Brad Leithauser

There was a vase that held the world’s riches, but it wasn’t cheap. It cost a dime — and this in a time and place when dimes were sizable, especially for a girl of eight whose construction-worker father was unemployed. The old metaphor was literal in this case and she counted her pennies till there were ten — then embarked on a mission of great secrecy, a purchase whose joys ran so deep, seventy years later, as she told the tale again, her face flushed. It was a birthday gift for her mother. There was a race of people heretofore glimpsed only on hanging scrolls in library books. They were on the vase — the smallest whole figures imaginable, purposeful and industrious as they fished or planted rice or hiked a hill whose spiral trail led to a temple perched upon a crag between cloud and waterfall. They were a vision exported from Japan — a country far as the moon, and far more beautiful, whose artists grasped an eight-year-old girl’s soul’s need for the minutely amplitudinous. There was a place (Detroit, the thirties) now slipped from sight, though here and there I’ll catch some holdover trace — maybe the grille on an old apartment door, or a slumped block of  houses, draped in torn sheets of rain, apparently posing for black-and-white photographs. Even the out- of-a-job, men like my grandfather, donned hats back then before leaving the house — to circle endlessly about, as if a lost job were a lost coin that might yet be found on the street where it had been dropped, making them whole again. There was a face, rucked with care, that would dreamily soften if  talk floated off toward some remote someplace beyond the seas. My grandmother had a yen for the faraway (which she imparted to her daughter), even as her life was tethered between a gray icy motionless Midwestern city — stalled like a car with a frozen ignition — and a Tennessee farm without electricity. (She did once see Washington — cherry season — and often spoke of  those long pink walkways beside the water that were  Japan’s gift to a grateful nation.) There is a vase — a piece of gimcrack that somehow made its way to a crowded curio case in a small souvenir shop in Detroit, seventy-plus years ago — which today stands atop the mantel in the apartment in DC where my fading mother is now living. When she was eight, in 1933, she gave it to my grandmother, who for all her poverty bequeathed her daughter so rich a bounty, including a taste for giving: the gift of grace. It seems a little miracle almost — that it’s intact, the little vase, conveying what its makers set out to convey: an inward island spared by Time, by the times. These days, she can scarcely say who she gave it to, or on what occasion. A — birthday? The pilgrim climbs the winding hill forever, station by station, and “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks. “You bought it for a dime,” I tell her. It holds the world’s riches still.

A car is idling on the cliff. Its top is down. Its headlights throw A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow On the pale air. On the shore, so far Below that the waves' push and drag Is dwindled to a hush—a kind Of oceanic idle—the sea Among the boulders plays a blind- Fold game of hide and seek, Or capture the flag. The flag Swells and sways. The car Is empty. A Friday, the first week Of June. Nineteen fifty-three. A car's idling on the cliff, But surely it won't be long before Somebody stops to investigate And things begin to happen fast: Men, troops of men will come, Arrive with blazing lights, a blast Of sirens, followed by still more Men. Though not a soul's in sight, The peace of the end of the late Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light Even so to bathe the heavens from Horizon to shore in a deep And delicate blue—will not keep. Confronted with such an overload Of questions (most beginning,Why would she... So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three), Attention will come to fix upon This odd last thing she did: leaving The car running, the headlights on. She stopped—it will transpire—to fill The tank a mere two miles down the road. (Just sixteen, the kid at the station will Quote her as saying, "What a pity You have to work today! It's not right... What weather! Goodness, what a night It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.") Was there a change of plan? Why the stop for gas? Possibly She'd not yet made up her mind? Or Had made it up but not yet settled On a place? Or could it be she knew Where she was headed, what she would do— And wanted to make sure the car ran For hours afterward? Might the car not be, Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse- In-reverse, meant to direct one not Away from but toward the shore And its broken boulders, there to spot The bobbing white flag of a blouse? Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands") That will muddle the town for three days, Until a Professor E. H. Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show, Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds" As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid It's not our bailiwick. Missing Persons, yes; missing poems, no." (What's truly tragic's never allowed To stand alone for long, of course. At each moment there's a crowd Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass At every wake who, angling a loud Necktie in the chip dip, Airs his problems with intestinal gas, Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well, Wade sent the Leader another briefword: "Decades of service to the Bard now force Me to amend the girl's little slip. 'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .") Yet none of her unshakeable entourage —Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue, And a yearning young grease-monkey—are Alerted yet. Still the empty car Idles, idles on the cliff, and night Isn't falling so much as day Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether She's found or not, her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw, The first stars easing through the blue, Engine and ocean breathing together.