Suzanne Buffam

Little patches of grass disappear In the jaws of lusty squirrels Who slip into the spruce. Cars collapse into parts. Spring dissolves into summer, The kitten into the cat. A tray of drinks departs from the buffet And voilà! the party’s over. All that’s left are some pickles And a sprig of wilting parsley on the rug. When I think of all those Gong-tormented Mesozoic seas I feel a ripple of extinction And blow a smoke ring through the trees. Soon there will be nothing left here but sky. When I think about the fact I am not thinking about you It is a new way of thinking about you.

☽ Not to Be Despised A Hyundai when hitchhiking. Peanuts when traveling coach. Support hose at forty. Dishonorable discharge. Water from a gas-station sink. ☽ For a third day in a row the doorbell rings just as I am finally settling down to do some work. I resolve to settle the matter once and for all. The man on my stoop holds a shovel in one hand and  in the other, his hat. An old pillowcse stuffed with something bulky—empty beer cans?—rests on the welcome mat at his feet. For twenty bucks, he offers to clear the front walk. Behind him, snowy steps descend to an icy path winding between a dead hydrangea and the Subaru parked, as usual, a little too close to  the fence. My husband, I recall, will not be home until late. The forecast tonight is more snow. I show the man the contents of my wallet—two crumpled fives and one single—which he accepts, bowing slightly. I nod and withdraw behind the locked door. Eleven dollars, I reflect as I return to the keyboard with my tepid kombucha, isn’t bad for a half-hour’s effort. If he works fast, he could be done in twenty minutes. When I take a cupcake break in the kitchen moments later, however, I spy him out the sliding glass door, dragging his shovel behind him down the street, my icy walkway, to all appearances, untouched. Fair enough, I say, jangling my pajama pocket full of loose change. ☽ Pillow is a funny word, Her Majesty announces in the rosy glow of  her nightlight. So is Word. She sits up wide-eyed and smiles.Word is a funny word, she repeats. So is Funny! So is Goodnight,  I intone from the doorway, and dissolve in the dark. ☽ Guilty Pleasures Beating a child at checkers. Peeing in swimming pools. Watching Dateline. Drinking milk from the carton. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers. Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers, watching Dateline, drinking milk from the carton. A roaring fire in July. ☽ Questionable Gestures To haggle with hookers. To roast a bride. Tax-deductible gifts. To supplement a hunger strike with juice. A post-doc at Yale School of Medicine’s Center for Obesity Research sponsored by Pizza Hut. Golden parachutes. Faux fur. Blush on a corpse. ☽ Last night I had a dream so vivid I didn’t bother to record it on my pillow. I was sipping a large stein of sangria at some sort of nightmarish gala, leaning on the arm of a once-powerful older man I’d met in college, upon whom I was now, in the dream, in the awkward position of passing literary judgment. He was wearing a white guayabera shirt with pink stitching, and what hair of his remained was slicked across a forehead speckled with age. I woke angry and aroused and could not get back to sleep. Was this a Prophetic Dream? A Psychological Healing Dream? A Belief Dream? The only option I could rule out for certain was a Dream of Daily Life. ☽ Incongruous A vegan in Vegas. A poor plastic surgeon. Tempests with names like “Trudy” and “Ted.” Perfume at a funeral. Military dolphins. Black balloons. Light rock. ☽ I read a message last night from a woman I have yet to meet beyond the dim glow of a list-serv. She lives in Tampa, if memory serves, and won a juried prize last year for a mixed-media meditation on habitat loss across America, including charts, chants, photographs, oral histories, crowdfunded films, and salvaged trash. She tracks the migratory patterns of purple martins above Wal-Mart parking lots and graphs the spawning grounds of Northern leopard frogs from the Gulf Stream waters to the redwood forests. She posts quarterly reports on her blog. She now finds herself, she confessed last night, in the unfamiliar position of lacking words. While dropping off her child at preschool yesterday, she explained,  she learned from a social worker stationed in the foyer about the sudden death, on Wednesday night, of a boy in the class. An accident at home, is all she knows. The details remain undisclosed. The toddlers have been told that ther friend now lives inside their hearts. What does that mean, her daughter wants to know. What does it mean that he is in our hearts? She doesn’t want Sam inside her, her daughter insists. Sam picks his nose. She doesn’t want Sam’s boogies polluting her heart. At a loss for words myself, I don’t reply. I sit at Her Majesty’s bedside that night and watch snowy pillows pile upon the peeling deckhairs outside. ☽ Better By Moonlight Equestrian statues. Landfills. The Grand Canyon. Sex after forty. Lawn furniture. Travel plans. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

