2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) Read online

  And an artist is, perhaps, the dying. The artist is spread out thin close to the ground to catch the dying. Cushioning the leaves’ fall. Blessing the fish's grave. Listening to the wind tell the last words of the dry fall corn. This is the artist. Not God but a man of God, blessing the death that will only just precede renewal. Holding the hands of salmon streams bubbling with the turbulence of an exfoliating thousand gasping gills.

  And all immortalized. Marked with a tombstone. Poems. Paintings. Music. Sculpture. Sketches. Recording it all. Remembering at all. Forgetting nothing. Abandoning no one.

  Add the mama rabbit close to death in the snow. She becomes soil willingly, hearing the artist's somber footsteps passing her grave.

  And he walks quietly over them all, then, tamping them down, watching them submit to fate, and nodding over and over in comfort,”Yes, you have lived your life. No, I will not forget you. Yes, I will tell them. Yes, I promise to tell them."

  So in a way the artist does not suffer. He is the friend who grants the dying wish. He is the messenger from one life to another. He is the caretaker of a being's most precious memory.

  The artist is there in the spring too. But no one needs him then when the winds and rain, so drunk and spinning and brawling are knocking each other down with their rent tree trunks and broken branches and walls of huge gale-force reincarnation.

  Then the artist is ignored. Life is new and strong and needs no reminding, no validation, no hand to hold through anxious bitter nights of unknowing. Worthless, unnecessary, dismissed and forgotten, he must even take shelter from their gay happenings. But as the spring dies, he is called again. Summoned. Not by people but by the sky. Spring implores the artist to record those valiant violent nights, the surges of which only one season is capable.

  Spring demands, “Tell them how the wind howled at the greatness of Green and how Green smacked him right there in front of all of us. Remember? Fucking hell. So wasted. Do you remember? Then crack. Bam. Right in front of me, too.”

  And the artist always remembers.

  And Springtime holds tight and chokes on his laughter remembering The Purple and The Black and so many of Green's stupid jokes. And how they all had so much fun together with The Wet. "Tell them that, sir. Tell them that. They'll listen to you. They have to."

  There is a place where you can hear a slough sloshing and breezes bending the grass. Countless plants grow there but nothing is more lush than one tall reed. Green grows only from its own source; not like Black and Rain, neither of which is bound. Theirs is a fatal imprudence where no cause, no choice, might ever be made. Black is so much of this slough’s everything: the mud, the water, the tree trunks where they are wet, and of course the night. And Rain? From April until June, Rain resents his inevitable making of Black. Rain exists in self-contempt, unable to stop himself from creating his rival. Both Rain and Black want time with Green.

  Green just wants to play.

  But Rain loves her, truly. When he falls upon her she shivers, shudders, bounces, and bends. If only Rain could stop time, could keep from slipping down off her fronds and becoming part of Black. He’s only with her intense beauty for an instant, never long, never enough time for real passion like she makes with Black.

  But Rain isn’t a martyr: not a matchmaker either. He cannot figure out how to keep her for himself and wishes, so impossibly, that time could stop in those gravitational moments when he just barely falls onto her supple yielding.

  Time never stops.

  Black hates to see Green playing with Rain’s love. He’s serious and gets irritated with their meaning and messing around. Black wants to be the sky so he can push the clouds along to get that falling shower away from her. He doesn’t want to be earthbound. So he rises supreme and makes a totalitarian takeover of the night. Black is the sky, ready to hold back the Rain, to dominate everything, even Green. So. There’s no color. He loses everything to his consumption and misses her so completely as he pushes Rain away. It is devastating to see none of her brightness, to see only himself extending sky to mud.

  She must be there. He can’t understand it. She was right there. And there. And there. And over there. She was everywhere for entire days.

  While the Black night bides his time, searching, Rain comes back falling for no reason, bouncing off what might or might not be his truest love.

  Exhausted from the domination and the search, Black gives up the sky.

