Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  “Who is that over the fireplace?” he asked.

  “The Mother of Us All,” she answered, “my great-great grandmother, our Leah, Rebecca, Sarah, the river out of which we all flowed, the Amazon of the family, the Mississippi, Rhine, Rio de la Plata....”

  “Let’s not forget the others out of which herself flowed. She’s no ultimate watershed, just another part of an immemorial process,” he said almost snidely, a terrible tendency in him to debunk, sprinkle everyone over with scorn and sarcasm.

  “Beware!” she said, lighting a huge gold candelabra with eighteen candles in it, with a book of matches she pulled out of the pocket of her white smock, “She hears all, she’s here hearing all....”

  “Why eighteen candles?”

  “Every letter in Hebrew has a number value. CHAI/LIFE adds up to eighteen.”

  “Interesting,” he said, “I would have thought you were protestant.”

  “But where!” came the answer tremulously out of the trembling candle flames and the whole night began to coalesce, incarnate, take on form, The Dead, her very special, personal dead, coming not so much out of the dark, as out of her own mind, as if she were dividing and multiplying in some sort of avalanching mitotic reproduction....

  “What’s happening?” he asked, trying to move toward the door, but they were coming from the direction of the door too, and he didn’t want to take a chance and try to move through them, almost certain that he couldn’t... that they were much more substance than shadow....

  “This is the way I always live... you’re coming into me,” he answered, pulling him toward her, him expecting to pass through her, for a moment convinced that she was even more shadowy than the rest of them...then

  realizing that he couldn’t have been more wrong as she clasped around him like a python and he felt himself starting to fall through infinite layers of space from the plateau of the high gods, down through the surface of the earth into a negative infinite that rose up and added its pressure to her slowly tightening coils.

  LOOKING FOR

  What was he looking for? Every day when his wife came home from the hospital (where she worked as a pathologist, a dreadful, morbid profession, he always felt) he’d be waiting for her on the front porch, tell her to park her car in the street, “Everything’s all packed and ready to go,” and she’d get in his car and off they’d go, looking for....

  He especially liked the forests back off the road, at the end of a series of rolls in the hills, rolls, waves, undulations, going back to a stand of oaks, pines, maples, now into Fall everything crying out its identity more than ever. Or not really crying out. There was too much slumbering passivity for that. They were more like sleeping giants; what you were really perceiving was their snores transmuted and transformed into the supersonic...into the colors of the leaves themselves.

  And then there’d be the paths themselves leading back into the impenetrableness of the densest forests, as if it was in there that the secrets were waiting to be whispered, the gods waiting hidden, waiting to reveal themselves to the unquiet, searching pilgrim, him always wanting to have a house in there somewhere so that the “presences” would speak full time, as if “city” and “people” still the gods and you needed to escape off into the hidden places for the voices to ever find you.

  One day they went off down a gravel road into nowhere and at the very end found a deserted house maybe fifty years old, no furniture, empty, all the windows intact, the roof, like you could move in the next day, but no one around, the garage empty, the door torn off.

  Let’s have our picnic here,” he said.

  She wasn’t so sure.

  But he took out the still hot barbecued chicken and coleslaw and corn chips and bottles of Kiwi and Strawberry and spread a blanket out on the lawn and sat down, a grey wasp-nest hanging from the tree above them. No sign of wasps there, but in the oblique light of the setting sun slicing across the roof of the house he could see scores of wasps up in the gutter, doing he couldn’t imagine what, expecting them, perhaps, to come down and attack. But they didn’t. Nothing. Zero. Just willows and elms and oaks and the dry brittle air and the sun going down that he didn’t want to go down, eating and then stretching out next to his wife, maybe expecting someone to come out of the house or down the road and shoot them for trespassing, but no one came and he walked out in back and imagined how it would be if he’d owned that house, had built a screened-in gazebo and camped out in it, a big wide one he could stretch out in, no neighbors, maybe a distant car now and then, an even more distant train, the earth itself must have made some noise spinning through space, n’est pas? Maybe if it was quiet enough you could hear that....

  Sun almost down, almost dusk.

  “Maybe we ought to go,” she said.

  And reluctantly they left, the next day went further south to Mason, the county seat of the county they lived in, Ingham County, drove past the county courthouse, 120 years old, down side streets overhung with thick ancient trees, the houses all grand, grandiose, seignorial, but grotesque and dark in the shadows of the trees, slowly getting swallowed up in blackness, late already, the sun every day cutting the light shorter and shorter, Bernie confessing “The worst fate I could think of would be to be an old man in one of these houses, all the kids gone, a fortune to heat and light up, all alone...like midnight all day long...,” gables and built-in corridors and closed-in back porches, extra upstairs bedrooms, so you could just imagine their endless inner mazes.

  But when they drove out of town again, the woods began to speak in the bright red-ball sunset moment when you dare not look into the sun itself for fear that you’d go blind: “It’s in here where I am, hidden, off the paths, over the hills into the forests!”

