Reginald Gibbons

for Maxine Kumin A cylinder of maple set in place, feet spread apart— and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer but honed like an axe, draws a semicircle overhead and strikes through the two new halves to leave the steel head sunk a half-inch in the block and the ash handle rigid in the air. A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits the butt end, and the blade rolls out of the cut. The half-logs are still rocking on the flagstones. So much less than what we have been persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood might have sufficed, but it is what we have been taught to disown and forget. Yet just such hardship is what saves. For if the stacked cords speak of felled trees, of countless five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill till the blood is wrung from your back and snowbound warmth must seem so far off you would rather freeze, yet each thin tongue torn from the grain when log-halves were sundered at one stroke will sing in the stove. To remind you of hands. Of how mere touch is song in the silence where hands live—the song of muddy bark, the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down, and the song of one hand over another, two of us holding the last length of the log in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw keeps ripping through hickory.

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page of them, all beginning with the letter b. Guidebooks preserve our knowledge of their hues and shapes, their breeding. Many poems have made delicate word-chimes— like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man— out of their lovely names. At the edge of the prairie in a cabin when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade— seem to blow with the announcing winds outside as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

My father came down not killed from among others, killers or killed, for whom he'd worn a uniform, and he lived a long afterward, a steady man on the flattest of plains. I called after him many times, surprised when I heard the catch in my own voice. He didn't know how to find the solace of listening to someone else speak of what he'd seen and survived. He himself closed his own mouth against his own words. In the wrong sequence, his spirit, then his mind, and last his body crossed over that infamous, peat-inky, metaphorical water that has no far shore. I think he was carried like a leaf in currents so gentle that a duckling, had it been alive, could have braved them, but too strong for a leaf. And saturated with minerals that steadily replaced organic cells, the water turned my father, an ex-soldier, to leaf-delicate stone inscribed with the axioms of countless veins.

Where moonlight angles through the east-west streets, down among the old for America tall buildings that changed the streets of other cities circulate elevated trains overhead shrieking and drumming, lit by explosions of sparks that harm no one and the shadowed persons walking underneath the erratic waves not of the lake but of noise move through fog sieved by the steel mesh of the supporting structures or through rain that rinses pavements and the el platforms or through new snow that quiets corners, moods, riveted careers. Working for others with hands, backs, machines, men built hard towers that part the high air, women and men built, cooked, cleaned, delivered, typed and filed, carried and delivered, priced and sold. The river and air were filthy. In a hundred years builders would migrate north a mile but in these modern times this was all the downtown that was. And circling on a round-cornered rectangle of tracks run the trains, clockwise and counter, veering through or loop-the-loop and out again. Why even try to list the kinds of places men and women made to make money? Not enough of them, yet too many. From slow trains overhead some passengers can still see stone ornaments, pilasters, lintels, carved by grandfathers, great uncles and gone second cousins of today—gargoyle heads and curving leaves, like memorials for that which was built to be torn down again someday, for those who got good wages out of all this building or were broken by it, or both, yet whose labor preserves a record of labor, imagination, ambition, skill, greed, folly, error, cost, story, so that a time before remains present within the bright careening now.

Someone has left us now before we have even touched hands. Getting lost in the pity of it sweeps you into an unknown stretch of canyon where oars thud against rock and rip free, you clutch at help, and even though you save yourself, the river funnels through the gorge and roars, roars, roars. Regret, a backwash of pain, one lost life swirls down rapids, rushes away, out of reach. It’s not forgetting that you want — it would be easy to drop one shoulder and dive, to come up gasping in a car on the way to work or blue in the face over the dishpan staring for who knows how long at a cup scoured clean under the suds. And not remembering. But the absence that is born must live as long as a man or a woman. There: it comes invisible headfirst, a bloodstreaked nothing, and is flushed away. While in the white room the dry light is cold; and waiting to be taken home mute ghosts lie in a row of empty cribs.

The children are eating lunch at home on a summer weekday when a man comes to the door and asks their mother if she has anything that needs fixing or carrying or any yardwork he can do. They chew their food a little dreamily as, with her back straight and her voice carefully polite, she says No, thank you, I’m sorry, and the man goes away. Who was that, Mama? they say. Oh, no one, she says. They are sitting down to dinner but they have to wait because the doorbell rings and a thin young boy begins to tell their father about a Sales Program he’s completing for a scholarship to be Supervisor, and he holds up a filthy tattered little booklet and lifts also his desperate guile and heavily guarded hope, and the children’s father says, No thank you, sorry but I can’t help you out this time, and the boy goes away. The children start to eat and don’t ask anything, because the boy was just a boy, but their father acts irritated and hasty when he sits back down. Once a glassy-eyed heavy girl who almost seems asleep as she stands outside their door offers for sale some little handtowels stitched by the blind people at the Lighthouse for the Blind and the children are in the folds of their mother’s full skirt listening to the girl’s small voice and their mother says, Well, I bought some the last time. She buys the children school supplies and food, she pays the two boys for mowing the yard together and weeding her flower bed. She gets a new sewing machine for her birthday from the children’s father, and she buys fabric and thread and patterns and makes dresses for the girls, to save money. She tells the children each to put a dime or quarter into the collection plate at Church, and once a month she puts in a little sealed white envelope, and the ushers move slowly along the ends of the pews weaving the baskets through the congregation, and the organist plays a long piece of music. Whisk brooms, magazine subscriptions, anything you need hauled away, little league raffle tickets, cookies, chocolate candy, can I do any yard work again and again, hairbrushes, Christmas cards, do you need help with your ironing one time, and more, came calling at the front door while the children were sometimes eating, sometimes playing. Their faces would soften with a kind of comfort in the authority of mother or father, with a kind of wonder at the needy callers. Their father left for work every day early, and came home for dinner, and almost always went again on Saturday; in his car. Their mother opened a savings account for each child and into each put the first five dollars. The children felt proud to see their names in the passbooks, and wanted to know when they could take the money out. But they were told they had to save their money not spend it. They felt a kind of pleasure in these mysteries, to know that there were things you would understand later when you grew up and had your own house and while your children were eating their dinner and making too much noise the way you did, you knew it was true, the doorbell would ring, the familiar surprise of it, who would it be, and someone would be holding a little worn book or a bundle of dishtowels or once an old man, but perhaps he only looked old, with his beard, came with bunches of carnations, white, red, and pink, and he too was turned away.

