I dreamt in spirals
double helices
hearing reasons
in vocal flanges.
I see her, funked out,
her fur-packed mink
blistering, glittering,
a dancer derelict still
stoking the fire with wind.
Land that caught
her fur on flames.
The parterre,
the door that locked
where serpents slung
alive and rolling, reeling.
Their tensions stretching
but wisdom never disheveling
War stirs while dreams are leavening.
Ensnare me with a string of spider silk that stretches
and catches our words like flies.
Roll grey smoke from burning blueberry bogs where you stand
on the singing sand, send smoke to cleave to these hills.
Draw me to you like the tide,
See me home like the swallow, steady star
The world is for us (not wide enough).
All afternoon I’ve been riverside.
Soon I will send my father’s body
to mix with sand and silt
But not today. Today the swollen river,
the blanching light, they are too much.
So I float into town past the church
buoyed on the hill, doors flung open
I board and everything is white–
walls, trim, baseboards, curtains.
When the breeze lifts off the water
filling the curtains like sails,
I am a child between clotheslines
newly hung with white sheets.
In that blink before daybreak
when the sun has rolled up the backside of the earth
and the world, your sweetheart,
comes calling,
Come to greet it, come.
First, hear the birds, a-chirrup
and the crickets, a-rattle,
Then, see the fog burning,
leveling the hills and washing over the land until
there it is–
one plume of grass, aglow.
I will teach you to read a human face,
And I will take you to the border
between us. I will tell you
what to call yourself, Ba-ba-ba,
yes, that’s how it begins.
I will show you wonders.
When I drop my end of this handkerchief,
you will see that you can balance
without my steady hand.
And I will teach you that you can name
what you love: moon, dog, tree, book.
I will show you blood and fire,
the great and the terrible,
all that you contain.
I will show you wonders.
I will show you wildflowers spilling
down the valley like a bridal train;
a cave of echoing drips and winding waters;
a forest of rock; the gush of geysers;
a field of fireflies; a star-studded sky.
At the end, I will read your face
and you will say my name, ba-ba-ba, yes,
that’s how it begins.
You will hold my hand as I cross
the border between us.
When the night pulls you away in a taxi,
I will show you wonders.
I will show you a moon turned to blood.
He dug through the snow, ungloved. A full moon threaded through the bare branches of the maple and cast shadows on the bright snow.
Inside, she opened her fist; the ring had left a mark on her palm. It had belonged to a lot of dutiful wives before her–his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She’d worn the ring, too, for most of their nineteen-year marriage. Except for the winter when she had excema between her fingers. Or the times when slipping it off during her mother-in-law’s visits gave her a private relief. She’d stopped wearing it altogether during her pregnancies because her fingers were too swollen. But when she finally put it on again, something had changed; the ring made her hand look like someone else’s. Sometimes, when she was chopping onions or folding laundry or rubbing a sick child’s back, she would pause, study her hand, and wonder whom it belonged to.
The husband must have sensed her ambivalence about the ring because he took her ring shopping for their fifteenth anniversary. They drove to a store with a glass atrium shaped like the sides of a point-cut diamond. When they stepped inside, the saleswoman greeted them without smiling.
“You’re due for an upgrade,” she whispered to the wife, who traced her hand absently along the glass case as she eyed ring after glittering ring.
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You can start with the diamond or the setting,” suggested the saleswoman. The wife looked to her husband. “I recommend starting with the diamond,” said the saleswoman quickly, setting a velvet pillow on the glass and then unlocking the cabinet.
The husband drummed his fingers against the display glass.
“I wouldn’t how to choose,” she looked up at her husband. He shifted his weight.
“You will know,” assured the saleswoman. “It’s like choosing a puppy from a litter. One wins your heart.” She dumped a dozen diamonds from the pouch onto the velvet pillow and prodded them to sparkle with her white-tipped nails, as if they were horses needing cropping. She studied the wife’s face, and then used a metal file to set one diamond apart from the rest. It was not the largest diamond, but light rebounded from it as if it were a many-sided mirror.
“This is the one,” the saleswoman told the husband. “I wouldn’t have guessed the emerald cut. It’s unconventional. But that narrows down the settings.”
She flipped over a business card, scribbled something on it, then slid it across the glass to the husband. He looked it over and placed it in his wallet next to a stack of crisp bills.
“And here you are, my dear.” The saleswoman pinched the wife’s own ring between her pointer finger and thumb and waited for her to take it. “You can wear this until you get the new one.”
Weeks, then months, then more anniversaries plodded by without hint of the new ring. So the wife started taking off her old one at night to remind her husband. And it helped sometimes.
