Square Inch Hours

by Sherod Santos

  SQUARE

  INCH

  HOURS

  POEMS

  SHEROD SANTOS

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  CONTENTS

  SECTION 1

  A House on a Hill

  SECTION 2

  Square Inch Hours

  J.

  Without the Color Red

  Act One

  Her Hair Tied Back in Braids

  On the Lower Order of Seraphim

  A Door Left Open for the Moths

  Where Once a Small Branch Fell

  Out of the World There Passed a Soul

  [. . .]

  SECTION 3

  I Was at One Time Close to Home

  SECTION 4

  Life Among the Vanished

  Fellini Attended by Nuns

  Mother Courage

  The Consolations of Philosophy

  Pessoa

  Zenobius the Rhetorician

  Ovid on the Near North Side

  A Feeling of And, a Feeling of Or

  Overseen by a Sliding Glass Panel

  I Went for a Walk in Winter

  The Bicycle Rider

  There Might’ve Been a Cellist in the Dining Hall

  Time Is an Accident

  Self-Portrait with Shaking Hands

  Apart from a Few Stone Bridges

  The Italic Gods

  SECTION 5

  The Window Above Superior

  SECTION 6

  From an Unlined Spiral Notebook

  SQUARE

  INCH

  HOURS

  SECTION

  1

  A HOUSE ON A HILL

  I have a house. There are rooms in the house. In one of those rooms I put on my clothes. In another I prepare my meals and eat at the counter with the radio on. In a third room there is an armchair, shelves of books on various subjects, a few in languages I don’t understand, and a small wooden table where, more often than not, I sit for hours following the pen across the page.

  •

  There are alder trees in the window, but if I take one step to the right all I can see are the flowered curtains people before me left behind. In the harbor, always the same three vessels: a trawler, a barge, a cargo ship, its deck stacked with red and blue containers, one of them filled with refugees. When I don’t go out for long periods of time, the drone of the pulp mill detaches itself and becomes a faint vibration in the floor. It’s easy enough to forget the mill and to feel the sound as something within me, something that carries on in me like a second sign of life.

  •

  Like a highlight in the painting of an eye that makes the eye more real, the morning jogger appears, not to distract from but to heighten the house’s isolation. Had she in passing glanced up the drive, I’m sure she wouldn’t have seen it as anything more than a retreat for someone in a far-off town. A person in general, not a person in fact.

  •

  On my occasional trips into the village, it’s not uncommon to encounter people I’ve seen before. Some nod as they pass, some pause long enough to exchange a few words, still others speak, regardless of what they speak about, as if passing on a secret they trust me to guard. In each case, I try to respond accordingly, “true to life,” for I want nothing more than to mix with people in the customary ways; to know that, whatever the spirit of our meeting, we have that spirit in common.

  •

  I often get drunk in the evening, and when I don’t I write, and when I write I’m in two places at once, for I’ve never been able, as the saying goes, to lose myself in my work. From time to time I take a break to walk outside and look at things from a different perspective. And from that perspective I often find some phrase that pleased me moments before displeases me now. On more than one occasion, that experience has caused me to laugh out loud. What an absurd way to live! Have I got nothing better to do than write down a word, then cross it out and write down another word in its place?

  •

  Getting out of bed in the morning, now and then I decide it’s time to change my routine, not to do away with it altogether, for I take it as a given, but to momentarily reverse its spell. To put off shaving until nightfall, leave the morning paper on the steps, turn on all the lights in the house and keep them on all day. Sooner or later the desired sensation of taking my life in my own hands comes over me, and I resume my habits as before.

  •

  One afternoon someone comes to the door and says, “So, you’re still in the land of the living.” He has brought with him a bottle of wine. He’s new to the house and sees its possibilities. He looks through the books on the shelves, turns on and off the table lamp, sits down in a chair and rubs its arms as if polishing the wood. Although he doesn’t bother to introduce himself, he refers to the past in a manner that suggests we’d once been friends. I can’t think of anything to say, nor does he appear to want me to, though the longer he stays the more impossible it seems, the idea that I’ll ever ask him to go.

  •

  In the end we leave the house together. Though he doesn’t say where we’re going, we take his car and drive out into the countryside, which is filled with sunlight and broad sweeps of spreading pine. Perhaps all along my silence was simply the prelude to a conversation, for we begin to talk about nothing in particular, though the tone is one of complete agreement, of two people who, from opposing sides, arrive at the same conclusion. As if to affirm our common bond, he switches on the radio to a station that plays only popular songs, each one as familiar as the next. From time to time he sings along, from time to time he taps his fingers on the steering wheel. At some point it appears I fall asleep, for the next thing I know we’re driving through the outskirts of a city. The road has widened from two lanes to four and all four lanes are full. The traffic slows, picks up, and slows again, though the city never seems to draw nearer. It’s early in the evening. My hands, I notice, are trembling. And from a now overcast sky, a light rain begins to fall.

  SECTION

  2

  SQUARE INCH HOURS

  J.

