Editor’s Note

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Contributors

Cover art: “Essence” :: Nick Patten

We continue with the new format in this issue, publishing non-topical writings (especially aphorisms) as well as the themed writings. There are seven contributions in the topical section, and four in the non-topical. And regular contributor Carlos V. Reyes gives us another installment of his epic “Fragments on Fragments.”

—Olivia Dresher

I was ten. Our phone number was 707-W and we lived at 717 Main Street. We’d just moved to Mayfield, PA and I didn’t know anybody. We lived in an upstairs apartment that was at the same height as the railroad embankment and I could look out my window and see the Delaware Lackawanna diesel speeding along the tracks, passing every hour dragging coal cars, blowing two blasts for the crossing on the corner.

I had trouble falling asleep. I always did. I’d gotten two books for Christmas—Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe. I would read them over and over until exhaustion finally grabbed me and subdued me; that nightly struggle.

One August morning I woke up and looked around at my little room with the pine cone wallpaper and knew with a felt knowledge so overpowering it defied what had been my reality. I knew that my whole life until that moment had been a dream and I was awakening for the first time.

Afraid, confused, puzzled…but empowered, curious, questing. I am here and alive. If that is so there must be a reason for the awakening. There must be purpose. What is this all about? How could I find out, who would know the answer to my questions?

No sense asking my mother, who would dismiss it as she did the motion of heat shimmering on August asphalt. She would just deny the existence. No, she was not to be trusted with something this important.

I began, like Crusoe assembling a list of things to take to the island, that small piece of awareness in the huge dark sea. I would keep this to myself and find the explanation ahead somewhere in that cave of the future.

Time dragged, school started, a more intensified boredom with occasional moments of terror, new friends. I read every story in the Prose and Poetry reader for fifth grade. No one mentioned this constellation of thought. In church I only heard about shalt-nots, things I hadn’t even thought about doing. No one said thou shalt wake up on a ten-year-old’s morning and understand that you are alive and can reach out into the unknown for whatever you can find. No one asked about the clarity of memory that followed, how a “me” began to form.

Drowsing through a sermon I heard the words “through a glass darkly” and held the sound of them as if they were silk.

the sound
of one mosquito
harmonizing

:::

The only recorded statement of Thales, the presocratic: “Everything is water, water is all.”

Los Angeles: weekend summer afternoon at the Ganges off Santa Monica Beach. Parking lots and freeways, jammed. North and south as far as the eye can see, hundreds, thousands of people of various races and ethnicities being lifted in the curl of the breaking wave. Pause; gather; surge; drop.

Hours and hours in the sun, day finally waning. Nearby, a woman with blonde hair and enormous blue eyes begins to glow in the dusk, gaining force in the waning light like some summer planet moving toward the horizon. On her back, propped up on her elbows, staring out to sea. Giving me a smile each time I pass, coming in from yet another session of porpoising in the shore break, a nod as if of approval: as if only the two of us can comprehend the secret of this light, these waves.

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She heard it, she says, as a riddle. A bell rings. A man dies. A bell rings. You can ask questions to get at the riddle, as she had to. For example, is there more than one bell? Did the man die on land? It turns out the “riddle” would be very hard to solve without clues, even once you establish that the man died in the water, and that at least one of the bells was a ship’s bell.

The story of the “riddle” is, finally, that there was a blind man, a very good swimmer, who swam in the ocean every day. Apparently the blind man’s practice was to put an alarm clock in the sand set to ring after a half hour. He’d hear the bell ring and would come in, guided by the sound. One day, however, a ship was passing just before the half-hour mark, and the bell the blind man heard—sound travels well in the water, she explains—was the ship’s, so the blind man began to follow the ship out to sea. This, she says, is a true story, that is, the person who told the “riddle” to her said it was a true story.

Blind man in the water, alarm clock on the beach. Improbable; unsatisfying. Nonetheless, the idea of a blind swimmer following a ship’s bell out to sea…now this image lingers, provokes. One can see the blind man in the swell, stroke after stroke after stroke. One can hear the ship’s bell. One can see the blind man, a very strong swimmer, ship pulling away, blind man ever more distant from shore. Ever more alone.

God, what a fate. Blind and alone at sea. Surely a nightmare, to be in water without knowing where the shore is, how far. Not to know what else is in there with you.

