Katie Peterson

November wind. The feeling of knowing something before you said it, all over everything. As in,shadow take me into the side of the mountain. As in,open up the earth and get inside. Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving means everything, how you came to be where you were, even if later it will hurt to think of it. And the forgotten, aren't they always the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish, when someone has their eye on them, and later when the shrines are made with local flowers and icons of heroes, roses in midsummer, angels on winter wings? I'll leave your local customs to your own imagination. Leaving, though, always a kind of unfolding of the act of staying. Last night I knew it was the East wind not asking for me arriving because the door to the kitchen blew open, last night, at the edge of sleep, like someone using only half the alphabet. The book about Brecht separating at the seam because my reading had been the last one it could take before breaking into Exile and After, California in the middle, with the playwright in short sleeves, bored on the PCH, looking at the dramatic cliff work with a friend who meant well, driving, arriving at the slumlord dockyards saying at last scenery. You must forgive me or forgive the book for breaking. It was tired, you see it was a paperback, from the time people actually wanted ones like that, thought books like that should be held in hands on beaches or in cars or in cafes. Sleepy, almost sleepy, falling asleep, awake, now, I admit it, I was completely awake, listening to the wind, which I cannot defend. Nothing in the mind but that reckless pleasure and somewhere in the book Brecht saying the truth is concrete

Sick in bed with a sore throat, I can’t get out of my mind the image of the cat harpsichord from the eighteenth century, soothing a prince with laughter. It worked like this: the tails of them attached to the strings of the instrument were pulled by different notes, and the difference between the way the cats cried was music. A shadow is only a shape. Which is why certain individuals can put their hands in light and make them birds, can say in shadow what they can’t in light. The tiny branches of the hedge in the yard that separates my house from the next look like the rib bones of a bird when the sun hits lunch. The world, they say, is best for a nest but no good for a flying place. Come back, I say to my dead, and the branches don’t even graze the window, when I eat it hurts.

How many times should I look at you and should I change my life? Monarch you make your orange assent to death. And how much dexterity can you really teach me? Does your courage even map onto these worldly obligations to friends, my job, desire for a little affection in the late hours of the evening, etc.? I can't put myself ever in your head. But I can lie on your wing, with my left eye letting my right dart forward as you do. Don't ask something with a lifespan how to change your life. Ask something you can't believe ever lived.

The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment more tropical than dense with the reflection of light. Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back. I turned and went into the house. Under the dining room table, a snake. Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back. Motion ate each centimeter of floor and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception to this when heat makes molasses of all of us. Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept making it make that beautiful scared shape upon the floor, so clean. Like two ice cubes rubbing each other and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear. Seeing the edges it found its way out.

In different cities, on different forms of transportation, a woman read Daniel Deronda until the year became the arbitrary pink the calendar chose for the middle of winter. And finally she sat in the reference section of the public library finishing Daniel Deronda for days at a slowing pace between pieces of newspapers and foreign language newspapers whose syntax she enjoyed, not understanding. And when she didn't anymore she wrote in the margins of Daniel Deronda for someone who might never see. Thought of that person who might never see, staring equally at the rain, equally thinking of her and of nothing in particular. Outside the news fell apart. If one chooses to be shallow or noble, or one is born so, and if it matters. Translations are appropriate when Nature is dormant, or when one has nothing to say, or does not know what to say. These are three different things but sometimes they are the same. It is not wrong to want nice things, neither is it wrong to want to be good, or to feel that as a physical force of pleasure: Daniel Deronda, who does not know who he is, who thinks he does, and goes away on a boat. But the cover is a picture of a woman gambling. The air warms outside the reference section, and also the rain. Incomprehensible news. Whenever a book ends, silence, as if a stewardship had ceased. A person can feel the bones of one's hands by stretching them. If love comes again, know better than to speak.

