John Reibetanz

If I close my eyes now, I can still see them canopied by the visor of my sunhat: three children islanded on a narrow rim of earth between the huge crack-willow that they squat before, hushed, poised to net a frog, and the pond the frog will jump to (it got away) a glass its dive will shatter. The unbroken image pleases my mind’s eye with its density, such thick crisscross of tree-trunk, earth, and tall grass I see no breach, no source for the light that steeps it but a blue burning in the pond’s green glass. The grass withered, the tree blew down, earth caught the frog, the children grew. Sky’s ice-blue flame teased along the wick it would consume.

When a creature dies ... the flesh and soft parts of the body rot quickly. All that is left are the bones and teeth. (textbook entry on ‘fossils’) Sometimes. You, mother, dying, left what was hard first: bones weeping into your veins like flutes, teeth vanished on some hospital lunch tray. In your last mute days you parted with one more hard thing: the gold ring I was to save for my child. As your hand offered that bright circle (only seen as a whole now, when empty) did your thoughts reach, like mine, for your first wedding ring? You took that one off when I was seven or eight and sent it spinning from a car window. I can still feel the wet blades of grass slipping through my fingers, night dew coming on, you and father loud in the parked car. I searched there as if life spilled from a ring that lay somewhere out of sight but within reach, hid where only the crickets knew. I took the scraping of their mating calls for crying, as if they shared loss—my childish heart consoled by a soft ‘as if.’ The consolation carries on: their song (light as air, softer than voices) plays through my thoughts about that evening and fills the lost ring’s hollow with life’s most lasting part, cries for new love.

‘Are you asleep?’ Like a door that always opens on the same empty closet, the old jokey question you can never answer ‘yes’ to is a snap, in comparison to ‘Where are you?’ Moving, wherever you are. Even your stillness on the back seat takes the bent of action, a kicking reach through swells and drifts of afghan. My live question mark, are they salt or sweet, the waters you riddle? Asking gets me as far as ladling water with a net. Though I can catch your small beached foot, and hear soft waves of breath, the mesh of senses isn’t fine enough to land you now. When you come back, you’ll rub the sand from your eyes and know nothing of where you’ve been. Love is like that: the element we breathe and move through, untouchable and always there.

If they, more petite than the mice whose flittings have pillaged their robes’ sparkled trim, stood tiptoe on the plumped felt tops of their thimble-sized footstools to scrutinize the worn fabric of this room’s blue distances, would they locate the source of lightning bolts in our faces’ wrinkled pleats and construe the stars’ dance from the tattered embroidery of our steps, or find in our seamless unravelling years the tissue of apocalypse?

We have cried often when we have given them the little victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they have fallen to sleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time. (parent of children working at a textile mill, to an 1832 Parliamentary inquiry into child employment) 1. They cry for children too tired to cry for themselves, daughters twelve, eleven, eight—eyes shutting down as a grate’s banked coals shut down at midnight, in the rising damp called ‘home.’ Too tired to eat after eighteen hours feeding looms whose steel teeth grind insatiably, the girls will be offered up again at dawn. Yet they are the lucky ones, to work where skylights hold swatches of the unaffordable blue. Imagine these girls’ mine-trapped cousins, hauling black rocks on sledges up tunnels of black air: half-undressed, belted, harnessed, saturated with the oil-blackened water they crawl through pumping ‘the lifeblood of British industry.’ Flogged for talking, Margaret Comeley, aged nine, can sometimes close her mouth around a piece of muffin—if she manages to keep it from the rats, ‘so ravenous they eat the corks out of our oil-flasks.’ Sarah Gooder fills her mouth with song ‘when I’ve light, but not in the dark; I dare not then.’ 2. Here is a working girl so filled with light she is pure song: her sun-bright bodice shines in counterpoint with her blue overskirt, and, from her forehead’s crescent of white linen, tapering light blazes a white path down arms and wrists to folds of spread blue cloth, like moonlight piloting the tide’s refrains. A Dutch milkmaid, Tanneke Everpoel, lucky enough to live in the Delft house where Vermeer’s eye and brush could catch the spill of morning light as her brief peacefulness brimmed over, serves here as a celebrant— bread heaped up on the altar-like table, wine transubstantiated into milk whose brilliance seems the source of the room’s light she pours forever from the earthenware’s black core. His pose; yet—all hers—underneath it (and signalled in her fixed eyes’ unconcern for the beholder) such complete immersion in what she does, that she is all she does and it is she, this offering-up of day. And he? When he was forty, the Sun King invaded Holland. No one wanted art. In debt to his baker for three years’ worth of bread, Vermeer, according to his widow, falling ‘into a frenzy,’ passed ‘from being healthy’ in ‘a day or a day and a half ... to being dead,’ ‘the very great burden of his children ... so taken to heart.’ 3. Knowing the earth is closer to the sun in winter won’t revive the street person sleeping towards cold death in a bus shelter. Bread in a painting won’t cure stomach ache. So Margaret dragged her great burden of coal while Sarah sat terrified in the dark, and neither knew Vermeer’s poised working girl, broke bread with her, shared her breaking light. The painting stood by, helpless to save them or him, and looking at it now cannot help anyone. Yet, it can cry for them, as parents take their children’s grief to heart: the beads of salt, shimmering on the bread like diamonds, can be tears the two girls shed down where no light sang their preciousness. The cradled pitcher’s brim can be their hearth, since it (and not the sky’s cold mine of stars) pours out what cannot shelter us, but feeds a hunger no daily bread can fill: for light— light that, like coal, comes from our earth; hunger that, unlike grief, is inexhaustible.

