By Kathleen Lee Featured Art: “Thinking Words” by Thad DeVassie
Nothing quite like the feel of pen in hand moving across paper, letters and words following like ducks slipping into water. Back and forth, margin to margin, emptying please, my mind. The whole raucous mess: complaints, general; also issues, first with one person then another, some, it’s true, already dead, also, my self, hapless on the witness stand wondering how it’s come to this. Until at last, the relief. Darkness cleared, the world flares: man with his dog draped across his shoulders ordering a triple espresso, whiff of patchouli, barista calling, Fern! Iced latte.
Bought a bus ticket to the wrong village and the next morning wandered in circles before finding the internet place where I read in an email that my old friend P was dead and all this time—a few years or more— I’d imagined his healthy happy life, his love of Scotch & his daughter, his dark wit, the way he considerately blew his cigarette smoke away from others— while actually he’d been entangled in illness, occupied with dying, and now—in a dingy basement surrounded by boys slumped asleep over their keyboards—I reckoned with how wrong I was and when I emerged onto the dirt road which I would never again walk in this life, I couldn’t tell if the road was flat, ascending, or descending and although the sun was up and the air warm it felt like dusk and it’s true I might never have seen P again even were he alive though I’m wrong about so much (where I am, the correct way to pronounce cesuo, how to live), a fact which made me sad and irritated and free.
And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters —Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”
As we drove through Wyoming and your eyes closed just a bit while the sunlight slanted through the moonroof, or maybe it was moonlight through the sunroof, and it could have been Montana, and you wondered if Gordon Lightfoot was an actual Indian. You didn’t know that a Great Lake was really an ocean with a chip on its shoulder, and an ore freighter could be a coffin in certain Novembers. Daughters can be like that: full of speculation that makes you doubt what you already know. But I know this— your hand drummed on your thigh and your head nodded in time and for a few moments those sailors were back on deck breathing sweet oxygen, instead of Lake Superior. Such is the power of a tune to restore the dead. And your eyes blinked, and a week went by, your hand waved and a month disappeared; you bobbed your head for a year or so. And when the song ended, you were a young woman about to sail away yourself. And I thought of the depth of loss and how it’s relative, some can never come home, some can never go home again. Why do stories of drowned sailors always cut so deep? Something about the going away and the not coming back. The not being here, but not elsewhere either. I don’t know the particulars, but I do know the future— how the freighter will founder, the sunshine diminish in a howl of seething froth. And me still poised on the pier, eyes on the horizon. When the church bell chimes those twenty-nine times, I’ll mourn it all, all the sailors, all the daughters, all the souls that won’t come back. But for now, in Colorado I think it was, we drifted in our little ore ship, bobbing on the only sea that mattered, ignoring the storms that always gather, always smother and smite and threaten the future, but never the now. Like a vessel on the swelling waves— some come back, some don’t even know they’ve left.
At Rusk, the PTs said don’t look down, keep your eyes on where you’re headed, but you know where you’re headed if you do—the sidewalk fraught, swelling up from tree roots trapped beneath them, the edges of the concrete slabs mismatched by inches, even fractions of inches, the corner cuts necessitating a change in the angle of your step. Fear holds on tight: the wild driver ahead of you on Flatbush Saturday night, weaving through traffic, or when you take the crazy curves on the narrow Jackie, neck and neck with another car. It’s always anticipating the thwack of impact. Knowing what can happen because it has happened—to you, your buddies in rehab, the names in today’s news—that it could happen to people you love and you can’t protect them. You couldn’t save your mother, your puny attempts to help your sister went nowhere. You tick off another birthday of the man who lies beside you, who you check for every morning—the one you tell slow down, watch out, red light—compare his age to the ages of his parents when they died. It’s the fear of the loneliness if he wasn’t there, that you’ll live on till 93 like your father, unless something else happens, some horror you won’t name, that you can’t survive.
Put your arms through the sleeves of this Bauhaus swirl. Let it drape from your shoulders, a shawl of distraction in abstraction: Kandinsky’s Dominant Curve. Feel the fine seams of your private mourning, the silky sway of teabag brown, sage green. Let yourself be satin amidst bisecting angles and arcs. You might find a hidden pocket. You might hold onto what isn’t. When my son was young, no one knew why the toggle of his genes didn’t fit. I kept slippering down hallways to brush my teeth in fluorescence, the smell of hospital soap deep in my skin. Each day a moving staircase of dread with a hair’s breadth handrail, a repeating pattern of unpredictability, cut on the bias, selvedge edged. His small misshapen head, tiny useless feet curved like lyres, little hands always infant-dimpled. When he died 26 years later, he was still surreal, but let me tell you about his eyes: blue riders, blue mountains, blue roses. He was the dominant curve of my life. Somehow Kandinsky painted it all, so I clipped a jigsaw of it together over and over after the after. The dining room table like a wall at the Guggenheim. This canvas my favorite kimono. If this piece feels soft and worn to you too, pull it closer, shrug it up around your neck. It’s quiet inside these colors, a place you can hear how things were. All those sharp pins and needles tacked these shapes together to be basted then stitched, hemming in what I couldn’t believe: I was going to live a life impossibly imperfect. Full of chaos. Full of not knowing. Full of my son’s suffering. I was going to live a life designed by a dominant curve. Kandinsky said, Everything starts from a dot.
Let’s start with something good. The summer sticky on our fingers, quarters sweating on the washing machine.
You were different from my friends at school, those rich girls, their hopscotch and honeysuckle. I was more like you,
the soles of our feet painted with a thin casing of dirt. Before puberty, I felt genderless. We were the same.
One summer day, we gathered coins from our trailers & rode our bikes to the gas station,
slushies were victory bells. This reclamation of self against my father drunk at home, his sad way of being.
I loved you. I think I did. Once, there was a tornado, and we hid in your bathtub. Behind you, there was a window.
The bright flashes of lightning made me squint. But you, you were facing me.
