Meghan O'Rourke

1 I tried to live that way for a while, among the trees, the green breeze, chewing Bubblicious and by the edge of the pool      spitting it out. The book open on my chest, a towel at my back      the diving board thwok ing, and leaving never arrived      Cut it out my mother said     my brother clowning around with a water gun Cut it out. The planes arrowed into silence, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, always coming home from summer     over the bridge to Brooklyn. The father stabbed on Orange Street, the Betamax in the trash, the Sasha doll the dog chewed up, hollow plastic arms gaping. Powdered pink lemonade, tonguing the sweet grains liquid-thick. I could stand in that self   for years wondering is it better to anticipate than to age     Imagining children with five different men, a great flood that would destroy your possessions     and free you to wander. Bathing suits and apples and suntan oil and a mother bending over you shadow of   her face on yours. It’s gone, that way, the breeze, the permanent pool. A father saying “ghost” and the sheets slipping off   the oak tree’s bough. When I wake, leaves in the water. You could say green forever and not be lying. 2 The pond near the house in Maine where we lived for one year to “get away” from the city     the pond where the skaters     on Saturdays came, red scarves     through white snow, voices drawing near and     pulling away, trees against the clouds. Trying to live off   the land for a while. Too hard in the end my father said.     What did he say? Forget it     you weren’t listening     He wore fishing overalls most days and stank of   guts. Our shouts slipping, the green garbage cans edging the white scar pond, so many days like secrets about to be divulged . . . White snow; to stink of   fish guts but     to be trying to live:               the pond near the house and the sound of   voices     drawing near. As you aged you got distracted, indebted. In the hospital around my mother the machines     beeped, the long leads of   the heart monitor, drooping parabolas. It’s not worth dying for     she said. What was it she meant? Swollen shells, the desiccated brown seedpods we used to pinch onto our noses and skate about     putting on airs. Then the books opened their pages and with our red woolen scarves flying and the Freezy Freakies’ once-invisible hearts reddening into the cold we disappeared. Evian bottles skitter against the chain-link fence. It’s gone     that way     the green planes arrowing into silence     gum wrappers slipping to the ground. O wild West Wind     be thou our friend and blow away the trash. Salvage us from     the heap of our making and Cut it out my mother said     Stop worrying about the future, it doesn’t belong to us and we don’t belong to it. 3 The surface more slippery, slick and white the ice. I stand at the pond’s edge gather the information     darkening there hello algae     hello fish pond my mind in the depths     going. On the beach I dig, tunnel to the hands of   the woman who stitched this red shirt     holes all the way to China. It got so easy to     get used to it, the orchestration of meaning against the night, life a tower you could climb on not a junk heap     pale picture books yellowing on the shelves. It got so     I close my eyes and walk along the hospital hall. The iris quivering in the March light, a nurse taking my mother’s pulse not paid enough to help us as we wished to be helped. And your hope left behind     turning the pages of   magazines, the models in Prada. As a girl it was a quest, to feel exploded every second, pudding pops     and Vietnam vets standing on the corner shaking their Styrofoam cups.     Holding her cup my mother stands, petting the dog, it’s 1982     the sun tunneling in     she drinks her coffee Cut it out or     Forget it or     Hello. Look, I’ve made a telephone for us. Put that cup to your ear, and I’ll put it to mine, and listen     I just need to find one of those Styrofoam cups and what about you     where did you go what kind of night is it there electric synthetic blackened or burnt. 