SKINNED MUSKRAT
The story on the radio is being reported in a very particular key: New York bemused. If you’ve grown up with this, it just sounds like fact: how quirky and unfathomable are the provinces! For an instant though, the tone shifts and feels more expansive—like muskrat skinning might be something more. Could stand for ambition and translate into values we all understand: set a challenge, work hard, move up in the ranks. Listening for that note checks smirkiness, quiets a certain form of laughter at the down-home thangs people do. And if that’s the way the listening goes, if things get even briefly metaphorical, then we get to be Rhonda, who won this year’s contest. She’s us at our best. A version of diligence. Someone who thinks at night to herself how she might make improvements, at a stoplight considers adjustments of tools, the best ordering of gestures. Runs replays. Feels, even as she cuts an apple, the musculature’s joy in its training, or when undressing a very muddy child, how adept she’s become at improvising around slippery problems. You can hear the moment the reporter slows. Deepens her question. Depatronizes. Gives Rhonda a chance to speak. Gets, actually, interested.
Hearing that feels like turning a corner and catching a breeze on an otherwise stifling street.
LANDFILL AND BODIES
A gash hurts, bleeds, scabs over, and in time mends, as grass comes to a torn and bare place, grows over a landfill so you can say of it hill, or far rise.
Lay the words on a scale: on one side the body, on the other, land. Let city dump mean your cut arm. Let greened be your skin made whole.
What once was ruined land might be reclaimed.
To have a doctor who’d say it like this—Your body will be a field again.
As will Fresh Kills in Staten Island, NY (“kills” from the Dutch for stream, brook, or channel), a stretch of land three times the size of Central Park. At its peak as a dump, Fresh Kills received twenty-nine thousand tons of garbage a day, from all five boroughs. The stench was so bad that passing it en route to the city, you had to breathe into a handkerchief. Gulls roved in clouds that darkened the sky. Rats had their kingdom. The highest mound was eye to eye with the Statue of Liberty.
In 2001, two million tons of wreckage from 9/11 was trucked to Fresh Kills for sorting.
For months, Fresh Kills was an open grave (the name wasn’t lost on anyone). More than three hundred people were identified from the remains.
And though it’s been closed for over ten years, the marsh grasses and miles of soft green still surprise—in the way, long after recovery, getting up from a chair and running to answer a knock at the door—no wincing, no forethought—still feels miraculous.
If “humor is tragedy plus time,” a ruin plus time can be sanctuary. In thirty more years, according to plan, Fresh Kills will include a seed farm, nursery, bird refuge, a field full of turbines and a green space memorial where people can stroll, picnic, remember.
A dump restored is a body healed.
A scar is a plaque on the body’s field.
Body of land, leg of a journey—see, all along you’ve been in training.
SPRING
Almost ten years ago this spring, I was desperate about many things, but my grandmother was still alive. It was hard to see frothy dogwood blossoms, to pass a magnolia’s tender pink cream or the fresh tips of evergreens touched by wind. Everything hurt. Now I breathe freely, move through currents of rough scent rising—mud, cut grass, some wild bloom swelling, releasing a milky sweatiness. I’m washed in waves of sidewalk heat. Shade in bowers, tides of noise—all here, and I’m alongside. But my grandmother is gone.
What is that?
A Möbius strip.
PRAYER
On my way home after a very long day, I have to decide: Should I walk in the street, or along the reservoir at the top of the hill? Street: I get to see used condoms, crack baggies, broken sparkles of windshield glass—basic, shining, urban grit I use to put together stories. Up the hill I get an expanse of clear water and air sweetened by the breath of plants at the banks. Today, up sounds best, like what I need most. Spirit is located up above, no? So I might rise above my worries and in that way lift my heart?
Though the reservoir is fenced. Another security camera was just installed (post-9/11 concerns) and a maintenance crew is loudly mowing.
Metaphors get compromised. Get eroded and need updating. Rerouting. Reconstituting.
