Category: Literary Features

Recipes That Aren’t Mine

Joe and I make refried beans on a Saturday morning while our four-month-old sits in a bouncer and gums his hands. We follow the recipe I’ve learned by watching my mom for years: heat oil in a deep pan, fold each white corn tortilla into four triangles, and toast them in the oil until they are brown and crisp. Joe always reminds me to flip the tortillas and remove them just when they are crispy, not a second later. I’ve burned dozens of tortillas in our two years of marriage, their pockmarked surfaces forming black bubbles. It’s always because I’m in a hurry, turning the heat up too high, or because I’m trying to get something else done at the same time—fry the rice, chop the cilantro. I return to smoking oil and charred chips. I’ve learned that the secret to this meal of refried beans, as with most Mexican food, is taking your time and giving it your attention.

 

—

 

When my parents were dating, my dad told my mom he had always wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom. They were sharing a meal my mom had made for him after a long day of work.

 

“You better be careful,” Mom said. “Someone might mistake that as a proposal.”

 

Dad, the story goes, blushed. “You never know—it might have been.”

 

Returning the jest, Mom smiled casually. “Well, you never know I might have said yes.”

 

Later that evening, he proposed to her on the San Antonio River Walk. He had no ring, no plan, really. I believe it was the only spur-of-the-moment decision he ever made in his adult life—my father the planner, the deliberator, the one I’m said to take after in my notorious cynicism.

 

I try to imagine what it was that overpowered him that day he proposed to Mom: love that disregarded fear and obstacles, a love effusive and daring, the kind of emotion I’ve rarely seen my practical, serious father express in words. A midwestern farm boy, he wasn’t raised to express feelings that way. Sometimes, when I think of Dad as a young man falling in love over food, I think also of the little boy finding comfort—love, safety, and home—in his mother’s cooking. I imagine meals were often my stoic grandmother’s only means of showing tenderness to her children. To say he wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom was to say he wanted a woman to share a home with.

 

On a Sunday morning, when I was having brunch at my parents’ house, Dad told me that beans and hot sauce have replaced mashed potatoes and gravy in his diet. I laughed, because I know how much Dad loves mashed potatoes and how much Mom hates them. She didn’t grow up with them and finds their texture unappetizing. I think of how Dad—born in Chicago, raised on a farm in Iowa—never ate a breakfast taco until he met Mom, born in Guadalajara and raised in San Antonio. Now he eats chorizo, eggs, beans, and jalapenos every morning for breakfast.

 

—

 

After I remove the tortilla chips, we let the oil cool a few minutes. I learned the need for this the hard way, too, from the time I poured an entire can of beans into the bubbling oil and ended up with a sprinkle of burns across my arm. When I told Mom, she scolded me in that strange way we get mad at people we love for hurting themselves.

 

“You have to wait,” she told me, a step I hadn’t remembered ever seeing her take. I simply assumed she’d learned the art of pouring beans into scalding oil without burning herself.

 

I’ve since made it Joe’s job to pour the beans into the pan, regardless of how cooled the oil is. This morning, we use a fifty-three-ounce can of Bush’s Pinto Beans, with their liquid. Joe and I joke that we have a problem, making too much for only two people.

 

“It was the smallest can I could find,” I say, but Joe is happy we’ll have leftovers for tacos later in the week.

 

—

 

Mom has used Bush’s for as long as I can remember, though she talks of a time she used to wash and boil her own beans.

 

“It takes too long,” she says now, “and Bush’s taste just as good.” On the rare occasions she makes frijoles borrachos, I’ve seen just how long it takes to prepare beans from scratch. She lays them out on a towel, their speckly, wiggly forms smooth as she runs her fingers over each one, feeling for bumps and sprouts. She throws out the misshapen ones, rearranges the remaining ones. Then she lets the beans soak in a cold-water bath overnight before boiling them until they’re soft, like butter, then adds tomatoes, cilantro, bacon, and a bottle of Corona beer to the broth. I asked her once if the bumpy beans are bad to eat.

 

“No,” she said. “I just want the pretty ones.”

 

She told me once that her dad, my Tito, used to carry out this bean ritual weekly, often recruiting her from backyard play or homework to help. She says there was always a pot of beans on the stove in her childhood home. Her family ate beans and rice almost every day.

 

“We were poor,” Mom says, which is a statement I realize I can’t understand, not the way she does. Beans and rice have never been the main dish at a family dinner I can remember. My grandparents both owned their own businesses, trades brought over from Mexico. My Tito was, and is, a shoe repairman; my Tita, a seamstress and a sculptor. But with five children, a language barrier, and dying trades, there were times when their hard work barely paid the bills. If they came to this country with the usual hopes of immigrants, their grandchildren even more than their children are the ones who have seen those hopes to fruition.

 

I think of the disparity between their lives and mine, of how much of who I am I’ve inherited from them and the world they came from. Some of those things are simple: the shape of my eyes, my ability to roll my “r’s,” my love for their simple, delicious food. Some of those things are more complex, specific to Mom’s family: a history of brokenness, abuse, and betrayal; a propensity for the dramatic, for storytelling. And yet, though I claim my Latina heritage, I only really know that world through Mom’s stories and recipes.

 

—

 

As Joe fries onions and corn tortillas for migas, another dish I’ve learned from Mom, I wait for the beans to heat back up. I watch as they turn frothy and bubbling, then take a potato masher and smash them into their broth. Once, Joe tried to mash them before they started to boil, and the masher made awkward chunks of the still too-hard beans. We learned that you have to wait until they’re soft, so that when you’re done smashing, the beans look almost like gravy.

 

I heat flour tortillas as I wait for the beans to cook. Joe laughs when I insist that the first tortilla, hot off the pan, go to testing the beans. It’s Mom’s tradition: standing in front of the hot stove, tortillas on a cast iron skillet, she’d rip the edge of one—her fingers moving quickly—and scoop the beans in their broth and hand it to me to taste. If it was too hot in my mouth, we knew they were ready. I do the same for Joe now, and he fits the whole piece of tortilla in his mouth in one bite.

 

“So good,” he says, and I smile, because he never ate refried beans for breakfast until he met me.

 

—

 

Mom tells me that, when I was born, she and Dad couldn’t afford to take pictures of me. With two children and Dad in grad school, film was an expense they couldn’t spare. Meanwhile, I scroll through the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken of my son on my iPhone, every snap as effortless and cheap as a can of beans.

 

I don’t remember those seasons of hardship, the years of hand-me-downs and one family car, when dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken counted as my parents’ date night. But I know their toll. I remember, even when we could afford new cars and a custom-built home, the nights when family dinners were disrupted by arguments so bitter they turned the food cold on our plates. Dad’s anger that Mom couldn’t keep to a budget. The stress of a job that kept him away on nights and weekends. The time his anger was so violent that he sent his fist into the drywall, and my brothers and I cried as a pot of Mexican rice sat untouched on the kitchen table. The time I asked Mom why they didn’t think their fighting hurt my brothers and me. If only I knew then how much she already knew that it did.

 

Years later, at my wedding, Dad whispered to me, “I pray Joseph is a better husband to you than I’ve been to your mom.” He was crying, that rare expressiveness surfacing, a vulnerability that told me that he knew, too, that my brothers and I felt the weight of his spousal mistakes, that we would carry them into our own marriages and families.

 

—

 

Joe asks if I want anything else with breakfast, and I add a handful of strawberries to the table of fried, Mexican food.

 

“Are you really going to eat those?” he asks, not because there’s anything wrong with the strawberries, but because I’m notorious for taking out strawberries and not eating them, leaving them to turn crusty and brown in a ceramic bowl all day.

 

“Yes,” I say, which will become a lie. The strawberries are there to make me feel healthy, though I will feel guilty later when I throw them away. Joe, who was not raised to calculate the cost of every item of wasted food, accepts my habit with patience.