That night, a tree fell on my father’s trailer. A crack in the ceiling over the living room. Water couldn’t get through. He never repaired it.
I think, now, how the world is like this: a series of lightning strikes, a sheet of frosted glass. And you,
you, don’t make me say this, you taught me to grieve myself on the trailer floor, how to exit the body and it’s called girdling, when a tree’s roots suffocate its own trunk
and I could not move and I could not look anywhere but the window behind you, always behind you and I knew then that we were not boys together but now only
this: the flashes of lightning he could not see, the crack in the ceiling that still hasn’t been fixed.
By Mark Kraushaar Featured Art: “Poppies” by Jenn Powers
Where’er you walk cool gales shall fan a glade. Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade . . . —G.F. Handel, “Semele”
These are some friends from years ago: car buff and cyclist Carla Breese, and Danny Leblanc, ninth-grade teacher of science at his desk, legs crossed, good-hearted, chewing his pen.
This is Agnes Cummins, Roxanne Watson, Bob Mulvahill, and Donny O., and I picture them together but I picture them alone and lost to me. All my friends from years ago. This is Margot and Peter and here’s Mike C. and Mike D. who died, both in twelfth grade and both in their cars. And this is Jack Fraze at work in his shop a pre-fab one-car garage, his ace-in-the-hole and his anchor to windward: hot plate, mini fridge, pea-green plastic lounger junk-picked or boosted he never remembers. Jack Fraze who’d fix anything and everything, mowers to toasters, broken or no.
And this is Bob York whose dream it was to drag his sad sagging motorhome from Mobile, Alabama, straight to Alaska. How clearly I see him, powdered donut on the bandsaw, greasy quilt, and cat box, chipped plaster Jesus over the drill press. This afternoon I let Bob stand for everyone I’ve known. I let that rusting Winnebago stand for certain uncertainty and I let Alaska stand for Eden, Bob’s route and arrival in Nome.
It’s been months since a neighbor rang the doorbell with a quiche or lentils or a bag full of fat purple grapes doomed to rot into mush on the counter
the mail slot silent, the last card long ago shoved through its brass mouth and you are thankful in a way because the worst is over
your beloved is dead and yes, you know, there are things that are worse than death but still you keep thinking of another line but you can’t find the right page
somewhere in the rural dust of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina where a daughter’s husband has died and the mother tells her, face held in her hands,
this is your face now this is the oldest your face will ever look, you look at the photos of his face, you bone-pick them bare,
you’d eat the pictures if it’d make him a permanent part of you and the world has moved on.
My mother calls about another death, this one a neighbor I haven’t met who took his paddleboard out at dawn and never came home, body and board found drifting a day later. Given his age, we guess a heart attack, but when my parents drop off a casserole, his widow explains he died by suicide in the place he loved. She says it matter-of-factly, their teenage daughter standing behind her as my parents fumble their condolences. She thought they were through the worst of it, she says, and hearing the story of strangers’ pain I think maybe ours will never end, or maybe this is how it will end for us, just when I think we’re safe. The ebb and flood of your depression determines the rhythms of our days, for whenever I think we’ll never sink so deep again, your face becomes a mask and I become someone who says, Your father is having one of his spells, as if you’re a wizard, or cursed. I’ve told you how my grandfather thought that his epilepsy was a sign of Satan, and how my grandmother, watching him preach, her eye trained on the pulpit, would leap to her feet when she saw a seizure coming, speaking in tongues as if the Holy Spirit moved her, since that alone would keep the congregation from seeing what she saw. Love oh love, can love be enough to save us, can I be life vest and vessel and breath?
I feel small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase, the one where she didn’t die, even when I visit it in my memory.
Even when I visit it in my memory, the duplex where she tried to die, I can never reach the top of that staircase.
The light hits the blood on the floor, (why can’t God see the staircase?) and my childhood cat has escaped, like she knew what was coming.
And in my memory I have escaped because I know what is coming. But memory is not reality and the reality is this: there was blood on the windowsill.
Memory is whichever wine goes down the easiest. Reality is the staircase, the windowsill. In a duplex on Orange Street, there’s blood all the way up the stairs.
In a duplex on Orange Street, I never move from the bottom of the stairs. Maybe God sees me. Maybe he doesn’t. But in my memory, I never go up.
I keep my head bowed. My blood is like wine. I never, ever grow up. I stay small at the bottom of the gray-blue staircase.
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be” -Ophelia, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5
Uncertainty looms heavy before sunrise. Dark driving, she calls it, at 5:00 AM to the hospital for her surgery, when she mentions losing our dog, Penny, a few months ago— anxiously lumping together unknowns— and I had trouble focusing but I tried to turn the conversation around with compliments—her outfit, hair, shoes— but I shut down when she said, It’s okay, Dad, I know that living is dying…
Stuck in the white shock of her wisdom I wanted to say something to redirect us but I couldn’t decide whether she was that conscious of her own mortality or if she was just being a child— redirecting gravity away from her upcoming operation toward something more certain.
At the last minute, the operation was canceled. As we walked out, my daughter took my hand because she knew I needed it telling me she felt good. She said she still missed Penny, and she would miss her as long as she was alive— me too I said but holding back on diving deeper trying not to lump together more unknowns, as we headed home with just enough sun to get all the way there without headlights.
We were talking about words we didn’t like. One of us was making a list, and we all wanted our words on it.
“Leverage” came up, and the overuse of “awesome.” (We were distracting ourselves from the reason we were together—
or not distracting, exactly, but giving ourselves a breather from grieving and thinking about loss. We were in town for a funeral.)
My turn came and I didn’t want to say, didn’t want my mouth to make the word, but I screwed up my courage and said it: “meatball.”
The others laughed, not at my word, I think, but at the face I made when I said it. The conversation turned to social justice, but “meatball” had been said aloud
and it imbued the rest of the visit, for me, with ridiculousness, and maybe, much as I hate “meatball”—my god— with hope.
