Susan Stewart

Believing each simple thing passes from a perception that is less clear into one that is, eventually, more clear. Believing each simple thing contains within it a minimal unity beyond which whatever else can be exists. That the two seeds, or four seeds, are where the pear will go and where it began. Black bark, blossoms in the mild rain, smelling like piss in the spring rain, the chips and twigs raining down beneath our weight as we broke off bouquets for the teacher. “What is that smell?” she asked. Stark, white, delicate, attached with green cuffs, twig to twig, the blooms bursting through the runnels that held them. Five runnels made in the foil by five fingers. The given world is infinite and reality is complete . That’s what I had written in the morning on the blackboard. And then, going home, I was stalled again on the bridge. I looked up and out and there I saw the girl flying and falling, flying and falling in the distance, in the narrow air between two buildings, her arms outspread, over and over against the strip of sky and above the gravel, or grass or ground—the light changed and I couldn’t see at all where or how she had dragged the trampoline that must have been the yielding source of all her motion. If you find a sight like this a kind of gift or sign, you’ve missed the way the mind seals over, the way the simplest thing pulls on its heavy hood and turns away slowly from a thought. For later, weeks later, I was stalled again in mid-bridge and couldn’t remember, yet could vaguely remember, the sense that something was about to happen, that the light would change like a bell or alarm and that in turn would mean the time had come when everyone must leave the school— with every sweater and pencil left in place —to burn, and burn and burn back to the ground.

In a drawer I found a map of the world, folded into eighths and then once again and each country bore the wrong name because the map of the world is an orphanage. The edges of the earth had a margin as frayed as the hem of the falling night and a crease moved down toward the center of the earth, halving the identical stars. Every river ran with its thin blue brother out from the heart of a country: there cedars twisted toward the southern sky and reeds plumed eastward like an augur’s pens. No dates on the wrinkles of that broad face, no slow grinding of mountains and sand, for— all at once, like a knife on a whetstone— the map of the world spoke in snakes and tongues. The hard-topped roads of the western suburbs and the distant lights of the capitol each pull away from the yellowed beaches and step into the lost sea of daybreak. The map of the world is a canvas turning away from the painter’s ink-stained hands while the pigments cake in their little glass jars and the brushes grow stiff with forgetting. There is no model, shy and half-undressed, no open window and flickering lamp, yet someone has left this sealed blue letter, this gypsy’s bandana on the darkening Table, each corner held down by a conch shell. What does the body remember at dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map of the world, erased and drawn again and Again, then covered with rivers and earth.

Before balance, before counting, before The record glistens and the needle slides, Grating, into the overture, there is the end Of weight, the leaning into nothing and then A caught breath, the record listens, the needle slides Over slowly, and all at once around us a woman’s voice Stretches weightless, leaning into nothing. Like a clothesline, the taut chorus: oh, hilarious Oh baby, all around us, over slowly, a woman’s voice Gathers above the pick me up, pick me up And the desperate put, put me down. First the tightrope, Then the light foot, and the taunting chorus Pick me up, pick me up. Oh, oh baby. The slippery floor shimmers and spins like a record while The light is swinging footloose on its rope Out of time. The shadows Slip, shimmering black, and spin across the floor, Then turn back and pick up again. Oh seedpod stuck for just One moment on the cattail, out of time, out of shadows, Downy cheek against a beard: oh scratches On the record, oh baby, oh measure Oh strange balance that grips us On this side of the world.

They never learned to tell one bird from another, a shrub from a weedy sapling, or when the season had forced a flower’s bloom, not even if a berry had ripened into poison. And yet they drew endless distinctions between colors and polish and coarseness of weave, and would not let their daughters marry out. They didn’t keep their children, though they gave them tests and fed them. They were known for meticulous records, for trophies and peeling stars. They burned things up or wore them down, had ranks and staff and lecterns, machines that moved them from place to place, bright jewels and playing cards. They were old when they could have been young, and young when they could have been old. They left a strange word in a tree: croatoan, and a track in the dust of Mars.

Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes that leave only thoughts of rain. An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no will, no will toward us. This is why the heart has paced and paced, will pace and pace across the field where yarrow was and now is dust. A leaf catches in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch. How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm when you pluck him from the air, when you pluck him from that sky where grieving swirls, and you will burn again throwing him back.