 

Some weeks later, when he leaves a pot roast out overnight, forgetting to cover it and put it in the fridge, I’m the one who can’t contain her anger, refusing to speak to him for half the day. Because the roast was expensive, time consuming, the time and the money we don’t have now with a baby. It’s only the sight of him bouncing our son, making him laugh, that reminds me of all the times I wished my parents had weighed their marriage against their anger. A pot roast is pretty light in the scale.

 

—

 

When Mom got breast cancer six years ago, Dad blamed it on food, on the milk from cows treated with hormones, on the grill her parents didn’t scrape clean of charcoal carcinogens. He began to research with all the zeal of the academic he had been before three kids. Diet, he decided, was at the heart of health. He told Mom to buy organic, unprocessed food. He decided to turn the hobby farm he’d had since we were kids into a business, even though raising pigs and cows and chickens is exhausting in any climate, but especially in the heat of Texas summers.

 

Now, he sells farm-raised beef, pastured pork, and free-range eggs in an effort to teach people about sustainable farming and healthy living. But I know the deeper reason, even if he won’t say it, even if his fear for Mom turns into scolding when she doesn’t drink bone broth or cook with the right oils. I know there is love, duty, vigilance, even in his anger.

 

When I was pregnant, he told me I shouldn’t eat corn flakes because they might be tainted with Roundup. I started crying. Hormones aside, my tears were the realization of how deep his fear went. Food has become protection from cancer, from diseases without known cause. Food is how he can protect his family. When he and Mom tell us to read ingredients, to make baby food from scratch, Joe and I complain that they’re being paranoid. We remind them that we can’t afford to buy all organic food. But we also know that food has become their shelter against things beyond their control. We can’t blame them for wanting to build it over us.

 

—

 

Joe and I eat the entire pan of migas and nearly half of the beans; we serve them with a side of Herdez green salsa. I like to remind Joe that I know something about Mexican cuisine, especially when we go to his family’s house for dinners and they serve things like pre-packaged guacamole and cold tortillas. But there is always the part of me that feels like an imposter, like I’m trying to claim something that barely is mine. I use canned beans and store-bought tortillas. If Mom does the same, it’s because she’s trying to save time, and not because she doesn’t know how to make them from scratch. Still, there are dishes she won’t make because she says my Tito makes them better.

 

“Plus, they take way too long,” she says, and I can’t tell if that’s the real reason or the excuse for why I’ve never had her tamales or her menudo. I’ve never made salsa, or chile relleno, or mole from her recipes for the same reasons, and because of the part of me that feels those recipes aren’t mine to make. It is the same feeling that washes over me when I hear someone speaking in Spanish, those sounds and syllables that echoed through my childhood when Mom spoke over the phone to her parents or when she drilled me on conjugation and tense, lessons I can barely recall. I can’t speak Spanish, and yet its cadence feels like home. Like a home I’ve inherited, but I can’t find the key.

 

When people ask me why I can’t speak Spanish, I usually blame my parents: Mom didn’t speak it often enough at home because Dad couldn’t understand it. But if I’m honest, I know that I was the one who stopped practicing, who was too embarrassed by an accent that didn’t flow as smoothly as my mother’s. When it comes to my Mexican heritage, is it only half-known because Mom didn’t share enough with me, or because I am too afraid to enter the discomfort of my unknowing?

 

—

 

After our son was born, Mom drove the five hours to visit us twice over three weeks. She brought meat from Dad’s freezers and filled ours with meals from my childhood. Enchiladas, taco meat, Mexican rice. She spent all day cooking or holding our son while we napped or took short walks, tried to regain a semblance of normalcy in those first, volatile weeks.

 

I don’t remember very much from those sleep-deprived days, except for this feeling that everything was on the verge of breaking. My body. This tiny, hungry person who needed me constantly. Everything about life that Joe and I knew before he came. Everyone talks about the joy of newborns. Few talk about the fear—of failing, of death—that comes with them.

 

But when Mom was there, I felt my fears recede, a sense of reassurance in her cooking and her smile. The sense that the walls of our little apartment would hold up through all the sleepless nights and the strange, repetitive days filled with nothing and everything. Wrestling squirming legs into infant diapers, staring at the rise and fall of his chest as though all our lungs were encased by that tiny rib cage. And even when Mom left and we sat at our table with the reheated food she’d made for us, there was a wholeness created by a family dinner, a comfort in tastes we knew.

 

—

 

As we finish breakfast, our son begins to fuss, so Joe picks him up and sits him on his lap, lets him sit at the table and look at the empty plates and thickening beans.

 

“In a few months, you can try these,” I tell him as I scrape the spoon across the pan, because I know that beans were among my own first tries at solid foods. I wonder to myself if he’ll like them, because I know that both of my brothers aren’t fans of the dish. I wonder if doctors recommend feeding babies beans, or if it’s one of those things my parents did that experts now swear have a hundred health risks, like giving your baby a stuffed animal to sleep with or using baby sunblock. I decide I’ll follow Mom’s example with this one. Our son sticks his tongue out when he smiles, and I notice again that his eyes are Joe’s, but his nose is like mine.

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The Little Engine: Four Takes

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Echolocation & Proof

Echolocation

I begin with near-silence,

the droning refrigerator,

a dog barking far off.

You’ve just fallen asleep

as morning splinters

through the blinds.

He kicks off his boots,

braces himself on the dresser,

pulls at the leg of his jeans.

Something wakes you—

a knocked over jar of change,

a picture frame falling flat.

You must miss the feeling

of waking in the night

knowing exactly where

you are, hearing only

your brothers’ muffled voices

through the wall. Years later,

nights when my friends and I

stay up until dawn,

you’ll wake this way again

to laughter resonating

down the hall. One night,

to meet our girlfriends,

J. T. and I will sneak

to Arroyo Vista Park.

You’ll wedge a drumstick

in the window-track and wait

for our knock at the door.

After sending J. T. home,

you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know

somethin’ aint right. Because

this all feels close enough

to the truth, and because I have

no evidence I was made

the usual way—not even a picture

of you and my father together—

I’ve made this:

In splinters of

morning, you pull me from

his open mouth while he sleeps,

piece me together from handfuls

of his running breath, the small

sound of whitewater.

 

Proof

The fact is I was made

from what Whitman called

“father-stuff,” from a current

of you and from being held.

This—the raw physiology of it—

may explain why most fathers

think only of pushing their sons

into the world and most mothers

only of keeping them from it.

But the facts only tell us

half of every story, and never

the half we need. I have

a photograph taken just weeks

after I was born. I was

sleeping on your bare chest.

You were slouched in an armchair

with your fingers laced like rivulets

under my feet. These are facts—

even if you forgot, and even if all

I remember from being with you

before Arizona is the smell of

shop grease and dipping tobacco,

you once held me the way

a riverbed wants to hold a river.

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Code Blue Theater

You were the one whiteboy who came over to visit a house where usually there were only blackfolk. You were friends with Kevin—my boyfriend—his former co-worker at the nursing home. You extended your hand not to give me dap, or to pull me into a bro hug, or even to change the shape of your hand for a fist bump, but to clasp my palm, as in a transaction.

 

You didn’t say wassup or what it do, but nice to meet you.

 

Your name was Riley, and you were tall with dirty blond hair, blue eyes, a chipped tooth, and some might say you were cute.

 

You drank Natural Light, smoked cigarettes, and weed if it was passed your way.

 

You were addicted to opioids, but you’d been trying to quit, especially after your girlfriend quit you; she was a CNA where you and Kevin worked, but after dating you a while and you wouldn’t let the pills go, she let you go. You left the nursing home not long after that.

 

One day, three years later, when I was home on spring break from graduate school in Iowa City, I watched you overdose.

 

It happened on a Friday afternoon, when you were supposed to be cutting the backyard, even though the sky was gray and steadily darkening with threats of a rainstorm.

 

I had plans to spend the day with Kevin on the couch binge-watching Netflix, but company kept arriving.

 

Benita was the first, announcing herself popping her Double Bubble gum.

 

You came in right after her, pulling a lawnmower behind you like a wagon, holding to the handle with one hand while jostling a can of Natural Light in the other. By the time you made it to the dining room—where Benita and I were sitting—you’d left a trail of beer that foamed on the hardwood floor.