  The reminders of her on the book she left behind: the taped tear in the dust jacket, the neatly printed marginal notes, the dog-ears, check marks, underlinings (single and double), the phonetic spelling of Russian names on the inside of the back cover. Closing the book, I wonder if I have seen too much, more than she might’ve liked me to, more than I might’ve liked as well, for when she later asks me how I liked the book, I respond in purely literary terms. Though I go on pretending nothing beyond that interests me, I can’t escape the feeling that I too have been marked and deciphered and underscored, that even my deepest secrets have been subject to her claims as a reader. But what if she’d read me incorrectly? Or worse, what if all along she’d only taken me literally, simply as I appeared to be?

  Without the Color Red

  The lunchtime crowd was filing in and the waiter’s disapproving stare let me know that I was taking up space. His blue shirt was missing a button and the damp underarms appeared to be dyed. Days before, I saw his face in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype at the Chicago History Museum. He was lying on a sidewalk in a pool of blood and, according to the caption, he’d been beaten with a pipe at a workers’ rally in Haymarket Square. A semicircle of men had gathered around him and, because the image took time to develop, they stood with fixed, inexpressive stares. At the center of the group, one of the men, who was wearing a hat, was holding a hat, the way magicians do, with the inside turned toward the camera, as if to prove the corpse is real.

  Act One

  Although a number of the cafeteria tables were empty, a man and woman stood near a wall beside a vitri
ne in which the few remaining sandwiches were lined up side by side. She was well along in her pregnancy, and he had a way of rising up onto the balls of his feet as if peering over a fence. But by sipping her soda through a straw, then using the straw to stab at a piece of ice, she managed to ignore him altogether. And yet, hoping beyond hope, he kept rising onto the balls of his feet, he kept peering over the fence.

  Her Hair Tied Back in Braids

  A sudden, audible yawn—her mouth so wide it doesn’t appear to be part of her face—from a girl reading at the library table. Then just as abruptly she closes her mouth and scans the room with the quiet, cow-eyed gaze so admired by the Etruscan painters.

  On the Lower Order of Seraphim

  From the tarmac spanning the lakefront, a group of teenagers dove, flipped, jackknifed into the water. Two days later, as if memory had been caught out in a lie, at the same spot, at the same time of day, another group of teenagers waded through water not deep enough to swim. Having drifted apart from her friends, a light-haired girl appeared to search the shallows, her hands moving on the surface in the slow circular motions of someone polishing a lens. Given that the summer was just beginning, her back was a blotchy pink—perhaps the lotion hadn’t been evenly applied?—and where the strap of her suit had slipped, a lurid band, like a surgical scar, bisected the curve of her shoulder.

  A Door Left Open for the Moths

  We argued. We sulked. She walked out in the morning and walked back in the afternoon. After an early evening nap, we tried to make nothing of it. I set up the outdoor table, she peeled potatoes and turnips for stew. If only for the sake of conversation, we decided after dinner to talk about the past. As if quoting a line from a poem she said, “I never thought it would come to this.” Silence. Then we cleared the table and blew the votive candles out. Stars came after. And darkness cheeped like a tiny bird.

  Where Once a Small Branch Fell

  Across a lightless landscape, a passenger train travels past, its eight airless, earth-colored cars trailing a loosening plume of smoke that thins into vapor behind them. Idling at the crossroads, I can see the blank faces staring out at the winter fields whose dense oak and poplar woods (where I hunted squirrels as a boy) were long ago cut down. On her way home from the Catholic school, a thirteen-year-old girl was dragged into those woods, raped, burned with matches and strangled with an extension cord. When two years later the woods were cleared, the “crime scene” was cleared away with it, and the memorial the family maintained—a small wooden cross wound round with flowering plastic vines—disappeared as well.

  Out of the World There Passed a Soul

  The hour of my mother’s funeral I spent clearing out her overgrown flowerbeds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nutshells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to do not feel what had to be done, not to go on asking, not to wonder anymore. Full from scraps I’d found at the back of the refrigerator, a mongrel dog lay curled on a stone and watched me work. It was Sunday. The telephone rang, then stopped, then rang again. By the end of the day I’d done what I could, so I swept the porch, switched on the outdoor safety lights and, locking the side gate behind me, walked away from a house where no one lived anymore.

  [. . .]

  Every evening at dockside, the same men in yellow oilskins step on and off their fishing boats. On one of those evenings, as the dog days were drawing to an end, one of the men accused another of stealing his traps, jabbing his finger in the direction of the sea, his cheeks red and swollen as if from blowing on a horn. On an overturned bucket in the boat, a transistor radio was playing a popular song, and the boy on board, gaff in hand, went about his business singing along. Interrupting himself, the accusing fisherman yelled at the boy to keep it down, and the boy in turn turned to me and asked me who I thought I was. If only I could say it ended there, but guided by the logic of cause and effect, a chain of events had already been set in motion. So I remained where I was, imagining this, imagining that, waiting for what was still to come.