Because it is a pearly evening I am sitting in the window reading a book I have read before. Branches emphasize their heft and sway over their shadows. Some kind of extra firmament, an ear over the earth's ear, extra, as language is to prayer. Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt you get more vista and less twist of road, and then you're looking at a valley you named yourself and irrigated yourself, full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts of rock, sage, at last a harvest, a desert that belongs to you— The trick to renunciation is starting now. The secret of detachment is having already given up, a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost, the human need for a body to fill in all your body's deficiencies, those clefts and dents already given up, the narrative of a life completely altered in the retrospect that knowledge brings and so discredited the point of memory utterly lost. That piece of land has always been suitable for a house. That nest has never been ready for eight baby birds who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch and home and scared themselves completely and remarkably away. Do you hear that? It's the wind negotiating the spine of one leaf it cannot decide whether to raise a fragment of an inch. Duncan writes as a reader struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle at certain unmistakable times with what's furtive and most right. When people marry they finish their names. I am still listening for mine to begin. My spine wants a bicycle to order its work, a red bicycle, a hill into a heart of a city that holds something I want. The pattern of the air around that leaf is like someone tracing my ribcage with his index finger and then walking away. Who can blame us for wanting other worlds, but shall we take them, or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear more like a mouth that bites the air and turns it into blood? A voice in the next room goes to sleep. Sleep moves in the branches of the oak become a rootless mass unsung by skeleton or name or height. My friend who says she does not believe in Paradise believes in rest: I believe that, or more likely I like to think of her, the way she held my name in her small mouth, as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone who on a night like this would reach towards my ribcage and trace it delicately and walk away.

So many forget-me-nots, with their white centers, scattered, you'd say, if there weren't so many everywhere, as many as the stars last night in between the branches above the porch, behind the house. Was it an argument or were there just things they had to say? I could have faith in so many creatures— the old setter from the neighbor yard who follows me around the corner and no longer, the chick with its new beak just past breakable whose lighter top feathers have a bit of flight, any mother bear— you say things and the next day it's like they don't matter, we want our faces to alter though we don't want to get older, neither do we want to get younger, repetition with less knowledge is ridiculous, just ask the Greeks, you get to keep being a tree but without the branch that showed the sky your starlike shape? I don't think so. Steadiness can be useful, but my loyalty loves a form that will follow me through changes. At a diagonal the dark woods on the back slope have enough space to walk between, not enough to hide. He looks into them and writes notes to his mother, she looks into them and finds alignment, or looks for what she wants. She has a human skeleton on her desk. He has a protractor. I had wishes for both of them yesterday but the weather has become so kindly, so temperate, I forget what blessings they don't think they have.

I wanted to be seen. But who would see me? I couldn’t think of the name for anything but a flower. The government makes coins that size and shape so your hand can feel safe holding them. The pictures stamped remind us where we are, or how the landscape we live in connects itself, through common value, to a different place. On this one, a spinnaker sails past a bridge. On that, a diamond shines like a child’s stilled top over a bird, as if the diamond made the natural world — bird, forest, state flower, sheaf of healthy corn, shining water — out of proportion in relation to itself. I love this. My own state has a bear, so small and out of proportion to me that my life- line can cross behind it. At last I do not fear that but feel proud the animal can sit in my palm so silently until I spend it. And if I lose it, then it becomes even more quiet. Most still just have an eagle, so it is as if 30 eagles were passed over from one hand to another when the one charged with arranging things for his Savior’s dinner arranged his Savior’s death. Heavier the yoke of heat in solitude. A walk uphill does not feel manageable. Who will see me?

In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was certain I had nothing to say. When I grew restless in the interior, the exterior gave.

We chose this animal to be our pet. His indifference allowed us to sleep. Cat, who made your ears bend back, who made you lazy as quick? Who made you work? It is a wonder any sun is left. Still it is always so abrupt. Sleep like an umbrella going up, clumsy like a broken umbrella coming down, this waking, and into what? I did not ask to be afraid. I did not ask for pleasure, but there it was, it exfoliated at its own leisure, grew until it was all that was— The brief interruption of who I am interrupts and punctuates the day I always assumed that I would share— Cat who cut the sun down from the sky and then responsible put it up again? There must be one of us that you prefer.