Photography by Robert Colosanto
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( Berkeley, California )
The AmateursIn her three-day visit from Vermont, my sister and I talk enough to fill three novels. Novel one: A woman sits in a bare apartment with the door to the spare bedroom closed. It was the room she used with the lover, when he came to her from his life with the wife and kids. Then one day she said a terrible thing: Choose. So he did, leaving her the empty room, which she keeps the same, as people do for the dead. He might be dead—no one would call, surely not the wife, whom the woman met once, a museum. Novel two: minimalist, experimental: a post- modern exhibition. The three of them meet by design (the woman's idea), walk from wall to wall, everything going to pieces. In real life, the details are different, my sister says; in real life, everybody gets to choose. But this isn't necessarily good. Take, for instance, the woman, staring at the closed door, beginning to believe she can will the lover back, fill the room with him exactly as if she'd gone out to buy tuberose, freesia, then let them ride in long vases toward the inevitable—we're into novel three, now, though it's really all the same one. My sister and I know this, so when we finish our tea, drive to visit our sick mother, whose mind is full of holes like a bad plot, Swiss cheese, her doctor says, we try to make grief into an empty space at the end, where happiness might appear again. But we're amateurs, and some things are beyond us.BulimiaI slipped into bed beside him with my clove-sweet mouth that had known the hunger of an ox an hour earlier when I'd crept down to the kitchen to stand in the dark, eating from cartons and boxes. Some nights he would wake, want me. I would lie still and run, he had no idea how far. Afterwards I would hold him in my arms the way I sometimes held one of his shirts, thinking of the ways to measure emptiness. It was not what you would call a life, though it was a life. I kept hearing the word ungoverned. Even the trees knew no restraint, banging against the back of the house, the low sky. By day I never let on. I took my body, walked it into a schoolroom, gave instruction. I was careful never to scrape my knuckles or cause other signs, so I did not look like someone with such hunger. But I was yoked to it. One day, reading the dictionary while my students bent to their work, I went from bulimia to ox, stared down at the words draft animal. I felt myself tear open. More holes to fill. Finally I broke away. But there's still the feel of the yoke at my shoulders each day, though I eat so little, a dark shape dragging behind me.The BargainVan Gogh’s man and woman have turned from the river streaked with stars as if they are about to step out of the painting into the next century, their clothes all wrong but their sorrow at exile pure as the original those other two knew as they turned from the light to flee through the gates into shadow and aridity, doubt, disillusion, knowing that to atone would take all their lives. So here they are on the eve of another century, the skirts of their dark coats brushing the wall of a bedroom, their faces younger than seems likely as they stare down at the middle-aged woman lying sleepless. They would soothe her as they might their own daughter, who drowned herself years ago in the river when the potato grower’s son died of fever. Oh, she is so like their daughter, the fine skin blue with veins, the mouth slightly open as if a word had caught half-finished on her lips. What they would give to hear! If only they could kneel closer. . . . The woman shifts the covers, thinking the tumor pushing deeper against her bones might choose just such a moment to stop. It is not, after all, like light from a star, having to go on. Why could it not be more like those two figures, paused where they are while night continues? Her terms are so simple, surely there is no need to argue; she’ll accept anything. Anything there is time for.Elegy after Van Gogh’s The Poet’s Garden– for Forrest HamerThe poet’s garden suffers from neglect. Weeds and grasses choke the roots of trees. It’s late summer, so some trees have gone fiery gold while others blossom. Wait. Green, fiery gold, blossoms—time is out of sync here. What’s more, the sky is yellow. When’s the last time you saw a yellow sky? Maybe when you drew one as a child. That’s why it’s here: the child’s sky above the poet’s garden—all out of sync with time. Do I repeat myself? It must be the effect of all these small wild flowers in the foreground and the strange cast of their shadows. They can’t be real, those high trees flung like shawls against the sky. No, across the yellow bed where the poet sleeps, dreaming of life in a different order, death like the rusted gate unseen beyond the weeping willow— nothing the poet will push open, no matter how close it comes—no matter the grit of rust on the poet’s palms, the cold feel of the iron, the emptiness of the moment when the dream stops and life resumes, sweetness resurrecting though it may taste bitter as the rust, though it may make no more sense than trees on fire with autumn while others bloom.DollSometimes a child comes along with an old-leather look in her eye, a quaver in her child’s Why? When she takes out the cups and saucers for tea, she’s mashing her gums like biscuits, you can hear the bones in her knees. You decide she could use a doll. She draws a red-ink heart where the heart should be, then scissors it out. The stuffing looks like a million old socks cut up. Later, the child sews the hole shut with black thread, insisting the doll is improved. She names it Charity. Every time you come to visit, she holds Charity out to you, then snatches it back. Ha ha! she shouts. It’s more a cackle, but you ignore this, for her mother’s sake. After all, it’s not as if you’re going to escape time, either. Some nights you dream your own death. You’re a death doll, with a sock plugged in the hole where there once was a heart. You cry and cry but nobody comes to stitch you back up. The child pours tea in a thimble cup. She’s done sewing.A Problem of InfinitiesMemorize a sonnet by Leopardi, the one so full of sweetness the air filled with bees and flowers when you first heard it, although it was raining, cold April rain that kept the deer going back to the hills because the roses were late, even the acanthus seemed arrested in mid-flight, small green-winged birds whose feathers shirred at the edge just the way her voice did when she said, Why is this happening to me? and it was like being given a problem in infinities—the symbols conveying nothing but cries from a void where the mad and sorrowful stood naked in wind and rain, lashed by forces beyond their control, as we all are, as she was, sheltered from the actual rain and cold but her memory ruined like the last of the camellias, strewn like that, useless abundance—as you stood at the window refusing to turn to her, thinking that if you multiplied one sorrow by another there would still be this one sorrow you were made to carry with whatever grace you might summon to your side, like those elegant exponentials you used to love writing, 10¹º, imagining yourself magnified to the dimensions of a star and then reduced to a small speck disappearing while she cried to you again to solve the problem and the flowers shook with bees and wind and sweetness massed into the densities surrounding you—
I - Clenched Fists and Clouded Metaphors
II - Soleil
III - Guesting in the House
IV - In the Dusky Hours
V - Finding Favor with the Muse
Featured Artist - Leslie Marcus
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Current Issue - Summer 2005
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