After my son died in October, I lived with Keats’ Autumn in my head— not the relish of lingering summer warmth in mid-fall, but his one-line imperative: Think not of the songs of spring. I watched summer’s hummingbirds fly off, then the gold of finches turn dull green. But I couldn’t live with the music of fall. I heard only those first words—think not—which I did very well. How much more Keats had demanded of himself. And how many more falls I had yet to undergo before I could hear, just outside my door, hedge crickets sing.
A year after my brother died, I told my daughter about the toad that once lived in the hollowed-out knot of an apple tree in the center of my childhood driveway. My brothers and I liked to visit it after school, but the tree came down in a snowstorm, and my parents graveled-over that spot. When my daughter asked what happened to the toad, I explained that it probably moved under a rock, or to the woodpile along the side of the house. “Or,” she responded, “it died.” Then, she skipped into the house and left me outside.
Suzie, I want to tell you how frequently I pass the apartment behind the supermarket where we street-danced to the Doobie Brothers,
light shifting as the fog lifted, front-yard roses iridescent in the salt-gray seaside morning.
You died, what, ten years ago? Not at once, really, though pills took you quickly. It began, I think, when we were children: without knowing why, we wanted out
of that rural beauty—the narrow valley and gleaming stream, summers spent diving off crumbling cliffs, as if nearness to death was the closest we came to leaving
your stepdad’s beery fingers, my Mother who loved to touch the sweaty chests of her daughters’ teenage lovers.
Nowadays, everything is a different kind of dangerous: rain stays away. June mist sucks away too soon, sunlight breaks through before it should.
What I want to say, Suzie, is a moment, gone fifty years, is just a moment, but you’re still here, unfleshed in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan—
our arms looped as we turn tight circles, round and round, your eyes locked on mine.
A week past the twenty-ninth anniversary of your death I read Seamus Heaney’s poem about the kite, and my first thought is to show it to you.
So I stumble again into the hole death leaves, unfillable.
Another morning of a day that promises to be beautiful without your presence except for this faint ache because you loved kites, their unpredictable dialogue with the wind transmitted to your hand.
That hand gone and gone again each time I reach for it.
Featured Art: “In the Garden” by Tina Moore, Tiffany Grubb, Alexis Rhinehart, Casey Collins, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)
I look for you in travel plazas. In claw machines. In corn husks, crank shafts, coils and pumps, in funnels. I look for you at breakfast and again at dusk. I look in weather, in dust, in bird song, in barking. In the magnetic field of the wildflower. In sockets, in closets, in strangers. In Spanish, in rain’s silver fringe. In the hawks that land to look at me. In the splinter that entered my thumb from a drawer that belonged to you, could it be? I hold the cheap pens in your purse. I spend money on shoes to make myself feel like you. I dreamt you were on my deck with your eyes closed. In your dresses I fold for someone else, I see how tiny you were. I watched the intern take your pulse and wondered if he was shy or right when he said you were gone. On the form for your flight from ICU to morgue to mortician to oven, to me, I guessed you were a hundred pounds, so light you could be made of helium. You could be made of air and be everywhere. Of a world made of so many unlikely things, of the mongoose’s ability to kill the cobra, of consciousness, of time before the beginning, before the two of us, of death, I see you enter the light above my shoulder and read what I’ve written. All this for you. This alphabet you shed in June, this word and the next and this final sentence a fence of roses that can only be you.
When John Coughlin sings Joey and Steven are tigers while driving the backroads of Hingham, Massachusetts it is of particular significance because Joe has been dead three years and his name has not been mentioned in any of John Coughlin’s invented songs with borrowed melodies since his oldest son was murdered. But of similar significance is that as John Coughlin continues to sing in the fading twilight with his still-living son Steven beside him there’s a sudden understanding— a distinct comprehension— that if they keep driving with the windows down— if John Coughlin keeps singing the names of his sons— the winding road before them will never end.
She dresses up anyway, the long blue cardigan drapes her form. Finished a bit of work, she snaps her fingers. The boy she once bathed and changed, lost to what? The surf? Is rip risk a thing? Locally, everything changes. She lets herself crave—noodles, a drive around the neighborhood, Ella crooning, Billie grieving. Is that it? Anguish, or just some annoyance? Not that word, not anguish. Describing anything is a stretch. Palm trees and ghosts, full moon, skeletons. Grand, the way she stood by the crematorium, her body shaking. Deep sobs in the shower like any creature. Primate mothers carry their dead infants for days, weeks, knowing what? The soul passed into another realm?
That’s not it—less drama, less fanfare. See what you can get away with if you undercut yourself? She gives a clownish smile to the surviving toddler, holds her hands high, palms open. The boy eats it up. She shares the crazy inner thoughts most keep to themselves: rebirth, the soul hungry for burgers, waiting in an intermediary space between here and there. So many ways to split hairs about there. Is that a secular stance?
She would make a grief therapist’s eyes roll with her talk of the pure land. Those eyes so used to performing sadness to mirror grief. She doesn’t want to blame anyone. Better to explain as fate, design—master plan. She plans with colored pens, makes sense of the random—why do I want to say ‘Fall days,’ as if the season matters? Monotony calms grief: write down every word that starts with k, the counselor said. Is anger better? Pin it on someone, this boy’s drowning. She wants to.
The coffee drinks change with the weather. She doesn’t say words a character in a TV series would say. She kneels before the altar, chants, thanks her partner for putting his hands together in prayer. No, she wouldn’t thank her mother, who’s supposed to sit cross-legged on hardwood. The man, the husband, somewhere between stranger and who?—blood relation? She wears childish sweatshirts, makes her feel closer to the boy she lost. Or it’s another look—the grieving, or past that. She stays with the one who was supposed to watch the boy in the surf. Supposed to save him? Her ring catches light. His ring a band the saleswoman said a chainsaw couldn’t cut through. She liked that, something unbreakable.
