I still worry that Delfina is hurt, however, so I tell her not to listen. “Louisa has all sorts of goofy ideas. I’ve been walking the path through the woods for months, but when I first got here she made it seem like some sort of death trap.”
“That’s probably because those woods are full of illegals,” says Eduardo.
Met by my blank stare, he continues, “You know, immigrants. The ones who can’t make rent, so they go live in the woods.”
“You mean they’re out there now?”
“They are every summer. Of course, when the weather gets bad, they’ll have to go—to one of the shelters, back to Guatemala, or they’ll freeze to death. You haven’t been here for a winter yet, have you, Cemetery Lady? It’s not good.”
I report Eduardo’s comments to Owen that night. My therapist has deemed it safe for me to cook under supervision, and Owen watches as I slice onions and barrage him with questions simultaneously. Does he think that the wood-carver is an immigrant living in the forest? Could it be someone I’ve seen around the village, a parishioner at the church, one of our volunteers? Is he one of the young men who wait beside the train station early each morning, hoping to be picked up for a day’s labor by a landscaping truck?
“Maybe we should leave a note,” I say. “Eduardo could help me write it in Spanish.”
“And say what? Are you an immigrant?”
“It’s getting cold, Owen. What is he—or she—going to do then?”
“I don’t know, El. Eduardo said there are shelters. Do you want to ask him to move in with us?”
In a burst of frustration, I drop the knife into the sink. The satisfying clang it makes serves to camouflage the noisiness of the silence between us, in which the stubborn reality is reverberating: I don’t know what to do any more than you do.
Over the next weeks, I become strategic in my offerings. I leave another scarf, then a hat, then a sweater that I knitted in several marathon sessions. Not knowing the size or gender of the recipient, I err on the side of large and boxy. The carver responds with a Canada goose, a coyote, and a fox—all animals that migrate for the winter.
One morning when I wake up, the air has turned over, revealing its cool underbelly. The panes of our bedroom window are cobwebbed with frost. Looking through them to the garden, I see that the tops of the gravestones—all fifteen, standing in neat rows—are capped by thin crescents of snow.
My notes on the families of the Catholic cemetery sit in a drawer of the desk in the guest room, untouched for nearly a month. In their place are fat sheaves of new papers—newspaper clippings and illustrations and broadsides documenting the factories and businesses of nineteenth-century Tattersall.
Since the historical society suspended its meetings for the season, my visits to the forest have become more sporadic. As I lace up my duck boots, I realize that it has been over a month since I last exchanged offerings. The hat and scarf that I slip on are exact replicas of the ones I knitted for the wood-carver. Whenever I leave the house, I scour the streets for the sight of a person wearing them, without success.
I head out the door, past Washington’s Rock and the rubble of Akin’s mill, luminous beneath its shawl of snow. When I reach the tree, a chilled vacancy is hanging in the air, as though the substance of every molecule has just been flushed clean.
I crouch next to the hollow, and that’s when I see them: all of the offerings that I have made, from the pile of lenses to the pair of gloves that I deposited last month, in neat piles like presents on Christmas morning. The only things missing are the tomatoes; the empty boxes sit in their place.
The angel is still there. Frost has set into the grooves and along the edges of the wood, piped in thin lines like white icing. Placed into the cleft of a branch just below it is a wooden otter, its small paws curled inward, its long body arched to form a loop.
I take the otter in my hand, then jump to my feet so quickly that I dip into orthostasis. A swarm of white stars momentarily blanches my vision, then disperses in a million different directions. My gaze tracks them frantically, as though in the buzzing movement of a single gleaming speck I might catch a glimpse of the wood-carver, scurrying out of sight. I rotate on my heels once, twice, spinning on a tilted axis on the frozen ground. Then I spring from the path and take off into the heart of the forest. I walk for an hour, pacing the bed of leaves that have grown hard and unyielding in the cold, until my hands are numbed and my coat sleeve is stiffened with the continuous trail of slime I have been wiping from my nose. Fortunately, the forest is small, bracketed by the village on all sides. When I come to one end, I stumble out onto the street beside the hospital. Charting a perpendicular path, I race through until I emerge at the grocery store parking lot.