  Wanting to get out of the car and follow the curves of the hills into the forest darkness itself and build a house there handsbreadths away from the sacred trees, enclosed and encircled in sacredness, waiting for the too long silent god(s) to speak, or perhaps not even speak but (beyond speech) simply filter into his spirit and link up, commune with him, as if all things had waiting spirits inside them and it was the business of true religion to open up the vaults of the soul and let the spirit-bands in....

  Another day out past Williamston, down another side street, a river, a shaky old steel bridge and a river walk path, the weather hanging on, so dry that he had to daub his lips with beeswax every day so they wouldn’t chap, the leaves like red and yellow antique paper, the river filled with geese and ducks.

  They sat down, sat, sat, sat until the sun went down and it began to get a little cold and she wanted to go home. But he could have stayed there forever, built a house on top of the riverbank, all glass, facing the water. What was he looking for, just a place to be old in, to turn off his mind and turn on other psychic-telepathic faculties....?

  He believed that’s what the sacred plants did, Peyote, Ayahuasca, Datura, Yaye, San Pedro Cactus, The Flesh of the Gods, simply activate perceptions of what was always really there. Maybe God wasn’t one but many, maybe He-She-It manifested Himself-Herself-Itself through a myriad of guises and impersonations....

  “Come on, I’m really getting cold,” she said.

  OK.”

  And he got up reluctantly, reluctantly went home and inside at all.

  Every day as long as the weather held up, he found another place to picnic in, wwwwwalk in, every day the sun setting earlier, feeling time being strangled and buried, clipped away sadistically by the Powers that ruled it all, if

  there were any powers that ruled anything... which he began to doubt more and more every day, as it got colder his wife staying home so he ventured it alone. Even when the rains came and then the snow and all the leaves were buried under white, he’d still be driving along on the back roads running after the last few scraps of light and a hill would rise in the distance, empty trees, or full, green pines, sumacs, and the voices would begin again: “We are in here, where truth begins, as long as you resist surrendering to us, you
will never find out who (or why) you really are.”

  SPRING WIND

  Slowly realizing that the bright, cold Spring wind isn’t just itself but full of pasts as I sit there drinking coffee outside Beaner’s Cafe. Richard Morris' last years, ten years ago, Cafe Puccini or somewhere else before there even was a Cafe Puccini in San Francisco. Deborah and Richard and I going into some corny spartan vegetarian restaurant, bean-sprouts and whole wheat cakes all over the place, the window full of junglish vines, the woman on the cash register asking “Are you all related or something?,” all of us glasses and tweeds and brief cases and all like Mahler and Rilke and Celine...and then for a moment it’s Ireland I’m standing on Land’s End, then walking on the beach at Galway and Father Pollard’s writing poetry in Irish Script on the sand, penduluming back between forty, then thirty, ten years ago, and now, a moment at Antofagasta with Alexandra, a walk along the Promenade (Brooklyn Heights) with Harry Smith, or seven years old in San Francisco for the 1939 World’s Fair. The next day it’s cold again, a sprinkling of snow and it’s Frankenstein and the lime pit in Chicago, a touch of rain and it’s Paris, I’m twenty, and there’s Elizabeth Trochee, Alexander has just dropped her for an American blonde and I see her sitting in a cafe alone, on the table black suede gloves stretched across a black suede purse, powder puff face, then that night clothes dropping to the floor in the dark. The rain of innumerable Easters and ten years in L.A., Joe Schwartz’s house the last time I saw him three years ago just after he’d had the third of his lower bowel taken out (“They think they got it all”), he and his wife in their huge old house in Baldwin Hills, and it rained full time the three days I stayed there, hills falling down all around them, hills that had been there for thousands of years. The ten years I lived in Los Angeles it would rain a day or two a year....

  But it’s not just that the sun or rain transport me to other places, but to other times right here in East Lansing where I’ve lived for thirty years.

  It’ll be late October Halloween weather and the air will be filled with little girls now grown and moved away forever, a visit here and there, but Halloween comes and the house is empty, thanksgiving comes and my head fills with Nona, my ex-wife in Kansas for whom Thanksgiving was the maximum centerpiece feast of the years. And I can almost smell the pies and turkey, and the TV in the living room in my head is on and Margaret (now in Scotland) is there with Alexandra (in Kansas City) and Christmas is only weeks away and my bedroom is filled with secret packages that no one knows about, sweaters and boots and earrings, books...and the real living room in real time is empty and the last time I saw Nona she was in a mental hospital, “clinically depressed,” and maybe I wouldn’t have recognized her on the street coming toward me if I hadn’t been forewarned it was her. And my first wife, Lucia, whom I ran into the other day and we talked for a while, is 68 now, black age-spots all around her eyes, looking very much like her own mother in Lima just before she died thirty-five years ago. And my soul reached out to her as we talked about jaguar shamans and Sor Juana de la Cruz and our last trip to the Inca ruin, Pisac, thirty-six years ago.

  A rustle of leaves and it all comes back. A magnolia in full bloom and my head is full of baby carriages. The grass littered with yellow maple leaves and Margaret and Alex and Chris are there hidden in/playing with the leaves.

  Thousands of pictures, whole shelves of them, only they don’t talk. Even old videos, the talking and all, Margaret’s wedding, Alex getting her belly-button pierced, Chris at the playground, don’t evoke things the way the wind and rain and sun do.

