Human Hours

by Catherine Barnett

  Jean once told me she’s not interested in writing about getting older but about getting dead. In Lucy, she speaks directly to the oldest and most complete human ancestor. There is no boundary between the living and the dead:

  Or what do you do now Lucy

  for love?

  Your eye-holes.

  Those of us who are scared just chronicle the slow path. The scar where they pulled my son from me is starting to sag now, etc., etc.

  Turns out when is a question children learn late, after where, what, and who. Why is perhaps the latest, and it can go on incessantly.

  Why and when and where and what all go back to the root who.

  Lately I’ve been walking around talking to myself, who is full of swearing and disbelief.

  Without much hope I opened my first small bottle of 3-in-One oil and applied it to the hinges of my front door that apparently keep my neighbor up at night. Squirting the oil on the wildly overpainted hinge was like throwing seeds on a blacktop and expecting a garden. But it worked, and that cheered me up.

  Imagine if Augustine had been addressing 3-in-One oil instead of God:

  Do the heaven and earth then contain Thee, since Thou fillest them? or dost Thou fill them and yet overflow, since they do not contain Thee? And whither, when the heaven and the earth are filled, pourest Thou forth the remainder of Thyself? … Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good!

  Can’t we let him sleep all winter?

  He wants to be set free. He wants to be set free upon the waters.

  So much depends upon the kindness of questions. And the questions we cannot not speak of.

  The radio is playing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was one of the first songs I learned on the guitar. At the age of ten, I couldn’t get enough of the questions. I played it for anyone who’d listen, I played it in my nightgown, in my hand-me-down red Speedo, in my mother’s sunglasses, in the reflection in my father’s martini glass. I got so good at it I could play it while balancing on a bongo board in the middle of the living room. I got so good at it I can still feel the precariousness underfoot.

  Appeal to Numbers

  In the brief rented rooms of our randomized

  uncontrolled experiment

  nights seem to last longer when I count

  one Mississippi two Mississippi

  not doing much

  only watching you sleep now

  your mouth a little bit open

  my mouth a little bit open

  Why are you so uneducated you once asked

  It’s true I can’t read music charts spreadsheets

  the future the signs the leaves your face

  the racing forms

  But stats ok yes

  Statistic of impermanence

  statistic of desire

  YOU WERE HERE

  says the silvery green light of time

  breathing in and out like any mortal

  eight Mississippi nine—

  Comic Morning

  What’s funny about this place

  is us regulars coming in with our different

  accoutrements, mine lately the little void

  of space I call honey, days

  I can barely get through I’m laughing so hard,

  see? In the back a woman squeezes oranges,

  someone presses the fresh white bread

  into communion wafers or party favors.

  In the window the chickens rotate blissfully,

  questioning nothing—

  Sometimes I flirt with the cashier, just improvising,

  the way birds land all in a hurry on the streetlamp,

  which stays warm even on cold nights.

  Guillaume says humor is sadness

  and he’s awfully pretty.

  What do they put in this coffee? Men?

  No wonder I get a little high. Remember

  when we didn’t have sex on the Ferris wheel,

  oh that was a blast,

  high, high above the Tuileries!

  Idée Fixe

  No woman wants to be low-hanging fruit,

  my glamorous girlfriend says, but I’m indiscriminate

  and love all fruit, I’m tempted to list each kind

  right here, in and out of season,

  because even just saying the names gives me pleasure,

  as does saying your name.

  I’m not alone in my passion—my whole family,

  we’re a little off in this regard,

  we can spend hours talking about cantaloupe

  or arguing over how many flats to buy

  when it’s Peach-O-Rama at the Metropolitan.

  Once I even drove half a day to get to Pence Orchards

  where I met and took photos of Bert Pence,

  who sold me three boxes of peaches at a wholesale price.

  He was so good to me, as was the late-summer freestone

  I picked as I walked back through the orchard

  in the August heat to the entrance gates,

  which were nothing like the Gates of Hell.

  On the contrary, I was in heaven there in Yakima.

  I can still smell that single peach, which was profusely

  low-hanging, it was the definition of low-hanging,

  it fell into my hands, as you did—

  or perhaps as I did into yours—

  but that was months ago.

  When I walked past the stands yesterday,

  on what should have been the first day of spring,

  all produce had been covered with heavy blankets,

  to keep it warm, to mitigate harm.

  Today the temperature dropped so low

  someone thought to remove the fruit entirely and stash it away.

  With this strange weather we’re having, will I see you again?

  I can’t help myself.