Thinking about it, one searches for firm ground. At the very least, all this is good reason to knock on wood at the thought of being blind, to thank one’s lucky stars. Good reason too, one concludes, not to swim in the ocean on moonless nights. Yet is there not something more that disturbs in this story? The sense that, somehow, all of us are blind, all of us alone at sea?

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(Drowning in) the sea of love. Soon after they met, one night they walked arm in arm on the long pier out on the bay, stopping every few minutes to embrace and kiss (at a suitable distance from the shark fishermen huddled in the cold by their coils of line and chain), sweep of water below and behind amplifying, extending, their falling in love.

Almost seven years later, she said, “We have to talk.”

“Let’s wait until next weekend,” he replied, and on Sunday it was to the pier and the bay that they went. A bright morning, fog burning off by eleven, lots of families out with their children, Latinos, African-Americans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Anglos of various ethnicities and persuasions, Serbian to post-punk, the multicultural/multiracial northern California of the very late twentieth century.

When, as they walked, she asked him the question she’d waited to insist on getting an answer to, the question he’d long been avoiding, when she at long last demanded to know, he could not believe he was actually saying the words. The truth if not elicited then made feasible by the expanse of water, the space above it, the light. As if only such open water allowed him to give so much pain.

Selected from Thomas Farber’s book, On Water (The Ecco Press, 1994).

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Meditations on Monkeys

I am watching howler monkeys on TV. It’s David Attenborough’s “Life of Mammals” and I’ve been working my way up the food chain all week. The sound squeezing past their overlarge hyoids is so ominous that I can understand why it frightens even jaguars. The howlers’ big paws are gripping and shaking the tree, their red-brown throats furiously inflating and rippling and for a moment, I scarcely breathe. I’m frozen, like those smaller monkeys in the tree to the left.

A later segment shows an orangutan holding a blue-handled hacksaw and attempting to cut a board because she has recently seen a human doing so. She’s huge and orange, a baby clinging to her side, and she can’t quite figure out which is the best way to hold the board or the saw. First she tries holding the board upright, her left hand curving the hacksaw back towards her chest instead of straight, and then, when that doesn’t work, laying the board flat across some rocks. The baby pulls at its mother, but is studiously ignored. It’s clear to me that no matter how many tries it takes, Mama’s determined to saw that board in half. No one, not even the side-clinging baby, is going to stop her.

The program moves on again, this time to a group of chimps decidedly less docile than those Jane Goodall’s been sharing with me over the years. After all, chimps have culture; each group is different, and these ones, apparently, are capable of a sort of mindless mob violence. It isn’t clear what’s happened. But suddenly one of the males becomes enraged, starts hitting another chimp, and soon the others are joining in, and it’s as if I’m watching again the footage from Wal-Mart where a group of strangers trample a worker to death in their attempt to get some holiday deal. After a short while it’s over, and the chimp has managed to crawl bloodily to a tree where he is calling out in his chimp voice, his hands loosely holding a small limb, body swaying as he attempts to stand. No other chimp ever responds to the cries.

Attenborough tells me his body has never been found, and though I’d like to think he’s just off somewhere nursing his wounds and plotting his triumphant reentry into chimp society, in reality it’s more likely that his corpse has been dragged into the undergrowth, his flesh even now nourishing some other living thing—that jaguar who was unlucky earlier, or a host of fat white maggots erupting from eye sockets like lava flows. And as the program moves on from the lonely, bloody chimp’s unanswered cries for help into its segment on humans, I suddenly realize why so many people would deny our common kinship. It’s not the tool making or the social behaviors or the way they form relationships. It’s not those brown eyes or the lips, not the hands that are like our hands. Just the knowing that we can so easily turn on ourselves. That we could easily be that chimp dragging himself off screen. It’s why we can’t meet the eyes of a homeless man on a corner. Because if community implies inclusion, doesn’t that necessarily also imply exclusion?

