The Stardust Lounge

by Deborah Digges

  Clearly I am not a professional in the area of the arts, but Stephen is a very special person, and I have dealt with people his age for over thirty years. I believe him to have a special dedication to and talent for the creative arts in a way I've not previously encountered. And he is extremely caring in his dealings with other people and, of course, with animals.

  Franklin M. Loew

  Dean

  Cornell Veterinary College

  Corrections and changes for Rough Music.

  1 See acknowledgments page: Note that the poem initially titled “The Afterlife” has been changed to “Chekhov's Darling. “ The acknowledgment Ploughshares should read “Chekhov's Darling” under the title “The Afterlife.”

  2. See dedication page: Note that the name Frank has been added to the dedication. Thus, the dedication should read: “For Stephen and Charles, for Trevor, and Susan, and Gerry, and Max, and for Frank.”

  3. See table of contents page: The title of “The Afterlife” has been changed to “Chekhov's Darling” (17th poem).

  4. See “Late Summer,” page 6. Note correction in line 23. “Theresa” has been corrected to “Therese.”

  5. See page 12, second page of “Rune for the Parable of Despair.” In line 6 of the second page, note that the word “blessed” has been put in quotation marks.

  6. See page 15, line 17 of “Rough Music.” There should be a hyphen between “breaking” and “glass.” It should read “breaking-glass.”

  7. See page 32, “Morning After a Blizzard.” Drop the And” that begins the poem. It should read, “What could they possibly need to bury in heaven? “

  8. See page 36, “Five Smooth Stones.” The first letter of line 12 should be capitalized since it is the beginning of a new sentence. It should read, uHe walks the streets opening gates for the yard dogs…”

  9. See page 38. Change title of poem from “The Afterlife” to “Chekhov's Darling.”

  At line five break line at the word “raised.”

  Add a dash after the word “pain.”

  Omit the lines, “like Chekhov's and it was clear to them the end was still far off…”

  Chekhov's Darling

  Then came the day even the water glass felt heavy and I knew, as I'd suspected, I grew lighter.

  I grew lighter, yes.

  Say, have you ever fainted?

  Such a distinct horizon as you are raised above your pain:

  And after forty years they entered Canaan…

  Don't tell me about turning from what might change you, taking the second, not the first compartment in the revolving door, tossing the note in the bottle back into the channel.

  No, the afternoon was not a practice for another.

  The birds, they flew.

  The virus spread throughout the city.

  It was a real day and I grew lighter.

  And I asked my fiend if I could hold his arm to keep myself from rising.

  I picked up the rare city stones and put them in my pocket while the buildings dreamed themselves backwards to rubble, and the sun-smashed windows, the mortar back to sand, and Orpheus in the flesh set broken china into the fissures of the sidewalk after he d poured the grout and smoothed it with his trowel.

  Then blue shard by blue shard he made a sky of the abysmal sepulchers across which the homeless floated, much as I, where the trains passed, and the ground shook.

  It was like standing inside singing, knowing something of its need.

  It was the troubled child grown old, happy, the lost in sight of home, and born for this.

  There is a sadness older than its texts that will outlive the language, like the lover who takes you by the roots of your hair.

  In this way I was awake, I was light, I grew lighter, though I had not yet been lifted.

  If you had to describe house to an alien, you might begin with ours. It would be a simple lesson drawn in the dirt with a stick: a rectangle with smaller ones inside, front entrance, dining room to the left, living room to the right, kitchen along the back. Upstairs is as simple: two bedrooms separated by a bathroom off the landing.

  Behind the house the woods bear in, shrinking the yard a little more this year, ferns and saplings sprouting from the leaf piles dumped over the fence, fallen tree branches from an ice storm dragged back and heaved over, weeds, dead bushes pulled out of the ground, bulbs that rotted in the window boxes, dead tomato plants, vase after vase of wild flowers thrown out, Christmas trees dumped, debris piling up, seeded and seeding, spilling over.