1. Consider the tragic fortitude of mannikins, the courage it takes under casual poses to do nothing interminably each day. To face unflinching (through sunlit glass that bars them from it) the rushing surf of life within reach where they must stand marooned on their islands’ plastic turf, and not to cry out: more heroic than those Romans the lava rain stunned to statues—misshaped by the panic that twisted their limbs, glazed with their pain in black rock—friezes of agony. You would never know, from the relaxed swivel of this woman’s wrist as she completes a backhand with her racket, that she will never take another swing, or from her smile that she has stood balanced here on one foot all summer like one of Dante’s damned, and not cracked. 2. ‘Cracked’ is my father’s word for ‘crazy,’ as in ‘You’d have to be cracked to pay that much for a pair of shoes.’ He’s not crazy, but he forgets, and today as we pay out his visit’s hours strolling on Bloor, he thinks up the same questions again minutes after he’s nodded and smiled at answers to them. Looking for things to look at and not think, I focus on another grove of mummers: headless, their necks poke out like worms from the smartly turned-over collars of turtlenecks and jackets. You can tell they’ve also lost their arms from the way the sleeves plummet slackly off their shoulders—although they, ashamed to show the mutilation, act cool and tuck the cuffs into their pockets. I look at my father—hands trembling, head crazed like china with minute cracks through which years exit invisibly— and must remind myself his show is kinder, the long-running comedy where he’s played every part, from fresh-faced mooning lover to child-duped parent to doddering senex: still free now (while heart and limbs play their duet) to do a walk-on, ad lib, bow out. He sweats a little in the sunshine. Summer stock, lacking the tragic poise that freezes these actors in their scene, we move on towards a shadier place.

‘I have always felt that desolation, that hell itself, is most powerfully expressed in an uninhabited natural landscape at its bleakest.’ —Anthony Hecht 1. To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited landscape as far from nature as you can get without actually leaving the planet, a man-made moon waste on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, fired in the sun’s kiln through unending afternoons when I was nine or ten. I can never get the whole scene put together in my head, thanks to whatever guardian spirit flags down potentially dangerous intruders on the verge of memory, but parts of me hold parts of it: my ears play out the hissing wires’ repeated rise and fall, dry waves breaking above pavement; my nostrils chafe where fumes of gasoline weep from soft tarred patches in the asphalt; through a chainlink grid, my eyes take in some lot’s trapped beach, its black sand an amalgam of gravel, soot, and broken glass; or they blink in sequence with the traffic light’s perpetual solitaire at a carless intersection, flicking over greens, ambers, reds; my hands remember enough not to touch the shut steel trap doors of delivery chutes where air trembles over surfaces as at their beginnings in a furnace. What fills my mind to bursting is emptiness, the spirit of inverted Genesis transforming light and water’s urge towards fullness into a miracle of unearthly loss. 2. Sentries, a pair of gasoline pumps napped. Their rubber arms dangled groundwards and looped back up, hanging slack from the brass lapel their trigger-fingers hooked at shoulder height. They were no angels, but kept the gate of hell whenever I made visits to the angels. Behind them, next to a roll-up garage door always rolled up, with an invisible car always risen above the stone lintel on the hydraulic lift, a soft drink cooler sat coffin-like against the stucco wall. And always songs from a hidden radio promised cool mountain rivers to the hot flat city: somebody else must have listened, but I never saw a soul in all my visits. The angels’ wings fluttered the moment I raised the lid, a potent shimmer, as if the sun itself shone from the chest, not its reflections playing off the steel bars and icy waters. The angels sat in rows between the bars, their orders chevroned by the shapes and colours of their glass capes: the bluish, scalloped whorl of cherubim, the powers’ straight sheer crystal, the emerald flare of flaming seraphim— all emissaries from the sky-washed shore of heaven. To put a coin in the dispenser, slide one of them along its plated channel and lift it free through the chest’s narrow gate— to kiss the cold stars of its distillation— was not important; it was only important to see the angels swimming in the glitter and dip my fingers in their flickering water at the centre of that man-made desert, knowing that they were man-made, and might shatter.

‘He thought it had only been put there to finish off th’ alphabet, like, though ampus-and (&) would ha’ done as well.’ (George Eliot: Adam Bede) And had in fact, for generations— the plump, open armed ‘&’ waving goodbye from the end of the old-world alphabet like an innkeeper framed in doorway candlelight, farewells swelled with hopes of come again. Then the old world burned down because we sensed, beyond the candle’s glow, the road led to a dead end. No traveler returned, even the unverified odd reports of happy returns petered out. So we renovated the alphabet, signing it off with a streamlined ‘z’ as sharp and final as lightning: no sense in posting notice of further connections that didn’t exist, or passing off maps as places. Trouble was, nobody felt at home in the revamped compound. Bookings fell off, postcards of views of blank walls piled unsold in the unvisited gift shop, the same paperbacks stalled on the revolving racks. It was a paradise of sorts, a golden age of nullity, no relatives breaking the costly silence. No wonder Eliot’s befuddled Jacob Storey felt his page of Z’s was somehow ‘not right,’ that ‘it was a letter you never wanted hardly.’ He knew, as one newly released from the unlit cell of his long-unlettered ignorance, what you did want hardly: you wanted, needed—as hardly as Hetty Sorrel, abandoned at the dock—someone to stand by. You were the murderess of your baby, silenced with a ‘z.’ You needed a hand, the open-armed return of all your relations. You wanted, harder than death, ampersand