No rush is needed, now how shall I say?
No need to flit by like hobble-de-hay,
No call to race through the garden today.
Slow by the roses and bend to their blooms,
Notice the lilacs that waft their perfumes,
And smell how the daffodils sweeten their rooms.
You’ll get where you’re going so soon anyway,
Get there perhaps a bit too soon, I’d say.
Happier be if you don’t rush today.
I stood with my back to the sudden blizzard that seemed to come out of nowhere and began to blanket the silent field, trying to get my bearings. When I turned, punishing gusts of icy wind whipped new pellets of snow across my face and stung my eyes. I was shaking, breathing in short gasps of the bitter cold, but I couldn’t imagine why. Something had happened, that much I knew, and apparently little else. How did I get here? I couldn’t remember. Where am I? I didn't know. I panicked.
Glancing about for whatever short twists I could endure, I saw only frozen stubble in every direction, and the field quickly filling from the heavy snowfall. I’m in shock, I guessed. Far off to the left I thought I saw a car—not the one I was drove—with its tires facing the sky. I couldn’t see mine. My God, I thought, I’ve had a wreck, a terrible wreck, and I can’t even remember it! Was anyone hurt? Killed? Was I alone? Am I injured? Surely I must be. Am I dead? I didn’t think so, but reality seemed beyond my ability to think.
I tried moving my feet and legs. Aha! I exulted, I could walk! Well of course you can, you idiot, I countered, how do you think you got here from the wreck? My hands were bare but not yet hurting from the cold, and nothing else hurt--not even a headache. My neck seemed a little sore perhaps, but that was all. Yet I could remember nothing. I thought I was somewhere familiar, but didn’t know where. What is this place?
I felt a strange calm stealing over me. I may be freezing. I have to go back, I thought, turning to face the wind and gingerly stepping through the crusted, crackling field in the direction of the car’s underbody I could just see over a distant rise to my left. It appeared to be about a quarter-mile away. The light was fading. I had to reach safety soon or I was afraid I’d pass out and freeze to death. Few had been on the roads; no one knew where I was or what had happened. Barb would probably be home from work by now and waiting, but she would have no way of knowing my life was in danger.
Slowly my memory seemed to return in waves, then fogs of confusion and panic would again flood in. I was on my way home from the campus, I remembered, driving alone on north five, outside the city by a couple of miles. I never even saw the driver of the van—the white van--yes! It was partly off the road, spun around and facing right at me in my lane when I rounded the turn. I had no chance to miss it, but its door was open. Its driver had abandoned it when he couldn’t get it back on the road, and was long gone before I had even hit it. I could remember that clearly now. Thank God, I thought, it was just me. At least I didn’t think there was anyone else in the van.
As night approached, the angry blizzard raged with even greater fury and slowed my progress, blinding me and forcing my eyes to wince against tiny spinning knives of sleet. It was becoming impossible to fix the horizon. The yellow-gray wreckage seemed to recede the closer I advanced.
Then it disappeared beneath the horizon altogether. I realized I was going down. My ankles and legs sank nearly to my waist in deep soft drifts as I half-tumbled into a ravine, and I grabbed onto a tree to stand up. The fading light left little detail to recognize, and I had to blindly trust my sense of balance over the uneven ground. Finally the ravine seemed to level out. Suddenly I slipped on ice under the snow and fell to one knee. I knew I was at the bottom, and the ice was mostly uncovered. I worried for a time about water underneath the ice and feared breaking through, but the small creek was frozen through, and I inched my way across it cautiously.
Finally I reached the other side, which was steeper. But I managed to climb up the slippery bank by grasping some saplings that held firm. The frozen ground held blessing as well as curse; had it been spring the soft mud would have loosed them from my weight as easily as pulling off candles from a birthday cake.
As I gained the top, I approached what seemed to be the top half of a wire fence, a few yards beyond which rose dark firs and large stones. In the gloom I couldn’t see an end to it in either direction. I tried to scramble over the it and managed to get my first leg over, but as I tried the second leg the wire caught my shoe in its irregular rectangles just as I cleared it, and again I fell, pitching forward onto a bank of snow that had drifted up against something hard, cold, and white, and I hit my head with a thud.
That’s the last I remembered till I was dimly aware of an owl plaintively screeching its night call. or was it a child’s or a woman’s voice? “Blaine,” the voice whispered.
I opened my eyes. Had I dreamed it? The blizzard had ended. The moon shone bright in a clear, starry night.
Raising my head, I saw dark roman letters carved into the white stone directly in front of me. As they slowly came into focus. I read my name. Underneath the small glyphs were dates: “Born-- July 10, 1939.” To the right of that, “Died—“ the remainder was covered by the drift. Gasping, I knew at once where I was.