  So Rain and spring Green arise together, growing bold. Such a love is not sweetness. To envy it is foolish. They are so temporary. There will be none of their constant spring touches in the baking dried-out most concrete parts of summer. But. For a few months, up until June, the Rain makes more and more attempts for her and so makes more and more of the Black.

  What choice does Green have when she looks at them both? The Rain is so bashful and Black is so boorish. Here in the wet spring Green is not bashful. She is defiant and charges all eyes, demanding the most loud roaring praise, which Rain’s thunderstorm gladly obliges.

  Black ignores her as much as he can.

  And Green knows he’s watching, knows how much he hates the Rain touching her. She pulls no punches, says, “Look at me against that gray-purple Rain cloud.” If it's windy, then Green says, “Watch. I'm silver powder one side and then Rain flipped me back over to shiny wet leaves.”

  Black will not dominate now. He can’t risk losing her again. So he lets her punish him with the jealousy he refuses to admit.

  Meanwhile Rain is good to Green. And they look good together. Green is perfect against the falling down that Rain makes of fields, tree trunks, and ditches.

  But Green isn’t just one tall reed standing in a Black and Rain slough. She is ferns near the road and a new forest full of leaves.

  Housewife wildflowers beaten to violent purple and black-eyed gold and the white sky after the Rain runs off all suspect wet Green and deep Black of a heedless immoral affair. Even the age-old sky understands and is winking with her burning ember racing clouds. Those others know it’s not love but necessity. So Green and Black are young again. So what? They’ve all shared pride and a terribly tyranny of heart.

  And it’s not all impassioned fight and flight. Sleek Black shows the lily Green her graceful reflection once a year, and Black ripples when the right breeze lets Green run a forgetful grassy tip along his stream spine. She whispers reminders of her reflected daylight into Black’s deepest lack of light. And Black protects her. Not her innocence. Not her life. But he wraps himself, night again, around the place where her growing tall, growing up straight, growing higher, fell over finally. He rests with her there where the same gravity that constantly takes Rain away along that same bent frond. Rain cannot do for her what Black does with his so sure surrounding.

  He’s always there for her. More than love. More than anything. There forever, for her.

  But Black grays into August’s concrete, turns dormant land to slippery sloughs, and stops running in such high contrast through tall spring Green’s provocative fronds.

  Black waits with the colorful rocks, once under finger-deep water, who are feeling abandoned too. Summer, fall, and winter, he knows, or hopes so strong it feels knowing, she will come back to him forever in spring.

  HE ASKED ME HOW TO LIGHT UP LOVE

  He asked me how to light up love. And I wondered. You mean set it on fire? Burn it? Cast shadows with it? Display it? Catch it in the dark? Look right at it for what it is? Welcome it? Expose it? Guide its way? Find proof of it? Give it contrast? Interrogate it? Warm it? Nurture it to grow? Protect it? Energize it? How do you want me to light up love? And then it was gone. So he said to me instead, who are you, really? And I knew. I am the water for Narcissus.

  IN A TURQUOISE TANK-TOP

  I saw a man.

  A black man

  in a turquoise tank-top, in

  a clapboard neighborhood’s

  cheap backyard garden.

  So many cheap

  backyards will
grow

  guarded along anything

  by the tracks on a Sunday

  watch into the city.

  Weeds and buckets and tires

  screaming laugh/cries

  and shoes and tipped-over

  tricycles fatigue-faded

  with the weight of too many

  children, too fast and furious

  inside the fences.

  But his backyard

  garden, alone and careful

  and neat, did not

  just happen

  in any messy

  neighborhood blur.

  Philadelphia came to me today with that choking in the back of your throat. The almost crying that happens when you visit time. I felt weak, needing to sit a moment in George Washington's sunrise/sunset hopeful launch chair.

