James McMichael

For the young man who would have myrrh from a woman, and cinnamon and aloes, smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it. Between her lips lies death. The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken Wisdom to him. Wisdom is the words that figure her as fear of the Lord. She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor. The young men Strangeness would claim She instructs. Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when pride comes, then comes shame. Let a man meet rather with a bear and her whelps than with folly. Withhold not good from those to whom it is due. The Lord’s eyes are on every place, as on Hell and destruction. Whose order was it that made the ends of the earth? Who put clothes on the deep? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if you can tell? Wisdom can. Still a child, she attended God when God had not yet divided the waters. It was no one but God’s to do to divide what isn’t said from what is. If God was male already, Wisdom was not male. (It may have been Wisdom’s difference from God that let God speak good into being.) Wisdom was God’s delight. She was with him over the waters. The still unformed deep would have lasted had God not given it form. It made God tremble that His call for it to be light there would not let night touch day. (There had to be room between them or they couldn’t be what God said they were.) God and Wisdom were two. Day and night were two also. Day gave it to be seen at once that down was and up. The deep had a face. God’s breath hovered over it until there was wind there instead. The wind is in force in many places over the earth’s dry land. Its going on like that is so it too can have extension and still not be seen. A door woke me. It was having to open and then flap shut against the stable’s north wall. some thuds were back-to-back. After others, there’d be a minute or more of only the wind. The wind had become something the trees had had between them for days now. They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved only so much. At the same time that it was many trees, the night wind I was hearing them in was one. (One has to be the number God has against the too-many-to-count.) If it had a back to it in those places how far north where right then it was quiet, the wind’s broad front was as high as just below God. (That’s where God starts to be a different nothing than wind.) If nothing’s around the wind to any of its sides, Wisdom confides that God’s around all. Inside all God holds, Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s good to be had, if God’s heeded. I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making God up out of the wind.

Amant in bed, dreaming. There are no borders to this miniature. B moves Bateau across the night. It is all the loops can do to let their gilding bulge with what is there. One light on the wide sea. The bones of stars. No other country is so curiously watered. From the estuaries to the very sources of its inwardtending channels, it rises in fogs which are themselves arterial. For its earth has more than once been seen quite early in the morning to lighten and give way. At the gate to the garden, Fair Welcome. She raises her hand. Salutare: to greet and to save. Leisures of tendrils are on all sides, winding with the snails through white acanthus and discarded badges of pilgrims. You may assign to the nineteen portholes in these borders whatever you like. The sand is of such fineness and the flow so singly clear that nothing seems to pass through, golden, and with all its lights. Water makes very much the best portable horizon. While its reflections are fainter than those in the speculum, their angles may be measured accurately and the differences from a true meridian reckoned by the clock. These sightings should be taken at least three hours before and after noon. Two liveried falconers, the jesses and bells, the gloves. Amant with the dove’s neck-ring, The lady in her chamber. Winter trees, rooks in the white branches, hounds, the dying boar. On the top of a mountain a lion waving his tail. The general course of the river straightens, and is moderately timbered. Scattered islands covered w/willow. Across from a single, long bluff of open rock, the plain to the S. is higher, extending quite to the mountains which contain still great quantities of snow. A small creek falls in from this side. Pursued its bottom for perhaps 4 m. Cottonwood. Much evidence of beaver. Now all of this is to be understood in a spiritual manner. Let us cover the nakedness of our fathers with the cloak of a favorable interpretation. Under a dry stalk of burdock, iron-brown latches and fittings, a few nails. The bulls are eating apples. Thick grasses sweat through the whole pasture. Dame Reason with her chaplet of apothegms. He should put his heart in a single place only. The truest things about bodies are their shadows. Pleas put me back in the water I am Paddle-to-the-Sea She has done this before. She wades into the current to the one point where the current lounges at her hips. She stands there. With all the time in the world, steadily, she kneels steadily deeper, to her shoulders, smiling, her hair cupped in both hands behind her neck. The Familiar gives Its first lesson to the lover. A new order is one that is renewed hourly. A drove of geese in its tall, while file plucks home through the wet fallow. Hedges darken between the fields. Along the wolds for miles in level tracts, haze from the lime-kilns. All quarters of the sky are wintry, huge. We could no longer be sure that we had passed the Préveranges. Freshets from the little stream poured onto the lane, filling ruts and drainages. In the dusk, and with our shoes soaked, we set off through a meadow, and another, and found soon an abandoned cottage of some old forester. We determined that I should stay and secure it as an outpost. Meaulnes went on alone. At an earlier hour, the ground at the wood’s edge illumines to some thousand footcandles, fades under the canopies, the layers of trees, of shrubs and herbs, under the dark itself, brighter by as many eyes as are buried there. Tied to a washboard, submerged, the panes of glass chime like clean ice. they are dangers harebells and just where the fall goes over they lean into the spray so far and bob so on their stems they thrill and a hammer rings carillon down the cows spine feel it there it goes again Death hath its seat close to the entrance of delight. —Gudique Sifting over porches and limp hibiscus, rust from the canvas awnings, its red spores dull in a moon that shows everything, houses and driveways, fishponds, all of them hiding from their insides, forgetting, looking around. there is no way to lie down and not lie in the same way that someone has had to lie thinking of how far it is to the places no one goes or to any place this far from the beds where the dying cry into the night this far Deacons and presbyters. The Laying On of Hands. In a vial, juice from the wild cucumber, powdered glass, the divine Endura.

