Marvin Bell

That you, Father, are “in my mind,” some will argue, who cherish the present but flee the past. They haven’t my need to ask, What was I? Asking instead, What am I?, they see themselves bejeweled and wingèd. Because they would fly and have value, their answers are pretty but false: the fixings of facile alchemists, preferring their stones to brains. The brain, remember, is not foolproof either, and does and does until it can’t. Sodden, quivering, crossed and recrossed, the mind can become a headstone or be malice stuffed with fish. Everything changes so quickly. You who were are no longer and what I was I’m not. Am I to know myself, except as I was? The rest is catchy, self-promising, false. Oh please write to me, and tell me. I just want to be happy again. That’s what I was, happy, maybe am, you would know.

1 One man held the huge pig down and the other stuck an ice pick into the jugular, which is when we started to pay attention. The blood rose ten feet with force while the sow swam on its back as if to cut its own neck. Its fatty back smacked the slippery cement while the assassins shuffled to keep their balance, and the bloody fountain rose and fell back and rose less and less high, until the red plume reentered the pig at the neck, and the belly collapsed and the pig face went dull. 2 I knew the pig was the butcher’s, whose game lived mainly behind our garage. Sometimes turkeys, always roosters and sheep. Once the windmill turned two days without stopping. The butcher would walk in his apron straight for the victim. The others would scratch and babble and get in the way. Then the butcher would lead the animal to the back door of his shop, stopping to kill it on a stump. It was always evening, after closing. The sea breeze would be rising, cloaking the hour in brine. 3 The pig we saw slaughtered was more than twice anything shut up in the patch we trespassed to make havoc. Since the butcher was Italian, not Jewish, that would be his pig. Like the barber who carried a cigar box of bets to the stationery store, like the Greek who made sweets and hid Greek illegals, immigrant “submarines,” the butcher had a business, his business, by which he took from our hands the cleaver and serrated knife for the guts, and gave us back in butcher paper and outer layers of brown wrapping our lives for their cries. 4 Hung up to drain, the great pig, hacked into portions, looked like a puzzle we could put together in the freezer to make a picture of a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things when we looked.

His army jacket bore the white rectangle of one who has torn off his name.  He sat mute at the round table where the trip-wire veterans ate breakfast.  They were foxhole buddies who went stateside without leaving the war. They had the look of men who held their breath and now their tongues.  What is to say beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower and lower as the war went on, spines curving toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged with ammo belts enough to make fine lace of enemy flesh and blood.  Now these who survived, who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front, lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires strung through tin cans.  Better an alarm than the constant nightmare of something moving on its belly to make your skin crawl with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

Of the sleeves, I remember their weight, like wet wool, on my arms, and the empty ends which hung past my hands. Of the body of the shirt, I remember the large buttons and larger buttonholes, which made a rack of wheels down my chest and could not be quickly unbuttoned. Of the collar, I remember its thickness without starch, by which it lay against my clavicle without moving. Of my trousers, the same—heavy, bulky, slow to give for a leg, a crowded feeling, a molasses to walk in. Of my boots, I remember the brittle soles, of a material that had not been made love to by any natural substance, and the laces: ropes to make prisoners of my feet. Of the helmet, I remember the webbed, inner liner, a brittle plastic underwear on which wobbled the crushing steel pot then strapped at the chin. Of the mortar, I remember the mortar plate, heavy enough to kill by weight, which I carried by rope. Of the machine gun, I remember the way it fit behind my head and across my shoulder blades as I carried it, or, to be precise, as it rode me. Of tactics, I remember the likelihood of shooting the wrong man, the weight of the rifle bolt, the difficulty of loading while prone, the shock of noise. For earplugs, some used cigarette filters or toilet paper. I don’t hear well now, for a man of my age, and the doctor says my ears were damaged and asks if I was in the Army, and of course I was but then a wounded eardrum wasn’t much in the scheme.

Flags of all sorts. The literary life. Each time we dreamt we’d done the gentlemanly thing, covering our causes in closets full of bones to remove ourselves forever from dearest possibilities, the old weapons re-injured us, the old armies conscripted us, and we gave in to getting even, a little less like us if a lot less like others. Many, thus, gained fame in the way of great plunderers, retiring to the university to cultivate grand plunder-gardens in the service of literature, the young and no more wars. Their continuing tributes make them our greatest saviors, whose many fortunes are followed by the many who have not one.