4 At night they come to you distorted and bright, like an old print on a light box, present,     present,          not quite. Are we inventing them as we sleep, or are they still     happening in a time we can’t touch? The hockey game on the blue tv glowing and slowing     I come home to a man slumped on the couch not-quite-saying a greeting     all the gone ones there the slap of skates     all gone and the commentator it’s going on forever the blade moving along rink says What a slapshot what a shot. You make a life, it is made of days and days, ordinary and subvocal, not busy becoming what they could be,               dark furlings of tiny church feelings, mysterious, I mean, and intricate like that high-windowed light — intricate and mysterious          I come home. Near our house we hung out on the Promenade after school the boys smoking the security systems in the Center blinking     a disco party blue red / blue red the East River reflecting scraped sky     cornices and clouds we could hear the roar of cars across it and taste the chemical air of   the offices the fathers worked in we’d been there to pick them up for the long weekend in the Catskills the hum-gray computers, the ibm Selectrics massive on the desks, eleven, twelve, thirteen, riding the graffitied subways, flirting, the boys     grabbing us calling     hey     hey. Changeable one day to the next. Jon talking of atheism blond hair in strips          At night the bomb mushrooming over the Statue of   Liberty, white blinding everywhere.          Oh, she said, don’t worry just a dream          just a dream. Everyone is scared of   Russia. Imagine          she laughed     We used to have to hide under our desks! Forget it     you weren’t listening     I was trying Don’t worry it gets you nothing to tell you something     the air cold the maples bare your mother pregnant Come on the horses are     past the window with a son much younger than you of   the house she rode them past the river where all the Catholic kids sailed ice boats uncles taking cash to wire home to Ireland. The future isn’t here yet, it’s always going to be,     but I’m holding you, walking the Promenade, thirty-six, the ferry crossing the river again. 5 and for a while               rain on the dirt road and the pastured gray horse     holding Chex Mix up to its fuzzed mouth     pockets of   time all summer     eating  ghosts in the arcade Pac-Man alive quarter after quarter I keep trying     Cut it out she said and forget it     I was trying to tell you my father cooking fish in the kitchen licking his thumb     to turn the page. In the meantime you try not to go into a kind of exile — Oh, you read too many books, says my friend Dan     Here’s the tv . And the small voices of children     enter the room, they sound so narrow and light and possible. But don’t you think we’re always making the same standing at the car rental kind of mistake we began by making at the last minute, rushing to call our fathers before setting off for vacation.     It’s warmer this August than it has been for decades. Still the sun bathing us isn’t preposterous or cold.          Grace: imagine it and all the afterworld fathers sleeping with their hair perfectly          combed faces mortician-clean unlike the ones they wore. In the motel Reagan on tv his hair in that parted wave     the milk prices up, my mother says, inflation.     Key Food on Montague, the linoleum tiles dirty and cracked, the dairy case goose-pimpling my skin. Those tiles are still there. She is dead now     and so is he. I know it seems bare to say it bare to     bare linoleum tiles. You who come after me I will be underfoot but     Oh, come off it, start again. We all live amid surfaces and                    and I wish I had the     Start over     Come on thou Step into the street, amidst the lightly turning trash, your hair lifting in the wind     Remember I have thought of   you the lines of our skates converging in a future etc. etc., the past the repository of   what can be salvaged, grace watering the basil on the windowsill, until the day comes of   looking back at it all, like a projectionist at a movie slipping through the reel, the stripped sound of   time — I tried to live that way for a while Bubblicious and          spitting it out Only forget it you          were if   I could hear your voice     again     I could pretend Rise and shine she called in the morning     Rise and shine leaves in the water     intricate and the dying Dutch elms the cool blue pool pockets of    time          Sun-In bleaching our hair the faces they wore     arcade ghosts and lilacs by the door in Maine where she leaned     close to me     said smell the planes buzzed     a purple light     fingers sticky if   I could only hear it again     you could say forever     tonguing the sweet grains     you could say forever     and not be

