Inexpensive
Coffee table
Book
Published in
an edition of one on the occasion of Christmas Holidays for Paul Finley,
December 16, 1996
Copyright ©
1996; all rights reserved.
For a nicer
text, download the e-book
version.
The Orchard
Our home in Ohio in the 1950s had about eighty
apple and a dozen cherry trees. In the spring the blossoms would roll through
in waves, cherries first, followed by the white apples, then the rose colored
blossoms, tufts of tied crepe paper, kleenex blossoms on wires, and finally
shag almost lilac in color the crapbapple trees with rusty dots reminding you
of cinnamon.
The trees were only 20 feet tall, and excellent for
kid-climbing. We could stay up in them for hours in the summer, nibbling the
first bitter green beads, and nod at this year's flavor, before the worms
invaded.
Our bodies were so small we could climb to the
highest twigs and the wind would hold us up there, heads poking through the
canopy, gazing out over the waving leaves.
I made a tree fort around the trunk one tree, out
of stolen plywood and ceramic tiles that stayed up for about five years. I
slept in it a few times, and drew up plans to include my friends in, like a
university where we would all tell one another what we had read in books, about
dinosaurs and what kinds of clouds there were, I would buy a sprayer and a
bottle of methionol and hook it up to a garden hose and walk through the
orchard demonstrating how to hose away the scaly mites and red cedar worms that
ravaged the sweet green meat, and my brother could maybe tell us about the
Civil War, and we would all be professors, trading wisdom down by the
boysenberry bramble, where the Queen Anne's lace teased the butterflies and
last year's lost baseballs lingered underfoot, the color of weeds.
When the apples were of a size we used them as
balls, smashing one after another with Lousiville Sluggers, up over the
monkeyball trees and into the swamp. A giant St. Bernard named Topper, that
belonged to the landlord, sometimes lumbered through, jowls dripping, a dazed,
mortal look on its face, and we would drop our bats and run into the barn, and
hide in the cornrick till he had passed.
We mounted a basketball hoop on the side of the
barn, and used to play PIG and HORSE and other animal games. Sometimes my
brother would stand on one side of the barn, and me on the other, and we would
throw a football over the roof to each other. You never knew where it would
appear as it crossed the roofline, and the ball seemed to pop into reality
there, like a sword held up from a wallowing pond.
One day the barn caught fire and all the stuff
inside was destroyed. I remember a corn grinder that we used to stuff ears of
hard corn into, and the cobs would pop out the end, shiny and red and clean,
like a peach basket of new pulled teeth.
My dad always wanted us to mow the yard, but the
mower was huge and we could not control it as it raced over the fallen apples,
swerving and sawing. When it was up and running it would mow the fallen apples
with its blades, and spray the slash around our ankles while we pushed, and
yellow jackets would sneak into our pantlegs and sting us. The rest of the time
it wouldn't run, and our dad would hike up his pantlegs and kneel on the garage
floor peering up at the glass gas-ball, emory board the sparkplug gap, crank
the cord, but it would never start. My brother and I had broken it with our
minds.
And in the fall, the rotting apples covered the
yard, bumpy and squishy and brown, and the whole world smelled like cider and
we had to rake them into piles with garden rakes, and the apples would stick on
the tines of the rake, and we'd have to pull them off every half minute.
Then we set the knobby apples on fire and the sweet
stink of roasting mash would swamp the neighborhood, and somewhere the muskrats
and possums and raccoons that we knew only as furtive figures drifting across
dirt roads at night stood up, sniffed the evening air and took notice.
At the center of the orchard stood a huge pile of
railroad ties, dripping creosote. We played King of the Mountain on them, but
gingerly, because they were always giving way, and wolf spiders made their home
in among the tarry beams. And when Mr. Thomas bulldozed the orchard lot and
built a tract home where my tree fort had been, the new neighbors used the
beams as a backstop for rifle targets, and it wasn't safe to wander over that
way any more, and we were getting older anyway.
But a part of me still bundled up after snowfalls
and trekked down to where the creek trickled through the trees, and smashed the
new ice with my galoshes. And in the spring, when the blossoms once again lit
up the remaining patch of trees, I would wonder if this was the year to spray,
and stop the cedar scabbing, rout out the inevitable worms, put red fruit on
the table in a painted bowl and earn our childhood finally, acting decisively,
consciously, with purpose and poise but some other things got in the way, and
we didn't.
