Elizabeth Spires

The world bends us to its purpose. In the public gardens, we found a “gazing globe” balanced on a waist-high pedestal, a silver ball a foot in circumference, reflecting sky and ground, ourselves as we stood above it. We stared into its depths, as in a crystal ball, our faces large and wild, arms and legs unnaturally small, as if a spell were on the world, or, finally, we clearly saw the world for what it was: too brightly shining, circular, unadorned. Trees bent toward us, mere shadows of themselves, their shadows more substantial than the trees themselves. The sky at one o’clock a milky white, light-filled, yet without sun or cloud. And beds of tulips rising from the groundswell, each one a little mouth. I knelt beside you on one knee, caught up in walls of air I couldn’t touch or see, the outer world around me wavering, as on a hot summer day. We looked out to the future. Our future selves. You stood dead center in the globe and raised your hand to stop the scene, your palm enlarging until it dwarfed the tallest trees. Then waving goodbye, we walked, as a joke, backward and away, farther and farther away— the globe still gazing on us— leaving ourselves behind to live forever in that silver room, to watch and spy on lovers like ourselves.

From flowering gnarled trees they come, weighing down the branches, dropping with a soft sound onto the loamy ground. Falling and fallen. That’s a pome. Common as an apple. Or more rare. A quince or pear. A knife paring away soft skin exposes tart sweet flesh. And deeper in, five seeds in a core are there to make more pomes. Look how it fits in my hand. What to do? What to do? I could give it to you. Or leave it on the table with a note both true and untrue: Ceci n’est pas un poème. I could paint it as a still life, a small window of light in the top right corner (only a dab of the whitest white), a place to peer in and watch it change and darken as pomes will do. O I remember days.... Climbing the branches of a tree ripe and heavy with pomes. Taking whatever I wanted. There were always enough then. Always enough.

Along Ocean Highway, apartments rise up to ten and twenty stories, white, hallucinatory, defying the shifting sand, the storm moving in off the Atlantic that drives the rain, needlelike, across the windshield so that we can’t see, so that we stop in Ocean City to wait the storm out at the Dutch, the only bar on the boardwalk open this time of year, all the concessions boarded up, weather-beaten, closed against the season. Last summer in violet light, kites spiraled downward in loops, then up, dragons and birds flying high above the boardwalk. Ocean City. Haven of the lost and aimless, with a ten-foot sand sculpture of Christ illuminated by neon lights. People on their way to Ripley’s BELIEVE IT OR NOT looked on in apathy, then wandered off, their children begging for another ride on the Avalanche or Safari. Out, far out, at the end of a pier, silhouetted against gray sky, gray water, Morbid Manor rose up, Gothic and dreamy, as children ran screaming from the exit door chased by a ghost with a chain saw. One child ignored it all; she lay with her face pressed close to a knothole in the pier, looking down, down, to the boiling black water. “What do you see?” I asked, but she didn’t move or answer me. Long, narrow, and dark, the Dutch, with its shifting clientele— from summer weekend pickups to Ocean City regulars— allows for strangers. We order Irish coffee, then two more, and use our change to play an arcade game. Aliens, half an inch high, in green armor, drop out of a glowing sky and quickly multiply. Our backs to the storm, we play out old anxieties, losing each game to time and starting over: we must save what’s being threatened and not ask why.

Swirl and smash of waves against the legs and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton, come as the fathers of our fathers came, to see the past’s Peep Show. On two good legs, on one, they came, veterans and stay-at-homes of the Great War, all casualties, to stroll the West Pier’s promenade, past bands, flags, and minstrel shows, past Gladys Pawsey in a high-necked bathing costume riding her bicycle off the high board, past Hokey-Pokey and Electric Shocker, to the old Penny Palace, pennies burning hotly in their hands, the worn watery profile of Queen Victoria looking away from it all. I bend to the mutoscope’s lit window to see “What the Butler Saw”: a woman artlessly taking off her clothes in a jerky striptease I can slow down or speed up by turning the handle of the mutoscope. Easily I raise her from darkness— the eye eternally aroused by what it can’t touch— to watch her brief repeating performance that counts for so little. Or so much. I can’t be sure which. Abruptly, THE END shuts down the image, but her story continues as she reverses time’s tawdry sequence to dress and quickly disappear down a maze of narrow streets and alleys filled with the ghostly bodies and bodiless ghosts of causality, the unredeemed and never-to-be-born bearing her along to a flight of shabby stairs, a rented room where she is free as anyone to dream her dreams and smoke a cigarette, smoke from the lit tip spiraling in patternless patterns toward the room’s bare light bulb, the light I see her by harsh, violently unforgiving, as she makes tomorrow into a question of either/or: to leave this room, this vacancy forever, or go on exactly as she has before. Old ghost, your history is nameless and sexual, you are your own enigma, victim or heroine of an act of repetition that, once chosen, will choose you for a lifetime. I peer into the tunneled past, so small, so faraway and fragmentary, and yet, not unconnected to what I am now. Dilapidation upon dilapidation, Brighton is crumbling, fading to sepia tones, as your unfunny burlesque continues past your life, perhaps past mine, the past preserved and persevering, the sentimental past.