 

You better clean that shit up before Kevin sees it, Benita said.

 

You looked back at the spillage and mouthed fuck.

 

Get the mop dude, she said when you stood there gaping at the mess you’d made. The way she exaggerated the u made it seem as if what she’d really said was: get the mop you dumb, triflin ass, muthafucka. Benita was harsh and, if you didn’t know it already, you got on her nerves. Why didn’t he just take the lawnmower around the side of the house? she said to me after you’d gone into the kitchen. But you didn’t go for a mop, you went for paper towels, which we could hear you tearing off in sheets. The mop, dude, get the mop, she yelled. You wasting paper towels.

 

You were shrug-shouldered with humiliation when you returned with a mop to clean up the mess. Did you wet it? You gotta wet it, Benita said and watched you slink off to the kitchen again.

 

At least you had the floor cleaned by the time Kevin came back inside.

 

You and I would often joke about Kevin’s idea of what constituted clean and orderly—how he liked his place mats arranged on the dining room table with the corners touching so the center of the table was a framed rectangle; how his condiment bottles on the countertop must be in rows by height with labels facing out; how the chairs should be tucked beneath the table when not in use so they weren’t in people’s way when they moved around the room.

 

Kevin didn’t comment on the wet streaks slowly fading away. He’d decided to put some meat on the grill and went into the spare bedroom where he kept a bag of charcoal in the closet and dragged it through the kitchen to take outdoors. I asked him if it might rain, which was my way of saying don’t cook out because it might rain. Kevin answered by asking me to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. I did not season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts.

 

Terry was the last to show up, talking on his cell phone. I told Kevin to ask him to season the burgers and boneless chicken breasts. Hearing his name, Terry waved me off then secluded himself in the living room, where blackout curtains created a dark alcove for him to hide in, but not to muffle the conversation he was having with his soon-to-be ex-wife, whom he’d recently begun to refer to as his baby mama.

 

I heard him pop the tab on a tall boy of Bud Ice (the only beer he and Kevin drank) and loudly slurp the spillover. Kevin had told me several times during our nightly, long-distance phone calls how Terry regretted that his marriage was breaking up and he didn’t care anymore that his wife had gotten pregnant with another man’s child. Of course, the fact that he, too, might father a child with another woman may have given him this perspective; he might have rationalized their mutual infidelities as a mutual cancelling out of wrongs: they’d both fucked up so couldn’t they just get past the drama to be parents to the one child they’d created together? He’d be by to pick her up later, I heard him say, and then his voice lowered in pitch, as if he’d cupped a hand around the mouthpiece. Come on, he said, crooning to her like an ’80s balladeer in what he could never deny wasn’t an attempt to please, baby, let me hit that, he said.

 

You’d taken the lawnmower to the backyard and returned to the dining room with another 12 oz. can of Natural Light. You popped the tab and set the can on the table beside Benita. Without taking a sip, you lingered briefly in the middle of the room and mumbled to yourself, or to Benita or to me, neither of us could tell, then took off again. You returned with a leaf blower, a gas can, which you carried beneath one arm, and another Natural Light. You opened it and placed it this time on the mantel and took the leaf blower and gas can to the backyard. Never once did you sip from either beer.

 

Benita looked up from a game she’d been playing on her cell phone to watch you leave the room and come back. Her hair, slicked down with grease, was pulled tight into a ponytail that lashed the air each time she whipped her head to follow you back and forth, a snarl stiffening her upper lip like a pinched fold of dough. Her expressiveness portrayed a three-dimensional annoyance that reminded me of the look on people’s faces after they’d made a petty comment about some petty thing.

 

When she heard Kevin in the kitchen, she went to him to ask what was wrong with you.

 

Kevin told her you were on one, entering the dining room seasoning a plate of boneless chicken breasts. He set the plate on the table to light a Black & Mild, then continued to lightly dust the meat with seasonings.

 

Benita asked what you were on.

 

Through an exhale of smoke, Kevin told her he didn’t know. Probably roxys, he said, two fifteens. He clenched the tip of the plastic filter between his teeth, his right eye cinched tight to avoid the smoke, and let the tip rest in the corner of his mouth.

 

Two fifteens my ass, Benita said.

 

As if on cue, you walked in tilting a can of Natural Light. You’d forgotten the other open, untouched cans still in their places on the table, the mantel. You tried to take a sip but missed your mouth when you stumbled, lifting your foot too high, as if you were prepared to step up and had come down thinking a landing was closer than it was, so gravity pulled you forward, which threw you off balance. You pretended to play it off with a bit of footwork you said you’d learned from watching Childish Gambino.

 

You need to sitdown, dude, Kevin said, laughing.

 

You fucked up, ain’t you? Benita said simultaneously.

 

I’m awright, you said, and as if to prove this you shook your arms and legs vigorously in the air. You seemed agitated. Your eyes were wet and tired, the rim of your lower lids puffy, pink like an albino rabbit’s eyes. Your eyes wanted sleep, but your body was fueled, apparently, by thirty milligrams of pills to keep you sleepless. When you disappeared outside again, Benita told Kevin that she heard that you crushed your pills. Kevin said yes, you did, and that you snorted the powder. Benita shook her head, her mouth pursed. She didn’t snort her pills, nor anything else for that matter. Unlike you, she took pills because she had sickle cell anemia. Yes, sometimes, she’d said many time before, when her sickle cell flared up and she could barely get out of bed, she had to call around to see if she could buy extra pills; she needed always to be in constant supply of pills to keep the symptoms of her sickle cell in check.

 

I gotta get this meat on the grill, Kevin said and grabbed the plate of boneless chicken breasts and headed outside. Terry came in just then and the two of them stopped just short of colliding. My bad, Terry said. He had been in the backyard and came to tell us you just fuckin threw up in the trash can.

 

Puttin shit up your nose. That’s what happens, Benita said.

 

Terry said you were outside sweaty and red in the face.

 

Would you put shit up your nose? Benita asked me.

 

Nah, I said, to imply hell no! as if I’d never dared to do something like that, ever, not ever had I smoked crack cocaine, nor did I once, when so fucked up, attempt to snort through the lit end of a cigarette. Obviously, Benita had forgotten I’d told her about my past drug use, about those very incidences. I searched her face for the recognition that told me she remembered, but her own eyes were glazed over with what could be either the weariness of being fed up with other people’s shit or this was the settling in of her own high. She tapped a cigarette out of her pack and proceeded to strike a series of sparks with her lighter. Your lighter’s out of fluid, Benita, I told her, but she kept trying.

 

Who knows why people do what they do, she said, her head beginning to loll.

 

When I finally went outside, the coals were lit and the grill was smoking. Kevin paced nervously as the skirt of his black bib apron fluttered in the slight breeze, clapping a pair of tongs together like pincers in one hand and taking frequent swigs from his beer with the other. Terry leaned against one of the posts on the small porch, giving me the side-eye when he saw me, shaking his head. It’s not looking too good, he said, nodding toward something past me. I followed his gaze to where you sat in a patio chair a few feet away from the grill. I hadn’t noticed you, but probably because I wasn’t expecting to see you sitting with your legs shoulder-width apart, each of your arms resting along the arms of the chair, your head hanging so your chin barely touched your chest, your mouth languishing partly open with drool stretching a silvery strand down into your lap.

 

Kevin and Terry alternated turns calling your name. Kevin tilted up your head, only for it to fall forward with a slight bob; he said you needed milk. Terry directed our attention to the dog, Kevin’s pit bull, who circled you in your chair then stopped to lie down. She whined, half-barked, then she was up again, letting loose a high-pitched squeal; she pawed at the dirt and grass, digging with her nails and sending a fretwork of dust into the air that formed a cloud around you.

 

Kevin came back without any milk but with Benita smoking her cigarette. Oh gawd, she said, her eyes now wide open when she saw you. She said she had to leave because you were fucked up. You were a whiteboy, she said, and if one of us had to call 911, she didn’t want any part in what happened when they got there.