The farmhouses north of Driggs, silos for miles along the road saying BUTLER or SIOUX. The light saying rain coming on, the wind not up yet, animals waiting as the front hits everything on the high fiats, hailstones bouncing like rabbits under the sage. Nothing running off. Creeks clear. The river itself a shallow, straight shoot to the north, its rocks mossy, slick above the few deep pockets. On another drainage, the O-T-O. Loose stands of aspen on the slopes. Dude cabins, their porches and split-log loveseats, dull yellow curtains slapping over the open sills. From Emigrant north to the Great Bend, loaves of haystacks, stud farms, charolais, steel flumes between the ditches. Access to the river’s acreage closed to its whole length, the county roads dusty, turning onto the high shelves of side valleys. Scattered shacks and corrals. An old homestead, the sod roof rotting out its timbers. Below the spurs from the higher range, basins in the mountain pastures fill with odd water. The henbane dries. Ruts cross in the grass at a schoolhouse. Each runnel mixing where it can the spring creeks deepen and go on easily, swelling to the larger tributary with its pools and banks. At any bend the willows bend too, and gravel bars on the other shore flare into the shallows. An encampment. Ponies wade to their knees and drink, raising up now and then to look out through the smoke to the near hills, the one plateau heading off beyond the Crazies and the Little Belts, north. It strikes the river at the Gates, the water piling through its broad course, level, ridges and the vertical faces of bluffs crowding to each side. This rock is of an excellent grit for whetstones, hard and sharp. There is here more timber than below the falls. A spring immensely clear and of a bluish cast boils up near its center with such force that its surface in that part is strangely higher than the surrounding earth. I heard today a noise resembling the discharge of a piece of ordnance. Unless it be the bursting of the rich mines of silver in these mountains, I am at a loss to account for it. As the passages about the falls are narrow and steep, and as the buffalo travel to the river in great herds, the hinder part presses those in front out of their depth to the strong current. Their carcasses by the hundreds litter the shore below the cataracts. We have made of the mast of the pirogue two axletrees. Walked ahead to my first view of the falls, hearing them from afar. Their spray is scarcely formed when bodies of the same beaten water thrust over and down, concealing every shape, their whiteness alone visible. We will leave at this place all heavy baggage, the red pirogue, and whatever provisions we can do without. Needing a cellar for the caching of our stores we set hands to digging. More white bear. These fellows leave a formidable impression in the mud or sand. Goodrich, who is remarkably fond of fishing, caught many trout of two different species. Came to in a handsome timbered bottom across from the entrance of a very considerable river. Its character is so precisely that of the one below that the party with few exceptions has pronounced it the Missouri. The fork to the south is perfectly transparent, runs rapidly with an even, unriffled surface. Its bed is composed of round, smooth stones like those of rivers issuing from a mountainous country. If this latter be the one we are to take we should encounter within 50 miles a series of precipitous falls. There is now no timber on the hills. The black rock has given place to a yellow and brown or black clay, brown and yellowish white sandstone and a hard, dark freestone. It rises from the water abruptly on both sides in varied walls. I could discover above their horizon only the most elevated points. The river retains both its whitish color and a proportion of its sediment, but it is much clearer than below. The banks afforded us good towing. This method of ascending the river is the safest and most expeditious. We pass a great number of dry streambeds. These plains being level and wholly destitute of timber, the wind blows violently with its loads of sand. Driftwood comes down as the water rises. The banks are falling in very fast and I wonder that our pirogues are not swallowed by them. Wild hyssop grows here. A few cottonwood along the verges. Undergrowths of rose and serviceberry, and small-leafed willow on the sandbars. Met this evening the famous white bear. I had rather deal with several indians than with this gentleman. Much less ice running in the river. We make ready to set out, the party in general good health except for a few venereal complaints. A windy, blustering day. Our two pirogues still frozen. I draw a connection of the country from the information of traders. The falls are about 800 miles west. Rose early and commenced roofing the two wings of huts. Our situation sandy. Cottonwood and elm, some small ash. We must now settle for the winter. Very cold. Hard frosts. The river falling. For several days we pass deserted Mandan villages along both banks. The beaver and otter are becoming more abundant. We put ashore at noon, setting fire to the prairies to signal that we wish council with the natives. These Arikara much reduced by pox. It is customary for their nation to show its grief by pain, some cutting off two smaller fingers at the second joint. The earth of the plains is in many places opened in long crevices, its soil indifferent and with a kind of timothy branching like flax from its main stalk. Delayed here today so as to take equal altitudes, the weights of the waters of the two rivers, their specific gravities. As we near the great Platte, the sandbars are more numerous, sawyers worse than they were below. Mulberry, oak and walnut. These prairies from the river have very much the appearance of farms. We continue to pole our way upstream. Nothwithstanding our precautions, we struck a bar and were near turning over. The sergeants are directed each to keep a journal of all passing occurrences and such other descriptions of the country as shall seem to them worthy of notice. Our hunters report deer in every copse. I got out and walked for one mile through a rush bottom, nettles as high as my breast. All the forepart of the day we were arranging our company and taking on those articles we will need. St. Charles. The men spent their last night agreeably, dancing with the French ladies, &c. My ride was on a road finely shaded, with now and then a good farm. The corn in tassel, its leaves of a deep rich green bending at the ends by their own weight. Wheat and oat stubble. A hilly country. I passed a toll-gate, and, looking back, had my last view of the town’s steeples. From the state house cupola I could count the