As I cut a series of straight lines, dissecting the forest systematically, I discover many things: a baby’s shoe, with a rubber sole and plaid canvas upper; dozens of scattered empty beer bottles and cans; a blue tarp, a small yellow bucket, a green watering can; countless golf balls (where is the golf course?); a rusted hammer; a broken flowerpot; an eviscerated mattress, spilling its guts of ragged stuffing and tangled springs; a syringe half filled with brown syrup; and bricks—bricks in piles and mounds, bricks stacked into pyramids and cairns, pouring out of the gnarled sockets of upturned trees, and tumbling into the river where they form makeshift paths and serendipitous dams; bricks pulverized into a fine dust that swells with the provocation of my footsteps and lingers in the air, tracing my path through the forest in long cords of lowly hovering red clouds.
These artifacts are distributed widely; there is no discernible pattern to them, nothing that gives the impression of a discrete living area, although there are several spots that I ineffectively craft into camps in my mind, looking for comfortable places on which to lay my head, choosing hideaways in which to store my precious belongings, and calculating convenient proximities to the stream. I even discover a brace of boulders, shaped into a shelf with a shady alcove beneath, which I envision as one of the Leatherman’s rock shelters—but aside from a shallow crust of old leaves and a few brushwood tumbleweeds, it’s empty.
If there was nothing there—absolutely nothing—I might feel a sense of closure. In the seemingly random, meaningless scatter of things, which hint but do not reveal, there is a tantalizing openness, a portal that refuses to be shut. In my mind I am still searching for a coherent thread with which to lace together the discordant bits of evidence, sifting through faces on the street, as though I might bring the pieces together with Sherlockian precision, and know all there is to know. But the truth is that I know even less about the carver than I do about Alexander Rooney. Both exist on a plane of existence that is separate, yet parallel, to mine. Some remote cosmic spasm jogged us into alignment, then just as quickly wrenched us apart again. Now where I look for them there is an absence like an empty tomb. Like a gravestone without a body. A shoe without a foot. A million lenses scattered and glittering on the forest floor, a galaxy of glass stars, fading into the dark.
Three Poems
Bin Ramke
ASBESTOS AND ITS CURIOUS DANGER
In the Middle Ages, supposed to be salamanders’ wool; another old name for it in English was fossil linen (18c.). Prester John, the emperor of India, and Pope Alexander III were said to have had robes or tunics made of it.
—Etymonline.com
An amorous mixture
of exotic and ordinary, a rock
woven fibrous into
potholders and flame-proof suits.
An act of touch—the dare of curiosity—
the sense of touch or taste or tenderness
of the infant informed foretold
mortal memory noli me tangere
momentary sense, tense
in its eager return-wish, hand to flame
to return to earth a sacrifice
(burning to know, o curious care)
of desire versus not-desire
contentment contained:
pl
easure is a staleness like virtue
not virtue as strength but virtue
versus, curious about the flame’s
affection flesh we felt
the world bare
and drink minerals of an evening
when tendrils tend to rise
from the surface, breathable,
picturesque, then gone, vaporish
like fire a song sold.
Having researched the kindling temperature
of flammables, we devised a test of nerve
as children one poured lighter
fluid in his palm, the other
set it aflame it might not hurt
then again it might.
THE LIKE OF LOOKS LIKE
1.
While I mourned at her bedside
I also wanted to know
what it was to die—not was like,
but was. I needed to document.
What I like, taking pictures
I cringe when I think of pain
When I feel pain I feel pain
That morning the mountains felt close
The clouds floating
The twelve-spotted skimmer floating
A tinkling stream weedy out the window
Color causes pain in time
Like was an adjective, “be pleasant”
To take a picture is violence
Theft is property
I own my own thieving
which was a camera flash her face …
2.
From the imagery of curious Lucretius on the nature of things:
Light like oxen: the sun’s light and his heat, because they are made of minute elements, which are as it were beaten with knocks, and do not hesitate to pass through the intervening air when struck by the blow of that which follows; for instantly light comes up behind light, and flash is pricked on by flash, as in a long team … 4:186–190
Or: since a shape handled in the dark is known to be the same as that seen in clear light by day, it must be that touch and sight are moved by a like cause. 4:230–233
Or, the face I touched was touched by light,
I could see and know and mourn.
3.
A child who learns to touch with
a braille-like confidence in what is there
and what is not lies against death
between waking and dreaming
when the very blankets warmed
by the child’s body are so like
a mother, equilibrium of
temperature, temperament,
that the whole world touchingly
conspires rhythmically like a lung.
4.
I like to take pictures with telephones.
Like a camera a machine to keep
a voice or any sound within a room
within which secrets adhere to walls
like mildew after a flood, coloring
the future which is a memory,
a likely memory of catastrophe.
5.
It looks like rain, my mother said,
and it did.
6.