Communication, never our forte: in the ER, I tell you you will be admitted upstairs for observation. You let out an anguished cry worthy of the London stage— This is it, Sara, I’m going upstairs! Your forefinger points up as you give me that knowing eye. It takes me a minute. Not that upstairs! But you swear, this is it, your curtain call, your swan song, the end of your road, your bucket kicked. Still, once on that heavenly floor, you cow the nurses, charm the doctor, vacuum up every last crumb of hamburger and fries.
Years later, on your actual deathbed, you turn red-rimmed eyes to me, barely managing to mouth, I have to go! You can go, Mom, we rush to assure you. Leaning over, I whisper, We’ll be okay. Your face gathers into the shadow of a glare as you try to swing your legs out of bed. The toilet, you gasp, not having the strength to say you idiot. But we can’t let you out of bed; we’ve become de facto jailers, your most private functions now public property, input and output duly recorded, your dignity the last casualty of this war. You give no easy victory to thieving death; not used to losing, you snatch back the breath we think has left you. Laboring for days, your sunken chest rises again and again, while we, your children, fall around you, exhausted. Then you are gone, giving us the slip at the devil’s hour. As we wash your cooling body, your hazel eyes pop open like a doll’s, as if you want to see, as if to insist you are still a part of things.
Three years now, I still resurrect my grandmother, pull her out of that mausoleum vault and bring her back to life. My life, that is. I know she’s tired and wants to rest, but grief is greedy and tireless. When I pull her back, she wears red, which, for now, is symbolic of Paradise. Sometimes, she is a cardinal, especially in winter when the world needs to be reminded of whatever it wants most. What I want is to take her to Kroger, so she can steal a grape or two. I want to take her to a doctor’s appointment so she can complain about the wait. I want to take her to see a movie so dramatic she will pretend not to notice that it hitches my breath and stings my eyes. Three years from now is unpredictable at best. And resurrection is only a way to drag the past with us, lest we forget. Yes, we forget.
My sister named this venerable maple growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road, main trunk long broken, pocked with holes, a once-mighty tree now slowly failing. She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning that when the top broke off, side branches shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms. On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights, our insufferable rudeness, which she thought should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand, which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced. No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother; she’s been hiding in stories since we were small. I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break. A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute, rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once hearing her voice.
He will come to live with you Make him feel welcome My mother says Her eyes turning away from mine Before I can search for the meaning
I imagine I might have a small, empty room off to the side With a reddish glim That might bother him at night When he takes off his thick, black-rimmed glasses And his eyelids become soft and white Butterflies in his leathery face
I would have to get a night-side table for his glasses And his teeth And his cowboy book So that he feels welcome when he comes to live with me
I think that old single bed will be fine Now that he is alone He wouldn’t want more anyway But I will get new sheets For his old, pale body and his tanned forearms And maybe a soft, new pillow for his sunken cheeks
I will ask my sister for that old painting With the open plains and hazy blue mountains So far, far in the distance The one she took when he died
So that he has something to look at And so that he feels welcome
When he comes to live with me, in me In a small room off to the side of my heart So very far from the plains where he grew up.
First I found the trapped fox and then we let it go and I wrote a poem about that and then in my weekly online writing group Pamela in Scotland says your fox poem reminds me of Ted Hughes’ animal poems and I think cool and then I read a poem in the LRB written by Nick Laird about praying with his little boy and I like it so much I order his book Go Giants and I print up his bio admiring his amazing hair envious
that his hair’s thicker than mine and then my brother dies and it’s the second worst day of my life and I need to think I have to think the fox that gorgeous beast appeared a few days earlier to guide him to an afterlife and I keep thinking of metaphors about cages and freedom from his schizophrenia and then my husband’s employer sends me sympathy flowers from a company named Foxglove see another fox and then
I solve a Wordle to subdue my traumatic responses to my brother’s death and the word is SNARL which is what I thought that trapped fox would have done like a dog but didn’t but it is what I feel like doing some of the time or bingeing shows or snacking or doing nothing and then I see a book by Julian Barnes on top of my stack of books at the top of the stairs so I start to read it since I’d meant to for years because I love his books and Ted Hughes
is mentioned in the first chapter now more Ted Hughes so I figure it is high time I read more of his poetry but his collected work is so thick it’s a brick on my shelf instead I look up his work online and the first poem is about a fox what what’s with all these foxes and there’s a hyphen in his title so I add one to mine because it needed one I see that now and then I receive that book by Nick Laird in the mail and he gives credit to Julian Barnes for a couple of lines and then I receive an unexpected parcel
in the mail with Billy Collins’ new book Musical Tables inside and in the front he quotes a line by Nick Laird more Nick see these mystifying links between Hughes Barnes Laird and Collins and then my friend in Manhattan texts me a photo he took of a window display full of stuffed toy foxes see more foxes but these are dressed in plaid after Macy’s unveiled their windows for Christmas ’22
and then I see a new photo online of Billy Collins giving a reading for his new book wearing a scarf with illustrated foxes on it more Collins more foxes and a few days later he mentioned on his poetry broadcast that the Prairie Home Companion Christmas Show would be playing that night so I tune in virtually and Garrison Keillor welcomes everyone to The Fabulous Fox Theater more foxes
still plus the brass fox door knocker Ada Limón just posted on Insta my God how many more fox sightings are there going to be in my future it wasn’t my brother’s style to pester me like this I have no answers and yet I thank the gods for each and every reminder of that living warm animal my husband and I let go which may who knows be the thing that peacefully accompanied him
to some afterlife and now it’s 3AM where all this stuff is swirling in my thoughts like pistachio-colored seed saucers that I used to watch from a bridge caught in the local river’s eddy on my early morning walks hoping to clear my head which sometimes worked or didn’t and I just lie here thinking about pistachio-green and how its complementary color is a certain shade of purple and then I think of purple hearts
and how valiant my brother was see my brother and then I recall the framed album cover I gave him of a vinyl record we used to play The Valiant Little Tailor because Taylor is our family name and I remember how he was his own kind of sixty-three-year-old soldier rescuing his other selves for decades from battlefields that were visible to him but not to me no matter how hard I squinted.
