Sometimes when I look at my hands, they don’t seem to belong
to anyone I know. My mother called her arm
my friend after the stroke, but that’s not what I mean. This evening some people
are having a party next door. Maria, her friends from the office.
Tents and white tables with big-headed
hydrangeas. Thunder, the sky darkening. I don’t know her
really and I wish the music would stop. I’ve heard people sitting in front
of a Rothko painting have been known to weep. He created work
larger than life, whatever that means. And filled with nothing
but color so various there hardly seems one you could
name with any certainty:
Ship Rock Follum Silver Point Bone black
Still, I insist on trying. When my mother was ill, she kept checking her vital signs,
her color gone
nearly to ceruse, the obsolete term for lead white. Plato made here
a relative term, our indefinable need
for something of substance, something vital: the real limelight
hydrangea gracing Maria’s tables. Maria, table, flower. In truth, Plato
said, they exist only
in the dark cave of the unknowable. Here we’re continually
approximate so it’s no wonder I don’t know my neighbor or recognize
parts of myself
meant to act definitively. Soon it will rain and the music will stop. Soon
what I’ve said won’t be a symbol for the end
of anything. My mother was a good
woman who only seemed bad
most of the time. In the dark she loved as devoutly as
her bottle of gin I trust she discovered the real world. Who can say
otherwise? One March morning
I wished someone would stop
bringing my mother back to life which the practical repercussions
of resuscitation bore little resemblance to. Plato. Rothko. Masters
of the impractical. The word abstract also means concentrated; in action, something
at remove which is why Rothko’s paintings move us—
finally at remove, the recognizable: how we abstract
our sorrow.
All the places things are not. That empty inlaid box, absent
the purple heart
I gave back. A mind’s eye snapshot—you on the beach with that small
boy, I forgot his name was Johnny. All that sun.
You reminded me, on the phone—it was
Johnny, just now released. I forget what he did time for.
I sent your purple heart
back in the mail, so you called. On the day Pat Nicholaison died in a mangle
of stunned metal and fire
on her way to the lake—would have been
1965, and Jackie
Odessa’s bike took that turn on Old Watson too fast for the last time, downtown
at 1:35 am, Wyvonne Hornburg, jailed for a jade heist, conned the part-time sheriff’s guard
into leaving. You went
to Viet Nam. There are holes in the world
—whole geographies missing. I wanted to know—
when that car backfired and you hit
the ground. Now you say so many years
the nightmares, how your hands
clench and you can’t control
anything anymore. Wyvonne Hornburg was
stabbed and even the sheriff said they were out to get him. Don’t we all want
to disappear a little?
You in the car, it was just
last month. The bottles of merlot lined up
at the table’s edge, the white cloth dropping off.
In the jungle it’s difficult to see, all that steam and green,
an impenetrable density. The damp blond
at your neck—I remember those nights by the feel of your body.
That morning, just back
from your road trip, I opened my eyes—all we had was a bed on the floor—
you there suddenly
over me. I don’t know why only some of us
come back. Your friend’s leg shot
off. It was one time
you were out on patrol alone. Ahead—your job to see disguised
absence, the enemy
you missed just that once. We’re losing
something unseen, all
the time. I want to make sense
of why Pat Nicholaison
is here, though she hasn’t existed for half a century. Or why we’re always taking turns
a little too fast.
Is it important to know what
happened? You got sick. I always thought it was unbearably
hot, close, cacophonous but
how violently
you shivered in the mountains, the air so cold and they couldn’t build a fire.
The men laid on you by turns. You said it in the car,
cried. I have no idea
where Wyvonne Hornburg
went that night he walked out into all that
darkness or why I still press
against you, though it was decades ago. All those spaces not filled in.
That empty box, you pushing my hands
away—Keep it. All that emptiness,
and I do.
