Smithereens. Terence Young
next to me complains how late
she’ll be now, thanks to this about-face, the early sailing not such a good idea after all in hindsight, unaware she has broken the most
vivid waking dream of my life and left me as disappointed as Keats must have been when some pedant pointed out it was Balboa, not
Cortés, who first set European eyes westward from that mountain top, a name that so spoiled the meter of his line he refused to change
it, certain till his death that facts had little to do with truth or beauty.
Snowfall
They’ve been sounding out the names of the dead: friends, relatives, this year’s crop of writers, musicians,
something to do while they are driving the long road between the last town and the next.
So many now, and those they forget hang between them like the empty spaces in a crossword.
Their route takes them high into snow country, where flurries descend and silence the game, wet, heavy flakes that slow the car’s wipers, narrow the view.
Used to be they’d tell themselves the departed were old, but they’re old now too, so they no longer mention anyone’s age.
The few who died young remain bright, as though the sun had been shining at the time, but they both know it is only their own youth that glows.
When the roster ends, they speculate on whose name may next pass their lips, but briefly, because to do so feels reckless.
Better to marvel at the list itself, how long it has grown, how death has worn thin, as if to be alive were the true miracle.
Their hotel that night is The Village Green, which they booked hoping for a peaceful place, where townspeople might gather to talk with friends and forget their hard lives,
but it is nothing like that, only a white box in a parking lot of white, and they spend the evening watching TV shows from the past, laughing again at all the actors they haven’t seen for years.
Mixed Blessing
For a while we called it the good fire, the best fire, the fire that saved us
because we were insured, and the insurance paid for all the things we could never afford,
the new wiring and plumbing and paint and sofas and stereos and computers
and clothes and pots and pans and bicycles and carpets and curtains and state-of-the-art
smoke detectors for the next fire, but every once in a while, an image of our
old basement kitchen will shove its way to the front row of my thought parade
and I will believe, as I do sometimes in dreams about things I’ve lost to disease, the years, the
insatiable ocean, that it still exists somewhere, behind a door that I have only to open
and walk through to find our son, seated at the makeshift bar, eating a snack after school,
my wife down on her knees trying to clean the hopelessly stained lino, our daughter
about to arrive with her boyfriend, and me too, fiddling with the coffee maker that started
the whole conflagration in the first place, only this time deciding not to repair it, un-
plugging the thing instead and carrying it wisely to my workshop where all toys and appliances
went to die, and leaving it there, returning with a bottle of terrible homemade wine
which I pour into a couple of glasses from the cupboard where we used to store our
hippy goblets made from clay and the poisonous lead decanters handed down, the sorts of things
we never replaced after they burned, like the Victrola and my father’s pewter mug, or couldn’t,
like our youngest’s kindergarten rendering of a tugboat—blue hull, aquamarine ocean, blowing
billows of smoke into a cloudless and benign sky.
My Mother’s Cigarette Case
I still have it somewhere, her initials engraved, all three, C.A.Y. in curling capitals, the surface tarnished because who polishes silver anymore?
I’ve seen a dozen similar at Value Village, tossed out by children who are better at letting go, so few interested in relics from an age that is still too recent.
It flips opens like an old-school cellphone, two neat halves that part, the cigarettes all in a row, tilting up.
I used it for a while to hold my own, an affectation I liked, the formality, how I would draw it from an inner jacket pocket, select one as though I were choosing a diamond from a display case.
But cigarettes became so long I’d have to cut them to fit, and I hadn’t the patience, dropped it in a drawer, then into a box that might be in the attic.
On evenings they had guests, my father in grey, my mother in green silk, I’d watch her reach for it in her purse or lift it from the coffee table, the way she’d light up and breathe in, allowing some smoke to remain hanging, which she’d take in a second later through her nose, French inhaling it was called, a name that made her even more attractive.
She would hold it flat against her palm until an errand claimed her, then set it aside discreetly.
Once, I picked it up, still warm from her grip, a bright, lovely thing that made me want it the way I want it even now, years after I have given up the habit, if only for the sound it made when she snapped it shut.
The Bear
Woken from an afternoon nap, you rise only to descend your wood- butcher stairway, past the vaulted, multi-mullioned window on whose
other side now sits a bear, Buddha-like, on his backside, head concealed in the Rubbermaid garbage can he holds aloft between two paws.
In sixty summers, you’ve never seen such a creature anywhere near this place, found no scat, heard no tales of neighbours’ fruit trees
bent or broken, undaunted for all this time to ramble, kids in tow, down the remnant logging roads and deer paths that make a park
of these toy woods, so close to town now town has devoured all the land between. Yet here he sits, or she, for all you know, fur so black
it’s almost blue, only thin glass between you, so suddenly proximate you are pressed to say what you are seeing, this vaudeville act, ursine
slapstick Chaplin who invites you to forget all danger, to forget you are still one animal coming upon another. A single noisy tread, one
telltale stair, and you are busted, as the beautiful comedian detects your gaze behind the fifteen panes that transform bear to cubist
caricature, your clown of darkness, who regains all fours and turns literal tail to amble, not run, back into the maze of forest and con-
spiratorial salal, but not before you throw sense and caution to the wind, wrench open the back door and follow at a distance, axe in
hand, berating your bruin-buffoon for transforming forever this be- nign acreage into something less safe, if more magical, where visiting
spirits leave behind their perfect signature, which, to all who will listen over dinner and wine, you reveal with a flourish at the tale’s
end, the garbage can’s rectangular lid and four neat punctures, arranged in a fan, an arc, like a winning hand of poker, jokers wild.
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