We meet near the bunches of tulips and bags of apples, a pair of women whose old professor husbands have died: our first Christmas in a frozen snow bank without them is behind us, the northern spring is near, but the path to it is still snowing over.
I’m rattled in the way that only chance encounters in a grocery aisle can undo me—my slipping armload of groceries is going to spill and while I hold the red tulips in their slick transparent sleeve yet more tightly—it’s all going to cascade: I want very much to get this right.
I want to staunch her grief with my own for this moment: no sense us both suffering, take a minute’s breather—I’ve got this thing covered for the both of us is what I want to say— but for all the intimacy of loss, we are just long-time acquaintances.
A woman—ornithologist husband dead decades ago—moves past us: the Academic Bereavement Society has called a surprise meeting in produce and my hold on myself is getting more slippery. Three women walk into a grocery store, I think, but the joke won’t tell itself.
Clumsy with grief, catching at the flowers, catching at words—I think to settle for saying hang on because that’s what I’m trying to do with this goddamn sleeve of red tulips, just trying, for this moment, to make it all the way to the register. In a few minutes I catch a glimpse of her heading out the automatic door: one of us through, I think—and take heart.
A year after your death we keep receiving college brochures telling you how nicely you’d fit at certain institutions, under a pine I guess, or next to a Doric column. The earth would bear you up. In youth group one of the leaders reads about Jesus raising Lazarus from death. Lazarus’ sister says to Jesus, If you had been here, my brother would not have died. Your sister leans over, says Same. She may be pissed for some time. Sometimes we think of you as Judas, hanging there, unused coins scattered at your feet. For a minute it helped to think that God also lost His son, but then, you know, the resurrection. I’ve been assured by Fr. Larry Richards you are not in hell. Something about full consent of the will. The way you made your grandma heave, though, I’m not so sure. Still, I said a few hundred thousand Divine Mercy Chaplets for you, so by now you should be on some beach in Costa Rica blowing through a palm toward a new day, rising.
After our son died, my wife found him in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly, at the oddest of times and places, and then in a pair of redtails that took up residence, nesting in a larch above our barn, and how their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us before rising over our kitchen roof made it seem as if they were looking in on us. In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home in high places—the edges of mountain trails, walking on a roof, or later, after he became a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder. So many mornings we woke to the redtails’ jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer, their presence multiplied my love for the ordinary more every day. We never thought, of course, any of those hawks was our son— who would ever want that?—but, once, watching one rise and rise on a draft of air, I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun— as if an old story could provide the distance I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged, and remembered a babysitter’s frantic call to come home, immediately, after she’d found our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing high up in the sky, throned on a branch, his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise of heights as he waved to me— and I must have looked very small calling up to him, staying calm so falsely as I pleaded with him to come down, to come down now.
One week after the clock in your chest clenched and froze forever at half past fifty, a crow careened through the door, grazing my temple like a stray bullet. In the aftermath of shock and startle, irony registered bitter in my craw. I used to think a bird crossing the threshold was a harbinger of death, but by the time this transgressor cut a crooked line through the living room, our windows were already draped in black crepe. The old wives, their feathered omen arrived late, clucked their tongues and rent their garments.
Featured Art: Faceless ballerina resting on floor with shade by Khoa Võ
Next to the Lost and Found, our church basement folding chair circle. Ten of us, week to week, scratch words in workbooks, read copies of How to Survive the Loss of a Love.
We pass or fail stages of grief. Video clips from the other side: a smiling blonde manages her checking account, living debt-free; gray men navigate dating and children.
Stories cycle in Share Time: Billy the missionary served 25 years with Kazakhstani orphans— one day, home on furlough, his wife drove to Walmart, never returned.
Dan’s wife ran off with the superintendent, and Sharon’s husband left her at Denny’s eating Moons Over My Hammy. She hasn’t had an egg since. I don’t know why, they said. Blame always a stick to be thrown.
Not your fault, we agreed. But maybe the fault was mine, the unsupportive wife, the wastrel. I drove 1700 miles, and still his voice, obscured by barroom backnoise,
Insufferable woman, come home. Each week I shift seats on the circle’s farthest curve. I’ve lost the knack for talking, afraid the other eyes will shinny up my face then flick away.
At Trader Joe’s, before group, while cashiers flip French bread into paper bags like a magic trick, I practice words. How to say I’ve left him, that he was mean to me. So I will be believed.
Featured Art: Children Playing on the Beach (1884) by Mary Cassatt
As I get you down from the closet shelf and unwrap the brown shipping paper to the square white box inside I lift the lid for the first time and stick my fingers deep inside you / What does she feel like Barbara says and I say go on see for yourself but she shushes me and leads the way out back to where the creek used to run and we just do it quickly without any words because words are a foolish way of asking forgiveness for these five years we’ve left you up there stacked amid the empty shoe boxes and children’s playthings / But now with both hands I swing the box like sand in a pail and scatter you into the overhead cave of the old Judas tree where your tiny parts glow for a flickering moment like early snow / And Barbara whispers yes Patsy I know still trying to find your way home again just like the whole rest of your life without somebody’s arm to hold on to
Featured Art: Yak by Mary Alice Woods, Jason Licht, and Tibetan Monks Visiting Passion Works Studio
I didn’t lose you to a matador in flat slippers and a sequined jacket. I didn’t lose you to a match’s glow you followed into a hummingbird’s nest. I didn’t lose you to Bruce or Abby, though Bruce could bawl blues like a baying hound and Abby danced like a leaf in a storm. I didn’t lose you to a silent drum or a curtain call or a summer sheen. No, I lost you to incomparable suave death in tights and tank top, his slick disco two-step. While he took you for a spin in his roadster, his red Alfa Spider, I rode in the rain on his rumble seat.
