Christian Wiman

After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in an odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist's downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking like overripe fruit; after the mountain aster and ice wine, Michigan football,Canes Venatici and the Four North Fracture Zone shrink to a room where voices grow hushed as if at some holy place, and even in the kindest eye there lurks the eternity to which he's been commended; after speech, touch, even the instinct to eat are gone, and he has become nothing but a collection of quiet tics and twitches as if something wanted out of his riddled bones, the carious maze of his brain; as the last day glaciers into his room, glass and chrome so infinites- imally facet- ed it seems he lives inside a diamond, he breaks into a wide smile, as if joy were the animal in him, blind, scrabbling, earth- covered creature tunneling up from God knows where to stand upright, feasting on distances, gazing dead into the sun.

Love's last urgency is earth and grief is all gravity and the long fall always back to earliest hours that exist nowhere but in one's brain. From the hard-packed pile of old-mown grass, from boredom, from pain, a boy's random slash unlocks a dark ardor of angry bees that link the trees and block his way home. I like to hold him holding me, mystery mastering fear, so young, standing unstung under what survives of sky. I learned too late how to live. Child, teach me how to die.

Lord is not a word. Song is not a salve. Suffer the child, who lived on sunlight and solitude. Savor the man, craving earth like an aftertaste. To discover in one's hand two local stones the size of a dead man's eyes saves no one, but to fling them with a grace you did not know you knew, to bring them skimming homing over blue, is to discover the river from which they came. Mild merciful amnesia through which I've moved as through a blue atmosphere of almost and was, how is it now, like ruins unearthed by ruin, my childhood should rise? Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred, savor this creature whose aloneness you ease and are.

Lean and sane in the last hour of a long fast or fiercer discipline he could touch dust into a sudden surge of limbs and speak leaves in the night air above him, inhabit quiet so wholly he heard roots inch into the unfeeling earth, rings increasing inside of that tree. Without moving, hardly breathing, he could call out of the long darkness walls around him, a house whose each room he knew, its hoard of silences, solitudes, doors opening onto the wide fields through which he moved, breathing deeply, unbewildered by the dead with their hands of wind, their faces of cloud. Stilled and gifted in the last hour before the first light, in the dark place of his own making, he could feel rocks relax alive beside him, gather from a moon-raveled river the pearl curves and blue fluency of a girl his hands once knew. He could let her go. He let it all go, desire and grief and raw need going out of him moment by moment into the mild immaculate night, love by love into a last passion of pure attention, nerves, readiness... Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.

Then all one day because of ice they couldn't make it down the hill. Or up, James says, dabbing at a spill of coffee, crunching toast as if it had a spine. But he could work, at any rate, could concentrate on that book he's been reading, or meaning to, the flu— or was it famine?—of '49, some smoldering fact he's found in the cold ash of some war. Gusting upward, lobes and nose on fire, his whole face florid from the heart attack he's somehow never had, he sways, repeating: Oh, we'd get down just fine, I expect, but we'd never make it back, then goes into his room and shuts the door. Eva's hours have nearer ends. She heats the little disk the cat sleeps on; chips, until her hands are gone, the glaze off all the feeders for the birds; then writes two friends to thank them for the birthday chocolates they've sent. The word alone makes her stomach burn. Which is mostly what age is, she's learned, the senses sharpening backwards, keen to what they can't perceive, when to be wise means mostly not to wish for what you love, for what you love is pain: spices or coffee, gin bringing the evening light into your veins, good chocolates the grandkids ravish like a horde of crows. You stuff your bellies with tomorrow's ache, she can almost hear him bellow, nipping and pinching to make them squeal. Hot water with honey, one coddled egg, dry saltines: Oh, what difference does it make? She picks up the chocolates, breaks the seal. • He draws the blinds on a wall of glass, winces at the glare, drags his chair into the bright crevasse between his bed and bookshelf, takes a deep breath of air, and buries himself in one of the early wordy furies of William Gladstone, never a man for minor keys. Creak and tick of the burdened limbs. A creak and tick inside of him as he crosses his legs and then uncrosses them, shifts his weight to ease the stiffness in one side, turns a page like a summit he has climbed, and breathes... Think of it—twenty thousand books devoured in Gladstone's life, and of his own enough to keep an army of bibliographers occupied; a whole age and empire crammed into one man: spellbinding crowds until he couldn't stand, felling his million trees, filling six decades' worth of diaries because a life is owed as well as owned, time a gift of which a good man gives account; who would mount, night after night, a moral, high-rhetorical siege upon some poor Haymarket tart in whom ruin and beauty were one word, then go home and whip himself for a sin that, all the evidence suggests, never occurred but in his heart. • And has just one, pleasure spreading through her blood like a single drop of ink. She scours the stove and countertop, bleaches coffee stains off the sink, cleans leaf by leaf the emerald ripple and the paradise palm, both mostly dormant now, reaches high for the philodendron, huge since trained to climb, and pauses, remembering the calm of constant motion that her mother was— a beauty, men said, though it hardly seemed a part of her, looking out of her own face like someone on a train; and remembering, too, the child-high hedgerows alone the lane behind their house on Paddox Close, the slice of sky above growing wider as she grew, the little park with its central statue (who was it of?), which, last time she'd seen, weather had worried to a Swedish ivy sort of green. • Emma Clifton, Elizabeth Collins, P. Lightfoot— even the names of those women are there amid the parliamentary proceedings, bulldog scholarship, affairs of state. He lifts his hand like a weight to check his watch, little trembles traveling through his bones into the air as through plucked strings a sound. Two hours until the final round at Palm Springs, with its hairpin fairways, lacquered greens, and that great eighteenth in homage to Bobby Jones. What a character!—touring in his teens, retired at twenty-eight with nothing left to win, at forty storming Normandy with men half his age. Even his death was rare— syringomyelia—cane to brace to wheelchair without a trace of self-pity, regret, rage: We all have to play the ball as it lies. How much of a man's revealed in how he dies... Poor Owen, barely sixty, Dean of the College, a decent book on Kant behind him: two days of chest pain slivering into a lifetime's knowledge and all the old beliefs come flooding back, silly relics and rituals, griefs you're born into, some guilt you can't even name. "Ischemia," that's exactly right: blood lack. • Sweet pickles and white bread, salted ham, a soybean spread that is his one concession to his heart, two butter cookies, plum jam: she clicks across the polished floor through motes that rise and float like molecules of light, pausing outside his door, hearing the Mahler chorus to which he always cries, plays to cry, she suspects, as if even sadness could be planned. She takes the knob in her hand, sees, inside its shine, white tablecloths, crystal cut fine as jewels, and, and... and a man with American shoulders and vowels, that face so open it wasn't, like the ocean, and that tidal way he had of filling any space that wasn't taken, the table where she sat with friends, afternoons and weekends, classrooms, boardrooms, lecture halls, the very bodies of their children, in whose broad limbs he seems to sprawl. Was that what she had fallen for, talk of golf, and Oxford, and roast beef in that gray decade after the war, that it seemed so safe a fall? • There—where the strings go silent and that woman's whole soul is in her throat... Ahome can have but one composer. Wasn't that the quote? That long ironclad letter Mahler wrote to Alma, the most exquisite woman in Vienna, who packed away that cold contract, her party dresses, and her own precocious technique, and settled, if you could call it that, into the role of being Gustav Mahler's wife: I am not happy, and yet not unhappy. My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak. But he loved her; and she is in his music as surely as the God he never quite possessed nor fully lost, as surely as the daughter is alive inside this song, whose life it cost. Gladstone also had a daughter die at five. Odd, not to have thought of that before. And Mahler's sisters name was Anna, and Gladstone's sister Ann; and wasn't Mrs. Gladstone's family from Oxford, or near? Oh, William dear, she told him once,if you weren't such a great man,you'd be a terrible bore. • Was that a laugh or a sob? Mahler dies off into the long silences, polite applause, and weirdly reverential tones of golf. This could take all day. She lets go of the knob, backs away. • He looks up as if he's heard a sound— what was it called, that late-medieval game out of which golf evolved? He looks down: O'Connor's on the second tee, It must have started earlier than he thought, Steady head, steady head, that pro at Sea Pines always said. James lifts one hand above his knee, so palsied now he can't keep his cocktails quiet, as if every instant were a shock his body took. Think of a stake driven through your skull into the ground.

