Michael Anania

As others or ourselves let’s say—furtive, then, inconsequent and sad— or on the edge of thought, perhaps, or into some predictable meandering, the outward accelerations of water against its shore dissipating into erosions, cuts and counter-cuts, remembered as landscape, the convenient certainties of an abandoned past. Is it tree or treeline or the massing of leaves against the sky or color freed from shadow or something of color deepening against shade, the sensible bluff that heaves above the bluff’s presumed insensible marl? River, again, always enclosed by its own turnings, its own turnings overgrown.

The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them. —Francis Parkman nothing but this continent intent on its dismay— hands, etc. bandaged, a torn petticoat fringed with lace, roseate frozen fingers, or elsewhere feet wrapped in burlap scuffing new snow after the indigo of their tunics seeps back into the soil this spring, the several springs’ dulling thaw and incidental greenery what marks they made were harrowed out by those who settled, so set themselves against the land whether to keep the land open to passage or parcel it to the plow Benton and Everett argued “English tartars,” some said, white savages to plunder the trade, “only farmer and tradesman stabilize” his head raised slightly the dying woodsman views the open plains, “flat water” squalls spilling stiff grasses into the small shade a stand of scrub trees gives his end “huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo were scattered everywhere” the Conestoga’s canvas straining to the wind, the plow’s first bite, the first indenture of the rutted road, crossties set down, oil, asphalt glittering quartz aggregate to the sun the harrow’s bright discs crumble the damp shine of the new furrow, the wind dulls and sifts grassland into dust two days in the storm cellar, wet rags to their faces, the slatted door impacted with wet rags, dowery linens strange light at the cyclone’s onset, a cupped brightness edging banks of dark clouds, fields darkening in lines of gathering dust, section on section spilling eastward, a straw drilled through a tree, a team of mules transported forty miles intact a dream of transport, Dorothy soaring on the wind, becalmed in still another summer, lost, follows billboards and Burma Shave into the city’s ragged sprawl Uptown or Lakeview, five children in three rooms, A.D.C., weathers like unpainted wood, stacked porches where her laundry tatters with city grit, bars haunted by banjo music everybody talks of home as though it were the sparkle of an earlier dream, a glint of rainwater in someone’s hair, names you can’t remember, old photographs gone brown with age, a man and woman, faces obscured by broad hats, a bare tree beside them, the bare distances empty and faded into the sky Oxus, Phasis, Palmyra— Oz encased in glass, “variegated with fields and meadows” store window dioramas display the life and manners of high-rise glass apartments— The El Dorado, Malibu East— warm winters, cool summers high above the city’s noise clouds move in facets across their polished faces, tipped red at sunset, presiding over a close-set clutter of flat, graveled roofs graceful as mannequins they are laughing into the summer evening, women bright as spring flowers, in autumn’s colors, warmed and smiling, they talk of love before a dying fire gray as she is, aging, she fingers the pictures of ladies’ magazines, fingers, as well, pictures she brought from home the red flowers on the floor wear into black treads, black dust comes in at her windows his weapons arranged at his side, the sun darkening his sight, Cooper contrived his death in alien spaces; Boone finished his days on a crumbling porch that fronted on the open West

(after Ehrich Weiss) I Geography matters. It is the plan, the arrangement of things that confuses our enemies, the difference between what they expect and what they get; as simple as bobbing for apples becomes difficult, deception is an achievement in ordering the obvious. II Let us make a song for our confusion: Call it “Red Skies over Gary” or “Red Skies in the Sunset” or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.” Red Skies over Gary, you are my sunset, my only home. Let us make ourselves invisible, not make songs, or even disappear suddenly from the sidewalks of Calumet. III Cobalt and carborundum are refinements of the art. So it’s true, you held the razor in your teeth, or was it pure magic, a miracle of place? One makes for workability, the other for hardness, and chromium bright, the stainless achievement. IV I came from Calumet to Gary, and it was early evening; south of the mills, poppy fields toxic red above the car lots, have a Coke on Texaco ’til the mercury arcs devour us and it is purple night.

This is my advice to foreigners: call it simply—the river; never say old muddy or even Missouri, and except when it is necessary ignore the fact that it moves. It is the river, a singular, stationary figure of division. Do not allow the pre-Socratic to enter your mind except when thinking of clear water trout streams in north central Wyoming. The river is a variety of land, a kind of dark sea or great bay, sea of greater ocean. At times I find it good discipline to think of it as a tree rooted in the delta, a snake on its topmost western branch. These hills are not containers; they give no vantage but that looking out is an act of transit. We are not confused, we do not lose our place.