“Blaine,” again I thought I heard my name faintly in the wind. “Blaine!” it was a female voice, louder this time—Mother? No. Mother always trailed down toward the end of my name,”
“Barbara?” I cried. "Over Here!"
With a trembling hand and my heart in my throat I reached out and scraped away the snow. “Died--. . . .” That's all there was. To the right, the stone was as smooth and unmarked as it had been when my parents first placed it a half-century before. Roger, my brother, had died of cancer when I was ten, and his was the first name the glyphs had completed. Mother had told me then that there was a place for me there as well if I ever wanted it. "Here! Over here!" I sobbed.
Fog was everywhere, and seemed it would last forever--so thick it was, I couldn't even see my feet as I stepped on indefinite matter. Yet I could not just stand still. I had to move, and I walked around aimlessly. When I stumbled into a ladder, I began to climb. Since the ladder was nearly vertical, I didn't know what it leaned against. Someone's house? Some building? Why was it there? I saw no paint buckets, building materials, or scaffolding anywhere, but as I said, things may have been there except the fog obscured them.
Who owned the ladder, who stood it upright, or for what purpose, I didn't know. Still, I felt I should climb it. I thought if I could climb above the fog, perhaps I could see things more clearly. But the ladder seemed impossibly high--was it a firetruck ladder used in cities? The kind it takes a front and a back driver to negotiate the corners? That might account for its interminable length, but I hadn't noticed any apparatus it was attached to. Still, there might have been. The gray fog had covered everything, swirling like waves around my feet.
How long I climbed the ladder, how many minutes or hours, I couldn't sense. It must have been for hours, even days. It was impossible to know where I had begun. It was impossible to know where I was climbing. It was impossible to know when I would reach the top, or what I would find there. There was only the ladder, my aching feet and legs, and the fog. Yet I continued in my ascent; not to climb from where I was scared me more, and the thought of backing down through the thick fog conjured up such demons in my mind that I imagined them chasing me up, and hurried up the rungs.
Then suddenly the fog lifted. I paused and looked around, and saw other ladders, and people climbing up them just like me! Some were below me, some above. But Some were nearly beside me. And I noticed one fellow who seemed to be stuck on his ladder, with his leg through a broken rung. He was no more than a few feet away, and down a few rungs. I couldn't tell for sure, but he didn't seem injured. When the rung broke, he had slipped and fallen through, but not far. His ladder caught his foot on the rung beneath.
He looked at me imploringly. "Give me a hand here, guy," he said. I reached down to try to help him, but he was out of reach by a few rungs. I backed down on my rungs and reached out, caught his wrist, and pulled him up. He twisted his leg free and took a deep breath. He didn't seem injured. "Thanks," he smiled. "I don't know how long I've been here. You're the first one I've seen this high up, but this damned fog-- ."
I was glad for him. The fog seemed to be lifting further, and our ladders seemed to rise up parallel as twin towers, straight up. I looked forward to the company as I continued upward. But my fellow climber, instead of continuing his climb, couldn't seem to get past the broken rung and gave up, then started down. "Hey," I shouted, "aren't you coming up?" He just smiled and waved me off as he lowered himself rung by rung, and was soon a speck in my view.
Further up the ladder I was nearly killed by another person--a young woman, I think from her scream, who flashed a blur of green and white through space only inches away and in a second disappeared below, sickening me. I didn't know if she had fallen from her ladder, or heaven forbid, had jumped. Or maybe she had risen to the top and could go no further, had reached her destination. I shuddered, took a breath, and thought of retreating downward, since the fog had simply lifted higher, but I still could not see the top. I felt compelled to continue my climb, at least till I could sense the top, the end.
Maybe there is no end, I thought. Or if there was, what did I expect to find there? Would it be worth the tiring climb? As I looked around, I saw the forest of ladders and climbers of the ladders stretching to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. Some were on the way up, some just looking around at this level or that, and some seemed to be climbing down. Sometimes there were two, three, or more people climbing the same ladder, it appeared. On one distant ladder I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Two climbers seemed to be fighting, flinging their legs out and around like boxers, trying to scramble over each other to reach the next rung. A thick-set fellow in a waving, colorful tie bounded down to the fight from several rungs above and, with one well-aimed heel to the jaw of the climber nearest him, kicked the challenger right off the ladder! He went back up, and the surviving climber seemed reluctant to follow too closely behind. He crept up the rungs more slowly, more warily now.
Then, as I regarded the ladders' endless stretch, I saw for the first time some ladders' tops! They just stood erect like all the others, leaning against nothing, or nothing I could see. But they ended, at various heights. They clearly had an end. I couldn't see enough to say if they had climbers on them anywhere along their visible length, or if anyone had mounted or tried their length. They just stood among the others, going nowhere.