October, 1996
THE ICE FATHER
(John
Wolfe's daughter remembers from the year 1923;
reconstructed from an AP wire story])
We left home that morning in the single-seat
sleigh, the thirteenth of February, my mama and papa, my brother Eldred and me,
Leona, for Gramma's house twelve miles away, and Papa kept urging us, he'd say,
You hurry up Leona, that wind is up to something or other, and aught but a fool
would tempt it. And Papa wore his great brown coat, with the horse's hair
collar, the one that reached all the way to his boots, and I sat beside him and
held on to his pocket, and Eldred and Mom held each other for heat.
Frazie, at first she didn't want to go, you could
see it plain when she looked over her shoulder, peering through her mane at the
door to the barn and the straw-warmed stall. But Papa liked saying that an old
horse couldn't do else but obey, and she lit out, headed into the wind already
so strong it blew your eyes dry. None of us talked up top in the sleigh, and
the shrill in the ear even drownded out Papa's coaxing the horse.
Wind weren't nothing new to us, and Hankinson was
but twelve mile, and Frazie was a good enough horse, yet still the clouds took
on a ugly look. Eldred, and he was older than me, began crying by and by, but I
sat still while the snow commenced to swirl, and Papa cursed and Mama gave him
the scold for that, and Pap flung down the reins and jumped off to unfasten
Frazie, and slapped her for luck in finding some still place nearby, and before
that horse took two full steps she vanished in the white.
I swear that storm must of hated us, it swore and
shouted and stomped for hours, shouted evilly every instant. Mama cupped her
hands and called out into Papa's ear, but no one heard, and Mama looked on us
terrible grievious, and just as grievious was what she said. She said Children,
gather round my knees.
And we both of us knelt beneath Mama's petticoat
and dress, Eldred holding her right leg and me having hold on the left, and
Mama crouched over us two and Papa stood strong and tall in the single seater,
the great brown coat teepeed around his shoulders and stretched down around us
all. And there he stood bare faced to the storm that screamed through the day,
until I began to hear, in the midst of the clamor, my heart and my mama's and
Eldred's hearts beating in threes, and no one said nothing. Eldred and I held
hold to the hem of Mama's dress, tucking it time and again underneath us.
Throughout, Papa never shifted weight.
I recall when Mama started to shake and I knew she
was weeping, and Eldred gone to sleep on my arm, and I did what I could to try
and be brave but for one small second when I thought of my Papa and couldn't
hold onto myself any longer and dug my fingers into Mama's leg, and though
nobody heard me on top of the roar, shouted Papa, Papa, don't die.
He stood like that for twenty hours, all through
the long night and on into morning. And when I awakened I knew from the
cracking of ice outside it was over. All of us below lost fingers and toes and
Mama lost both ears as well and almost lost her nose -- we were a fright to
see. And Papa, why, he was dead. He was all froze through and could not be
lifted, not by the minister who came out from Hankinson to help the farmer from
over the hill who showed up with Frazie tethered and well. We was only ten
trees from help all the while.
I wished you could of seen my Papa, his eyes was
frozen open, still blue, you could tell he was thinking of something far off. I
tried saying goodbye but it was like tapping through ten panes of glass, and I
had lost all feeling in my hands. The reverend backed me away by the shoulder
but I pushed his mitt away and cried. Oh Papa, I told him that Valentine's day,
how could you stand stock still and still leave us.
February, 1978
THE GOOD KING
I write a
story for my daughter
There was a king in a land far from this place, where the
moon sits purple on the edge of night, and the corn plants praise the golden
sun.
This king, whose name was Thomas, was rich with
gold and treasure, and a splendid court, and a great house, and shopkeepers,
and farms, and cathedrals, and armies, and thousands of loyal subjects. The
nations feared him. The people revered him, though they never saw his face.
For he seldom left his castle, and his people did
not know him. He was thought to be cold, and aloof. He wanted very much to be a
good king for them, to govern his people wisely. To him that meant working
long, hard days, exhausting his scribes, and burning many candles to the nub.
He worked tirelessly to serve his people, but he was not happy. He did not feel
he knew his people, or that they knew him.
