his mind a little too,” he adds, pulling on the bill
of his Sherwin-Williams cap.
Jim had to stand and watch as the helicopter
grappled with, then lifted, his son’s body from the river
with tongs. “They used like a big pair of kitchen tongs
for it, if you can imagine. Attached to a cable. But God always
takes the sweetest ones, don’t He?” Mr Sears says. He has
His own mysterious purposes.” “What do you think about it?”
I want to know. “I don’t want to think,” he says. “We
can’t ask or question His ways. It’s not for us to know.
I just know He taken him home now, the little one.”
He goes on to tell me Jim Sr’s wife took him to thirteen foreign
countries in Europe in hopes it’d help him get over it. But
it didn’t. He couldn’t. “Mission unaccomplished,” Howard says.
Jim’s come down with Parkinson’s disease. What next?
He’s home from Europe now, but still blames himself
for sending Jim Jr back to the car that morning to look for
that thermos of lemonade. They didn’t need any lemonade
that day! Lord, lord, what was he thinking of, Jim Sr has said
a hundred—no, a thousand—times now, and to anyone who will
still listen. If only he hadn’t made lemonade in the first
place that morning! What could he have been thinking about?
Further, if they hadn’t shopped the night before at Safeway, and
if that bin of yellowy lemons hadn’t stood next to where they
kept the oranges, apples, grapefruit and bananas.
That’s what Jim Sr had really wanted to buy, some oranges
and apples, not lemons for lemonade, forget lemons, he hated
lemons—at least now he did—but Jim Jr, he liked lemonade,
always had. He wanted lemonade.
“Let’s look at it this way,” Jim Sr would say, “those lemons
had to come from someplace, didn’t they? The Imperial Valley,
probably, or else over near Sacramento, they raise lemons
there, right?” They had to be planted and irrigated and
watched over and then pitched into sacks by field workers and
weighed and then dumped into boxes and shipped by rail or
truck to this god-forsaken place where a man can’t do anything
but lose his children! Those boxes would’ve been off-loaded
from the truck by boys not much older than Jim Jr himself.
Then they had to be uncrated and poured all yellow and
lemony-smelling out of their crates by those boys, and washed
and sprayed by some kid who was still living, walking around town,
living and breathing, big as you please. Then they were carried
into the store and placed in that bin under that eye-catching sign
that said Have You Had Fresh Lemonade Lately? As Jim Sr’s
reckoning went, it harks all the way back to first causes, back to
the first lemon cultivated on earth. If there hadn’t been any lemons
on earth, and there hadn’t been any Safeway store, well, Jim would
still have his son, right? And Howard Sears would still have his
grandson, sure. You see, there were a lot of people involved
in this tragedy. There were the farmers and the pickers of lemons,
the truck drivers, the big Safeway store.… Jim Sr, too, he was ready
to assume his share of responsibility, of course. He was the most
guilty of all. But he was still in his nosedive, Howard Sears
told me. Still, he had to pull out of this somehow and go on.
Everybody’s heart was broken, right. Even so.
Not long ago Jim Sr’s wife got him started in a little
wood-carving class here in town. Now he’s trying to whittle bears
and seals, owls, eagles, seagulls, anything, but
he can’t stick to any one creature long enough to finish
the job, is Mr Sears’s assessment. The trouble is, Howard Sears
goes on, every time Jim Sr looks up from his lathe, or his
carving knife, he sees his son breaking out of the water downriver,
and rising up—being reeled in, so to speak—beginning to turn and
turn in circles until he was up, way up above the fir trees, tongs
sticking out of his back, and then the copter turning and swinging
upriver, accompanied by the roar and whap-whap of
the chopper blades. Jim Jr passing now over the searchers who
line the bank of the river. His arms are stretched out from his sides,
and drops of water fly out from him. He passes overhead once more,
closer now, and then returns a minute later to be deposited, ever
so gently laid down, directly at the feet of his father. A man
who, having seen everything now—his dead son rise from the river
in the grip of metal pinchers and turn and turn in circles flying
above the tree line—would like nothing more now than
to just die. But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers
sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly
he was given that other lifetime.
