Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  But yellow gets to be glorious, too. And its brightness not wholly awful. Such a yellow scours sight, fattens it. It is uncorruptedly lemonlike. And the sharp bolt of black on the wing shines like a whip of licorice. At the end of the path and around the bend, here’s the coming-upon again. The moment itself doesn’t close down. Its brightness is not a slamming door. Yellow’s not trying to make up for the end.

  Time crests there.

  The weather patterns.

  Fish in the lake. Dogs by the shore with laughing kids.

  Why must a last moment be made so visible? And held aloft! Why must it dangle, and shift so softly, and keep on making a finality? From it, light rises. On it light settles. Slippery as tallow. Shushing in breeze.

  I think it’s good to be in a place where thought can’t form the usual way, and a familiar scene—a bird-in-a-tree—gets overturned. Dissembled. Made into a precarity. Looked at one way: cornucopic. Tilted another, it goes sepulchral. How close those can be.

  Someone might come and cut the bird down. Or I will, tomorrow.

  And after the bird’s gone, what would be there, as I come through the trees and around the bend—what, besides shots of memory? An arch of branches over the lake? A green frame around a spot of blue sky, rowboats in a fringe of rushes, the cattails and milkweed about to burst—and past the tangle, just the lake again?

  Once, that spot worked like a bower. I liked to walk there and pause at the turn, and enter it, and feel contained. Then, into the bower rained a bird. Dropped a bird. Now swings a bird. Hangs a bird. Yellow shines and yellow ripens. Somewhere are sparrows in a field, seen and watched over the story goes, and counted, even as they fall. But come stand in this clearing, late afternoon, the still lake fuzzed with gnats in the shade, the oak’s heavy green branch overhead, and lean just so. Center the goldfinch in the frame, squint a little, hold in sight—a planet, flecklet, blot on sun.

  A ripe pear, a portent, an airless balloon.

  A being whose falling was noted, was seen, whose end was tallied (by the hand of, if you believe.)

  An occasion for wondering what it feels like to believe.

  There Are Things Awry Here

  I found a perimeter, thank God, and I’m walking. I’m making an hour of it, finding a way to get my breathing going hard. These four big lots with big box stores must compass a mile. Measuring helps. I am here (quick check: yes, panting and sweaty) but it feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers at all. So I’ll get to work, in the way I know how:

  Here is a farmer entering a black field. He’s a proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery, with a serviceable rope looped over his arm. But the farmer comes out of a logo’d truck and the rope links up to a ChemLawn can and off he goes to tend the weeds asserting through the blacktop. He pisses I don’t know where during his long day in the sun. His hat’s a tattered, red, GO BAMA cap. His tin lunchpail is a bag from Popeye’s, just down the road (I mean highway).

  Here is a rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock. He’s nearly cantering over the brown grass, it’s already cropped short, but hey, he’s on contract, it’s the 15th of the month, so he comes to harrow the edge of the lot. The rancher rides masterfully and the mower goes fast; he turns sharply, leans into the bit, and the beast resists not at all.

  Here are the animals branded and waiting, they’re tired, they stopped where the grass was fresh and a pond provided. It’s dusk coming on, a slight chill picking up that turns them toward home, but they don’t raise their heads, catch a scent of dog, of round-up coming. The herd’s mixed. “MsBob” is all in with “Luvbun” and “GoTide.” “Bubbaboy,” “Nully,” and “Sphinx” are there, too. The stock are purebred Camaros, Explorers, Elantras, Legends. Docile and ragged. Worn, overfed.

  More is wrong.

  The flags are frozen. They’re fifty feet high but don’t move in wind and they carry no sentiment, like “these we hoist high over our small town/farm/ranch to keep alive spirit, memory, fervor. . . .” The flags have names: Ryan’s, Outback, Hooters (best saloon in town, I’d say, judging by all the horses tied up out front). IHOP. Waffle House. Wal-Mart on a far—I’d like to say “hill” but that’s out of the question, the hill’s been dozed, subdued into “rise.”