  It's a house easily lost in green or memory. Such is its effaced dignity, a postwar modesty tinged with shame regarding exposed cinderblock foundations, aluminum siding, low ceilings, unadorned windows, door frames, staircase, fireplace. Were it to disappear, fall in or sail off one night, neighbors walking their dogs might say, “Wasn't there a house there among the trees? Maybe. Or maybe we were mistaken.”

  It's a house aware of New England's weathers, the changing light altering the interiors as if it wanted to be a different house each season. By summer it stars the upper rooms among treetops. The boys climb out the windows to sit on the roof overlooking the woods where they sun themselves, drink iced coffee.

  Winters we live downstairs in front of the fire. Then with the spring thaw the basement floods, soaking this or that box of books and photos we carry up the bulkhead and mete out, pinning pictures to the clothesline, saving as many as we can, throwing the rest away, not without relief.

  Our animals bring in the weathers. By now we have nine cats and three dogs who smell of the grass, the autumn leaves, smell of rain, dust, pinesap. Spring, summer, and fall the cats bring their kills into the house—mice, voles, birds. This morning I woke to find a sleek star-nosed mole on my pillow.

  Stephen has rescued a kangaroo mouse from Vasco, by far the most gifted hunter. Stephen resuscitated the mouse by rubbing its throat and belly, and kept the mouse as a pet in his old hamster cage. He named him Frederick, who seemed happy to be protected through the winter. By spring he escaped his cage, though we see him now and then around the house, nearly sauntering toward the kitchen.

  The cat we call Mr. T. once caught a wood thrush and carried it up to Trevor's room. We discovered Mr. T. and her bird apparently resting together, the bird alert, quiet in its wisdom, Mr. T. lounging next to it. Trevor carefully, stealthily lifted the bird from between Mr. T.'s paws and delivered it outside. It sat on Trevor's finger a few moments, then flew up into the mountain ash where it chirped and crabbed, furious for the near-fatal adventure.

  The wide backyard slopes toward the woods, the hillside covered with pine needles on which G.Q. likes to slide on his back. He slides under the huge white pine, the hammock strung between trees, slides toward what will be his own burial ground when, later this year, he'll suddenly have a stroke, his epitaph to read Earth, receive an honored guest…

  But from this April window today I can still watch him, Rufus, Buster, and some of the cats as they lounge in the new grass near the woods. Stephen and Trevor have dragged lawn chairs down there and they sun themselves among their brood.

  I love those animals who lie so peacefully around my boys. I'm grateful for the many times they have drawn the boys away from anger, sadness. They've taught us in ways only animals can; their muteness insists that we listen with eyes and hearts. We lived blessed in our speculations.

  The animals offer us a subject besides ourselves, besides the frustration of human interaction, work, scheduling, bad tempers, fatigue. They become our higher concern, need care and attendance in spite of run-ins with the law, missed classes, failing grades, flat tires, snowstorms, the furnace on the blink, the refrigerator empty. Care of the animals, above all, is what we come to value in one another. To defer to and care properly for them in the midst of crisis is to be a success, to be praised and cherished.

  We mirror our animals and they us. Buster mirrors us in his sudden shifts to seizing. We must stop what we are doing and come to his aid. Stripping off th
e urine-soaked sheets, our T-shirts smeared with feces, we make peace with our own helplessness as we practice a tolerance of a kind we hadn't believed ourselves capable.

  As for G.Q., we now know he can't help his aggression that looks to all the world like meanness. Having forgiven him, we must still be consistent in our work with him and make sure he gets his medicine as we learn how difficult it is for all of us in this house to practice restraint.

  And Rufus? Who could have imagined that the leveret-killing Rufus would so passionately nurture our orphaned kittens? Who could have predicted that he was just the dog for the job? What quality in him was stirred, not only to lick down the kittens, but to climb into the drawer after each feeding and settle among them, providing them with his closeness, warmth?