I deposit my tired universe of bones beside the farmhouse. Discrete, the butterfly weed with its leaves tapered to a soft point leans against the lower stem of a coneflower. I eat sweet bread and strawberries and stare into the pocket of oaks dawdling at the far edge of the field. I draw rings in the clouds with my outstretched finger, the posture not unlike accusation, the hair erect at the brush of a spider against an exposed ankle. The only choice is how far to carry a burden. I’ve known the most ordinary people, autumn, untamed piles of burning leaves. I’ve watched from a safe distance and disregarded the intensity with which I scratched my wrist, the skin slick and glinting beneath a series of similar suns. I’ve negotiated my right to fathom the bodies of insects. It’s going well so far. I’ve given up chocolate bars and late nights and thoughts of making my life a metaphor. Still the coneflower is nimble atop its spread of fibrous root. I wait for the sun to stain the clouds that shade of rattled yellow that announces evening, the low light, a thing I know but still need to parse.
I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain although there is no mountain only rolling hills although hills don’t really roll & as I look at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store a gasp happens in my head a quake in my heart they aren’t here my father who loved sweets my mother who loved shoes & the sun shines on a world of orphans I quake along mountain street like a rolling gasp although if someone asked how are you I’d say fine like most of us are & aren’t I thought sadness was a prison but it connects us & if a chain it should be one of tenderness my father died two years ago although sometimes I say a year a way of keeping him closer can’t do that anymore with my mother need math on paper the ache woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests we live in a tsunami waves of being & non-being but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying bunion pads feeling drowned & drying under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song playing in my parents’ house in the sixties first there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is
If I had a choice between being wrong and the world dying— you know, the oceans turning into lemon juice, the air to Lysol, the forests cinder, tundra swamp, shipping lanes jammed with dead polar bears, Manhattan a gondola, the world, a Gondwana of dengue— I would, of course, choose the latter. And maybe, just maybe, clinging to the last antenna of the last skyscraper to be swallowed by the waves, pointing my big fat finger at the dead world, and at all the mother- fuckers who did it, shouting, Told you so, Told you so—maybe, as the water was closing over my mouth, I’d understand how we got into this mess in the first place.
Conception, gamete meeting gamete, cells dividing and differentiating. Who wants to imagine themselves coming into the world this way? Instead think of your parents as amateurs lying down in the enchanted dark and rising up as seasoned weavers of light. Picture fire, with sparks flying off. One was lucky enough to catch—and now pulses inside you. Listen to yourself breathe.
2
Like a rolling billiard ball we touch the world one green millisecond at a time.
3
A good story possesses its own magnetic north, to which every vibrating sentence must point.
4
To live is to doubt.
5
At the exit of the Paris catacombs, which houses the remains of six million sleepers, the guard looked me over, then fanned a flashlight into my backpack: Any bones, any bones? No, I said, then smuggled my skeleton into the morning.
6
Should I read Descartes or listen to Motown? Depends whether I want to interrogate my doubts or slap them on my feet and dance them under the table.
7
The young are young. The old are young and old at the same time. You have to be old to know this—that’s the problem.
Move to a different country. Take a new spouse. Make beautiful different-country babies with soft, different-country hair
and only speak your old-country language late at night in between dreams. Your new husband will ask the following morning who this person is; you keep repeating his name.
Oh, you say, in your new language. Don’t worry about it. Just an old friend.
Option Two
Build a house. Bake your late spouse’s remains into the walls. Like the spectrophiliac Amethyst Realm, feel paranormal hands on your legs and back as you rub yourself on the corners of the foyer.
Moan the name your ears haven’t heard since you reopened the coffin and saw silver bones.
Option Three
Meet a woman with dark hair and patience longer than yours. Tell her a lie: you’ve never done this before.
She’ll grin and say, “Sure you haven’t.” Later, in her shower, pressed against the pink tile wall, you can’t help but notice she uses his same shampoo.
Featured Art: A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards
De Sandro’s café with the orange tablecloths wades into the one stone street without tourists, all the Venetians pushing their big delivery carts at first of morning. From what I understand of it, the shouting is voluble, happy, glad to be alive, almost never without reference to anatomy.
Nine years after your death it is still your birthday. I’m treating you to cappuccino and showing off my lacework of Italian. Ecco, I cry, pointing to the beautiful faces, the beautiful things.
Everything was outlandish to you. Nothing is to me. In that way balance is achieved across the long years.
But I think you would like these people. They would pull out the orange chairs, sit down, listen to what you have to say. You would be old and wise in a city old and wise, and that would be enough.
I’d better think of something else before the mood turns heavy and hard to carry over the Rialto Bridge with the shops just opening. All those selfie-taking children, all that brightness bearing down.
Happy birthday, I want to say, from the last place on earth, where the earth dissolves and the crazy towers lean out over watching for what comes—sinuous, flowing, unexpected—next.
Featured Art: River Village in a Rainstorm by Lu Wenying
How many of you said, “How I prayed for the day to pass quickly.”
How many said, “I didn’t care about the result even if I did achieve it.”
How many of you said, “I dreamed of making them like me, if only for my elevation of thought and unmistakable wit.”
How many of you said, “I was ridiculously exaggerating the facts, but how could I help it?”
How many said, “I could not control myself and was already shaking with fever.”
Who said, “Then followed three years of gloomy memories.”
Did anyone say, “If it’s gonna be shame, bring it; if it’s gonna be disgrace, I’ll take it; if it’s gonna be degradation, welcome; the worse it is, the better.”
How many of you said, “Strangeness is not a vice.”
Featured art: ‘Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)’ by Vincent Van Gogh
I’m walking home late after work along Meadowbrook Road when I realize the guy half a block ahead of me is Bill, from Religious Studies. I recognize his bald spot, like a pale moon in the dusk, and his kind of shuffling, inward-gazing gait. Bill walks like a pilgrim, measuring his stride for the long journey, for the next step in the hard progression of steps.