Watching Turtles is Like Someone Leaving

I’m not kind, only Midwestern. Here we use politeness like a glass shard, a frigid ice that at any moment could crack and tip you in. Winter is only the unsaid parts of our personalities coalescing in the atmosphere above our heads. And like our hearts, even the turtles here freeze themselves. In winter, metabolic functions of the North American Painted mimic death. A terrapin butterfly, thawing to life in the spring, you can find them near lakes, watch their slow lumbering through the grass of apartment complexes. Maybe the only kindness I possess is toward these creatures, once carrying one across a roadway, remembering when I found one dead, some kind of brain matter or entrails squeezing out from the shell in a milky white spiral, an opal shimmer in the hot sun. I was fifteen and cleaning the roadside with the church youth group. The entrails were runic, a forgotten language communicating nothing but unease. I scooped its unmoving body and long gleaming strand of insides into a black trash bag I tied off with a twist tie. I’ll never forget that rope of inner self spinning outward, an unnatural umbilical cord, connected to no mother, unless that mother was death, which in all of its sizes, frightens me.

Like Darwin’s finches, studied by him to distraction, I have watched these turtles and others countless times over the years, in all kinds of settings: paddling through the ocean, in terrariums and aquarium tanks, spilling out of lakes onto logs dripping wet, even being raced out of circles painted on asphalt in two small Northern Minnesota towns. But unlike Darwin, whose study led to great discoveries, all I ever get is the sense that watching turtles is like someone leaving—I feel only loss.

When you look at turtles long enough, you begin to notice several things. First, even the young ones seem old, as if they hatch from their shells knowing some secret we all want the answer to. The second is how varied turtles are, like humans, in color and size, habits and habitats. They make their homes in water both salty and fresh, in grasslands and dry deserts. In fact, the only place turtles do not call home is the Arctic. They might have toes, or just paddles for propulsion, be able to turn their necks or not, have teeth or instead serrated jaw edges to rasp at vegetation with. Even their names vary, from red-eared slider to slug-thighed.

Though humans too have adapted to or created tools and technologies that let them survive in varied environments as well, we didn’t do it with their ease. Nor do we coexist with other creatures as peacefully as the turtles do. On the Galapagos Islands, Darwin’s finches and the tortoises have formed an essential symbiotic relationship—the finches eat off the parasitic bugs that would make the turtles their home, thus protecting the turtles from disease, the bugs in turn a food source that sustains the finches. It is not uncommon to see a tortoise lumbering along with a finch as passenger, riding the high hill of their domed shells, perfectly balanced. It is perhaps through examining the Galapagos tortoises specifically that my sense of how watching turtles can evoke loss comes from. These turtles are notoriously long lived. When kept as pets, they outlive their owners; need to be planned for in wills, passed down like sets of dusty china, archaic and unevolved. Caring for one of these creatures means acknowledging your own inevitable end and even, in a sense, accepting the idea of it. They’ll be around after you’re gone; maybe even after humans themselves have gone. Like crocodiles, like sharks, the tortoises are unchanging. You can see it in the way they slowly stare, and just as slowly blink.

For all their bulk, they’re surprisingly fragile, their shells honeycombed hives of air pockets sloping above their shoulders. Their very immensity necessitates this fragility; a solid shell would be too heavy for the legs of the Galapagos tortoise to support and would restrict its movement when seeking food. If a turtle cracks its shell open from a fall or from a too heavy weight being placed atop it, it will likely not survive for long. All that which a shell is designed to protect, the soft inner parts, would be at risk. We humans have our ribs to protect these things for us, yet we are ultimately more fragile than tortoises and can die in any one of a thousand ways: starvation, suffocation, disease, drowning, love. I think of these and the other thousand ways we humans expose ourselves to risk each time I look at a turtle and find it looking back. And then I shiver, pull my arms closer around myself, add an extra layer of protection over my heart.

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The Scream

My mother tells me my father cries every time they bring him food. There is a virus going around, she tells me. Yes, I say, and maybe he can’t say he’s sick. I imagine my father sitting up, his body erect, trying to look dignified.

I turn on the six o’clock news and see all kinds of Californians elated about having so much water. The camera focuses on flowers growing wildly, spreading their joy. A farmer is interviewed. This year, he says, he doesn’t have to worry. An aging hippie stands next to a river. Life is good, he grins into the camera.

I pick up the phone and call my mother. She sounds tired. I check the time. Were you sleeping? I ask. No, but it’s been a long day, she says. Your father won’t eat. And he doesn’t have a virus. She was called in to sign some papers so he could be fed through a tube.

When they moved him to a room to insert the feeding tube, my father who never raised his voice screamed so loud he terrorized the residents. Even the Nurse-Who-Smiles-No-Matter-What looked up from her station. They had to restrain him.

The other day, my mother says, they found him out in the parking lot. He got into someone’s car. They don’t know how he got out. He wants out, I say. It won’t be long now, she says. She’ll call me Sunday—if not sooner.