Now
it happened that one day, King Thomas grew impatient with the long hours and
rustling paper and the thick castle air. He decided to venture out into his
domain. He canceled his appointments, and telling no one, he dressed in
ordinary clothing, as a traveling seller of silks, taking only a purse of gold,
a letter of recommendation, and a ruby ring. He slipped past the guards at the
castle gate, and out into the city.
The city bazaars were a rainbow of color, and
voices, and music. What will you give me for this fine lamp?, a vendor cried.
Ribbons! I have ribbons of scarlet and gold!, cried another. Onion pies! Hot
from my stone oven!, cried a third.
Thomas was glad to see the merriment and prosperity
of the booths. People were buying and selling, and laughing and talking. It meant
he was succeeding in his efforts as king, that his people should be so happy.
He wandered through the square, where the children
of the city's merchants were playing ring-o-leary. He walked down streets where
the grand houses of his administrators gave way to the smaller houses of the
ordinary people, and beyond them, the hovels and shacks of the city's poor.
He stood by a lamppost and watched a man beat a
donkey with a stick. He saw a woman drag her daughter by one hand into the
sagging doorway of an open hut. He saw a famished child sitting listlessly in
the shadow of the cathedral wall. He heard the wail of a baby from one of the
houses, sounding frightened and miserable.
A tear rolled down his cheek. He had not known such
unhappiness existed. He was ashamed he had let his country slip into such
misery.
As
evening drew near, he was walking in the shadow of a dark bridge when two men
accosted him. Your money or your life, one man hissed, and he felt the other
man's arms encircle him.
"Take my money," said Thomas, thinking of
the poverty he had seen that day. "Take it, and buy what you need. I want
you to have it."
The thieves took his purse from the king's belt and
shook it to hear the clink of gold coins. The one thief threw the purse to the
other, who snatched it away and laughed.
The two men turned and glowered at the Thomas.
"You never saw us, "they told him. Thomas watched as the two thieves
skipped away down the cobbled street.
Troubled, he wandered down the alleyways. He was hungry,
and cold, and sad. He stopped in the doorway of a humble home. Inside he saw
the embers of a warm fire glowing, and a woman sitting by it, wrapped in a
shawl. Summoning his courage, he knocked.
"Excuse me, missus," he told the woman
who peered at him from the window, "can you spare a traveler a piece of
bread, and a place by your fire?"
How do I know you are not the brigand Milan, come
to kill me in my sleep? the woman demanded? A poor woman cannot open her door
in these dark times. Begone, and God's grace with you.
Begging forgiveness, the king slipped away. Walking
in rapid strides, he hastened back to the palace. He must sit down with his
advisors at once and plot ways to do away with the poverty and crime he had
witnessed. He must enlist the help of his armies to put an end to injustice and
uncaring .
The
moon's rays found him beside the great palace gate. A trickle of rain dampened
his head and shoulders. His agitation was plain on his face. He presented
himself to the officer of the hour.
"I am the king," he said. "Let me
enter."
The officer approached, along with another dragoon.
"The king? At this hour? Be away with you, fool!"
"I tell you I am your master the king."
One of the dragoons held a lantern to his face and
torn clothes, saw the dried tears on his face. "The king, eh?" he
sneered. He turned to his companion. "You recognize the king, don't
you?"
"Oh, indeed I do. All hail his highness the
king!" the dragoon said, and spat.
"Lunatic," the officer said, "have
you your papers?"
The dragoons went through his pockets. They found
no identification, but they did find his letter of recommendation, stamped with
the king's private seal. One dragoon read it to the other:
Who bears
this letter is our sovereign king.
The dragoons hooted with laughter. "You, our
king?" one of them said. "Our king is a great man, noble of
countenance, all-powerful. You are a madman, an imposter . Shame on you! I
should have your ears cut off. In fact, I think I will," he said, and drew
his sword.
But the other dragoon held him back. "That's a
fine cotton coat he wears, he whispered. And the night is wicked cold."
While one dragoon snatched the cloak from the
king's shoulders, the other tore his letter into bits.
"If you are truly king you will have no trouble
replacing a simple cloak," they said. And they pushed him to the ground,
and laughed, and strode away.
Cold
to his bones, Thomas made his way back down the unfamiliar streets, past house
after house. Every house was dark, now. Even the chimney of the frightened
woman was cold and still now. He shivered and walked on in the drizzle, across
the city bridge, out into the open farmland and up into the hilly pastures
surrounding the city.