☽ A Great Book can be read again and again, inexhaustibly, with great benefit to great minds, wrote Mortimer Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World program at the university where my husband will be going up for tenure next fall, and where I sometimes teach as well, albeit in a lesser, “non-ladder” position. Not only must a Great Book still matter today, Adler insisted, it must touch upon at least twenty- five of the one hundred and two Great Ideas that have occupied Great Minds for the last twenty-five centuries. Ranging from Angel to World, a comprehensive list of these concepts can be found in Adler’s two-volume Syntopicon: an Index to the Great Ideas, which was published with Great Fanfare, if not Great Financial Success, by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. Although the index includes many Great Ideas, including Art, Beauty, Change, Desire, Eternity, Family, Fate, Happiness, History, Pain, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, Time, and Truth, it does not, alas, include an entry on Pillows, which often strike me, as I sink into mine at the end of long day of anything, these days, as at the very least worthy of note. Among the five hundred and eleven Great Books on Adler’s list, updated in 1990 to appease his quibbling critics, moreover, only four, I can’t help counting, were written by women—Virginia, Willa, Jane, and George—none of whom, as far as I can discover, were anyone’s mother. ☽ Missing Scenes In which Eve plucks her moustache. In which Achilles waxes his ass. In which a butterfly triggers The Tempest. In which Moby Dick performs his own stunts. In which Bashō smokes hashish. In which the Buddha buys bonds. In which the Heavenly Banquet is served with a spork. In which Galahad chugs from the grail. In which spring follows summer. In which moss grows on meteors. In which Pelé scores on the Peloponnesian Fields. ☽ Not in stock, says the campus bookstore clerk looking up from his screen with a smile when I inquire, incognito, after my books which are nowhere to be found on the shelves. We used to have two copies of the first one, he says, but no one bought them, so we sent them back last June. We never carried the second one, he adds, but we could order it for you. What’s your name? I glance up, above his head, at a shelf of Staff Picks. Between a history of disgust and a guide for saving the planet, I spot my husband’s last book, gleaming in the day’s dying light. Forget it, I mutter into my muffler, I can get it from Amazon by Friday. I go home and order an ivory satin pillowcase instead, guaranteed to reduce hair loss due to breakage and soften fine lines. ☽ No Use Wet cigarettes. E-cigarettes. A babysitter whose babysitter is sick. Nunchucks at a gunfight. Stiletto heels at the beach. Last year’s flu shot. Next year’s peace talks. ☽ Heian courtesans slept lightly, when they slept at all, fully dressed in perfumed robes on straw mats, behind elabroately painted screens upon which their noble visitors knocked softly at all hours. In their onnade “women’s script,” they kept detailed notes about flowers, festivals, and furtive trysts on delicately tinted pages stashed in narrow drawers inside their pillows. These documents, copied and recopied over the centuries by courtiers, monks, and scholars in a relentlessly modernizing Japan, provide readers today with the richest portrait of any culture of its time on the globe. I now had a vast quantity of paper at my disposal, reports the nonchalant Shōnagon, and I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. ☽ All day I lie sprawled across my pillow watching a light crust of  snow retract across the lawn into a thin band of shade along the  fence. I watch the sun fail to rise above the Japanese maple and  drop like a coin into a slot in the wall. ☽ Therapies A to Z Art. Biblio. Chemo. Dung. Electroshock. Family. Gestalt. Hippo. Ichthyo. Jenga. Kite. Light. Music. Neurolinguistic. Occupational. Primal scream. Quantum touch. Reiki. Sandplay. Transpersonal. Ultraviolet. Viro. Wilderness. X-ray. Yoga. Zoo.

Fate piles up On the bloody Norman shore. If you must swim there Swim on your back.

The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint. You should never see it coming. And you should never hear the end of it.

I was ready for a new experience. All the old ones had burned out. They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields. From a distance some appeared to be smoldering But when I approached with my hat in my hands They let out small puffs of smoke and expired. Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up With the otherworldly glow of TV And these were smoking a little bit too. I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece. I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis And conjured dusky columns in the clouds. I watched waves lap the crumbling coast. I heard wind strip the woods. I saw the last living snow leopard Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me That nothing worth doing is worth doing For the sake of experience alone. I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time. The sun came out. It was the old sun With only a few billion years left to shine.

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house To match my dark mood. I have left all the sugar out of the pie. My rage is a kind of domestic rage. I learned it from my mother Who learned it from her mother before her And so on. Surely the Greeks had a word for this. Now surely the Germans do. The more words a person knows To describe her private sufferings The more distantly she can perceive them. I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home. What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given? To act well the part that’s been cast for us? Wind. Light. Fire. Time. A train whistles through the far hills. One day I plan to be riding it.