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I flash back to a scene when my father could still sit in his chair at home with my mother. He had developed a nervous disorder that caused him to dig his right arm involuntarily with his fingernails, leaving a trail of what looked like a junkie’s needle tracks. The doctor had given him a drug so he would not dig his arm. He did not dig but he hallucinated. He went to the place of the scream, I think now. “They’re going to come and take me away,” he told me. “They’re going to take me out West.” His face grew tense. He was getting angry. “I don’t want to go. When the time comes, that’s what they’ll try to do, I’m telling you.”

The Response

I am in the middle of a conversation with a Japanese friend about aging parents. She needs to be in the U.S. to make her videos. She needs response. Americans respond, she explains. The Japanese sit quietly, politely. You never know, she says.

I tell her the story of my father’s scream. We both laugh at the part of the story where my father escapes from the Home. We cheer like Californians over water. We cheer as if he’d hit a home run. He only left for first base when a strike was called. He had to go back to home plate where they restrained him, can you imagine? Yes, we could imagine. We are quiet now, respectful. I wait for her response. Hmmmm, she says, about the problem that has no answer. The story is about dignity, she says. “I will like to read your story.”

I tell her about a TV program I saw years ago. An old man in a nursing home insisted he had the right to starve himself to death. A nurse looked into the camera and told us she must do her job. “It is my job to feed him,” she explained. The man said he had a right to refuse her work. She would still get paid for trying. How did members of the audience respond? No one knows. We were like a Japanese audience. Years later I respond, sitting at my kitchen table with a Japanese friend talking about aging parents and my father’s protest.

Our conversation is interrupted by the ringing phone that demands answering. I pick it up. My mother starts crying. She says she didn’t want to do it. Do what? I ask, a little confused, a little scared. The tubes, she blurts. He was such a dignified man. It isn’t right, she sobs.

The Viewing

I go away. I visit Santa Fe instead of my father. I am riding over red rocks in a big-screen sky. I catch glimpses of cacti and wild flowers. I stop to photograph the Black Mesa. I stop again & again to see the mesa changed by the light. Click. Click-click. I pause: the mesa takes me in. I am changed by the light that changes the mesa that remains unchanged. I study my lesson in black & white. A friend tells me the Indians regard the mesa as sacred. No one walks on the mesa. It is only for viewing.

The pilot’s voice tells us to fasten our seat belts. We are going through the clouds now. The seat belt sign flashes. We are going fast, up & down. I hold on.

In Houston I call my mother. There is no change, my mother says, or I would have called you. He looks good, my mother whispers. I’ve known him since I was 19, and now he won’t speak to me. He won’t even look at me.

I board another plane and close my eyes, letting the red & blue of Santa Fe run out to the black mesa where I am sitting with my mother next to my father. I imagine him flat out in bed, shrouded in white, his arms restrained, his eyes closed. We sit side by side. We don’t speak. We study his face: his carefully combed white hair and mustache and smooth olive skin. He’s still handsome, my mother says.

His lips are relaxed now.
His scream’s gone.

We bob through the clouds.
The light flickers.

I want to scream when the mesa doesn’t let in any more light.
My mother puts her hand over my clenched fist.

I want the mesa to respond—Life is sacred.

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Tonight, as the sky was bending its dark blues down to its pink horizon, I tried to pick ripe raspberries for another round of jam. We have fifteen feet of raspberry canes and they make for us each year 10 quarts of berries and sometimes a pie. It was getting dark for picking but the berries were starting to over-ripen. First I squeezed between the fence and the monster limbed vines, where it was already 20 minutes darker. Stepping over the scratchy boughs and pushing some up and over me, I stooped to see the silhouette of the berries against the sky. Color drains to gray and black at night so I went for the shape of a full, but still firm, berry.

My hands are looking for the hairy berries—hanging down like innocent testicles. It’s getting darker and I’m reaching and touching. Not knowing if I’ll find a leaf, a shadow, or a berry between my fingers. Not knowing if it will be rotten and smear wet and moldy in my hand. Or if it will be a hard and (although I don’t see it) light pink fruit. I’m looking for the ripe ones that fall off their pulpy conical umbilicus into my blind hand with just the lightest pull. If they are not perfectly ripe the plant won’t give them up, hanging on, fighting me, wanting to feed the berries whatever it is they ooze through their dimpled connection to each seed and juice orb. When the berries are ripe, the pointy light-green bracts, many-nippled breasts, give up their fruit with a token tug and hang alone, pale and done. Tonight one launched its fruit before I could reach it, dropping it, as it turned out, onto my toe. I bent down in that dark tight prickly place and found it on my big toe, ripe and ready to become jam, unwasted.

