D. Nurkse

Death is coming and you must build a starship to take you to Venus. Make it from a catsup bottle, a flashlight coil, a penny, the cat’s bell, Mom’s charm bracelet. They say that planet is torment, whipped by circular wind, choked in vitriol clouds. But no. When you get there it is a light in the sky and I am with you. If you find nothing else, borrow the pleated wing of a winter moth, lighter than dust.

They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married, sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks, or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas. Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old, the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind, they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi, limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered, infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops darning gray veils—and who were we, watching? Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint, how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

We gave our dogs a button to sniff, or a tissue, and they bounded off confident in their training, in the power of their senses to recreate the body, but after eighteen hours in rubble where even steel was pulverized they curled on themselves and stared up at us and in their soft huge eyes we saw mirrored the longing for death: then we had to beg a stranger to be a victim and crouch behind a girder, and let the dogs discover him and tug him proudly, with suppressed yaps, back to Command and the rows of empty triage tables. But who will hide from us? Who will keep digging for us here in the cloud of ashes?

I was not beaten but the boy beside me was. He broke stride, stumbled, the sticks circled over him, corralling him into their world. I met his eyes and lip-read “run,” a whisper engulfed in sirens. I slowed down in an unknown neighborhood, a street of watch repairers, tinsmiths, tailors sitting cross-legged in dim windows staring at lacquered Singers like men whose eyes are lost in a fire, and I ducked past them glancing sideways in deep pity because I’d been a step away from freedom.

It ends badly, this glass of wine, before you drink it you have to drink a prior glass, before you sip you gulp, before you chug the bottle you pour it down your throat, before we lie together naked, we divorce, before we rest we grow old, it ends in chaos, but it is delicious, when we wake it is the past, we are the faces staring from the high lit window, the unmet lovers, the rivals who do not exist, united in a radiance that will not fade at dawn.

Ignorance will carry me through the last days, the blistering cities, over briny rivers swarming with jellyfish, as once my father carried me from the car up the tacked carpet to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.

We want to give ourselves away utterly but afterwards we resent it, it is the same with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly under the dusty pines, their small chests swell as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place where a seed was once: this is our law too, to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance, then to hold the entire forest in one tilt of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.

1 I cradled my newborn daughter and felt the heartbeat pull me out of shock. She didn’t know what her hands were: she folded them. I asked her was there a place where there was no world. She didn’t know what a voice was: her lips were the shape of a nipple. 2 In the park the child says: watch me. It will not count unless you see. And she shows me the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble, the tricks performed at leisure in midair, each unknown until it is finished. At home she orders: see me eat. I watch her curl on herself, sleep; as I try to leave the dark room her dreaming voice commands me: watch. 3 Always we passed the seesaw on the way to the swings but tonight I remember the principle of the lever, I sit the child at one end, I sit near the center, the fulcrum, at once she has power to lift me off the earth and keep me suspended by her tiny weight, she laughing, I stunned at the power of the formula.

We undid a button, turned out the light, and in that narrow bed we built the great city— water towers, cisterns, hot asphalt roofs, parks, septic tanks, arterial roads, Canarsie, the intricate channels, the seacoast, underwater mountains, bluffs, islands, the next continent, using only the palms of our hands and the tips of our tongues, next we made darkness itself, by then it was time for dawn and we closed our eyes and counted to ourselves until the sun rose and we had to take it all to pieces for there could be only one Brooklyn.

1 hat As soon as I put it on Brooklyn went dark, but when I took it off my wooden horse stared at me with dazzling glass eyes. 2 coat The shirred hem swished on the floor. Huge shoulders sloped like pines under snow. A panel in the lapel read Kuut, Tallinn in thread letters. I hid at the center behind jet buttons too round to undo. That coarse-nap wool outlasted Estonian winter but now the moths left a trellis of holes so it was never dark when I curled up hugging my knees. My mother cried out: Who are you? I answered in my deepest voice: His coat. 3 shoes I shoved my hands in and taught them to walk: now stumble, now march against your will, left, right, to the Narva front: now dance: and somewhere in that immense city where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a name.