  REACTIONS TO THE BROKEN HEART: A MONTHLY PLANNER

  January: What am I to do with this foundation-rib he's blaming me for stealing again? I relive the same repercussive week of apocalyptic beginnings. Living it too hard-aware. How much genesis can a heart endure? And how was it before, when we were one? I cannot remember now what with the new light shining in my eyes and the new creatures in my Eden.

  February: Driving fast in a thick storm there are windshield rivers forming over my thoughts of you, riding an old us.

  It's dry in my head where you’re asking again why I held back my hand from the together forever we could have been.

  I don't know.

  Dots of rain, stunned from falling, pause a breath, hold tight and take things in, before running on to join the windshield streams. Or they’re just swept up quicker than that without a chance alone. Just blown back and off streaking into the sky.

  In that moment.

  Now see the path of you and me, so close no obstacle fleck of windshield dirt or glass ripples between us. But I hold back my hand, for a moment, savoring me in the years without you.

  March: "Sometimes I don't mean what I say," he said to me with reassurance. How can he think that's true? & Why do I believe it? Reassuring and holding on but then remembering some words used to be: "I love you."

  April: Which flowers were those in that wet-stormed tree? The fighting ones. The abandoned ones. Pink prayer hands with their candles close to black swaying branches. Which flowers were those, babe? They must have had a name. You knew. But I knew better. And then we both were wrong. What is there to pray to? The rains laugh too often, I think. And the pink-white fingers fell. Browned in veiny-torn creases at the muddy feet of a Japanese magnolia tree. But it didn't matter when the wind came: votive light left without question, fluttered away out of those thousand praying candles that weren’t lit for us, left a green-shard lawn strewn with torn-open, torn-off, torn-down and away, ripped-up, ruined, pink-white petal-filmy hands.

  May: I can hear you. I can hear you laughing. I can feel your laughing when there are times when you should have called or might have thought to have called that were filled with each other. There were times when your eyes might have fallen on my picture or you might have remembered a good time we had together but instead you were cooking dinner or finding the tuning fork or chain saw. It never enters your mind and that is why you're laughing.

  June: At home, Marie went on dancing with no one but the ceiling fan. There were two eyes somewhere else about to cry. Or so she thought.

  July: Damn. His mother must've been seething mad to look down at the horror in her arms. She must have been. Torn apart, as I am now, and abandoned. Helpless. Left to look on and wonder. Is that the way it was, ma'am? Is that the best love can do?

  August: Now don't get the wrong idea about this wind. It wasn't a harsh wind, ever. It was a warm, circular wind—perfect for easing the sun's intensity on your back, or for whooshing your hair into your mouth, but not for throwing sand into your eyes, or making you wish you had worn a jacket. It was the music that turned silences between diffident lovers into a song of crashing waves, which they both understood must be listened to. It was the governess wind that rocks you to sleep in the cradle of your house, and the reassuring wind that reminds you that you are alive—if you are forgotten.

  September: It's midnight again and I'm writing a letter for later. For the past week at different moments my eyes have filled with tears. I have taken walks that led me nowhere and have started sentences which in the end meant nothing. When I want to sit down, I make myself stand up and move forward. When I have gone on aimlessly for too long, I rest alone. All because I know how much I will miss you.

  October: I didn't know he did it,

  but he’s gone hunting again

  (damned) with his twenty-two.

  Leaves crunching through

  the woods. Shepherd panting

  out his trotting tongue. A summer

  goes by and he's back again with some

  (dripping) kill. Asking me to slice it,

  to cook it up and feed it

  to him and the dog

  as if I didn't notice the

  (wet) carcass, bloody red, was

  mine once, my subtle

  hope, my expectation.

  But it was always fair game.

  I suppose I even made it a

  (fucking) test. There it is.

  It's constant and will be there forever.

  So he took the challenge. I was

  right. It stood still. An easy target

  for the hunter

  (ready) with his twenty-two.

