Mary Ruefle

Beloved, men in thick green coats came crunching through the snow, the insignia on their shoulders of uncertain origin, a country I could not be sure of, a salute so terrifying I heard myself lying to avoid arrest, and was arrested along with Jocko, whose tear had snapped off, a tiny icicle he put in his mouth. We were taken to the ice prison, a palace encrusted with hoarfrost, its dome lit from within, Jocko admired the wiring, he kicked the walls to test the strength of his new boots.  A television stood in a block of ice, its blue image still moving like a liquid center. You asked for my innermost thoughts.  I wonder will I ever see a grape again?  When I think of the vineyard where we met in October—when you dropped a cluster custom insisted you be kissed by a stranger—how after the harvest we plunged into a stream so icy our palms turned pink.  It seemed our future was sealed.  Everyone said so.  It is quiet here.  Not closing our ranks weakens us hugely.  The snowflakes fall in a featureless bath.  I am the stranger who kissed you.  On sunny days each tree is a glittering chandelier.  The power of mindless beauty!  Jocko told a joke and has been dead since May.  A bullethole in his forehead the officers call a third eye.  For a month I milked a barnful of cows.  It is a lot like cleansing a chandelier.  Wipe and polish, wipe and polish, round and round you go. I have lost my spectacles.  Is the book I was reading still open by the side of our bed?  Treat it as a bookmark saving my place in our story. (here the letter breaks off)

It is said that many have been cured of madness by drinking of the spring in the orchard of this convent, but I doubt it, for it is a very pleasant place and a surfeit of pleasantries often leads directly to madness. I do not have much experience of madness (once a sister ran naked down the hall) but I have tasted the water and it is clear and fresh, there is nothing unpleasant about it. The Abbess said of a certain man he is a drink of water—meaning he was a bore— but I want to meet that man, he would be as welcome in my life as Jesus in the orchard here, though the fat old Abbess might shoo him away.  I would be so glad to have him drink, to serve him with a round of little glasses on a painted tray, like the ‘cocktail parties’ in the secular world, and I the hostess, turning her cheek to be kissed in the fray. I would wear white clothes and my headdress, and he might carry a scythe and cut the morning glories, or simply sit and sun his nose. But they have taken my Lord away, lodged Him in the earth somewhere, call Him leaves, vines, breeze, bird. It cannot be true. Looking for Him in these things condemns us to a lifetime of imbecile activity. He has a face, arms, legs, a navel. He is a man, for He is everything I am not. How can it be otherwise? Before I leave the spring, I lean over it and weep. I spit upon the flowers. I stumble up the hill. We are somewhere below the Tserna Gota— meaning the Black Mountain—and when I reach the top I count the villages—there are two—where we are the last on earth to think of Him as having a head. Here, too, is the source of the spring, and crows with lethargic dispositions circle and circle the spot.

I take the bird on the woodpile, separate it from its function, feather by feather. I blow up its scale. I make a whole life out of it: everywhere I am, its sense of loitering lights on my shoulder.

Oh, I said, this is going to be. And it was. Oh, I said, this will never happen. But it did. And a purple fog descended upon the land. The roots of trees curled up. The world was divided into two countries. Every photograph taken in the first was of people. Every photograph taken in the second showed none. All of the girl children were named And. All of the boy children named Then.

I He stood outside the gates of Lhasa for four days singing I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed, but the berries are delicious if you remember to wash them.

We are a sad people, without hats. The history of our nation is tragically benign. We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard. We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear who stands alone in the moonlight reading what little text there is on the graves. He looks quite desirable like that. He looks like the center of the universe. Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words while the others are busy making more of him. Soon the more will ask of him to write their love letters and he will oblige, using the language of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground, beloved by us who have been standing here for hours, a proud people after all.