Thomas was furious that his own soldiers were
criminals. His entire kingdom was a kind of lie. Its king was good, but its
people were in pain. He needed time to think, to plan a course of action.
He walked for hours across meadows and through
trees. An owl taunted him from the branch of a fir tree. "Who? Who?"
Finally he came to a rude lean-to with a thatch roof. Inside it smelled like
animals, and the sound of water dripping from holes in the thatch. He found a
piece of rotted burlap and wrapped it round his shoulders. He removed his shoes
and set them aside, and brushed the mud from between his toes. He lay in the
damp straw and he slept.
He
woke in the morning to a strange sensation. A ewe stood next to him, licking
his hair. He could smell the sheep's wet wool.
Bewildered, the disheveled king sat and rubbed his
eyes. He was halfway up a tall hill. Below him a dozen sheep grazed, and not
far from them, a boy, perhaps eight years of age.
"Hello, there," he called. But the boy
did not look up toward him. "Hello," he called again, "I am
lost, could you tell me where I am?" But the boy gave no sign of
acknowledging him.
Thomas rose and, shoeless, began stumbling down the
path toward the boy. The stones and thistles stung his soft feet. Even when he
drew near the boy did not turn around.
"Boy," he said, touching the boy's
shoulder. But the boy whirled around, astonished, as if he had not heard him
approaching. The boy's eyes were wild and dark, they fluttered with alertness.
His face bore the marks of many beatings.
Thomas looked at the boy's startled expression and
understood. "You cannot hear, can you," he said softly. The boy shook
his head. "And I am very lost," the king said.
The boy broke a piece of bread in half and shared
it with the king. Then he led him to a brook, where he satisfied his thirst. As
the king looked into the water in his cupped hands, he saw his face, chapped
and bruised. He no longer looked like any sort of king. He looked like a man of
no great account. The only sign of his identity was the ruby ring on his right
hand, the ring of the realm.
As
the day wore on, the boy led his flock to the next hill to graze, and Thomas
followed. All day they walked along the rocky ridge, following where the sheep
led them. When the sun began to set, the boy took him by the hand and took him
over the hilltop and into the next valley. They walked along a copse of poplar
trees until they came to a tent of skins and cloth.
Inside Thomas heard men speaking loudly.
"Where is that boy?" "Why was water not fetched?"
"I'll teach that dreamer a lesson with my knout!"
Thomas pulled the boy aside. He wanted to tell the
boy not to go in. The boy patted his hand, as if to say, he had no choice.
Thomas waited under a tall tree. He listened as the men took turns shouting.
"Lazy idiot!" "Hit him for me, too!" "The dolt kicked
over my wine!"
He heard a crash, as if something had been thrown
to the ground and broken. Someone cursed, and the king could just make out
against the lantern light, the sight of an arm raised against the boy.
Thomas rushed in, and confronted three men in rough
attire. The boy was on the ground, trembling, his hands over his head. One of
the men was striking him again and again with a knotted scrap of leather.
"Stop!" the king cried. In a rage, he
held up his ring, the red ruby glinting in the candle light. Take this, and let
the boy be!
The men looked crazily at him in the dim light. His
hair was bedraggled, his face was haggard, with dried drops of blood on his
brow. The red jewel glittered magically above him.
"Get the ring!" one man cried, and they
gathered around him, and pushed him to the ground, and struck him with their
fists. Thomas moaned. He curled into a ball and groaned.
He
awoke in the dark. The tent had been packed up and taken away. The men were
gone, as were their sacks and their donkey. His ring was gone. All that
remained were the king and the boy, sleeping bare-legged on the open ground,
with a handful of sheep bleating around them.
Thomas sat up, and knelt by the boy, gathering him
up in his arms. The two together were warmer than each apart.
King Thomas sat in the darkness, rocking the boy in
his arms. Perhaps this was enough, he thought. Perhaps kings cannot really be
kings, he thought. They are too far away from the people, what they were
thinking and feeling. People dream of kings, but kings don't matter. High above
them a star shot briefly across the sky, then disappeared. And they rocked, and
rocked, and rocked.
Back in the city, the word went out that the king
had abdicated and fled. From what, no one was certain.
Some said he had run away with a princess to her
country. Some said he had lost his mind, and was in the towers still, muttering
to himself and playing with his fingers. Perhaps plotters had poisoned him.