Such Diamonds
It was a glorious morning. The sun was shining brightly and
cleaving with its rays the layers of white snow
still lingering here and there. The snow as it took leave of
the earth glittered with such diamonds that it hurt the eyes
to look, while the young winter corn was hastily thrusting up
its green beside it. The rooks floated with dignity over
the fields. A rook would fly, drop
to earth, and give several hops before standing firmly
on its feet.…
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“A Nightmare”
Wake Up
In June, in the Kyborg Castle, in the canton
of Zurich, in the late afternoon, in the room
underneath the chapel, in the dungeon,
the executioner’s block hunches on the floor next
to the Iron Maiden in her iron gown. Her serene features
are engraved with a little noncommittal smile. If
you ever once slipped inside her she closed her spiked
interior on you like a demon, like one
possessed. Embrace—that word on the card next to
the phrase “no escape from.”
Over in a corner stands the rack, a dreamlike
contrivance that did all it was called on to do, and more,
no questions asked. And if the victim passed out
too soon from pain, as his bones were being broken
one by one, the torturers simply threw a bucket of water
on him and woke him up. Woke him again,
later, if necessary. They were thorough. They knew
what they were doing.
The bucket is gone, but there’s an old cherrywood
crucifix up on the wall in a corner of the room:
Christ hanging on his cross, of course, what else?
The torturers were human after all, yes? And who
knows—at the last minute their victim might see
the light, some chink of understanding, even acceptance of
his fate might break, might pour into his nearly molten
heart. Jesu Christo, my Savior.
I stare at the block. Why not? Why not indeed?
Who hasn’t ever wanted to stick his neck out without fear
of consequence? Who hasn’t wanted to lay his life on the line,
then draw back at the last minute?
Who, secretly, doesn’t lust after every experience?
It’s late. There’s nobody else in the dungeon but us,
she and me, the North Pole and the South. I drop down
to my knees on the stone floor, grasp my hands behind
my back, and lay my head on the block. Inch it forward
into the pulse-filled groove until my throat fits the shallow
depression. I close my eyes, draw a breath. A deep breath.
The air thicker somehow, as if I can almost taste it.
For a moment, calm now, I feel I could almost drift off.
Wake up, she says, and I do, turn my head over to see
her standing above me with her arms raised. I see the axe too,
the one she pretends to hold, so heavy it’s all she
can do to hold it up over her shoulder. Only kidding,
she says, and lowers her arms, and the idea-of-axe, then
grins. I’m not finished yet, I say. A minute later, when I
do it again, put my head back down on the block, in
the same polished groove, eyes closed, heart racing
a little now, there’s no time for the prayer forming in my
throat. It drops unfinished from my lips as I hear her
sudden movement. Feel flesh against my flesh as the sharp
wedge of her hand comes down unswervingly to the base of
my skull and I tilt, nose over chin into the last
of sight, of whatever sheen or rapture I can grasp to take
with me, wherever I’m bound.
You can get up now, she says, and
I do. I push myself up off my knees, and I look at her,
neither of us smiling, just shaky
and not ourselves. Then her smile and my arm going
around her hips as we walk into the next corridor
needing the light. And outside then, in the open, needing more.
What the Doctor Said
He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may even have thanked him habit being so strong
Let’s Roar, Your Honor
To scream with pain, to cry, to summon help, to call
generally—all that is described here as “roaring.”
In Siberia not only bears roar, but sparrows and mice as well.
“The cat got it, and it’s roaring,” they say of a mouse.