The last time I saw father alive he was using a black umbrella, closed, to beat off some pigeons hanging outside the marble portals of a museum. We were visitors, walking very slowly, so father could stoop and examine everything. We had not been in the museum, but were resting on its steps. We saw it all—the fountains, the statues, the parks and the post office. Cities are made of such things. Once we encountered a wedding coming out of the cathedral and were caught in a shower of rice; as the bride flicked her veiled head father licked his little finger and in this way saved a grain. On the next block he announced he was going to heaven. But first let’s go back to the hotel and rest, he said: I want my mint. Those were practically his last words. And what did I want more than anything in the world? Probably the ancient Polish recipe for blood soup, which was finally told to me in an empty deli in a deserted mill town in western Massachusetts by the owner’s mother, who was alone one day when I burst in and demanded a bowl. But, she said, lacing her fingers around a jar of morello cherries, it requires one cup of new blood drawn from the goose whose neck you’ve just wrung to put in the pot, and where in these days can I find anything as fresh as that? I had lost track of my life before, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of wayfarer’s bliss when she continued to list, one by one, the impossible ingredients I needed to live. We sat at the greasy table far into the night, while snow fell on the locked doors of the church next door, dedicated to St. Stanislas, which was rumored to be beautiful inside, and contain the remains of his beloved head.

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt.  This bench would hardly ever be used and in summer when the grasses were high would remain partially hidden from view.  We both knew we wanted the bench to be made of teak so that it would last a long time in the harsh weather and so that we would never have to paint it.  Teak weathers to a soft silver that might, in November or March, disappear into the gray hills that are the backdrop of our lives.  My husband wanted a four foot bench and I wanted a five foot bench.  This is what we argued about.  My husband insisted that a four foot bench was all we needed, since no more than two people (presumably ourselves) would ever sit on it at the same time.  I felt his reasoning was not only beside the point but missed it entirely; I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more people than would ever actually sit down.  The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve.  After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it, so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench, the greater the expanse of that plank, the more it matched its true function, which was imaginary.  My husband mentioned money and I said that I was happier to have no bench at all, which would cost nothing, than to have a four foot bench, which would be expensive.  I said that having no bench at all was closer to the five foot bench than the four foot bench because having no bench served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench. We grew very tired of discussing the three benches and for a day we rested from our argument.  During this day I had many things to do and many of them involved my driving past other houses, none of which had benches, that is they each had the third bench, and as I drove past the other houses I could see a bench here and a bench there; sometimes I saw the bench very close to the house, against a wall or on a porch, and sometimes I saw the bench under a tree or in the open grass, cut or uncut, and once I saw the bench at the end of the driveway, blocking the road.  Always it was a five foot bench that I saw, a long sleek bench or a broken down bench, a bench with a slatted back or a bench with a solid, carved back, and always the bench was empty. But I knew that for my husband the third bench was only four feet long and he saw always two people sitting on it, two happy or tired people, two people who were happy to be alive or two people tired from having worked hard enough to buy the bench they were sitting on.  Or they were happy and tired, happy to have reached the end of some argument, tired from having had it.  For these people, the bench was an emblem of their days, which were fruitful because their suffering had come to an end. On my bench, which was always empty, nothing had come to an end because nothing had begun, no one had sat down, though the bench was always there waiting for exactly that to happen.  And the bench was always long enough so that someone, if he desired to, could lie all the way down.  That day passed.  Another day followed it and my husband and I began, once more, to discuss the bench.  The sound of our voices revealed a renewed interest and vigor.  I thought I sensed in him a coming around to my view of the bench and I know he sensed in me a coming around to his view of the bench, because at one point I said that a four foot bench reminded me of rough notes towards a real bench while a five foot bench was like a fragment of an even longer bench and I admitted it was at times hard to tell the difference.  He said he didn’t know anything about the difference between rough notes and fragments but he agreed that between the two benches there was, possibly, just perhaps—he could imagine it—very little difference.  It was, after all, only a foot we were talking about.  And I think it was then, in both of our minds, that a fourth bench came into being, a bench that was only a foot long, a miniature bench, a bench we could build ourselves, though of course we did not.  This seemed to be, essentially, the bench we were talking about.  Much later, when the birds came back, or the leaves drifted downwards, or the snow fell, slowly and lightly at first, then heavier and faster, it was this bench that we both saw when we looked out the window at the bench we eventually placed in the meadow which continued to grow as if there were no bench at all.

The mountain skies were clear except for the umlaut of a cloud over the village. The little girl wore yellow gloves. She looked in the peephole and saw a stack of unused marionettes. Yet, she wondered.