Barbara Ras

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time. If they ask you how it felt, say solitary, at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet, then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed, and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes. If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman, who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed, and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea— stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman. If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest, people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink. Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear and beg for hours with his cup empty. Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun. When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking, How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní, indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger, giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.

Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon's light fueling the windy spooling memory of elephant? What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize your parents in heaven," instead of "Being one with God will make your mother and father pointless." That was back when I was young enough to love them absolutely though still fear for their place in heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full of something resembling street water after rain. Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess, to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkercheif of coins to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder, Land O'Lakes, and two Camels. If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence. Of the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tuunnel and down 34th Street to the Garden. So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken pathos. It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were, the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest— the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly, unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things like Popsicles unthinkingly. And though dailiness may have no place for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life will appear in a dream, arriving with the weight and certitude of an elephant, and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.

Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst from someone we love? After my mother died, sometimes I'd take the one piece of her clothing I'd kept to bed and bury my face in her flowered blouse to smell her last skin, but even from the first it was futile. What I got was the smell of goneness, the smell of screen doors where moths have spent their wing powder beating failingly to reach the light. My massage therapist said she felt grief in my body like hard empty boxes. I felt like I was always handling dough, never wanting the kneading to be done, never wanting to bake the bread that meant the end of something having to do with a mother and daughter in a kitchen. My mother has been gone for years, and I begin to see, in the spots on the backs of my hands, in the shelf my cheekbones make for my cheeks, in the way I hold my mouth against gravity's pull, that I carry her with me, my skin, her skin, her last skin.

Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, some members dismembered to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling. Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow, the man on top of a boxcar waving, his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book, knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough. Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders, endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you, of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past, the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil, of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic, the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism, and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships. Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined, families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns to talk to their people on the other side, of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another, a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates, and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral, of course of course of course of course, now then, negotiations, whatever, palisades, the end of whimsy, but then one evening though it is wartime, a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight and history stops talking for a moment and sighs while the melancholy of Albinoni passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little, the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental, and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace, and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet, waiting out the storm with a sheep that had come up to lean against your side like a rock.

All year, death, after death, after death. Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky, God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night, never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights lead the way home, but maybe too early to find the moon turning half its body away, holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief breaks over you when you've already given all you've got and hands you tools you don't know how to use. The blush of dark thirty turned bleak when I heard about the O— O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m., hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake, as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it. Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating. And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire, import a ballistic missile to crown its village green? Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes," but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East, telling me with the gravest authority— that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there: "Hatred is in the rocks."

The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. The rain goes on, daily, sometimes, and we cry, As often as not alone. The fishmonger, the bell ringer, the cook, each Can be corrupted in a less than dire way. Nothing can replace the sea breezes you were born to. Nothing can stay the shy ache in the palm you hold out to the fortune-teller. The concrete lions on her steps go on Making bloodless journeys, they go on Hunting in air longer than any of you will live to watch, Hunting still after your futures become all irises and blamelessness.