Did all the ladders ultimately end like these? I shuddered. Was there nothing beyond their tops? Surely not, I thought. Ladders had to go somewhere, didn't they? Else why have them? And just the effort of climbing them so laboriously, for so long, surely had to have some meaning. Else why do it? And there was the fog, high, high above it all, hiding the tops of many ladders. There had to be something there, above that fog. There surely had to be.
I looked up again at the long, straight rails of my ladder, stared at the endless rungs above me, and felt as if my destiny converged, as the rails, at the vanishing point in the fog above. Again I began to climb the rungs, peering high as intently as I could, up, up into the inscrutable fog which continued to lift, rather than disperse, the higher I rose.
As Devon danced, he chose to drown
and turned around as he sank down,
turned and twisted round and round,
pirhouetting down and down,
Slowly lifted, a hand gestured,
Sad eyes smiled,
Pierrot Lunaire, a harlequin clown,
"Prete-moi ta plum-e," he mimed,
"Ma chandelle est morte,"
And as he danced, lowering down,
he gracefully bowed to curious fish,
and drowned.
Tomorrow, I believe, will be a writing day.
Not a lawn-mowing day,
Not a shopping day, or a bill-paying day,
Not a car-fixing, computing, or piano-playing day,
Not a day of puttering or sputtering around town
Gathering up supplies and groceries,
Getting gas or oil,
Galumphing around on foot or bike,
Clearing the mind,
Refreshing the goals,
Reflecting upon what has been or what may be,
Seeking answers—
And seeking answers—
Forever seeking, never quite finding answers—
Those things are for every other day, but
Not for tomorrow,
No, not tomorrow, for
Tomorrow, I believe, will be a writing day.
Tomorrow will be a writing day because
I am in voice!
At last in voice!
Finally surprised in glorious, prodigal voice!
I would like, in my last breath,
To play a song or write a poem
To say to all, “I loved you
As I could, and wished you well.”
I live I think in two contrary worlds.
The first I understand but do not like,
The next I do not understand but like.
And neither would exist for me alone.
They used to be my closest friends;
I saw them often.
They elude me mostly now, though—
Sometimes I spot one off to one side
In my reverie,
My pen sometimes snags one as it flits through my underthoughts
Like a firefly in a dark field,
Teasing and glowing
When it’s pushed up by some curious feeling or shift,
Suddenly—simply—
There!
What wild horses could not drag into view
Is simply there (where?)
Then gone (why?).
Who are you? What are you?
Unseen images, phantom forms so gossamer fleeting,
Yet tantalizing, fascinating, curious to behold?
And why do you beckon your novitiate so seldom with arcane rite
To your society so little late?
Your secret siren sound so seldom late?
You used to be my closest friends--
You used to be my closest friends!
We played together, stayed together, you and I—
We loved each other, teased each other--
Day and night we pleased each other—
Constant companions, you and I, inseparable comrades!
And I knew you well, Shadowface, and you, Lightform,
Sighsong, Laughtear, Pixiedust. Where is Mister Blue, I wonder?
And who killed Cock Robin?—WHO GOES THERE?
Be ye Friend or foe? Who ye be I’d like to know.
And where oh where oh where did ye go?
Why did you leave so suddenly, my Friendfoe? Without a word, without a sign—
No smile, no tear, no warning at all.
Did you all leave together? I wonder.
It seemed so. Such sudden exodus, such haste!
And wherever did you go? Say no, no. These tears beg to know—Ah!
But I see something, I do believe—
Ah, ha-ha, ho-ho—
Sly things! You were only hiding from me!
All these years just watching me,
Never far, and watching,
Watching—over me,
Guardians—over me.
Why?
I believe I know:
You were waiting for me!
Waiting, hesitating, so polite and not wishing to impose, intrude—
Aren’t you the little Miss Manners though!
I never knew.
Well here I am! Welcome, welcome, shy friends!
Come out, come out, wherever you are,
Come out, my friends, be ye near or far,
Come all, come round, we can play once more!
Be friends anew, as friends afore.
You need not fear, I will not tell
One soul indeed (I didn’t before).
I missed you. Missed you all since you left,
Left me in a world of ideas without feeling,
Facts without love—mechanistic toys—
Plastic supergirls, boisterous superboys—
Please come back, draw nigh again—
I’ll own you all and hide no more.
I promise, I will hide no more.
One bright morning Pepe sat in his wooden high chair spooning his oatmeal as usual into his round face. Maria, his mother, was making broth at the stove and singing happily. She turned to admire her dear boy. “Peppito,” she crooned, “mi Niño.”
It was a beautiful day. Outside the window, Maria could hear some shaker parrots chattering as they flitted about building a branchy nest in the church tower in the nearby square. A bluebird flew down to the window, landed on the sill, and cocked its head at her as if to ask some question.
