William Matthews

Because we rage inside the old boundaries, like a young girl leaving the Church, scared of her parents. Because we all dream of saving the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo, shielding the herd with our bodies. Because grief unites us, like the locked antlers of moose who die on their knees in pairs.

Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up, Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly to a point, piano teachers love to poke into the palms of junior pianists with lazy hands. What easy villains these robotic dullards are in their floral- print teaching dresses (can those mauve blurs be peonies?). The teachers’ plucky, make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan bloom of dust the couch exhaled when I scrunched down to wait for Mrs. Oxley, just how we value them. She’d launch my predecessor home and drink some lemonade, then free me from the couch. The wisdom in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where Monk grew up, is that those names, Thelonious Sphere, came later, but nobody’s sure: he made his escape by turning himself into a genius in broad daylight while nobody watched. Just a weird little black kid one day and next thing anybody knew he was inexplicable and gone. We don’t give lessons in that. In fact it’s to stave off such desertions that we pay for lessons. It works for a while. Think of all the time we spend thinking about our kids. It’s Mrs. Oxley, the frump with a metronome, and Mr. Mote, the bad teacher and secret weeper, we might think on, and everyone we pay to tend our young, opaque and truculent and terrified, not yet ready to replace us, or escape us, if that be the work.

No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock, Georgia, or maybe Hop River, Connecticut. She is opening a plastic bag. A grotesque parody of the primeval muck starts oozing out. And behold, the plastic bag is magic; there is no closing it. Soap in unsoftened water, sewage, asbestos coiled like vermicelli, Masonite shavings, a liquefied lifetime subscription to The New York Times delivered all at once. Empty body stockings, limp, forlorn, like collapsed lungs. A blithering slur of face creams, an army of photocopies travelling on its stomach of acronyms, tooth paste tubes wrung rigid and dry. Also, two hundred and one tons of crumpled bumpers wrapped in insurance claims, slag, coal dust, plastic trimmings, industrial excrementa. Lake Erie is returning our gifts. At first she thought she had won something. Now it slithers through the house, out windows, down the street, spreading everywhere but heading, mostly, west. Maybe heading is the wrong word, implying shape and choice. It took the shape of the landscape it rippled across like the last blanket. And it went west because the way lay open once again: not the same fecund rug the earth grew when white people scraped their first paths to the Pacific across the waves of the inland grasses. Outside Ravenswood, West Virginia, abandoned cars shine in the sun like beetlebacks. The ore it took to make the iron it took to make the steel it took to make the cars, that ore would remember the glaciers if it could. Now comes another grinding, but not— thanks to our new techniques—so slow. The amiable cars wait stilly in their pasture. Three Edsels forage in the southeast corner like bishops of a ruined church. There are Fords and Dodges, a Mercury on blocks, four Darts and a Pierce Arrow, a choir of silenced Chevrolets. And, showing their lapsed trademarks and proud grilles to a new westward expansion, two Hudsons, a LaSalle and a DeSoto. I was hoping to describe the colors of this industrial autumn— rust, a faded purple like the dusty skin of a Concord grape, flaking moss- green paint with primer peeking blandly through, the garish macho reds insurance companies punish, the greys (opaque) and silvers (bright), the snob colors (e.g. British Racing Green), the two-tone combinations time will spurn like roadkill (1957: pink and grey), cornflower blue, naval blue, royal blue, stark blue, true blue, the blacker blue the diver sees beneath him when he plumbs thirty feet— but now they are all covered, rolling and churning in the last accident, like bubbles in lava. And now my Cincinnati—the hills above the river, the lawn that drained toward Ricwood Ave. like a small valley of uncles, the sultry river musk that slid like a compromising note through my bedroom window— and indeed all Cincinnati seethes. The vats at Proctor & Gamble cease their slick congealing, and my beloved birthplace is but another whorl of dirt. Up north near Lebanon and Troy and Rosewood, the corn I skulked in as a boy lays back its ears like a shamed dog. Hair along the sow’s spine rises. The Holstein pivots his massive head toward where the barn stood; the spreading stain he sees is his new owner. What we imagined was the fire-storm, or, failing that, the glacier. Or we hoped we’d get off easy, losing only California. With the seismologists and mystics we say the last California ridge crumble into the ocean. And we were read with elegies: O California, sportswear and defense contracts, gasses that induce deference, high school girls with their own cars, we wanted to love you without pain. O California, when you were moored to us like a vast splinter of melon, like a huge and garish gondola, then we were happier, although we showed it by easy contempt. But now you are lost at sea, your cargo of mudslides and Chardonnays lost, the prints of the old movies lost, the thick unlighted candles of the redwoods snuffed in advance. On the ocean floor they lie like hands of a broken clock. O California, here we come, quoting Ecclesiastes, ruinous with self-knowledge. Meanwhile, because the muck won’t stop for lamentation, Kansas succumbs. Drawn down by anklets of DDT, the jayhawk circles lower and lower while the sludge moils and crests. Now we are about to lose our voices we remember that tomorrow is our echo. O the old songs, the good days: bad faith and civil disobedience, sloppy scholarship and tooth decay. Now the age of footnotes is ours. Ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid. While the rivers thickened and fish rose like vomit, the students of water stamped each fish with its death date. Don’t let a chance like this go by, they thought, though it went by as everything went by—towers of water flecked by a confetti of topsoil, clucked tongues, smug prayers. What we paid too much for and too little attention to, our very lives, all jumbled now and far too big in aggregate to understand or mourn, goes by, and all our eloquence places its weight on the spare word goodbye.

