Paisley Rekdal

It was the week of asking. Asking to watch her eat. Asking if she understood the doctors’ questions. Asking her to explain the difference between wanting to die right now, and dying later. The tumor making certain answers unquestionable. I watched her point to the incense dish from which someone swept all the ashes up. Asking if she recognized us. Because that is what the living want: thinking it is a sign we have been loved. But the answer was a summer drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which a wolf slept, suckling her cubs. Some deaths are good and it makes them hard to grieve. She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her to die, too. That was important. But first we wanted her to remember. From the bed, a finger pressed into a pile of leaves. Gray haunch, unmovable ashes.I didn’t want to disturb their tableau

And then I thought, Can I have more of this, would it be possible for every day to be a greater awakening: more light, more light, your face on the pillow with the sleep creases rudely fragmenting it, hair so stiff from paint and sheet rock it feels like the dirty short hank of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck before he hauled me up and forward, white flanks flecked green with shit and the satin of his dander, the livingness, the warmth of all that blood just under the skin and in the long, thick muscle of the neck— He was smarter than most of the children I went to school with. He knew how to stand with just the crescent of his hoof along a boot toe and press, incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain so surprising when it came, its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof pinned one’s foot completely to the ground, we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush to push him off, that hot insistence with its large horse eye trained deliberately on us, to watch— Like us, he knew how to announce through violence how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want despite our practiced ministrations: too young not to try to empathize with this cunning: this thing that was and was not human we must respect for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because I could not love him anymore in the ways I’d taught myself, watching the slim bodies of teenagers guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring as if they were one body, one fluid motion of electric understanding I would never feel working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed an indifference that gave me logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting the hand placed on back or shoulder and never feel the desired response. I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine and inflict on me, the sudden jerking of head away from halter, the tentative nose inspecting first before it might decide to relent and eat. I loved what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure might be blended, one warmth bleeding into another as the future bleeds into the past, more light, more light, your hand against my shoulder, the image of the one who taught me disobedience is the first right of being alive.

Shouldn’t it ache, this slit into the sweet and salt mix of  waters comprising the mussel, its labial meats winged open: yellow- fleshed, black and gray around the tough adductor? It hurts to imagine it, regardless of the harvester’s denials, swiveling his knife to make the incision: one dull cyst nicked from the oyster’s mantle — its thread of red gland no bigger than a seed of  trout roe — pressed inside the tendered flesh. Both hosts eased open with a knife (as if anything could be said to be eased with a knife): so that one pearl after another can be harvested, polished, added to others until a single rope is strung on silk. Linked by what you think is pain. Nothing could be so roughly handled and yet feel so little, your pity turned into part of this production: you with your small, four-chambered heart, shyness, hungers, envy: what could be so precious you’d cleave another to keep it close? Imagine the weeks it takes to wind nacre over the red seed placed at the other heart’s mantle. The mussel become what no one wants to: vessel, caisson, wounded into making us the thing we want to call beautiful.

It’s a simple resistance between the pull of springs and struggle of joints: two coiled silver muscles working in the lamp against blue washers and pivot plates, locking nut coolly swiveling loose with age. In the arm it’s done with blood: tissues plumped then promptly deflated. What else am I supposed to start with? Not the light bulb, to which this whole narrative yearns, loving the glass envelope sizzling with light, grasshopper antennae scrubbed with electricity until each filament’s turned to fire. No, I have to start with the arm first, the mint-blue lamp, then maybe light itself to specify what startles me about you, globe of hot fruit, Christ heart throbbing in the open chest; curtains of robe parted just enough to see what afterglow defines us, waits for us, rubbing its slow music out into the wet dark— Tonight, I’m counting out my seeds of waiting for you through a current that is silent and might always be, though it thrums in every gesture: like this white eye burning within the metal shade I carefully adjust over a plate of orange slices each evening.

Yesterday, everything was possible. Today we’re good as married. You don’t want to hear that, do you, thinking I’m going to call you back in from the rain to fight over the morning paper, limning my deft and emotional promiscuities? That we’ll sit in our sitting room, watching the shaggy junipers twirl in winter wind as a storm closes its throat around the city? I’m thinking about how to ask God to be nicer. I’m thinking about that fabled leper colony where the last, solitary patient waited inside its unlocked tower three years in the belief she could not step outside. And how the local doctors visited only to re-wrap her face, to brush out her last gold strands of hair, wondering how to save anybody so willing to kill herself with denial. They wanted to talk about pain, the doctors, to say, One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio play in another room, and feel yourself suddenly filling like a jug with the cold awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster of your old ambivalence, the familiarity of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body. The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore. The doctors said, Fear should never be elevated to ritual. They told the woman, You must change your life! One day, I’m on the steps of an office tower losing a shoe, the next I’m screaming on a gurney, I’m stuffing a baby into a diaper. I’m wondering the woods in my scar-dark cape. Every story has an archetype, doesn’t it? And if so, why aren’t we married? Why can’t we be just like everyone else this fucking, fucking once? God, I hate the way this tale is turning out: two aged strangers learning to tuck in their blood, hiding the knives and bread crumbs deep inside their pockets. Look, this time I swear, I won’t run; really; I’ll come and go from my stone room without a mirror, all my extremities taped in white. I’ll learn to knit with three fingers. I’ll learn to read into the deepening silences, to be nice to your step-sisters, singing to drown out the tears of their ugliness. I love you. Can I even say that? In this story, I want to spend the rest of my life growing quietly bored with you, locking away loom and spindle, sweeping out the piles of rose petals and ash. For once, I plan to triumph over smug experience. I marry you. Don’t hit me. Please, just come in from the stars awhile, sit here in this sitting room, let me find you another section of the paper to argue over. The doctors said I get to wear a suit. They said I’ll be released next Thursday. Listen: even now, the junipers are whispering their dark good-byes, thin limbs smocked in white. A riderless horse has appeared on the horizon. And somewhere, out in the meretricious night, somebody’s life is quietly changing.