  Here is a field between parking lots—real grass and dirt with bottles tossed in, amber longnecks, flat clears of hard stuff. The word “artifact” comes, but it’s bumped out by “garbage,” the depths are all wrong, and in a matter of weeks it will all be turned over. Not a field’s breaking. Not loamy and clod-filled. More Tyvek and tar. By which things are wrapped, laid in, erected. How easily the new names for “seasons” come forth: undeveloped, developing, development, developed. Skirting the site I lose options like “fallow,” that yearlong rest wherein land regains strength. I’m losing the language for thoughts about gleaning. “Crop” goes to “cropping” as in Photoshop fixing. (And the term “Photoshopping”—wow, that gets confusing.)

  Here is a farm woman, her shawl held against wind. It’s late February in Tuscaloosa, and the tornadoes that hit farther south last week are still lending their kick. She leans into the gust as she crosses, with bags, the black earth (I’m thinking that black below tar), the damp earth (I say earth out of habit, I see), but it’s very well marked, white lines intersect, and the acre or so she’s covered (I’m holding on here, with “acre” as measure) is field distance, but it’s not a field anymore. She’s juggling bags and pinning her name tag, she works at the Cobb, the town’s multiplex, and she’s late for her shift. On my next turn around the series of lots, she’ll be behind glass, with money and tickets. Smoothing her hair. Gulping her Big Gulp. Settling. (Settler. Settlement. Sigh.)

  A bit farther on, here is a mailbox with its red flag flipped up, in front of the Marriott, my closest neighbor (I’m a Hilton-Tuscaloosa guest for the week.) It’s a wooden mailbox on a wooden post, which means “rustic”—and truly, it is weatherworn. Around each fire hydrant—the hotels here in parking lot land are each fitted with two stumpy blue ones—grows a thicket of bushes. To hide the hydrant. Though in any small town, hydrants are red and freestanding on actual street corners. This greenery means to convey “tended garden.” Which makes the hydrant a reverse sort of flower, one that emits water. Which I guess fits the whole upended scene.

  Here are four tall trees in a tangly grove—former trees because now they’re dead, though a grove, I know, accommodates all forms of growth and decomposition, all cycles and stages. Long, bare branches and rough, broken ones alternate all the way down. It’s the kind of ex-tree that might draw an owl (that’s what I’m conjuring, a native barred owl), it’s got to be full of grubs just beginning to stir, and it offers a safe, clear view of the land. In the air is the scent of burning something. Highway and rubber. Diesel and speed. In fact, it’s all over—had I known such a smell as a kid, I’d not notice, or only on days when the wind kicked up. Poor farm wife in her booth, her hair tangled and blown. Gusts helping my rancher into his stable, right up the ramp and the tailgate slams shut. And my farmer—he’s holding his rope low and firm while it leaks a bright poison as yellow and brief as a corn snake sunning, then startled, then disappearing back into the ground.

  Here in the lot is some corrugated cardboard I thought was an animal’s vertebrae (sign of hope, life in burrows!). Here the Brinks truck is outside The Cobb, and the driver is armed, as he’s been since the beginning of transfers of loot. Here, with a thought to my love up north, I pluck a dandelion (it escaped the farmer), the gesture complete as it’s always been—small, flowery symbol of tender missing. I passed a shard of—it looked like pottery (domestic life/human scale!)—but close up was a shorn chunk of thick plastic.

  And before the Committee on Irrevocable Mistakes chose this to do to the land—plant tar, seed commerce—here was what?

  What was here, that a body moved through it?

  Back
in my room I can’t shake the sensation (despite my dandelion in a plastic cup, curtains wide open, basket of apples to naturalize things): a strangeness, an insistence is hovering. The strangeness makes me say aloud to myself—something had to be here, something had been.

