On Looking: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  One idly picks up pine cones, rocks, shells to mark a moment, to commemorate time. One picks them up because they shine out from their mud, or water lapping brightens their veins and shorn faces, or there they are, wedged inexplicably whole in a jetty and a spiral tip beckons, though the center be partial and broken.

  Deposition on Watches

  That week my watch broke, so I borrowed my son’s digital Monsters, Inc. watch. But I missed the clean, white face of my old one, and its circular sweep. The digital time dosed its minutes, shifted its numbers too economically one into the next, the angular 2 and angular 5 simple mirror images, a single bar across the middle making the 0 an 8. Then, as the days without school-time unwound and were lashed together instead by flares of fear, spots of love, solemn noon bell at the cathedral, all the morning’s held breath, all the whites piling, like suds, their calm expanse up, it was easy to wear no watch at all. But I have not become a person divested of watches. I miss the circle’s perpetuity, dawn and dusk sharing the same space, if only for minutes. The hour pinning itself to the changing light of seasons.

  The watch I want now—I saw a picture of it yesterday—posits a looker at the center, who, to properly see the numbers, would have to turn and face each one: already by 2 the numbers start to tilt, so that the 6 is a 9, if you’re outside looking in. But a 6 if you’re in the middle. I like to think of standing in the center, arms reaching out and brushing all the minutes and hours.

  I like the idea of turning to face the hour, having the hours arrayed around me. From a still point, having to face the increments of a day.

  Deposition on Failure

  Last May, I remember, on this very sidewalk: a fly’s soap-bubble, gasoline colors; taut grimace on the face of a baby bird, that hatched and unliving, ancient, pimpled bud on the grass; corms of daylilies, and “corm” itself that most perfect union of “corn” and “worm,” meaning exactly the thick, stubborn grub I hacked to separate. I remember the ripe, raw, shivery scents.

  But during this thaw, come on so fast now—just for a day, just for caprice, it was sixty degrees.

  And when I went out walking the sun was so soft—an assertion, bravura. Where warmth thawed the planes of bone like a high bank, my face was a running stream again. I took off my mittens and left them in the crook of a tree; it always takes a few days to believe the warmth.

  The snow receded, the warmth returned, and I was fine. I was negative. Negative, negative, I was thinking, buoyant. The hard winter lifted all at once, the sun came, dewy and beading, the air was sweet and I was fine—oh burgeoning cliché I entertained, cannot believe I entertained: spring bearing its blood-tide and life all abloom, all’s well ending well in a spate, a thrall of undulant weather, etc. Rising, on cue, such music as dripping icicles conduct, such shine and promise, oh window of light on the nibbled Red Delicious little Sam just dropped. And the neighbors’ voices carrying, the out-of-doors voices lofting, reconfiguring again the space between our houses: it was New World Symphony, English horn-solo-fresh. I was a turning season, a spit of land at low tide, a window thrown open. Would you believe it if I told you (told unto you, lo! for real) I saw a butterfly—and it was corn-yellow? I resisted the easy convergence—spring, warmth, I’m fine—not a bit, and I knew that to be an indulgence, a failure, partial sight. As if I had come to the brightness of that day wholly—wholly—from dark.

  But I cannot forget—for this is a deposition—that all that dark week there was this, too: the diamond-blue light at each drift’s core. My husband’s abundant embrace. Sanctum of my child under quilts. In candlelight, sewing the ghost. Folding a swan. With books, in the folds of a story. Our son, himself, that most beloved unfolding.

  And the color of the sky: workshirt-turned-inside-out, and the gray of our house against it, a darker inner seam, revealed. Our house an object light chose for lavishing, a river stone eddied into calm. The tender crack in a baking loaf, its creamy rift rough at the edges and going gold. Of all the names for snow considered, of all the shifts in tone it made, I found clamshell, bone, and pearl. That week I found lead in the white, mouse in it, and refracted granite. Talc with pepper. Layers of dried mud, zinc, and iron. Blown milkweed and ashy cinder. Silvered cornfield. Uncooked biscuit. Mummy, oatmeal, sand, and linen. Some morning glory. Some roadside aster.