It is still dark but I can see a little easier as I round the edge of the row of raspberries and emerge from between the scratchy vines and the fence. Now I navigate between the raspberry vine tentacles and the beehive, easier at night when the bees have all come home and are packing their pollen into the wax cells, regurgitating their nectar. In the darkening light I smell honey and when I am perfectly still, I can hear the bees inside the hive. I round the corner that during the day is an airstrip for landing bees. A few hundred workers are sitting out on what would be their porch, fanning their wings, cooling off the hive and perhaps enjoying the evening.

I have two quarts picked and need just a cup or so more for the low-sugar recipe. In the dark I pick a berry with a big green triangular bug sitting on it. As I pick it off and drop it, I smell a buggy odor in the night air, a smell that I remember tasting every once in a while on my berries.

This is getting too lush. Each time my hand reaches out into the thicket of vine and finds a ripe berry I think I’ve got to write about this. It’s all so graphic I wonder if it is not only berries I’m reaching my fingers out for, but words, ripe and red and falling into my hand.

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Status Report

Death happens when it’s inconvenient, in a snow storm, when the plows haven’t awakened to clear the streets. Though Death personified is suave, it’s really a lump. It doesn’t ask, Is this a good time for you? Is your calendar clear? It blunders into an important lunch, while the candidate’s mouth is full of turkey wrap. It rings the doorbell well past the time for visitors, while the old man sits heavily on the toilet, thinking it’s a spot of heartburn. It happens when no one is much expecting it and looking in the right direction. It happens as if no one has ever died before. It happens to my father.

6:00: Stops at local grocery to pick up a few supplies, a turkey wrap, some orange juice, an apple. Not much, he never buys much. He can’t carry much.

6:20: Pulls into the long sweeping drive of Luther Crest, the retirement community where he resides and parks in his spot near the entrance.

6:25: Carries his bag of groceries into Luther Crest and takes the elevator up. Exits the elevator on the 3rd floor, turns right down a long winding corridor identical to the one he would have taken if he turned left. Walks with a shuffling step, past one closed door after another, each with a number and name in small black print in the tiny box above the doorbell. Outside each apartment door, a ledge with sad displays, vases of plastic flowers, animal figurines, snow globes covered in dust. Thinks the stuffed animals are speaking to him. Encounters no one on this long corridor but hears the sounds of televisions behind the doors turned up too loud.

6:30: Calls the woman he has been seeing, who my sisters and I have not met because he thinks his dating her will be an affront to the memory of our mother, which it is not, and makes plans to see her the next day.

9:05: Cannot breathe. The nitroglycerin spray does nothing and the attack continues. Turns blue.

9:07: Calls the first responder and she comes quickly. She is a young woman who knows what is in the room. She calls an ambulance.

9:30: By the time the ambulance arrives death and my father are one.

10:15–1:03: I don’t know what my sisters do at the hospital or what has happened to death. Was he ever admitted? Did he have a room? Or was he in emergency?

1:03: Carol calls. My husband Richard and I are sound asleep. The dogs are settled. It is cold because the heat has shut off for the night and it is snowing lightly outside. Richard gets up and answers the phone. Hello. Yes, she’s here. Handing the phone to me, Your sister. Hello I say. Sorry to be calling so late, she says. I know it is something terrible she has called to tell me. I know this before she speaks.

1:30: Richard takes the dogs downstairs and outside. He’s brought them back in and they sit on the big blue pillow under the dining room table while I talk to my sister. I don’t know what I’m saying.

1:45: I urge Richard to go back to bed. He resettles the dogs and gets in bed.

1:46: I step outside to our screened porch, open the door, and stand on our small deck. You’d think there would be silence then, when everyone is mostly in bed sleeping or trying to do so, and my father is dead. I hear a leaky gutter dripping—drip, drip— dispensing the day’s rain water upon the ground, and I hear the river, swollen with melted snow and ice from the warm days, whishing downstream, the current, constant and unfettered, marked by force or strength, a steady onward movement.