You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Music swells the emotions; music exists to punctuate seeing. Emotion, therefore, is punctuation. Formless, freedom resembles abasement. Abasement is as infinite as desire. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Those who are not demons are saints. You are not a demon or a saint. Women are small and want something, so laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Bed are sites of abasement. The news is about the news. Faces in close-up are always in anguish. Hair and teeth are clues to class. Clothes are changing, hanging up or down And change itself is a laugh. Cause can’t be figured and consequence is yet to come. You’re either awake or asleep and that, too, is a clue to class. Children are never with groups of children unless they are singing in chorus. Their mothers cannot do enough, though there’s always room for improvement. And improvement lies in progress, though collapsing is good for a laugh. Saints will turn to the worse. Demons die if they can be found. Nature is combat, weather is sublime. Even weather can make you laugh. People you don’t know are louder than you are, but what is far away cannot harm you— Books are objects, families are inspiring. Animals protect their young; the young come with the territory. English is the only language. Reading is an occasion for interruption, and interruption is a kind of laugh. Something is bound to get better. And there is a pill with your name on it. When indoors, stick with your own race— that way you’ll feel free to laugh. Strangers are paying attention to your smell. A camera will light like a moth on disaster. Pity will turn to irony. The street is a dark and frightful place. Fires are daily. Your car is your face. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

I had heard the story before about the two prisoners, alone in the same cell, and one gives the other lessons in a language. Day after day, the pupil studies hard— what else does he have to do?—and year after year they practice, waiting for the hour of release. They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders, the rules for imperatives and conjugations, but near the end of his sentence, the teacher suddenly dies and only the pupil goes back through the gate and into the open world. He travels to the country of his new language, fluent, and full of hope. Yet when he arrives he finds that the language he speaks is not the language that is spoken. He has learned a language one other person knew—its inventor, his cell-mate and teacher. And then the other evening, I heard the story again. This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil was his wife. She had dreamed of learning Polish and, hour after hour, for years on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach her a Polish that does not and never did exist. The man who told the story would like to marry his girlfriend. They love to read in bed and between them speak three languages. They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t sure that they themselves knew what was funny. I wondered why the man had told the story, and thought of the tricks enclosure can play. A nod, or silence, another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud drifts beyond the scene and the two stand pointing in different directions at the very same empty sky. Even so, there was something else about the story, like teaching a stunt to an animal—a four-legged creature might prance on two legs or a two-legged creature might fall onto four. I remembered, then, the miscarriage, and before that the months of waiting: like baskets filled with bright shapes, the imagination run wild. And then what arrived: the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea, a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous present folding over the future, like a wave overtaking a grain of sand. There was a myth I once knew about twins who spoke a private language, though one spoke only the truth and the other only lies. The savior gets mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor stays as true to himself as a god. All night the rain falls here, falls there, and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.

He described her mouth as full of ashes. So when he kissed her finally he was thinking about ashes and the blacker rim just below the edge of the ashtray, and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips, and the lips themselves, at the limit of another darkness, farther and far more interior. Then the way the red, paling, just outside those lines caught fire and the pages caught soon after that. Slowly at first, but then all at once at the scalloped brown corners of each; like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird, extended, then folded in on itself; multiple, stiffening, gone.

1. Is it true that they dream? It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly. The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants. The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea. We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood. The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking. The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain. 2. Do they dream of the past or of the future? Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers. Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk. Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk. As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon. Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger. I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand. 3. Do they dream of this world or of another? The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead. A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep. There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes. Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so. Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing. Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us. 4. How can we learn more? This is all we will ever know.

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure stubbornness its batteries go dead. The bank robber leans on his horn in desperation while his partner snaps the rubber bands around the money. A band, you can hear it up the river, first like the new heart of the child on your lap, then like an old moon pulsing below your nails, or something softly moving through your arms and throat. Here, press here, not just drums. A clown is throwing caramels at the porch rails, balloons are exploding or sailing up the river. The lucky trees, to be able to stand that close. If we talk too much, we’ll surely miss it. And at the still center of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out of another life, old cars get up from the dead and dance like cripples hired out for a tent meeting. Up and down the sidewalk, the town sucks in its breath like a girl taking short gasps just above her trumpet, or a fire engine’s horn, heaving like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping against the water tower, this afternoon just like a parade. The sore-footed ponies are loaded down with flags and the library float says “Immortal Shakespeare,” says it with carnations and the hides of roses, says it with a jester and a princess wearing wings. And she stutters, but no one cares or can hear her. Except for the man on the unicycle who tips his top hat to the crowd, who swears he will follow her anywhere, who follows the mayor and the city council, who follows the tap dancing class and the Future Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation between his teeth and sways back and forth like a broken clock. And then things begin again, a car follows the man on the unicycle and suddenly it’s just another car, a pair of dice dangling from the rearview mirror, a woman giving her breast to a child and another child carefully peeling a crayon, then slowly giving the peels to his grandmother, who opens the big brass clasps of her pocketbook and lets the bright curls drop slowly to the bottom like confetti or a boy’s first haircut. Like a first yellow leaf that fell when we weren’t looking. Because it’s summer. Like a smooth yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing in the new left boot of the drummer, that someone skimmed on the river exactly at three o’clock. Not out of anger or of boredom this time, but as if it could almost wear wings.