Mauricio, the old mailman, had just turned his new aluminum cart into her front walk and was approaching the door. The leather mailbag it carried had grown too heavy upon his shoulder a few months ago, and his arthritis was flaring. It had been a wonderful thing when Luz, his postmistress, had presented him with the new aluminum cart to ease his burden—the first mailcart in his district. Mauricio had resisted at first, from pride. “Oh, but they’re using them everywhere in the big cities now,” his fellow workers had assured him. And he had gratefully relented. His co-workers had clapped as he took the handle and pushed it back and forth at the small ceremony. Since he had begun using the new cart, a smile had returned to replace the former grimace of pain as he made his rounds with a new lightness in his step, easily rolling and steering the cart before him.
Paco, the family toy Shnauzer, had been resting his head on his paws under the kitchen table, his designated ambush redoubt, when he sensed Mauricio’s approach as soon as the cart turned onto the walk. The sentinel sprang to his legs from his rest, on and skittered across the tile floor, his salt and pepper body of fluff charging toward the front door. “Brroo—roof-roof!” he barked excitedly and leaped to scratch the worn wood. But his leap was suddenly stopped in midair. “Roo-- .” Paco hung suspended, a small furry sculpture of thwarted fury and purpose unfulfilled.
In the pan before her, Maria saw the simmering broth just as suddenly stop in midboil. She whirled around to her darling boy.
“Peppito, what’s wrong?” she cried, rushing to snatch him up to her shoulder. In the middle of the child’s considerable baby head his coal-black eyes bulged beseechingly upward to his mother for aid. His pumpkin cheeks puffed out to his ears in a rainbow of pallid pinks and reds, then yellows, then blues, then purples, until it seemed they would burst. “Oh, my baby, my sweet, darling boy!” Maria swooped the child to her shoulder in one motion and began to pat his back vigorously and shake him gently up and down as she swayed from side to side. “There, there, you ate your oatmeal too fast, you naughty child,” she scolded. “Now just see what you have done! Oh, dear! Oh dear!”
Paco’s left paw had stopped just inches from the inside of the door, where it remained, while on its outside, only a few more inches from Paco’s slathering, bared little teeth, Mauricio’s bony right fingers clutched the day’s letters aloft in a graceful tableau as his left held the mailbox lid upright to receive them. In the nearby square the shaker parrots hung silently in orbit like hummingbirds around the old church tower in the square, and the bluebird cocked its head quizzically looking in at the scene like a beautiful, stuffed Christmas ornament. All the world was frozen in time as Mother Maria stroked and patted, bobbed and cooed her little Peppito.
And finally, with a heave of his little chest, the multicolored child let out the loudest, longest “Burrraaappp!” of which any child had ever relieved himself.
“There, there,” Maria cooed, “There’s my good boy!”
When the baby finished, his little body with its huge head seemingly beginning to return to normal proportions, a deep sigh and long yawn ensued, and he fell fast asleep in the comfort of his mother’s gently rocking, soft, warm embrace.
Mauricio dropped the letters into the box and quietly smiled under his gray mustache to hear Paco’s little cannonball body fly into the door on the other side harmlessly with a muffled thump and scratch its snare drum roll of flying paws , growling and barking. The doorbell chimed from Mauricio’s pressing, and the broth on Maria’s stove resumed its soft gurgling. The shaker parrots spun noisily again about the church tower in the square, and the little bluebird on the windowsill flew up to a cherry tree bough, hopped to face the idyllic cottage, then cheeped to confirm that all the world could continue its wondrous song.
Charles was ninety-nine
The day before his birthday,
But he looked like a movie star.
It so enraged the other residents of Merry Lane
That they bumped him off the east balcony
As he balanced on one leg for Tai Chi
At sunrise.
Tomorrow, I believe, will be a writing day,
Not a lawn-mowing day,
Not a shopping day, or a bill-paying day,
Not a car-fixing, computing, or piano-p;aying day,
Not a day of puttering or sputtering around town
Gathering up supplies and groceries,
Getting gas or oil, galumphing around on foot or bike,
Clearing the mind,
Refreshing the goals, reflecting upon what has been or what may be,
Seeking answers—
And seeking answers—
Forever seeking, never quite finding, answers—
Those things are for every other day, but
Not for tomorrow, for
Tomorrow, I believe, will be a writing day.
Tomorrow will be a writing day because
I am in voice!
At last in voice!
Finally surprised to be in glorious, prodigal voice!
When I sat on a rock, on a ridge,
I saw something
I didn’t see elsewhere.
I saw something, heard something—
I looked around; on a distant hill
There were other trees, other ridges—
A squirrel grabbed a small pine nut, scampered to another rock,
Turned, froze on me—
Then in a blink, vanished.
What I saw, gone.
What I heard, gone.
I looked behind, upward
There were higher trees, higher ridges—
I might see something, hear something, even more there—
Something more again, just there.