 

I didn’t pay Benita any attention. I watched you, wondering how many sad clowns were packed inside that tiny car.

 

Kevin, too, paid Benita no mind because he thought you were just passing out, which was good, he said, because you needed to sleep it off.

 

I wasn’t so sure. I went inside.

 

I heard Benita’s thick-heeled boots not soon after, clomping into the dining room where I’d distracted myself on the computer.

 

Benita stuttered directions for me to look up on the internet the signs of an overdose. I did and listed a few symptoms to her: dilated pupils, severe difficulty or shallow breathing, gurgling sounds, blue lips or fingers, nausea or vomiting, unresponsiveness … a person didn’t need to exhibit all the symptoms to indicate an overdose. Benita rushed outside, yelling to Kevin and Terry: vomiting, something about the pupils, gurgling in the throat, breathing with blue lips …

 

It had been roughly thirty minutes since you unloaded your car with all the tools you needed to cut Kevin’s backyard, since you danced your way out of a stumble and Kevin and I laughed, since you popped open three cans of beer, two of which you abandoned untouched, and then you suddenly began vomiting in the garbage can and were placed in that chair. But, if you had done so, how long had it been since you snorted those pills?

 

Benita rushed back through the house gathering her purse and cellphone off the table, and waved goodbye. See ya. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. I’m going to get my nails done.

 

I set the laptop aside, feeling uneasy. I needed to see for myself how bad it had gotten for Benita to leave the way she did.

 

I felt as if I were about to open a door into a past that often haunted me, entering a room to lift a sheet covering a body that lay cold on a slab. Was it me?

 

I became a visitor in a place I hadn’t been to in a while. Even though I recognized those familiar surroundings, I felt like a stranger, and it was possible that you, too, felt like a stranger inside your own body.

 

I’m coming, I’m coming was the reluctant way I walked through the rooms to get outdoors.

 

I heard music that wasn’t playing before as I approached the backyard, smelled mesquite smoke mixed with charred chicken flesh and seasonings that didn’t waft on the subtle breeze before, and, through the window, I saw the opaque clouds billowing from the grill that before was a cloud of dust the dog had kicked up, but this new cloud blocked you from my view.

 

This was the moment I pretended that I didn’t wait too long to follow my intuition; that I didn’t need to suspect a bad situation even when your slack-jawed mouth drooled with so much silvery, silken strands of spit; that you weren’t propped up like a mannequin to model normalcy; that you weren’t trying to convince us that you were only having a bad trip (but nothing you couldn’t shake off); that this was you just playing possum.

 

Kevin used his cell phone to record you while he and Terry kept calling your name. But you couldn’t answer them.

 

Your arms had gone limp, no longer resting on the chair; your hands were likewise motionless between your thighs. You breathed, but your breathing was labored, shallow gasps as if the air inside was trapped so deep inside your chest that when it reached my ears it was the echo of your efforts to breathe that I heard, your lungs taking in breath but sending back the faint noise of rattling cans.

 

You were in tremors as if from shocks of low-voltage electricity, as if your body was a city of dimming lights from a series of rolling brownouts.

 

You were shutting down.

 

Your face was blue with the encroachment of more blue—your lips blue, your cheeks besieged with blue, an armada of blue storming toward the north theater of your face, capillaries carrying the blue until the totality of your face would be subsumed by blue, and Terry and Kevin acted as if they didn’t know whether to continue to barbeque, to wait and see what happened, or to do as I said and fucking call 911.

 

I couldn’t stop looking at you. I wouldn’t blink; if I didn’t blink, you’d be fine; you’d be fine because I was fine; because I was proof that rock bottom didn’t need to mean death.

 

I’d come down off the pipe once and struggled through the night shivering, and no amount of blanketing would qualm, and nothing could distract me from believing that as I lay in a bed demonized by crack cocaine, I felt elsewhere the heels of so many people walking back and forth across the future site of my grave.

 

I had to believe that Terry didn’t want to call 911 because he was a felon who didn’t want cops swarming with their detective work.

 

Kevin was afraid that he might be wrong about you having a bad trip, and that you were dying while he drank beer, recording you while he made sure the boneless chicken breasts were neither overcooked nor raw in the middle. He was afraid, the way we all were, that this wan’t the movies where the blue in your face was special effects makeup and magic.

 

We heard sirens coming from of St. Mary’s Hospital, a few blocks away. Within minutes, three paramedics in a fire truck climbed out and, together, walked casually to the backyard.

 

Back here? one said, pointing.

 

Yes, back here, I said, swinging my arm like a propeller to rush them.

 

The first paramedic knelt beside you, took his fist and rubbed circles over your heart. The second asked us your name. When we told him, he asked you if you could hear him. What’d you take today? he asked. Your response carried the same low gurgling you’d been making since Kevin dialed 911. Shaking his head, the paramedic repeated the question.

 

The third paramedic started an IV and gave your vitals to the second, who wrote them down on his gloved hand. The glove was blue, and I worried the ink wouldn’t show. I came closer when the first paramedic shone his tiny flashlight into your eyes to check your pupils. They were small as pinpoints. The whites of your eyes waxy.

 

Two cops arrived and immediately began gathering details. The first cop took information from one of the paramedics, while the second spoke with Kevin. He told the cop that you admitted taking two fifteens of roxys, but Kevin believed you took more than that, or you took something else with it. The first paramedic stopped rubbing your chest to interrupt their conversation. He agreed with Kevin, so the cop asked if you were ever in the house. First, Kevin said no, then he backtracked, and said instead that you had been unloading the lawnmower from your truck and started to bring it through the house before he stopped you and asked that you bring the lawnmower around the house to the backyard. I worried he was implicating himself too much because he was so desperate for you not to be in the house in his version of events. He didn’t want to give the cops probable cause to search the house.

 

Terry had been quiet, shrinking back, his eyes suspiciously watching the cops. He saw me looking for him and when our eyes locked, he mouthed that’s the cop. It took him a few times mouthing and gesturing at the cop for me to understand what he said, but then I understood. Terry had been in a minor car accident just around the corner from Kevin’s house a few weeks earlier. But Terry didn’t have a driver’s license. The cop wrote him a ticket and that seemed to be the end of it. But seeing him now, at the house, was too much of a coincidence. It incited a nervous fear within Terry that showed on his face.

 

I walked over to tell Terry I didn’t think the cop recognized him. He was too busy explaining to Kevin how people would sometimes ask to use the bathroom so they could take drugs. That’s why he wanted to know if you were in the house. He needed a timeline of events. But everyone’s conversations were put on hold when suddenly you leaned forward so abruptly in your chair you nearly fell out of it. Two of the paramedics had to catch you and press you back into the chair. Easy, easy Riley, they said.

 

You shook your head, looked around to familiarize yourself, and as if none of this ever happened, responding to a barrage of questions, you verified your name, spelled your last name that had earlier given Kevin trouble; you gave your address, and, finally, because you were cold you asked for a blanket.

 

In a minute, a paramedic said.

 

Curiously, though, no one asked you what you’d taken. They loaded you onto a gurney with a blue blanket. You wrapped it around yourself, including your head. Your muffled voice asked what hospital they were taking you to.

 

It’s wherever you want to go, a paramedic said.

 

You said St. Mary’s since it was closest to your house.

 

As they wheeled you away, Kevin closed the lid on the grill to suffocate the still red-hot coals. I took the chair you sat in and stacked it with the others. A smear of blood on the armrest had to be wiped away. Terry wanted to leave but was afraid to get in his car and drive home.  Across the street, where you’d parked your car, the two original police officers were joined by two more squad cars and a K-9 unit. It had grown dark by then. Flashlights lit the interior of your car while a German shepherd was taken by the leash to sniff around and eventually inside your vehicle. They had your car keys, I’d forgotten. After you were taken away, Kevin found them, which must have fallen from your pocket at some point, hidden in the high grass. One of the police officers asked to take them.

