William Matthews

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it, and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection that could contain, like a microchip, an epic treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld. And at the base of our glass there’s nothing so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text so short it consists only of the author’s signature, which has to stand, like the future, for what might have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life. Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!

You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus. He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), “I just ruined my body.” And there, Exhibit A, it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music. Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know rises but to the edge of the atmosphere. You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring and know how much you must coax out. How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword from a stone. But what’s inside the bass wants out, the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard as you can, little by little, in perfect time, as the work of the body becomes a body of work.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that was how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar, casting beer money from a thin reel of ones, the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two other things, but they were wrong, as it happened. So I made him look at the poem. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do. If they were baseball executives they’d plot to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game could be saved from children.   Of course later that night he fired his pianist in mid-number and flurried him from the stand. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,” he explained, and the band played on.

The ones his age who shook my hand on their way out sent fear along my arm like heroin. These weren’t men mute about their feelings, or what’s a body language for? And I, the glib one, who’d stood with my back to my father’s body and praised the heart that attacked him? I’d made my stab at elegy, the flesh made word: the very spit in my mouth was sour with ruth and eloquence. What could be worse? Silence, the anthem of my father’s new country. And thus this babble, like a dial tone, from our bodies.

There is another world, but it is in this one. Paul Eluard First there were those who died before I was born. It was as if they had just left and their shadows would slip out after them under the door so recently closed the air in its path was still swirling to rest. Some of the furniture came from them, I was told, and one day I opened two chests of drawers to learn what the dead kept. But it was when I learned to read that I began always to live among the dead. I remember Rapunzel, the improved animals in the Just-So Stories, and a flock of birds that saved themselves from a hunter by flying in place in the shape of a tree, their wings imitating the whisk of wind in the leaves. My sons and I are like some wine the dead have already bottled. They wish us well, but there is nothing they can do for us. Sebastian cries in his sleep, I bring him into my bed, talk to him, rub his back. To help his sons live easily among the dead is a father’s great work. Now Sebastian drifts, soon he’ll sleep. We can almost hear the dead breathing. They sound like water under a ship at sea. To love the dead is easy. They are final, perfect. But to love a child is sometimes to fail at love while the dead look on with their abstract sorrow. To love a child is to turn away from the patient dead. It is to sleep carefully in case he cries. Later, when my sons are grown among their own dead, I can dive easily into sleep and loll among the coral of my dreams growing on themselves until at the end I almost never dream of anyone, except my sons, who is still alive.

for Richard Hugo The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches tomorrow on why we are sad. Brethren, Montana’s a landscape requiring faith: the visible government arrives in trucks, if you live out far enough. If you live in town, the government’s gone, on errands, in trucks. Let citizens go to meetings, I’ll stay home. I hate a parade. By the time you get the trout up through the tiny triangular holes in the Coors cans, they’re so small you have to throw them back. Glum miles we go to Grandmother’s house. The earth out here doesn’t bear us up so much as it keeps us out, an old trick of the beautiful. Remember what Chief Left Hand said? Never mind. Everything else was taken from him, let’s leave his grief alone. My Eastern friends ask me how I like it in the West, or God’s country, as it’s sometimes called, though God, like a slumlord, lives in the suburbs: Heaven. And I don’t live “in the West”; I live in this canyon among a few other houses and abandoned mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.

Each of them must have terrified his parents by being so big, obsessive and exact so young, already gone and leaving, like a big tipper, that huge changeling’s body in his place. The prince of bone spurs and bad knees. The year I first saw them play Malone was a high school freshman, already too big for any bed, 14, a natural resource. You have to learn not to apologize, a form of vanity. You flare up in the lane, exotic anywhere else. You roll the ball off fingers twice as long as your girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man, says some jerk. Now they’re defunct and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19, rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench, his pet of a body grown sullen as fast as it grew up. Something in you remembers every time the ball left your fingertips wrong and nothing the ball can do in the air will change that. You watch it set, stupid moon, the way you watch yourself in a recurring dream. You never lose your touch or forget how taxed bodies go at the same pace they owe, how brutally well the universe works to be beautiful, how we metabolize loss as fast as we have to.

