Jessica Greenbaum

As the storm-struck oak leaned closer to the house — The remaining six-story half of the tree listing toward the glass box Of  the kitchen like someone in the first tilt of stumbling — The other half crashed into the neighbors’ yards, a massive Diagonal for which we had no visual cue save for An antler dropped by a constellation — As the ragged half   leaned nearer, the second storm of cloying snow Began pulling on the shocked, still-looming splitting, and its branches dragged Lower like ripped hems it was tripping over Until they rustled on the roof under which I Quickly made dinner, each noise a threat from a body under which we so recently Said, Thank goodness for our tree, how it has accompanied us all these years, Thank goodness for its recitation of the seasons out our windows and over The little lot of our yard, thank goodness for the birdsong and 
squirrel games Which keep us from living alone, and for its proffered shade, the crack of the bat Resounding through September when its dime-sized acorns Land on the tin awning next door. Have Mercy on us, you, the massively beautiful, now ravaged and charged With destruction. We did speak like that. As if from a book of psalms Because it took up the sky

So you see why it could not have been a more humble moment. If there was any outward sign of regalia It might have been the twilight crowning of the day, just then, A perfect moment of dusk, but changing, as a wave does Even as you admire it. Because the southbound stop Mirrors the one northbound where we so often find ourselves At the beginning, southbound’s return holds the memory Of northbound’s setting-out, and the grassy median between With its undisturbed trees defines an elusive strip of the present Where no one lives. After twenty-eight years of the trip, It’s like two beakers of colored water — one green, one blue — Have poured themselves back and forth, because On one side we are tinted by remembering the other. But this aspect of the journey, at least, we know we will repeat. As dusk cohered that moment — aquas, pinks, violets — Just at that moment as I was returning to the car A woman came the other way, her two young daughters Holding her hands, and the gloaming sparkled around them So that I froze, as they were backlit, starry, They were the southbound reminder of who I had been beginning The trip. She didn’t look like me, but what I did recognize Was her clarity of purpose, in what Sharon Olds called the days of great usefulness, making life as nice As she could for them, always writing the best story, And also, beneath her skin, living with delight as quiet As the shoots anchoring grass beneath the earth. I walked back to my car. My husband sat in the driver’s seat, Our weekend’s luggage thrown in back. Tell me we really had those girls, I said, and that they held my hands like that. When I got home I pictured her helping them each into bed — I knew it was Later than she had hoped — then reading Each section of the paper’s terrible news, finally alone.

Because you used to leaf through the dictionary, Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary, Each letter would still have your attention if not For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals Hinged on a daisy. That’s why I’ll just use your Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book, Looked into the darkness and realized he had Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness— No congregation of figures needed, he could speak One letter at a time because all of creation Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then Quietly, because it was from his heart, he Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those Sounds, all others were born, all manner of Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to Understand who he was, had been, how flaws Venerate the human being, how aspirations return Without spite. Now for you, may your wife’s X-ray return with good news, may we raise our Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town, and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed, stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit the LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table, prompting a dim:Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’s habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you to shoe salesmen: She has a funny foot; the apartments, the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness, which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work in The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking up a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced, but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point; I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left through the hole of an argument decades ago, a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you on the bus someday, and your greeting will package our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance. And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions, because I never expect those people who have mattered to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke. And of course I have to remember what parted us, that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person, and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here, again, telling you everything with no reason but for memory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.

The day turned into the city and the city turned into the mind and the moving trucks trumbled along like loud worries speaking over the bicycle’s idea which wove between the more armored vehicles of expression and over planks left by the construction workers on a holiday morning when no work was being done because no matter the day, we tend towards remaking parts of it—what we said or did, or how we looked— and the buildings were like faces lining the banks of a parade obstructing and highlighting each other defining height and width for each other offsetting grace and function like Audrey Hepburn from Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate with wrought iron fences and become recurring choruses of memory reassembling around benches we sat in once, while seagulls wheel like immigrating thoughts, and never-leaving chickadees hop bared hedges and low trees like commas and semicolons, landing where needed, separating subjects from adjectives, stringing along the long ideas, showing how the cage has no door, and the lights changed so the tide of sound ebbed and returned like our own breath and when I knew everything was going to look the same as the mind I stopped at a lively corner where the signs themselves were like perpendicular dialects in conversation and I put both my feet on the ground took the bag from the basket so pleased it had not been crushed by the mightiness of all else that goes on and gave you the sentence inside.

I had just hung up from talking to you and we had been so immersed in the difficulty you were facing, and forgive me, I was thinking that as long as we kept talking, you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school as the afternoon deepened into early evening, and me in the study, all the books around that had been sources of beauty to us, as long as we stayed in the conversation padded with history like the floor of the pine forest, as long as I thought out loud, made a joke at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange, but the boys were leaving the track and after we hung up I looked out the window to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red, massive but made from the thinnest twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs they were waving and shining in a light like no other and left only to them.

before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I’ve fished many a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out, and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally) from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond; and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down into your father’s basement workroom to look for the right size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine, you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools, the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets, the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves, their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and tapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes, gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts, the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words, and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybe more like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence. With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes, still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no choice but to understand the power of creation running through the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper, but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come:thwash, the next day another, an example of everything that gets done in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case, the strange October weather warming them. There were the conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

I only have a moment so let me tell you the shortest story, about arriving at a long loved place, the house of friends in Maine, their lawn of wildflowers, their grandfather clock and candid portraits, their gabled attic rooms, and woodstove in the kitchen, all accessories of the genuine summer years before, when I was their son’s girlfriend and tied an apron behind my neck, beneath my braids, and took from their garden the harvest for a dinner I would make alone and serve at their big table with the gladness of the found, and loved. The eggplant shone like polished wood, the tomatoes smelled like their furred collars, the dozen zucchini lined up on the counter like placid troops with the onions, their minions, and I even remember the garlic, each clove from its airmail envelope brought to the cutting board, ready for my instruction. And in this very slight story, a decade later, I came by myself, having been dropped by the airport cab, and waited for the family to arrive home from work. I walked into the lawn, waist-high in the swaying, purple lupines, the subject of   June’s afternoon light as I had never been addressed — a displaced young woman with cropped hair, no place to which I wished to return, and no one to gather me in his arms. That day the lupines received me, and I was in love with them, because they were all I had left, and in that same manner I have loved much of the world since then, and who is to say there is more of a reason, or more to love?