 

You came back to the house a few hours later. Kevin and I were playing a game of spades with some friends—the JJs, Jay and Jalisa—who arrived shortly after the cops had put away their flashlights and left. Kevin showed them the video he’d taken of you earlier in the chair. Jalisa had been rolling a blunt and Jay smoking a cigarette, and both of them watched with their mouths agape at the blue, drooling face gurgling ceaselessly before the camera.

 

As they watched the video, I replayed that sudden intake of breath that brought you back to seemingly full vitality. Narcan, I was told, was what the paramedic administered through the IV. They said it took about two minutes to revive you. Two more minutes without it, you might have been dead.

 

You had come back to ask Kevin to let you keep your lawn equipment in his backyard, to tell him privately that you’d taken heroin earlier that day, and to thank him for calling 911. Kevin must have told you I was the one who told him to. You said thank you, Darius, on your way out, avoiding my eyes, though you briefly squeezed my shoulder. Kevin walked you to the door and returned quickly to the table to deal the cards for another hand. We beat the JJs that night, but probably because they’d gotten too high smoking the blunt to pay attention.

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Two Lynchburg Poems

Riverside Park, Lynchburg

At Riverside Park off Rivermont Avenue,

Katy and I sit on a boulder viewing

the overcast valley where classmates

died leaping

from the 200-foot train trestle.

Every day my body betrays itself into

believing it’s dying, believing the pastor’s

words that homosexual boys

are destined for death.

Katy lights a cigarette as a canopy of leaves protects

us from the rain, says, “I wonder what it feels like to know

you’re going to die.” The train whistles

in the distance.

My mom pretended to die for attention

after she left me. For once I don’t feel her

absence in my body. For once

I feel kind of okay, like I won’t walk

up and down a foggy

Court Street at three a.m. in front of the Episcopal church,

crying and begging

God to make me straight so my father

doesn’t leave me too.

We walk back toward the car in the rain,

listening to the train chug pass in the distance

along the riverbank.

In the clearing between the path and the forest

a gathering of fireflies twinkles in the twilight, my prayers

burning in the trees.

My arms around Katy who, after smoking,

smells like my mom plummeting to earth

on a meteor.

A tear carves down the tracks of skin and leaps off

my jawline. My body simmers to smoke,

little fires,

this figure of ash.

 

[Driving away from Lynchburg]

Driving away from Lynchburg, realizing

the Blue Ridge is my home but not

where I’m meant to live,

a tiger swallowtail smears across

my windshield in powder yellow.

I too have wished to feel the painless

end, but a windshield

nebula requires a life, brittle

as the swallowtail’s chitin wings,

one the mountains can’t afford to lose.

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The Bright Forest

My beloved spoke, and said unto me:

‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

—from “The Song of Songs,” attributed to King Solomon, circa 950 BCE

 

This planet may host a thousand worlds, or maybe millions: worlds within worlds, each nation a deck of cards, each citizen a new deal. But as certain as Gregory might be that many worlds must exist, he knew that he had claims in only two. He could live in the world which contained Sylvie, or he could live in the world which did not. He had a secret name for the world with Sylvie. He called it the Bright Forest.

 

Sometimes she could draw him into that world merely by speaking his name on the telephone. “Gregory?” she would begin uncertainly, and then pause. The uncertainty itself seemed to undo the normal world. It was like a fairy-call, and in that brief silence Gregory would be drawn, sometimes against his will, into the forest ruled by the misrule of Sylvie: a fairy queen, dark, with the serious expression of a girl, not of a woman. In the forest, she was at times openly a child, but no less the author of the tale. Much later, when he lived in the other world full time, the world without Sylvie, the Big World as he called it, he liked to say that he once knew someone who had thought about growing up but had thought better of it. People would smile when they heard this kind of thing, would joke about Peter Pan, but later, privately, he felt bad. Privately, he said, “What if innocence matters?” And he admitted to himself that when young with Sylvie he had looked up into windy sunlit birch trees and they had both seen the leaves flash in great numbers. And only when together! This was tantamount to a confession of faith by a fallen child, and it tore at him so much that sometimes long later he would pick up his phone and call her, and begin, uncertainly: “Sylvie…” then pause for the fairy-call in return and say, again like a child himself: “Oh Sylvie, today I turned forty-one.”

 

As a boy, Gregory was pale, with pale eyes that you could look straight through without interest. Drive into the suburbs and you might see dozens like him—boys with bikes and the pettiest temptations. He had gone to college as a studious lad without a clue on how to make friends or find a lover. He wrote to his parents: “Dear Mom and Dad: All is well. It looks like I have made peace with my Econ 12 T.A. and have been to the beach three times. I should be able to make your check last until February.” When it rained outside his dormitory, however, he opened his window for the wet smell. And sometimes, like a premonition, he would walk out into a night of crickets and feel a largeness in the sky—but nothing much more than that until he met Sylvie.

 

They met as freshmen in English Lit 221: The Romantics, where they were in the same section, and Sylvie was the only one who really cared about Byron, who she called an elitist pig. He just thought Byron a bore, though there was something to some of that stuff by Keats. She loved Keats and Shelley, too, but hardly bothered to turn in assignments. Sylvie was no “college girl,” but merely “in college” the way an animal wanders into a serious place, an office or a classroom, sniffs, and wanders out again. She told him seriously that professors murdered all poetry. That poets were in fact real people who really cared about what they were writing, and not in the least what stupid college students or professors said about it. That poets had actually seen the magic in the world and tried to communicate it, and that he should try reading their stuff under a tree without looking for the fucking underlying themes. “Seriously, Gregory. Tonight.” And she took him out at ten p.m. with his book and a flashlight and a jar of peanut butter in case they got hungry.

 

Of course they kissed, and her hands roamed, and they fell in love.

 

 

—

 

 

In love! There came a day when he walked into a city park in the full knowledge of being in love—looking at the other people in wonder, as if they must know. Of sharing secret amazements in the eyes of other young people, who must be, like himself, in love. If only he had known that it was all true, all along, all of it. Neither Gregory nor Sylvie were handsome people, but love does not require physical beauty, it only requires an alliance with beauty. So the two of them forgot about literature and sought beauty together everywhere—parks, houses, restaurants, bed.

 

In the face of this alliance with beauty, other things fell away. And so there came another amazing day when Gregory walked down the main street of the college town in full knowledge of Sylvie failing in all her classes. Not just one, but all. This information overwhelmed his previous knowledge of how the world operated. He saw how provisional and fraudulent the Big World was, and he ran into a store to buy champagne and potato chips to bring them back to her for a celebration of freedom. In the right light, this was a magnificent act, the act of a prince to his princess—and of course, after that, there was nothing for it but to fail along with her. He wrote to his parents, announcing his decision to drop out of college: “Dear Mom and Dad, I am finally taking responsibility for my own life. I think I’m about to discover a great truth, but I’m not sure what it is.”

 

He was, of course, about to discover the deepest extents of the Bright Forest, a world where anything might become beautiful. In the Bright Forest were green bottles and mossy curbsides, wet iron railings, bits of colored paper caught in the trees. A world like a fine photograph. He could see roads leading to dilapidated gas stations, sudden rocky overhangs, rows of maple, the gathering places of strangers. In the Bright Forest no one read newspapers on trains; they ran their fingers across the cold windowpanes, drawing circles. Later, at the station, people did not speak of schedules, they huddled against each other on benches and whispered. Or played guitars. Sometimes these same men and women would walk into the alleyways behind restaurants or lie naked together behind the hedges in a public park. In the Bright Forest, goals did not matter, only each step mattered, each momentary act—each meal of crackers and cheese, each raindrop in wintertime, each glance, each motion of the hand before the eyes. Sylvie and Gregory rented a shabby room together, got low-paying jobs, and before long the Bright Forest was everywhere: painted on the vinyl cushions of diner booths and tall against the blank stares of cars in parking lots. Each object in the natural world was but a marker for a potent force in the Bright Forest, each work along its paths a work of gods. In the distance, somewhere, was a lazy conductor beating a slow baton: Now you will sleep, will sleep, now you will make love. They would listen and lie together on long afternoons, would lose jobs for lying together on long afternoons.