buildings, the number of which was ninety. A wooden bridge crosses the river just below the town. Men were engaged in racing their horses. I sought lodging and was shown to bed in a large barrack where a man and wife conversed with me until I feigned sleep. This is a post town, the mails arriving from both east and west on Wednesdays and Saturdays. A young woman gave me directions from an upstairs window. I descended the hill into Frankfort. There has lately been established a large manufactory for spinning hemp and flax. It is wrought by water and keeps in motion 1200 spindles. The streets of Lexington cross at right angles, its stores filled both with imports and with local goods: fine cutlery, tin ware, muslins and nankeens. I was so well put up that a man would be fastidious to a fault to have found the least thing wanting. Approaching the city the land changed steadily for the better, no longer broken, as to the eastward, but fine extensive levels and slopes, the road very wide, with grazing parks, meadows, and every spot cultivated. The farms hereabout have generally good and spacious stone barns, a few acres cleared but for those stumps or girdled trees still standing. The neighbors found last year a human jawbone, rough and honeycombed. My wagoner arrived this afternoon and went on, appointing to be in Louisville before me. I pass a house with small turrets at its corners, lawns, the whole needing only vineyards for the look of villas in Provence and Languedoc. Noticed along the banks of the Holston phlox with white flowers and phlox with pink flowers, two different species, very small phlox with lance-shaped leaves. Where I come in from Abingdon, the Kentucky road divides, the other fork for Burke courthouse. With nothing to do I make ink from gall nuts. More opossum taken in the woods. This animal’s greatest peculiarity is the false belly of the female. She can draw the slit so close that one must look narrowly to find it if she be virgin. The air clearing this morning, I was surprised with a full prospect of mountains. This river where we leave off is 240 miles distant in a straight line from Currituck Inlet. The turkey-cocks begin to gobble, which is the language wherein they make love. We have a dreamer of dreams among us who warned me in the morning to take care that I not fall into the creek. I thanked him and used what caution I could, but my horse made a false leap and laid me down in the water at my full length. The sky at sunset had a swept look. There was risk of our dining with St. Anthony when one indian knocked down a fat bear. Of the stem of the silk-grass their women make small aprons which they wear for decency. They put these on with so much art that their most negligent postures reveal nothing to our curiosity. The ruffles of some of our fellows were a little discolored by the bloodroot which these ladies use to improve their charms. Bear, it would seem, is no diet for saints, for it is apt to make them too rampant. At night, the surveyors took advantage of a clear sky. This trial of our variance shows it still something less then 3 degrees, so it remains much as we had found it at the sea. We have now run the poles beyond those inhabitants most inland. There fell a sort of Scots mist all the way. I have learned how rattlesnakes take a squirrel. They ogle the poor beast till by force of charm it falls down stupefied and senseless. The snake approaches it and moistens first one ear and then the other with his spittle, making the head all slippery. When that is done he draws this member into his mouth, and after it, by casual degrees, all the rest of the body. I am not so rigid an observer of the Sabbath as to allow of no journeys to be taken upon it. Nor would I care, like a certain New England magistrate, to order a man to the whipping post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord’s Day. And yet we found plainly that travelling on the Sunday had not thriven with us in the least. The rain was enlivened with loud thunder, and there is something in the woods that makes this sound more awful, the violence of the lightning more visible as the trees are shivered quite to the root. This Great Dismal Swamp is the source of five several rivers. We run our line to its skirts, which begin with dwarf reeds, moist uneven ground. The season inclining us to aguish distempers, we were suffered by the resident to cut up wood for firing, drive away the damps. At the bottom of the account Mankind are great losers by the luxuries of feather beds and warm apartments. We perceive our appetites to mend, and though we have to drink only what Adam had in Paradise, that stream of life runs cool and peaceably in our veins. The days are hard. Our slumbers sweeten, and if ever we dream of women they are kind. I delight to see the banks of the Inlet adorned with myrtle, yet it must be owned that, sacred to Venus though it be, this plant grows commonly in very dirty soil. Norfolk has most the air of a town of any in Virginia. There are now riding at her wharves near 20 brigantines. The trade hither is engrossed by those saints of New England who every week carry off a pretty deal of tobacco. I have found that after my devotions a walk in the garden can do much to fill my heart with clear obedience. I repair me there that I might think deeply of the earth and how it will be all too soon my sleeping-place. For I am told to fear such things as bring me to ill terms, told of those who seek congress with the earth that they shall have her in their time forever. That her places sing their love-songs for no man. That I am not the suitor whose betrothed awaits him, but some unwelcome third with God alone her lover. And yet I would look upon such country as will show me nature undressed, the strata of the land, her lays and beds and all her privacies. For my wonder tells me I should be promiscuous, should learn by all the laws of bodies and by where they are the joyful news out of the new found world. This walk is news. Its bodies point me always in and out along some newer course. There have been divers days together wherein alone I’ve watched these flowers buoyed on their stems and holding up the sun. Just now I catch them thinking on themselves, composing from their dark places the least passages for light, tendering how they look and how I look on them. It comes to me that the world is to the end of it thinking on itself and how its parts gather with one another for their time. These are the light, and all the forms they show are lords of inns wherein the soul takes rest. If I could find it in myself to hide the world within the world then there would be no place to which I could remove it, save that brightness wherein all things come to see.

