Fall

It was clear, as the car pulled in, that this would be a long, joyless ride.  Something in the way the engine sputtered.  Something about how she knocked.  Thudlike, too methodical. 

Things hadn’t been the same since that weekend she went to Connecticut without him.  It had been spring then, flowers everywhere.  He had been busy in the garden.

The leaves were still on the vine now, but they’d turned brown. 

He walked to the window, looked out as the light slanted across her taut face. 

“Wait a minute,” he said, motioning toward the door through the glass as he pointed, mouthing the words in an exaggerated fashion as he spoke without making a sound. Mimicking the words to her as though she were not already standing outside, did not already feel the chill...  “Let me grab my coat.”

When My Father Died

When my father died, I didn’t grieve. It wasn’t because I refused to let him go or was glad to see him gone, or any of the usual reasons. I didn’t love him too much or too little, or anything like that. It was just because the feeling never came. I thought it would, I expected it to happen, but it simply never did. It was like I was sitting in the train station waiting for the last train out, having arrived just on time by the clock on the wall, and got stuck forever in that moment when you’re not sure whether you missed the train altogether or whether it’s simply late, that moment before you are forced to decide that it’s not going to come and that it’s time to find another way home. You sit and read your paper and remain calm in such moments, with a studious kind of patience. You listen for the train in the still of the night and try to keep expecting it. You remain in the moment and think of something other than the paper and train and the waiting, and you wait until the next moment comes.

The call had come in at 2 a.m., while I was warm in my bed in the middle of an early night in January. It was five years ago, and I slept through the ringing. I awoke only when I heard my wife -- or, more properly put, the woman who was my wife at the time -- cursing the darkness and the phone and the world as she padded across the floor and felt around on the dresser for her glasses so she could make her way to the kitchen to pick up the receiver. I remember her scuffling urgency, coupled with the hint of resentment in her grumbling. She always thought it was unfair that she was a lighter sleeper than I, and that it was inevitably she who had to climb out of bed and push into the cold on a morning like this to answer the phone or the doorbell or the tree limb tapping on the window. Or the babies. Or the children into whom the babies had grown.

I rolled over and drifted in a languid suspension, half awake and half dreaming, then slowly roused myself from my slumber as I became aware of her voice as she spoke with the person on the other end. It was slack in the way that early morning yawning voices are slack, with the warmth of the body making the mouth wide and loose. “Hello?” she said, half yawning, half questioning -- fully hoping I suppose even in the midst of her sleep-induced state that it was a some drunk on the other end who had dialed the wrong number, since a call at that hour is almost never good news if it is meant for you. She grew quiet for a moment and listened to the person talking and I leaned out over the cliff, readying to swan dive back into the deep warm sleep from which I was only then half aroused. I teetered on the cliff and forced myself to listen to the silence in her voice before jerking back from the edge as the next words she spoke were unintelligible to me, but unmistakable in the way the looseness in her jaw had snapped into rigid attention. Her voice became tense, then concerned, and finally dawned to some horrible unspoken realization. I sat up in bed, suddenly knowing what had happened without knowing anything at all.

“Chris, it’s your mom. You need to get up and talk to your mom.” I walked to the phone, knowing it would be bad news and that my life would never be quite the same again.

If my life at that moment had been a song, it would have been a dirge. The movement would have been one of high funereal flourish, a brightening and tensing of the instruments before the long solemn march to decline. It was as if the tensing of the jaw of the woman who was my wife at the time, as she passed through loose slackness into rigid attention, had jolted entirely and immediately through me. I was awake, fully and completely, and tense with an unknown and ancient urgency.

“Hello? Is everything O.K?” -- I picked up the receiver and suddenly became aware of a stack of bills on the counter, and the fact that I had yet to caulk around the replacement windows I had put in the summer before. It’s odd how the littlest details suddenly make themselves known when your brain turns completely on. It’s like your entire life flashes before your eyes. I knew, even as I asked the question, that everything was not O.K., and I could be pretty certain just exactly which part of it wasn’t. And yet, even with the tension in my body, I felt an emotion that can only be described as relief as I heard my mother voice. The orchestra was playing something loud and dramatic in a minor key as I waited for her answer, and I could barely hear her talking through the music as she told me how she had come into the bedroom and found him stretched across the bed, how the paramedics had been unable to revive him, how I needed to fly out the next morning and bring a suit for the funeral. There was a slight decrescendo as I took a breath and she stopped talking, and I asked the question which had to be asked. My father had had a heart attack before, several years after I had graduated from college, and had actually been dead for several minutes before being raised from the dead to live on as if nothing serious had taken place. The average number of heart attacks in my family is three for the men by the time they are 70, so I knew that there was at least the theoretical possibility that this one, being number two, was not the final in the series. I asked if she was certain, as if there was somehow the possibility that this was just another false alarm. Then I paused again and music stopped, and the orchestra laid down their horns in expectation of her reply. I noted that her voice sounded surprisingly businesslike, as if she had processed the information and was satisfied with the outcome.