 

Months passed effortlessly and grandly. Gregory let his head grow foggy and warm for whole weeks at a time. Sunlight would cross dusty rooms, grow weak with winter, strong with summer. He was for a long time a kind of prince, and in these, which he considered his finest hours, he was capable of the most royal actions: a quarter to a bum, a long night holding Sylvie when her father died. Prince Gregory could open his eyes to the near and the far and see them both as his dominion. Up close was Sylvie, her face, her hands, her frequent illnesses, her fears. In the distance were palaces: deeper glens, sea cliffs. Each palace they must find, or each palace would never be found by humankind, for there seemed to be no sight but their own. One afternoon in the year he was twenty would remain with Gregory for the rest of his life, a moment of greatness few people in this world can claim: the two of them standing on a small, grassy hill in a public park. A breeze was blowing, and hand in hand, the whole earth was telescoped into the power of Sylvie and Gregory, young and in love and owning it, just owning it all. Looking out, Gregory felt benevolence toward the scene, felt benevolence and generosity of spirit, as would any great man.

 

 

—

 

 

Over the course of four years, however, Sylvie and Gregory changed from eighteen to twenty, and then to twenty-two. Despite the best efforts of the forest, Sylvie discovered that Gregory retained ambitions. He found that she could sometimes look strong and serious. One night he brought a lamp up close to her face and declared that she had become a woman.

 

“Really?” she asked.

 

“Really,” he said.

 

She had no secrets from him, of course, and they began to talk about children. Carelessly, but they talked. “Imagine me having a baby,” Sylvie would say, squatting and pretending to pull a baby from her womb. “It would just come out, like this.” She did not know his secret term for their relationship, the “Bright Forest,” but she knew that theirs would be the first baby of some amazing world. This baby would walk with them hand in hand among its trees. They would found a dynasty born in the poverty of the Bright Forest. A dynasty!

 

Nevertheless, talk of a child triggered an ancient male fear which lay dormant but deep inside Gregory. Time, he saw, was hotting up. Conversations such as the following began to occur:

 

Gregory (condescendingly): “I don’t understand how you could have lost your fucking keys again. Look, I keep mine on this nail by the door. They’re always there and I can always find them.”

 

Sylvie (in tears): “What does it matter, Gregory? What does it fucking matter?”

 

Though such scenes became common, a greater threat arose. For the Bright Forest had a determined enemy, and his name was “Morning.” All was well when they slept in and kept the shades drawn, but sometimes Gregory would awake early with a curious restlessness, and, leaving Sylvie in the humid bedroom, he would walk out into the Morning. At Morning he heard the brass of trucks and streetcars, the cries of work and doing, could smell the clean hard smell of dew evaporating from the Big World, see mailmen. Eventually, Morning became a kind of religion with him. “Sylvie just doesn’t understand this,” he told himself, observing the early people and secretly smiling at their purpose. “These people understand something she just does not understand at all.” And when he returned to find Sylvie still asleep, the bedclothes warm to the touch and the shades peeking pinpricks of sunlight, when he touched the damp shine of sleep on her forehead and smelled the smell of long untidy human habitation, he began to be repelled.

 

Frightened, he’d close the door and go into the kitchen to make coffee. Once, he even called his parents for advice.

 

 

—

 

 

Sylvie began to sense a change in Gregory, and it became an uncomfortable joke between them that he was never home when she awoke. “I want to wake up together,” she would say. “We can open our eyes at the very same instant and then just lie there for a while before going to work or whatever.” And often, after his new routine of newspaper and coffee, Gregory would return to the bedroom, and, consciously steeling himself against—what, he didn’t know—he would crawl back into bed, and awaken her with much charm and grace. But this effort became deception and acting.

 

Gregory began to ask: was the Bright Forest merely a stepping stone to another, even finer world? And once that question had been asked, Morning was no longer enough. The idea of a baby born in the Bright Forest became more and more a threat. The Big World seemed more and more a release.

 

One day, Gregory got a real job downtown, to which he went at the appointed hours and worked not just for cash, but advancement. Such joy he took in arriving at a cold office in a gray a.m. would be hard to describe, but there he’d be, beaming inwardly to himself as he wrote things in files and passed messages to people in well-chosen clothing. At lunchtime, he would walk into the hustle of the city with a serious smile, and he would rejoice in the wind that tunneled through the office buildings and set the pant legs of busy men to flapping. The wind! Puzzling movements! Men themselves! The Big World held less beauty than the Bright Forest, but he found it strangely satisfying. He began to look collegiate again, tall and thin, with round glasses and a preppie vest. In the office he became liked, for he had a way of fixing his eyes on a person with an innocent concentration which brought him much good will.

 

His parents rejoiced that he had finally made a job last more than a few months. Hey, maybe he’d go back to school.

 

When Gregory told Sylvie that he enjoyed “this cycle of coming and going each day, being away from you and then with you again,” she at first believed him. She was too naive, perhaps, to realize what was going on. After all, what could really threaten the beauty of the Bright Forest? When he came home each day, she would throw herself around his neck and try to drag him into bed, but he would demur, would say he was tired, and again she would believe him. She didn’t realize that he had brought the Big World in with him, and that she, in her old sweater and sneakers, and with all that undisguised love in her eyes, looked merely out of place. Little by little, Gregory grew impatient with “her” cheap restaurants and “her” back roads, and he began to be repelled by sex. Seriously: a certain American Puritanism rose up in him against a life of pleasure. Worse, he now saw not a determined “poetry-in-real-life,” but a kind of desperate quality to all his days with Sylvie, an excess of beauty which might well appear ugly to the outsider. To people, for example, from his office.

 

At night, lying awake by Sylvie’s side, keeping a precious inch between himself and her flesh, Gregory would actually wonder how he could have given himself to this woman who was like none of the women he knew in his other, Big World of men and ideas. She, for example, could not keep facts straight and ask the right questions when taking a message over the phone. Just now, she was, for heaven’s sake, working in an organic food collective. She had no shine of rapid plans in her eyes, she wore no masculine jackets, and touched no colored shadows to her eyes.

 

“You should throw out that shirt,” he’d say. “It’s falling apart.”

 

“You look like a college boy in that jacket,” she would reply, as a joke. “Do they laugh at you at work?”

 

But he did not smile.

 

Late at night, he could hear the wind curl around the edges of the apartment building like a kind of warning, and sometimes, rising noiselessly, he would walk out onto the balcony and feel a kind of tremendous and lonely power in the darkness. At such times, even though it was not Morning, he would let a strength come into his limbs which thrilled him, which reminded him that he was young and might do anything. For a short time, at least, young.

 

 

—

 

 

In such a manner, little by little, Gregory became utterly alone from Sylvie, and entirely left the Bright Forest for the Big World. This should be no surprise: a new world is all we ever ask, and for the second time in his life, counting the moment he quit college, he felt mighty and free.

 

The final separation came in the worst way, when Sylvie was out of town, visiting her mother. Indeed, a whole month passed without a visit to the Bright Forest. Under the circumstances, far too long for it to survive.

 

During that month, Gregory relaxed visibly and worked late hours. So little did he think about Sylvie that he imagined that she did not think of him either. When he finally wrote his letter, on actual paper with a pen, he was sure it would come as no real surprise: “Dearest Sylvie, I’m sorry to write you a letter, but it must be done in a letter, if it is to be done at all. If you would find your own true strength, I know that you must leave me for a time. I am holding you back every moment we are together. We once said that the present should never destroy the beauty of the past, and in that spirit, I say that it has all been so beautiful that I am brought only to joy in looking back. You know what you have taught me, and I only hope the world can teach you what I cannot as time goes by. Write to me. Gregory.”

 

Lying face down on her childhood bed, Sylvie could only think of that word “strength.” Strength? What did strength have to fucking do with it? Either you stick with someone or you don’t. The letter had come at a dark moment with her mother, when she was hoping for a word from Gregory to cheer her, and now she thought the world had come to an end. Who was this jerk masquerading as Gregory, who had signed such a letter? A letter so full of ugliness and distrust? She reviewed the few weeks before their parting and could not remember having met this other Gregory, though looking back, she could see the signs that he had been growing inside her true Gregory.