And while I like Bill, and in some ways even admire him (he wrote something important maybe a decade ago on Vatican II), I slow down a little bit. I even stop and pretend to tie my shoes, not wanting to overtake him, because I’m afraid of the thing he’s carrying, which is big and invisible and grotesque, a burden he’s lugging through the twilight, its weight and unwieldiness slowing him down, as it has for five years, since a drunk killed his teenaged son, and Bill’s bald spot dawned like a tonsure and his gait grew tentative and unsure, and his gaze turned inward as his body curled itself around the enormous, boy-shaped emptiness, and the question he spends his days asking God.
And if I caught up with him and we walked together through the dusk he would ask me about my own son, who is three, and the vast prospect of the future onto which that number opens, involving Little League and camp-outs and touch football in the backyard would hang there, terrible and ablaze in the autumn twilight, and the two of us would have to slog down Meadowbrook Road like penitents, adding its awful weight to the weight of his son on our backs, our shoulders, and so I fail Bill, and stop and pretend to tie my shoes.
When I worked as a janitor at the courthouse I met a detective in the Sheriff’s department whose son, I learned, had committed suicide some months earlier. Having lost a son myself in a car-train collision, I tried to offer my condolences. “Your boy kill himself?” the detective asked bluntly. “We never knew,” I replied. The detective grunted noncommittally and opened his desk drawer to take out a photo of his son, a young man in his twenties, kneeling and embracing a dog as he grinned for the camera. “Two days before it happened,” the detective said. “About the same age as our son,” I said. The detective stared at the photo for a moment. “You got a dog?” he asked. “Two,” I said. “Thing about a dog,” he said, “a person can screw up a hundred ways, and his dog will love him when he can’t even love his self.” “Our son’s dog still sleeps at the foot of his bed,” I said. The detective turned the photograph over on its face and glanced up at me, his eyes as cold as stars. “Ain’t his dog,” he said. “It’s mine.”
Featured Art: We Both Saw a Large Pale Light, plate 2 of 6 by Odilon Redon, 1896
Last time I saw my dad was at the cemetery on Pilgrim Hill, pale as a ghost but he wasn’t dead. He stood over the grave of his grandfather, the hero of our family. I called out to him and waved and he turned my way—he looked sad and then he looked ashamed and I felt bad for him until I understood that his shame was directed at me.
No point in pondering his disappointment, I know I’m a failure in his eyes and there’s no way back to the sunshine of his pride— the boy of great promise is long dead and here I am. And there he was—he turned away from me and peered right through the gravestone and into a glorious dream of the past where a brave man stood against the mob and brought reason to our torn-up town.
I tried to smile because I love him so much and because I know he’ll be the next to go— that’s why he was there on Pilgrim Hill and in fact as I stood there watching he got even paler and I could see the silhouette of a fencepost behind him, dim x-ray of a thick dead spine.
A full moon rose in the afternoon sky. Oh Daddy, said the scream inside my head, oh Papa, please don’t go without giving me your blessing, the sweet sneeze of your blessing. And then I knew that he didn’t have it in him and never had, that he was too faint and frail and too scared to issue blessing or curse. And I forgave him, I did my best to forgive him and when I wake up on these fullmoon nights that’s what I do, I forgive him as best I can because now I can’t see him anymore that’s how pale he’s gotten but I know he’s alive and still walks this town.
I unearth it while cleaning up my office, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing that my father sent me two years before he died, its bright red cover like an accusation, a yellow Post-it bearing his cheerful half-script still attached: “Jeff—even if you read only the first part of this book, you’ll get the gist. Return it some time, no hurry. Love, Dad.” I chose to place the emphasis on “no hurry” and hadn’t cracked its little crimson spine when, a year later, he asked me what I thought. When I told him I hadn’t gotten to it yet, he said he wanted it back, so he could lend it “to someone who might actually read it.” “But I might still read it,” I said half-heartedly. “No, you won’t.” Which made me all the more determined not to read it, so I said fine, I’d send it back. But I never did—and then he got sick, and our investment in that particular contest seemed pointless.
But here it is again, this little red book so unlike Mao’s, as if my father were making a move from beyond the grave. Okay, my turn. Is it because I need to prove him wrong even now, or that I want to make amends belatedly for disappointing him yet again that I open the book and begin reading? Or am I doing it in his honor? And is he still trying to tell me I invested in the wrong things?—poetry, for instance. “Counting angels on a pin,” he said once. Which is just the kind of cliché I find in the book. Later, though, he claimed to like my poems, the funny ones at least. And if we drew a graph of our relationship over his last decades it would look a lot like the Dow: a steady ascent with several harrowing jagged downward spikes. The little red book says nothing about those, though it does advise not getting too caught up in the market’s dramatic nose-dives.
Unless, perhaps, you’re trying to realize your loss—another topic that the book, with its rosy perspective, blithely avoids as it enthuses on “the miracle of compounding.” But instead of getting annoyed I feel an odd joy: my father could have written this book. He too was an optimist who liked to talk about money, and so I used to ask him questions— What’s the best kind of mortgage to get? Is life insurance a good idea?—and those led to some of our least fraught conversations. That’s why he gave me the book. And he was right: I get the gist after two chapters. And the suggestions seem helpful, if limited— I even underline a few sentences. Still, that other book, the one about losses, would be more complicated, and harder to write, its author finally coming to understand that, no matter what the future brings, he won’t be able to ask his father’s advice.
When my father was ten, his mother died and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed at God. He said, “Take me, you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my uncle, was so scared he ran into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like, why God had let him come back, if he had seen their mother, what she was wearing.
Featured Image:View of Toledo by El Greco, 1599-1600
I leave the World Service on at night, snoozing through the British iteration of gang rape and kidnapping. I’ll stir sometimes to hear a few moments of economic collapse, but it’s really white noise, blanching the laughter of drunks outside. Sleeping to tragedy helps tamp down my father’s last days, his morphine speech, how my mother sent me to Kentucky Fried Chicken with a coupon for his last meal, and how shame drove me to throw the coupon out. If his death were broadcast in the night, his of thousands of dying fathers, and you slept well, how could I begrudge you a night of rest?
