Connie Voisine

The plane is packed and over sweaty heads, rumpled hair, the movie glows in the transatlantic nighttime murmur of priests and nuns and Riverdancers returning home—a baby is cooed by an older mother, a boy feels for his seat in the dark. I’ve read my books already, 2 days traveling, the difficulties technical.I hate that money, says the priest beside me, and he orders another scotch, his third. The Feast of the Epiphany tomorrow, he studies religious journals for a message, writes in a notebook impossibly small.We are having problems with sound, the flight attendant announces, it is not your headset, and so the oceans swell in silence, bright blue tumbles across the screen mutely, foam collapsing over a tiny nimble figure but she darts through to a green glow, sunshine through a veil of wave, her surfboard tense between her feet and the world’s largest ocean. Her ride is long, impossibly long—her hips stay low, a friend drops onto her wave and, together, they glide towards the shore. No music. Just water and that blue. I check the SkyMall catalogue for something I might need and didn’t know. There are reasons I am flying over the ocean, reasons I I wish I were sure of. Someday I might say,yes, I chose him, and it wasn’t wise. Or maybe we’ll be old and surrounded by our own. The screen flashes; the surf is wild, but the bright sky makes me whisper, Hawaii, where nothing could be that beautiful but is. The waves are bigger and she sets out, flowered bikini, hair pulled back in a serious bun. But too soon she’s underwater, arms above her head, spinning down into a champagne sea. The priest asks would I like some English chocolate. I say no at first then say yes. I say, how many Euros for the scotch? The baby Jesus is about to be adored by black men, foreign kings, in fact, tomorrow. They’re stumbling, the Magi, 12 days across an ocean and through the desert. It’s hot so they must travel at night— who wouldn’t? And there was that star, sudden and perhaps a sign. We’ve already tried to get there once, I want to say to the kings. It’s cool in this 747, which later the pilot will land with only one engine. A problem with compressors. But what a sweet, sweet ocean, and those few younger girls who try to ride it. And what a night, warmed by the sun-shocked smell of saddle and sweat, the strong breath of camels. What carved, fragrant trunkfuls born across deserts and ready to be opened before an infant god.

The cat wants to be a strong thing—a hand, a tree. The girl wants to be a pirate, in a tree. The tree wants to be the pond with its face of shining. The pond wants to be the sun who dumps its sugar on the grass. The grass wants to be the foot, its sole, its heel. The foot wants to be the brain who always gets to choose. The brain wants to be the feet dumb in their shoes. The shoe wants to be the buckle that the girl shines with a cloth. The buckle wants to be the magpie lifting what shines. The magpie wants to be the egg in the nest touching its brother. The egg wants to be the feather. The feather wants to be the mite, devouring its plume.

It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down. It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk. The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my oblivious siblings. A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind. A gush of yolk and then darker. Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala—vinyl seats, the rear- view, headrests and you, your hand through your hair. An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss. Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander. Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must. Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother. That girl was shining me on. In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of my room. I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans. It must be the Night Fever, I sang with the 8-track. But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door, tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . . and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn. I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms. I shall say what inordinate love is. The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.

Tulips panted against the wall.So much need to feed a crisp stem