Pawnbroker, scavenger, cheapskate, come creeping from your pigeon-filled backrooms, past guns and clocks and locks and cages, past pockets emptied and coins picked from the floor; come sweeping with the rainclouds down the river through the brokenblack windows of factories to avenues where movies whisk through basement projectors and children peel up into the supplejack twilight— there a black-eyed straight-backed drag queen preens, fusses, fixes her hair in a shop window on Prince, a young businessman jingles his change and does his Travis Bickle for a long-faced friend, there on the corner I laughed at a joke Jim made. In the bedroom the moon is a dented spoon, cold, getting colder, so hurry sleep, come creep into bed, let’s get it over with; lay me down and close my eyes and tell me whip, tell me winnow tell me sweet tell me skittish tell me No tell me no such thing tell me straw into gold tell me crept into fire tell me lost all my money tell me hoarded , verboten , but promise tomorrow I will be profligate, stepping into the sun like a trophy.

Stone by stone, body by body in the grass: For this we trade our lone compass, Become swans instead, adrift in glaze- Light, kilned in the arms of each other Into vessel-vassal new. Or shrew, As the case may be. What would you do? Listen to the footsteps in the thistles. Put the kettle on for tea, and whisper it to me.

Was it like lifting a veil And was the grass treacherous, the green grass Did you think of your own mother Was it like a virus Did the software flicker And was this the beginning Was it like that Was there gas station food and was it a long trip And is there sun there or drones or punishment or growth Was it a blackout And did you still create me And what was I like on the first day of my life Were we two from the start And was our time an entrance or an ending Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow And then what were our names Did you love me or did I misunderstand Is it terrible Do you intend to come back Do you hear the world’s keening Will you stay the night

I Because I was born in a kingdom, there was a king. At times the king was a despot; at other times, not. Axes flashed in the road at night, but if you closed your eyes and sang the old ballads sitting on the well edge amongst your kinspeople then the silver did not appear to be broken. Such were the circumstances. They made a liar out of me. Did they change my spirit? Kith in the night the sound of owls. A bird fight. II We also had a queen, whetted by the moon. And we her subjects, softening in her sight. III What one had the other had to have too. Soon parrots bloomed in every garden, and every daughter had a tuning fork jeweled with emeralds. IV Learning to hunt in the new empire, the king invited his subjects to send him their knives. He tested these knives on oranges, pomegranates, acorn squash, soft birches, stillborns, prisoners who had broken rules. He used them on the teeth of traitors. V When strangers massed at the borders, the courtiers practiced subjection of the foreign. The court held a procession of twine, rope, gold, knife, light, and prostitutes with their vials of white powder. Smoke coursed into the courtyard, and we wrought hunger upon the bodies of strangers. I am sure you can imagine it, really what need is there for me to tell you? You were a stranger once too, and I brought rope. VI Afterward, I always slept, and let the dealers come to me alone with jewels. VII In the court at night, we debated the skin of language, questioned what might one day be revealed inside: a pink and soft fruit, a woman in a field. . . Or a shadow, sticky and loose as old jam. Our own dialect was abstract, we wished to understand not how things were but what spectacle we might make from them. VIII One day a merchant brought moving pictures, the emperor's new delight. He tacked dark cloth to all the windows, top and bottom, and turned the lights off, cranking the machine like a needle and thread making forms into which we could insinuate our cold bodies and find warmth. Light; dark. And the sliding images of courtiers merrily balancing pineapples on their heads, as if this were an adequate story. IX And our queen, that hidden self. What became of her? Slid into the night like a statue, and felt around into shadows, nothing to prove, all worldly latitudes, knowing as a spider in retreat. The web her mind, and in it, the fly. X On Sundays, we flew kites to ensure our joy was seen by all those who threatened to threaten us. The thread spooling out up high in the purple sky and silver gelatin films being made, sliding through the cranking machine so that the barbarians could know we made images of ourselves coated in precious metal and sent them away indifferent to our wealth. I miss the citrus smell of spring on the plaza filled with young and long-limbed kite flyers. XI Do I have anything else to add? Only that I obeyed my king, my kind, I was not faithless. Should I be punished for that? It is true some of my pictures creak unhappily through the spindle. It is true one day they came to my house. I know the powder we coated our fingers with made us thirsty and sometimes cruel. But I was born with a spirit like you. I have woken, you see, and I wish to be made new.

Inventing a horse is not easy. One must not only think of the horse. One must dig fence posts around him. One must include a place where horses like to live; or do when they live with humans like you. Slowly, you must walk him in the cold; feed him bran mash, apples; accustom him to the harness; holding in mind even when you are tired harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun; one must imagine teaching him to run among the knuckles of tree roots, not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves, and not to grow thin in the city, where at some point you will have to live; and one must imagine the absence of money. Most of all, though: the living weight, the sound of his feet on the needles, and, since he is heavy, and real, and sometimes tired after a run down the river with a light whip at his side, one must imagine love in the mind that does not know love, an animal mind, a love that does not depend on your image of it, your understanding of it; indifferent to all that it lacks: a muzzle and two black eyes looking the day away, a field empty of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees, and some piles of hay.