I “At odds again,” hands moving out of the shadows. And now, now everything seems definite, discrete, fingers webbed with sunlight the tree lets through, arms still in their own time, circling, catch up, catch hold at the wrists, like cell chains in a watchcrystal completing themselves. Together again. Shoulders, torso, each one of us one, once more. It is hard to imagine minutes just past. II “At odds again,” hands moving against the wind like loose flapping things, washcloths, words long frayed with careless use. You wanted to say it was beginning to bother you, beginning to wish, wondering if thought in broken light could ever touch itself, reassemble itself. The King, our promise, broken, the sword we imagined gone, hovers like leafmold in the light. Say it, then, the stain of things remains. III “At odds again,” elbow cupped into wet leaves. After love, there are moments of clutter, and no amount of practice will teach you to regard them as anything more than what you lean against catching its buried chill. Keep your fancy to yourself; facts do not fade but are momentarily obscured, the work of hands, touch and its out- come, the absence of touch, and distance, the inevitable space between, shapes all our limitations. IV “At odds again,” knee raised slightly, sunlight and shade, patchwork coverlet. Bits and pieces, the story of each thing connected, end to end, this instant extended in every direction. Not a thing in space or things in spaces or spaces between what space seems occupied for this moment, the next. We are not snowstorms of ourselves, spindrift and curl. The whorl of action is a template in time: the casual shifting of leaves, hands moving, the certain flex of possibility.

It is easily forgotten, year to year, exactly where the plot is, though the place is entirely familiar— a willow tree by a curving roadway sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves; damp grass strewn with flower boxes, canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies circling in draped black crepe family stones, fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries; such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair brushed back, and the single waterfaucet, birdlike upon its grey pipe stem, a stream opening at its foot. We know the stories that are told, by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy regarding the precise enactments of their own gesturing. And among the women there will be a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering. The morning may be brilliant; the season is one of brilliances—sunlight through the fountained willow behind us, its splayed shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward, irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones. It may be that since our walk there is faltering, moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain, bluebells and zebragrass toward that place between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way is lost, that we have no practiced step there, and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us.

“In warm sunlight jade engenders smoke”; poetry, like indigo mountain, keeps its distance; the light plays words and figures, stone’s edge edged with air, green haze growing. Amused by butterflies, Chuang Tsu dreaming, the emperor’s heart in spring, thoroughly transformed. Still, in pieces, the words rest so much apart. Risking my life I lean on dangerous railings. When the dream wakes to its own particulars, the strands scattered, loose hair on muslin, broken characters the reeds make, unmake— vague    no reason bright    again    dark—

for Anselm Hollo I what is most valued, the cherished things any moment in Iowa settles so carelessly upon you—cat stickers, a coded signal Home Orange Juice is trucking by, some morning or any day when winter spring summer and the poem begin again II who was it started laughing? someone otherwise somber, the Christmas lariateer spinning double circles, dancing through the lasso at his side, bullwhipping cigarettes from his lovely assistant’s scarlet mouth every hour on the hour next to the howling Santa Claus III would have thought other- wise, conceded the point at first argument; of course there were mornings, the hills went on to Cedar Rapids and Davenport; in its own season the corn’s pollen stung another hand; brown rivers paled with ice; those were the truck washes we had known before, the spit of gravel from the humming wheels; the patient customer of truck stops knows the best of these returns, hulks them into the dark of his coffee with rounded shoulders and extended forearms IV it is the line of force or the vector that sees us through our ambiguities, diagram of rivers, path the semi takes among its various winds, turn the night makes at a neon sign, EATS, locus of all points on the lasso’s rim, itself remembered; somehow each of us knows the double twist of brittle fiber that holds the line together, knows the turns the rain takes, heaves the long land rests against our feet

(after Albert Cook) All day, that is forever, they fall, leaves, pine needles, as blindly as hours into hours colliding, and the chill rain—what else do you expect of October?— spilling from one roof to another, like words from lips to lips, your long incertain say in all of this unsure of where the camera is and how the light is placed and what it is that’s ending.

Quick passage into memory and behind only blank spaces, blue stain on pink litmus or merely known so closely something falls away receding from touch, caught in the air your fingers move, agile water-fly padding the surface of what is seen even among these defractions, bent pencil or warps of a flat eye, the wide world circling.