“Yes. He’s Dead.”

I put down the receiver and sat in the darkness until morning.

Born in the Hearts of Stars, Part 2

What does it mean to be born in the hearts of stars? This is the crowd’s inevitable follow-up question. It’s a reasonable but difficult question. It deserves the kind of measured and careful response one might give, for example, to a boy who has asked where babies come from. One must dance around the edges of mythology to give an adequate reply to such a question, but one must do this without falling into the fire.

The answer requires a bit of poetry, something more than a mere recitation of the mechanical workings of things, but the poetry must be informed. Too much fact makes the eyes glaze over, but too much fiction makes them blind. For example, to satisfy the boy’s curiosity about the origins of babies, one should not be too obscuring or invent too much fiction posed as fact, else the boy will spend his life when he becomes a man looking under cabbage leaves for his offspring or scouring the sky for storks. One must attempt, when answering such a question, to walk the fine line between science and fiction, without blurring the line so that everything becomes science fiction. This is clear enough about a topic such as making babies, on which everyone, eventually at least, professes to be an expert -- even though few among the crowd can correctly define the various body parts or systems which play a part in their pornographic understandings. It is even clearer, however, when discussing the making of matter, a subject on which few know anything or profess to know anything or, except in our little narrative, care to.

The problem is that the crowd takes matter for granted. The chair holds up when they sit in it, that’s all they need to know. What do they care if Heisenberg wrings his hands in the knowledge that this is theoretically impossible? It is the gap between science and practical fact that makes the crowd’s ignorance understandable. They live in a world of bliss because they live in a universe in which the blistering realities of the parts and systems that went into making up their bodies and their minds, or the ground on which they walk and the sky above their heads, operate in a way that protects them from having to know. As long as they can plant something in the soil and harvest it for their food, what need have they of knowing where the soil comes from, or what its particulate substances are?

There is another problem, of course, which is that many in the crowd have read storybooks and believe in mad scientists who cook up matter in their basement laboratories, alchemists who while searching for gold accidentally spill their inventions across the table and onto the floor so that the chemicals run out the door and down the street and into the soil and up to the sky. Or else they believe in a god who, as some other storyteller long ago claimed, created the world in the space of six days. The crowd takes comfort in these beliefs because they have not stopped to think how long it took this god or that mad scientist to create the other ten million worlds that whirl and roil through space. Or they have not considered why god or the mad scientist, if they exist, would go to the trouble of creating a world in which so many people act, while professing belief in his magic, as if the world’s creator has not even the power to heal their wounds or to stop their wound-making or to clean up the milk they continually spill across the table and onto the floor to mix with their eternal tears.

So, they sit on their chairs without thinking about the miraculous power that the chairs have to hold them up, or they sit in their pews or on their couches or in sidewalk cafes, and they argue like two little boys arguing over where babies come from -- except that some of them believe babies are found under cabbage leaves while others believes they are brought by storks. They argue until they are blue in the face and their fists turn red in anger, and they choose up sides and begin societies and develop cultures and establish academies which provide food for thought and grist for the mill of religious wars, and thus a thousand years are spent in murdering each other over which version of the fairy tale comes closest to the truth.

It’s sad, really, because neither version comes anywhere near the truth, but for these members of the crowd, it is the gap between science and faith that makes their ignorance understandable. They live in a world that is far from other worlds, and by associating only with those of similar beliefs they make that distance further still. What need have they of knowing whether they are right or wrong in their beliefs when they, and those who believe as they do, so thoroughly believe they are right? They remain uncurious not because they shun knowledge, but because their heads are filled with something that for them surpasses knowledge.

Except that now, for just a moment, they are not uncurious. For the purposes of our little story, they have gathered in a room and they are curious. Someone has posed a question. The scientists are amazed that they’ve been consulted at all, much less taken seriously for an answer. Normally they slink among the shadows and meet in the back alleys of their own small academies, whispering in quiet tones about the hidden nature of their knowledge. Normally they sit in front of their computers or their microscopes and admire the beauty of the world without having to give an account for it. But now they have been given center stage and with the exception of the occasional shuffling of one of the crepe tissue ribbons which swirl around the outer walls of the gymnasium, they have been granted a near perfect silence in which to make their case. They realize that they may have only one shot to do this, as the crowd is filled with preachers and philosophers and businessmen, all of whom are sure to want to poke holes in their story.

But they do know that the crowd needs a story, they need something which will hold their attention and give them hope and understanding, and the scientists know that the story must not be too impractical. They must use poetry to describe the motion of particles and the development of material concepts, and they know that the poetry must be drawn from experience. So they choose from among them one who has a gift for language, who has an imagination for narrative, and he is pushed to the forefront to explain. He leans into the microphone and clears his throat and replies.

