David Roderick

Basho said to refuse a prayer until its warmth hunches inside like a bird in its hutch. First the fledgling is born, then the worm, then they meet somewhere in the grass. I choose my paper for its cereal color, fuss over shaving a pencil. The prayer means to cleanse both triumph and lust. O derivative, sunlight reaping the trees, this whole morning cries through a single reed. Pencil, razor blade, spit—I'll try not to hurry.

November 22, 1963 First, a black mark in the sky, a speck that grows into a plane widening, dramatically circling before it touches a gray strip of land designed for its landing. Then the players descend the wheeled stair to the stage for the cameras, our collective eye: first her, then him, as is custom, and their entourage trailing behind, those who believe the world is young and the future spreads out like geography. It's the beginning of all that, and what a show it is, the bouquet of roses we see given to her on the scratchy screen, the film pouring its light, edges burned. And who knows what's truth, what's myth, or if they arrive as hawks or doves, brave with risk in a bright and swirling land where the dust seems to crown from its own gray dust. Here's the raw footage. Here's the film clicking in the projector, and, as all things seen through it are black and white, isn't it important to note her roses are red and not yellow, and that neither of them squints in the bright Texas sun? If you can stand what the light inside the darkness does to your eyes, watch them pause there for a moment: our champion, our grace, in that high noon that holds all the freshness of the morning.

Like the Necessary Evil and Enola Gay, in a sphere of air that’s calm and mildly cool, I need some last grip of blue to trigger my sleep. It was technically flawless, that mission, as they’d dropped a few dry-run pumpkins with a bird’s-eye scope. When I close my eyes under the drone of a fan, I see planes rattling in the aftermath. Smoothly soldered rivets saved the men inside. At a commemoration the captain said, “I’m proud I started with nothing and made it work as perfectly as it did.” Then, when the press persisted, red flashing his face: “Hey, I sleep clear every night.” I lie in another state, placeless in the air, with the sound of occasional sirens or barking dogs. In a magazine I read about Predators over Pakistan, our drone with fifty eyes named Gorgon Stare. The men at Langley, bombing by remote, call a person who escapes their fire, who runs from a car or burning hut, a squirter. Night is sometimes an acid, sometimes a cure. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part human, part story, but our mouths pass on in silence. I think of the men who brought that silence: Mr. Harry S. Truman, Captain Paul Tibbets, who painted his mother’s name on the nose of the plane. My dream house circles me. Peonies thrive in beds I forget to water. With pillows I lie. A white cotton sheet covers my chest. I’ve been told to sleep in peace, where the trees are crowned with plenty and where birds float through wood-lawn, broom, and shrubs. Where a found twig can be golden or mundane. To orchestrate my sleep I take a pill, and as I fade finally, at the time of night when the birds believe they’re leaves, I dream of a path in acacia season where the air smells lemony and my whole day seems to rest on the limbs of the trees. Suddenly, a siren sound. Wind ripping the valley after a flash… In Plymouth, spring of ’45, while the Pacific squadrons trained, my father was born without cataracts in his eyes—David Roderick, 7 lbs., asleep on his mother’s white gown. There must have been milk and a huge cloud of necessity in which they breathed. In August, before he could talk, neutrons sheared from a core. I’ve read what they left behind: shrines’ ashes, and the boy under his desk who sang all day while his classmates fell silent, one by one. Two concussions hit the planes. They roared away from the light they’d made, the rain. At night, when I falter again, and the pill dissolves in my veins, I think of Langley’s coffee, its infrared eyes. I think of the Enola Gay parked in the Smithsonian, where a woman smashed a jar of blood on its wing. When I signed my mortgage, I also signed for the peonies and for the shield of my yard’s tall trees. The birds daub nests of twigs and human hair. My potting shed makes its own black sense of heat. Here’s the price I pay for sleeping:Reapers circling a far-off village, my drones. To eyes at a distance, a screen lies always between a failure and a dream. In other words,homo fabula: we’re part story, part human, but only if our names are known, and only if our names, when spoken aloud, are pronounced correctly, with proper inflection, as when a mother addresses her son.

In flowerbeds we crowd, some praying, some bowing as the world, minute as it is, stays in motion: box stores doing business, fast food joints, and above us a crow, secular bird, lighting on a lamppost while we take pictures or cry as if we could live forever in this gloried surround, gazing up at the window holding her bleared hair, her mouth that is a frenzy of trapped pollen or dust, eyes like smooth shells that make us forget what fertilized the flowers at our feet, bulbs fortified with potash or bone meal, dried blood, which reminds me of the Annunziata I saw in Italy, painted by those who thought color itself was divine: crushed shell, coral and ash, pigments mixed with egg in a man’s mouth, and I worry about standing too close to the believers, I who rubberneck and lie, do I stand too close to the woman at least six months along with her own child, waving a sonogram with a faint infant shape inside, an image scratched by waves: light squandered here, dilated there, compressed oil and dust as every body contains its atlas of salt, kiss-worn, and always some bud dreamed in springtime, and though I’m a yarner and one for whom doubt is a clutched root, I can’t yet walk to my car, standing here wondering if after His birth the virgin girl saw the rest of her life would be nothing but a way to talk about that morning: gold nearly blinding, herdsmen and kings, and with its broad warm tongue a cow licking the afterbirth from the hay.

I’m not interested in sadness, just a yard as elder earth, a library of sunflowers battered by the night’s rain. When sliced wide, halved at dawn, I can see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock. Hardly held, for years I slept with my window wide open, wanting screen-cut threads of rain. Blind suburb, dear untruth, you who already know what I mean when I praise every spared copse, you were my battery, my sad clue, but after I mowed the lawn and watched robins chesting for seeds I couldn’t resist what hung in the toolshed, where, with a pair of garden shears I cut all the hair from my arms. That need, that scared need to whiten or clean a surface: plywood or lawn, and the spywall behind which I stood, stock-still, and sinned against the fly’s flyness. Though you live inside me, though you laid eggs in the moisture at the corners of my eyes, I still dream about your sinking empire twenty feet above sea level, and the many things you never see: beautiful bleached gas can, tomato posts bent into art,

Loot my point of view, hove my heart free from its hived booth though I know your smoke, its black blossom, is a substance I’ll never become: colors of plaster and grass I’ve prepped flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin. It’s a personal matter to me, the wind. But let it be our cathedral feeling: a sculpture of ash dragging its robe over the hills because of us, because of me. Yellow is hurried, but red moves like a swarm through toothpick homes, pans over roofs, where the ethos we child from the ground will blacken to ruin. Let’s glory this roughened nap of landscape, this parched Arcadia, with one nude-struck match and a breeze.