Rita Mae Reese

You have forgotten it all. You have forgotten your name, where you lived, who you loved, why. I am simply your nurse, terse and unlovely I point to things and remind you what they are: chair, book, daughter, soup. And when we are alone I tell you what lies in each direction: This way is death, and this way, after a longer walk, is death, and that way is death but you won’t see it until it is right in front of you. Once after your niece had been to visit you and I said something about how you must love her or she must love you or something useless like that, you gripped my forearm in your terrible swift hand and said,she is everything— you gave me a shake—everything to me. And then you fell back into the well. Deep in the well of everything. And I stand at the edge and call: chair, book, daughter, soup.

What we can say has already been said about each painting in the gallery— about the quality of light, the way she holds her head. So we are silent in the subway, silent in bed. Our bodies too are mute; we fall asleep knowing what we could say has already been said. Over toast and coffee and the newspaper thoroughly read the day unfolds between us. I am too weak to carry this quality of light, the way she holds her head. I would vow to leave if love had left if this were the wedding of two gypsies. But what should I say? It has been said the dead would properly bury the dead and here I am, alive at last and buried by the quality of light, and the way she holds her head. Perhaps women, sex, love are all over-rated. Which of us is the artist and which the light? You see, the words I might say have been better said— words concerning the quality of light, the way you hold your head.

The word is the making of the world. — Wallace Stevens It’s a filmstrip afternoon and we’re all grateful to the humming projector in the middle of our desks, the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult. There’s a vague promise of revelation from the title and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice calling from a house carrying within it our freedom not to answer. Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress is falling asleep at her father’s desk, turning into Alice in Wonderland as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar. The Mad Hatter and Jabberwocky tell her to lure the letters into a trap so they can beat them to death with mallets. We’d like to see that. Without words no one could tell us what to do. We know grammar is just a byproduct, like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew too fast for its own good and that history is a series of conspiracies by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is falling asleep on the wide window ledge, her blue polyester pants gapped to reveal her white socks and pink spotted shins. We try not to look. The Mad Hatter doesn’t say that the alphabet was first used to keep track of property or that for centuries people believed if women learned to write the lost world would never be recovered or that the Mayans believed outsiders wrote things down not in order to remember them but to free themselves into the work of forgetting. That year Mrs. Bradford taught us about the Lewis & Clark expedition over and over again. We never learned why it mattered so much to her or what possible use it could be to anyone. The professor tells Judy about the thousands of words Arabs needed for camels and their parts, the dozen words Eskimos had for snow, and a chimp who learned seven human words. A voice made visible says: magic is a matter of fact to you, Every miracle has to have its qualifications, reservations, footnotes and our heads rise from our desks. The rest of the year will be a series of substitute teachers who teach us nothing but footnotes and their own reservations. Mrs. Bradford dead of a brain tumor. We sit in our sixth-grade desks with the blinds closed against the tree-lined streets as the letters of the world rise up and, forming a single word, eclipse our world and fill our mouths with shadows.