After Walt Whitman A last formality is running late, as a life can't, this hot day. The final ethereal glow of the sun seems to come up from underfoot in this parkland of polysyllabic death. These deep graves, two this time, neatly cut into the earth, await the arrivals, and two adjacent heaps of damp fertile glebe are half blanketed by reticent dark tarpaulins. After the full moon's first moments of horizon-magnified fact and risen largesse, it has contracted as our heaven has passed it by and now it floats above the crowns of the inky trees and well beyond bare roofs. It has always been an entity born dead—not a phantom, as must be this son, a muddy part of whom soared from cratered waste lands far away before landing here, and also this veteran father, whose heart staggered into an ER and failed after he heard what circumstance had done to his one boy. No horses—hearses, the first two cars. A corps of six men— they bear the heavy coffined corpse of the father toward his very small opening in the planet; and six more envoys of duty, with much-practiced attentiveness, slow-step the light son, an imperfect cadaver with handles, to his own last place. White gloves lift up the draped famed cloth, super-striped and starry, from the younger casket, fold it just so— hands with hands over hands in ritual honor, a ceremony neither of mystical creed nor of doubter's midnights—then they advance it to the one who remains. She's looking away from her burials, down at the blades of moon grass. She feels no great gut blows from startled convulsive big drums that shake the spirits of mourners, nor any whirring of equally perilous small drums that might reduce the silence. The son is submitted as lifeless organism to dirt; the father’s remains descend into his pit alongside, likewise on tightly held ropes men slowly let slip. (In foremost ranks of a final unbecoming these two fell alike.) The ropes snake back up into what's left of natural light— remainder of the ancient calculus of day and night. From a boom box ten paces away, the familiar bugled notes say that the journey of these remains is done. Even if no grief shadows the bugler, bugles do sound it, word it—that unacceptable sentence of slow notes. Distant, on overtime, respectful, yet much too near, a stranger waits to start up a backhoe. On such occasions, after courage of soldiers or folly of command or cold wrong purposes among patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed madness in red valleys, mountains, cities, villages, in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick hearts, we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight.

The loop of rusty cable incises its shadow on the stucco wall. My father smiles shyly and takes one of my cigarettes, holding it awkwardly at first, as if it were a dart, while the yard slowly swings across the wide sill of daylight. Then it is a young man’s quick hand that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall, his white shirt open at the throat, where the skin is weathered, and he chats and daydreams, something he never does. Smoking his cigarette, he is even younger than I am, a brother who begins to guess, amazed, that what he will do will turn out to be this. He recalls the house he had when I was born, leaning against it now after work, the pale stucco of memory, 1947. Baby bottles stand near the sink inside. The new wire of the telephone, dozing in a coil, waits for the first call. The years are smoke.

In homage to Osip Mandelshtam I am sure I do not believe we can move a pencil through a white field, pulled by a team of upside- down ox-head letter A s, and in real fact furrow it. Poor old page-earth — sized, cut, scraped, ploughed with mule-pencils or impressed by ink, illuminated, printed, obscurely inscribed, and revered or destroyed, revered and destroyed, and here comes yet another walled-garden crop for eye, ear, lungs, legs, mind. • The cranium dome hangs from its own silk conceptual thread of thought, conceiving its infinite in- complete perfection: its Zeno, its Zeus, its Dante, its Te Deums and freak shows, frescoes, twine theory, money, bread, bricks and wine, six-syllable abstractions, axes and facts, its every variation of custom, including vertical graves of men buried upside down without their heads. • (In dusk-lit, telling ways, tell me, little swallow, Tuscan or T’ang or wrung somehow from time: since I have neither feather nor wing, how I too can go into a grave made only of air.) • “For your sweet joy, take “from my cupped hands a “little glittering “of sun, a little “honey — for this is “what Persephone’s “bees have commanded. “A boat can’t cast off “if it isn’t moored; “no one can hear a “shadow that wears fur “boots; we can’t best our “fright in this dark wood. “Our kisses — these are “all that we can save, “velvety as bees “that die if they are “exiled from the hive. “They’re murmuring in “the transparent groves “of the night; the wilds “of mountain Greece are “their motherland; their “diet is time, lung- “wort, pale meadowsweet. “For joy, please take this “pagan gift: this rude, “rustling necklace of “the bees that died, for “these had transmuted “honey into sun.”

Something needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each waste basket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while, the unmoving buildings—houses and a church—in the cold street. Across it a dark young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snowshovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his dirty navy blue knit hat, and at a house where the walk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he half wakes and he says a few words I can’t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the kindly farewell that is a habit he wears as disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I see it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter. My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouthhole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a perfect piece of small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is tired or weak and the wind can’t get in. Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn’t see a bundled-up lame child out of school and even turned out of the house for a while, or a blind woman with burns or a sick bald veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what’s happened and will keep happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs. When he finally gets past where I can see him, it feels as if a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and I smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and I look around the room for something to pick up or straighten, and I take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and I walk out.