Stanley Plumly

In the dark we disappear, pure being. Our mirror images, impure being. Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and nothingness (Sartre)—which is purer being? Being alone is no way to be: thus loneliness is the test of pure being. Nights in love I fell too far or not quite far enough—one pure, one impure being. Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water, smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being. Stillness and more stillness and the light locked deep inside—both pure and impure being. Is is the verb of being, I the noun— or pronoun for the purists of being. I was, I am, I looked within and saw nothing very clearly: purest being.

Sometimes it’s the shoes, the tying and untying, the bending of the heart to put them on, take them off, the rush of blood between the head and feet, my face, sometimes, if I could see it, astonished. Other times the stairs, three, four stages at the most, “flights” we call them, in honor of the wings we’ll never have, the fifth floor the one that kills the breath, where the bird in the building flies to first. Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own, the parts left behind not to be replaced, a loss ongoing, and every day increased, like rising in the night, at 3:00 am, to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall, the rings around the streetlight in the rain, and then the rain, the red fist in the heart opening and closing almost without me. “ — Yesterday brought to today so lightly!” The morning, more and more, like evening. When I bend to tie my shoes and the blood fills the cup, it’s as if I see into the hidden earth, see the sunburned path on which I pass in shoes that look like sandals and arrive at a house where my feet are washed and wiped with my mother’s hair and anointed with the autumn oils of wildflowers.

They were the local Ohio palm, tropic in the heat of trains. They could grow in anything—pitch, whole grain, cinders, ash and rust, the dirt dumped back of the foundry, what the men wore home. Little willows, they were made to be brushed back by the traffic of boxcars the way wind will dust the shade of the small part of a river.—They'd go from almost green to almost gray with each long passing, each leaf, each branch a stain on the winded air. They were too thin for rain—nothing could touch them. So we'd start with pocketknives, cutting and whittling them down, from willow, palm, or any other name. They were what they looked like. Horsewhip, whipweed. They could lay on a fine welt if you wanted. And on a hot, dry day, July, they could all but burn. At a certain age you try to pull all kinds of things out of the ground, out of the loose gravel thrown by trains. Or break off what you can and cut it clean.

Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere, an early autumn stillness in the air, the kind of empty day you fill by taking in the full size of the valley and its layers leading slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country, if you stand here long enough, you could stay for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall, pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall meadow, high above the harvest, perfect to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains, though you could walk until it’s dark and not reach those rains— you could walk the rest of the day into the picture and not know why, at any given moment, you’re there.

When the wind was right everything else was wrong, like the oak we thought built better than the house split like a ship on a rock. We let it stand the winter, spectral, shagged, every sky its snow, then cut it down, dismantled it in pieces like disease. Then limbs from the yellow poplar broke at will— fell from the heights like bones of the Puritans; even to gather them in bundles seemed puritanical. And the willow, by its nature, wept long tears of its overbranching, so pale they were autumnal. These we turned too easily to switches, mocking the bickering in the spruce's nesting eaves, which crows, then jays bothered all they could. The list, the list. The sycamore made maps of disappearance; the copper beech, parental in its girth, was clipped hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn't heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then love—nothing we tried would work. More apple trees that grew nowhere but down. More maples spilling sugar. More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.

Myths of the landscape— the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces, the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses, then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings, across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . . Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder, then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash. The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off, my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath, my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light. Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides— the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept, and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle. In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray, in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion, calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge, the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled. The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there, then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out. There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade. We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line. I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down. I can see him bending over, gone. Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum, which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.

Like the waxwings in the juniper, a dozen at a time, divided, paired, passing the berries back and forth, and by nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy. Or a party of redwings grazing what falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit— made light in the head and cut by the light, swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken.... It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms unbending, yielding, striking a balance, walking the white invisible line drawn just ahead in the air, first sign the slur, the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in the mouth melodious, too close, which starts the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric silences, the song of our undoing. It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap- and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is the object, affection the compulsion, love the overspill—the body nodding, still standing, ready to fly straight out of itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple- over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift; back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar. Someone is troubled, someone is trying, in earnest, to explain; to speak without swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect word among so few or the too many— to sing like the thrush from the deepest part of the understory, territorial, carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike in order to make one sobering sound. Sound of the breath blown over the bottle, sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer, my father says, lifting his glass to greet a morning in which he's awake to be with the birds: or up all night in the sleep of the world, alive again, singing.