I don’t know why all the bricks on my block are stamped
with the word Hydraulics. If it had been
me at the turn of the century
before this one, I would have impressed something, say
from Keats: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, for example,
so people with heavy burdens
staring at the sidewalk would have
something to think about. Months later I find his glasses
stuck above the driver’s side visor. In the car my father wrecked
twice after he stopped believing in stop signs. I look at them and think
myopic, also muein to close the eyes, though he was
farsighted. I detest fruitlessness. Hyperopia—what my father had, is a defect
rendering the sufferer unable to focus on near objects. An inability, perhaps, to see
signs. Images, like notes on an old piano, won’t stay in tune
on the retina. Of course myopic also means improvident. Or maybe something
from Heidegger: Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing? Ideas like that to last
a lifetime. I’m not sure why he drove right through all the signs. Something I think
he might have passed on to me. Sometimes I watch the ducks
on Lafayette pond for a long time. There’s a lot I don’t understand. They never swim in circles. Not one
fruitless motion. In fact you can’t see them moving
at all—it’s all below the surface, out of sight. Did you know
that if two swans are female, one assumes the role of the male for their mating
dance? Suffering from hyperopia often means things right in front
of you appear blurred. The obvious becoming thereby
mysterious. My father was an engineer who understood hydraulic fluidics—the movement
of pressurized water. Pascal’s law, for instance, which states if you increase
pressure at any point in a confined liquid, there is equal
pressure at every other point. What’s so amazing about the mating dance is how
the swans perfectly mirror each other—facing each other, arching their necks
in unison, they assemble themselves into a heart absent
its center. All that emptiness pressing in equally. Then they cross necks, dip their heads past
the pond’s surface, out of view. I’m told the dead might be like birds flown
out of sight. A sign easily missed. Maybe the truth is this beautiful
and quiet flight. Maybe it really is that simple. When I watch the swans rising, lifting
their wings, I’m still not quite convinced. I’m not asking
for much: if we could remain, for example,
improvident or out of tune, I’d take that. I just want to believe the laws of science
discover something of substance, discernible objects—as light and flight
are not. A sign of something I can believe in rather than nothing in a disguise.
Maybe this is the way it ends—things
scattered on desks, chairs, whatever’s
close. How sycamore trees were so perfectly caught
in river water, reflected, spans big as your hand. Those hands, the oars a little
splintered. I could say it was a still
evening, silvery blue. And that the river was so clear the mottled
river rocks stirred to visibility.
It’s nearly a prayer, how quiet my mind gets.
Jesse had big farmer hands, showed us where the morels grew
under May apples.
Black and white cows lined up at milking time
down the lime-green pasture each dusk. At the end of his life
Keats held out his hand and that’s how the poem ends
—a thing alive, undone, a fragment
of himself extended
to us. How do cicadas
know when to start and when to finish?
I think of their sound as a song sung by one voice
I’ll never use.
I learned yesterday that priests are required
to have two sets
of thumbs and forefingers in order to properly offer
the host. I’m not loved
anymore, if I’m being honest. Maybe it’s good
to let go of things
a little. The gaps between
spring when the dogwoods came on in the dark woods
and fall when the leaves burned
in the far field, they’ve
increased. I don’t see you any longer
completely. The smooth
skin over muscle, eyes like sky. Properly speaking,
the host is Christ’s body. I don’t recall
if we’re taught to think of it that way,
literally. I do remember your actual
body and mine and that once we were
one hard truth. I’m amazed at what I remember
about Keats. Of all
the things he did with that hand to make beauty literal. So maybe this is the way
things end—dragging them all out
again, setting them up on desks, chairs, whatever keeps them close, makes them
nearly whole.
Virginia Slachman is the author of two poetry collections. Her latest book, Inside Such Darkness, was released in June 2010. Slachman, former poetry editor of Aspen Magazine and associate director of the Aspen Writers Conference, publishes in such literary magazines as Salmagundi, River Styx, and The Cincinnati Review. Recipient of a $5,000 fellowship award in poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, Slachman’s memoir, Many Brave Hearts, is presently offered to the market via the Amanda Mecke Literary Agency. She teaches at Principia College.