Liz Waldner

“It must be awful,” she said to the dog locked in it as she left the kitchen that wasn’t hers, closing its door, to head up the stairs with every good thing she could find to eat in her arms (to eat in her arms—O Katherine!) “not to have any arms.”

If   I would be walking down the road you told me to imagine and I would and find a diner kind of   teacup sitting on its saucer in the middle then I would feel so good in my life that is just like mine I would walk right up and look into my face eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup and say, “Thank you, I have enjoyed imagining all this.”

A moth lies open and lies like an old bleached beech leaf, a lean-to between window frame and sill. Its death protects a collection of tinier deaths and other dirts beneath. Although the white paint is water-stained, on it death is dirt, and hapless. The just-severed tiger lily is drinking its glass of water, I hope. This hope is sere. This hope is severe. What you ruin ruins you, too and so you hope for favor. I mean I do. The underside of a ladybug wanders the window. I wander the continent, my undercarriage not as evident, so go more perilously, it seems to me. But I am only me; to you it seems clear I mean to disappear, and am mean and project on you some ancient fear. If I were a bug, I hope I wouldn’t be this giant winged thing, spindly like a crane fly, skinny-legged like me, kissing the cold ceiling, fumbling for the face of the other, seeking. It came in with me last night when I turned on the light. I lay awake, afraid it would touch my face. It wants out. I want out, too.

An asparagus eating contest— I thought I’d misheard. Downstairs the rude old man lays tile, makes demasiado noise. I fell asleep at last around 5:30 am and he woke me an hour later or so: it is better I don’t look at the clock. By this means I clock my progress: I know now it is sometimes better not to know. I have midnight equilibrium but it is gone by 3 am. Thank you for Cloud of Sparrows, man who wrote it. I read all night. Thank you for the pen from Iran, Kamyar. Its myriad stars have just run out of ink eleven years on. Thank you, sun, for leaf shadows on horrible carpet in horrible box I live in and for tree by which I mean what’s living. I think of the gardens I planted and left. I think of beets, of beans and asparagus. Then on the radio, hear the contest. The noise of ten lanes of traffic does not cancel the consolation of seeing the wind in the sweetgum leaves. The experience of this is my food and my sleep. As at some strange customs, I declare.

If I were in a book it would be the book in which some lesser angel bemoans the state of my soul and is comforted for it and is corrected for it by some greater angel who knows as the reader knows that it is not one’s soul that suffers the indignities of ignobility: the inability to curb the petty smallness of spirit, ungladness in the company of bureaucrats, anger’s decay, in the sense that my soul itself cannot be harmed nor tarnished though it can witness my sorrow on finding that illness alters me from the self I thought I’d more or less known. What can one do about one’s nature? I look at the spider that’s finally restrung its great wheel away from the door. I’d like to close the door, go away, leaving the spider be. I’d like to preclude the possibility of angel, as of prey.

The general increase in green accords in me with a growing and specific gravity about — it hopes — to be undone like a bud. What kind of   leaf or the existence of  bugs or the always later rumor of   ravishment by wind or water don’t interest me. Sun does. Come close. Come slow. And look me again in the eyes as you do.