Jennifer Michael Hecht

I believe you can build a boat. I believe you can get to water. I do not believe you can get the boat on water. How do other people bear what you are still afraid of? The answer is that when big things happen you do go through the looking glass, but it is still you who goes through, the inner text is all still right to left, so you just keep reading. Because there is no boat and there is no water. I stare at my tiny baby's face but he so wriggles he can't quite be seen. He grows steadier, more the blur is gone; joins us in the myth of the stable. Of the quakiness of infancy and old age we shimmer and shimmy into being and out again. In the mean- time, we're horses in the stable of the myth. A quick check of the ocean, or any fire, is a reminder of how things seem; I can't seem to see them. You’re on the beach and you find out the secretary of defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil. Your friend asks if they get 10 percent. She was funny, your friend. The water in this metaphor is unreal because of the way time passes, so you can't quite get the boat on water, but you can build the boat, and a boat is good for a lot of things not just on water. Will we, without the boat on water, always feel that we are missing something basic to the picture? No. That is what I'm trying to say. It is important to let sense quiver; even in this stable of the myth of stable, even living aboard a boat mired in mud in view of the sea. Who wants yet another world? It's enough already.

We speak of rebellion when the kid is a hellion and the folks are as mild as a spoon. Likewise Republicans born of freethinking lesbians seem like reactors, turncoats on how they were raised. Let me offer another concatenation of this explanation. Think of your mother as one discrete corner of a person with a multiple mental disorder. You're one of the others. One that split off. Not a turncoat then, but the expression

I Promises to keep was a lie, he had nothing. Through the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict's talk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was always going into the woods. It was he who wrote,The best way out is always through. You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet. He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm, lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go deeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year. II He had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bed to head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me, monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though. In the middle of life he found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myself in a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I got lost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I've got promises to keep, smiles to go before I leap. I'm going into the woods. They're lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me, no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep. It doesn't matter where I sleep. It doesn't matter where I sleep.

Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s contractions are five minutes apart. Doctor says,Is this her first child? guy says,No, it’s her husband. I promise to try to remember who I am. Wife gets up on one elbow, says, I wanted to get married. It seemed a fulfillment of some several things, a thing to be done. Even the diamond ring was some thing like a quest, a thing they set you out to get and how insane the quest is; how you have to turn it every way before you can even think to seek it; this metaphysical refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d have guessed? She sighs, I like the predictability of two, I like my pleasures fully expected, when the expectation of them grows patterned in its steady surprise. I’ve got my sweet and tumble pat. Here on earth, I like to count upon a thing like that. Thus explained the woman in contractions to her lover holding on the telephone for the doctor to recover from this strange conversational turn. You say you’re whom? It is a pleasure to meet you. She rolls her eyes, but he’d once asked her Am I your first lover? and she’d said,Could be. Your face looks familiar.

Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. One is that some of the girls like cute boys and some like ugly older men and sometimes women. The difference between them is the ones who like older men were felt up by their fathers or uncles or older brothers, or if he didn't touch you, still you lived in his cauldron of curses and urges which could be just as worse. They grow already old, angry, and wise, they get rich, get mean, get theirs. The untouched/uncursed others are happy never needing to do much, and never do much more than good. They envy their mean, rich, talented, drunk sisters. Good girls drink milk and make milk and know they've missed out and know they're better off. They might dance and design but won't rip out lungs for a flag. Bad ones write books and slash red paint on canvas; they've rage to vent, they've fault lines and will rip a toga off a Caesar and stab a goat for the ether. It's as simple as that. Either, deep in the dark of your history, someone showed you that you could be used as a cash machine, as a popcorn popper, as a rocket launch, as a coin-slot jackpot spunker, or they didn't and you grew up unused and clueless. Either you got a clue and spiked lunch or you got zilch but no punch. And you never knew. It's exactly not anyone's fault. If it happened and you don't like older men that's just because you like them so much you won't let yourself have one. If you did everyone would see. Then they would know what happened a long time ago, with you and with that original him, whose eyes you've been avoiding for decades gone forgotten. That's why you date men smaller than you or not at all. Or maybe you've turned into a man. It isn't anyone's fault, it is just human and it is what happens. Or doesn't happen. That's that. Any questions? If you see a girl dressed to say No one tells me what to do, you know someone once told her what to do.

We are tender and our lives are sweet and they are already over and we are visiting them in some kind of endless reprieve from oblivion, we are walking around in them and after we shatter with love for everything we settle in. Thou tiger on television chowing, thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation. Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean's harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce a vineyard of grapes from one's apron and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up bread and offer up one's armful to the throng? Let us live as if we were still among the living, let our days be patterned after theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

It’s like being lost in the forest, hungry, with a plump live chicken in your cradling arms: you want to savage the bird, but you also want the eggs. You go weak on your legs. What’s worse, what you need most is the companionship, but you’re too hungry to know that. That is something you only know after you’ve been lost a lot and always, eventually, alit upon your bird; consumed her before you’d realized what a friend she’d been, letting you sleep-in late on the forest floor though she herself awoke at the moment of dawn and thought of long-lost rooster voices quaking the golden straw. She looks over at you, sleeping, and what can I tell you, she loves you, but like a friend. Eventually, when lost in a forest with a friendly chicken you make a point of emerging from the woods together, triumphant; her, fat with bugs, you, lean with berries. Still, while you yet wander, you can not resist telling her your joke: Guy sees a pig with three legs, asks the farmer, What gives ? Farmer says, That pig woke my family from a fire , got us all out . Says the guy, And lost the leg thereby ? Nope , says the farmer, Still had all four when he took a bullet for me when I had my little struggle with the law . Guy nods, So that’s where he lost his paw ? Farmer shakes it off, says, Nah , we fixed him up . A pause, guy says, So how’d he lose the leg ? Farmer says, Well , hell , a pig like that you don’t eat all at once . Chicken squints. Doesn’t think it’s funny.