Perhaps he had taken the crown jewels and betrayed his own country. Clearly he
had never been a good king.
And so, in the kingdom where the moon sits purple
on the edge of night, and the corn plants praise the golden sun, a new king was
installed, a cousin of the old king. The new king was praised far and wide.
Unlike his predecessor, he would be a good king.
At the coronation procession through the city,
people from all over the kingdom filled the streets to cheer their new leader.
The new king commanded that coins be thrown to the cheering people, and the
imperial trumpets blared.
And no one took notice, among the roaring throng,
of a shepherd boy on an older man's shoulders, shouting louder than all the
rest. For he had caught a royal coin, and shared it with his father.
December, 1991
DEATH, HELL
AND SANTA CLAUS
My kids are reaching a certain age, and they are
finding stuff out. About six months ago my seven-year-old -- she will want me
to point out that she was 6 at the time -- asked me if there really was or was
not a Santa Claus.
She had asked the question before, but then it was
with a look on her face that seemed to say, "You won't believe what some
of the kids at school whose folks are divorced said." This time, the look
said, "I already know."
So I told her. "Santa Claus is a disguise for
all the moms and dads and grandparents of the world, who want to show kids how
much they love them, but don't want credit for doing it."
Not bad for no warning, right? Anyway, she bought
it, especially when I took her aside and told her that now she was on our side,
and it wouldn't do to spoil the fun for her little brother, 3.
My daughter is a gentle soul, and she absorbs these
changes gracefully. But I can't get over the feeling that I am only giving her
one thread of the tapestry at a time. I am aching to spill the whole kettle of
beans in one summary blurt-out to her. "No Santa Claus, and we die, and
there may or may not be a God, and if there is, maybe there is a hell you go to
when you die, and injustice is not always punished in this life, absurd
household accidents claim a million Americans every year, people's lives hit
unspeakable dead-ends, they marry the wrong people, their kids move away, marry
bums, and break their hearts, the social system breaks their spirit, and the
universe is a gigantic pulsing mystery, and your parents have sex."
That is too much to lay on a kid. In fact, I'll bet
you're a little shaken yourself -- I know I am. But adult life is a robust
catalog of this kind of gloom. Whenever we tell our kids to grow up, what we
really mean is get wise and give up.
I don't remember when I first learned about death.
Probably Red Ryder meant to shoot a gun out of someone's hand, but the bullet
ricocheted (zing!) and pierced his heart instead. But real death, as opposed to
TV death, revealed its nature only with the passage of years. One night when I
was 7 my mom had to pack quickly for a trip to Michigan. Her mom had had a heart
attack, and was dead. In her grief, my mom said Grandma was "with the
angels now," ostensibly to comfort me -- but probably more to comfort
herself. To me it raised the specter of my Grandma -- a lovely warm-hearted
woman whom I had seen tear a still-warm chicken apart at the kitchen table --
cavorting with angels. Surely that was as absurd as no afterlife at all?
In those days people were less nervous about death
-- it happened, and you cried. We hadn't yet learned to be properly anxious
about it. I'm 41 now, and I and a lot of my generation are listening with much
closer attention to talk about such things as living wills, actuarial
probabilities, and claims about canola oil and rice bran. The signs of our
ripeness -- bulging bellies and IRAs -- are signs that we are ready to be
plucked from the vine. And our kids, these precious custom units sent to
replace us, are just barely coming to grips with "reality."
Family life gave us the basics, but it took the
nuns at school to platte out the full ideology of death. We die because of Adam
and Eve's sin, they said. If they had not indulged themselves at our expense,
we would live forever.
I spent at least a year cursing Adam and Eve's
stupidity. Then it dawned on me that they hadn't been given a very complete
instructions manual for the Garden. God told them they would surely die. But
what did they know of death? And since when were all the rest of us included in
their fate? I can see Adam and Eve having to die, but what did I ever do to
deserve to die? I had always been aces to everyone I knew.
Well, maybe not aces. Maybe not even deuces. By the
second grade I had accepted the concept that someday, probably when I was
really old and really didn't care much one way or the other, I would die. This
was hard in itself. What made it worse was the new knowledge that I would
almost certainly go to hell.
Hell? Yes. In its ancient wisdom my religion had
decided that the death of the body was insufficient deterrent in and of itself.