In dogma is the secret that renders God unconditioned, on one condition. “If you are not My people, I am not your God.” As fashioned by His people's witness, a made thing, God, condemns the made things graven images are. Inscribed as born wittingly of Himself, God is (so to speak) that Father abler than the most sovereign earthly father to make all things good. God the Father is conceived as for us. Purposive, stewarding, benign, He covenants our living on. “Written in continuance” in His Book before they took form were the parts of our fitful bodies. As if what's given with the world is life only, life, and not (along with it, in time) at last, life's needful withdrawal, God's said to let the truthful keep their lives forever if they swear God does what He says. These are the portions: either I'll outlast death or it me. Little matter which if it's the avowed God I'm given up to. That I'm settled in the finite is what's true instead. Living is a good I don't want stopped even for the saved. I'm beholden to it all the way that, in its one chance each with me and others, death hasn't used itself up yet. Mine affords me another day hours before it's light. Along with the caused things outside that I can't see, I'm here ahead of myself again toward that coupling with the ground when “I am poured out like water.” Death's still to be heard from at its least reserved. Under its breath it primes me to pay up and look pleasant.

I’m four at the hospital I was born in. From behind the nurse’s white gown and mask: I want you to count backward from ten for me now out loud. * My stepmother with a stack of my father’s papers. What do I do with it, Jimmie? * It was a beautiful suit of clothes, very expensive. I saw it hanging from the mirror on the far side of his car. He was so pleased when he found my note on the windshield. He took the suit upstairs and came back down to let me see it on him. * When they want rain, they put their mouths to the water and blow. They take some in their hands and as they throw it upward cry Look here! Do like this! * A note to her television set was left by a woman who then took her own life. * We were replaced on the line by the Unimates. They’re good at the work. They’re never late. The one problem with them is that they don’t buy cars. * It defies me. I put it right here where I always do, and it’s not there. I loathe a beastly key. * If you work hard to keep a secret, you’re resentful when it’s not found out. * Through our closed eyelids as the bomb exploded, we could see every bone in our hands. * It has a Slavic name he couldn’t pronounce. I said It’s flanged and chrome, with seven spiders on each side. That’s it, he said. Where can he but it, he needs it today. I told him I don’t know, but I’ve got one in my garage. * She can’t leave you alone. Sits you down, feeds you what you don’t need to eat. It’s no use telling Bertie Mae no. And of course we wouldn’t take nothing for her. * I’ve killed other people. You’ll find that this will go better if you and I don’t talk. * Foreplay starts at breakfast. * On the answering machine: If you could call me tonight no matter how late, it would be a good idea.

The mountain north of Pasadena has severe and angular back canyons where the light is always unexpected, out of place, too simple for the clutter of the granite blocks along the creeks. The slopes have low rough shrubs, some firebreaks. It rains sometimes, and then the soils wash easily through Rubio and Eaton canyons to the small catch-basins and the storage tanks. The bedrocks tilt toward the west, and so the seepage drains that way. Along a wall of the Arroyo, it comes down in springs named Tibbets, Ivy, Flutterwheel. These are the only steady water, and the Indiana colony had hauled it out in tubs and barrels to their lots. They’d cleared the greasewood from the flats and planted groves of orange and peach trees, built their houses in the California Style with battened redwood boards. Nearer the Arroyo, on its terraces, they saved a few live oak. They’d have December picnics there and afterward would walk from that side, down the bluff. The floor was cool, and there were sycamore and alder, loose irregular new channels through the willows. On the other side, and south, below the San Rafaels, more oak, the sun. They’d take a new way back. Their lots extended east to the Lake Vineyard Land and Water Company. And as a grudging compromise between that tract and theirs, the Central School was built in the dry neat rows of the orchards east of where they lived. Excursion parties from the Middle West were taken mostly with the climate. At the citrus fairs, the charts and produce showed them that it didn’t freeze. Storms were rare and offered the consoling interest of a flood in the Arroyo, loud and stupid boulders the size of safes colliding down the wash. A new hotel faced south on Colorado. Like the Ward Block to its right across Fair Oaks, it was substantial, frame, with dormers and brick chimneys. Each had its widow’s walk and looked as much like Boston as it needed to. Someone from Los Angeles brought in a telephone. He hooked it up in the store on the southeast corner, rode back downtown and called and asked for so-and-so, who wasn’t there. From that one crossing, there were fewer lots each month, new storefronts and more traffic, speculating boomers and pikers, midnight sales, bands and free lunches at the auctions. Owners were induced to move east on Colorado to more eligible locations, but the cross-streets led through dusty tent-lined orchards to the chaparral. The boom came back toward the center and was done. What they’d been selling was the weather and a place to live, and that was what was left. As their one industry, the Novelty Works of Mr. Wakeley went on stuffing scorpions and trapdoor spiders, horny toads, small animals and birds. The