Debora Greger

Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains — jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future. And how, always just ahead, gray water glittered, happy to be just a mirage. Who steps off the gray bus at the depot? Sidewalks shudder all the way home. Blinds close their scratchy eyes. Who settles in your old room? Sniffy air sprawls as if it owns the place, and now your teenage secrets have no one to tell. For the spider laying claim to the corner, there is a stickiness to spin, that the living may beg to be wrapped in silk and devoured, leaving not even the flinch from memory.

Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? —Wallace Stevens Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing, the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread, from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely into these hollowed grounds, the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life, sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough to waft round the lord of all purveyed. His to count the hauls past the yawning gates of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify, to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist of the far-flung future, enough evidence in the inscriptions to identify most owners: spells scratched on the backs of envelopes to be read out before animal sacrifice, the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains. Over tomatoes splitting their sides, over a teacup stained with roses flattened into mosaic petal from petal, earthmovers move a little mountain and, having moved it, move on, overturning a diamond sprung from its ring, glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye. If the art of loneliness is landscape, armload by carload of black-bagged leaves, landfill contours its likeness.

Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic, fuming along the one four-lane street. The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away from the bypass that never had much to pass by but coyote and rabbitbrush. Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read— I stared at stars light-years away. Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler damping down yesterday until it’s today. The cottonwoods shiver, or I do, every leaf rustling as if it’s the one about to tear itself, not I. Memory takes the graveyard shift.

Every seaworthy vessel a woman whose mate, eloquent of how she handled under the worst of weathers, hailed his goddess of wet fire, handmaid and dockside whore. Over the courtyard’s dry dock, linens snapped. Brisk was the wind that claimed divine right to salvage whatever tore loose, brisk at the docks the trade in foreign plumage, and the milliner, arms full of wings, who tripped in a puddle that brimmed with sky. Past the known world, past the map that decorated a room with scalloped waters where ships the size of fingernail parings were never snagged by the dragon-sharp islands, a keel of leaf scraped across a pane. A branch scratched endearments on the air it then brushed clean as sand. Had the woman rereading a letter looked to the window casting her light, she could have seen almost to land’s end, the salt sea broken into semaphore flashing its glassy code for tears back to shore, seen almost to the cage on deck, the pigeons gray as the mind, some to bear messages home the first days out, the rest to fatten in the hold.

In the lost city of gold that was Oroville, the golden age had come and gone. I was the only person in the vast movie house. What was showing that winter night thirty years ago? The Gold Rush, of course, as if it had arrived in 1925 and never left. Gilt dripped from the ceiling. Stains mapped their worthless claims. And there I was, still in that cheap coat the color of slush. Who was beside me? Not you, Love; you were on the other side of the country, so it was the cold that threw an icy arm around my shoulders. A heater coughed, not meaning to intrude. The projector rattled to life and, down a mineshaft of dusty light, a blizzard swirled toward the blank screen of my past. O silent film of my life, unwind! It wasn't the wind but the silence that howled, ecstatic in the emptiness at the heart of the West. But Chaplin had a mystic's hunger for the finer things: he boiled his boot. He wound a shoelace on a fork. He tasted shame for me, and found it sweet.

The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo, a flightless bird gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes, into the archives of air, the whale hauled a harvest of dust. In the ripples of glass sealed over songbird skins, I wavered. What could be said for love? From the Full-Serv to the Self-Serv Island at the Gulf station next door, landlocked waves shivered in a row of corn. The great flukes lifted. A Milky Way scarred the underside more vast than the Midwestern night. Dark cargoes would give themselves up to these shallows that waited to take home the sailor, home to the sea of fossilized coral upon whose shoals just down the road the motels of Coralville lay sprawled. Here would lie a ring scratched by a scrivener with florid hand, In thy breast my heart does rest flung back to shore, here rest two coins face to face, joined by the salt that turned them faceless as they turned to each other.