1:50: I walk down to the banks of the river. Our house looks lit like a cruise ship sailing dark water, portholes aglow. I hear the river sweeping forward.

2:00: I think of my father hastening away from the grave site where we buried my mother, trying to get to his car as fast as he could. He bought a cheap suit a size too small for the occasion and the buttons were popping, the seams were unraveling. He was hurrying to his car holding the lapels.

2:02: And now here I stand in the dark with all my buttons popping.

Fizzle¹; oh you and your deaths

Death in the making, in the form of an old black cat with green eyes, curled in the curve of my arm, in the hollow space between my husband and me in the marital bed, labored breathing, still it was, facing me with a face, all through the night when suddenly up it got and vomited on the spread, and then moved to the corner, no food or water would it take; it had nothing left to say, still it moved from place to place searching for a final resting place? a last anchor? a place to be alone, I think…off stage, but I wouldn’t let it be alone, no, I had to search for it, look in all the old places, up in the attic in the eaves, under the back porch ruins, opening and closing doors, until I found it huddling outside, I had to put my arms around it, small it was…near the end…there had been so much more in my memory, and I had to embrace it, hold it, not let it go, Father called then and I couldn’t answer, I could hear the rings through the windows, I knew it was him, I always know when it is Father calling, he knows when not to call, has an uncanny sense when I am in the throes of something…this is when he calls, I can count on it, I can count on what he’ll say if I answer too…oh you and your deaths, he’ll say it as if I collect them…deaths, that is, maybe I do; what’s to be done about it, I can’t help I’m in the thick of ruin, and he lets the phone ring such a long time, eternity really, refusing to accept I won’t answer, that he can’t wear me down, why don’t I answer, well, I could say I was outside, with my arms around the huddling thing, I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to and I didn’t want to because I don’t like lying, I can’t say…everything is wonderful…lilacs blowing…ducks swimming…happy day…that kind of thing, I can’t and that’s what Father wants and when he doesn’t get happy day, he lets me have it, oh you and your deaths…that’s what he says with boredom and condescension dripping from his voice…so no…I didn’t answer, I was busy and then the strangest thing happened…a bunch of tiny birds, sparrows, flew about the tree, out of nowhere, ten I should think, they were making an awful noise, half past noon it was…what was it, I wondered, that stirred them, then I saw…the buteo regalis…all ruffled, all turned out…kree-a kree-a…compact, legs rusted and ruffled, lots of white, juvenile, it was, still green about the killing, saw its white legs landing in the grass by the tree lit with sparrows, the sparrows were dive bombing the hawk…he held his ground, a small emperor, the wind picked up…a bottle far away rattled as it rolled down a hill, the way things that need to flow downwards do, and the sparrows were up and swooping, the sun came out from behind the clouds, everything ablaze with light, the hawk still in the grass, dominion that’s the word I thought, was I sparrow or hawk…was I one…or the other, which face did I wear as the hawk flew up, sparrows in tow, his royal retinue, from tree to tree, they flew…and then out of sight, the sun disappeared, the sky thickened, wind grew and grew, building; branches began to break and pitch down, a few drops of rain, no more, I expected downpour, I expected the river to overflow its banks, but…no…a few drops…a sprinkling, on and off…all through the day until night like an intermittent suitor who comes and goes and can’t decide whether to stay, still I didn’t answer my father’s call oh you and your deaths, I picked up the branches dragging the big ones to the bank of the river, adding them to the pile, I went inside and changed the sheets…pulled them off the bed, tried to dry the damp place on the spread, I remade the bed and got in.

End Notes

We have no say in how we come into this world.

No one asks: would you like to be born on a cold morning when the trees are ruined?

Would it suit you to be the child of parents whose unhappiness tunnels through the neighborhood, live in a room with heavy boulders wedged against the door?

We’re thrown into ourselves, finger nail by finger nail, eye lash by eye lash, roped to crumbs our mother bestows until some epic push dumps us out onto a cold steel slab.

Then hands sleeved in plastic grab us and shake us like we are rag dolls.

Listen: I know how I want to make my exit.

Let it not be February, not in the month I was born.

Let me have gotten somewhere beyond where I started.

Let there not be snow crusted blue on rooftops and steeples.

Let the river not be frozen and let the trees not be bare.

Let the deer not be hungry, staggered at the salted curbs.