  My granddaughter, Gabrielle, one and a half, and her mother’s in Paris and I’m having a decaf cap at Beaner’s cafe thinking about her for a while and then remembering my grandmother in Chicago on just this kind of cold , bright Spring day, which brings all sorts of strings of memories with it, like pulling up an anchor accompanied by all kinds of special effects bangs and clatters, all the years of closeness and then separation and one last visit before she died.

  “Little Hughie,” looking up at me from her wheel chair, “I wouldn’t recognize you.”

  And then six months later she was gone. Her in Tucson, I don’t even remember where I was then.

  That’s the key isn’t it, this radical discontinuity, people dropping of the edge of the world and my not being there when they drop, Sidney Bernard, Menke Katz, Bukowski, Alexandra Garrett, my own parents, grandmother....never at funerals, never at gravesides, like it all happens ‘out there’ somewhere and doesn’t have anything to do with me.

  I want every memory to be a door I can walk into, and the problem is that it’s increasingly easy to do just that, suddenly be in Burgos cathedral with Alexandra age one in a stroller, making a kinds of mini-quacking,-squeaking, -murmuring noises because she liked the way her sounds were twisted into grave, interesting echoes by the vast stone interior. Or I’m, on the beach in L.A. and Hughie’s six, Cecilia’s five, Marcella’s three, and I’m stretched out on the sand (Playa del Rey) half-asleep and they’re going into the water, lots of big crashing waves, something could happen to them, could have, but never did...and Carol Schwind comes along wearing her spiked heels even in the sand (“I even sleep in them, I’m crazy,” she told me one night) and she’s mine and I’m hers and she’s twenty-five and I’m thirty-five and whatever happened to the last thirty years...?

  Adios, compañeros de la vida....so long, companions of my life.

  It’s a curse to actually live in REALITY the way I do, the curse of being a poet, I suppose.

  It’s so much easier to be Kosher and center on making a radical separation of different kinds of dishes, or wear veils of commune with the Godhead directly and be on the road to the Great Bye and Bye instead of being corrosively and totally in ALLTIME full time.

  The wind blows, the light cuts. Even the magnolias are late this year. And the lilacs...young Virginia Woolf walks by wearing a sweater and a long Indian cotton skirt, and I want to get up and follow her into some sort of forever-young eternity, but then I look again and she’s sixty-five too, six hundred and sixty-five, six thousand, million....

  I’m a thin fading dot on a piece of yellowing paper flaking off in the blustery Spring wind filled with associations that fade with me as I fade, no one aware of the tortured richness of this cappuccino moment. All they see is just a guy with long blond (dyed) hair, eyes concealed behind glasses so that no one can even remotely guess the varieties of anguish and joy that can come from living in the dying center of what seems like an infinitely complex net of personal poetic omniscience.

  APRIL AND JANUARY

  1.

  He was an amazing young-looking 62, mainly because he was so lazy and self-indulgent and had his hair dyed and was fanatically vegetarian and always walked to the university, so it didn’t seem so outrageous when he asked her “Why don’t we have a baby?,” blonde, 22, although she’d answered pretty snippily , “First of all I’m going to marry Bryan, and you’re married, and besides I couldn’t react to anyone as old as you...and I don’t want to break up your marriage....”

  Six months later Bryan had moved to Washington, D.C.. some big old house restoration job in Georgetown, and Bryan and April hadn’t exactly “broken up,” but everything was on a permanent, mournful “hold.” And six months after that she had broken up Dan’s marriage and was pregnant.

  They got married two weeks after the divorce went through and in the wedding pictures....well, Dan swore she was working at looking older than she was, would do anything short of drawing in wrinkle-lines around her eyes, and he didn’t feel good about that; the idea hadn’t been to age her, but then it hadn’t been to rejuvenate him either, but it had?!?!?

  2.

  Sixty-seven, twenty-seven. Only five years but he’d slowed down considerably. They had sex, but it was more manual than anything else. He wasn’t a physically active guy. She’d tried to get him into the pool at the university every night, half an hour on a stationary bicycle, a little jogging, but no
, he was doing a book on Olmec culture as pure shamanism. “The only culture in the world -- outside of Shang China -- totally based on shamanism, death of the old self, return to the ancestral caves, rebirth of the individual linked up with the rebirth of the year...really fascinating, like a whole society based on the rules of the Cistertian Order. or like Tibet in a way, the total lamaistic Society....ony instead of fasting and meditation, it’s hallucinogenic drugs, and....”

  She was patient, but it was a balloon attached to a tire pump, up, up, up, thinner and thinner the gummy membrane, and then....

  “How about taking Cecily out to the park?”

  “Me taking her out?”

  A second balloon beginning to fill, twice as big as the first.

  “We can take her out!”

  Out the front door with the little blonde piece of perfect fluff. Bright. She could already read a little, was taking ballet and dulcimer lessons, as if her mother was trying to boil her down into essential Italian spaghetti sauce nerdiness, the western evening sky spread out like a giant dirty yellow circus tent, days already noticeably shorter in late August, nine o’clock and it was already crumpled parchment.