forbearance
If you, my constant reader, are sapped by this wearisome method of telling, take pity on me who, at a very great loss of time, had to work through at least a thousand repetitions of it, not to mention the anguish involved in writing with the dead at my side, over my shoulder; nor will you be surprised to know that by now the ninth year is nearly past since I took on the task.
birds
She dreams that she stands beneath a tree and the tree is filled with birds and a din not unlike the one that filled her grandmother’s house in the midst of a celebration, just at the setting out of a meal, when all elbows, hands, eyes, mouths, cups, plates, platters, pots, and spatulas were moving, meeting, busy. And the sister dreaming wonders, is this one of the dreams about the birds, the birds that are and yet are not real because their tail and their crest feathers are much too long, too wrought, too luminous in color, and their movements in the air less like flight and more like conversation: at times lively, at others lingering, at times coy, at others insistent. And just then, a bird, a single one, comes out of the clamorous canopy, shows itself to the sister, who sees it is a small tree finch, common in form, size, and plumage. And the sister follows the small bird as it moves from tree to hedge, across a manicured garden, and through the open door of a lamplit house. And she sees that it is day, and yet the lights are on in the house, yet it is the bright middle of day, outside, a thousand birds singing. Entering the house, the sister finds herself in a long dark hall, its two sides regularly opening onto numerous rooms, some grand and others close. And passing the rooms, she sees that each is filled with a variety of lit lamps hanging from the ceilings, sitting atop every piece of furniture, and standing about the floor—filling the rooms floor to ceiling at every level with lit bulbs—each lamp placed so as to be in perfect relation to all the others. She enters one of the rooms at the farther end of the hall and is drawn to a framed image directly ahead of her on one of the walls. She steps through and around the lamps, which glimmer and twinkle, but none too brightly. The sister steps in front of the image, and, mistaking it for a mirror, stares long into it, recognizes the furrow in her brow, the reflective eyes, the earnest set lips. She stares long and wonders at the cropped hair, the pointy mustache, the square beard, the tall, white, stiff ruff. She wonders and scrutinizes, then remembers the picture in her schoolbook, the portrait of the man with eyes like telescopes, the new astronomer who studied the rhythms of the universe, and told tales of order and harmony. The recognition is immediate.
the garden
Enter. There is room here for many. The air is fresh, the sky blue. Find a bench. Set down your blanket. Look out. The garden is in full bloom. Find the chapter, find the page. Look in, says the book.
Who writes war? Who tells its story? The soldier? The scholar? Did the early poets, those great explorers of the underworld, scratch their knowledge of war into the leaves of dead trees and bequeath that understanding to posterity or, holding their boon too near, did they take it back under with them? Does the historian not have the clearest grasp of events? Perhaps the story belongs to the traveler who was passing through when war escalated; he had a camera around his neck and he had no stake in the conflict. Perhaps it belongs to the boy who was tempted by the bright and idle toy, which ripped his arm from his body and strew his fingers a hundred feet in each direction. The boy who carried that limb three miles back to his house, through the wood, across the newly tilled fields, and into the courtyard to place the shredded appendage before his sisters and his mother. And does the newscaster who is informed say anything when he moves his lips? The volume is up, Father asked us to turn it up, shhh, this is about us.
Is war a word or a cry? Is it a song, a dirge repeated across time and space? And who sings this song? Or perhaps, by necessity, war must be a wail, necessarily howled by invisible lips (for who has seen such a creature?), carried over hills, through the canopies of trees, beneath doors, into homes and heads? Is war a man’s tale to tell? Is it his alone, of his mind and calculated there, afterward incubated in his groin? How carefully he guards that place! Does woman know the story better, tend to it in her full heart, succor it at her breast, feel its pain more acutely between her legs, whence the limbless boy sprouted? The gods, what do they say? Or do they speak? This one, he watches, his leg twitches, a yawn, the god surrenders to sleep. Does he dream war? And in his dream, when he is no longer the great, wise, male god, but a girl, no, five small girls, does he then speak war? Will war then have a name in the god’s dream? And will the girls, one or all of them, ever speak the name? The three letters together, they are not what you see, would like to think they are: they are not tidy, not pure. Inherently, they lie and can therefore not be trusted on the page or on the tongue. See how tightly they are bound together, the three letters: consonants, like lips pursed around the single opening where the wail lies, unwilling to utter the truth, to release the cry within the vowel. But wait. Separate the letters. Here you have a beginning, or the chance for one, for the movable type will combine again and with others and, given a task, will find meaning after much circling, after much distillation, find meaning at the center, that place of concentration where the mass of a billion stars is compressed down to a point.
