Maria Hummel

One son plays monster rage. His brother plays ship crashed in a maze. We are reading Hulk. We are reading Theseus. White sails, green men, bright women who give everything and get nothing. The monster son would never sail a ship into a maze, but brothers are not the same. They hear the same stories and make different toys of them, muscled figures in their fists, walls of wood and magnets. Who knows why a part of me always departs this place, glides out the window to rain and falling leaves, dresses of wetness and gold. She floats there, blessed by air, but when she tries to slip back in, she can’t; she hangs beyond the glass, panicked, then bulging with fury. Days later another part of me flies, into a maple the color of platelets, and another into bareness and sky. I’ve lost count of how many fists are now pounding my house, how many mouths are braying how many cries, but here inside, for now, my dear sons call to me for their fallen castles, built again, to find all the missing arrows.

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train. We pass a junkyard and the bay, then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel. You lose your hat. I find it. The train sighs open at Burlingame, past dark tons of scrap and water. I carry you down the black steps. Burlingame is the size of joy: a race past bakeries, gold rings in open black cases. I don’t care who sees my crooked smile or what erases it, past the bakery, when you tire. We ride the blades again beside the crooked bay. You smile. I hold you like a hole holds light. We wear our hats and ride the knives. They cannot fix you. They try and try. Tunnel! Into the dark open we go. Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

This is the sound of the bell. It rings, full of brass and the end it brings: once for the children, once for the child who sits alone. His eyes hurt and mild, he waits, holding his things. Time should hold no meaning for him yet. You don’t learn how to play; you forget. But he knows a while well, and longs for the clang of the bell. A bell is a room of nothing. No, a dome with a hidden swing — a will, a sway, a tone, a peal, the beginning of song. The wild crowd nears, passes, laughing. Here is the sound of the bell.

I don’t know when I stopped believing in heaven, or if I do. Maybe I just stopped receiving heaven. The sun rose. I climbed into the pines’ brittle crowns. You could say I was retrieving heaven. Not a place or a time, but blindness to everything but one light, pulsing, pleasing: heaven. We married in September. Everyone was still wearing their summer shirts, sleeves of heaven. It was white, there was a bend, and the car spun. It was then I prayed, pleading with heaven. When he goes limp,lie him down on thegurney, Mom. Oxygen mask, breathing heaven. The hospital shines, our son flies in and out. The snow falls hard, relieving heaven. He loves the colors of planets. I teach him their lifelessness: beautiful, deceiving heaven. I don’t know who is buried beneath me but I hear her break as I am leaving heaven. How can you cry for one ruined life, Maria, when you could be grieving for heaven?