  Essay on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

  John Locke says children don’t understand elapsed time,

  and when I was a girl it was true

  and it remains true—

  It’s been three hundred years and still my feelings for Locke

  must pass unrequited.

  I keep his book in my satchel

  with other pleasures—

  lipstick, Ricola, matches, binder clips, and a tiny bar of soap

  stolen from the Renaissance Inn

  where I sometimes cheat on Locke with another man.

  At least objects endure—

  see how my old sofa holds up!

  Locke would look pretty good lying here

  with his long face, his furrowed brow and center part,

  he who too quickly flourished

  and outraced this crowded place.

  La duration, I said, trying to roll my r

  when some new French friends asked

  what I’d been thinking about.

  John Locke et la duration.

  They thought I said l’adoration,

  which is also true.

  Turns out duration is not a French word,

  no matter how badly I pronounce it.

  The correct term is la durée,

  another word I mispronounce

  though once I passed a lovely durée

  riding my rented Vélib’ from the Seine

  to the Sacré-Coeur,

  where had I planned in advance

  I could have spent the night in adoration.

  Instead I only leaned my bike against the church

  and looked out across the sea of human hours.

  Son in August

  Dignity, I said to myself

  as he carried his last things into the dorm.

  It was not a long goodbye,

  nothing sad in it,

  all I had to do was turn

  and head up the hill.

  All I had to do was balance

  on two feet that seemed to belong

  to
a marionette who had no idea

  what came next or who governed the strings.

  There’s no emergency, I told her,

  just get back to your car,

  that’s it, that’s all that’s required.

  I didn’t mind accompanying her,

  I myself had nowhere to go.

  She drove east then farther east

  under a river through a tunnel

  until she found herself back at home,

  with a purpose.

  And the purpose was?

  To recognize the green awning.

  To find a key in a pocket.

  To fit that key in the lock,

  take off her shoes, drop them on the floor

  with others left there like old coins

  from a place she must have visited.

  Worth something but what.

  There were no clues in the medicine cabinet,

  none in the cupboard, none in the freezer

  where she found old licorice and Bit-O-Honey

  shoved next to a ziplock of bluish breast milk,

  all of it frozen solid over nineteen years

  into some work of art, a sculpture,

  an archaic something of something.

  She looked at my hands reaching into the freezer.

  Or I looked at hers.

  They were strong, worn, spackled with age

  as they removed the milk-ice

  stashed like weed far in the back.

  Do they even make this stuff anymore?

  What’s it good for?

  What was it ever good for?

  Repurposed, she thought,

  isn’t that the word the kids keep saying

  these days? Hey sweetie,

  she called to the unoccupied room,

  hey love. It was so hot the air

  from the freezer turned to steam

  and she took the ice into her own hands,

  held it, held it gently against the back

  of my warm animal neck

  until something began to melt and I was alone.

  Lore

  To think, to swear, and to jaywalk I learned from my father,

  who even now curses me if, his hand in mine,

  I want to wait at the crosswalk.

  I don’t think waiting is such a dumb thing to do,

  but my father has other opinions.

  He’s a thinking-man’s jaywalker,

  he’s a thinking-man’s thinking man

  who can no longer think,

  an emeritus who loved taking us to the Oasis

  where we could borrow his penknife

  and carve any profanities we liked into the long dark bar.

  Shit, I’d like to carve there now. Or Please explain!

  Back at home he taught us little about the US tax code

  but showed us how to tie knots, pack a car, remove

  the washcloths our mother placed gently over our eyes

  when we took our first showers.

  Some things were inimitable, beyond a child’s capacities.

  He moved his scalp back and forth with élan

  when we asked him to flex his muscles.

  Claimed he transplanted the hair from his head to his chest,

  which I have yet to try.

  Preserve your options, he often said.

  Put me out on the ice, he often said, as he grew older until he grew older.

  Adversity is when a hero’s two options are both bad.

  What’s next, he says.

  And then, he says.

  What is wrong, he says and then forgets what he wanted to ask.

  Old age is so profane.

  When I waited tables, my father told me to declare my tips,

  which I never did. I wore a floppy hat

  and worked under the table.

  Now I stand here with him dodging cars

  as if they, too, like him are only desperate engines

  saying slow down, or hurry along now.

  The Necessary Preoccupations

  Cure means something else to a roofer, as does cant.

  I just found out I’ve got no mansard and my underlayment is aging

  like my flashing, which were my eyes.

  Eyes has the word yes in it, have you ever realized that?

  I might have misheard the roofer’s blue eyes.

  Is there plywood on that baby? he asked.