balance of trade was not in Pasadena’s favor. But there were jobs. James Scoville kept men doing rockwork on the banks above his groves. The Arroyo narrowed there, and so he had them build a pumphouse and a dam and turn a railroad trestle upside down between two concrete footings. This was the central bridge. It crossed to open ranchland that would subdivide more slowly than the woodlots on the bluffs. Another bridge, La Loma, farther south, was taller, with a wider span and sycamores around its girders. It had replaced the Johnston bridge and made it easier to sell the tracts. The wealth of the invisible elite went into homes on Grand and Orange Grove, Raymond, Nithsdale Rd., Arroyo Terrace, Bellefontaine, new bungalows that looked much less expensive than they were. In their commissions, Charles and Henry Greene used common and available materials, stones from the Arroyo, bricks, a simple flexible pine frame of 2 x 4s and hand-split cedar shakes, porches that were railed with the same rough timber as the posts and beams and trusses and the overhanging rafters for the roof. Their costs were mostly labor. They’d show the workers where they wanted terraces and knolls, what trees and shrubs to save. A local factory expanded to keep up with them, and they’d make daily visits there to oversee the millmen and the carvers or the quality of lumber that had just been shipped. Their mason did exactly what they called for on retaining-walls, the color of the fill, which stone or clinker at what angle to the rest. Each minor thing they cared about earned what it had to do with matters that were not their business. Where the money for a house had come from, what the Mayor had in mind, or Public Works, or how the street would look with lights— affairs like these beyond the garden stayed accessible, a movement to and from the house implicit in its horizontal lines. The roof was long and relatively flat. Beams above the frames of doors and windows were much broader than the frames themselves and paralleled the covered entryways and porches. Even the stairs inside were less than vertical, each section of the railing carved from a single piece of teak and joined to all the other teak—the notched and interlocking kickplates, the splines and level boards that were the facing of the well. Their stairs were furniture. A bench along a landing had the same insistent finish as the inglehook, the same square ebony caps for screwheads as the chairs and tables. Everything showed you how it went together. A scarf or box-joint, metal straps, continuous sure banding from the hallway into any room. There was tile and leaded glass, but it was mostly wood—mahoganies and walnuts, oak, redwood or white cedar wainscots, doweled and pegged loose furniture in teak or birch or lignum-vitae, a smooth self-lubricating wood that didn’t crack. The grain inside was outside too in rafters and stiff rounded beam-ends that were oiled and rubbed. They looked penetrable to light, looked as if they could absorb and carry it at any single time toward the one best place inside. Lucile’s house on Holliston was miles from the Arroyo. But it was imitation Greene & Greene, a less impressive version of their simplest large two-story frames. Its eaves on both the north and south reached almost to the neighbors’ lots, lots that for several blocks each way repeated themselves with slightly different houses. The man she’d bought it from was still a pharmacist at Lake and Villa. He didn’t know me and I never spoke to him. He had a massive tumor on his neck and jaw, and I would be amazed each time I saw him that he wasn’t dead. Until a year or so before he’d sold the house, there’d been an organ with the pipes extending to an upstairs bedroom, probably the room across the hall from Donna’s. There would have been no floor between the first and second stories, our den and sewing room a single shaftlike chamber that the sound would fill. It’s just as likely that the floor had been there all along, exactly as we knew it, with the organ somewhere else. But of all the rooms downstairs, only the den could open to the room above it. With the ranks of pipes along the wall that backed against the stairs, there would have been high windows to the south and west, and possibly, around three sides, a thin railed walk one got to from the upstairs hall. I might let myself care more about how well or what he played if it were clearer to me how the organ looked. If I know anything about its wood, I know it from the oak-frame sliding doors between the den and living room. So if the console had been quartered oak, the case was walnut—no tracery around the pipes, the same plain cuts as for the cabinets and counters everywhere downstairs. How many manuals there were, or knobs with nameplates for the pitches and the stops, if the bench was free or fixed, or whether the pedals for the naturals were strips that flared slightly in their alignment toward the darker sharps— the whole clear shape of it in that one place remains as closed to me as how it worked, as the feeders and the reservoirs, the valves, the layers of coarse felt between the double panels of the swell-box; as how the sliders kept the air below the upper-boards and pipes and let it go and let it sound the way he wanted it to sound, the wind inside the pipe striking against a lip and coming back, contained and vibrant for the time he kept it there. Its shock to the air outside the pipe was how it sounded, the way he wanted it to sound, or as it might have sounded if the room were larger and the sounds dispersed and mixed less palpably, went on together with the light or darkness in the room. There wouldn’t have been time between the sounds to count them to be sure that nothing of the piece was missing. Nor was there time for me, at any moment in the sewing room, to know the changes that the light had