Freya Manfred

The older we get the stranger my husband becomes, and the less certain I am that I know him. We used to lie eye to eye, breathing together in the immensity of each moment. Lithe and starry-eyed, we could leap fences even with babies on our backs. His eyes still dream off toward something in the distance I can't see; but now he gazes more zealously, and leaps into battle with a more certain voice over politics, religion, or art, and some old friends won't come to dinner. The molecules of our bodies spiral off into the stars on winds of change and chance, as we welcome the unknown, the incalculable, the spirit and heart of everything we named and knew so well— and never truly named, or knew, but only loved, at last.

I spy his head above the waves, big as a man’s fist, black eyes peering at me, until he dives into darker, deeper water. Yesterday I saw him a foot from my outstretched hand, already tilting his great domed shell away. Ribbons of green moss rippled behind him, growing along the ridge of his back and down his long reptilian tail. He swims in everything he knows, and what he knows is never forgotten. Wisely, he fears me as if I were the Plague, which I am, sick unto death, swimming to heal myself in his primeval sea.

On a hill overlooking the Rock River my father’s pear tree shimmers, in perfect peace, covered with hundreds of ripe pears with pert tops, plump bottoms, and long curved leaves. Until the green-haloed tree rose up and sang hello, I had forgotten. . . He planted it twelve years ago, when he was seventy-three, so that in September he could stroll down with the sound of the crickets rising and falling around him, and stand, naked to the waist, slightly bent, sucking juice from a ripe pear.