Jonathan Galassi

The barroom mirror lit up with our wives has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills Japanese subcompact, little lives asleep behind us, heading for the hills in utter darkness through invisible countryside we know by heart by light; but woods that are humane and hospitable often turn eerie on a moonless night. Our talk is quiet: the week’s triumphs, failings, gossip, memories—but largely fears. In our brief repertoire of poses ailing’s primary, and more so with the years now every step seems haunted by the future, not only ours, but all that they will face: a stricter world, with scarceness for a teacher, bad air, bad water, no untrammeled space or so it seems to us, after the Fall, but for the young the world is always new. Maybe that’s what dates us worst of all and saves them: What we’ll miss they never knew. We’re old enough now to be old enough, to know what loss is—not just hair and breath; each has eyeballed reality by now: a rift, a failure, or a major death. They landed on us; we were not consulted, although our darkest yearnings aren’t so deep. Let’s tick off the short wish list of adulthood: sleep, honor, sleep, love, riches, sleep, and sleep . . . and camaraderie, that warms the blood, the mildest, most forgiving form of love. In an uncertain world a certain good is one who’ll laugh off what you’re leery of. That’s why we’re out here, racing with the clock through cold and darkness: so that, glass in hand, we’ll face our half-life, padded for the shock by a few old souls who understand. Now the odometer, uncompromising, shows all its nines’ tails hanging in the air. Now an entire row of moons is rising, rising, rising, risen—we are there: Total Maturity. The trick is how to amortize remorse, desire, and dread. Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now. The serious years are opening ahead.

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues, bright hair blazing in the theater, red hair raving in the bar—as now the little leaves shoot veils of gold across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring, ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood- russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . . When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens, your ochres and your umbers have evolved nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness, when the woods are rife with soddenness (unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream, barberry by the trunks, and bitter watercress inside the druid pool) will your thin, still-glinting thread insist to catch the eye in filigreed titrations stitched along among beneath the branches, in the branches where it lives all winter, occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .

You were in bed. You heard your mother working in the kitchen. It was still light, the birds were bickering, the waterfall behind the house was falling. Its rushing lulled you, you loved the moment you lay in, and you counted the time from this instant to this, and put it away to be lived on another night, your wedding night or some other night that needed all the luck, all the saved-up minutes you could bring it. Later you filled bottles in the stream and dated them and stored them in a cupboard. Months after, you retrieved them to stare at what time had done. You were eight, but already you knew it was working on you, each minute you passed through was gone. You didn’t want to give up your old clothes. You’d watch your mother wrap your dresses in a box for another girl and know that where their stripes and buttons went what you’d lived in them followed. But those minutes in bed, minutes of utter safety, you heard the water falling and didn’t want it to fall. You wanted to keep it, you saved yourself that minute. I don’t know if you still have it or if you’ve had to spend it on you or on me. But I know you still save minutes I used to think went unwatched into our account in time that allows no withdrawals. You hold onto the slippers and letters, things that are leaving, things we’ve left, evidence we’re judged unfairly by. You have the picture, you and Pam in blue fishing in the stream below the pool, staring back at the camera half-abashed. Your jacket is still in the closet. You never wear it, you don’t even remember when you did, but it’s here to testify the picture doesn’t lie —though the color’s different, your hair is shorter now, and the water in the pool is long gone downstream.

FOR B. Somewhere ahead I see you watching something out your window, what I don’t know. You’re tall, not on your tiptoes, green, no longer yellow, no longer little, little one, but the changeless changing seasons are still with us. Summer’s back, so beautiful it always reeks of ending, and now its breeze is stirring in your room commanding the lawn, trying to wake you to say the day is wasting, but you’re north of childhood now and out of here, and I’ve gone south.

Now that the ticket to eternity has your name on it, we are here to pay the awkward tribute post-modernity allows to those who think they think your way but hear you only faintly, filtered through a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise seems to expand our notion of the true. An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light, mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: intimations of the miracle when the null steps forward as the all— these were signals, sparks that spattered from the anvil of illusions where you learned the music of a generation burned by an old myth: the end that will not come. There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, where votive plastic hyacinths relay the promise of one more technicolor day —the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, and your dictator, while your names get blurred with all the others, like your hardest word dissolving in the language of the tribe.

The backyard apple tree gets sad so soon, takes on a used-up, feather-duster look within a week. The ivy’s spring reconnaissance campaign sends red feelers out and up and down to find the sun. Ivy from last summer clogs the pool, brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch soft to the touch and rank with interface of rut and rot. The month after the month they say is cruel is and is not.

If your bearded friend helps you catch the trout barehanded in the pool of the dream and you carry it in his pail barefoot up the rocky stream to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan; if you snip the dill for the carrots and then swim until your lips are bluer than the lake where will it take you? Not anywhere as pure and primal as these sunstruck days sistered by starstruck nights. Don’t cloud the drowning brightness of your eyes, don’t answer my asking look with anything but the truth, don’t spill the fresh-picked raspberries on the car seat and stain your shirt with indelible blood. Or spill them, darling. How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you, xylem and phloem of your leafy future already starting to spread its shade above us?

Down the path between the apples through the maple grove of suicides then left at the old wall along the wire fence to the brook- bank where narcissus noses into skunk cabbage and hepatica: Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers out for your flash of white tail and alert to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den, crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again as it elbows below us and runs for the creek racks strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid, tightroping over the rocks in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp scent and battling the mayflies the black flies horseflies mosquitoes there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling tentacular embrace battered and scarred, am I seeing your fabled face in the oily pools, are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles branchbones, little leaves halving our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine? Your bloodhounds bay at the copper creek, your velvet cape’s aloft in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer, hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, gashed, gutted, kneed-up, muddy and galled—call me Actaeon....