What words or harder gift does the light require of me carving from the dark this difficult tree? What place or farther peace do I almost see emerging from the night and heart of me? The sky whitens, goes on and on. Fields wrinkle into rows of cotton, go on and on. Night like a fling of crows disperses and is gone. What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky, this tree.

Incurable and unbelieving in any truth but the truth of grieving, I saw a tree inside a tree rise kaleidoscopically as if the leaves had livelier ghosts. I pressed my face as close to the pane as I could get to watch that fitful, fluent spirit that seemed a single being undefined or countless beings of one mind haul its strange cohesion beyond the limits of my vision over the house heavenwards. Of course I knew those leaves were birds. Of course that old tree stood exactly as it had and would (but why should it seem fuller now?) and though a man's mind might endow even a tree with some excess of life to which a man seems witness, that life is not the life of men. And that is where the joy came in.

Do you remember the rude nudists? Lazing easy in girth and tongue, wet slops and smacks of flesh as they buttered every crevice. Sungrunts. Blubberpalaver. We were always hiking some hill toward some beauty some human meanness ruined. We were always waiting too long to let ourselves be seen. It was an ocean's gesticulations, articulate elephant seals, grounded clouds grown all one mouth. What could we do but laugh, casting clothes aside as if the air were ice and water a warm bed, goose-stepping goose-pimpled past their appeased surprise into the waves. What could we do? We could—we did—love take a long look at each other and creep quietly away.

A shadow in the shape of a house slides out of a house and loses its shape on the lawn. Trees seek each other as the wind within them dies. Darkness starts inside of things but keeps on going when the things are gone. Barefoot careless in the farthest parts of the yard children become their cries.

2810 El Paso Street, 1974 Solitary as a mast on a mountaintop, an ocean of knowing long withdrawn, she dittied the days, grew fluent in cat, felt, she said, each seed surreptitiously split the adamantine dark, believing green. It was the town's torpor washed me to her door, it was the itch existence stranded me on that shore of big-lipped shells pinked with altogether other suns, random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls sometimes a citizen seemed to peek through, inward and inward all the space and spice of her edible heavens. O to feel again within the molded dough wet pottery, buttery cosmos, brain that has not cooled; to bring to being an instant sculpture garden: five flashlit jackrabbits locked in black. From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, its engine of discriminate shit. From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God. How gone she must be, graveless maybe, who felt the best death would be for friends to eat you, whose last name I never even knew: dirt-rich mouse-proud lady who Rubied me into a life so starred and laughtered there was no need for after.