Learning As You Go

I

            In the kitchen, which was always very hot, your mother banged uneven rhythms as she prepared elaborate dinners. She never wanted help; in fact she shooed you away--and that was why you sat on the back stairs and listened. You wanted to see if her rhythms could be understood--whether the way she pounded the counter could tell you anything about what she was cooking, how it would taste, how she felt about it, how she felt. After all, she was your mother.

            There were living things everywhere you looked in those days, from insects to birds to your mother and your dreams. The bones inside your body wanted to do other things than just be inside you, so they felt jumpy and impatient and made you want to fly, made you want to sing and dance and run everywhere. You’d heard about marrow, about the core inside bones, and you knew that birds’ bones are hollow. What then was marrow? Where the magic is stored. You sat on the back stairs and listened to your mother and thought about the magic deep inside your bones, as fireflies started to flicker in the dusk.

            Many years later you lived beside a harbor that sometimes filled with foot-long fish, each of which had a single bite in its belly which had almost--but not quite--killed it.                     They’d swim around in circles until they died.

            The bells of the church across the harbor clanged; trains passed, full of strangers.

            Your mother talked on the phone while you sat downstairs in your room, listening to the house around you settle deeper into the ground.

II

            There are bees in the cabin you built in the woods; they’ve made the small cabin into a hive. You drive with your family for hours to get there, and then you can’t go in because of the bees.

            So you camp out under the stars beside the river. Your children swim naked and jump from the trees, while you make a smudge-pot fire and carry it into the cabin, stun the bees with smoke, sweep them up, and carry them off to someone else’s  land.

            You were standing in your garage on a Saturday morning when a skinny dog, obviously lost and frightened, walked up to you, tail between its legs, and whimpered for food or affection. And you clapped your hands and shooed it on its way.

            That’s why there are deep pits of grief beneath the ground, places which used to be filled with stones.

            Holes you walk across, drumming your own emptiness.

            Our lives create a kind of grain on things as they pass through time, but that’s all that lasts of us, like a turtle’s track across the sand.

III

            When you were a child you believed poetry had power; you thought a poem written on a scrap of paper and hidden could do something to the place it was hidden in, that very good poems could affect the world they were about. And so you wrote poems about the soul that filled your body with unnamed animals and birds that moved in flocks across the sky, turning as one body to flash in the wind. You thought such poems could attract good things to you, that you'd make your world real by writing poems about it.

            But then your bones grew too big for your body, your words grew too numerous for your brain, your desires felt like other kinds of birds, that moved in even larger flocks, up and down the coast, very high, eating nothing for days, just flying as one body, landing like a cloud and eating everything bare.

            One year the leaves fell before they’d lost their green. They looked like gloves or leather wallets on the ground.

            A few years later, you lay down as a river and watched your family drift away.

            Now you open a file cabinet at your new job and find a pile of small hands, like raccoons’ hands or squirrels’. They're dry and black, odorless and clean, but they fill the drawer of the cabinet, where you’re supposed to file records of the bills you’ve received from the government for building a stone wall by hand across the entire state, a monumental art project you’re lucky to have won the contract for. So you assume it’s just another project you don’t understand. You get a plastic grocery bag and fill it with those hands, which have lifelines and fingernails. One wears a ring, but you’re sure they’re animal hands--in fact driving here today you saw a raccoon hobbling on stumps by the side of the road, living on road kill and garbage. He’d lost his tail, too, for some other art project.

IV

            I’ve trained myself, she said, to see the poetry that shows itself all over the world, every moment, without any influence from me or anyone else. The way a clump of snow falls from a tall branch to land between your collar and neck, so you look up and see a flock of black birds flying in formation across the white sky; the way you sleep in a fetal position; the way the grass of the marsh you live beside whispers differently at every tide. It’s been raining, she reminded you, for an entire month.

            You, on the other hand, have to make up your poems, writing until they come to you, making up little lies that sometimes connect, the way a fishhook sometimes connects with a fish you might really want to cook and eat.

            All night while we sleep, birds fly around our houses gathering nest-stuff and singing in the voices of people we’d almost forgotten.

            You dream of the way butter knives sometimes glint in their drawer, the way a window breaks sometimes without being touched, the way trees fall over on a calm summer afternoon.

            You were just fine there; you wanted nothing but the basic necessities. The mood was always festive and you walked out on the beach every evening just after dark. Once you saw a sea turtle pull herself from the waves and up onto the beach where she burrowed a little and sat still, laying her eggs.

            Later, the chandelier swayed while you talked. Smoking, you leaned back and smiled at her: as if this were true, or this. A box of marbles made a century ago. A saw in the rain where there are no trees...

            There were so many days you did nothing; so many days you wasted. You’d read for awhile and then go to sleep. Then you’d wake up and read a little more. That was the summer it rained every day. You sloshed through the streets looking for surprises. People you loved pretended not to know your name, and you often found mourning doves lying dead in the grass or on your front stoop.

            By the time you emerged into common air, whatever you’d lost was lost for good.