  Spires

  I keep thinking of spires. How they must have appealed. That she might have wished for one to press her cheek to. I keep seeing rooftops, slate sharply pitched, as gray as high clouds, as a gathering storm. Smokestacks, the university’s turrets, tram lines spoking out from the center of Warsaw, north toward the apartment we shared, ten years ago now. I keep seeing the city from air.

  Ten years ago this All Souls’ Day we took the train out to spend the afternoon with her family. It got dark very early. At the cemetery in Skierniewice, the candles, graveside, sent up a glow, a warm light without edges. There were so many people to push our way through. So much going on. The mums at each plot and the tidying up. The villagers with rakes and trowels and bags. Silk flowers, carnations, evergreen boughs. The newly-turned graves, their dark soil, wet. The picnics on graves, the deceased as host. Sitting down with the family, and the vodka brought out. Meat wrapped in paper and hunks of hard cheese. Pickles in jars. The blackberry jam. The plum wine and fruit brandies. Orange rinds in thick syrup. Sour tomatoes. Hardboiled eggs. The cabbage in spices, vinegar, salt. This return every year to keep company, faith. To keep solace going.

  The church’s thin spire against early night. The dark overtaking and honing the point. Filing it. Spire: the harder I looked for it, the more quickly it seemed to dissolve.

  And after, back to her grandparents’ farm. The lean-to with bathroom, coats hanging, and workboots. Inside, the kitchen’s wood stove in a blaze. Soup going, and noodles. Walls stenciled with vines. Two small, high beds with crewel-work covers. Round tables with books, dried flowers, medicine. Steaming duck stew, blood sausage, pâtés, vegetable salads, brown bread, and more pickles. A hard bagel, blessed, and hung on a string along with the key to the wardrobe.

  A spire. Ascent. A holy send-off. But the letter that came today said nothing of spires. Mentioned just an apartment. That she jumped from up there. Apartments in Warsaw are flat-roofed and blocky, each one like the next. Apartments are boxes and the stairs lead you up. We lived together like that. On weekends we’d hear the knife-grinder’s bright bell as he wheeled his cart through the courtyard below. The long whine as he’d hold the blades to the stone. Then the noise growing faint as he pushed his cart on to the next courtyard and the next.

  Once visiting her parents, hours from Warsaw, we heard it again, from up on their roof. I think it was something she always did—go up for the quiet, the solitude, even in winter. Go up to isolate one sound among many. Knife grinder. Train whistle. From the living room’s balcony you could see—nothing. They hung their pheasants and quail out there, the meat so tender it fell from the bones and we picked shot from our mouths as we ate that night. Out there, the preserves and wrapped cheese stayed all winter. But you could see nothing. Just rows and rows of balconies piled with food and boxes and tools. So we went to the roof.

  And from there we saw—nothing. From there, Skierniewice was snow-patched and half-built. The stark land was flattened and scarred with trenches. The train station a blotch of coal smoke to the east. Kids crawling through drain pipes, kicking tangles of wire. Frozen tire-track humps, hardened in cold. Greasy puddles half-frozen, fumes heavy in air and the oil drums toppled. The dream of trees was years and years off. You walked past the blocks and blocks of apartments, not looking until you got to your door and then you ducked in and went up.

  From the roof you could see, she said, the whole town. The whole blasted site. The scandal of progress, the terrible hope. Landscape of false starts. Of political whim, invisible funds. Of work on hold. The dirty paths scuffed from street to door. She said, You can see the whole town from up here. (But not the neat market squar
e, miles off, no. Not the rough wooden tables abundant with oranges, beets, children’s striped socks even in winter. Not the old, cobbled streets with cottages, yards, and small, resourceful, winterproofed gardens.)

  She jumped from a roof, from forty floors up, two weeks before All Souls’ Day. A hard depression her friend’s letter said.