  Something made me make stand-ins, cut-outs, cartoons. It made me possessive, led me to say “my rancher, my farmer, my good farmer’s wife”—mine, because I had to make them. From scratch. Out of something. Had to make them look like. A past. “The past.” I conjured clichés (which come fashioned with roots.) I had to make something, because the land couldn’t do it. The land gave nothing up. There was no plan, no narrative here, or tether-back-to. Just boxes to eat in. Big boxes for shopping. One boxy theater with nine movies plexed in. The parking lots gaped. Snipped, sprayed and divided. Unpeopled. Tidied for no one.

  Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts—voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks, sops and sprouts. But this land didn’t read. It babbled the way useless things babble—fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubly plaques for occasions, ConGRADulation mugs / frames /figurines. Capped, crusted, contained, so laden with stuff—how can it breathe?

  Here, surely, went people with thoughts, in the past—and not as I conjured them: fleet, makeshifty odes, dumb stock-assumptions, citified cartoons, with force of wind, vast stretch of blacktop shaping my story of them very poorly. (Points, maybe, for hale traits I imbued: reticence, dignity, industriousness, skill!) My folks were as flat as those cowboy silhouettes slouched up against mailboxes, but the drive to olden them, tie them back to the earth, give them good pastoral work was real.

  I’ll start over, since this is America, land of beginnings. Since overnight, here didn’t clarify at all, I’ll start again, very simply, with my simple problem:

  Here it’s February 2008, and I can’t figure out how to get my body to land in a land where the present’s not speaking. Where stories won’t take, and walking is sliding. I found a cadence to quiet the chatter, a word useful for focus and pacing out steps—“Refuse,” which I used as both re-FUSE and REF-use, resistance-meets-garbage, iambic /trochaic, sing-songy, buoyant—but alas, it ordered not much. So today I go searching in earnest. To the library first, then around the corner to Special Collections where I blurt my question to the expert on duty: Near the site of The Cobb—that whole south side of town (“mess of emptiness” I’m conveying with pauses)—by the Big K and Hooters (“that awful nowhere” suggested by sighs), before all that, what was there?

  Ah, she says, disappearing in the back, then returning with a stack of yellowing magazines. Here, try these.

  I find a clear table, spread the magazines out and turn the dry pages.

  Once it was February 1942 here. It was British Cadet Class 42E at the Alabama Institute of Aeronautics, a wartime flying school operating in cooperation with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Here First Captain Wheeler wrote in Fins and Flippers, the cadets’ magazine, a note of gratitude to the American trainers “for interpreting their training system in a manner intelligible to we British Cadets.”

  Here, in their monthly, the cadets and their officers noted the welcomed, small acts of American civility, and laughed over their own displacement (Moors! Tuscaloosa!) all in the literary conventions of the time—yearbooky, vignettish, clean-cut and well-mannered.

  And just for a moment, the ugliness recedes (note of gratitude for the cadets, as they hover around, high in the blue, learning dials and gauges and jostling each other; note of—I can’t help it—pleasure, as I read to myself and their lovely accents kick in.) The pour of blacktop, the gray icing of curb, I’m being assured now, isn’t the earth. That’s its burnt crust. That’s its sackcloth for unholy times, before the Rapture comes and restores, assumes the earth back to woods, fields, shores where I might ramble and stroll—little myth I can’t help invoking, which more commonly goes, in my head, wordlessly: it’ll get better, it’ll be righted, cleaned and made pure, it will, how bad could it be, see how perfectly blue the sky is! (That’s stock-Lia talking, brightly, brightly because the ugliness hurts, the wincing is constant; that’s the me rucksacked up and ready for hiking, neverminding the dark and gathering clouds, grabbing a poncho, and let’s go everyone!)

  Here, near the Cobb, is the land where Mac wrote, in Fins and Flippers, a little piece called “Our London”:I remember the sun setting over the last rugged corner of Britain in a blaze of crimson magnificence that we saw when the ship sailed in August. I remember seeing the lights of Toronto start to blink from a small island on Lake Ontario. But best of all—I remember London.

