Sara Miller

Two women on a train sit beside me. I am young and the world is flying and I am watching. One of them is frosty. The other turns like a leaf to hand me something — it looked for all the world like a page. I thought at the time that it needed me and I was right. The letters fell into place and simple flowers grew. Now it talks unceasingly in long white verses as if at a wedding, something women understand and gently want and then regift. I myself agree with Herbert, who in a dark mood conjured the mushrooms underfoot unseen by bride or groom and with him I say, Perhaps the world is unimportant after all, though this is not what one discusses with women on a train, no matter how long the journey, or untroubled the land.

Last night in bed I mouthed a prayer of my own composition. It sounded offhand, it was carelessly addressed, it twisted my meaning entirely, it left an ache, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I took down my yellowed copy of French With Pictures by the late literary critic I.A. Richards and I put my petition into soft French words. I.A. Richards believed that irony was the language of redemption. He wrote and lectured famously on this, but his masterpiece was French With Pictures. “The chapeau is on the table.” “The man with the beard stands before the window.” “She comes from a village by the sea.” There is no improving the old traditions. They are already mortal, partial, and wrong. The woman at the table by the window puts her head into her hands. “Into your hands,” she said.

Had to come in out of the people, they blew me about so. Was told of the life taking place elsewhere. Went to check on that, flying late and low over the west. Saw no house, no shade. Sat down on the damp bank on the far shore at the left edge of the world, against which the sea endlessly lapped. So now there were two of us, who beat the world by day and caressed it by night and the world didn’t say yea and she didn’t say nay.

The overweight, overnight parts that came to me in a dream. Their clothes no longer fit, it was this that brought them to me crying, their faces twitching. That had to end. No, they said, it didn’t. So I rolled over to ghosts that couldn’t dent a pillow. The clock shed. Night pulled its burdens into harbor and I woke, glad for the day, its telltale light, its flying minute, that genie work, and the everlasting perturbations of my people, their glories, their heavy last words, and for these, I rose.

I wish I could keep my thoughts in order and my ducks in a row. I wish I could keep my ducks in a thought or my thoughts in a duck. My point is that we all exist, wetly, in the hunt. The ducks are aware of this in their own way, which is floating. The way of the mind is brevity. There may be other thoughts on other days in the minds of other and better men and their constant companions, the women, but these same tidy capsules — never. This is just one of the things I noticed about my thoughts as they passed easefully by.

The evidence was in and it went to the contrary. The contrary wound around us rather like a river. The river reacted, spider-like, tangling up its legs with other wet parts we thought we knew, such as creeks and fjords and deltas and such. A beaver sits on the riverbank watching all of this unfold. He doesn’t know what a fjord is, and he doesn’t care for other waters, or even other beavers, or the merest hint of other business, so he removes this evidence. Then he builds a structure which for years he is rehabbing. Inside it is hollow and there is his nest. He is a dark little bastard, all the same. The water had a fine way of   being, now it is tortured by these nests and their vassal. Yet the river doesn’t overthrow the beaver. Quite the contrary. The river goes around polite as a snake. It argues a tiny bit at the edges of the lodge, where young beavers could be napping. You and I would let loose a flood of tears. Not the river. You and I would seep hotly into our darkest places. Not the river. It is a long way from home and has that on its mind, the day of rising, when the temples will all be cleansed and the whole unfathomable truth will out. According to the waters. According to their book.