 

“Now I am alone,” she thought, correctly.

 

This other Gregory grew a moustache, moved halfway across the country, enrolled at a new university—and after a few months he was no longer a child in the Bright Forest, but an adult in the Big World. City streets began to lose their shine and glimmer. He completed a tax return. He graduated. He obtained a job in a sales statistics firm. He fixed his own lunch to bring to work, and he began looking at advertisements for cameras and stereo systems and folding couches. In time he forgot the smell of women, or rather the women around him were so clean that he could not smell them through their blouses and sinless colognes.

 

About a third of the way into the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there’s a curious moment when the chorus pauses for the orchestra to play a theme like a little brass band—a brief, bouncy military march, revving up for another grand entrance. Gregory whistled that little tune to himself almost every Morning. If he thought back to his time with Sylvie, he would say things like this to himself:

 

“Is it only the first moments of any new enterprise that set the whole image and beauty for what is to come? Surely everything that happened in that first moment beneath the oak when Sylvie’s hands roamed created everything that occurred in the next four years.”

 

Again and again he recalled specific moments of joy in the Bright Forest, but always he heard himself describing his former love to his new friends in disparaging terms: “Those were awful days after I left school, just floundering around. There was this girl who flunked out and took me with her. She, like, never grew up.”

 

But Gregory found no new woman in the Big World. And sure enough, six years further on, when he was nearing thirty, he began to dream again of making love to Sylvie. The dream of her would arise against his will around him in the night like a close and familiar room. He began to telephone her in Phoenix or Boulder or wherever she had moved that month and found himself talking to her in the small, childlike voice of his previous love.

 

“Sylvie?”

 

Sylvie was at first hesitant and kept her distance over the phone. Gregory took this as a sign of strength, and in his mind, judging by the new tone of her voice, his heart began to dress her in sleek, adult working jackets and straight slacks; he pictured her wearing makeup and staring him directly in the eye. Then she began to call, too. “Gregory,” would come the call. Each time, after they spoke, he would walk out into the city with new eyes and look briefly down graffiti-laden alleyways and into the beautiful shadows of the trees, revisiting the Bright Forest. But safely.

 

 

—

 

 

At last, one long holiday weekend, Gregory boarded a plane and met Sylvie in her latest town. Over the course of those six years, she had known many men and many jobs. Gregory had become the poet who was her first love, and her best, but who had abandoned her in some vague, artistic confusion. She lost her anger and told herself they had had to part in order to grow up. She could now speak in a more direct manner, dress in well-kept skirts (though not sleek adult jackets), own a car, make plans in advance, offend people less often, and generally pass as a citizen of the Big World.

 

When Gregory arrived, therefore, he was at first perfectly enchanted. He felt his fondest wish had come true. Sylvie had gained all the strength he had spoken of in his heartless letter! They went out to dinner without even holding hands, and Gregory was magnificent with charming talk and generous public behavior. He had learned how to smoke cigarettes, and he displayed this new talent with bravado, blowing smoke into a warm summer night. Sylvie, in her turn, acted witty, and she looked at him with the indulgence of a former lover, now grown mature, gently hinting at the secrets they had in the past, and laughing indulgently at the right moments.

 

Like in a movie made by the Big World.

 

No one in the restaurant looked at them oddly or suspected them to be refugees from another world altogether. And back at her apartment, they went about the business of getting ready for bed with coy efficiency. When the lights went out, Gregory crawled into Sylvie’s bed with confidence, eager to make love like men do to women in the Big World.

 

On the second day, however, Sylvie didn’t bother to comb her hair as carefully. Gregory overslept.

 

On the third day, spent idly at a beach, they didn’t walk as they’d both intended, with pants rolled and shoes held discreetly, but instead sprawled in the sand, making a mess with sandwich wrappers. Sylvie forgot to mention the plans she had for Gregory to meet her new friends—annoying and confusing him.

 

And by the end of the fourth day, when he awoke dreamy and lost, and looked deeply into the waxy magnolia leaves that rattled outside Sylvie’s window, he lost sight of Morning. He saw only that the Bright Forest had sprung up lush and fantastic from the ground all around them, once again. All day they slept and woke, slept and woke, missing the appointment to meet her friends. It wasn’t their fault, Gregory thought. When they got together, everything just went to hell.

 

As anyone will tell you, much is changed in one’s life merely by having a regular job. And so, even though he delayed his return flight until late into the night, Gregory did eventually drag himself to the airport.

 

For a time, as they sat together waiting for his flight to depart, it’s true that everyone else looked like a stranger.

 

Only after their final kiss, and when he found himself alone on the airplane, did Gregory begin to think about how to organize the next day. He checked his messages. His calendar. A few minutes later, he felt the vast cool relief of flying into the Big World forever.

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Insomnia

Night works a dark purple down the loom.

Again, I watch dawn unravel those rows,

 

a weaving and unweaving no less coy

than Penelope producing her burial shroud.

 

Please let today end. I am desperate to feel better

and know days will trudge past this point with me in tow.

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Two Poems

Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Café

His first job out of school was working

as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,

sat bedside with the dying

 

for a living, and he tells me what

it was like to wait for the joints

in their fingers to go loose like he

 

was letting the fish steal the hook to swim

back off into scripture with.

Out down the road

 

the early service releases and a ringing

tower sends off the congregation

with the old, irregular style bell

 

ringing that signifies to me an actual

human is somewhere down there tugging

one end of some rope that crashes

 

a lead tongue against the hollow insides

of cast iron. You hear that, I say,

pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,

 

and he says they’re an expression of joy

meant to help us forget our sadness

for a minute or so, and I say

 

it’s there though, pointing at my heart

with the bacon, the sadness, even

when we let ourselves forget it,

 

same as it’s always been,

the heartache and the thousand

natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

 

He says he prefers Blake

over Shakespeare any day of the week

when it comes to either sadness or joy,

 

To see a world in a grain of sand, he says

and a heaven in a wild flower.

When the ringing quits

 

I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which

is a damn lie, but I don’t tell him I actually

prefer my wife’s hair slinking down her back

 

though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night

for a cigar on the porch in early fall,

or that I’ll always prefer to bury the light

 

and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks

with a hole in one of the big toes

over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.

 

There are houses so broken

they aren’t worth fixing, and sometimes

that’s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned

 

to dryrot turned so useless you couldn’t

sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers

she loves me from the other room and all

 

I hear are bells. Other times, there’s only

a lonely wind passing through the storm door

whispering almost nothing at all.

 

Art Fair

I came to meander through open-air booths erected

in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends

who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn décor,

 

in the name of grade school art teachers

who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,

in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire

 

into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers

who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.

I came here because there exist people with second lives

 

that last longer than the first, and because we all

eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander

these grassy lanes like ghosts who’ve fallen

 

into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail

to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch

me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,

 

or that hand-twined chandelier, because there’s a price

in my head that’s incapable of change and all it takes

is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.

 

I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent

to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler

mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color

 

than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body

and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down

into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.

 

Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through

each one of my eye’s billion vessels, because color

and form, and because far from the Louvres

 

of the world artists still find ways to fashion

grief into the arcades of other people’s hearts.

Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises

 

from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere

there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player

slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough

 

the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each

one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes

where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder

 

level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang

an image upon the dining room wall

where before there was nothing, until now.

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Logos

The beginning of Virginia happened . . . when? That moment is lost in time. Early on, she was at the edge of my consciousness but still a writer whom, even as an English major, I had never read. Woolf wasn’t on the syllabus in any of my classes—not required reading in those days just before there were courses in feminist literature. After my graduation, I read Woolf with a vengeance. I liked the experimental novels well enough—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—but what intrigued me most was the gradual publication of her letters and diaries.

 

That wealth of material gave me a window on a life radically different from my own. For a period of years, I felt as if her friends were also my friends, and that the conversations she participated in were as important to me as they were for her. It was easy to achieve this intimacy. The diaries and letters are filled with minutiae, nuanced insights, deeply personal impressions, and remembered conversations. They offer more information than most people ever reveal about their lives. The details are so extensive. It would probably be possible to chronicle Woolf’s daily life for decades.