Here is one possible answer, the scientist begins, one narrative scenario for how matter came from stars. The universe had, in the beginning, after the beginning of time but before the formation of matter, poured its dust across space in a brutal angry gesture. It had spewed and spit its rage like a drunken father, words lost in the hot infernal glare of his severity. The birth of stars, his children, was colored by the weight of this legacy. The stars had spun and sputtered in response to their brutish paternity. They searched for ways to give weight and meaning to their own lives. But muted by the trauma of their childhood alienation, they went unnoticed for millions and millions of years. Simple-minded hydrogen and helium stood in the midst of their fires and stared into the glow, but the stars found that they needed more. They became addicted, as it were, to their need for attention. They gathered more and greater strength unto themselves from the attraction of similarly violent elements who fed on the same alienation. They were like teenagers running in the streets in a world filled with anarchy. They formed gangs and cliques and bands. They strutted and preened and gathered their strength, and flailed their arms in protest, but they could not fill their voracious appetites for love, for affection, for the warm glow of admiration.

Lacking language to express themselves, having learned from their father only the impressive show of force, they grew and matured in stature. They developed muscle. They became ever more dangerous in their violence. While it is true that some simply came to accept their lot and pulled in around themselves in a marshalling of resources, to nurse their wounds and pain, others flexed and tightened. They rebelled and spun and sputtered, and the largest among them, those with the greatest weight and stature, the bullies, in a final showy performance of self-destructive art, blew themselves up and disappeared into the smoke and ash. It was as if they could not bear the thought of going so long unrecognized, of being so misunderstood. So they released their primal screams in muted brilliant passion and exploded across the universe. It was in this release by these most impressive stars that a miracle occurred. On their deathbed, these supernovas, having lived their lives in seething but silent anger, finally acquired a voice. It was as if these stars, these giants, had known somehow all along what they wanted to express but had simply been unable to find the words. In turning in on themselves, in confronting their demons and their pain, in becoming self-destructive, they found language.

It was, perhaps, a language ruled by an ancient emotional intelligence, an expressiveness coming from a reptile brain that functioned in its heated compacted vibrations to take simple words and syllables and then combine them into more complex phrase constructions, but it was language nonetheless. Imagine, if you will, the neglected baby learning language, but without the guidance of Wittgenstein, or the shunted student learning the math of the universe without the benefit of Einstein’s equations. An innate, if late-flowering brilliance and sudden understanding brought a release of orgasmic intelligence. In the glow of their final throaty protests, in the throes of their death rattles, these stars produced communication. It was a language of symbols and numbers, an alphabet language of chemical barbarity. But it had a grammar and a punctuated periodicity, and it had a product which could be used for more novel constructions. The vast universe of stars had, in its heated eccentricity, come to spit and boil and shun and flail in the hearts of these largest disasters, and the atomic building blocks of matter came spewing forth, now matured in fiery baptism, now sent strewn across space in a second diaspora, new homeless searching for a home.

We are born in the hearts of stars, that is, because the stuff that makes us, the stuff that makes everything, was created in the tremendous heat and compaction and nuclear attractions that occurred in those moments of intense suffering and destruction.

The scientist leans back from the microphone. The crowd is stunned. They have never heard the story put quite this way. It almost sounds believable, largely because they do not know exactly what it means. But they know that the scientist has said something about the earliest stages of the universe. They know that he has linked exploding stars to the creation of material worlds. They think of their own fathers, their own children, and the story makes a kind of sense. They have heard the common saying that if you want to make an omelette you have to crack a few eggs and they remember having to walk on eggshells around their drunken fathers. They think of how their own children came -- pushing through the thin tissue of the gelatinous membrane at birth, and they think they understand. The worlds were born as they themselves were born, from a kind of painful reckoning with life at the threshold of death’s door. And family, the preserver and continuance of life, sets up the pattern and builds in the problems and teaches the language of life which the person must deal with throughout life until death. Heat and light, force and pressure, begat matter, just as the human race is begat by the warmth and constriction and bonding of family.

　

Flight

In a dream I keep having lately,

I am sitting on a park bench,

eating my lunch,

when you swoop down on me in a hurried rush of feathers and bone.

I look over at you,

And you nod toward me with your huge, horny beak.

Slowly, I place my sandwich back in its sack and I slide my hand across the cracked grey surface of the park bench, until I am only inches away from your face,

and I can almost feel the airy softness of your tufted plumes.

That's when you catch a glint of light from some corner of your beaded eye,

And it frightens you,

And you fl-

                                fl-fl

           fl-fl-fl-fl-fl

flutter

                                                                         away.

Sugarsnap

We're two peas in a pod,

You and I.

Your well-rounded firmament

Slides along my ecliptic seed,

As we slip through the elongated housing

Of our two-valved vessel.

Your tendrilous vines twine

Around my trembling trellis.

My fibrous sheathing gleams

In the early morning dew

Of your succulent sweetness.

The recipe book says:

"They are sweet, crisp, and versatile.

Can be eaten whole and raw,

or gently steamed and lightly turned.

Mange tout!