Susan Stewart

The man in the yellow hard hat, the one with the mask across his nose and mouth, pulls the lever that turns the great arm of the crane up and over and sideways toward the earth; then the wrecking ball dangles crazily, so delicately, like a silver fob loosened from a waistcoat pocket: shocking to see the dust fly up and the timber sail up, then so slowly down, how the summer air bristles with a hundred splinters and the smallest is a splintered flame, for it takes so many lengthening erratic movements to tear away what stands between the sidewalk and the bell tower, where the pigeons now rise in grand indignant waves at such poor timing, such a deaf ear toward the music; in this way the silence between hand and lever is turned into a ragged and sorely lifted wing: the wrecking ball lurches in a narrowing arc until only the dust resists—the rest comes down, story by story, and is hauled off in flatbed trucks. Meanwhile the pedestrians come and go, now and then glancing at their accurate watches. Gradually, the dust becomes the rose light of autumn. But one evening a woman loses her way as she’s swept into a passing wave of commuters and she looks up toward the perfectly empty rectangle now hanging between the rutted mud and the sky. There along the sides of the adjacent building, like a set for a simple elementary school play, like the gestures of the dead in her children’s faces, she sees the flowered paper of her parents’ bedroom, the pink stripes leading up the stairs to the attic, and the outline of the claw- footed bathtub, font of the lost cathedral of childhood.

Shoulders knobbed against a slat-backed chair, the temples tugged, a pull at the nape, you felt the up- sweep as she smoothed the fine wisps back and tucked yank into yank and a third into that until the consecutive dodges of thumbs and first fingers gathered, fraying and filing to their end—ended in an ornament that, suspended, looked ridiculous, even on a child who mostly set forth with what was called a “finished” look, some loose ends in order where others were not and a slight weight below the nape’s pull. The view others had of it was invisible to you. It made something there where there would have been a blank—now instead a kind of face sent from woman to woman like a duty, an obstinate duty to pattern. It’s too simple to see one thing rather than another, a wish protruding once it’s been suppressed, a vise that holds a thought in its proper place until it bobs to the surface of a generally balmy sea. Women and woman only a letter away—a strand gets mixed, then mixed right out of the heaven of perfect fit; one kind of accident turns into another. The whole head throbs for days. Black and white are woven into gray the way hyperbole has no chance once it’s juxtaposed to reason—negation just a thread among the available options and hope itself apparent there in the very notion a made thing can last. Tougher, coarser, split weave in the years. Shorter, longer, shorter, the brain bound to its anchor. The brushed-out waves with their rick-rack shadows, a thread inside the case, the case inside the locket, the locket beneath the yoke. All the effort to save in itself a form of loss. You can tell a story many ways. You can leave something out or put something in; you can fool yourself and hide. You can shake out the form or try to manage every wisp, but the latter will only bring you pain. You went under the hand and eye of another and the tether cannot be undone.

for Edward Hirsch Like a distant singing, like a finger sizzling for just one moment on the iron, it almost hurts. Almost. But then something pulls away, and the smooth belly of evening slides over the earth; the pines and the spaniels stop howling and suddenly drop off to sleep. While the air is numb with the drowsiness of clouds, the needle sails free of the scars on the record and the record player lifts its artificial arm! This hurts. But then a boy lays his cards on his bedspread the way a sailor spreads his sails on the sand, and even this reminds me of tables being set, of a woman calling and calling her children through blistered hands. Then something lets go, and in her left palm she sees her own eyes, and in her right the evening’s first star pulls her toward the distant singing of the sky. Then something else lets go; the long sheet of night winds slowly through the pines. Here and there the lights go up, like a shy applauding.