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. —The Tempest The only potion I saw him brew was tea of his own blend, a mash of leaves and bark. Good for whatever ailed you was his claim, as if he could see the leaps and falls he’d named “the heart.” Who knows? For argument, just say he had no need, had made me up: one in his likeness, who wouldn’t touch the stuff. Who tried to see a window where he outlined in air its air of distance, ladylike, a pane designed to cut you off from the world of the dunghill and the worm. Who fashioned a cloak of leaves that aped his cape, mine only as magic as waterproof, a screen against the downpour day after day of sun, unlike the one he wrapped in and became no longer Father but some other, a stranger— the island’s only one—the local god, or was it merely King of Somewhere Else? Or mother country, I his colony? He held forth promise of some other isle, no drier but more “cultivated,” not just with crops but with quotation marks. How he held forth, dutiful silence mine to guard. I borrowed foreign names from the remains of a map that washed ashore, my own worn out through under-use. So, Carolina North, or South? Virginia West? As long as I remembered not to answer to “Miranda!”, the call of parent bird to fledgling ingrate, then I was not the heir apparent but your normal castaway, a little bored with ins and outs of tidepools’ smelly courts. Perhaps not world enough, but I had time to watch a hermit crab align himself and back into a vacant whelk and haul the home he wore from rocky A to B. All that watching—watching for what? A sail blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs? A gorgeous morning, same as yesterday, I in the same old shirt he’d handed down, divining rightly that if it failed to fit, a scabbard’s belt would cinch it as a dress. To the crab’s new quarters a small limpet clung. What did I want to be? What did I know but him, the man who’d loved his subjects less than his library, who’d lost his kingdom, who couldn’t put down a book he’d yet to finish? How close the air remote upon that isle, the like of which I have not breathed again. How it held water, building up a wall by keeping molecules apart. How close those castles, not to be counted on except to rumble, then to wilt late afternoons, all squandered weakness. Whatever I had sensed about my difference I caught from him or from the books he carried in his head. Such dreams he made on me. I am a leaf torn loose from his drowned book. All men are islands, though they swear otherwise. All islands are alike in their unhappiness.

NONES At three p.m. under sky coming to harm something too red flashes from a limb, so red it hurts: against sky coming apart, against a left-out, twice-soaked shirt, a cardinal inflames the profane cathedral of suburban yard its owner let fall into disgrace. How rain embarrasses the half-pruned hedge. The half-mown grass that sports a tonsure in reverse shines under the torture. Rain slicks with praise red shed, red feather. Crested seedeater out of character where you’re neither the strictly monkish brown thrasher nor the odd hermit thrush, you scratch in the underbrush of faith to see what you can flush: a grub. A seed. Eminence not grise but rouge, from your lipsticked beak you pass a sowbug to your mate. You peck at a slug sliming your path, seeming to beg your forgiveness. To what would you confess beyond season-to-season unfaithfulness? VESPERS There are more divine hours: a gold-leafed page a mower rows with a scythe as tall as the tower that tents aloft a tiny sky bereft of cloud, a chapel ceiling left unstarred, heaven a lake turned upside down, filled with an emptiness that’s clean because it’s cold, glacial enough to scald the skin it bathed, the lungs it filled. On devotion’s last page, deep in the golden age of illumination, the hunt’s cortège has halted at the edge of the known world, a clearing wedged in a forest of spears. Red bird the badge on the huntsman’s tunic, you’re the splash of crimson lake, the distant lordship’s flag, the cleric dog’s bright collar, its heretic tongue. It slavers on the bleeding stag. Snarling at prayer that chases belief, it licks the offal of grief, the heart cast aside reward enough.

And in that city the houses of the dead are left empty, if the dead are famous enough; by day the living pay to see if dust is all that befalls the lives they left behind. Coating even the glassed-in waistcoat in time, coloring the air of the room stripped bare, down four stories of twisted stair it falls, down on the dictionary no longer there. Empty your pockets, empty your hearts, that empty upper room exhorts. Forget the scrap of paper with the missing word for what’s missing— go home to your rented room. Go on. Six cramped quills, one elbow chair, missing a leg, held up all those years by Johnson’s willing it to hold his bulk—now even the “soul hath elbowroom” in that room where scribes scribbled out that quote. In that city the dead never want to get up, just as in life. What can we offer them? Just this dust to cover them deeper, kin to the soot that shadowed their days. Kiss from a wife who no longer wanted to be touched— love, he held, regarded with passionate affection, like one sex to the other, first; or, second, made do with the affection of a friend; or managed merely parental tenderness, third; or, fourth, no more than pleasure with, delighting in; or, fifth, no less than the reverent unwillingness to offend. O had a long sound, as in alone. Her opium. On clean-shirt day he would pay a visit to his wife. Pack meant large bundle of any thing—“on your head a pack of sorrows.” Quiet. The square just off Fleet Street so quiet Carlyle got lost on his way there. Remember the garret floorboards’ complaint, the muffled ruffling of pigeons just overhead? Such silence we fell into stair by stair, the house to ourselves. Tired of London, he claimed, and one was tired of life. Were we just tired? Under the low ceiling as below deck, up where no angle was true, we sank in deeper silence, valedictory, the way it took us in. Volumes of ancient air closed around us, blank, weighted by the latest dust. What had we come to the house of the dead to see? Something exotic? The zebra presented to the queen in 1726? Something exactly as it might have been? Did you yawn first, back among the living? You pulled me from traffic rushing downstream instead of up, that Zambezi best forded from stripe to painted stripe, a “zebra crossing.” I’d looked the wrong way.