SURPRISE
From a stump, green shoots grow. How tiring to see that and think, Ah, Spring! Or a single tulip blooms before all the others in the largest bed in the park—and what’s that, bravery? And skipping ahead, late August: goldfinch-on-a-spent-sunflower as harbinger of fall? Drops of fresh blood on the sidewalk (how fatly they pool before drying out)—what would that be: the life force ebbing?
Stop, known equivalencies!
I want my spring flowers unassigned. Bare. To fly past rebirth. I want green to finger the throat of air. Let stumps not sprout, but harbor and castle, be brainpans for a hive of thought, stirred awake, hungry, open-mouthed, gaping.
Shining cat on the neighbor’s roof: black nest of sun.
Everything always just come upon.
Seeing a guy on the subway one morning (notable for his purple-and-yellow striped slicker and red-fringed umbrella), and then later that day, on a different line, there he is again. That means, if I let it mean. Suggests the workings of fate uncharted, all the meetings that go unnoticed. Falling cartoon anvils that missed me. Occasions for gratitude, overlooked. Occasions for fear I’m not given to see.
There he goes, up the stairs and away.
To be for someone a metaphor is to be not yourself but a measure of things, the site where chance firms and vastness brightens—you, trying to get home after a long day at work, in your heavy raincoat and couture umbrella, your throat sore and head hurting. You who are tired and just want to lie down.
AUTOMATON
Seated at his little desk, this one was built to sketch a ship. He’s geared to hold a long brass pen engraved with twining fleur-delis. The boy with pink porcelain cheeks and a swipe of brown hair pauses and tilts his face up as if conjuring the next perfect mast-and-rigging, before turning back to his paper to draw it. He adds curled waves and puffs of clouds. I can hear the cogs at work on a flag, a sail, an expanse of deck—the shush of a thought turning over, a quiet click in the neck as he nods, his left hand caressing a thought-shape in air. So that what I feel is—and here, I can’t peel back the skin of it very easily. The sensation pushes past vanity (how Romantic a person looks when writing), past the uncanny (shiver of the inanimate made flesh)—and into weird certainty: I know what he’s feeling—ache in the shoulder from sitting too long, internal cams controlling the pen strokes, the eye blinks, the thought-pause. The distinction so quick—not I’m like but I am.
OPTICAL ILLUSION
I’ve always liked that image where a young woman in a fur stole, looking over her shoulder, shifts (when you refocus from black space to white) to reveal an old woman with a pointy, hooked nose. I like that little shudder, the way each contains the other, the easy slippage from delicate necklace to tight-lipped grimace. But then, when I saw it the other day, this refinement came: to really get what the picture’s suggesting, I’d have to look in a mirror and be shocked. I’d have to feel age as a scrim, or a veil over my present face—and I don’t feel that yet. I still look like what I know myself to be. I understand the illusion, but not intimately.
Some metaphors one has to grow into.
FRISBEE
The red disc gets stuck in a tree—it’s a blustery day but the thing’s held fast, like an apple on a tough stem. We wait for the wind to blow it out (which would make the Frisbee a windfall fruit) but when a gust comes, it just lifts and adjusts. Then a bigger gust comes and the Frisbee falls. And there it is: a way to understand being subject to forces I can’t resist. I watch and feel what buffeted is: my heart pushed around on a bright fall day.
In the still-dark morning sky, the moon’s a white water stain. Then it’s a lozenge dissolved by noon. Then at night it takes on a face. It looks upon us.
A face has its dark side. Joy waxes and wanes.
Tides of excitement can overcome a child at a birthday party.
Say a father’s away at war; he might as well be in another galaxy, in his tank, on Skype as the cake is cut. A child could say My father is a star. My father is sand. And she’d be right in so many ways.
*
Sometimes when we saw the war on TV—and the villages burned, and the people ran—the picture would dissolve. We said it turned to snow, it was winter after all, it was very hot in Vietnam but all the kids still turned to snow, they were that far away and that close.
*
One afternoon, I hovered a finger over a pill bug, touched it gently and watched it roll up. I did that a few times, then curled up next to it. My mother came out and said, “Are you hurt?” “No, I’m a pill bug.” By which I meant, I don’t want to be seen. I’m gray. A pebble. A pinfeather. Safe.
