I Believe the Crows

    I sit here every afternoon to watch the sun go down and the moon come up, near to each other -- both low above the horizon.
    I do not ask the obvious question: How could that be? The sun and the moon, so near connected? I do not say, That can't be, it's impossible! because I know an infinity of late afternoons where I have sat and watched this same scene -- as if it were a painting! -- and I believe the crows.
    I believe the crows. Their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, on back in time before there were paintings, have seen the same thing I do now, and have eaten the seeds of wheat, and have talked about it all as they do now.
    Look! Admire! Plenty! Caw! Caw!
 
 
 
This painting by Vincent Van Gogh was completed shortly before he committed suicide.

My Own Castle

    Although the sky is indigo, like the textiles from de Nimes, and although my horse is watered and well fed, I am not sure I want to pause here to stare at the darkened towers of that castle on the steep smooth mountain (made of stiff coagulated custard), nor do I want to hallooo to its loneliness. I dare not stop to gaze and wonder:
    Why is there a black cloud over that castle, with its many empty windows
and crenelations like filed teeth?
    I dare not take the time to look back at my own castle -- to admire the way it smiles at me in its good humor and waves its flag.
    Why does my own castle have a light and down-soft cloud above it? Are there two gods of the air blowing? One, his foul black breath, so thick it sinks rather than floats, and the other, laughing as she blows, so her sweet airy breath rises like the good smell of baking bread.
    Are there two gods?
  I dare not slow down again because now I see the wooden fences that try to keep the dark castle-men safe from land or sea invasion, and I see they have but five warriors left. And are they warriors? or are they widows, left behind?
    No-one waits to hear me, but what I have to say is "I am your neighbor. I'm just passing by."

Lined with Black Lace

SWEATER•Black cashmere lined with lace, w/blk snap-on mink collar, or embroidery strip. Size S $125.
    1. Okay, which is it? the snap-on mink collar or the embroidery strip? that's all I want to know right now. Let's see; the mink = animal screaming in pain as it is skinned alive. I know I'd rather have the embroidery strip.
    2. But what is embroidered on the strip? I hope it's naked men, frontal and backall. I like both.
    3. Is the lace scratchy? Am I going to be sitting at the concert scratching in time to Chris Mann's Scratch Scratch - A History of Grammar ? Or will I be distracted (almost an anagram of scratched) while I'm learning to scratch??
    4. Sometimes it's illuminating to read want ads. What do they want? What do I want? Where would I put it? How many new musical techniques do I want to know about? What is it about hip hop?
    5. Rabbits. I dreamed about a rabbit last night. I was helping a man who couldn't walk because his legs were too limp, and he really wanted to go somewhere down the highway, and I got him a rabbit also. I'm a very helpful person.
    6. Whaddyuh think? Am I really a BLACK Cashmere sweater type? Do they ever make cashmere out of denim? rayon? kudzu?