  Though I am many thousands of miles away, I see her constantly, not as she stands now, bruised and battered, but as she was when I spent my adolescent initiation within her walls; and I am sorry that I was not able to appreciate her then as I do now. For in those days, Regent Street just signified to me the roads that led from Piccadilly Circus to Oxford Street. Charing Cross was just a station that served my purpose in going south. The same applied to Fleet Street, Cheapside and Soho, and a host of other fine places....

  Here, my students and I are reading Virginia Woolf, who worked in Mac’s London, right through the war, this very same war, on her own piece, “A Sketch of the Past.” Almost every entry begins with a mere nod to the war outside her window. Instead, it’s her past, her lost houses, land, family—whole eras gone, irre-placeably gone—that demand recounting:As we sat down to lunch two days ago . . . John came in, looked white about the gills, his pale eyes paler than usual, and said the French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate their terms to France. Meanwhile, on this very hot morning, with a blue bottle buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries in the Square, I sit in my room at 37 Mecklenburgh Square and turn to my father....

  Yesterday . . . five German raiders passed so close over Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate. But being alive today, and having a waste hour on my hands . . . I will go on with this story....

  Here, it’s London for us, when we gather, my students and I, three hours each night to talk about books, language, art—forms of flight, forms of landing. With my cadets, it’s getting less strange. All this sitting and reading together helps.

  Here, Ryan, one of my hosts, brought me an umbrella since I came unprepared for sudden storms. Here Group Captain Leonard Thorne notes, as I do, the residents of Tuscaloosa’s “wonderful hospitality and friendship.”

  Nights, here, I am much impressed by my Hilton stack-up of pillows. (I can easily be made to feel rich by an abundance of bedclothes, plumping them while watching bad, late-night TV, letting the excess fall to the floor.) Seems I would have played nicely with R.A.F. Hazlehurst who “still thinks a pillow is a weapon and not a headrest.” We’d have blurred the room with soft flying weapons. “Born and bred in Derbyshire. Educated at Winchester. ‘Dick’ to his buddies . . . ,” he’s the bareheaded one, no leather helmet-and-goggle set, or dress cap all the others wear, in their Fins and Flippers photo.

  And here is E. G. Gordon, transferred from the Royal Artillery Anti-Aircraft, born in London, educated at Kingsbury School, Middlesex, whose chief sport is boxing, who “claims to be the shortest man in the R.A.F and so lives in constant dread of six-foot blind dates.” Here, layered over the land, are his jitters, which, from his photo, it seems he makes light of: his flight cap is precipitously tilted, one side of his mouth hiked, mischievous, laughing, his tie expertly knotted, his meticulous uniform sharp-pressed and not especially diminutive-looking. Whatever he left behind of himself, whatever I sensed on my walk, subatomic, molecularly present—that which I now know to call E. G.—was right here. Was so young. In the photo, he’s no more than twenty. If he’s alive now, he’s older than my father.

  Here, I walk into class thinking Really I have nothing to say to these people, the prope
r study of writing is reading, is well-managed awe, desire to make a thing, stamina for finishing, adoration of language, and so on about reverie, solitude, etc. Here, sitting down, I’m going over my secret: I don’t want to be inspiring, I just want to write and they, too, should want that—let’s all agree to go home and work hard. I walk in, I see people with books, stacks of books I’ve asked them to read. Besides Woolf, there’s James Agee (let’s take that out class), who lived with the poorest white sharecroppers of Alabama and whose force of nature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was published in 1941, as he might add, Year of Our Lord, to dignify the event. (Event. I choose my word carefully, friends, for, as Agee writes, ‘this is a book only by necessity . . .’ let’s turn to page xi. . . .) Now I’m cooking. I, in my flight suit (black sweater and jeans) look into the faces of my cadets. Everyone’s eager. We walk to the runway. We find the ignition.