How her breath sounded:
Kussmaul, Cheyne-Stokes
Biot’s respiration, ataxic
agonal
like sounds like
in the end.
I did take her picture, digital death mask
like Proust’s like Napoleon’s
like Mary, Queen of Scots’s
like DanteBlakeKeats’s like alike.
7.
But to draw close to a death
is not to know—unless to one’s
own death, not even a mother’s.
I know no more now
than then; curiously less.
WHY WE LIVE WHERE WE LIVE
Plots of these stars’ velocities have swoops, arches, and spirals indicating patches of stars that are moving together. If the Milky Way were in equilibrium, and hadn’t been recently perturbed, those patterns wouldn’t appear. That they do indicates that something has shaken up the stars recently enough that their orbits haven’t relaxed back to a stable state yet.
—Leah Crane, New Scientist, April 30, 2018
A small dog eats grass then runs
for no clear reason but to an observer
with a will and with intent.
Observers want to know, cannot
accept the mere, the more or less
unreasoned romp; die of curiosity, we say.
Hers is a philosophy of dirt, and of perturbation,
and she is given a name which is odd.
“Pet” is an English word of unknown origin.
I have watched animals under the sun
and under starlight they are not the same.
*
At night she sleeps and dreams
but offers no hint (a word related to hunt
which indicates a pack of hounds).
To understand movement one
must be still for long.
We would know the difference
but we cannot find the boundary,
unlike dogs at the fence
separating themselves like gravel at a sieve,
big ones left behind barking,
small ones slipping through spaces …
the boundary is never where we are looking
but is often where we are standing, hopeless.
*
Did only primates develop an astronomy?
We know of dung beetles’ use of the stars,
which counts. We know of birds
whose children make initial flights
thousands of miles from home
with no instruction but knowing
the shapes stars make when viewed
from here. That counts. Observers
are curious to know. Which
else among the denizens
of this ground we walk on makes a science
of starlight? When William Herschel
sat in the dark garden looking
through the lenses he himself
had ground, his sister sat
at her desk at a far window noting
his messages sent by string—one sharp
pull meant angle of declination,
two quick meant …
one long pull meant …
this to protect his eyes from the light
of her lamp. She took his notes.
She was so small
and full of her own science.
Her eyes could have filled
with her own comets.
Teardrop-shape.
The following three reasons motivated the representation of a soil profile: to explain the resurrection of the dead, to display the roots, and to show ploughing.
—Encyclopedia of Soil Science, “Soil in Art”
From within comes a living layer
maybe like a dream, sandy, damp
and dangerous. My little dog knows,
while digging, me. Admire
in a cave in France paint made of earth
on rock walls—they made a copy
nearby and many humans look.
I like “to display the roots.” Dis-
play. Deploy. Bring to light. Bright
engagement of the tubular tangle …
plicare, pleat, unpleat, explicate,
explicit. But one could have reached
manually into the dirt to trace
roots from the plant into the scatter.
Oh, and I read that trees at night
might breathe, very slowly but
measurably; not breathe but draw
fluid upward, a kind of contraction
of the cambium. An exchange process
in the dark. My little dog
dug there, in starlight,
mole-like, happy. I watch her incuriosity
as a release, a respite.
What the artist made: molecularly
whittled seismic soil ve
xed concavities.
The manner in which we sense the world remains forever incomplete and ambiguous because we always experience things from a particular point of view or relationship. The body is open to the world but things are always hidden from it.
—Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone
Desperate for air pushed
by wind breath between breaths
hazarding a life with remaining years
he aged as best he could, less
disguising himself as himself he walked
along the paths trying to place
one foot half on the paving half
on the grass or sandy edge
for no reason except focus
having recently learned of leaf
beetles who disguise themselves
as the bite marks they make
he tried to, not to, tried
to leave no trace intractable
in passivity. He knew his place.
He had no place, which he knew
as honorable. The wind moved
his accumulations
cloud-like
before his feet dust risen
rising even as the sole slid
along the edge. There is
no edge there is only
change, another word for age.
No one watched. I find this
curious, how many aged men
go unwatched in the world,
go and live and linger
and no one watching wonders why.
The seasons change as they will
we have changed them unwitting
it is warm now when once was
cold is a place of small creatures
no song where once birds sang.
We watched a sheet of plastic
the color of watched wind
roll down a street into cylindrical
fabric-like lacy light shifting
against pavement like handling
beauty arisen from foam
as foam or wave as
particle persistent rhythmic
as force of wind unwinding.