 

I learned about her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and about Virginia’s marriage to Leonard Woolf, a Jewish writer, editor, liberal politician, and the man with whom she founded the revolutionary Hogarth Press. I was fascinated as her relationship with Vita Sackville-West unfolded, a love affair between two married women, flirtatious and communicative—resulting in the high humor and euphoria of Woolf’s novel Orlando—only to find a quieter resolution as they drifted apart.

 

What attracted me to Woolf? My life was completely unlike hers. I was not born into the London literati. I had my origins in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I had no famous father and no brothers at Cambridge. We definitely did not spend idyllic summers in Cornwall in a large house on the English seacoast waited on by servants, walking the beach, and playing games of cricket in the garden. My family took car trips across the American West, slogging along the interstates to see our country, camping out to save money, and eating macaroni and cheese out of a box.

 

I came from people whom Woolf might have dismissed or even despised and ridiculed—from farmers, mill workers, and civil servants, from those who were uneducated, at least by Woolf’s criteria. My people did not read books as a means of understanding the self, defining feelings, or interpreting the world. They worked. They were mostly just trying to survive and get by. I came from them, and yet I still wanted to be like Woolf. I wanted to write. Virginia became, at least for a decade, my higher power.

 

—

 

It’s 2006. My friend Nancy and I are touring London. I am here partly in pursuit of my mentor—Virginia Woolf. At this point, I’ve read everything she’s written. I’ve waltzed through that embarrassment of riches—the printed pages she left behind—her novels, letters, diaries, essays, and articles. Now I’m walking the streets she walked.

 

It’s dusk when we board the London Eye for a bird’s-eye view of the city beginning to turn on its lights. In our glass car, we rise and fall while feasting on this unparalleled view of London. Although it undoubtedly looked different in her time, this is Woolf’s city—a place she inhabited in all ways. After the ride, we choose to dine at the café in the crypt below St. Martin’s in the Fields. I order mushroom stroganoff with delicate new potatoes and a fennel salad. Nancy has a dish with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and Savoy cabbage. Our globed glasses of white wine fracture light into the vaulted space.

 

It’s wonderful, yes, and isn’t this a moment Woolf might have chosen to memorialize? It seems to me I should write about it. What are we saying to one another? What are my thoughts and impressions of this day? If I don’t get this down somehow, won’t it be lost forever? I wonder. Does that really matter? Isn’t it enough that Nancy and I are here sharing this moment?

 

Later, I lie awake with jet lag thinking about Woolf’s second novel, Jacob’s Room. After a galloping romp through a young man’s life at Cambridge, we learn that Jacob, the protagonist, has died as a soldier in World War I. The final scene of the novel has Jacob’s mother and one of his friends cleaning out his rooms. They find Jacob’s papers strewn across his desk as though he had left for a stroll in the park.

 

There’s a horror in this vision, a sense of futility and emptiness. A person—vital and rich with life—is suddenly gone. The novel poses the ultimate question. What is left of all that sensation, what remains of so much rich lived experience once the person has passed? It occurs to me that, in her novels, Woolf is almost always writing toward the same end game. Yes, this is happening—this vivid and incredibly complex life tapestry. Yet, it’s also disappearing. Suddenly, because of either time or death, a chunk of it is gone, lost forever.

 

Woolf’s most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, chronicles a family’s summer in Cornwall. But those moments are also lost. When they return to the house on the shore years later, the whole emotional tenor and tempo of their lives has changed. The mother has died, leaving them to struggle. The long-awaited trip to the lighthouse takes on a completely different meaning than it did on a day in the distant past when it was impossible to go because of bad weather.

 

At the novel’s end, Lily Briscoe, a peripheral character, takes center stage. She is a spinster and a Sunday painter, a woman not taken seriously by the male-dominated art world. Yet, she perseveres. Lily is at work painting the Cornwall scene when the family returns. Finally, almost giving up in frustration, unable to express the whole as she sees it, Lily declares a truce. The painting must be finished. There’s nothing more to be done. “I have had my vision,” she announces. And this seems the best we can hope for—to have that vision and attempt to record something about it even as the moment is passing.

 

Woolf tries to preserve those moments that don’t last, the globes of being and experience that simply disappear. She seems to be saying it’s important to celebrate the freshness, newness, and immediacy that make the world overflow. But the other side of this promise is the tragedy of time passing, the heartbreak of death and loss. I can clearly see this is Woolf’s vision. But is it mine?

 

After my trip to London, sick of the insistent need to turn every experience into copy, I stopped writing for five or six years. I told myself it was enough to have my experiences without constantly formulating words to describe them. It was an immense relief.  My mind felt free. And yet, there must have been something of a warring voice within me because I saved my notes—notes about that day in the city and the meal I shared with Nancy. I must have believed that, one day, I would need or want them, and I did.  But when I finally began to write again, it was with a different attitude. I knew I could live without writing, even without Virginia.

 

—

 

The Buddhists say that, to become enlightened, you must actually kill the Buddha, meaning you must destroy your idols. This comes from an old Zen koan attributed to the Zen Master Linji, a Chinese Zen Buddhist monk who founded the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism and who died in 866.

 

The saying says: If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha.

 

I guess I did this to Woolf after my trip to London. Not that I actually killed Virginia, but I doubted her. I saw her as a person, brilliant but limited, part of her own time, her class, and her culture. Woolf gave me a window on her world but not a passage into it. She had been my teacher, but perhaps I had learned what I needed to learn from her. She taught me to pay attention, to notice details, to hear my environment, and to listen to my own thoughts.  At this realization, there was disappointment and a sense of loss. It felt a bit like losing an old friend either to death or indifference. It’s all well and good to have idols, but suddenly, I knew I would never be this person who spent three weeks touring Greece with the painter and art critic Roger Fry.

 

Woolf’s festival of words took me somewhere. She got me to London and enriched my time there. But in the end, I returned home, leaving England for my own geographical and personal world. My physical and spiritual home for most of my life has been the northern boreal forest of North America. It’s a place where I walk on footpaths between towering trees, a place where I count my breaths while listening for the air rush of bird wings. This is where I belong.

 

This winter has been a hard one. Nearby, just off the footpath, several crows feed on the remains of unidentifiable dead animal. Busily tearing toward the center of the carcass for red meat, the two companionable black birds ignore this approaching human. Likewise, a soaring red-tailed hawk offers me no greeting as it flies overhead and beyond my field of vision. As I tread my forest path, I experience the spaciousness that exists outside and beyond words.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love words for their capacity to partially tame the world’s wildness. I adore them as they lean into metaphor and traverse distances. But I see their limitations. Words are temporary containment fields. I believe that, although words were her medium, Woolf understood this. She was always writing into the void, always using language to push toward the no-word zone. In novels that exist on the margins of human experience—Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves—Virginia has taken me to regions where there is simply nothing more to say.

 

What can we know of poor Jacob after he has passed? Lives and loves succumb to time. Individuals exist for a while and then they are gone. The waves roll toward the shore, relentlessly washing away all footsteps on the beach. Eventually, through her suicide, Woolf crossed the ultimate barrier. No one could follow her into that beyond. Still, during her lifetime, Virginia returned to the place of making again and again. She tried to hold her ground even as that ground was slipping out from underneath her. She had a faith I sometimes lose. When I tire of carefully wrought language, I leave my writing desk and head into the woods seeking the place of no-words.

 

Entering this wordless zone is another way of killing the Buddha. But I know he isn’t really dead. I’ll be back at my computer soon enough. Tall pine trees creak in the wind. It seems that, though it is incomprehensible to me, they speak in a language all their own. And suddenly I get it. Virginia is the hawk flying away from me. She was here but she’s moved beyond my field of vision. I can’t say where she is now or what she is like. I’m not even sure what I am like, but I am resolved. I turn back on the path that will take me home. My house isn’t far away, really no distance at all.

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