sense.
Ah, unreal body, home to an unreal sense!
Move one finger and the universe shifts: try it.
Let the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The anatomy of perception (5)
Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders our view. . . . We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are prejudicial to us and not perceptible by the senses; we do not feel but suffer them. . . . Extreme youth and extreme age hinder the mind, as also too much and too little education. In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, and we them. (Pascal)
In his late eighties, my grandfather’s neck bone sprouted a spur that pressed against his throat.
Imagine it, to be slowly choked to death by your own spine!
It got to where he could barely swallow & all his meals had to be pureed – “like baby food,” he groused.
He had already lost almost all sense of taste; only very sweet and very salty foods had any appeal.
Eating now became onerous, with only the promise of mealtime sociability with the other residents of the old folks’ home to hold his interest.
He grew light as a bird.
Even so, a portion of every mouthful – a drop or two, perhaps – blocked by the bony growth, trickled down his windpipe.
And as Pascal observed, “a drop of water suffices to kill a man.”
He contracted pneumonia.
Starved for oxygen, his brain fed him lies.
Fear found expression in hatred.
The coma was a mercy.
Children and grandchildren filled the small hospital room to overflowing.
He lay with eyes shut & mouth agape below the beak of a nose, one tube in his left arm & another in his urethra, his skeletal frame naked under the bed sheet.
As the night wore on, the gaps between the slight movements of his chest grew longer and longer.
Finally, when several minutes had elapsed, someone felt for a pulse: no hint of motion.
Then a great sigh that caught in a dozen throats, a gasping sob.
As vision blurred we embraced & embraced, baffled to find each other so unfamiliar, ourselves so strange.