Susan Mitchell

for Nathaniel, 1900—1968 All afternoon you worked at cutting them down. Branch after branch tossed into the heap. You had your ceremony. Old pants. The pipe. The pipe rested in the cleft of the tree. When the pile got big enough, you threw the kerosene. Now the woods are clouded again. You forgot the world could be this messy. Air thickens into leaves, the leaves into worms. Behind the barn, overnight, it seems, tents have spread out in the apple trees. There’s work for you. So you come back in your pants old as dirt. With a pipe heavy as stone. No time to lose. Whatever is rotten, whatever won’t hold the weight of another season, you hack down. There’s one moment, though, when you feel almost sorry for them. The tents break into flame and the small, black pieces of anguish crawl out into the grass. Those that get away, well, you let them get away this time.

I ran into the afterlife. No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky dark as the inside of a movie theater at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time, expanding at terrific speed over the car which was disappearing, flattening out empty as the fields on either side. It was impossible to think under that rain louder than engines. I turned off the radio to listen, let my head fill up until every bone was vibrating—sky. Twice, trees of lightning broke out of the asphalt. I could smell the highway burning. Long after, saw blue smoke twirling behind the eyeballs, lariats doing fancy rope tricks, jerking silver dollars out of the air, along with billiard cues, ninepins. I was starting to feel I could drive forever when suddenly one of those trees was right in front of me. Of course, I hit it— branches shooting stars down the windshield, poor car shaking like a dazed cow. I thought this time for sure I was dead so whatever was on the other side had to be eternity. Saw sky enormous as nowhere. Kept on driving.

Off Havana, the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On a green sofa five dresses wait to be fitted. The seamstress kneeling at Mother's feet has no idea I am about to be born. Mother pats her stomach which is flat as the lace mats on the dressmaker's table. She thinks I'm playing in my room. But as usual, she's wrong. I'm about to be born in a park in Havana. Oh, this is important, everything in the dressmaker's house is furred like a cat. And Havana leans right up against the windows. In the park, the air is chocolate, the sweet breath of a man smoking an expensive cigar. The grass is drinkable, dazzling, white. In a moment I'll get up from a bench, lured by a flock of pigeons, lazily sipping the same syrupy music through a straw. Mother is so ignorant, she thinks I'm rolled like a ball of yarn under the bed. What does she know of how I got trapped in my life? She thinks it's all behind her, the bloody sheets, the mirror in the ceiling where I opened such a sudden furious blue, her eyes bruised shut like mine. The pigeon's eyes are orange, unblinking, a doll's. Mother always said I wanted to touch everything because I was a child. But I was younger than that. I was so young I thought whatever I wanted, the world wanted too. Workers in the fields wanted the glint of sun on their machetes. Sugarcane came naturally sweet, you had only to lick the earth where it grew. The music I heard each night outside my window lived in the mouth of a bird. I was so young I thought it was easy as walking into the ocean which always had room for my body. So when I held out my hands I expected the pigeon to float between them like a blossom, dusting my fingers with the manna of its wings. But the world is wily, and doesn't want to be held for long, which is why as my hands reached out, workers lay down their machetes and left the fields, which is why a prostitute in a little calle of Havana dreamed the world was a peach and flicked open a knife. And Mother, startled, shook out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt across the front, as if she had fallen chasing after me in the rain. But what could I do? I was about to be born, I was about to have my hair combed into the new music everyone was singing. The dressmaker sang it, her mouth filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped blood on his apron. Mother sang it and thought her body was leaving her body. And when I tried I was so young the music beat right through me, which is how the pigeon got away. The song the world sings day after day isn't made of feathers, and the song a bird pours itself into is tough as a branch growing with the singer and the singer's delight.

At first all you see are the folds of drapery, high grass close together, swaying beads you parted as a child, field behind the house, then river. Sky. You were told finches lived there, red- winged, tipsy, upside down their hold on the reeds, even so they sang, trilling over and over your outstretched hands song poured like seeds from a basket or from a bowl, water. There was a woman, young, beautiful—you used to hug her from behind, closing your hands over the cry of surprise she gave out like perfume. Now here she is, rising from the dead landscape of memory, just this fragment of her, still kneeling.

Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind. The bear is long gone. Drunk on apples, she banged over the trash cans that fall night, then skidded downstream. By now she must be logged in for the winter. Unless she is choosy. I imagine her as very choosy, sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying each one on for size, but always coming out again. Until tonight. Tonight sap freezes under her skin. Her breath leaves white apples in the air. As she walks she dozes, listening to the sound of axes chopping wood. Somewhere she can never catch up to trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow When she does find it finally, the log draws her in as easily as a forest, and for a while she continues to see, just ahead of her, the moon trapped like a salmon in the ice.