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Across Siberia”
Proposal
I ask her and then she asks me. We each
accept. There’s no back and forth about it. After nearly eleven years
together, we know our minds and more. And this postponement, it’s
ripened too. Makes sense now. I suppose we should be
in a rose-filled garden or at least on a beautiful cliff overhanging
the sea, but we’re on the couch, the one where sleep
sometimes catches us with our books open, or
some old Bette Davis movie unspools
in glamorous black and white—flames in the fireplace dancing
menacingly in the background as she ascends the marble
staircase with a sweet little snub-nosed
revolver, intending to snuff her ex-lover, the fur coat
he bought her draped loosely over her shoulders. Oh lovely, oh lethal
entanglements. In such a world
to be true.
A few days back some things got clear
about there not being all those years ahead we’d kept
assuming. The doctor going on finally about “the shell” I’d be
leaving behind, doing his best to steer us away from the vale of
tears and foreboding. “But he loves his life,” I heard a voice say.
Hers. And the young doctor, hardly skipping a beat, “I know.
I guess you have to go through those seven stages. But you end
up in acceptance.”
After that we went to lunch in a little café we’d never
been in before. She had pastrami. I had soup. A lot
of other people were having lunch too. Luckily
nobody we knew. We had plans to make, time pressing down
on us like a vise, squeezing out hope to make room for
the everlasting—that word making me want to shout “Is there
an Egyptian in the house?”
Back home we held on to each other and, without
embarrassment or caginess, let it all reach full meaning. This
was it, so any holding back had to be stupid, had to be
insane and meager. How many ever get to this? I thought
at the time. It’s not far from here to needing
a celebration, a joining, a bringing of friends into it,
a handing out of champagne and
Perrier. “Reno,” I said. “Let’s go to Reno and get married.”
In Reno, I told her, it’s marriages
and remarriages twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. No
waiting period. Just “I do.” And “I do.” And if you slip
the preacher ten bucks extra, maybe he’ll even furnish
a witness. Sure, she’d heard all
those stories of divorcees tossing their wedding rings into
the Truckee River and marching up to the altar ten minutes later
with someone new. Hadn’t she thrown her own last wedding band
into the Irish Sea? But she agreed. Reno was just
the place. She had a green cotton dress I’d bought her in Bath.
She’d send it to the cleaners.
We were getting ready, as if we’d found an answer to
that question of what’s left
when there’s no more hope: the muffled sound of dice coming
down
the felt-covered table, the click of the wheel,
the slots ringing on into the night, and one more, one
more chance. And then that suite we engaged for.
Cherish
From the window I see her bend to the roses
holding close to the bloom so as not to
prick her fingers. With the other hand she clips, pauses and
clips, more alone in the world
than I had known. She won’t
look up, not now. She’s alone
with roses and with something else I can only think, not
say. I know the names of those bushes
given for our late wedding: Love, Honor, Cherish —
this last the rose she holds out to me suddenly, having
entered the house between glances. I press
my nose to it, draw the sweetness in, let it cling—scent
of promise, of treasure. My hand on her wrist to bring her close,
her eyes green as river-moss. Saying it then, against
what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurrie
d petal
can still find her.
Gravy
No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”
No Need
I see an empty place at the table.
Whose? Who else’s? Who am I kidding?
The boat’s waiting. No need for oars
or a wind. I’ve left the key
in the same place. You know where.
Remember me and all we did together.
Now, hold me tight. That’s it. Kiss me
hard on the lips. There. Now
let me go, my dearest. Let me go.
We shall not meet again in this life,
so kiss me goodbye now. Here, kiss me again.
Once more. There. That’s enough.
Now, my dearest, let me go.
It’s time to be on the way.
Through the Boughs
Down below the window, on the deck, some ragged-looking
birds gather at the feeder. The same birds, I think,
that come every day to eat and quarrel. Time was, time was,
they cry and strike at each other. It’s nearly time, yes.
The sky stays dark all day, the wind is from the west and
won’t stop blowing.… Give me your hand for a time. Hold on
to mine. That’s right, yes. Squeeze hard. Time was we
thought we had time on our side. Time was, time was,
those ragged birds cry.
Afterglow
The dusk of evening comes on. Earlier a little rain
All of Us: The Collected Poems Page 26
