Tod Marshall

I The weight of my son at the emergency room for an eye injury, sack of flour, sack of salt, dusty bag of bones collapsed after all those tears. Why does Turner come to mind, those shackled ankles, those drowning slaves? II And horizons. Each measure, each cleaving of flesh to soil, breath to sentence, body toward earth. The shepherd watches his flock cross the stream; nymphs bathe and flirt and sun themselves on rocks. Water against ankles, pebbles beneath feet. III An old woman sits next to us, and every time she shifts in her seat, I can hear her bones click. Dying, her faulty architecture like an old radiator, cooling engine. IV The burden of seeing, explosive sunlight, the swirling painted water pouring over Turner’s slaves. My son sleeps. Have you ever walked out into the sticky heat of a Memphis night and asked for gunshots to stop for just one hot hour? O heap of body, heap of bones, heap of dreams, heap of moans. V A story with a happy ending and no answers, slight corneal scratch healed with anti-bacterial rinse, the eyeball’s protective pocket cupping the universe like a calm inlet offering a foundering ship protection from rough seas. You tell me: What washes blood from a balcony? I’m listening. I’m saying please. The sun rises quickly. And so do sea monsters.

Myth is prison, a palace, truth without fact. Myth is birth and pleasure, teeth and death, sharp shiver of that which is broken. Myth is patriarchal and worn, full of fratricide and rape. Myth is a garden, makes good television, memoir, the scandal of animals and people coupling beneath the stars. Myth is crow eating roadkill and dodging the occasional cars, a pile of guts and bones. Myth is carrying the body back to the den. –Close your eyes and count to ten. 1. “In language, there are always two.” The Iliad stolen from Thoreau’s cabin, the only thing taken during those years. Remember, too,The Aenied (we all have lived through times of war) and that passage a friend said to know well, “Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son, Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.” 2. Ultrasound images of my heart. That it moves and moves and then moves again, plump muscle shuddering, laboring to make up for one bad valve. Spots in the ocean where nothing lives and yet there is movement, water moving. I stand in the river fishing and watching an osprey slide through the air ten feet above the water. I hear those wings. 3. Eleven years of loving can’t just vanish. I have photographs. I have facts. “Hapy Birthday Dady” scribbled on a card. How easy to sit at a desk and not see the full moon through the window. Roy Sullivan, Virginia Park Ranger, struck by lightning seven times, kills himself after being dumped by a lover. “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” A friend asks, “Why are you hiding in myth?” 4. I gather a lock of his hair, a scrap of T-shirt, a baby tooth, his tiny spoon, a diaper pin with a blue plastic stork, the quilted blanket, his first steps, hands clutching my fingers, the long night when his fever rose to 104˚, his split lip at age six when he jumped with outspread arms, the first shoe, a locket with a toddler photo, first day of school, first finger painting, the green cardboard sculpture like something shaped by Breton, T-ball games, the flopping trout he squeezed too hard, his first broken bone, his fear when he felt my trembling hands trying to tell him something about the sun. 5. Trout with a slashed back where talons tore dorsal flesh and the flesh slipped from an osprey’s grip to a lucky landing in the creek’s waiting water, thrashing and calming, lingering beneath a deep cutbank, and weeks later, taking my elk hair caddis and leaping completely out of the water. On the far bank, a muskrat struggles and does a melodramatic gangster fall into the creek where it splashes and sinks. “Rattlesnake,” my friend says, and I nod and stare at where the ripple swirls into the current and think about sinking bones. 6. The court acknowledges the petitioner’s long involvement with _________’s life and sincerely hopes that the parties involved will have the generosity and wisdom to honor that relationship. Do not blame the wind that scatters apple blossoms ruthlessly. Allow that flowers desire farewell blessings before their time has come. 7. Fishing in the desert creek a few days after the hearing, I find bones, steer skulls with round sockets for horns, and step near three rattlesnakes, almost grab a fourth when climbing a steep bank. The snakes were sluggish, though, late spring when the temperatures in the desert dipped into the thirties at night. Only one rattled, and the rain of the previous days made the fishing terrible, water brown and swift. I didn’t get a bite and drove home, bought a bucket of fried chicken, and ate in front of the television his clothes still hanging in a closet. 8. There is no end to the hours when cedars and peaks scratch the sky’s belly. No garden, but sometimes, wildflowers. Sometimes, fish hold against the river’s current then dart with a silvery flash downstream. Sometimes, deer on the other shore stand still for a moment, then hunch toward their grazing. 9. A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the inflatable  castles rented and set up on the lawn, only wants to run all afternoon, playing chase, tag-like game where I growl and laugh and lumber around the playground, his giggling, both of us laughing and roaring, and I catch him and he gets away and climbs to the top of the jungle gym where he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real, and I walk beneath him and he doesn’t pause. He jumps into my arms, and I catch him. 10. Ready or nothere I come— A feather floats downstream, the rings of a ripple smooth. Love is possible. The heron hunts in the shallows with slow deliberate steps, startles from the creek, and rises. Sunlight warms basalt walls fields of sage, and Hawthorne groves, here, where tumble- weeds rove for home.

We stopped at a farmer’s house before parking at the dock that creaked over the river. Rowboats for rent, five bucks an hour, twenty for the day. Deep water: I knew a canvas bag was in the trunk. I knew lunch would be roast beef sandwiches and hot stew from a thermos, chunks of carrot and potatoes cut by my mother who slept through the racket of our leaving. While my father paid, I loaded the boat with our poles and tackle boxes, lead sinkers shaped like grey pears, raincoats and a case of beer. I was ten and I knew my dad would toss that canvas bag into the aluminum boat with a thunk. We fish for gar with kittens, he’d yelled last night at my mother, and that was that. The rowboat slid from the dock, the occasional clunk of the first six-pack clipped on the fish stringer, and I knew that I should take my time fastening the wire leader to the brass swivel, tying on those massive sinkers. I knew that the six-inch treble hook would tremble in my hands, and when I was done, I knew what came next, a canvas bag, stiff kittens, blood. I tore two hooks through the side of a calico, yanked upward with a sharp tug to lodge the third barb beneath the ribs. I dangled my fingers in cold water to wash them, then reared the rod back into a cast that splashed twenty feet from the boat. He popped the third beer and finished baiting his hook. Too deep for an anchor, we drifted, and far beneath, the gar cruised back and forth, their prehistoric snouts slicing the dark, bumping our bait again and again until that fierce hunger I was learning said clamp down and take it.