We’re sitting at the table the way people do When a family member dies and a stream of well-wishers Arrive with sympathy and food.
Everyone is concerned for the widow, 70, tough, wiry, Who now seems weak and befuddled, staring at people She’s known for years without answering,
Rising and walking out the back door, staring at the woods At the far end of their land. Returning to the table without a word.
We’re all thinking how often one spouse dies Soon after the other, dies of nothing But lack. Because we are surrounded by guns, her husband’s
Sizeable collection—pistols in glass cases, rifles In racks and corners—talk turns to their value, the merits Of revolvers versus semi autos, plinking, protection.
Now, for the first time, the widow speaks, remembering That she went to the coop this morning and found curled In a nesting box a snake, unhinged mouth filled
With a whole egg, disappearing a swallow at a time. She walked back to the house, pulled her .410 Off the rack, returned to the coop and blew its head off.
A hog-nose, she says. A good snake. But I had to. She shrugs her shoulders. I had to. Glancing At each other, we nod in agreement, relieved.
I’d never call. First of all, I’d be intruding, and besides I can see my dead friend with all his dead friends even now, translucent, weightless, winging through a cloud or sitting in a circle on some creaky, folding chairs— Hello, my name is Peter and I’ve been dead ten years, car wreck. Hello my name is Edith and I’ve been dead a week, pneumonia. Hello, my name is Frank and I’ve been . . . .
Oh, I know they’d all be friendly but even dialing later when I guess he’d be alone I’d have too many questions: If you’re nowhere now and nothing is this the same as everywhere and everything? And, Peter, do you sleep in heaven? Do you eat up there? What’s the weather anyway? And that tenderness of heart we try so hard to keep a secret: in heaven we’re wide open, aren’t we? Stay in touch. No, don’t.
I was attempting the old familiar, the regular slog, when I slipped into missing her again, the child my wife and I would never have. Sometimes she was a girl and sometimes a boy. But like heaven, I held her there in my mind, a place of light where nothing is done, but all is felt. She was a multitude. The great uncapturable plasm of love. Often she was only a finch’s thin line across a rice-paper sky, tearing through all stations of life. The way she might have worn her hair, or adorned the surprising aspect of surface-self for appeal. Or how the supremacy of personality might emerge, wriggling out as it does. Or the first run-in with terrible, terrible sexuality.
Featured Art: Jonny Dunn’s Sandwich Shop, Paducah, Kentucky by Walker Evans
She did not fit her body anymore— she was lost inside it— not like some punished child wincing in the corner of a vast room— not, either, like a ring fitted snug in its box— more like the single yellow pill in her white medicine cup— that’s how she was, waiting— carving precise cubes from a thin lamb chop, chewing with such listless fatigue, I feared she might never finish, and so pretended that by looking away I was preserving her dignity.
Chewing and swallowing— that’s how I remember her— not as a face or even sequence of faces, but as a complex montage, a simultaneous superimposition of every face she’d worn since birth. Read More
Feature image: Ugo da Carpi. The Sibyl and a Child Bearing a Torch, 1510-1530. The Art Institute of Chicago.
who was given up for adoption early on, when it was clear they couldn’t manage him. It was, says your father, the worst decision they’d ever made. (It’s you and your parents at the kitchen table. Between you, the steam from the teapot uncurls in a kind of breathing statuary.) He was your inverse, your yin: When you went to sleep, that’s when his terrorizing of everyone would begin. He went from home to home to group home, and then to prison, half mad, a drug-addled teen, with your name tattooed over the veins in both forearms. “That’s when we moved to Minnesota,” says your mother, but of course he found you here, at the end of an abbreviated sentence, and slit your throat while you slept. This was last year. You’ve been dead ever since. We know this must be hard for you to hear: but you don’t exist. You’re your own twin brother’s obsession with you. (Can it be? Instinctively, you reach to touch yourself about the shoulders, the neck, but everything’s . . . identical.) It’s like a mad dream— yes, the recurring one you’ve had since you were a child, in which you go from door to door, trying to trade your life for another’s, but nobody will trade, and you go on and on, pounding, until, impossibly, you finally find someone willing, and you wake. Your mother reaches through the figure of steam to lift the teapot and pour from out its only portal a little stream into her cup, her husband’s cup, the cup in front of you. She sets the teapot down, and now there are four apparitions dwindling there, silken, gesturing. One of them says, We love you the same. But you can hardly hear them as you push up your sleeves —one at a time—and read, and reread, your name.
All I could do was think of her face. Or not think of it, the way after receiving her letter I felt relief, gratitude, and then lost the actual note she wrote, the tiny, lovely photograph of her children I’d vowed to cherish. And then I saw: my grief was the objective correlative, a hook on which I could hang all the scraps of whatever other sadnesses I was more frightened of. And the grief, like a person, like her in her solicitude, almost prevented me from seeing this
Under the rusting red metal lid we’re waiting for you—your father’s tools. We always knew you weren’t going to build a doghouse or repair the stairs or tighten a bibcock faucet, but we wanted to be of use as in the old days. Ah, the old days! When we heard your father’s tread on the basement steps, we were thrilled. The hammer clenched its head, the bubble trembled in the level, the pliers stretched its jaws. But after your father died it was worse than we ex- pected. You carted us out to your car, left us for months in the trunk, and then stuck us on the floor of this hall closet next to the vacuum cleaner. Now the hacksaw’s teeth are rusting, the file’s worn down, and the measuring tape sags beside the plane. The poor jackscrew, no longer attached to a work bench, has grown forgetful, and thinks it’s really a micrometer caliper. All you care about is duct tape these days, tearing off flashy shreds to cover your botched work while the tough little nails languish. So watch out! All of us in here are fed up with your disregard for some of mankind’s oldest inventions, so if you ever do open this lid you’re going to get hurt.
Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas
Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone, most of the stories are about loss, or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details, as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath. I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war, who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them, and one more lost to his own drunken wildness under a moon who doesn’t remember us. It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces spinning in the mirrored ball.
New Ohio Review 