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles. Dr. Johnson No one keeps a secret so well as a child Victor Hugo My mother stands at the screen door, laughing. “Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog. I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved like this. The air is tight to my nervous body. I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing to myself all day like a fieldful of August insects, just things I whisper, really, a trance in sneakers. I’m learning to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school, I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself, a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road- side park. I love to be called for dinner. Spot goes out and I go in and the lights in the kitchen go on and the dark, which also has a body like a cloud’s, leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. .       .       . Here’s a sky no higher than a streetlamp, and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire. It’s 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle, minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow; and here’s our sleep-sodden paperboy with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog, his unclouding face set for paper route like an alarm clock. Here’s a memory in the making, for this could be the morning he doesn’t come home and his parents two hours later drive his route until they find him asleep, propped against a streetlamp, his papers all delivered and his dirty paper- satchel slack, like an emptied lung, and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue through which a last few dandruff-flecks of snow meander casually down. The dog squeaks in out of the dark, snuffling me too me too. And here he goes home to memory, and to hot chocolate on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice, and to the long and ordinary day, school, two triumphs and one severe humiliation on the playground, the past already growing its scabs, the busride home, dinner, and evening leading to sleep like the slide that will spill him out, come June, into the eye-reddening chlorine waters of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed. Kiss. Kiss. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark. Here the dog lies down by his bed, and sighs and farts. Will he always be this skinny, chicken-bones? He’ll remember like a prayer how his mother made breakfast for him every morning before he trudged out to snip the papers free. Just as his mother will remember she felt guilty never to wake up with him to give him breakfast. It was Cream of Wheat they always or never had together. It turns out you are the story of your childhood and you’re under constant revision, like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong, shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk. And each of these selves had a childhood it traded for love and grudged to give away, now lost irretrievably, in storage like a set of dishes from which no food, no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard sauce, nor even a single raspberry, can be eaten until the afterlife, which is only childhood in its last disguise, all radiance or all humiliation, and so it is forfeit a final time. In fact it was awful, you think, or why should the piecework of grief be endless? Only because death is, and likewise loss, which is not awful, but only breathtaking. There’s no truth about your childhood, though there’s a story, yours to tend, like a fire or garden. Make it a good one, since you’ll have to live it out, and all its revisions, so long as you all shall live, for they shall be gathered to your deathbed, and they’ll have known to what you and they would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you. The map in the shopping center has an X signed “you are here.” A dream is like that. In a dream you are never eighty, though you may risk death by other means: you’re on a ledge and memory calls you to jump, but a deft cop talks you in to a small, bright room, and snickers. And in a dream, you’re everyone somewhat, but not wholly. I think I know how that works: for twenty-one years I had a father and then I became a father, replacing him but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers. Surely, that’s what middle-aged means, being father and son to sons and father. That a male has only one mother is another story, told wherever men weep wholly. Though nobody’s replaced. In one dream I’m leading a rope of children to safety, through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out and I have to throw snowballs well to him so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know he’s my father, at ease in his catcher’s squat, and that the dream has revived to us both an old unspoken fantasy: we’re a battery. I’m young, I’m brash, I don’t know how to pitch but I can throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he can handle pitchers and control a game. I look to him for a sign. I’d nod for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip without seams, and I don’t rely only on my live, young arm, but throw by all the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs toward him no faster than the snow in the dream drifts down. Nothing takes forever, but I know what the phrase means. The children grow more cold and hungry and cruel to each other the longer the ball’s in the air, and it begins to melt. By the time it gets to him we’ll be our waking ages, and each of us is himself alone, and we all join hands and go. .       .       . Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey and that green you see just under the surface of water, a shimmer more than a color. Time to dive back into sleep, as if into happiness, that neglected discipline .... In those sixth-grade book reports you had to say if the book was optimistic or not, and everyone looked at you the same way: how would he turn out? He rolls in his sleep like an otter. Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it’s funny, and on the way to work he pries the cap off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn’t cool one weary thing for long; it’s gonna be a cooker. The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat on his upper lip, as if waking itself, becoming explicit, were hard work. Who knows if he’s happy or not? A child is all the tools a child has, growing up, who makes what he can.

for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line. Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the rumpled body isn’t round, it isn’t perpendicular. You have to draw “an imaginary line,” as the breezy coaches say, “through your shoulders.” Here’s how to cheat: remember your collarbone. Now the instructions grow spiritual—deep breathing, relax and concentrate both; aim for the front of the rim but miss it deliberately so the ball goes in. Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot 200 foul shots every day. Teach yourself not to be bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances are you don’t; you’d love to be good at it but not by a love that drives you to shoot 200 foul shots every day, and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots we’re talking about now— the clinic having served to bring us together—circle eccentrically in a sky of stolid orbits as unlike as you and I are from the arcs those foul shots leave behind when they go in.

the only parts of the body the same size at birth as they’ll always be. “That’s why all babies are beautiful,” Thurber used to say as he grew blind—not dark, he’d go on to explain, but floating in a pale light always, a kind of candlelit murk from a sourceless light. He needed dark to see: for a while he drew on black paper with white pastel chalk but it grew worse. Light bored into his eyes but where did it go? Into a sea of phosphenes, along the wet fuse of some dead nerve, it hid everywhere and couldn’t be found. I’ve used up three guesses, all of them right. It’s like scuba diving, going down into the black cone-tip that dives farther than I can, though I dive closer all the time.