Ellen Bryant Voigt

The fingers lie in the lap, separate, lonely, as in the field the separate blades of grass shrivel or grow tall.

In the still morning when you move toward me in sleep for love, I dream of an island where long-stemmed cranes, serious weather vanes, turn slowly on one foot. There the dragonfly folds his mica wings and rides the tall reed close as a handle. The hippo yawns, nods to thick pythons, slack and drowsy, who droop down like untied sashes from the trees. The brash hyenas do not cackle and run but lie with their paws on their heads like dogs. The lazy crow’s caw falls like a sigh. In the field below, the fat moles build their dull passage with an old instinct that needs no light or waking; its slow beat turns the hand in sleep as we turn toward each other in the ripe air of summer, before the change of weather, before the heavy drop of the apples.

In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour, two figures emerge from their scalloped house carrying sledges that they clap, in turn, against the surface of the bell. By legend they are summer and winter, youth and age, as though the forces of plenty and of loss played equally on the human soul, extracted easily the same low bronze note spreading upward from the encumbrance of the village, past alluvial fields to the pocked highland where cattle shift their massive heads at this dissonance, this faint redundant pressure in the ears, in the air. From the village, the mountain seems a single stone, a single blank completion. Seeing the summit pierce the abstract heavens, we reconstruct the valley on the mountain— a shepherd propped against his crook, birds enthralled on a branch, the branch feathering the edge of the canvas—transposing such forms as can extend the flawed earth and embody us, intact, unaltering, among the soft surprising trees of childhood, mimosa, honey locust and willow. Wood in the midst of woods, the village houses are allied in a formal shape beside a stream, the streets concluding at the monument. Again the ravishing moment of the bell: the townspeople, curious or accustomed, stop to count the strokes, odd or even—the confectioner counting out the lavendar candies for his customer, the butcher, the greengrocer, the surgeon and the constable—as the housewife stands on the stoop, shaking her mop, and sees the dust briefly veil the air, an algebra of swirling particles.

The Bone-man lives in a stucco house. He ticks his heels on the cold terrazzo floor. He parks his ragtruck in the yard, instructs his crew on the white telephone. I am training my dog to attack the red-capped hunter bearing his long package. I am training the tethered jay to cry out against the killer who cracks the latch. On the open map, the road to my house bulges like a vein. He takes a train, he rents a car, he lurches in with an open fly. Sweet Eve was just the Farmer’s Daughter, he wooed her with a wormy apple. He’s a dirty joke, he’s always everybody’s last lover, he’s a regular can of worms—you wry Medusa, I am a mongoose staring you down.

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs—inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is done with pain: ice on the wound, the isolating tourniquet— as though to check an open vein where the self pumps out of the self would stop the second movement of the heart, diastolic, inclusive: to love is to siphon loss into that chamber. 2. What does it mean when a woman says, “my husband,” if she sits all day in the tub; if she worries her life like a dog a rat; if her husband seems familiar but abstract, a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use. They’ve reached the middle years. Spared grief, they are given dread as they tend the frail on either side of them. Even their marriage is another child, grown rude and querulous since death practiced on them and withdrew. He asks of her only a little lie, a pale copy drawn from the inked stone where they loll beside the unicorn, great lovers then, two strangers joined by appetite: it frightens her, to live by memory’s poor diminished light. She wants something crisp and permanent, like coral—a crown, a trellis, an iron shawl across the bed where they are laced together, the moon bleaching the house, their bodies abandoned— 3. In last week’s mail, still spread on the kitchen table, the list of endangered species. How plain the animals are, quaint, domestic, but the names lift from the page: Woundfin. Whooping Crane. Squawfish. Black-footed Ferret. California Least Tern. Dearest, the beast of Loch Ness, that shy, broad-backed, two-headed creature, may be a pair of whales or manatee, male and female, driven from their deep mud nest, who cling to each other, circling the surface of the lake.