worked downstairs. Not that I would have tried to know, or done much more than suffer my current fit of pouting. I’d hear Lucile walk past the stairs toward the kitchen in her busy self-important way. Maybe she’d leave. From a back window of the sewing room, I’d see her in her car and starting out the driveway. These were the least obstructed windows in the house. Late in the day, haze showed its tired agreement with the house next door, the shingles dull and olive like the rusted screens, the asphalt paper on the roof. I could see my aunt’s back yard on Chester. Trees as far west of us as Lake marked off the streets in staggered elevations—palms, short rows of deodars and jacarandas. At night, from a window in the southern wall, the top three letters on the tower for the academy kept coming on one at a time, then all together. [...] Richard Arkwright was a barber. He toured the markets and the farms and bought the hair of country girls and made it into wigs. When he hired John Kay to build a frame for spinning thread from the strands of cotton, manufacture was domestic—looms and jennies in the kitchens of the small freeholders and the farmers who would sell their cloth to merchants. Wool was the English staple trade, a privilege of the landed graziers. All gentlemen wore silk. Raw cotton was a coarse adherent fiber from Brazil and the Antilles. It had to be opened and cleaned and have its strands laid parallel by two large cards that worked it back and forth between them. Drawing made the slivers equal in thickness by redoubling them, and roving made them thicker still and left them ready to be spun. Arkwright’s water-frame replaced the hand’s inexpert pulling and pushing, movements that begin and end and can’t repeat themselves exactly. At Cromford, with the money of two hosiers, he built a gas-lit mill above the Derwent. He needed journeymen clockmakers who did tooth and pinion, a smith who forged and filed. Afraid that no one man would know “all that I should expect he might,” he was “determined to let no person see the works.” He wanted “locks and hangings for the windows; good latches for the outer doors, and for the inner doors as well.” To make the other money come to him, he specified as little as he could in all his patents. And as he sold the plans, he built six factories in Lancashire. At Glasgow, he was made an honorary burgess and was taken to the Falls of Clyde, at New Lanark, where he would build another mill. He advertised for weavers, framework-knitters. Children who were seven could have constant employment. In the riot against machines, they burned his mill near Chorley. He was threatened: “I will lie in wait for you in this town Nottingham or wherever I most likely to find you. I will ashure shute you as your name is what it is. Dam you do you think the town must be ruled by such a barber as you.” Contemporaries thought he was a Newton or Napoleon. He was knighted and named High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He claimed that he could pay the national debt if he were left alone to make his money; and when he died, the income from his mills was more than that of most German principalities. He was asthmatic. An economist of time, he worked at English grammar as he traveled in a post-chaise with four horses driven always at top speed. He lost his patents at a trial in 1785. The industry was open. In the damp valleys, at breaks in the long profiles of the streams, new spinning mills went up. They were too far outside the towns to worry that they’d be inspected—close enough to send their thread to upland workshops by the new trans-Pennine turnpike roads, or by the new canal that crossed the valley of the Calder, through the Craven drumlins east to the other watershed, and Leeds. There was so much thread that barns were fitted up with handlooms that could weave good fustians and cambrics. Cotton was its own new country, and the landlords feared the moneyed men. Land could itself be capital, the business of the aristocracy. Each landlord had his broken straggling plots, their furrows running lengthwise to the rounded headlands where the plough would turn. He knew which land was his, but it was open and was grazed collectively by several owners. Between harvest and sowing, even his farmers’ pigs would graze there with the sheep. Cows grazed the catchwork meadows on the terraces, or at the watersides. Enclosure was the landlords’ plan to change their strips of arable to larger straighter fields. They would appropriate the wastes—the marshes and moors, the peat-bogs where the farmers got their fuel. Commons had been “a profit which a man hath in the land of another, as to pasture beasts thereon, cut wood, catch fish, hunt coneys, and the like.” In most of the Midland parishes, there were now Acts for Enclosure of the Open and Common Fields, new roads with wide grass verges to a ditch, then quickset hedgerows, ash, occasional small farmsteads with a croft, no lanes, the landlord’s manor and his park, and in the fields the thickets for his foxes. It cost him less to graze than till. The stiff clay soils would hold a year of wheat, another of spring corn, lie fallow. The land would yield him more if he could save the labor of his farmers and the cottagers. Tenure at Will was his prerogative to put them off the land when he was through with them. As he engrossed more farms, they set his hedges, drained and marled the looser tracts and planted clover, turnips, and lucerne. He managed breeds of stock and turned them out to graze the even turf across the hillocks. Enclosure had made “fat beasts, and lean poor people.” With no one skill peculiar to themselves, they left the villages for workshops in the north. The Earl of Leicester said “I look around and see no other house than mine. I am like the ogre in the tale, and have eaten up all my neighbors.”