  And something about ferrule and bitumen,

  a word I imagine having been called under as many roofs

  as breaths. I like to say it with the British pronunciation.

  Bitumen.

  Hot stuff is bitumen, actually, I looked it up.

  I look up but can’t see the roof and can’t climb up on the roof

  to see the stars, which were his eyes.

  Weep hole is not an anatomical term,

  we looked for my weep holes but he couldn’t find them,

  he gave up too soon, some men do.

  Doggedness is my hobby, that’s what I wrote

  on the jury-duty questionnaire.

  Someone else wrote down happy hour.

  Happy hours, which were his eyes—

  He promised to send a bid last night but nothing

  except Your pkg has shipped

  came across the ether, through the skies,

  down through the three layers of old shingles I’ve got to haul away

  before anything new goes up.

  Most shingles have a lifetime warranty now.

  Who needs a lifetime?

  All of Ulysses takes place in one single bitumen flashpoint of a day.

  I see the words yes and yeses and eyes in Ulysses.

  Molly Bloom says yes eighty-seven times and the sky touches the roof.

  Yes, I would have said.

  In the package coming my way are new headlights.

  Those are headlights that were his eyes!

  And blue-tinted headlights aren’t even legal.

  The Art of the Security Question

  I love orange in the fall, maroon all winter.

  Bach’s cello suites, Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No.”

  My first kiss?

  My father’s mother’s maiden name?

  We just got scammed out of four thousand dollars.

  Someone called and said my nephew,

  caught DUI, needed to be bailed out.

  Because we’ve already lost two children,

  my mother and my sister went to every CVS in West Seattle

  looking for enough gift cards to satisfy the man

  who pretended he was in a Sacramento courtroom trying to help.

  What do you think happens to you when you die?

  my mother asked a week later.

  What’s that? asked my father, turning over in his sleep.

  Researchers say the safest questions have answers that are not enduring.

  If you asked me now what song I love best?

  I like the soundtrack to Call Me by Your Name.

  I sat next to my father in the movie theater.

  Did he wonder why the stranger to his left

  put her head on his shoulder?

  He kept asking, Who’s here with me?

  Could that be a security question?

  I ask myself if this is the last time.

  O Esperanza!

  Turns out my inner clown is full of hope.

  She says she wants a gavel.

  She wants to stencil her name on a wooden gavel:

  Esperanza’s Gavel.

  Clowns are clichés and they aren’t afraid of clichés.

  Mine just sleeps when she’s tired.

  But she can’t shake the hopes.

  She’s got a bad case of it, something congenital perhaps.

  Maybe it was sexually transmitted,

  something to do with oxytocin or contractions or nipple stimulation,

  maybe that’s it, a little goes a long way.

  Hope is also
the name of a bakery in Queens.

  And there’s a lake in Ohio called Hope Lake where you can get nachos.

  I’m so stuffed with it the comedians in the Cellar never call on me,

  even when I’m sitting right there in the front row with a dumb look of hope on my face.

  Look at these books: hope.

  Look at this face: hope.

  When I was young I studied with Richard Rorty, that was lucky,

  I stared out the window and couldn’t understand a word he said,

  he drew a long flat line after the C he gave me,

  the class was called Metaphysics and Epistemology,

  that’s eleven syllables, that’s

  hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope hope.

  Just before he died, Rorty said his sense of the holy was bound up with the hope

  that someday our remote descendants will live in a global civilization

  in which love is pretty much the only law.

  Accursed Questions, ii

  I can’t stop reading Happy Days. It’s so perfect I understand it no better than the theory of relativity or the meaning of love hand-painted on signs held long ago by students down on the campus where we sometimes skinny-dipped in the fountain and stole fancy pens from the bookstore, genuine Montblancs that still don’t work.

  Guaranteed … genuine … pure … what? Winnie asks over and over in the first act, as if knowing will help between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep.

  One weekend between the bells you and I kissed and kissed and the questions begin again.

  Oh let them last at least until we are decanted from the vessel containing the fluid of future time to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated by the phenomena of hours.

  Are you allowed to ask that question? he said midmorning with the blinds drawn.

  Yes, I nodded, but instead I asked, What are days for?

  In the space between interlocutor and addressee, there is something erotic, responsive, uncontrolled.

  No one likes to be interrogated, though I have to admit I have sometimes enjoyed being frisked. It hasn’t happened in a while. In fact, recently I was allowed to pass through security without taking off my shoes. The man behind me wore boots I thought I could love, so I waited for him at the exit, pretending I was just tying up my flip-flop. Flimsy and inappropriate for where we were both headed.