Here comes the powdered milk I drank as a child, and the money it saved. Here come the papers I delivered, the spotted dog in heat that followed me home and the dogs that followed her. Here comes a load of white laundry from basketball practice, and sheets with their watermarks of semen. And here comes snow, a language in which no word is ever repeated, love is impossible, and remorse. . . . Yet childhood doesn’t end, but accumulates, each memory knit to the next, and the fields become one field. If to die is to lose all detail, then death is not so distinguished, but a profusion of detail, a last gossip, character passed wholly into fate and fate in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

A snake is the love of a thumb and forefinger. Other times, an arm that has swallowed a bicep. The air behind this one is like a knot in a child’s shoelace come undone while you were blinking. It is bearing something away. What? What time does the next snake leave? This one’s tail is ravelling into its burrow— a rosary returned to a purse. The snake is the last time your spine could go anywhere alone.

I wondered if the others felt as heroic and as safe:my unmangled family slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead behind my flashlight’s beam. Stones, thick roots as twisted as a ruined body, what did I fear? I hoped my batteries had eight more lives than the lost child. I feared I’d find something. Reader, by now you must be sure you know just where we are, deep in symbolic woods. Irony, self-accusation, someone else’s suffering. The search is that of art. You’re wrong, though it’s an intelligent mistake. There was a real lost child. I don’t want to swaddle it in metaphor. I’m just a journalist who can’t believe in objectivity. I’m in these poems because I’m in my life. But I digress. A man four volunteers to the left of me made the discovery. We circled in like waves returning to the parent shock. You’ve read this far, you might as well have been there too. Your eyes accuse me of false chase. Come off it, you’re the one who thought it wouldn’t matter what we found. Though we came with lights and tongues thick in our heads, the issue was a human life. The child was still alive. Admit you’re glad.

How easily happiness begins by dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions. This could mean soup or risotto or chutney (from the Sanskrit chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions go limp and then nacreous and then what cookbooks call clear, though if they were eyes you could see clearly the cataracts in them. It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare and rage and murmury animal comfort that infant humans secrete. This is the best domestic perfume. You sit down to eat with a rumor of onions still on your twice-washed hands and lift to your mouth a hint of a story about loam and usual endurance. It’s there when you clean up and rinse the wine glasses and make a joke, and you leave the minutest whiff of it on the light switch, later, when you climb the stairs.

Eat all you want but don’t swallow it . —Archie Moore The ruth of soups and balm of sauces I renounce equally. What Rorschach saw in ink I find in the buttery frizzle in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind, and the sweet peat-smoke tang of bananas, and cream in clots, and chocolate. I give away the satisfactions of food and take desire for food: I’ll be travelling light to the heaven of revisions. Why be adipose: an expense, etc., in a waste, etc.? Something like the body of the poet’s work, with its pale shadows, begins to pare and replace the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?

The wallful of quoted passages from his work, with the requisite specimens pinned next to their literary cameo appearances, was too good a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t, why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read and look, you could be happy a month in that small room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen: he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly of his back and the small wedge of face that shows brims with indifference to anything not on the page. The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light over the page, too far away for us to read. We also liked the chest of specimen drawers labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians, “Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials the thousands he examined for his monograph on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues. And there in the center of the room a carillon of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there, and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov), a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak, an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak, the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida: in the series Nabokov did on this beauty he noted for each specimen the altitude at which it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say, “and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita, The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues flew by, and we improvised a path through cars and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow to wherever we went next. I must have been mute, or whatever I said won from silence nothing it mourned to lose. I was back in that small room, vast by love of each flickering detail, each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase. I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled over a stopped sewer grate and thought— wouldn’t you know it—about love and art: you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south- western Ohio) by a book or improved by a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop, septic with a rage not for order but for the love the senses bear for what they do, for detail that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence. You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary. This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core: just as you’re having what you wanted most, you want it more and more until that’s more than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

Haze. Three student violists boarding a bus. A clatter of jackhammers. Granular light. A film of sweat for primer and the heat for a coat of paint. A man and a woman on a bench: she tells him he must be psychic, for how else could he sense, even before she knew, that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle on the boil. I never meant, she says. But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi. I’m sorry, she says. The comforts of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon. The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly around a corner. How familiar it feels to feel strange, hollower than a bassoon. A rill of chill air in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.