When you move away, you see how much depends on the pace of the days—how much depended on the haze we waded through each summer, visible heat, wavy and discursive as the lazy track of the snake in the dusty road; and on the habit in town of porches thatched in vines, and in the country long dense promenades, the way we sacrificed the yards to shade. It was partly the heat that made my father plant so many trees—two maples marking the site for the house, two elms on either side when it was done; mimosa by the fence, and as it failed, fast-growing chestnuts, loblolly pines; and dogwood, redbud, ornamental crab. On the farm, everything else he grew something could eat, but this would be a permanent mark of his industry, a glade established in the open field. Or so it seemed. Looking back at the empty house from across the hill, I see how well the house is camouflaged, see how that porous fence of saplings, their later scrim of foliage, thickened around it, and still he chinked and mortared, planting more. Last summer, although he’d lost all tolerance for heat, he backed the truck in at the family grave and stood in the truckbed all afternoon, pruning the landmark oak, repairing recent damage by a wind; then he came home and hung a swing in one of the horse-chestnuts for my visit. The heat was a hand at his throat, a fist to his weak heart. But it made a triumph of the cooler air inside, in the bedroom, in the maple bedstead where he slept, in the brick house nearly swamped by leaves.

Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves are strung along a stick, the women standing in the August heat for hours—since first light— under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt. The older children hand the leaves from the slide, three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides waiting in what little shade there is: it’s ten o’clock, almost dinnertime. They pull the pails of cold lunch and Mason jars of tea out of the spring when they see the farmer coming from the field, their men stripped to the waist, polished by sweat and tired as mules. By afternoon, the loose cotton dresses, even the headrags are dark with sweat. Still their fingers never miss a stitch, though they’re paid not by the stick but by the day, and the talk—unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances— unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff-twig bouncing on one lip, the string paying out through their calluses, the piles of wide green leaves diminishing, until the men appear with the last slide and clamber up the rafters of the barn to line the loaded sticks along the tiers. It’s Friday: the farmer pays with a wad of ones and fives, having turned the mule out to its feed and water, hung up the stiffened traces and the bit. He checks again the other barns, already fired, crude ovens of log and mud where the crop is cured; in that hot dry acrid air, spreads a yellowing leaf across his palm, rolls an edge in his fingers, gauging by its texture and its smell how high to drive the fire. His crew is quiet in the pickup truck—did you think they were singing? They are much too tired to even speak, can barely lick salt from the back of a hand, brush at flies, hush a baby with a sugartit. And the man who owns this land is also tired. Everyday this week he’s meant to bring home pears from the old tree by the barn, but now he sees the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow jackets feeding there. He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife—he’ll say their banker raised a piss-poor field this year. And she will lean against the doorjamb while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin with a split lemon and a pumice stone, rubs them raw trying to cut the gummy resin, that stubborn black stain within the green.

Reading in bed, full of sentiment for the mild evening and the children asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them cry out now and then the brief reports of sufficient imagination, and listening at the same time compassionately to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble in the chimney— then it was out, not a trapped bird beating at the seams of the ceiling, but a bat lifting toward us, falling away. Dominion over every living thing, large brain, a choice of weapons—

This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor’s their own waiting room, in the Tribune a column for their news, in the village a neighborhood called Sugar Hill, uneven rows of unresponsive houses that took the maids back in each afternoon— in our homes used the designated door, on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs. Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids as the town bulged, families surfacing for groceries, medicine and wine, the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard, around the stone soldier and the flag, and still I never saw them on the street. It seemed a chivalric code laced the milk: you’d try not to look and they would try to be invisible. Once, on my way to the creek, I went without permission to the tenants’ log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square, leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior, Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught the terrifying smell of sweat and grease, smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress— This was rural Piedmont, upper south; we lived on a farm but not in poverty. When finally we got our own TV, the evening news with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan seemed like another movie—King Solomon’s Mines, the serial of Atlantis in the sea. By then I was thirteen, and no longer went to movies to see movies. The downstairs forged its attentions forward, toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little to one side or the other, arranging the pairs that would own the county, stores and farms, everything but easy passage out of there— and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film sputtered on the reel, when the music died and the lights came on, I swiveled my face up to where they whooped and swore, to the smoky blue haze and that tribe of black and brown, licorice, coffee, taffy, red oak, sweet tea— wanting to look, not knowing how to see, I thought it was a special privilege to enter the side door, climb the stairs and scan the even rows below—trained bears in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, while they were free, lounging above us, their laughter pelting down on us like trash.