The sisters sit in a circle. And the girl, the middle one, opens her mouth. She makes a hissing sound, falters, shakes her head, hisses again. She looks from sister to sister, then at her own hands, which perspire and tremble, as if crying. She knows she must speak the word. It is a single word, she knows this, feels it in her own soft, small belly, sees it in her sisters’ unblinking eyes. It is a word, one, but not the one heard, read, or spoken. It is not war, war is not what you may think, read, speak … think, speak, watch, shudder, read the newspaper, the book, though you might. The sister does not, cannot find the word in the lazy god’s dream. Though she dives in and under, she comes up.
She surrenders and accepts this defeat, breathes in, cleansed of the god’s lazy dream. She leaves the search for letters, leaves the letters to their own devices, knowing they will, through movement and rearrangement, through circling and distillation, spell the single utterance that war is not.
She, instead, returns to the first form: the image drawn. Her eyes closed, breath held, against the pile of the crimson rug, with her steady finger, she draws this: And eyes closed, she knows that her sisters nod in agreement and, with her, exhale.
laughter
What happens when after eons of winding toward center, that light-devouring aperture, our great galaxy unwinds outward? Does it not seem that this unwinding is inevitable, a very necessary release from the draw of the keen orifice, a denial of its relentless suction? But what is the opposite of the fall toward center? Perhaps a return to childhood? What would be the result of breaking such a pact, the pact with the grave, the strange cosmic and human pact with gravity? A loosening of things wound perhaps: vocal chords vibrating with the singular sound of laughter.
X
There is no sign to mark where our maternal grandfather buried his family’s treasure after the invading armies slaughtered his parents. In a hurry and terrified, just before he fled his homeland, he dug a great pit and in it buried a chest filled with the weight of ten grown men in gold and gemstones. And as one fleeing a new and unfamiliar terror, confident that he would soon return to retrieve his riches, reoccupy his family’s land, and repopulate it with his brood, he neglected to mark the location of his fortune or to draw a map leading back to it. And the new life that absorbed the exile in the new land, the wife and the children and the vocation that came to fill his days and his embrace, this new and ever-unfurling life buried the old life with many layers of sediment so that the tales that draw my regard now from the present are the muffled echoes of another time. And how I strain to hear!
X misses the spot where the dead lie, in single or mass graves. Though many feet and the wheels of traveling vehicles cross and cross again over them, nothing signals the locations where the wa
r dead lie. Who and what will honor them? Memory? It only lives a generation, a single lifetime. Is it not instead the tale, long and circuitous, which brings the reader to the gravesite? Come, sway with me.
X, that most difficult and evasive of letters. It wants to say so much, with such authority and purpose, yet it yields so little. For it is all limbs, pointing to a center, and all limbs, pointing out. I have it, it says, it is here, look! And yet, there is nothing when we turn. It says there! We look. In the meantime, it has scurried off, like a spider anxious for shadows and corners.
wanderers
They are a nostalgic people. They stand upright, walk from place to place, sit, lie down, and stand again, and walk again, and throughout, the longing, like a plumb line hanging from that soft pit below the sternum, draws them downward to the earth’s dense core. And against this draw, their eyes gaze upward, as if for relief.
Mother, she listens to the worn tapes that play and play again the old film songs. The girls need only to press a button and she is transported, and they with her through the twinkling, wistful spaces, hanging on her skirts, admiring the whirling planets and the fixed small lights.