Once she left it carelessly on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. “What is your ring doing here?” He demanded, as if she had let the children out without mittens.
“I took it off to wash the dishes,” she said without looking up from her novel. “It’s a bit loose. I might need to have it resized.”
“Well, be careful with it. It’s a family heirloom, remember?”
“I haven’t lost a ring yet.” She glanced at him over the rim of her coffee cup.
“I think you are being snide.”
“Not at all.” She set the cup down and rubbed her finger over a small chip in the saucer. Her hand was trembling.
The husband had lost his wedding ring during their honeymoon to Looking Glass Falls. They had been hiking and stopped beneath the falls for a swim. She balanced on the slippery rocks and dipped her toes into the frigid water. He dove in. When he surfaced, he shook the water from his hair and hollered at her to join him. He swam to the deepest part of the plunge pool, where the water spilled over the rim of rocks. There, the water seemed black and impenetrable. When her husband dove under, she saw a sinking flash of flesh and then nothing at all. She grew worried and waded in up to her chest. Suddenly, he grabbed her leg and pulled her under. They surfaced, sputtering and laughing, until she noticed his naked finger. “Your ring!”
The husband borrowed a mask and snorkel from some kids who were diving for pennies. He dove time and again into that deep and infinite pool. She held her breath with him, for him, until he breached, blowing water, gasping and blue. Nothing. Nothing and nothing and nothing again. He returned to her, shivering. They had no words for what had happened. They had to cut their losses and move on.
Sometimes, when she woke in the night and lay in bed next to her husband, she imagined that lost ring, lodged between river rocks, beyond the reach of sunlight and the pounding of the falls.
He continued pawing through the snow, this time in the far corner of the yard.
Virgin snow covered the ground beneath the balcony door from which she had tossed the ring. Or pretended to. Now his footprints marred the snow as if their yard were a playground after recess. He hung his head. She almost called to him, “I have the ring. Come inside and warm up.”
He suddenly straightened and turned toward her, jaw clenched. She could see his eyes across the yard, round and white as the moon.
She withdrew from the window and tiptoed down the stairs so she didn’t wake the children. She hurried to the back door, and, holding the ring in her left hand, reached out with her right to lock it, just as he came to the door. They stared at one another through the glass. His nostrils flared and frosted the pane. Her own transposed reflection distorted the features of her husband’s face. Together, they had a grotesquely large nose, hollow cheeks, and cavernous eyes. He pounded on the door. She stumbled back and held the ring in the air, where it glittered like ice in the moonlight.
His eyes widened, then hardened. He bent over to scoop up a handful of snow and slam it against the glass.
She flung the ring into the room’s darkness where it pinged against the tile floor. Then she unlocked the door and raced up the stairs. Panting, she crawled into bed with their youngest child.
Their daughter lay sideways across the bed, her arms splayed across the mattress. The wife caught her daughter’s hand, warm and soft, and drew it to her chest. Thank goodness she has my hands, thought the wife.
She heard her husband’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. He paused in front of the boys’ room. She could hear him breathe. His measured footfalls continued down the hall. He stopped in front of their daughter’s door and pushed it open with his knuckles.
The wife pressed herself harder against her daughter’s warm body. Her husband stood in the doorway, a shadow. They stared across the room, as if they could see one another through the darkness. They had no words for what had happened. They had to cut their losses and move on.
My ex-husband and I were dividing property. He wanted everything of value. Eventually, only the lawn mower and a couple of chipped clay pots remained.
It was my turn to pick. I chose the mower.
“You already have a lawn mower!”
“Nothing else is worth anything.”
“You are going to make me buy a $300 lawn mower so that you can sell this one on Craigslist for $75?”
“It’s your turn to pick.”
He chose the pots.
The next morning I rolled the lawnmower to his new house as a housewarming gift.
If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,–but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. –But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into he region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.
When we stepped off the path through the prairie
we left a trail of bent grasses
like the trace of a finger through sand.
Some find it unbearable, the tickle,
grass against the thighs, spider webs broken
across the face, the thought of ticks.
But you and I, we can’t help ourselves.
We step into the ungroomed grass
and startle a butterfly who bumps, not once
but twice, between us before blinking away
like the bouncing ball over the words of a song.
We follow her to a small spring
that sings softly, a spring where yellow finches bathe
and watercress spreads, where sand plumes
from fissures in the rock.
My infant, pinched and swaddled,
sleeping through pots clanging, doors slamming,
curls her fingers around my finger outstretched
against her palm. It’s a reflex,
that tiniest embrace, but to me
it is a declaration, a promise,
like the wedding kiss.
evelynwestbrook 