Connie Wanek

When I push your button you fly off the handle, old skin and bones, black bat wing. We're alike, you and I. Both of us resemble my mother, so fierce in her advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable child who'll catch his death in this tempest. Such a headwind! Sometimes it requires all my strength just to end a line. But when the wind is at my back, we're likely to get carried away, and say something we can never retract, something saturated from the ribs down, an old stony word like ruin. You're what roof I have, frail thing, you're my argument against the whole sky. You're the fundamental difference between wet and dry.

Mittens are drying on the radiator, boots nearby, one on its side. Like some monstrous segmented insect the radiator elongates under the window. Or it is a beast with many shoulders domesticated in the Ice Age. How many years it takes to move from room to room! Some cage their radiators but this is unnecessary as they have little desire to escape. Like turtles they are quite self-contained. If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.

Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. Some share eggs, some share expertise, and some won’t even wave. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign. Strange to think they’re in the air like lead bees with a fatal sting. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy, came back. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool. His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Checking a trap.

We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold, as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary. At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.

And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place . . . T. S. Eliot The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond and drove little waves toward us, brisk, purposeful waves that vanished at our feet, such energy thwarted by so little elevation. The wind was endless, seamless, old as the earth. Insects came to regard us with favor. I felt them alight, felt their minute footfalls. I was a challenge, an Everest . . . And you, whom I have heard breathe all night, sigh through the water of sleep with vestigial gills . . . A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent, while higher up two bullet-shaped jets dragged their roars behind them on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little. Perhaps it was necessary. All our years together— and not just together. Surely by now we have the same blood type, the same myopia. Sometimes I think we’re the same sex, the one in the middle of man and woman, born of both as every child is. The waves came to us, one each heartbeat, and lay themselves at our feet. The swelling goes down. The fever cools. There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago bear and beaver, fox and partridge den and nest and hunt and are hunted. I wish I had the means to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild. But then where would we live? I wanted that hour with you all winter— I thought of it while I worked, before I slept and when I woke, a time when the tangled would straighten, when contrition would become benediction: the positive hour, shining like mica. At last the wind brought it to us across the pond, then took it up again, every last minute.

Butter, like love, seems common enough yet has so many imitators. I held a brick of it, heavy and cool, and glimpsed what seemed like skin beneath a corner of its wrap; the décolletage revealed a most attractive fat! And most refined. Not milk, not cream, not even crème de la crème . It was a delicacy which assured me that bliss follows agitation, that even pasture daisies through the alchemy of four stomachs may grace a king's table. We have a yellow bowl near the toaster where summer's butter grows soft and sentimental. We love it better for its weeping, its nostalgia for buckets and churns and deep stone wells, for the press of a wooden butter mold shaped like a swollen heart.

A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the red of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown. Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world, closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop.