Kathleen Graber

What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them. . . . With this alone have we any concern. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason At a church rummage sale, I study the perfection of shadows in a painting by Caravaggio, although what I hold is only a small print of Christ—its frame broken—dining at Emmaus with three of the Apostles. And because the table is dramatically, if not unbelievably, lit, the bowls & pitcher & loaves send their dark crescents onto the immaculate white cloth. When the Savior raises his hand to offer a blessing, its shade deepens further his crimson smock.Tenebrosus: that rich, convincing darkness. As though the master understood that the obscured world only seems to us somehow even more familiar, as though our sense of our own unknowing had at last been made visible—even if what we do not know cannot itself be seen. The future’s drape, the carnival fortunetellers of my childhood might have called it, but also the now’s, displayed as it is—so many unmatched cups & saucers, old coats & wicker baskets—all around us. At a party last week, someone said verisimilitude. We were huddled on a tiny porch. It was the first cool night & the wine had no conclusion. The talk turned quickly to shepherds & the pastoral & then, to opera, before someone recalled a horror film he’d watched late one night with his brother. In black & white vignettes, an evil tree stump possessed by the spirit of an executed prince hunts the scheming tribal elders who have destroyed him. A former pro wrestler in a costume of wire & rubber bark & wearing a permanent scowl lumbers after vengeance in the confusion & fear of 1957 on a half-dozen root-legs, driving his victims into quicksand or toppling himself over upon him. Though here the point is the teller’s small brother & the boy’s allegiance, even in a state of suspended disbelief, to what we call sense. How, he wanted to know, suddenly unusually earnest, did the tree manage to get itself up again? Yesterday I spoke to a friend who is despairing: back home, waiting tables, he’s dating a woman whose marriage has only just come to an end. When he wakes, he discovers he does not recognize himself. One afternoon, walking home from school, I hit my best friend in the face with a book. It may well be that she hit me. Thin pages flew out into the street. More punches were thrown & I came away bruised. In that book, a novel by Emily Brontë, the land is violent & unjust & we are violent & unjust upon it. Even worse, our greatest passions change nothing at all. Before one of us hit the other, there must have been a cause, but I can’t recall it, which makes it seem nonlinear now, &, thus, apocryphal, both impossible & impossibly real. I failed, though I tried, to offer comfort. It’s not that our lives don’t resemble our lives. I’ve been alone so often lately I sometimes catch myself watching myself— breathing in the fresh spears of rosemary or admiring the shallots, peeling their translucent wrappers away, centering one on the board, making the first careful cut, lifting the purple halves. Before stories, we were too busy for stories, too busy hunting & suffering to invent the tales of our own resurrections. Caught out in the kitchen’s brightness last night, the handle of the skillet cast its simple, perfected form across the stove—pierced, like the eye of the needle, so that it can be hung from a hook, as pans, presumably, have always been. Outside the wind picked up. Thunder. The dog trotted off, hid her head beneath the chair. But today: a charity sale at Trinity Chapel & sun on the tar of the buckled walks. In the cracks, beads of water spin into light. Tell yourself it’s simple: this is where it’s been heading all along. Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur.

Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night. —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We spend our lives trying to grasp the premise. William Blake is not, for instance, William Blake, but rather a 19th century accountant from Cleveland on the lam for murder & the theft of a horse. In the closing scene, he is going to die, & so is Nobody, his half-Blackfoot, half-Blood guide. Sure, this is a Western, a morality tale about a destiny made manifest through the voice of a gun & a hero whose mythic flight from innocence destroys him. But we all come to the end of the line soon enough. The obvious just seems wiser when Nobody says it.Time, it turns out, is the most common noun in the English language, as if by constant invocation, we could keep it at bay. Yesterday, I sat in another state on a large rubber ball in my brother’s basement bouncing my newborn nephew in my arms. His mother, on the phone with a friend, asks what we should fear more, the hobo spider or the poison that kills it. I want to whisper into his ear something that feels like knowledge: Once upon a time, there was nothing & one day, there will be nothing again. This is the faraway place to which his tiny weight calls me. If he could understand the words. I think, he would know what I mean, having only just sprung himself from that fine sea. Sometimes we coo to soothe him:Don’t cry, Little Bird. I know, I know. But only the roar of the vacuum finally calms him, for nothing sounds as much like the lost world of the womb as the motors of our machines. The root of travel means torture, having passed from Medieval Latin into Old French. As the action opens, Johnny Depp, shot in black & white, is already rocking into night on a train. And soon, he will begin his dying. This is not to say that the inky band fanning across the morning blue of a kestrel’s tail feathers has no meaning, or the first fingers of rust coming into bloom on the green enameled chassis of a Corona typewriter left in the rain. Direct observation, the naturalist Niko Tinbergen assures us, is the only real thing. Perhaps this is what I should tell him. Or that this moment, too, is a part of some migration. Every snow bunting composes its own song, & a careful watcher can tell one kittiwake from its neighbor by the little dots on the tips of its wings. The most used verb is also the most humble— merely to be. Nobody can teach to William Blake the auguries of William Blake. We are, instead, our own vatic visions, bumbling prophets. Our sense of ourselves as invented as film. Later, in an ocean-going canoe lined with cedar boughs, he will drift out into cold breakers, two bullets in his chest. But, here, in his small hat & wire glasses, he still seems sweetly comic. He holds up a letter; someone’s promised him a job. His fancy plaid suit makes him look like a clown.

One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? —Marcus Aurelius When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late: there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week, though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV. A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window, a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind & the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it; I can’t throw it away.Every change is a death, you tell yourself, turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself, I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me, but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves to blame:Wipe out thy imagination. We fill our hands when they are empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.