1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand. That it represents the true direction of the wind. Beach grass, tousled phragmite. Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing. An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery. The cranberry bushes biting down to survive. And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic. And the earless roaring in the shape of a sphere. A baritone wind, tuned to the breath of the clouds. Pushing sand that made a hilly prison of time. For wind and water both move inland. Abrading scrub — the stunted, the dwarfed, the bantam. A fine sandpaper, an eraser as wide as the horizon. Itself made of galaxies, billions against the grain. Sand: the mortal infinitude of a single rock. 2. Walking in the Drowning Forest Pitch pine, thirty-five-foot oaks to their necks in sand. That the ocean signals the lighthouse. Gull feathers call to the fox that left them behind. Impressions of deer feet, dog feet and gull claws. The piping plover in seclusion. Somewhere the blind owl to be healed at sunset. Here is artistry beyond self-flattery. A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain. A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense. To which the crab comes sideways. With which the sunken ship shares its secrets. From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one. He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar. He knows, who has worn the whitecaps. Who has slipped from the ferry or leaped from the bridge. To be spoken of, though no one knows.

Ethics without faith, excuse me, is the butter and not the bread. You can’t nourish them all, the dead pile up at the hospital doors. And even they are not so numerous as the mothers come in maternity. The Provider knows his faults— love of architecture and repair— but will not fall into them for long: he can’t afford the adolescent luxury, the fellowship of the future looks greedily toward his family. The black keys fit black cylinders in the locks in holes in the night. He had a skeleton key once, a rubber arm and complete confidence. Now, as head of the family, he is inevitably on the wrong side looking out.

The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered for months, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in the tile maker’s shape of a ship to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee where once before the river below rose up to swallow the bank, World’s Fairs where one can enter the cell of a human body or see Paris, London, Marrakech and the Taj Mahal in one afternoon, the headache that may be sinus or bad eyes or allergy or a tumor, the bruise that was blue now yellow the effect of labor or abuse, the cataclysmic event in a personal life not totally forgotten, the memory of doing well that turned to unexpressed anger just because love was everywhere preventing helpless mistakes— achievement and perfection for the first time considered in error, the end of life being life itself, life itself ignorance, we never tire of making the world smaller, looking in doll houses, and a mailman who has picked up every bright piece of glass and tile in forty years of rounds retired to build a house of glass and tile which is his life, no kick coming, while in a suburb of Chicago a leaning tower of Pisa drawn to scale signals a shopping plaza where goods come in from around the world, for the people who live there. And Vico says gods and goddesses are the self writ large— selves to make earthquakes, tornadoes, eclipses, selves to lift the sun— and Vico says all things having been named for the namers, us, we give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back, a cup has its lip and a bottle its neck, and ever after rivers flow from their headwaters and a well-oiled engine purrs at the center of good feeling. So take your misery down a notch in aches and pains and little diseases, in years of photo albums, in journals of dreams interrupted by mornings, in furniture you built yourself, in copies and imitations, in scale-model wars and families and the age of fancy automobiles. And when once in your life you make the big trip to the original, chances are you’ll mainly see your own face in the glass that protects everything of which there’s one only in the form of its only maker.

It could be a clip, it could be a comb; it could be your mother, coming home. It could be a rooster; perhaps it’s a comb; it could be your father, coming home. It could be a paper; it could be a pin. It could be your childhood, sinking in. The toys give off the nervousness of age. It’s useless pretending they aren’t finished: faces faded, unable to stand, buttons lost down the drain during baths. Those were the days we loved down there, the soap disappearing as the water spoke, saying, it could be a wheel, maybe a pipe; it could be your father, taking his nap. Legs propped straight, the head tilted back; the end was near when he could keep track. It could be the first one; it could be the second; the father of a friend just sickened and sickened.

The heavy, wet, guttural small-plane engine fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness about where the airport should be. I take a lot for granted, not pleased to be living under the phlegm- soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets and live elsewhere in Clean Zones, but figuring the air is full of sorrows. I don’t blame the quick use of the entire earth on the boozy pilot come down to get a dose of cobalt for his cancer. He’s got a little life left, if he doesn’t have to take all day to reach it. With the black patches inside him, and the scars and the streaks and the sick stomach, his life is more and more like that of the lowliest child chimney sweep in the mind of the great insensible, William Blake. William Blake, the repeated one, Blake, half mad, half remembered, who knew his anatomy, down to the little-observed muscle in the shoulder that lifts the wing. The little London chimney sweeper reaches up and reaches down. In his back, every vertebra is separated from the long hours of stretching. With one deep, tired breath, the lungs go black. By the Holiday Company crane, adding a level to the hospital, on the highest land in the county, heavy sits the pure-white Air Care helicopter, with its bulging eye. It has kept many going, a good buy, something. Now someone I know says Blake in anger, angry for his brother in the factory and his sister on the ward, but tonight I have no more anger than the muscle that lifts my knee when I walk. Another pleads with the ocean that the words for suffering and trouble take place in a sound that will be all sounds and in the tidal roll of all our lives and every event, but I am silent by water, and am less to such power than a failed lung. And I think it is only a clever trick to know that one thing may be contained in another. Hence, Blake in the sweep, one in the ground in one in the air, myself in the clinic for runaway cells, now and later.