Linda Gregerson

The ones too broke or wise to get parts from a dealer come here where the mud is red and eternal. Eight front ends are stacked on girders he salvaged too. Ask for Bruce, he said on the phone, and doesn’t crack a smile when you show up. Twenty-four fifty if we find one, sister. Bruce, it says on his coveralls, and Bruce on the ones his helper wears. The routine’s so good they’re keeping it. The taillight you can have. Except for the traffic, the wrong parts of Baltimore aren’t so bad: each house pulling its straightest face, the curbs and stoops lined up like a man inverting his pockets to show he’s got nothing to hide. Construction sites gone aimless and the detours feeling more like home. You know where to find a cheap lunch. Up front, a woman hears the list through twice before, as to a sweet and original prompting, she picks fried trout. Likewise the oyster shucker, pretending you’ve asked for a straw with your beer. He searches the counter above which reigns a picture of Washington Stokes, retired, who cleaned fish to order for fifty-nine years. A girl on a schedule deserves what she gets, and sometimes gets it kindly, earned or no. Untouched by heat of sun or city police, the fair-haired accommodate best by having everything to learn. But here comes your beer without a straw, as though good nature were common as thirst. Here’s Washington Stokes, who would understand the strategy that lets the fool go free.

Isabella Whitney , The maner of her Wyll, 1573 1 We’re told it was mostly the soul at stake, its formal setting-forth, as over water, where, against all odds, the words-on-paper make a sort of currency, which heaven, against all odds, accepts. So Will, which is to say,May what I purpose, please, this once, and what will happen coincide. To which the worldly dispositions were mere after-thought: your mother’s ring and so forth. What the law considered yours to give. Which in the case of women was restricted—this was long ago, and elsewhere—so that one confessedly “weak of purse” might all the more emphatically be thought of as having little to say. Except about the soul. The late disturbance in religion having done that much, the each for each responsible, even a servant, even the poor. Wild, then—quite beyond the pale—to hustle the soul-part so hastily off the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney, to the city and its faithlessness. Whose smells and sounds—the hawker’s cry, the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff of getting-by no woman of even the slightest affectation would profess to know, much less to know so well. As one would know the special places on his body, were the passion merely personal. 2 Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud. The city’s vast tautology. No city without people and no people but will long for what the city says they lack: high ceilings, gloves and laces, news, the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space for solitude, enough to eat. And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it, some without-which-not, some little but needful part in all the passing- from-hand-to-hand of it, so every time the bondsman racks his debtor or the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un- practiced girl imagines she has prompted a look of wistfulness, a piece of it is yours because your seeing it has made it that much slower to rejoin the blank oblivion of never-having- been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy- three. The year of our Redeemer, as they used to say. That other circuit of always-in-your- debt. From which she wrested, in her open I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money way of authorship, a world not just of plenty but—and here’s the part of that’s legacy—of love.

It had almost nothing to do with sex. The boy in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin was not and never had been simply in our pay. Or was it some lost logic the regional accent restores? A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer playing Thisby botching similes and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night and said It’s wet and, making the connection he has had to learn by rote,You’re sad. It’s never not like this for him.As if, the adolescents mouth wherever California spills its luminous vernacular.As if, until the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just say we’ll live here for a while. O habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young friend it’s never not some labored simulacrum, every tone of voice, each give, each take is wrested from an unrelenting social dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how odd to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder we pass for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance: minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard and now she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s misreading. Reader, it’s sharp as the lion’s tooth. Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well, which feels for all the world like honest work. They’ve never worked with mind before, the rich man says. But moonlight says,With flesh.

When love was a question, the message arrived in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura was hardly to be believed. For flight, it took three stagehands: two on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you thought fancy rained like grace. Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all. Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor might cough. The passions, I take my clues from an obvious source, may be less like climatic events than we conventionalize, though I’ve heard of tornadoes that break the second-best glassware and leave everything else untouched. There’s a finer conviction than seamlessness elicits: the Greeks knew a god by the clanking behind his descent. The heart, poor pump, protests till you’d think it’s rusted past redemption, but there’s tuning in these counterweights, celebration’s assembled voice.

The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must have told you that. Poison leaks into the basements and tedium into the schools. The oak is going the way of the elm in the upper Midwest—my cousin earns a living by taking the dead ones down. And Jason’s alive yet, the fair- haired child, his metal crib next to my daughter’s. Jason is one but last saw light five months ago and won’t see light again. · Leaf against leaf without malice or forethought, the manifold species of murmuring harm. No harm intended, there never is. The new inadequate software gets the reference librarian fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one weekend and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four rabbits and seventeen months of research. Ignorance loves as ignorance does and always holds high office. · Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune the third of July. July’s the month of hospital ro- tations; on holiday weekends the venerable stay home. So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table and couldn’t be made to breathe for three-and-a- quarter hours, the staff were too green to let him go. The household gods have abandoned us to the gods of juris- prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve of new tarmac, the municipal pool, the sky at work on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky, the park where idling cars, mere yards from the slide and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel bags: the admitting room and its stately drive, possessed of the town’s best view. · And what’s to become of the three-year-old brother? When Jason was found face down near the dogdish—it takes just a cupful of water to drown— his brother stood still in the corner and said he was hungry and said that it wasn’t his fault. No fault. The fault’s in nature, who will without system or explanation make permanent havoc of little mistakes. A natural mistake, the transient ill-will we define as the normal and trust to be inconsequent, by nature’s own abundance soon absorbed. · Oak wilt, it’s called, the new disease. Like any such contagion—hypocrisy in the conference room, flattery in the halls—it works its mischief mostly unremarked. The men on the links haven’t noticed yet. Their form is good. They’re par. The woman who’s prospered from hating ideas loves causes instead. A little shade, a little firewood. I know a stand of oak on which my father’s earthly joy depends. We’re slow to cut our losses.