I. The Trouble With Language

Last night I went to bed thinking that old, endless, quiet thought: I don’t
want to ever die. Then, in the deep of night my husband shuddered
a little, put his hand on my arm, bolted onto his elbow and looked at me.
It was dark. I could only see the shape of him. He said with strange
conviction, “I love you.”

He said it like he had just remembered how deeply he could love. Like he
had just discovered what love is really. I kissed him on his
forehead, then his shoulder. I thought he must be feeling something
important.

The final dream I had last night was about my mother. I bumped into her at
the grocery store deli counter. She was trying desperately to place her
order, stuttering her words. On the other side of the counter two
middle-aged women clad in hairnets and aprons did a mocking, eye rolling
thing.

“I don’t know. I’ll take. Wait. I don’t know,” my mother said. She did not
know what she wanted to say, or she did not know how to say it.

One of the women scowled and said, “You’re giving us a lesson in patience
and endurance.”

“Yes,” my mother said and looked at the floor. She walked away with
nothing. It seemed to me that the trouble was not my mother’s lack of
language, but the women’s lack of compassion.

When I woke, it was summer in the north. The sun lit the sky softly, like a
film of jelly over dark toast, orange in the underbelly of the clouds. All
was very quiet except the cat. I fed him and then let him out the back
door. He stood on the rusty fire escape and mewed, mewed into the sky, and
woke my husband.

My husband walked through the kitchen, slow and heavy-lidded. “Come on,” he
said to the cat, and carried it back to bed. There weren’t any dreams or
mewing after that. Just a sleeping man and a sleeping cat.

The apartment grew still and strange and empty.

II. Getting To The Diner

I have left a man in bed with the idea of myself. Without him, I wander
through the town. Everyone is sleeping or else dancing where the forest
meets the street.

Here, the drunks are singing their songs, bonding over let’s not change
tonight. I watch them like a photographer watches the slow twitch of her
subject. There, a line of blind girls, single file, snaking to the river.
They have tied weights to the knots of their ankles. One step. Two step.
One-by-one. I watch them the way a morning person hears the birds.

If you keep walking, you could go all the way to your end. But walking is
also a kind of birth. Considering the intensity of the way we enter into
the whole of the world, pushed out, squeezed around our skin, no wonder we
crave such massive feeling. War strategies. Highs so high. Sorrow about
someone else’s sorrow. Neither the girls nor the drunks have eaten in three
days.

It is hunger or worry that keeps me twist-tied to the town, though
sometimes I say it is love. I enter the diner when I mean to just keep
walking. I have five dollars. A quiet appetite. A bright grey vision. I
have just so many days and so many eyes. I will eat, circle, hunger, eat,
the way I will go on loving anything I do not fear.

III. Armies

All the tiniest girls in the world live here. I notice them, sometimes, as
they crawl through the old gray cracks between the wooden floorboards. I
notice them from my bed when I am lying there, too tired to pick up any
devices, too tired to even be waiting.

But usually I am waiting. Waiting at the kitchen table for the coffee pot
to fill. Waiting for my husband’s head and mine to merge like I know they
are supposed to. Waiting until I am finally old. Waiting until I change my
mind, or don’t.

The tiny girls, all the while, are marching to and fro, on some kind of
mission assigned by some kind of angel, or devil, or antique genetic code.
They are moving by instinct, that old pulse some men don’t take seriously.

They move, I imagine, in kaleidoscopic patterns. If you zoom close, the
cells in their bodies make the same repeating shapes. If you zoom out, to
outer space, the stars in all the universes move the same way, too.

I wait so long that I become angry. I wait so long that I question the
validity of my anger. I wait so long that I question my waiting.

My husband is washing the dishes. I am near him at the kitchen table,
waiting for the coffee, feeling the girls’ tiny bodies patter beneath my
hand as though it were a roof. But my husband drops a dish, and I flinch. I
flatten the roof to the ground.

IV: What We Bury

Sometimes the birds are floating in an imperfect V, the birches bloom, and
beyond them, blue. The sun threads gold into the waving sheets on the
laundry line. In this moment, there is so much beauty in the world that
death must also be beautiful. This is when I love so much I can’t believe
it. This is when I love so much I can’t breathe.

My grandfather stopped breathing a year before he died. We sat in a park,
held hands. He ripped out a page of his sketchbook, gave it to me. We drew
one of the strange imported trees they put in the center of all the
landscaping, the kind of tangled tree that looks like it’s strangling
itself. After working a while, I looked down at my grandfather’s page. I
had expected to find a masterpiece. I was told he had been a brilliant
artist, or wanted to be, or should have been. I was disappointed with the
sparse, light lines on his page, because I didn’t understand beginnings.

I was afraid of death and I knew my grandfather was very old. I told myself
I had better make sure he knows I love him. The sun had stopped refracting
shades of gold the year I told him I love you a million times.

Before he died, he hollowed out a space for me in his chest that I could
fit into if I crouched. But I had already done for him all I could. We
buried other things inside him, instead. A flower petal pawed free by a
longhaired cat. Paint painted over wallpaper. A covered bridge over a
dried-up river. Slippers that make feet sweat. A third-floor fire escape,
with rust. Two girls riding bikes, one popping a wheelie. A brass wrist
cuff and a tiger’s eye ring. Drawing paper and a charcoal stick. A shovel
scraping ice. An unfolded blanket left on a beige couch. The knot in a
plank of the scuffed wood floor. A pair of world wars. A fully occupied
strip of power outlets. Power outlets plugged into power outlets late at
night. A night light. A hammer left under the porch. A child’s bathrobe. A
bee’s torso on a window sill. A pair of antique mirrors that reflect each
other just as far as space and time.