  November: I planted my bulb garden yesterday. I figured I was not going to waste sixty dollars' worth of bulbs because I was a lazy ass who was always thinking about you. In order to assure that I was not a lazy ass I chose not a sunny warm dry day to plant, but instead, the dreary wet cantankerous weathered yesterday. My neighbor yelled at me twice. About the twenty-degree rain on me. About the coat I wasn't wearing. About the gravel I was planting my garden in. About the fact it was one in the morning. Oh well. I put in an excessive amount of pink tulips. I don't know that I am necessarily a fan of pink tulips, but in they went. And I covered the entire new bed, which has been double dug and has all sorts of good eats for little baby roots in it, with leaves from the back of the house. Then because all these leaves were blowing in the wind I shoveled some of the wet broken-down leaves from the street. People rake their lawns. Put the leaves in the street next to the curb. And the rains come. And the cars park on them and break them down. Perfect mulch. And weight for the dryer leaves. After I was satisfied with that layer I went inside. Then I wondered how many petroleum products were in those leaves from the street on my sixty dollars' worth of bulbs in the ground.

  December: It's as if I am not in control. I've got the dark quiet, the refusal. I have a soothing rain. I even have the time. But I can't. Why is that? Because it isn't enough to do it just for me. Life begins in the time and in a mind that won't get sad.

  I have a fat deaf cat who sits on her hands all day smelling the carpet. There must be better role models.

  MR. BEAT

  There's a bassinet

  on the window ledge

  and Grandma's arms

  to away-brush the

  snow, Paul. Oh, Paul,

  such a story to base

  your life on.

  And from so far away.

  DEW

  After the rain

  senna leaves

  are jewelry farms

  and the wind

  a migrant worker.

  ENDS OF GOOD THINGS

  My father retired this year. It was a mixed occasion. My entire life I have known him almost exclusively as the guy who grades papers at the kitchen table all night. When I went to sleep as a child, his shadow shifted across my bedroom door when he got some raisins, marshmallows, or oatmeal cookies.

  Students called the house with pathetic excuses for missed exams and my father would listen patiently and continually give second chances. At faculty picnics where it was a little too cold to swim and where we would spit watermelon seed
s across the cracked cement basketball courts until some priest yelled at us, my father stood talking. But other days we drove slowly all over any piece of land that St. Joe ever owned, listening for birds and looking skyward. Once Dad woke us all out of a dead sleep and shuffled us into the car. He’d heard an owl in Drexel Woods and insisted we come hear it too.

  Hoo-hoo-whooo-ah! He stood there in the night, by the car, in the woods, calling up into the blackness with the rest of us drowsing.

  Last year I read in the local newspaper that he was having his annual bird walk at Lake Banet. The entire top half of the front page was dedicated to an interview with my father. One would suppose it was a sizable event. So when he got back that morning, I asked my father how it had gone. He said very well. They had seen a flock of plovers, several sandpipers, a few vireos, a thrush, plenty of geese and ducks, and a few rather notable warblers. He explained about the birds for forty-five minutes. When he seemed to be finished I asked how many people had shown up as a result of such good advertisement by the article. And my father said, “Oh, it was just me for the most part. Another professor stopped by for a while, I guess." After all that no one had come.

  So what?

  That's us. Our household. Summers, too.

  Gen ripped and tore through Chopin, Beethoven, Clementi, Shostakovich, Debussy, Mozart, Bartok, and composers I wasn't ever aware of. Hours of music pouring out summer doors. I heard it, we all heard it, while we played football and baseball and ran through the Iroquois looking for crawdads. Strange the culture we created at 803 Stewart Drive. All around us were the generations of Hoosiers, but Mom and Dad, each from a different city far away, burrowed their way into a life like the crosshatched fields. Trying everything to pass the time. Dad drove all over the state fighting for better education and looking for birds. Mom played the piano, learned to paint, planted an organic garden in the midst of chemically-treated lawns.