Her Life List

    She was nearing the end of her Life List. She'd only started it a few months before, when she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she had already done. (One thing -- "learn English grammar more perfectly" -- she realized that she would never do. For example, she probably should have written the second sentence [see above] "... she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she had done already" or maybe it was "... she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she already had done". But all she could hear was her mother's querulous voice saying blah blah blah already blah blah. It was too late for all that, already.)
    She had jumped on a trampoline; she had played a bass guitar; she had peed in the desert; she had had wild pigs brush against her as they ran through a forest; she had kissed a skeleton; she had climbed a sycamore tree 30 feet in the air and gotten back down by herself. With her cat. She had gone up in the basket of a cherry picker and surveyed her own street this way and that and peeked over the cornice of her own house, without ever looking directly at the ground or her own feet. She had jumped in quarry water that was too deep for her and thrashed back to shore, alive.
    She had pasted on a mustache, worn men's shoes and jacket, and passed for a man at a bar. (Someone, she thought maybe it was another man, had flirted with her.)
    She had written letters to the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and eventually one of her letters had appeared in each.
    She had crossed "Jump out of an airplane" off her Life List, realizing that that was more honestly what she wanted. She had stood at the foot of a ladder, at the top of which a Mexican man leaned against a fourth floor windowsill while he painted the minions and pinions, or was that mullions and millions, or pillions, or muntans? Ah yes, muntins! She had stood there, looking up, and seeing the curvature of the ladder, so tall it was mimicking the curvature of the earth she thought, and had decided against adding that to her life list.
    She had written a novel and she had it. Printed out. Somewhere.
    She had fallen in love once more, driven a tractor, picked up a spider and let it jump off her hand onto her shirt before it climbed into her hair.
    She had bid on, and won, the opportunity to walk slowly into a (large) cage with a (very old) tiger and stay for five minutes. $510 went to the Zoo. For free she had held a baby orangutan. (That had been near the top of her Life List. Oh, the sheer physical joy of that, the trust in those round beautiful brown eyes, the tickle of those darling fingers!)
    She had posed nude for a drawing class at the senior center, and afterward had chased a mugger and hit him with her umbrella. (If she hadn't had an umbrella, she would have hit him with her fist, but thank god she had an umbrella.) And not only that, she had stood on him until the police came.
    She had slept one night -- a sort of fund-raising pajama party -- at a homeless shelter; and been locked up one night in jail, for refusing to disperse with the rest of a crowd.
    She had called up the man who had broken her heart 40 years before and said, calmly, "I never liked you either." There!
    And now she faced the last two items. The last one was simply, "Die." The second to last was "Drive 120 miles per hour without endangering anyone else. Fly perhaps?" The time had come. She had kept her mother's old Ford Galaxy in a garage, taking it out every week for 30 years to blow out the ... well, now she couldn't remember what she was blowing out; something to do with tubes or pipes. Sort of like a colon cleanse for cars. This was a car from 1971, and it was long and lean and still a shiny dark green. It would look like a flying leaf, a glistening magnolia leaf, as it sped along, with her at the wheel, dressed in a cream-colored magnolia-petal satin dress with a nice hat on her head.
    She went to sleep that night, the night before she planned to fly the Ford. She dreamed that she drove to the grocery store, and saw her neighbor there picking out another dog. She went inside, and it was an antique show, and another friend bought a green enameled brooch in the shape of the pi symbol: (π) Then a truck came up behind her and the driver complained that there were puppies running under her car, and so she threw a piece of paper out the cracked window. She could see tire tracks in the muddy hill next to her. The grass was ruined, ground into the ground. And then she pressed her foot to the metal, or was that pedal to the metal?, and in other words she floored the Ford, and took off at what surely was 120 mph.
    Her mother might have liked this! It was a glorious sensation. The Ford Galaxy flew straight off the top of a high building, passing through cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds (accumulations and seriousness) and slowly it began to descend.
    She could still steer! It was amazing! She wasn't frightened! Slowly the Ford descended toward a narrow one-way street downtown. She could see that there were cars moving along the street, and she could see the gaps between cars in the left lane and cars in the right lane, and places where cars were parked. She guided the Ford down, and it landed with a slight bump right between two cars, and she kept on driving, and then she woke up. At least she thought she woke up. Now she wasn't at all sure.

Rib Cage

    Every time I drove to my friend’s house I saw the dead deer in the road.
    First she lay as a shapely but stricken form, her orangey fur stretched over high ribs, her small black hooves lying like tossed dice on the asphalt, her head resting on pebbles and the chuff of roadways.
    Each time I drove there, with my own tender feelings toward my friend herded, gathered for protection inside my ribcage, where they must stay invisible as if dead, I saw the deer – crumpling day by day, car by car, driver by oblivious driver, into the roadway, crushed so that even bloat couldn’t raise her up again.
           
    She is almost disintegrated now.
           
    Dust to dust? Sinews and muscles to ground meat; bones to chalky splinters, hooves to powdered keratin, doe eyes to pulp, mites to motes, and finally, after enough hot days' pulverizing, dust to dust.