Father, he works the soil with his hands or the edge of a spade. He pinches the dead flowers and leaves and clips the redundant branches. He understands and admires the simple forms, the basic forms, and he works to raise them again from the new soil: the round apple, the pendulous grape cluster, the vertical leak. And the girls chase these old icons, running from garden patch to garden patch.
The sisters need not look to Father or to Mother for the source of their longing. They carry the gene; they look back. Though nothing is there, they look.
above us,
The cosmos: where the living and the dead dwell in harmony.
book
Down the centuries, one after another arrives to rule and dictate. They bring their gods and their technologies. And some decree adherence to the gods and some to the machines. The men of boots and rifles arrive from distant lands to annihilate the devout and set up a new godless order. They fill the streets, proclaim their supremacy, and burn down grandfather’s bookstore. Grandfather is a pious man who sells holy books to the faithful. His shop incinerated, he knows they will find his home and his family next. In the dark of the night, he and his small family leave with their beliefs, a few articles of clothing, and a single singed book. They arrive in the new land still longing for the old.
Father, born in the new land, falls in love with the land out of which his learned, devout father—exchanging books for sickle and spade—raises cotton, beets, peaches, mulberries, goats, chickens, a home, and a simple living for his family. Father, still a child, runs away to the city to quench a thirst for learning older than himself at his tender age. It is not long before he has amassed the knowledge, gained the experience through the many jobs, found Mother, and sired his own brood. It is not long before the men of boots and rifles and tanks arrive to his beloved land to annihilate the educated, the connected, the wealthy, and the believers. Father and Mother, and their five small girls, leave with a few articles of clothing, a set of porcelain dishes, two red wool rugs, and the old longing for the first land.
Father’s brothers, left behind, are killed by the men of god who are next to arrive to cleanse the country of the disbelievers and the educated, the fashionable, and the traveler walking north when he should be walking south down the village road. His brothers leave behind and pass down to their small and yet-unborn children the single book they and Father, growing up on the farm, read as small boys: a holy book with gilded edges, written in a scribe’s melodious hand, badly charred along two edges, and smelling of fire.
bright star
The girl dreams that the sun has gone away. She steps outside and sees the night sky, though it is day. It is night, but it should be day. She knows it is true, yet her mind fights it: the sun has left for another sky. In its place it has left behind the billion stars that it once bedimmed with its own brilliance. It has left behind the inky backdrop. And the dreaming girl looks at the stars twinkling against the black curtain. And the dreaming girl falls to her knees in disbelief. She falls to her knees from the absolute shock of this insuperable loss. She falls to her knees and, in falling, bruises and scrapes them. Her knees bleed. In her mind, a thousand small explosions. In her mind, a thousand small , like many suns bursting. She falls onto the ground, wants to fall into the earth, to disappear into its depths, wants to disappear inside its solid utter darkness. And the earth opens, it takes her in. It is not her mother but it will take her in. She falls forward, her head heavy, her arms limp, her knees bent; falls into the dark cavern that has opened up to take her in. When the earth closes up over her again, she does not draw a last breath of air, she does not look back to take in a final glimpse of the sky. And what are a billion stars twinkling when hers has gone?
the living-on
The living-on after another has passed. The walking-away from a fresh grave filled. As if barefoot, over glass.
longing
So the exiled sisters learn to make their way in the new land: here is a book; here is your school desk; here your friends; here an alphabet to help you communicate with them; if you wear this top just so, comb your hair just so, you will acquire more of them; if you add 2 and 3, you will have 5; if you turn the television dial, you will locate wonders and truths; if you nod when spoken to, you will comprehend the mysteries. The sisters learn to wear the proper articles of clothing, the proper smiles; learn to nod and wave hello; to draw the clouds just so; to fill the notebooks just so with the accurate figures; to speak the proper words in the customary ways to their teachers, neighbors, grocers, school friends: to navigate the new land in accordance with the correct codes and standards of the land.
But the sisters know that 2 and 3 rarely equal 5; that their hair daily sculpts itself according to its own laws and whatever pact it has made with the elements of the natural world; that clouds do not desire to be illustrated, they demand to be followed in the sky by eyes half-open; that the television only displays a two dimensional copy of the external land; and, most naturally, that the mysteries are not explicable.