  SECTION

  3

  I WAS AT ONE TIME CLOSE TO HOME

  I arrived early in the afternoon and, on the advice of the woman who checked me in, had lunch at a local restaurant. The walls were a dark mahogany against which open portholes framed a series of painted nautical scenes rooted in local lore. The coasters were shaped like a captain’s wheel, a drawing on the scalloped tablemat pointed north through a spyglass to the whaling station the state shut down a century before. My first thought was, Mother would’ve liked it, but Mother is dead, her soul having slipped through a pinhole in the bedroom blinds with which in the last years of her life she’d banished all natural light.

  •

  I chose a table by the window and watched, pigeon-toed up by the backwash entering the harbor slips, the returning squid and albacore boats reverse against the piles, each one an image I perceived as an “event” and my watching it as an “activity.” Almost as soon as I sat down, I regretted not buying a paper, not so much to keep informed as to distract myself from the traveler’s sense that if I don’t look now, something will be missed. Because, I supposed, a pebble was stuck in the sole of my shoe, moving my foot—which I soon found difficult not to do—was like skating on ice, the loops and cursives scrawling out beneath me. So thin the ice. And the hand that pressed against it from below.

  •

  Once the meal arrived I felt fortified by the day-to-day rituals of taking bread from a breadbasket, cutting into a piece of meat, tasting for salt and pepper. If someone had been with me, I might’ve made a toast and had my toast returned. But then, weren’t all the diners “with me”? To those who were close I felt closest, yes, but to those on the other side of the room I felt an affinity as well. In fact, it wasn’t all that hard to imagine pulling our tables together and having the meal delivered to us on serving platters we passed from one to the other. I could see myself, as everyone rose to make their goodbyes, patting the head of a child, taking the arm of an elderly woman, shaking hands with all the new friends I’d made.

  •

  After a long drizzly offshore fog, the sky finally cleared, and it went on clearing throughout the day, the sun getting brighter by the hour, seabirds circling like ashes in the air. And then, as if a second sun appeared in another quadrant of the sky, the heavy, flexing surface of the water radiated outward from a central flare, the widening rings overrunning the pier until it seemed that only shadows remained, holding the places for what was gone.

  •

  As if we shared in the same experience, people on the street kept pace with me, and I did my best to keep pace with them. When I made an effort to meet each glance, my gesture was returned in kind, and throughout the afternoon I went on responding to this, not that, going here, not there, trusting myself to fate. In the Shipman’s Bar I basked in the secret knowledge that something was going to happen, that someone was going to arrive and, immediately, go away, or not go away, or stay and not go anywhere and never go away. Had the bartender engaged me in conversation, I would’ve shown great interest in whatever subject he raised, but how much more I would’ve liked to take the next step and buy a round of drinks, or pour my heart out to anyone close enough to hear.

  •

  In the early evening there were very few people on the streets—even the restaurants appeared half-empty—which was fine with me. Plenty, perhaps too much, had already happened, and I replayed in my mind the time I’d spent watching a pair of copulating flies on a windowsill, the book I’d read in a coffee shop about the bandit Tiburcio Vásquez, the walk I’d taken at low tide to search among the rock pools for anemones. After such a long day of sensations, I not only felt exhausted, I also felt I’d lost the means to think coherently about anything. Even though it was early, I looked forward to the moment when I’d return to my room, put myself to bed and, in the slow rotation of the bedside fan, turn my back on my surroundings.

  •

  Sleep came a
nd passed and in between a dream of her lying in bed while the caregiver, with the absurdly repetitive movements of someone rehearsing a play, dressed her naked body in the clothes she’d be cremated in. Rising earlier than usual, I went outside to get some air, but as soon as I closed the door I was struck by an irrepressible urge to break into a run. So I ran, and I kept on running, and I didn’t stop until, unable to run any longer, I collapsed on the verge of an open field. The grasses blew from right to left. From right to left a contrail crossed so high overhead I couldn’t see the plane it issued from. Birds, shadows, treetops, everything moved, one thing following another, all moved in the direction of the wind.

  •

  By the time I got back to my room I realized there was no point in staying on longer. The news reported that up and down the coast the weather was clear and would remain that way for the rest of the day. If I left by noon I’d be back in my apartment before dark, and it was there I knew that in a day or two I would try again, jotting down the intermittent notes, organizing notes into sentences, endlessly erasing and filling in. At the very least that was something to do—perhaps that was all there was to do—but surely that was not nothing. Surely it didn’t end there.

  SECTION

  4

  LIFE AMONG THE VANISHED

  Fellini Attended by Nuns

  The drugs he was administered left him comatose for hours on end, and in between, in moments of semiconsciousness, he floated through a realm of intense, horrifying visions: his room like the inside of a mouth; his head like a small good-luck egg, the kind one sees in bakery windows lying on a piece of tulle; the entire façade of the Palermo cathedral collapsing around his bed. Awake, he wondered if he was dying, and he wondered if he was dying from fear. But fear of what? That the film he was planning to make—Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, which he never made—exceeded his strength to do so. In time, the hallucinations were replaced by a greater fear: that things were only what they were. The telephone was a telephone, the bed was a bed, the door did what doors do. And no matter how hard he struggled, no matter how much he focused his attention, nothing was more than it was meant to be. And yet voices went on asking: “Would you like some paper?” “Can I bring you a pen?”