PLATE GLASS WINDOW
A pebble. A pinfeather. A broken-necked sparrow on sparrow-brown stones. The moss green, the gaps dark, the peace in between. River stones as smooth as eggs. A finger in moss for the velvety damp. Ruffle of feathers the weight of an eyelash. My hard-bent wrist doing angle-of-broken. Try, with your body: I’m that, or That’s me. The order won’t matter, one thing is another—neither’s only itself, but spreads across continents, yards, galaxies. Species.
To alter one thing is to alter another.
LOON
To alter one thing is to alter another.
If a metaphor is an ecosystem, a way of revealing unseen dependencies, You’re a loon as a way to say crazy isn’t so simple anymore. Loons who eat fish full of mercury and breathe air contaminated by coal-fired plants can’t incubate properly. Their eggs thin or don’t hatch. And mercury wrecks the nervous system. The loons don’t act right; they’re not loon-like but uncoordinated, nervous, exhausted. Their feathers fledge unevenly, so flying is harder, migration’s thrown off, and they can’t maintain breeding territory.
Mad as a hatter in centuries past referred to the dementia caused by mercury used in making felt hats. (To hatter means also to weary, to wear out with fatigue.) Milliners suffered loon-like symptoms, all the confusions and disturbances, plus tremors, sweating, loss of hair, teeth, and nails.
If you want to reflect the moment’s concerns, language can’t mean in ways it used to. You’re a loon might still indicate crazy as expressed by the bird’s ghosted, shuddery call—but crazy complicates and layers up. Poison alters etymology’s DNA. If a loon’s driven mad by poison, if it cannot mate, and cannot care—for its young or about its fate—you’ll have to recognize that in its call. And if you can hear that, imagine the sound you’d make on a late summer night, at a cool, blue, Adirondack lake—you there with your mate, with no way of increasing yourself, or yourselves, as a pair. And how desperate you’d sound, in your grief.
UNABASHED, WITH RIVER
Try saying, The earth is my mother. Try not feeling dopey, or worried you’ll sound like a faux-Native, hippie freak. Try thinking, My mother is someone I love and rely on. Who angers me. Who I don’t understand. Am tied to by fate. Who’s complex. Ferocious. Whom I fear. Am in awe of.
Try: My brother is a bird of prey. My brother’s a bracing, cold river.
Then what?
Go further.
Try River seen from a plane as Blood-moving-in-veins.
A river bent in an S as Snake. Not snaking. But Snake. If intensely bright—way brighter than a black racer in sun—say A snake in flames, a burning snake. The language here is not fanciful but real as a twisted river burning, the Cuyahoga (Iroquois, crooked river), sludge-filled, oily, and ruined. By the late ’60s, nothing lived in that open sewer. Not a sunfish. Not a black snake. And finally, one fire, the thirteenth recorded since the 1850s, was enough. (You can trace the origins of the Environmental Protection Agency to this time and, in part, to this place.) The Cuyahoga’s not yet recovered, but so far, sixty species of fish have been counted and in healthy sections, beavers, herons, and eagles have been spotted nesting along the banks.
Kids fishing or paddling along today don’t know the moon once effloresced, and sun rainbowed up in oily swells. That the air was sulfur. That once we made of a gift, a sewer.
It’s hard to see Bright skin of water prickling in wind as Cicatrice.
MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURES IN THE BACKGROUND
Once I stayed at a house where the owners kept a stone bird in a cage. The bird’s absolute stillness, the impossibility of song felt cautionary. Wherever I sat, I couldn’t get away from it, I mean the old and very real truth—that people get turned from themselves into many things—salt, nightingales, gold, the loveliest of lakeside flowers. And their names become a way to think about seasons, the sky, failure, luck, circumstance.
Look anywhere, at anything, and you’ll find yourself there; the world offers us to ourselves at every turn: Midas touch. Narcissist. Metaphors are terribly generous that way.