Let the old people not be huddled behind their blue space heaters.

Let me not be ferried to a funeral home, those thick blocks of ice.

Let me not be put in a wood box no matter how rare the wood.

Let me not be burned in the world’s hottest oven.

Let no one gather at the town’s center and sprinkle flowers or words.

Let no one scatter me from a ship’s bow or saw me in obituary.

Let me not be stored in a decorative urn.

Let school children put down their pencils.

Let yellow buses turn into wigwams.

Let there be horses crossing the river with nothing but flies on their backs.

Let all the windows be open.

Let the wind be fierce.

Let the tires of cars go flat.

Let all the stall doors be unbolted.

Let all the fences fall.

Let apples drop from the trees.

Let the horses and deer enter the world’s final orchard.

Let the river swamp its banks after five days of heavy rain.

Let the tips of blue from the flags of iris ripen early.

Let branches the length of canoes rush downstream with the current.

Let the wind lift and die, like a forgotten field.

Let me set off in a blue plastic boat under the stone bridge past Spurgen Hunsicker’s house where the rubber tire still swings, past the village of willows.

Let the horses be dark on the road through town.

Let me hear the clop of hooves in rhythm, the stutter stutter swish of their feathery tails.

Let me disappear into the woods.

Let the mice take over the kitchen and run their mad dance from drawer to drawer.

Let them sleep in the spoons.

1. In the tradition of Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles, brief prose pieces, spasms of imagery and memory.

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He’d done it once before—come to the big city via two buses, the ferry, another bus, the bus tunnel—to meet me on the weekend and spend the night, but never so late in the day, never when it was basically dark by the time we were to connect up. He’s nearly 16, but I found myself waiting for the anticipated bus with more worry than I usually have for him these days. What if he wasn’t on the bus?

Do you know how many things could go wrong? I’d told him not to stray or dawdle. I’d told him to watch out for “demons on the road to Ixtlan”—still my favorite Castanedian metaphor for those whose intentions are maleficent: bad boatmen and bum liquor.

I was parked in a nearby parking lot watching the bus I hoped he’d be on. It was now dark. My worries were ratcheting upward. The bus stopped. The passengers disgorged. And there he was! A smile of relief went through me.

When I had him in the car and was disinterring him for his adventure, he told me how, on the streets of downtown, he’d passed by a black man in a black mask who offered to make a poem from his name.

“Sure,” he said, and so stopped while the man went through his routine, delivering the goods.

All my suppressed worry came to the surface, “How could you?! I told you not to stray or dawdle! You could have missed your bus! Why?!”

Nonplussed, he replied seriously, “I always stop for black men in black masks who offer to make a poem from my name.”

I looked at him incredulously, gearing myself up for a further rant. But then broke out laughing. There was nothing I could say. The gods favor him.

:::

At every turn
the dream
that wants me
to write it
down

::

Like holding fog
this grey cashmere scarf
I found at Goodwill

::

Scarecrow gone
but the crucifix
still stands

::

The wind
has come to sculpt
the snow

::

A bell the shape of a child is ringing.

::

Pouring rain
at midnight
a hearse stops
in front of a neighbor’s house
and waits

::

All winter
that one leaf
that won’t let go

::

The beauty of a fragment is that it’s there but not there.

::

Chinatown
every face
alone

::

Melt me winter says to spring.

::

Flying across country
I read Thoreau
in a cloud

::

She doesn’t please me at all
the people pleaser

::

What is a pomegranate if not a geode?

::

Before the concert
peep
of a pitch pipe

::

In the midst
of missing him
mosquitoes

::

Tree rings
saying hello
from long ago

::

While we talk he woks.

::

Mourning doves
an ancient
ache

::

Slowly
the incense unwinds
like a serpent
that has slept
a thousand years

::

Spring wind
I kneel
on the soft earth
and wrap my arms
around myself

::

Moths
nibble
at the night

::

Computer keyboard my word piano.

::

With a match
he ignites
one end of my shadow
and watches it
burn away

::

House quiet
I fold into full lotus
and cry

::

Digging for facts while fragments just appear.

::

As I reach to water
the fern
a sheet of falling light

::

I treasure
the stone
you threw at me

::

The snail making lace.

::

At the top
of the Ferris Wheel
lilac scent

::

Abandoned farmhouse
lace curtains blowing
out the window

::

A tulip opens…
mandala

:::