In Phnom Penh’s museum, the skulls are stacked in aquarium tanks: grim toys for hooks to ply free from the rubble. Here, each one gets a tag, a mount, a photograph to suggest a life, perhaps a name, might be envisioned. Yet I’m more moved by what’s anonymous, past; imagine fields of faces sunken with decay, eyes jellied in their sockets, heel meats bruised, bloated in the rain— Perhaps the skulls prefer a lack of names as, scrubbed of self and skin, they’re trauma’s best witnesses: fused by time and pain to one crisis, never to be separated. Lost as men, they become event. in this, they achieve a terrible transcendence.

There was a time when I watched it happen. Strangers pressed to other strangers in one bed, clothes on, air humid with the cloying scent of fruit juice and vodka; none of us giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene of that possibility, pretending to sleep, actually sleeping. Then waking again to slip a hand over a shoulder, slide a finger inside the waistband of a skirt; so young (we are even now still so young) in that hotel room turning blue then lighter blue. We wouldn’t have tried for more: the kiss, the button; firm, white shape of an image slipped wholly into the mind, acted upon, dreamed upon, filling the thin vessels of the lungs. Earlier, a film, its forced sounds of lovemaking. The tension I felt winding into the muscles of some of the others in the room. I remember I left for awhile. We all left for awhile; even the music was frightening. How to strip ourselves like that, point at the places that were wanted, plucked and peeled; speaking the words, hearing them form us, the nature of what we were and could do to each other? The music, the rocking, the sobbing. The man called the woman by parts of herself. Some laughed at this. I remember I must have been one of them. In the morning, the hotel room was turning white. After the long night, hands were slipping and unslipping, moving over the flattened pillows as if in hopes something small could still satisfy us. Someone turned and looked at someone else; we all heard it. Legs shifted, sheets slid themselves down waists or shoulders, tightened again at the necks of those pretending to sleep as the unblinking sun crawled in our window. From another room, coughing, We all heard it. Someone looked at someone else. The room turned white. The air began clearing.

In the perfect universe of math it’s said the world’s eternal aberration. In fact, we should be less than dead, math itself disrupted for matter ever to be read as real. A thought so hard to fathom that The Nation in its article on math has said we lack the right imagination: the human head will not subtract itself from the equation, zero out the eager ego to be less than dead. Did the numbers hunger for mistake, for fun upend themselves to recalculate our infinite extinction? And was existence meant for all, since it could be said without our numbers others might have thrived: the black rhinoceros, shortnose sturgeon—? Articles of horn and scale both less and more than dead, figurative dreams that now haunt us in our beds. Memory’s another flaw in our equation. Was it The Nation? I forget. Regardless, I know that someone said in a perfect universe, we’d all be dead.

And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin, light snow torn under wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles, whipping, loom— ¤ I have always wanted to sing a song of praise for the unscathed: myself stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch from gone; slim pole slicing cable up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy (like butter, the mechanic will later tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth), to pierce the exact point I was supposed to sit, stopping because praise begins where pain transfigures itself, stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I transfigure myself from driver to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure bolting up and opening her eyes. And here are the thousand wrecks from a life configured in snow before me: myself, at five, pulled from the burning car seat; at twelve, bleeding from the scalp after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen, tumbling over the slick hood rushing; sockets of windows with glass bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes given out and worse, the icy loop de loops on roads, the trucker’s 18 fat wheels squealing— All the ways technology should have killed me and didn’t. Praise for my death-hungry luck! And all the manner in which I’ve failed it— marriage lost, buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude at the Greyhound station knowing no one to retrieve me, carless among the other pressed tight to their own disaster or boredom— unbearably young mothers, drifters, boy soldiers shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving the same thread of conversation back and forth between ourselves. How could this happen to me at this age, at this stage, how did I not notice, and will you put this seat up? and will you lend me this quarter? and will you call me a cab when we get back home? The young man in the seat before me, head full of zigzagging tight braids says, Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Florida and while you’re at it look up all the bones buried in the Everglades, repeats it for the amusement of the woman across from him, who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself, and when we pass my accident on the road points and whistles, snickers:Bet you no one walked away from that one. For this, and for all these things: praise to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape takes on a nuclear glow, so bright we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise for myself playing at morbidity because I thought I had a right to it as if flesh had to follow spirit to such a pure depth the bones themselves could not rest but must be broken, nerves singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest. As if I had nothing except this white earth, this smashed car to praise what I knew before and know even better now, the hills cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise to my youth and to my age, praise to ambition and small-mindedness, the kind I recognize and the kind I am soon to recognize; praise to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise for the splinters of delight that can pierce it. Praise for wood pole, praise for glass. Praise for muscle, praise for bone. The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today. And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by, the light of us a wash of gold illuminating bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming like my heart here, on this earth, bloody and still beating.

I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth: does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence awhile, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, a garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpecker knocking at the white- and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit scratching under the barberry: is it indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved? It is only a little time, a little space. Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush like a stream of kerosene being lit? If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light.