The soul must also be perishable -- it could be caught in the throes of death
agony throughout eternity. If you were not really, really good. A classic case
of double jeopardy.
As for why I would go to hell, it was only logical.
There was just too much dishwater over the dam -- mostly lies. Virtually
everything I said was a lie. Couldn't help myself -- still can't. So, around
age 8, I adopted a modified limited hangout strategy. Yes, I would die. But on
the day of judgment, realizing God had to make a lot of snap decisions amid all
the hubbub of Armageddon, I intended to make a dramatic plea for clemency -- on
the grounds that I was weak, that I was sorry, that I had always had the
feeling that, somehow, God had a special feeling about me, and now was the time
to put that feeling to the test.
That might not work, of course, so I probably had
to be working on Plan B all along. In Plan B you look to others to save you,
you work like crazy all your life to make a positive impression on people.
Perhaps, if you did great and memorable things, when you died, a part of you
would carry over -- your reputation. Maybe you would earn a line in the
World Almanac, or have your picture appear in the daily paper, holding a big
fish. Or maybe all you would be is a cherished thought in the minds of those
who knew you, and they maybe would build a wax diorama of you doing something
typical, like clipping your toenails, just off the living room of your great
great grandchildren's house, and you would sit like that for eternity, a grin
on your face and your foot in your hand. And the effigy would be smiling,
because through it you had cheated the grave, sort of. That's if things went
really, really well.
I haven't told my kids about hell. It's bad enough
they know all about death already. All those people on getting gunned down on
the news, blowing up, and going over cliffs in cars. They know all about death.
Maybe. One day my daughter threw herself on the
sofa. "I wish I were dead!" she sobbed. But when I asked her why she
wanted to be dead, she said she fell and scraped her knee on the bus, and
whenever she flexed it it stung. If she were dead, she figured, she wouldn't feel
the sting.
I was glad she didn't know about dying. I went
through a morbid streak when I was an adolescent, in which I lay awake for
hours at night, certain a tumor was working its way through my head, certain
blackness, oblivion, and unfulfillment were my destiny. It was all about me,
that death -- only I would make that dark crossing.
When my stepdad died last fall, after a long
illness, I took the kids to the vigil. There lay my dear old dad, who had been
a lion in life, always roaring about one thing or another, then sick and
feeble, and now, all done up by the embalmer, well, he looked great -- noble,
calm, patriarchal. My stepdad was what you would call a great guy. Always doing
for other people, and impossibly generous. Even when I was on the outs with my
family he always slipped me a few 20s when he saw me. His employees loved him,
everyone in town loved him -- even his wife and children loved him. Toward the
end he let his white beard grew, a kind of Santa Claus himself. When he came
down sick, with a real brain tumor, this rough, loud man surprised everyone
with a sudden meekness and peacefulness of heart. It was a tough time, and he
bore it well.
I held my young son against my chest as we viewed
the casket. He did not disgrace me. He stared solemnly at his grandfather's
face, said, "Poppa's sleeping," and absently raised the arm of his
Donatello figurine.
I worried how the funeral might affect the kids, if
they would have nightmares, or what. On the way back, outside Chicago, I
noticed a tear in Daniele's eye. "Are you all right?" I asked.
"I'm fine," she said. "I'm just sad
Poppa is dead."
Maybe that's how it is, then -- fantasy death
giving way to the real thing, obsessions and compulsions giving way to grief,
and life going on, like a young girl. We drove home singing the happy hiker
song, and that night I dreamed of the body of Santa at night, reposed in soft
snow, and high above the crisp, still sky, the stars of heaven sparkling.
May, 1993
When You Are Pope
When you are pope you cannot be like other men. You
cannot be seen disappearing into limos outside casinos or polishing off a beer
at a corner tavern, the old men snorting at your caftan and cap.
You cannot affect a commanding air, pulling at your
cincture and laughing like a man, you must be humble all the day. You must be
unworthy to loosen the bootstraps of the world, even if you are not feeling
humble, or humble has become tiresome as a singsong prayer.
Everyone is your boss because everyone knows you
and expects certain behavior. No spitting, no grumpiness, no annoyance with
fools for if you show any signs of being human they will not let you be pope
any more and you will wind up on a bridge somewhere selling windup toys or
grilled kebabs and people will come up to you squinting saying I know you.