The sisters remember when and by what means they left their birthland, and when and how they arrived in the land of the sun, but they cannot recall when and why they became exiles of the internal land. And it is this exile, and the riddle of it, that produces the keenest longing in their small chests. What the sisters knew within themselves, in the beginning, does not correspond to what they find in the world without. The land about them is a strange and corrupted reproduction of the land within. The two are animated—wind and whir, unfurl and thrum, oscillate and ping—by different machinery. In the first land, the internal land, all makes sense. In the external, the sisters make themselves dizzy chasing the how’s and just-so’s, the therefore’s and must-be’s.
Occasionally, they come across someone who seems to share the longing, who returns the candid smile, or gazes into their eyes with a silent affectionate greeting, or are themselves practicing the gesture: the ice cream truck driver who absentmindedly hands them their cones on a late summer’s evening, while longingly scanning the red, bird-filled sky in the west; the gleaming toddler in the stroller at the grocery store, present but not yet exiled; the school teacher who says, “yes, this is so and that is correct” but hands the sister a book not on the reading list; the old man at the wedding who folds his napkin into a rotating menagerie of animal figures long after the other guests have risen from the dinner table to dance and mingle.
The sisters live in the new land but long and long to return to the first, to the beginning. How vast, how full, how true was life in the first land, the internal land. In the interior, thought and flight were one and the same; sight and understanding were one; imagination, like a generator, produced both light and heat; ardor simultaneously produced tears and a smile, lifted the body, weightless, into the air, and compressed it to a breathless poin
t. One imagined, and one was. One did, and one was. One spoke and one was in the internal. All corresponded. In the interior land, the sisters are. In the external, they were but shadows. The external life is a crude counterfeit of the first. No matter how the sisters try to live in consonance with the internal, to allow the logic of the interior a seat in the outer world, the two lands will not meet and, over the years, they shift further and further apart. So the longing grows. So, the sisters, pining after what no longer is, become like dispossessed comets chasing their own trailing locks about the solar system. And it is there, against the black dome of a wintry sky, that the new astronomer first fixes his eyes on the sisters.
banished
The sister whose turn it is to take the trash bins out into the alleyway for pickup has forgotten to complete her chore. But a mournful wailing in her dream wakes her. The room is still dark and only a dusty blue light comes in through the window. She rises from bed, pulls on a sweatshirt, and slips on her tennis shoes. It is early yet and the warm glow outlining the closed bathroom door tells her that Mother is getting ready for work. She steps gingerly through the house and carefully opens and shuts the door to the backyard. The gate to the alley opens with a grumble. In the distance, she hears the beeping and clunking of the garbage trucks. She pulls the two bins up, one at a time, over the grass and the gravel, and parks them next to the neighbor’s bins. A piercing howl fixes her to her spot. She looks left and right down the alleyway. All is still. Another wail, this one longer, more distant, more humanlike, draws her attention to the right. But a crash to her left, and a few houses down, makes her jump and turn to face that direction as she backs up against Father’s car. A willowy form emerges from behind a knocked-over trash bin. It is a silhouette in the early dim dawn, yet it is lighter than all around it. It seems to shift without moving, not gliding, but flickering in and out of her vision—though she has not blinked—and each time appearing inches from where it was. And all the while, it keeps its gleaming eyes steady on her as well. The upright ears, the pointy snout, the full tail, the long legs tell her it is a dog. But the way the animal stands motionless-moving and familiarly gazes at her, and the wails still echoing in her ears, assures the sister the creature is not a dog. Finding her courage, she backs up into the yard, closes the gate and stands inside for several minutes. She hears the more distant howl again, and hears a rustle, then a rush outside the gate. Answering its mate’s call, the jackal streaks down the alleyway. The sky in the east has a pink tinge to it now. She walks back to the house. Through the neighbor’s chainlink fence, she sees the neighbor’s dog curled up and soundly asleep on its blanket.
Above Us the Milky Way Page 29