Joyce Sutphen

I have forgotten the words, and therefore I shall not conceive of a mysterious salvation, I shall not become a tall lily and bloom into blue and white. Then what oracular event shall appear on my doorstep? What announcement shall crowd me to a corner, protesting an unworthiness, which doubtless shall be believed? But these are only bells we hear, pulled down by the arms of the drunken janitor, two fingers missing on his left hand. And we have climbed into that tower, its spiraling wooden staircase creaking beneath our feet. We have seen for ourselves that it is only iron that rings, iron swinging on an iron bar, the rough rope threading down to the cold ground, no death or holiness in those hollow shells.

My mind is shuffling its deck tonight, slipping one card over another, letting them all fall together at the corners; the random hand of memory is dealing from the bottom of the pack. First: a bearded man emptying the dragon kiln, then a woman whistling, her face turned away as she opens the oven. Next: a big cat, six toes on each paw, climbing up the yardpole. Last: a pair of workhorses circling a tree until they grind themselves to dust. There is no one home in the world tonight. Everyone is out of range. The cradles are empty, the boughs broken down. Trees go helter-skelter and the wheel is creaking on its shaft. Hit me, I say to the dealer. Hit me again.

I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines, and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards. They will always be the ones who say “It is time to go now,” even as we linger at the door, or stand by the waiting cars, they remember someone—an uncle we never knew—and sigh, all of them together, like wind in the oak trees behind the farm where they grew up—a place I remember—especially the hen house and the soft clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love, after so many years of only that, after thinking that nothing else mattered. And what was I thinking of when I stopped thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force? I thought about how far away Death once had seemed, how unexpected that it could happen to someone I knew quite well, how impossible that this should be the normal thing, as natural as frost and winter. I thought about the way we’d aged, how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.