PSI (Pronounced Sigh)

    This sandy beach is one of many along the course of the river winding through the park. The beaches travel like vacationers in search of perfect refuge, and change size with every storm clot of debris.
    This month her favorite beach goes halfway across the river. Water washes out the banks and the shallow rush takes small stones, sand, sunken leaves on watersogged caravans along the bottom.
    She always brings her dogs. They pull sticks from the muck. They chase each other; climbing the bank on one side, then leaping back in to swim.
    She walks bent over, looking down. She feels the blood rush in her head. She gleans broken glass and crushed cans from sand and water. She has a knack, perhaps a talent, for seeing the particular shade of brown glass from the shoulder of a beer bottle, or for spotting a fragment of a plate amongst the small rocks. She puts fancy bits of china, glass with parts of embossed words, a china doll arm, a bullet, in her pocket.
    It is quiet; she mutters “Goddam people, broken glass, so much... .” She feels terrible today. Everything breaks.
             
    When you have a broken bumper on your pickup truck, first you notice that pedestrians look scoldingly at you. Something is your fault. Then, when a Schumann piano etude on the radio comes to an end, you hear metal scraping on pavement. It is yours. You stop.
    A large piece of rusted iron has fallen from the grasp of the chrome bumper. It has been dragging on the street.
           
    She wrenches it off, and when she drives away the truck seems lighter, quieter. She has left the piece of iron alongside the road, giving it to a fiefdom of castoff bolts and bottlecaps, shreds of tires, tangled bungies, and bits of forlorn glass.
       
    Today she has driven the truck to the park. As she wades in the river she finds a sparkplug, a tire that is being buried by mud, as if some troll under the river is pulling it to his part of the world.
       
    When you have a broken heart in your chest, especially if you are old, you first notice that this may be, probably will be, the last broken heart of your life. You don’t hear noises, you hear hearts beating and sobs. You hear breaking glass, and the clatter of washed plates that will never again hold meals for two. You aren’t quieter, lighter; you are heavy.
    She lets her tears pour as she bends to pick up trash. She observes herself from the shore. She wants to look broken. She wants to look strong. She wants to look lonely. She wants him to be looking.
       
    She realizes that she hasn’t heard the dogs in a while – the while she has been cursing herself and the “goddam people” who let broken glass fall into rivers to be mistaken by minnows for food, so it rips their guts. She feels terrible today. Everything is broken.
    She straightens to whistle for the dogs. They do not come. She is one of the goddam irresponsible people. She hears a train whistle, a high-pitched bark, an owl. Have the dogs been crushed to bits of bone and fur by the train? Will she leave the park alone, carrying a bag of smashed cans, plastic string, and a pocketful of wordparts: “oun...” “mad...” “refill...” “..ola” “...psi”? She cries some more. Then, without a sound louder than the river itself, the dogs return and wait for her to take them home.

Two on the Highway

    A few years ago, I was coming north on 95, and then 395. On a curve, while going 50 miles an hour, I saw something I'll never forget, and I'll never forgive myself for not doing something. There was a mallard duck, a female, crouched near the concrete wall on the left. I'm sure she was injured or stunned and unable to fly away. I was afraid to stop, but I don't forgive myself for giving in to fear. If I always did that, would I ever do anything I should?
    A week later, driving again on 395, I made myself look for the duck's body, but I couldn't see it. No brown lump, no smashed bill and water-splashing feet, no downy breast pressed to the asphalt, no small bright eyes which I swear looked at me as I drove by the first time. Perhaps, I sometimes say to myself, perhaps she recovered when it got later, and the traffic subsided. But how realistic is that?
    Yesterday I was driving south on 83, and I saw a straw snap-brim fedora, waiting by the concrete wall. It was settled there, on the debris which accumulates on the edges of highways, and immediately I thought of the duck. Blown off course, both of them, and I did imagine the man's head, bare and over-sunned without the hat. And again, I imagined the mallard's ducklings, waiting for her to fly back.