William Logan

The city humid, the church rusty and Baroque, and the directions appalling, the Miami sky turned gray as a blanket, and soon tropical rain was falling; the priest repeatedly invoked the Beast in View, as if he were stalling; and in the back a few ushers whipped out their cell phones and started calling. What of the palm scrub, through which mildewed creatures came crawling, or the two cousins from Chicago, who at the reception couldn't stop brawling? All weddings are madness, and except for the sherbet-hued bridesmaids not even a little enthralling. But the stooped and aged, what in their moth-eaten hours were they recalling? Some first nervous kiss, perhaps, the razor of a touch, and all that "Baby Doll"-ing; then the mortgage in Opa-Locka, nine months of waiting, and half a life of squalling.

That oily bale of rags, lost to the silent architectures of the wood— or so it seemed, as the fall’s chancels darkened, and rough earth gave and forgave. Forgave, I mean, the intrusion.

Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled among the tanned intruders, licking their hands. Pools of iridescent shellfish lay open in the restaurant window, a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs, their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements. The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled in its slime. Many and ingenious are the postures of death. But look! There, in a corner, beneath a willowware plate, a lone crab clicked its claws, creeping over a casket of walleyed fish, through a valley of oysters keeping their counsel, only to shift warily under the shadow of a wine bottle. Which saint, O saints, watches over the saintly crab? The man of forks and spears, the man of arrows? In the Ca’ d’Oro, the stiffened Sebastian takes each arrow through his flesh like a skewer. He wears a little napkin around his middle. Saint, watch over the fragile boat of the runaway crab. Let him steal his way back to the green lagoon, go floating down the Grand Canal on his own motoscafo. Let him take second life, a later martyrdom. Let him wave his bent claws in a mockery of farewell, lest we eat in his hollow shell his captive meat.

The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed— yet Punchinello gripped the eagle’s neck. (The dream of life is just another dream.) It soared above the masts, canals, the steam of chimneys, till our Punch was just a speck. The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed, the harbor, Venice, Europe—even the gleam blazing San Marco’s horses shrank. A fleck! The dream of life is just another dream that really wants a king, a god’s regime, or some poor hurricane to wreck the ship at anchor. Wasn’t what it seemed, Punch’s old life, another Ponzi scheme? Weren’t sailors waving from the quarter-deck? The dream of life is just another dream that none of us will live to see redeemed. Death scrawls his bold John Hancock on your check. The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed. The dream of life is just another dream.

Like columns of mist in some temple to a vanished god, the late cloud-stacks mass over a June reduced to the sickly greens of the Norfolk broads; and, above the steam-soiled mess where earthworms grovel, where lumpish toads set up the resistances of grace, where badgers undermine the tarred road, I watch the canvas of that underpainted sky through a jellied glass of vermouth while the gravestone crops up and an oily wind steels itself to the south. There certain winged creatures from a century misplaced on shelves take the day down with a moaning chant known to themselves.

The leaves had fallen in that sullen place, but none around him knew just where they were. The sky revealed no sun. A ragged blur remained where each man's face had been a face. Two angels soon crept forth with trays of bread, circling among the lost like prison guards. Love is not love, unless its will affords forgiveness for the words that are not said. Still he could not believe that this was Hell, that others sent before him did not know; yet, once his name and memory grew faint, it was no worse, perhaps, than a cheap motel. It is the love of failure makes a saint. He stood up then, but did not try to go.

In their excess, their blowsy dreaming and King Solomon-like tempers, the clouds possess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils, when a painter earned his profession as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps, treated that blank pasture of the “heavens” like something that had lived. Their crawly undoings remind us of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls of cotton—the morning phosphorescent or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt. The nights there were scumbled with light. How could we ever have taken them for the abstinence of art?

How should I now recall the icy lace of the pane like a sheet of cellophane, or the skies of alcohol poured over the saltbox town? On that stony New England tableau, the halo of falling snow glared like a waxy crown. Through blue frozen lots my giant parents strolled, wrapped tight against the cold like woolen Argonauts, searching for that tall perfection of Scotch pine from the hundreds laid in line like the dead at Guadalcanal. The clapboard village aglow that starry stark December I barely now remember, or the brutish ache of snow burning my face like quicklime. Yet one thing was still missing. I saw my parents kissing, perhaps for the last time.

The lift, the very lift and pull of it! They’d wasted the summer morning, father and son in the devil’s breath of July—gnats wheeling madly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics across the struts, like the canvas skin of a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yard with its humpback boulder, they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twine until the contraption yanked itself from bald earth, high above the matchbox houses on the verge of woods and the sweet-smelling bog, to a height where a boy might peer over the horizon to Boston—and beyond, the ocean. The son was my father. I tottered at his legs, having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s. They payed out the ramshackle affair until it became a postage stamp. The line burned a bloody groove into my palms, the last time they stood at ease with each other.