Wesley McNair

When her recorded voice on the phone said who she was again and again to the piles of newspapers and magazines and the clothes in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes. When she could no longer walk through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody- to-help-me way of walking, with her head bent down to her knees as if she were searching for a dime that had rolled into a crack on the floor, though it was impossible to see the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed to no one was so bad she could not stand at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff to find what was edible. When she could hardly even sit as she loved to sit, all night on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers hanging nearby on the curtainless bar of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up in the tub, falling asleep and waking up while she cut out newspaper clippings and listened to the late-night talk on her crackling radio about alien landings and why the government had denied them. When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing ache of her foot trying over and over to wash the black from her big toe and could not because it was gangrene. When at last they came to carry my mother out of the wilderness of that house and she lay thin and frail and disoriented between bouts of tests and X-rays, and I came to find her in the white bed of her white room among nurses who brushed her hair while she looked up at them and smiled with her yellow upper plate that seemed to hold her face together, dazed and disbelieving, as if she were in heaven, then turned, still smiling, to the door where her stout, bestroked younger brother teetered into the room on his cane, all the way from Missouri with her elderly sister and her bald-headed baby brother, whom she despised. When he smiled back and dipped his bald head down to kiss her, and her sister and her other brother hugged her with serious expressions, and her childish astonishment slowly changed to suspicion and the old wildness returned to her eye because she began to see this was not what she wanted at all, I sitting down by her good ear holding her hand to talk to her about going into the home that was not her home, her baby brother winking, the others nodding and saying, Listen to Wesley. When it became clear to her that we were not her people, the ones she had left behind in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper clippings, in the bags of unopened mail, in her mind, and she turned her face away so I could see the print of red on her cheek as if she had been slapped hard. When the three of them began to implore their older sister saying, Ruth, Ruth, and We come out here for your own good, and That time rolls around for all of us, getting frustrated and mad because they meant, but did not know they meant, themselves too. When the gray sister, the angriest of them, finally said through her pleated lips and lower plate, You was always the stubborn one, we ain’t here to poison you, turn around and say something. When she wouldn’t.

What became of the dear strands of hair pressed against the perspiration of your lover's brow after lovemaking as you gazed into the world of those eyes, now only yours? What became of any afternoon that was so vivid you forgot the present was up to its old trick of pretending it would be there always? What became of the one who believed so deeply in this moment he memorized everything in it and left it for you?

As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understands the loneliness of the hostess in her dark driveway, embracing herself after the guests who promised more and soon have gone, and even visits the old schoolteacher who reads the same happy ending to each new class, working her toes in her shoes. How could the people of the kingdom not have known the curse of sorrow was nothing more than a long sleep they had only to wake from? In dreams the body, which longs for transformation too, suddenly lifts us above the dark roofs of our houses, and far above the streets of the town, until they seem like any other small things fastened to earth.

From down the road, starting up and stopping once more, the sound of a puppy on a chain who has not yet discovered he will spend his life there. Foolish dog, to forget where he is and wander until he feels the collar close fast around his throat, then cry all over again about the little space in which he finds himself. Soon, when there is no grass left in it and he understands it is all he has, he will snarl and bark whenever he senses a threat to it. Who would believe this small sorrow could lead to such fury no one would ever come near him?

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets) and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.

At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,” she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his workboots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.

In her last notes, when her hand began to tremble, my mother tried to teach it the penmanship she was known for, how to make the slanted stems of the p's and d's, the descending roundness of the capital m's, the long loops of the f's crossed at the center, sending it back again and again until each message was the same: a record of her insistence that the hand return her to the way she was before, and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.

It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image—shaking His head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing— tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something as common as the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.

How the thickest of them erupt just above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff no wind can move them.   Let us praise them in all of their varieties, some skinny as the bands of headphones, some rising from a part that extends halfway around the head, others four or five strings stretched so taut the scalp resembles a musical instrument.   Let us praise the sprays that hold them, and the combs that coax such abundance to the front of the head in the mirror, the combers entirely forget the back.   And let us celebrate the combers, who address the old sorrow of time’s passing day after day, bringing out of the barrenness of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful harvest, no wishful flag of hope, but, thick, or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all in subways, offices, and malls across America.

How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it. I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. You discovered the initials of lovers carved on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart. How wrong the place was to us then, unable to see the portents of our future that seem so clear now in the naiveté of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s disdain for those with little money, the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.