  A new cat has found us. Maybe from the woods she saw our light, or followed the others to see where they retreated each night. For weeks last winter we set food on the sill and kept the kitchen window open, though it was below freezing outside, our fifty-year-old furnace pumping up heat day and night in deference to her, the second floor a balmy eighty degrees.

  After a while she came halfway in the window. By moving her food to the counters we got her to come inside. Soon she took up residence behind the couch. She grew fat and healthy fighting with the other cats if they approached her, hissing and striking out if the dogs dared to pass too close.

  The boys named her Sybil because one moment she craved affection and in the next batted them away with open claws. Trevor worked hardest at taming her. He'd lie on the floor by the couch, cooing, coaxing her. Opening cans of tuna, he'd mete out treats for her, at the same time tossing chunks to the dogs to keep them at bay.

  One day Stephen discovered Sybil preening herself in the loft of our newly converted garage. He called Trevor, Charles, and me to the threshold to see. Stephen took Sybil's picture and developed it. Now it's mounted on our fridge, a trophy for Trevor in honor of what he's made possible.

  May, 1996

  Stephen Digges

  Expository Writing

  Prose poem narrative

  Body Music

  Clouds muted the light that day. Shadows drifted away from their human mirrors, parting companions. Dulled. March rain touched the children's faces in schoolyards. I watched them in passing. The moisture clung to everyone's skin. Wind chimes sounded, like too many navigations into the wet morning air. I walked listening.

  My destination was unknown, but it was a path of meander intricately spinning itself while I walked, a giant loom unraveling at my feet. Missouri. In the thawing ponds and lakes carp fed on neurolichen. I felt twisted, ashamed of my existence.

  An old man sat in a chair on a white porch in front of his time-dusted, one-story house. He watched me through his “wisdom”: I met his eyes below the brim of his brown mesh baseball cap that read “Smith & Wesson.”

  Now beyond his vision, I still felt his eyes judging me. The day was repeating itself.

  Missouri had trapped me inside it, trapped me inside my father's home. It was as if I had tripped, my step thrown off, and now I was destined to walk in circles for what felt like the eternity of my thirteenth year.

  The past was useless rhetoric. My life in the city had become irrelevant, though like the end of a song sequence, the memory directed my every stride—. My body still moved with it, that period of my life in which I had lived as a dreamer on Boston's streets.

  In comparison Columbia, Missouri, was the stopped time of neon malls, golf courses, duplexes, trailer parks, and cow pastures. This was my new residence.

  The short time I had already spent in Missouri was miserable. Only two weeks at my new school, West Junior High, had passed before the principal called me into her office. Her voice twanged with a deep southern accent. She spoke sternly through tight lips.

  “I know why you're here, Stephen. Your father and I had a long chat about it before I let you into this school…”

  My ears would not listen anymore and my eyes became blank windows watching her, while my mind took me to other places, my real home, my mother, and the scent of spray paint freshly drying on the outdoor walls of Boston.

  “Are you even listening to me, Stephen?” she interrupted my reverie.

  “Yeah, yeah, I am,” I responded softly, gazing now on the floor.

  “Have we reached an understanding then?” she inquired.

  “Most likely,” I retorted. She didn't take my answer well. She began dissecting my appearance.

  ‘And if you think you can go around this school with pants hangin’ half off your ass, an’ a bad attitude, you're wrong, Mr. Digges. An’ next time I see you wearin'your pants like that I am gonna wrap a rope around your waist, and make you wear it all day. This school has a dress code an'…” Droplets of spit flew from her lips as she pronounced her s ‘s.

  Tears began to blur my vision, rounding the world into one narrow tunnel. I wasn't quite sure why, but I felt like a silhouette, half human, all details fading. My life had become so foreign, an interrupted, irregular maze that bore sharp edges, the shapes becoming more and more abstract with each tick of the seconds inside of Central Standard Time.

  After that exchange with the principal, I had set out on my wandering at ten-thirty in the morning. I had left silently, hiding my emotions so that the principal wouldn't detect how powerfully she had got to me.