  Up there was no spire, just flatness, blacktopped. Stubborn, decisive, she would have known this: a spire’s a hook, a snag into light, a handhold, steadying. A stake in the sky, and she wanted none of it. She would go instead to a practical block, hunched on the earth. Modestly, to one with back stairs. I know how she climbed them—huffing and stopping to rest on the landing for only a second. Red-faced from the effort. We did it each day, going out, coming back: school, work, library, movie, museum. She’d have measured and thought the whole thing through, as she always thought through—anyone’s sadness, disappointment, neglect. Birthdays. Occasions.

  The street would be clear. She would carry ID.

  She would not leave a note.

  Ten years ago I sat at my window—reading and working, writing, translating, as she sat at hers across the hall. From there I could see young mothers with prams, sitting and chatting in the dry scruffy courtyard, their white breath gathering as they rebundled the children. I’d work and look out, work by looking—at nothing in particular: all the near balconies, tram cables, the highway, the bus lot that served as a market on Saturdays. Weigh and decide: this word or that one. Finish a line, go on to the next. I’d let the words come. I’d get up and come back, easing the distance between possibilities.

  Once while I was working I looked up and saw a woman digging her window box out with a fork. It was cold. Late November. She dug and pulled the dry stalks up, shook the roots and put the old flower heads into a little basket. Then she hit a tough spot—it must have been frozen—and had to dig hard. The fork caught the plant’s root and flipped it in air. She watched it go down. Put her hands on the rail and watched as it fell. Then she stopped altogether. Left the fork in. Left the window box like that, half-finished, all winter.

  (in memory, G. G.)

  On Invisibility

  It is black and dull and coiled like excrement between the overturned boats. Coiled like excrement—that was the phrase, word for word, and then I read that D.H. Lawrence saw a snake in just that way. Exactly that.

  I’ll go on anyway.

  Coiled like a rope dropped fast, coiled and dull as an arm after rowing, the slack muscle looped over bone and aching.

  It’s early fall and I am living for a while in the seam between weathers, with the whining of crickets and junketing locusts. A Viceroy dodges; the light spots on its wings are fine scales to sift the body through air. I move closer to the snake and it shifts, seeing me. Overturn the stone of my heart, I think. Being watched is something like being remade.

  Later that day, I stand in the place the snake was coiled, where its jawbones unhinged to swallow a frog and, when finished, the single rough scale of its eyelid dropped down and made the moment dark. I stand in the place its body was. And the place is fearsome and thickened with presence. I say God-fearing, which I’ve never said, and mean by that a trembling when walking on ground crosshatched by so many lives. I mean I fear being one of so many.

  Brown snake, barn snake, cow snake, no. “Common Water Snake” I read in the pocket guide, “vicious but not deadly.” I like the honesty, the drama delivered as simple fact: what flashing and tearing, struggle and edge—and recovery—the guide’s author observed to say that.

  I stand in the place where a water snake rested. Between overturned boats with their rusting chains. On a bare spot of ground with tufted, dried grass.

  And standing, I am stitched through by the hum and gather of wings on their way to a stand of cattails at edge of the lake.

  When I step away the grass springs back, then straightens in sun. The world seals up and I am gone.

  If the squirrels digging into our roof wore bells, we would hear them enter; then we could pound and scare them away before they got in. Barring that, you got a friend with a BB gun? the roofer asks. Makes them go away real quick.

  A woman in a sprawling suburb nearby is angry about bears. They come into her yard and topple the garbage cans. One day her dog cornered a bear near the fence—He did exactly as he was supposed to do to give us time to get away, she says. But soon the bear wouldn’t move at all; even as she banged on pots and yelled it wouldn’t leave. The bear comes around often now and she’s at the end of her rope. She wears a whistle all the time. Her kids can’t play in the yard, for fear, and the dog is locked up. Something’s got to be done.

  Make the bears invisible again. Invisible so that you must imagine: a bear once walked here, rocked this tree to shake down fruit before all the people moved into its space.

