From Word To Word

She is an island awash in sweet water, and her shores are the rocks of the north, sedimented and petrified and shattered, beautiful with the beauty of all things that are carved by glaciers and vast waters, with the beauty of all things that grow deep roots on shallow soils and wave-pitted rocks.  This is a beauty that lasts through long ages, through the rising and subsiding of seasons under high northern skies.  It is the beauty of sweet water lapping at the foundations of island stone and at the roots of tenuous cedars that bend in worship beneath the heavens.

I overheard this conversation, or this monologue rather, in a cafe the other day.  It was like listening to a character from a bad movie, so I wrote it down, mostly because I had no idea what else I could do about it.  There was much more of it, much more than I could tolerate at the time, and much more than any of my readers would be able to tolerate now, but here is a sample of the kind of thing that frightens me most in the world.

Well, my son went to one of those little islands, you know, Fiji I think, or something.  And I tried to find it on a globe, so I could see where he was every day, but there’s just so much water, so much, and the islands are all so small, and there’s  so many of them.  And the names are small too, on the globe I mean.  I couldn’t even find the right one, but I picked one anyway, because they’re all pretty much the same to me, you know what I mean?  But my son doesn’t write for weeks and weeks.  He just sends this little email that he got there safe and everything, and then I don’t hear from him in forever.  And its not like him, you know, not to write his momma, so I’m a little bit worried, but then he sends me a long email about how primitive, just primitive, everything is there, and how he can’t find wifi or anything, and how he finally found this internet cafe or something, but the speed is really slow, so he can’t write as much as he’d like.  That’s why he doesn’t write me as much, but he still writes when he can, because he loves his momma.

I saw this girl on the bus early Sunday morning after too little sleep.  What I saw in her probably says more about me than about her.

Her hair was cut at her chin, striving for a kind of boldness, but its whisps and curls made it fragile and uncertain, slipping down around her face as she leaned over her cell phone, drifting along the collar of her quilted black jacket.  She was clothed in blackness wholly, in black leather gloves and black wool skirt and black silk stockings and black patent shoes, and then, like blood, the redness of the scarf that split her blackness almost to the waist, a huge and ghastly incision, a wound that she had long ago given up trying to close, though her gloved hands, leathered and black, kept fluttering up, convulsively, to brush at the redness that spilled from her coat and chest, then down again to her skirt and tights, then up again to the colour oozing at her throat.  She is dipping her fingers in blood, I thought, to write her incantations, hesitant and wavering, on her arms and stomach and thighs, to inscribe the wards, now long belated, of her protection.

To my still-closed eyes the streetlights are a vague and hidden glory, the cool radience of distant suns.  I am adrift in the void of their autumn night, adrift in the midst of everything, in the coolness and emptiness of everything, so far adrift that those who pass me by do not know to envy me.  They are blinded by their open eyes.  They do not know that they too drift among the stars, that their passing too is from radience to radience, from glory to glory.

The pipe tobacco was stale and dry, quick to light, quick to burn, acrid on my tongue, and I could take no pleasure in it, though I filled my mouth with its burning until I could feel the nicotine at the base of my skull, and then I tamped the still glowing dottle onto the stone of the stairway, bright embers, like red and angry stars, and I tamped them out, one by one, with the bowl of the pipe, and I let the scotch cover the smoke’s bitterness, for a moment, and when I could taste it again, it was mixed with peat and oak and alcohol and something I could not name, like a face in a dream that has filled the whole of the night and left it resting on my tongue.

Home is not a place for walking on water.  It does not give itself to miracles of this sort.  It is a place for wading deeply, up to the neck, until its crests pass over us and we breathe the still necessary air of the world, only in gasps, between its warm and uterine swells.  This is its miracle, that we find ourselves submerged in it, like a womb, and yet we do not drown.

There is a drifting and a falling that seizes time when the sun is setting and a summer is becoming an autumn and the heat of a day is fraying into the cold of a night. Each moment then genuflects to the circling of the sun and of the seasons, and their adoration makes us all the hushed attendants of a mystery. This time disdains all measure, passing with the incalculable rhythm of rustling leaves and blowing grasses and singing insects and cresting waves, finding the hollows and the spaces of the dimmed day. Such moments are marked only in their passing. They leave no inheritance. Without memory or remainder, they are only the splendid instant of their worship.

The clouds on Tuesday evening were divided over me, gray to the north, then a sharp line, then darker to the south, with rain trailing behind the sharpness in the sky like smoke from the edge of a grassfire. In the earth, between the green of grass and the darkness of dirt, I was making my own line, but its slow progression was followed neither by rain nor by smoke, only by upended clods of soil. Between earth and sky, I was doubly divided, by the sharp-lined clouds and by the sharp-lined soil, and the wind troubled this divided place, drove the clouds steadily above and the dry dirt in little gusts below, joining them to each other across a vast chasm of air.

The rain fell suddenly, the rolling line in the clouds passing over and beyond me, the air full with the sound of rushing droplets, rushing in wind-driven waves, as if the sea had come and submerged me, though I was motionless, as if the clouds had become a vast and encompassing ocean. The darkness of the storm submerged me also, and I seemed to be working in the twilight of an ocean floor, no longer between places, but beneath all places, the lowermost of things, the depths where primordial creatures are born, the darkness over which there is only the sound of hovering wings.

The dry, brown earth on my spade became moistly and darkly edged. The channel through the soil filled to its sudden end, a river against its dam. With every spadeful, the water surged forward, a little further, in frantic bursts, convulsively. The mud clung to the blade. The channel washed over my feet. The darkness and the water and the wet earth all but erased the line from sight, and my digging became wholly tactile, the smooth curve of the channel, the abrupt hardness at its end, the steel under my foot, the water and earth filling my sandals and covering my legs. The division of the clouds had passed and hidden the division of the earth from me also, but I clung to the divided soil by the feel of caked mud and by the smell of wet grass and by the taste of sweat mingled with rain.