Megan Snyder-Camp

The casseroles just showed up. According to her sister a symbolic casting of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear— according to a friend she looked just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon, suitcase still in the trunk. She’d carried him dead for days. Out above the reeds a sphere of birds stretches and knots, rises as one brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger when it came filled every chair.

Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save: polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan or the wolf. We can't save everything but the kids are ready with their banks, the season's extra, the not- ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel to make our list? We bring more and more money to the table but the list outruns it. My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice, sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says, I want you to do nothing. It's only May and already they've declared a statewide drought. Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there. Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us is deductible. Silence of the was-river, was-bear. In the movies everyone is building some kind of ark.

"Organizers Abruptly Cancel 25"' Anniversary Gala Honoring NASA's Hubble Telescope As Riots Burn Through Baltimore" The camera is having trouble focusing. A blurry spot where the universe is. Outside, a storm is brewing, trashcans into windshields. Outside agitators, a nebula of thick dust. The images are black and white but you can imagine the green of this star's birth as its extra spirals out. This spring a cosmic mirage where you could watch, on every television, the death of a star in a supernova explosion nine billion years ago across the cosmos. Here in Sandtown, six men have broken the spine of another. It was a mistake to send the camera out so quickly. Easy to fix the lens but nearly impossible to reach it, as far out from us as it has drifted already.

The first person in recorded history struck by a comet slept on her couch across the road from the Comet Drive-In and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee, and woke her. Everything that hurts hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm . . . Here let the towers go, let them write his crossing, cursive, back and forth his name steadying our tongues . . . Famous, overcoat floating down without him, the idea that we stand where we mean to stand, 1974, a distraction from my parents’ morning commute. At 59th Street they split. The poems I was writing were no longer poems of their divorce, my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens, their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.

She invents wilderness out of absence, erases houses, the husband, the sewer pipe and the suburb it empties. Leaving the sparrow, the snake. Daily walks in her Virginia suburb minus the curb. Biographers struggle to account for these years in the wilderness, the housewife off hiking. Maybe her Virginia should be a West Virginia: wilder, less money, the creek a holler not this empty cul-de-sac. Some days she erased all but the air, maybe the light. Husband of the space bar, carpool a clean section break. She became a man in the wilderness and won the Pulitzer. I told the truth, she said, only I left some out. What rises in such a clearing? What stays home checking and re-checking the egg.

After a while the 500-year-old village became a secret, carved into the wall of the forest where it met the Pacific, eleven long houses and their racks of drying fish, their dogs. No roads to this town, only boats and the memory of boaters. Blankets made from woodpecker feathers, cattail fluff, cedar bark and dog hair woven into a plaid pattern. At least that's what I remember of the museum's diorama. When the mud came down the mountain and covered the village, no one had lived there for years. It was a boater who remembered, after a while, that the village was gone, and also that it had once existed. Archaeologists brought garden hoses to wash the mud off and hooked the hoses up to the sea. Some of what had been preserved in the mud was destroyed that day by the water pressure, and then later most else was ruined by the wind and rain, but at least for a few weeks they could hold the bones in their hands. The archaeologists brought their dogs, they lived there a while.

Since kindergarten my son's class has practiced for when a lion enters the building. They have a safe wall they crouch against. A closet some of the children fit into. The lion roams wild in the hall. Races up the stairs. When the lion is at the door they are taught to think of emptiness. Darkness. A real lion not some yellow-furred animal.

What we built to hold us, the year's memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other's mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide, hinges the gap with spider silk, learning to give, to give, to give until breaking. Only then— either one gives until breaking or one does not.

In this land the children tear their hearts in half. Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten can be had. If a stand of birches is found to be made of tin, the soil around them will bleed with rust. In this land children study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books any soldier who stumbles will not fall. No one will fall, a gift parents try not to make much of. At every meal some is set aside. In every garden a patch lies fallow. At parties there are whispers of illegal cheeses. Camembert, especially, is said to taste alive. And so the children learn to make room. To leave some. Nothing will come, but nothing will go. To love like this half must rattle in its pit.

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash, a reaction sending out runners across her chest, a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back into fashion, their son coming back from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger spread down the long hallway of their house and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy, the mother decides to see the son again, and so our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth, all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot in this registered historic district (all of the houses bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories, run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon, cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue, in this yard no marker stone and under this stone their son’s everything, no double, no double