Mary Barnard

The seas has made a wall for its defence of falling water. Those whose impertinence leads them to its moving ledges it rejects. Those who surrender it will with the next wave drag under. Sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion. The way to the dunes is easy. The shelving sand is stiffened in the rain and loosened again in the sun’s fingers. Children, lustful of the glistening hours drink and are insatiate. Wind under the eyelids, confusion walling their ears, their bodies glow in the cold wash of the beach. And after, they walk with rigid feet the planked street of the town. They miss the slipping texture of the sand and a sand pillow under the hollow instep. They are unmoved by fears that breed in darkening kitchens at sundown following storm, and they rebel against cold waiting in the wind and rain for the late sail. Did you, as I, condemn the coastal fog and long for islands seen from a sail’s shadow? The dunes lie more passive to the wind than water is. This, then, the country of our choice. It is infertile, narrow, prone under a dome of choral sound: water breaking upon water. Litter of bare logs in the drift— the sea has had its sharp word with them. Wild roses, wild strawberries cover the dune shoulder It is a naked restless garden that descends from the crouched pine to shellfish caught in flat reflecting sands. We lose the childish avarice of horizons. The sea ends against another shore. The cracked ribs of a wreck project from the washed beach. Under the shell-encrusted timbers dripping brine plucks at the silence of slant chambers opening seaward. What moving keel remembers such things as here are buried under sand? The transitory ponds and smooth bar slide easily under the advancing tide, emerging with the moon’s turning. Clear lagoons behind the shattered hulk, thin movements of sea grass on the dune rim bending against cloud, these things are oursI Submissive to the sea and wind, resistful of all else, sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion.

After reading Ash Wednesday she looked once at the baked beans and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl, she observed a kind of poetic Lent— and I had thought I liked poetry better than she did. I do. But to me its most endearing quality is its unsuitableness; and, conversely, the chief wonder in heaven (whither I also am sometimes transported) is the kind of baggage I bring with me. Surely there is no more exquisite jointure in the anatomy of life than that at which poetry dovetails with the inevitable meal and Mrs. B. sits murmuring of avocados.

Wheel of sorrow, centerless. Voices, sad without cause, slope upward, expiring on grave summits. Mournfulness of muddy playgrounds, raw smell of rubbers and wrapped lunches when little girls stand in a circle singing of windows and of lovers. Hearing them, no one could tell why they sing sadly, but there is in their voices the pathos of all handed-down garments hanging loosely on small bodies.

At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet made dark tracks on the hearth. Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat, but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold. The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor. She sat there with a silvered cedar knot for a low stool; and I sat opposite, my lips and eyelids hot in the heat of the fire. Piling on dry bark, seeing that no steam went up from her dark dress, I felt uneasiness as though firm sand had shifted under my feet in the wash of a wave. I brought her soup from the stove and she would not eat, but sat there crying her cold tears, her blue lips quivering with cold and grief. She blamed me for a thief, saying that I had burned a piece of wood the tide washed up. And I said, No, the tide had washed it out again; and even so, a piece of sodden wood was not so rare as polished agate stones or ambergris. She stood and wrung her hair so that the water made a sudden splash on the round rug by the door. I saw her go across the little footbridge to the beach. After, I threw the knot on the hot coals. It fell apart and burned with a white flash, a crackling roar in the chimney and dark smoke. I beat it out with a poker in the soft ash. Now I am frightened on the shore at night, and all the phosphorescent swells that rise come towards me with the threat of her dark eyes with a cold firelight in them; and crooked driftwood writhes in dry sand when I pass. Should she return and bring her sisters with her, the withdrawing tide would leave a long pool in my bed. There would be nothing more of me this side the melting foamline of the latest wave.

What’s geography? What difference what mountain it is? In the intimacy of this altitude its discolored snowfields overhang half the world. On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky, feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind spinning the blood-weighted body head downward. The mountain that had become a known profile on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth swinging us above falling spaces, above a map of the world. Disturber of the unseen, provoker of the gusts in which we bend struggling against destruction gaping eastward. The wind fails. The breath held. The illusion of death. The resisting shoulder unopposed lurches west in innocent still air, as steep, as deep.

Out of a high meadow where flowers bloom above cloud, come down; pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice. Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir, surprise in the perfect leg-stems and queries unstirred by recognition or fear pooled in the deep eyes. Come down by regions where rocks lift through the hot haze of pain; down landscapes darkened, crossed by the rift of death-shock; place print of a neat hoof on trampled ground where not one leaf or root remains unbitten; but come down always, accompany me to the morass of the decaying mind. There we’ll share one rotted stump between us.

Ink-black, but moving independently across the black and white parquet of print, the ant cancels the author out. The page, translated to itself, bears hair-like legs disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber. These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning, destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence laying waste all languages, until, thinly, the fictional dialogue begins again: the page goes on telling another story.

The country lies flat, expressionless as the face of a stranger. Not one hillock shelters a buried bone. The city: a scene thin as a theater backdrop, where no doors open, no streets extend beyond the view from the corner. Only the railroad embankment is high, shaggy with grass. Only the freight, knuckling a red sun under its wheels, drags familiar box-car shapes down long perspectives of childhood meals and all crossings at sunset. With a look deep as the continent, with the casual greeting of those who will meet again, it bestrides the viaduct. Its span is the span of trestles above mountain gorges, its roar the echo of streams still wearing away stone.

Rotting in the wet gray air the railroad depot stands deserted under still green trees. In the fields cold begins an end. There were other too-long-postponed departures. They left, finally, because of well water gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill of rain in chimneys. The spot is abandoned even in memory. They knew, locking doors upon empty houses, to leave without regret is to lose title to one home forever.