Tony Hoagland

She goes out to hang the windchime in her nightie and her work boots. It’s six-thirty in the morning and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch, windchime in her left hand, hammer in her right, the nail gripped tight between her teeth but nothing happens next because she’s trying to figure out how to switch #1 with #3. She must have been standing in the kitchen, coffee in her hand, asleep, when she heard it—the wind blowing through the sound the windchime wasn’t making because it wasn’t there. No one, including me, especially anymore believes till death do us part, but I can see what I would miss in leaving— the way her ankles go into the work boots as she stands upon the ice chest; the problem scrunched into her forehead; the little kissable mouth with the nail in it.

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills. She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass marks off the place where the memories are kept, like a library book named Dorothy. Some of the chapters might be:Dorothy: Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook; Dorothy, Wife and Atheist; Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not. In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass reminds you of persistence and the endless wind reminds you of indifference, Ruth brings batches of white roses, extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful because as soon as she is gone she knows the deer come out of the woods to eat them. What was made for the eye goes into the mouth, thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away, and in bed when she tries to remember her mother, she drifts instead to the roses, and when she thinks about the roses she sees instead the deer chewing them— pale petals of the roses in the dark warm bellies of the sleeping deer— that’s what going to sleep is like.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

Yes, the young mothers are beautiful, with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion, still dazed from their great outpouring, pushing their strollers along the public river walk.

There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.

Play the one about the family of the ducks where the ducks go down to the river and one of them thinks the water will be cold but then they jump in anyway and like it and splash around. No, I must play the one about the nervous man from Palestine in row 14 with a brown bag in his lap in which a gun is hidden in a sandwich. Play the one about the handsome man and woman standing on the steps of her apartment and how the darkness and her perfume and the beating of their hearts conjoin to make them feel like leaping from the edge of chance— No, I should play the one about the hard rectangle of the credit card hidden in the man’s back pocket and how the woman spent an hour plucking out her brows, and how her perfume was made from the destruction of a hundred flowers. Then play the one about the flower industry in which the migrant workers curse their own infected hands from tossing sheaves of roses and carnations into the back of the refrigerated trucks. No, I must play the one about the single yellow daffodil standing on my kitchen table whose cut stem draws the water upwards so the plant is flushed with the conviction that the water has been sent to find and raise it up from somewhere so deep inside the earth not even flowers can remember.

tell the flowers—they think the sun loves them. The grass is under the same simple-minded impression about the rain, the fog, the dew. And when the wind blows, it feels so good they lose control of themselves and swobtoggle wildly around, bumping accidentally into their slender neighbors. Forgetful little lotus-eaters, solar-powered hydroholics, drawing nourishment up through stems into their thin green skin, high on the expensive chemistry of mitochondrial explosion, believing that the dirt loves them, the night, the stars— reaching down a little deeper with their pale albino roots, all Dizzy Gillespie with the utter sufficiency of everything. They don't imagine lawn mowers, the four stomachs of the cow, or human beings with boots who stop to marvel at their exsquisite flexibility and color. They persist in their soft-headed hallucination of happiness. But please don't mention it. Not yet. Tell me what would you possibly gain from being right?

Don’t take it personal , they said; but I did, I took it all quite personal— the breeze and the river and the color of the fields; the price of grapefruit and stamps, the wet hair of women in the rain— And I cursed what hurt me and I praised what gave me joy, the most simple-minded of possible responses. The government reminded me of my father, with its deafness and its laws, and the weather reminded me of my mom, with her tropical squalls.

Without even knowing it, I have believed in you for a long time. When I looked at my blood under a microscope I could see truth multiplying over and over. —Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma persuaded me but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass thrust up above the January snow. Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse, from the museum series on European masters. When my friend died on the way to the hospital it was not his death that so amazed me but that the driver of the cab did not insist upon the fare. Quotation marks: what should we put inside them? Shall I say “I”  “have been hurt” “by”  “you,”  you neglectful monster? I speak now because experience has shown me that my mind will never be clear for long. I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid than ever in my life. “For my heart is tangled in thy nets; my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time...” The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites. The parade for the slain police officer goes past the bakery and the smell of fresh bread makes the mourners salivate against their will.

Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians, amped up to dinosaur proportions, test drove their equipment through our ears. Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs, as if they wished that they could knock us quite literally dead. We called that fun in 1970, when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving. I’m here to tell you that they were, and many of us did, despite ourselves, though the road from there to here is paved with dead brain cells, parents shocked to silence, and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood the quaking tint and texture of red jelly. Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads to show where we have been; we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin to show what we were thinking when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn, and Death kept blinking. But here I stand, an average-looking man staring at a room where someone blond in braids with a beautiful belief in answers is still asking questions. Through the silence in my dead ear, I can almost hear the future whisper to the past: it says that this is not a test and everybody passes.