I know I’ll lose her. One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up. She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring. Nothing from her will reach me after that. I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house mine too if I can make them take her place. I’ll have to. I mustn’t think her room and whether if by nine one morning in a year she will have left it, sleepy, late, remembering tomorrow is New York, her interview with UN General Services a cinch to go well. What I must think instead is Bobby’s follow-through from the left side. He pulls my lob past Geoff, who’s bored. Shagging five soaked balls isn’t Geoff’s idea. I tell him he can hit soon. He takes his time, then underhands the first off line and halfway back. Ground fog, right field, the freeway, LAX. She has both official languages. For the International Court, “The Registrar shall arrange to have interpreted from French to English and from English into French each statement, question and response.” Or maybe it will be Washington she’ll work for. On mission to a new West African republic, she might sign on with Reynolds, Kaiser, Bethlehem Steel. They needed Guinea’s bauxite for aluminum, manganese from Gabon, their dealings for more plants and harbors slowed by lengthy phonecalls through Paris, When there were snags, she’d fly there that same afternoon, her calendar a mix of eighty hours on and whole weeks off. There’d be sidetrips to England by Calais and one aisle over from her on the crossing, by himself, the man I saw this week I fear she’d like. He’d have noticed her before they cleared the dock, she’d been writing something, left wrist bent toward him, the card almost filled, now, with whatever she’d been telling someone else. She’d start another, the address first. Eased that he’d sense it in his shoulders when she stood to leave, he’d keep himself from looking, it was much better not to look, he might not interest her, better not to be left remembering how she looked. Dover. He’d follow her to the train and sit across from her, apply himself convincingly to his four appointments and their dossiers. After she’d make notes to herself from a bed and breakfast guide, from The Guide to the National Trust, she’d put the books back in her hemp bag. He didn’t mean to be nosy, he’d say, but was she going to see some country houses while she’s here? Comfortably, she’d tell him which ones. Though he knew them all, he’d be so taken with her that he’d lose what she was saying, he’d undergo the list and ask if she’d be hiring a car. She’d pick one up tomorrow in Hammersmith and then drive west. Would she have dinner with him tonight? She’d say she’d like that: she was booked at the St. Margaret’s, off Russell Square, could he meet her there at seven? When she’d close her eyes, her head against the cushioned wing of the seat, he’d think her managing to rest was not so much a carelessness to his attentions as that she wasn’t vain. She wouldn’t catch him watching if he angled his look away from her toward the window, in the tunnels especially he’d see reflected in its glass her gradual full outline as she breathed. There would be time all evening to talk. He’d tell her then about his uncle’s place in Surrey where they’d both be welcome, its rubble-stone and leaded casements, tile, an east loggia to the lawns and wooded slope. He’d loved the kitchen garden as a boy, the path there, silver lavender and catmint borders, an oak-doored archway framing for him on chains above a well the twin coronas of roses in the cool damp light. [...] Our house is a winter rental. Each June, we store everything we don’t take with us in the camper to Idaho and Montana. It’s two full days’ drive with desert much of the way, then farms. Only in the last half hour, past Ashton, up the hill, are there logging roads and lodgepole, spruce and fir. It agrees with us to be outdoors all summer. I’m shameless about how much I want to fish the broad wadeable meadow streams. The new mayflies can’t lift themselves from the surface film until their wings dry. When I watch them drift down over the slack water, disturbances are rocks sometimes and sometimes fish. Linda does needlepoint and crossword puzzles. She keeps checklists of the flowers she finds on her long woodland walks. We do our wash in town and play cards in the hotel lobby. We have time to read. By August, there are berries. A six-pack of Grain Belt beer is ninety-nine cents. Friends have a ranch with acres that stretch back through bottomland to their mountain pasture. The old Hodges’ place is vacant. They ask us to stay. In the upstairs bedroom under the cottonwood, it’s almost dark when it clouds up late in the afternoon. We find cancelled checks in the homestead down by the creek. Lots are for sale. In our fifth summer there, we buy one. A contractor frames a house for us which I have six weeks to enclose. I want to be, but I’m not good at it, it doesn’t please me at all when my rip-cut splinters the cedar batten, I miss the stud completely with a second nail and I throw things and scream. She can’t stand it when I’m like this. But though she has to leave sometimes and not come back for hours, the work gets done. We drain the pipes, hang shutters, close the place up. [...] After five years of saying it, it became a joke with us that we’d have a baby in five years. We’re waiting for the EPT. Sitting as far away from it as she can and still be home, she wants me to be the one to read it. I’m surprised how glad I am. Her not being glad lasts half an hour. She’ll work for the library until she’s due in June. The baby does its tours inside her. When we put the big headphones on her tummy, it seems to hear. Her doctor tells her to cut down on salt, her blood pressure’s high. We buy a stethoscope and cuff. She tells Linda to quit her job and go to bed. The salt-free cottage cheese is cardboard, but it’s not working, nothing is, I can wait until she’s been resting for an hour before I take it, it doesn’t help. Since her diastolic number’s always high, it’s of course high when she sees the doctor: she’ll be in the hospital tomorrow morning if we don’t change doctors tonight. La Leche League has two it recommends. The one who calls back asks everything. If she were his wife, he says, he’d want her in the hospital. We’re too frightened to sleep. I hold her. I fall off only when it’s almost light and by then the birds have started. It makes her cry to hear them. When she’s admitted to the ward, they hook an IV up to her that hurts her hand. On the vacant bed next to her, there’s a tray with a syringe and drugs: if she goes into labor she might have convulsions. They tell