Kathy Fagan

It would have been a fine path for a lizard to cross but I saw none. Brambles and sweet briar grew on the town side, poppies and wild grasses on the river. Too hot for birds, the ducks were out, in water and mud, and frogs were out, by the hundreds it seemed, saying, Way, Way, in their deepest voices. It was beautiful there but I’d seen beauty and its opposite so often that when warmth broke over my skin I remembered winter, the way fresh grief undoes you the moment you’re fully awake. When she turned two, I asked my young friend what she would serve at her birthday party and she said, Tofu and cupcakes. When she was three and I was very sad she called and said, What are you doing? Picking flowers? She talked in poems like she was dreaming all the time or very old or Virginia Woolf. More often in the first world one wakes from not to the nightmare. When I dreamed I lost my love I willed myself awake because I would not survive the pain again, even dreaming. Which is responsible for that mercy, Doktor, the conscious or the un-? I want the poppies picked and I want the poppies left where they grow. Like looking through the window of a moving train at someone walking up a road lined with poplars and being someone walking up a road lined with poplars. The train and the trees, a shower of petals and bees, sun on the glass and the train perpendicular to the road. Things entirely themselves arriving in the deep double shadows of the grass and passersby.

Canal du Midi, France Arcades of plane trees arc Aves above the canal. I know they are not a choir. I know they are not Kabuki, tusk, knuckle, or the swords and flames St. Joan rode into, though it’s true I think of them as these, and as the sky’s deep pockets of snow, white keys, mammoth teeth. It is my way and my need: mes amours, sycamores. My emblems on a crest, gallery of visible ghosts. Mostly I love the light they hold inside, the all-too-much and aged toujours of them, their airborne electricities. Who’s to explain affinities like these? Two seas were joined this way in 1681, sparing sailors from piracy and storms. In the 1830s, planes were planted on its banks to protect vacationers from sun. Now a careless tourist nicks a tree with rope and spreads disease that will kill them all.Ceratocystis platani, traced to munitions boxes brought by World War II GIs. 42,000 must be felled and burned to save, scientists hope, the remaining planes, cousin to our sycamore, that is the wood that made the box that held the fungus riding in the waters of the canal. Measures have been taken. The road to hell, etc. St. Joan, finally, was burned to death for the cross- dressing; Kabuki theaters incinerated by soldiers for their drag shows and wartime sympathies. Sorrow. Desire. There are so many auto fatalities on plane-lined streets here, the French joke about why the tree crossed the road. They burn the hollows out sometimes. Inscribe vaginal lips around the gashes in swaths of hot pink paint. What we leave behind and what is left of us are related questions. The graves in town are up to three centuries old. Some crypts, forged crosses, chipped wreaths of ceramic flowers. Earth gouged, trees felled, buildings razed, never mind the lives. In the new world, a fungus-resistant sycamore is bred to replace relatives destroyed at the canal. Measures taken. Like swapping out the burnt-out bulbs on a string of Christmas lights. So what if we are replaceable? Mostly I love how we burst the prisons of our skins and shine. Outside the cemetery, someone’s magic-markered a locked electrical box with the words Sexe Toyes. The plaques on the graves nearby are inscribed Souvenirs and Regrets. Which are, even in my language, polite ways of saying Done.

Jets shake the air and snow breaks off a tree branch in little puffs. One cardinal. Cars moving slowly downhill on the ice. It is always someone’s last day. Dearest Bird, she read from the card she’d found unattached to the flowers, Happy Day To Our Sweetest Hart. Love Monster And Beef Dad. Their secret language. Manischewitz, she calls me for the sweetness. Manitoba, for the expanse. Deer rest in snow, charcoal muzzle to charcoal hoof, heads slung over their shoulders like swans. One is in REM. Look at it dreaming, she said. Fern buttons unwheel in a dark place behind the snow, a contrast she loves in me. The sledding hill is closed, the days like an unused billboard, but sunsets have been fantastic, jewel-toned as the flowers unattached to the card, or hot like the cardinal who pins the whole picture up with your eye. Meanwhile, her tree is an iron room with the moon inside. Its branches have a mental disorder so sunsets keep dodging them. I am the color of that tree she loves and nearly as still. And my blood, which is not in this picture, will soon cool, sunset winking out in my eyes and her eyes welling in a language that once fell and rose in drifts then melted, starry, she said, starry, into my warm coat.