You must always be for life and always be for peace
and never concede the fact that everybody dies and the world is ripe with
people who could benefit richly from a ferocious beating and everyone knows it
but you are not allowed to say it.
People go on and on about this saint and that saint
and you can say nothing though you know all the evidence in all their files,
who was too fond of the muscatel, who wrote letters of an unholy nature, who
masturbated with the lilies of the field, and who, when the dog the body was
disinterred and the coffin cracked the look on their face was a maniac grin,
frozen that way for eternity.
It is hard to keep up with friends. It is not the
same when you are pope. They are so fond of you now, fonder than they ever were
of you before and nothing you say gets through to them, they won't let you be
honest any more. There are times you want to burst out crying and tell them
everything what a crock the Vatican is and what assholes the cardinals all are
and what you would give just to sit and play cards and sip gin like you used to
years ago before people stopped listening.
When you are pope you understand your career has
probably peaked, there will probably not be many achievements after this, it
will be unusual even to catch a fish on a Saturday in an aluminum boat, the
little waves banging against the prow, and haul it flipping into your net. You
will look over your shoulder and the lake will be full of other boats, and film
crews and helicopters, and people will say it's not a fish, it's an allegory,
you have to think about this on a very complex level, nothing is simple any
more.
When you are pope it is sadder than you imagined.
The devout and the suffering look to you as if you had the answers for their madness,
for the cough that has been getting worse, for the world in arms, and the
torture of the faithful over slow flames, and you would do anything to take
away the pain but what can you do, you are only a pope.
Your faith that never let you down before is
suspect, you haven't heard from God in years, he is like some clever zephyr
that blows into town and blows out again, now you see him, then for thousands
of years you don't, and if gets to be too much and you start to doubt it's your
fault, where's your faith you sad son of a bitch, I was just waiting for this
moment, I knew you would disappoint me.
And now the light pours in at Castle Gandolfo, and
you awaken late and your kidneys ache and you wonder how long you can carry the
cross for the rest of the world, and you think of a girl you knew in school,
and you wonder what became of her, if she got old and fat and lost that look
that lifted you up off your feet all those years ago or she is still who she
was then, a lifetime later, and all this time she could have been your friend,
and you turn in the bedsheets, holding your side, you feel as if a spear that
fetched water from you, and it is seeping away like raindrops from the body,
shiny as silver, famous as dust.
July, 1996
Things I Meant to Notice
I meant for the longest time to think about the
little tasks, about tying the shoes, and fitting the hands into gloves, I saw
my big hands negotiating the laces and trying sleeve after sleeve over finger
and thumb.
I could have set aside the sand I dumped out of
each sneaker, enough for a beach, enough for a castle and a moat.
I could have written about the look on their faces
sometimes, that they saw us not as the oafs who yelled and sighed and lived
stupidly above eye level, but shining gods, shining, omnipotent and perfect.
How when they cried in your arms they were praying
to you to make it better, to lift the pain from their lives, and you could.
I could have written about the tiredness of the
house, the exhaustion of the tabletops, crusted with crud, sponged pointlessly
after meals, the flakes and globs spattered on the floor that fill the cracks
in the hardwood.
Or the handles on the stroller that were not long
enough, so you walked in a crouch, and the white plastic wheels that turned
sideways on a whim or a pebble and skidded to a halt.
I could have remembered their bodies between us in
bed when they were just babies, the smell of them there, the cramped caution of
the dark, the wet exhalation from their noses. The kick of them against
blanket, that wakes you and momentarily annoys you, then draws you even closer.
Why did they finally leave our bed, our big pink
comforter and the warmth of the family, for beds of their own? There was space
for us all, and another night would have cost them nothing, but they went.
I could have described the last night they woke up
frightened and sauntered in barefoot and climbed in between us. They slept
again immediately, and we tried, too.
But I know you were thinking, off on your side,
that this is the moment, and this was our life, and the white skin of our
children dove and fell again beside us, in the bright sun setting, out to sea.
December, 1996
Did
you tip your writer?
I enjoyed serving this essay up for
you. I do it for free, and I enjoy it. If you'd like to contribute to this
site, however, to keep it up and humming, consider dropping a $1 tip in the
"Honor Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click
the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike
Total tips, year to date: $203.00 - MANY THANKS!