us on Monday that the baby wouldn’t be able to breathe yet on its own, on Wednesday that it could suffocate inside her, her placenta’s shutting down. They’ll do another amniocentesis in the morning, they’ll take the baby in the afternoon. She and I are such cases by now that I think they’ll lie, they’ll want to quiet us for the birth by telling us the baby’s lungs are ready, that stranger things have happened in three days. A nurse comes in and says the baby’s lungs are ready, let’s go to prep. Since Linda can’t have it naturally, it matters all the more to her that she at least be awake. She’ll get to be. Both doctors promised me this morning that she’ll have a local, it’s up to them. I get scrubbed. Everyone’s in greens. Down a corridor, away from me so I won’t hear, the anesthesiologist is talking to her doctors, who are very intent. The scene breaks up. Her doctors don’t have to tell me, I know already, I want to hit them, I say I’d promised her because they’d promised, I’d told her she could be awake, that I could be there with her. Stop it, you can’t let her see you like this, her pediatrician says. She’s partly sedated. I tell her I’ll be waiting right down the hall. From another room than hers, a baby, a first cry. I have to hear it or not listen too for our baby, Linda’s asleep, she can’t. If it’s from her room now that I’m hearing something fainter, someone should tell me soon. I believe the nurse who says “I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s really good.” “How is Linda?” “They’re sewing her up now, she’ll be fine.” There’s no reason not to believe her, Linda’s not going to die, she’s not going to die or have to hate it that she didn’t, her baby’s all right, we haven’t killed it by not changing doctors. It won’t have to be breathed for by a machine. Almost a month early, he’s a wonder to the staff at five pounds ten, he’s Linda’s doing, she should be proud of him, she’ll nurse him and she’ll heal. I can buy her now the blue- and white-checked gingham mother and baby rabbit. I can buy her a robe. He comes home with her after the weekend. The two of them feel so hallowed to me that I’m slow to tell it hasn’t worked out for her at all. She writes an essay about it. His having been taken from her early means she failed. Bodies are bodies. They know things, they have their own ways. She could have done it if she’d gotten the chance. Her doctor didn’t want Linda caring how things went. That had to be her job, not Linda’s. She’d gone on to say it almost proudly of Linda at the last: “This little girl would be fine if she didn’t have a brain.” It’s a long essay. I recognize everything but me. Not her antagonist, exactly, I’d been another thing she’d had to worry. Whenever I’d taken her blood pressure, she’d felt blamed by me if it was high. Each crisis had been hers to deal with by herself. Too busy or aloof to find her a better doctor, I’d taught my classes, read, worked on my poem. [...] She’s at the mirror. I need to get behind it to the aspirin, do so, close it. “Goodness you wake up with a lot of headaches.” “Sorry.” “Don’t be sorry, I’m sorry for you.” Surprised that it turned out like that, and hating her, hating what I’d heard in my own voice, I get out of her way. From the privacy of brooding on it in another room, I hear what she meant: “Congratulations. As good as you are at headaches, why settle for so little, why not work up a malignancy of some kind?” And I remember that yesterday, when we were getting in the car, she winced. She’s always twisting her neck or back or something, so I didn’t ask her “Did you hurt yourself?” but “Did you hurt yourself again?” [...] I move the rest of my clothes out of the house. Our fights about money pass. In having to leave her, I also have to think again the most forgettable of our outings. Over the years, we’d taken our bodies along in company to certain places. In front of me a little to the left, she’d answered “Yes” to “Two for dinner?” I wasn’t thinking, at the time, how I fit into what she cared about: she fit for me. It comes back to me now because I have to change it, I’d gotten it wrong. Normal, expected, there’s a brittle politeness between us when I stop by to pick up Owen. Below the hem of her flannel housedress, her bare feet.

The Artichoke She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. She would sustain him, Would cover his heart. The hairy needles And the bigger leaves, These she licked into shape, Tipping each with its point. He is the mud-flower, The thorny hugger. The Asparagus She sent packs of great beasts to pass Over him, trailing belly-fur and dust, Bending their nostrils to his frail spear. This was to toughen him. For what? Stupidly, like a squirrel, standing up, Looking here and there, looking to all sides, He is cut down and taken away. She can smell him steaming, his crowns Already tender, his spine giving in. Now he is threatening to wither terribly, And slip from the water altogether, And billow through the kitchen like prayer. The Cauliflower Her words clot in his head. He presses himself to remember And feels the skin peel back, The skull bleach, crack, fall away. All that's left of him is the brain, Its tissue knotting up to shade him, The pain of its light pulsing How to move, how to move. Herbs Before fog leaves the scrub-oak Or the grasses of the downland, Take dragonwort under the black alder, Take cockspur grass and henbane, The belladonna, the deadly nightshade. Free them as you would a spider's web, Singing over them: Out, little wen, Out, little wen. Sing this into the mouth of the woman. Corn I am the corn quail. What I do is quick. You will know only The muffled clucking, The scurry, the first Shiver of feathers And I will be up, I will be in your Head with no way out, Wings beating at the Air behind your eyes. Celery The hope with water is that it will conceal nothing, that a clearness will follow upon it like the clearness after much rain, or the clearness where the air reaches to the river and touches it, where the rain falls from the trees into the river. Bell Pepper To find enough rooms for the gathering The walls go on alone not waiting For corners but thinking of sleeves And how the wind fills them and the snow Fills them and how cold it is without Fires when there are not enough rooms. Potatoes It had been growing in her like vegetables. She was going into the ground where it could Do better, where she could have potatoes. They would be small and easily mistaken For stones. It would fall to her to Sort them out, persuade them to stay Close to her, comforting her, letting her Wear them on her body, in her hair, Helping her hold always very still.