Fleda Brown

FOR "I'm leaving you," she said, "for you make me sick." But of course she didn't say that. She thought the "for"; she admired its elegant distance, the way it's wedged like an iron strut between result and cause, the way it's almost "far," and dire as a raised eyebrow. She liked the way it sounds like speaking through a cardboard paper towel tube, using it for a megaphone: not loud, but strong, all those compacted years shoving out the other end, as if she were certain she wanted to be alone. OR The first four bars of Beethoven's sixth, the Pastorale , repeat and repeat, always with variation: or , and or , something to violate expectations, not fully antiphonal, only an oar dipped into the measure to make an interior swirl, pulling the craft slightly to the side, yet ahead, still: little cupped trails alongside to mark where the mind turned, questions were asked, and shed, before moving on, nothing that can't be repaired. NOR As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests strip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure, as a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes and goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden alone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star, mind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden against loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.

We dressed for church.  I had a white hat and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke. You had to do that to show God you cared. God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible, while my panty-hose itched and my atheist father chewed his tongue and threatened to run out the door but didn't for my mother's sake, and she swallowed her fate, this marriage, like a communion cracker, and my brain- damaged brother lurched around the church nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next. My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew. If you get the vowel caught between the two consonants of your lips, it can carry you dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd give anything to be in the middle of, now.

I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powder- bitterness, the red combustion, my life, since anemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.