Möbius

for R.G. As if sliding down the green, scuffed face of the wave, a seaplane falls and turns together, keeping the waters of the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’s frowning strip of shoreline, the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes of the rich, when these flip upside down, and the pale clouded sky floats below the ocean, then we jolt awake— But this is not her dream, not water or land. Tell me again, what illness do I think I have? The ropes of blood coil through her neck, they twist as it twists, as the head looks for parents and young men, for nurses, strangers, year upon year attending until the pulpy blood knots up at last, and the warrens of the brain dry and crackle, a town of names she saunters one long night: streets without signs lead to a girlhood park, to songs under stars, and lipstick, old houses forever unbuilding themselves—but within the blue jungle scaffolding, a gallery of faces stares back at her, portraits she can’t place . . . and then the town flattens and crumbles behind her, it grows to dry scrabbled pasture under a dishplate moon, hanging there in the tints of the sky, yet like a stopped clock, right twice a day: Now ma’am, can you remember the name of the President who was shot in the ‘60s? —Lincoln? And if the names had sunk beneath the sea, rolling hump and hollow, leopard spotted foam—surgeons would haul up the big sharks and club them silly, knife off a fin, then drop them bleeding onto the docks of Alcatraz, warning the inmates: “See that? No inside fin, they’ll  swim round this Rock forever. . . .” The convicts build the prison, then move inside, their block minds ignite a thousand homes by dawn, then melt in the butter sun of breakfast porridge. . . . But this is not the Philosopher’s circle prison, no lidless Eye radiates from the center, beneficent and watchful: the neutered grounds here at the Residence for Life are groomed like the campus of Depression State U: past the dwarfish berms and drumlins a mazy cobalt walkway slithers to the storage lake, with its hooded fount of aqua vitae sudsing the green larvae, its dry Gazebo Isle no one shuffles to . . . One night, the distraught Residence cook shoots himself dead: everyone mourns, but only the young staff seek counseling, their threshold of death not yet raised to that of teetering Mr. On-His-Toes, of Ms. Wheelchair-With-Political-Bumper-Stickers, or elegant Mrs. Whisper, polite confused survivors of wiped-out families, trolley cars, jobs learned and lost, a cosmos squeezed beneath the blood boulder— Why can’t I remember my problem? They do not scream. They who once made things happen now watch things happen to them: they hand their middle chapters to their children, and quietly appraise the spindle of a leafless sapling outside, staked to three larger poles of wood: all of them under arrest. And you must calm yourself. In the acrid hold of their boat, whose strangely knotted sail whips the wind round on each side, anchorless boat that hugs the dock, and keeps the dock from drifting to sea, you can hear the first, reeling chapters, of pierside painters crowding a rustic barrel-and-shanty scene so clichéd the locals called it “Port Motif Number One”—: the washy dab and smear of the medical test, Can you tell me what day this is? —You mean now? The brush like an oar rinses off its paints; a filmy rainbow upon the waters, coils and ribbons you trace in your own sweet time.