1 I count the rays of the jellyfish: twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by, thirteen in the next, time gone awry. A great wind brought them in, left them here to die, indifferent time measured by whirling moon and sun, by tides in perpetual fall and rise. Englobed, transparent, they litter the beach, creatureless creatures deprived of speech who spawn more like themselves before they die. I peer into each and see a faceless red center, red spokes like a star. They are, and are not, like what we are. 2 At noon, in the too bright light, watchful, looking too hard, we saw the scene turn dark and lost the children for a moment, waves crashing around them. Shadow blended with shadow, the sun inside a cloud, and then the children were restored to us, our worst fears a hallucination. All afternoon their castles, poor and proud, rose and fell. Great civilizations were built, came to an end, the children mighty lords, their castles only as small as we are to the stars and starry structures. The day was infinite for them, time stretching to the farthest horizon, the sun their overlord. But how to reconcile these summer days washing away with our need to commemorate, to hold onto? They knew. And so they sang a song tuneless and true, admitting no fixed point, no absolute, words overheard and blurred by great winds blowing in, a rhyme or round for a time such as we live in: The world is made, knocked down, and made again! 3 This is the moment of stasis: gulls stall above the burned-out mansion on the bluff, gone for thirty years, and cairns rise up, stone balanced on stone. By evening, the beach is empty, my shadow a long-legged giant leading me past small battlements to the day’s masterpiece: a dripping castle, all towers and crenellation, tall as a child, made by many children, flying three-pointed flags that wave hopefully in the wind. Closer, I see the moat, the courtyard’s secret pool in which, macabrely, red jellyfish float, death and potentiality entwined forever. A crab small as my fingernail, dead, perfect in every detail, with hairlike spinnerets and claws, guards the open castle door from entry as night begins to fall and shadows dark as ink wash in to stain the beach. Shivering, I think, O sentry, who would enter here? 4 Traveling once, I stood under the open sky inside a great unfinished cathedral. Stonemasons, there for generations, clung like ants to thin scaffolding, carving griffins and saints, the rising spires and portals dripping like hot wax, and birds flew freely in and out of lacy walls, like angels thrown down from heaven. Gaudy and grand, it was a vision of eternal mind. Its maker, dead for a long time, had left no finished plan, design, but work went on, days turning into years, the century coming to a close. In disbelief, I touched each twisting vine and leaf, marveling at what had been done, and what was yet to be, and wished, as I wish now, O let it never be complete!

The island’s dark tonight. The radio crackles with static, news of a blackout, the voice coming through first loud, then soft, as if a storm were moving to cut all lifelines off. My one-room cabin has a bed, a table, a chair. Living this way, I understand better that scene by an anonymous illuminator: a row of monks eating at a rough table, diagonals of light slicing across the room to fall, as if by accident, on their simple meal. The black and white tiles on the floor a symbol of the formal repetitions of the simplest life, or maybe an oblique allusion to a paradox of theology: the complementary nature of good and evil. Is evil possible here where everyone lives so individually and nature appears to be neutral toward everything but itself? Some mornings I wake too suddenly, the light on the wall brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder for a moment, where am I? I answer myself, my disembodied voice high and far off like what I imagine saints and martyrs heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island. Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee, settling into the simple ceremony of another morning. Outside the sea birds pick the clam flats clean, fly off, returning late in the afternoon looking for more to scavenge. Good days, I swim in the quarry, sun myself on the rocks, and plan a diary. One entry: I feel this place to be a rough approximation of heaven, the heaven of the lost ...

Key West In the Cubano diner, tiny cups of black, black coffee, hot and sweet, and chipped blue china plates of black beans and yellowtail, fished by the fishermen as the sun came up this morning. Yesterday out on the reef, we looked through the floor of the boat, through layers of clear, clean water— windows looking into other windows— down to the floor of the world, shallow, pliant, and shifting. There, schools of yellowtail swam through the living coral, bright as stained glass, cast into underwater constellations both strange and familiar: a flower, a brain, a cathedral. Suddenly a shadow parted the school— as if a cloud had just blotted the sun— a barracuda swerving as they swerved, and nothing they could do. After it fed, the two halves joined, the missing ones unmourned, all as it was before. If I could live for a thousand years, ten thousand, would ever I see the great family of men, women, and children, both preying and preyed-upon, swimming as freely as the yellowtail? Would that be heaven or hell? Each naked human face a candle joining other candles in a procession spanning many centuries, entering the cathedral of live stone whose heavy doors are cast with scenes from our own lives, moving as moving pictures move, until the reel runs out. In that world-without-end hour, will the future read us in relief, blindly touching each raised and burnished scene with fingertips, the ejaculate word forming on their lips, an O! and then again an O! of terror and astonishment? O how will they sing knowing what they know? Streaming through time, they see our approach, we are plotted in space, our light outlives our lives and sends a signal far into the future: the past is alive! Dead and dark for a long time, we are as stars to them, stars wishing to be wished on.

Switzerland, 1920 Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country, I square the egg and put it in a letter that all may read, gilding each word a little so that touched, it yields to a secret stirring, a small gold bird on a spring suddenly appearing to sing a small song of regret, elation, that overspills all private bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War, I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court. All for a bored Czarina! My version of history fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale, hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets! The old riddle of the chicken and the egg is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque of the imagination, the egg came first, containing, as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses inducing unrest among those too hungry to see the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat. Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all beautiful forms, a box without corners in which anything can be contained, anything except Time, that old jeweler who laughed when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks and watches of a country precisely ordered and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize. Three times I kiss you in memory of that first Easter, that first white rising, and send this message as if it could save you: Even the present is dead. We must live now in the future. Yours, Fabergé.