  And fenced the apple. And planted peach.

  Invisible: without a trace, kept out, planted over. Unseen.

  There are so many ways: a trap as big as an oil drum. A gun. Bait, which lulls the bear to sleep. Something to stun. Bracelets and collars. Dogs and alarms.

  In Bosch’s hell, being unseen is a sickening constant: the action’s all tripping, spilling, and cracking—all the bent bodies make a writhing mosaic—but no one is watching anyone else. If a tree were to fall in this forest of horrors there would be no philosophy, no koan about it—which requires the mind at nimble attention, human discussion, an idea in passing, passing along, gathering steam, gathering moss. And hell is being passed over untouched. Going glimpsed-but-unseen.

  As happens anywhere, midafternoon. Or any time soft chairs are lined up, and the applause signs flash in the TV studio. And viewers in their own homes receive: the roars, the devouring, the language in filtered, monotonous bleeps. The music cued up and dramatically fading. We hope that by bringing you the stories of these brave people you will be—what, moved? educated? But first we will see, we will see and see: the stubby limbs, the mountains of flesh and crushed, cobbled ears, bodies pierced like St. Sebastian’s, cruelty, fate, the huge boy’s face filling the screen. And in the audience, the twisted relief on all the faces: I am not he. Remember that, the music says: remember, so gratitude grows and flowers, grows heavy and sweet with strange-shaped flowers, spiked and dripping. Flower-talons.

  Ferocious, these toothy, untouchable flowers.

  Remember the toddler as big as a bear—and his normal-sized mother and normal-sized aunt who spray their hair stiff and blink, silver-lidded, under the lights like the shutters of passé machines.

  Framing us, whom they do not see.

  I play the hand-over-hand game with my son. He is three. What can I be when I am older? (Anything you want.) Maybe an artist and I can still live with you? (Of course, of course.) We take turns hiding, revealing, and slapping our hands back down to the kitchen table. His hand is a weight and a fragility. Here and gone. For long, heavy months I was filled and waiting, and then, once I held him, the loss rushed in: first he will be here and then he will not. First he is with me—and then I am the fragility. Here and then gone. For now, we slap our hands down, faster and faster and pull them away, down and away, down and away. We make a blur of our hands and we laugh about it.

  Once I looked in the mirror and saw—not a thing. So I made of my arm a sketchy ladder and climbed the pain up. I reeled myself into quietude. The pain was there, but the pain was good. It framed my body and held it still, until I could find myself again.

  I walk down to the lake, to the spot under trees, to the open space between overturned boats again. In this dusty place, a water snake sat coiled in sun like a vine, like a belt, tense arm, long shadow, and (thought through the ages, not mine alone) excrement. I stay a moment then slip away, quietly, that the snake might return, that it might be seen, oh let it be seen, dull, vicious, and coiled. Let it disgust and surprise someone else.

  On Praise

  My friend went down in a ditch of his own devising. A week later, dirty and stronger,
he emerged, and we stood, none of us ditch-diggers, at the edge of the hole he made for a sewerline, like a route, from street to house. “Nice hole,” the others said, but I was thinking how good it must have been, by this labor, to lower yourself into the ground to be held by the ground. How good, for a change, to stop and lean against the wall of your own work and measure with your body the achievement and the depth. With shoulders, keep even the width of the ditch. And resting, but not idly, take the earth between your fingers and roll your material to powder. Grind it between your teeth. Find it along the river of your spine.

  I did not want to say, to have to say I was impressed—though for the sake of others standing and admiring, and convention, I agreed. No one digs his own ditch these days. But praise for your effort called up an emptiness. And hearing the word aloud, “impressed,” an insufficiency. Because I know the way you work, stringing ligatures, stooping and rising with skeins and emulsions, with calipers of your own fashioning, cracking densities, minting and hoisting, probing and rowing toward. I know your precisely headlong way with undertakings: elsewhere, on a page. In a summer yard blackened with sour cherries. Photographing the cherries.