  The path found itself and I followed it. Ten miles from my father's house I stepped left after right, in a silent fury. The white, one-story houses all looked the same, distinguished by junked cars that littered the lawn, a brown sofa leaking tan innards at the arm rests, on the cushions, bed mattresses stained with rust from the springs that coiled toward the sky like useless promises.

  And it was on this street that the old man in his rifle cap had scrutinized and judged me. “Someday he'll choke,” I thought, “on this Missouri air.”

  As for the boy the old man shook his head at, now I recall him for you, recall the boy to let him go, and wish the past well, five years later. If I were to have met him/myself on that day of wandering, I would tell him to be patient, to love his individuality, to listen to the answers that lie within, that come in the tempos and waves of the heartbeat. Just listen and wait. Body music.

  Grade: B+

  Fall, 1999

  Hadwen Park. I'm walking the dogs through a woods south of Worcester. It's late October, warm enough I hardly need a jacket. Most of the leaves are down, the paths along the steep hillsides lost under the eddying leaves, pine needles.

  The dogs run out ahead, debris parting in their wake, and as I walk I kick aside the leaves to read the graffiti strewn across the asphalt. Names, insults, professions of love, and the names of rock and rap bands, Nirvana, The Dead, framed by marijuana leaves.

  As I head down the hill I cross the blue-black outline of a huge penis and testicles, more names, apparently of a more recent era for the names of the bands, the pitched tenor of the profanities, as if the older graffiti had somehow been a draft for this great black smear like a cloud or a thought, across which is written, in white, school sucks.

  “School sucks,” I say as I align myself in the old exercise of joining, which Eduardo once taught me so well. School sucks, and all its horrors of restriction. And its teachers suck, who are surely aliens sent to torture their students with rules, deadlines, information that the kids believe has so little to do with their lives.

  Kids’ lives are on fire, and Mr. So-and-so says they have to do math. Their lives are burning and Ms. says that paper is due tomorrow, no hats in the house, no smoking, four minutes between classes.

  School sucks that houses their days, children in the throes of adolescence that does violence to the body and soul, that is the world changing while they are not, or vice versa, the world in wrong alignment. How to navigate the chasm?

  Both Trevor and Stephen made it through, each in his way. After our battling the administration as we futilely tried to see to his advancement, Trevor made the deci
sion to drop out of high school. He successfully took his GEDs in the fall of his sixteenth year and began junior college. Taking a job at a Caribbean restaurant in Amherst, he moved out of our house to share an apartment with friends in June of 1996, the spring of Stephen's graduation. The following fall, Stephen began a B.F.A. in photography in New York City.

  We celebrated Stephen's graduation. His father and grandparents flew in from Missouri, and Stanley came up from Maryland. Charles, who had moved back to Russia in January of 1996 to work as a journalist, returned to see his brother graduate. Charles brought with him many friends who had known Stephen in Brookline, and who, over the years, came to understand the portent of the event.

  Trevor returned for the celebration, bringing with him jerk chicken and beans for the party we threw the next day. My sister Eve drove up from Connecticut to help prepare for the all-day event we planned for Stephen, his guests, and his friends.

  A subtext of possibilities went unspoken. But the alternative story with its different trajectory ghosted, even intensified our celebration. It offered that Stephen's graduation from high school was not the moment that he and we who loved him had been waiting for.

  Rather, it was a moment, like so many others, which made one kind of future more immediately accessible than another. We were not unaware of the other grueling, even tragic alternative. Inside that alternative we glimpsed ourselves as flat, dismissible characters—the helpless single mother and the rebellious teen—roles reinforced by a culture pointing fingers at us, roles that separated a son from his mother and isolated us in our confusion.

  That culture judged me harshly while it allowed my young son, lost in adolescent grief, easy access to guns. Stephen's graduation from high school exemplified our tenuous connection to a system that insisted on itself as the only way, though we knew it was not the only way at all. Trevor had taught us that, and Eduardo, and our animals.