Chard DeNiord

The guests are floating in the lobby, walking but also gliding to the front desk then away, checking in, checking out, muscular souls adorned in cotton, wool, and rayon, chewing the future inside their heads, slicing the air with ironed pleats, avoiding the camera at every turn so as, so as to get it right this time, which is the first time. “First cut, best cut!” the director shouts since this is also a silent film for the deaf and therefore everyone. His aim is to get the cast to see what they’ve been missing, to disregard the very sounds that they don’t hear to begin with, but would notice immediately if they were gone. See how they glide on the ether above the floor. The insouciance, Lord. The insouciance! They are all here in the magic of the set, every soul in the guise of a guest going about her business, a rendezvous here, as assignation there, the solitary sipping at the bar. Someone striking appears at the door. The rain outside beats down on the streets with terrible force until all you can hear is the roar of the sky as it passes above, and then below, on its narrow tracks.

It’s not paradise I’m looking for but the naming I hardly gave a thought to. Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness among the animals before I started listening to the news. Call it the hint I had about the knowledge that would explode. In the meantime, which is real time plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt and speaking French, which is more than I can take, which I marvel at like a boy from the most distant seat in the Kronos Dome, where I am one of so many now I see the point of falling off. There’s not enough seats for us all to attend the eschaton. This ecstasy that plants beauty on my tongue, so that if it were a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness of a hummingbird and grace of a heron, is so much mercy in light of the darkness that comes. Who would say consolation? Who would say dross? Not that anyone would blame them. All night I hear so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted to look back, to save myself in hindsight, where all I see is the absence of me. Where all I hear is your voice, which couldn’t be more strange. How to go on walking hand in hand without our bodies on the path we made for our feet, talking, talking?

The nurse calls to tell me on Sunday evenings how he’s doing. How he’s holding his own in front of the window with a thousand channels behind the one that saves his screen with snow, fish houses, and eagles. How the days hang above the ice as vast recycled pages on which he writes in invisible ink. How the sun arcs across the sky, then breaks like a plate above the horizon. How the temperature drops below zero at dusk, then continues to fall till morning. In this way she teaches me how to speak to him in his sleep at his home in Minnesota, which is the same, she says, as talking to a friend you’ve never met, but grown close to nonetheless from hearing his voice. I hear the snow falling as she holds the phone outside the window. Silence is the sound of snow falling on snow, I think as I listen to the flakes inside the air before she closes the window. “I’m thinking of walleye in their sleep,” I tell my father. “Of catching them as they dream, then throwing them back in the hole I drilled by hand with the auger you gave me as a child, whose handle is stained with blood from my turning it so many times into the ice of Bad Medicine.” I wait for her voice to return, then say, “Just this for now since any more would disappear the lake inside his head on which he builds a house for us to fish throughout the winter.”

For Ethan Canin I sat on the dock at dusk and spoke to the fish who swam beneath me like ears with fins to hear my secrets. “That words come close?” I whispered. “The sky enters me like a sword with my own hand on the hilt. How to witness what I can't express— the smell of lilacs, the dirge of loons. Make up the rest if you wish. Less is enough. Say I sound like one of the Hosts. That I'm crying also and there's nothing you can do to make me stop. That I'm like the peepers, katydids, and thrush with my own song— all call in the opera of dusk. Or is it response?”

My sister and I went out to them with sugar cubes and bridled their heads when they bent down to eat from our palms. We led them over to the long white fence on which we climbed to the topmost rail, then threw our legs across their backs, clutching the reins to steady ourselves against their girth, steering them out into the hills until we were lost, or thought we were, only to find ourselves at Judith Creek or Holcomb Rock where we’d turn back in the early dark, gripping their manes, crouching low, galloping hard on the high soft road across the fields to the open barn.

He lowered his head and darted through the grass, flushing a hen from off her nest, then zeroing in on the day-old chicks instead of the mother whose decoy trick had failed to lure him away. In the time it took for me to notice this, he'd broken the necks of two of the chicks and torn the skin from off their backs and heads. The taste of their blood had deafened him to my commands, so I went to him like an angry god and chased him away with my staff and rod, inflicting a wound also in his side for him to go on licking, to wash their blood from off his tongue with his own blood, and then I kneeled in the grass to regard his kill while the mother keened inside the woods not far away. Oh, what a mess they were with their heads snapped back and wings unhinged. I picked up the bodies like bloody socks and prayed to the god in charge of this field for my own weakness to feel this much for slaughtered chicks. For an understanding of his need to kill the most vulnerable thing, whether hungry or not.

The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them, then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still, slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow, prehensile bones. I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do, how else to live among them and keep my view. Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning, especially the cardinal in snow. What sign to post on the sill that says, "Warning, large glass window. Fatal if struck. Fly around or above but not away. There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath. I need you, which is to say, I'm sorry for my genius as the creature inside who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window I've built with the knowledge of its danger to you. With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants: the sight of you, the sight of you."

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? —Allen Ginsberg "Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell— ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles." I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things, lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road. In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears with the sound of tires on blue macadam.The doors close in an hour....