Brenda Hillman

In movies when the hero is about to die, He scatters a few phrases in a place like this, Hoping the words will come up again Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him As now they do for us. Someone has planted a row of little trees To stop the wind. Instead they’ve learned To bend like the elect In one direction only; they know The sea will shatter them. Isn’t it always like this? Something uncontrollable becomes the hero, Taking off its dress, the ice plants Sunburn from the center out So we can see that their deaths Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours, We are allowed again the glare Of the sand, the druid hills, The grasses brushing the legs, though Just to have felt it once would have been enough.

Titled after Satie I. Three pears ripen On the ledge. Weeks pass. They are a marriage. The middle one’s the conversation The other two are having. He is their condition. Three wings without birds, Three feelings. How can they help themselves? They can’t. How can they stay like that? They can. II. The pears are consulting. Business is bad this year, D’Anjou, Bartlett. They are psychiatrists, Patient and slick. Hunger reaches the hard stem. It will get rid of them. III. The pears are old women; They are the same. Slight rouge, Green braille dresses, They blush in unison. They will stay young. They will not ripen. In the new world, Ripeness is nothing.

The problem of time.          Of there not being enough of it. My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes. Numbers hung in the math book like motel coathangers. The Lean Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges, bubbly earth tones in the center. The latest thing they’re saying is lack of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough it’s not even an issue, time falls away into 'the curve' which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book, soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave) The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face lived for months in my dresser, no arrows for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio nose         (before the lie) left in the center;            the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia)                  I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room: Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrow- and-a-half when I started thinking about it; now there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet. Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . . Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. . Push us out in the boat and leave time here— (because: where in the plan was it written, You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water, even the caterpillar will hurry past you? Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark from being ruined. Opened the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:) “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed into a fourth dimension but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne. . . At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew. . . I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat, you were happy there; the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond, whichever one is eternal

~~ & thus you entered a forest of solitudes where in this great sense your life had been pursued, till like a shadow breaking off a rising body, a need hovered & grew. Some lined feature of another fate strives to be met, sits low & upright. Those qualities which had been energy or grace past pain wove from the nerves a nest or instinct. Your calms are interesting. Write to us during this terrible government. A universe coughs blue & draws a twiceness from the mitred now, while your garden hand spells the inexhaustible forms~~ FOR  ELIZABETH   ROBINSON

I passed through nature into the next. Children running in unsupervised shadows. Last century’s fountains learning not to lie. Risk to identify with only one element since one will die but in the summer air around each thought, something is built and avoided. You go through an arch and aren’t the arch, just infinity of form, curve’s curve of becoming, a phrase tracking it to future’s celadon relief. As others dressed as others we were supposed to meet. Citizens walked here without disappointment, seeing no statue or palace with eleven axes, patient in the mindless heat—

The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes, his whole hand inside the boot he’s shining, everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired on gravel he’s spread out in the window, shoes placed as though they’re walking, and beside them propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day, first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron, fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ... * The cleaner waits behind the silver bell; he’s from Cambodia and has free Christian literature on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter, searches through the coats, some left for years, he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats. As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under the whooshing of motion, I see my husband’s coat— how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now, I don’t have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go around between the women’s suits and stay all night. . . * I watch the young butcher flipping over the young chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it, first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away; he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze— to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?— I can wait, but the spaces can’t, there’s a slight ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ... Somehow I thought we would know everything through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he responds without really looking up; I love that. * oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren’t they— what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers, the plums just about over, the agapanthus—“lilies of denial”— in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to— like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it, not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror, the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth: the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family, having briefly reached inside the visible mystery and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God, looking interested and competent; she touches the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ... (—a man told me I better think about my ‘system.’ Oh dear! I better think about my ‘system’—!)

Often visitors there, saddened by lack of trees, go out to a promontory. Then, backed by the banded sunset, the trail of the Conquistadores, the father puts on the camera, the leather albatross, and has the children imitate saguaros. One at a time they stand there smiling, fingers up like the tines of a fork while the stately saguaro goes on being entered by wrens, diseases, and sunlight. The mother sits on a rock, arms folded across her breasts. To her the cactus looks scared, its needles like hair in cartoons. With its arms in preacher or waltz position, it gives the impression of great effort in every direction, like the mother. Thousands of these gray-green cacti cross the valley: nature repeating itself, children repeating nature, father repeating children and mother watching. Later, the children think the cactus was moral, had something to teach them, some survival technique or just regular beauty. But what else could it do? The only protection against death was to love solitude.

The labeled bins on the California hillside catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars. Families pull up with their interesting trash and start unloading: Here, sweetheart, this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle hits with a thud. Diet soda cans spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun- permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic, as matter greets itself and starts to change. What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered into the bin, we could see it waiting there, could believe everything is alive and specific and personal, could tell by the tilt of one bottle against the next that it’s difficult to be singular, to have identity, to keep an outline safe in the terrors of space. Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts, tossing it in; and the bottle lies there in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself, before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . . And what if some don’t want to. What if some items in the piles of paper, the orange and blue envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers pressing through the cloudy windows with our names, some among those pale sheets curled with moisture, would rather stay as they are. It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes— tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized drafts of poems—that which was blank shall be made blank again—but what if that failed letter wants to be a failure, not go back to pulp, and thought .. . Or across the parking lot, where light insists on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want to be changed, though they should want to, shouldn’t they, should want to be changed by light, light which is called sweet reason, honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes from the parking lot looking helpless though it is matter that has been betrayed. . . All afternoon the bins are carried off by those who know about where things should go, who are used to the clatter the cans make, pouring out; and the families, who believed change would heal them are pulling away in their vans, slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . . The bins fill again with hard substances, the hills bear down with their fugitive gold, the pampas grass bending low to protect what was briefly certain and alive with hope.

We bury the sparrows of Europe with found instruments, their breasts light as an ounce of tea where we had seen them off the path, their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings near the pawnbroker’s house by the canal, in average neighborhoods of the resisters, or in markets of princely delphinium & flax, flying from awnings at unmarked rates to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs we would descend much later; in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters where streets were taken one by one, where consciousness is a stair or path, we mark their domains with notched sticks of hickory or chestnut or ash because our cities of princely pallor should not have unmarked graves. Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge to which patterned being is parallel: they came as if from the margins of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning our little hourglass up on the screen.

We had a grief we didn't understand while standing at the edge of some low scrub hills as if humans were extra or already gone;— what had been in us before? a life that asks for mostly wanting freedom to get things done in order to feel less helpless about the end of things alone—; when i think of time on earth, i feel the angle of gray minutes entering the medium days yet not "built-up":: our work together: groups, the willing burden of an old belief, & beyond them love, as of a great life going like fast creatures peeling back marked seeds, gold-brown integuments the color time will be when we are gone—