Carter Revard

It’s true we have invented quark-extraction, and this allows our aiming gravity at will; it’s true also that time can now be made to flow backward or forward by the same process. It may be true as well that what is happening at the focal point, the meristem of this process, creates a future kind of space, a tiny universe that has quite different rules. In this, it seems, whatever one may choose to do or be becomes at once the case. In short, we have discovered heaven and it’s in our grasp. However, the Patent Office has not yet approved and cites less positive aspects of this invention. First, it does not generate profit, and it does make obsolete all present delivery systems for our nukes. Then, it will let private citizens do things that only a chosen few, that is, OUR sort, should be allowed— fly freely from one country to any other, spreading diseases and bankrupting transportation. Home-heating, auto-making industries will be trashed, employment shelled, depressions spread worldwide, sheer anarchy descend. For these and other reasons, no one must know of this. . . .

It’s midnight in a drizzling fog on Sunset Avenue and we are walking through the scent of orange blossoms and past a white camellia blown down or flung by someone onto rainblack asphalt waiting for the gray Mercedes sedan to run over and smash its petals and leave us walking in the smell of Diesel exhaust with orange-blossom bouquet. Where the next blue morning and the gray Pacific meet as the Palisades fall away two sparrowhawks are beating their tapered wings in place, watching for jay or chewink to stray too far from their thorny scrub to get back— and the female suddenly towers, her wings half-close and she stoops like a dropping dagger, but down the steep slope she rockets past them and turns again into updraft to the clifftops to hover— as the jay peers out through thorns, and the lines of white surf whisper in.

Brimming the trees with song they flood July, spill over into August pulsing lovecries, cicadas here—one that our cat brought me lay, legs folded neatly, on clear wings as on a shroud, green and white, fizzing now and then, but when I threw it spread wings and zagged in a wide curve into the sweetgum tree where presently its dry buzzsaw whined for some significant other to auger down into dark dense earth and gnaw at the roots of things, sans eyes, sans wings, sans song for seventeen years or so. As daylight sharpens, deer slip back into the woods. I wonder what a deer, when danger grows too bright, makes of a world whose darker, truer memories in ear and nose must solve the dazzle of our alien eyes, more surgical at stripping off its cover, at masking selves as downwind leaves. I’ve read somewhere the claim, by computer people, that pain cannot be felt until self-consciousness has been achieved, and they had programmed in that level, so they said, of artificial pain. In A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.

On humming rubber along this white concrete, lighthearted between the gravities of source and destination like a man halfway to the moon in this bubble of tuneless whistling at seventy miles an hour from the windvents, over prairie swells rising and falling, over the quick offramp that drops to its underpass and the truck thundering beneath as I cross with the country music twanging out my windows, I'm grooving down this highway feeling technology is freedom's other name when —a meadowlark comes sailing across my windshield with breast shining yellow and five notes pierce the windroar like a flash of nectar on mind, gone as the country music swells up and drops me wheeling down my notch of cement-bottomed sky between home and away and wanting to move again through country that a bird has defined wholly with song, and maybe next time see how he flies so easy, when he sings.

What I walked down to the highway for, through the summer dawn, was the Sunday funnies, or so I thought— but what I remember reading there in the shadowless light among meadowlarks singing was tracks in the deep warm dust of the lane, where it parted with its beige dryness the meadow’s dew— the sleek trail where a snake had crossed and slid into tall grass; the stippled parallels with marks between them where a black blister-beetle had dragged its bulbous belly across in search of weeds more green; the labyrinth of lacelike dimples left by a speed-freak tiger-beetles’s sprints that ended where it took wing with a little blur of dust-grains; and stepping through the beetle-trails, the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track crossing unhurried and walking along the ditch to find an easy place for climbing; not far past that, a line of cat-prints running straight down the lane and ending with deep marks where it leaped across the ditch to the meadow for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits: and freshly placed this morning, the slender runes of bob-whites running, scuffles of dustbaths taken— and there ahead crouched low at the lane-edge under purple pokeweed-berries four quail had seen me, and when I walked slowly on toward them, instead of flying they ran with a fluid scuttling on down the lane and stopped frozen till I came too close —then quietly when I expected an explosion of wings they took off low and whispering and sailed, rocking and tilting out over the meadow’s tall bluestem, dropped down and were gone until I heard them whistling, down by the little pond, and whistled back so sharply that when I got back to the  house they still were answering and one flew into the elm and whistled from its shadows up over the porch where I sat reading the funnies while the kittens played with the headlines till when the first gold sunlight tipped the elm’s leaves he flew back out to the meadow and sank down into the sun-brilliant dew on curving wings, and my brothers and sisters waked by the whistling came pouring out onto the porch and claimed their share of the Sunday funnies— and I went on to read the headlines of World War Two, with maps of the struggling armies leaving tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya and the navies churning their wakes of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea where the ships went down on fire and the waves bobbed and flamed with the maimed survivors , screaming in Japanese or English until their gasoline-blistered heads sank down to the tiger sharks and the war was lost or won for children sitting in sunlight, believing their cause was just and knowing it would prevail, as the dew vanished away.