Posts filed under 'Dobyns, Stephen'
Nathan had hit Paula, but I’m not sure if that was true or as what everyone assumed. Living with Nathan seemed the same as being hit.
[…]
Nathan’s indifference to consequence: first he had it, then it went away, then it came back and killed him. It’s shape that makes a person’s life interesting. When Nathan ducked into my room, pulled down his pants, and set fire to his pubic hair, he seemed to do it without thought. It was just a crazy idea that had struck him. Then he left and the smell would hang there. You could almost see it as bits of black ash drifted down over my books and papers. I hated to brush them away with my bare hand. Nobody liked him for it. Burning the Black Forest was an absurdity without issue, except to the dean and those jocks who get excited by what they didn’t understand. It wasn’t a graceful action, but it was done with a kind of grace. It wasn’t the action of a guy who feels he must work sixteen hours a day to keep people from yelling at him, a guy who wakes up before the crows to think about mortgage payments, health insurance, life insurance, his kids’ college education, and how he’s going to pay for his retirement. Does Nathan’s son have any of that? Sometimes I hope he’s hairy like his father, just a ball of thick black hair. And when Nathan’s foot had swollen up to the size of a basketball, what did he think then? I imagine him sitting in his hut with the Indians hovering outside the door. He had a terrible fever and was sweating his guts out. There must have been flies all over the place. Was he afraid? I like to think he didn’t care. An ex-wife who hated him, a child he didn’t know, his foot as big as a basketball– I liked to think that Nathan didn’t even feel fear. That’s how he stays fixed in my mind: indifferent to consequence. It’s something we like to hear that other people can do. I mean, even if we can’t imagine it for ourselves, don’t we want to believe it’s possible?
June 25th, 2007
But seriousness had amounted to Jason Plover’s trademark. He had been a tall, heavyset man fond of wearing a thick tweed overcoat, which made his figure resemble a rolled-up mattress. When he walked he like to set his entire foot flat upon the ground before lifting it for the next step. His heavy tread was well known in the English department at Tufts, where he had taught for fifteen years. He had vast black eyebrows that he could wield as a samurai wields his sword. One position showed scorn, another superiority, and a third deep thought. There are many writers in the Boston area. Toss a stone in a public place and you are likely to hit one. But for seriousness–sheer, bullying, heavy-lidded, I’m-the-most-important-poet-on-God’s-green-acre seriousness–Jason Plover had the rest of the writers beat.
Now all was changed.
The headline in the Boston Herald read Plummeting Porker Pulverizes Poet.
[…]
There was something about these stories that made time seem causal, and Harriet realized she was attempting to repair her sense of causality. Her husband’s death appeared to lie outside causality. The malignant Demiurge who hangs life’s carrot before our eyes had been having his or her little joke. What do we do with an extremely serious poet? We kill him with a falling pig. Those people who had laughed at the manner of her husband’s death: shouldn’t they have been terrified? Didn’t Jason’s death indicate an awful truth about the cosmos–that if it has a divine direction, then its prime mover is whimsy?
[…]
She thought of her husband’s seriousness, how he wore it like a garment. Most often his laughter had been ironic or sarcastic or superior. His laughter had been judgmental and, as a result, all his laughter had been serious. Was it possible to laugh without any element of judgment? Jason Plover’s life had been an edifice built to demonstrate the solemnity of his endeavor. Poor Jason, killed by a falling pig; his death had overturned the premises of his life.
[…]
Harriet Spense considered how Franklin yearned for the fame that had resulted in her husband’s ultimate trivialization. She found herself laughing. She put her hands on her knees, leaned her head back, and gasped for breath. It was neither a guffar nor the hysterical shriek of nervousness. It was the laugh of someone whose solemnity has been overthrown, the laugh that erases every other concern. Our plans, our memories, our fears are all replaced by a peculiar yet distinctive hooting. To some it sounds like a mob of crows; to others, a donkeys bray. In fact, it is the sound of the world disappearing as all the content is sucked from our heads, to be replaced–briefly; oh, too briefly–by a happy vacancy. And doesn’t this sustain us? Doesn’t it provide the strength to let us bear up our burden and continue our mortal journey?
June 25th, 2007
He’d not known he loved her so he let her go.
You know those movies where a bunch of soldiers
jump out the back of a plane? That’s how she looked,
falling away through scattered clouds, a dark speck
getting smaller, then nothing. He turned aside.
He felt a squeezing, a pain in his chest, but
he told himself it was nothing. He made up
another life, had some good times, bad times.
Always there was this squeezing but he felt sure
it meant nothing. He built himself a new house,
family; he tried to make his way in the world
as one makes little figurines out of clay,
clay women and children, clay automobiles,
a clay dog to fetch his paper, clay slippers.
Move, he said to the figurines, jump through hoops.
He kept remembering how she’d disappeared
like someone tumbling from the back of a plane.
You know the movie– it’s Germany and wartime.
The parachutes drifting down like milkweed seeds
in the rising sun– that’s what she looked like,
falling through cloud, a dark speck getting smaller.
Wasn’t this the old trouble with adult life,
wasn’t there always damage and destruction–
like looking at a wartime landscape, the wrecked
villages, plundered fields, the roads shot to hell?
Sometimes it felt reversed and he was down there
with his little clay life wastching the figurines
get blasted to bits. The planes would disappear,
distant specks of silver. He’d see the wreckage,
dead animals, busted machines. This is my life,
he would think, this is what I’ve made for myself.
Although the sun was rising, the clock had stopped,
the season stopped. The day wasn’t beginning,
it had ended. In the sky, there was nothing,
no parachutes or planes, not even birds, just
a vacancy; that’s what the pain was, the squeezing,
this absence like the sky itself inside him.
August 15th, 2005
I think of you on the other side, lonely
and as unhappy as I am; but possibly
you are content in a room with white walls,
flowering plants, a room where I might even
be welcome could I discover the right roads.
From my side of the valley, I see darkness
climbing the distant hills. It is getting late.
We have to learn to save ourselves, change ourselves,
or else we’ll come to a time when love won’t help–
night of no welcome, night of the long indifference.
August 15th, 2005
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept–
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
August 14th, 2005
… When
the temptation had struck him to make something
really big, he had first conceived of it
as a kind of scarecrow to stand in the middle
of the garden and frighten off predators. What
voice had he listened to that convinced him
to give the creature his own face? No voice
but his own. It had amused him to make
a kind of living mirror, a little homunculus
that could learn a few of his lesser tricks.
And he had imagined sitting in the evening
with his friend the Devil watching the small
human creatures frolic in the grass. They would
be like children, good-natured and always singing.
When had he realized his mistake? Perhaps
when he smiled down at the first and it
didn’t smile back; when he reached down to help
it to its feet and it shrugged his hand aside.
Standing up, it hadn’t walked on the paths marked
with white stones but on the flowers themselves.
It’s lonely, God had said. So he made it a mate,
then watched them feed on each other’s bodies,
bicker and fight and trample through his garden,
dissatisfied with everything and wanting to escape.
Naturally, he hadn’t objected. Kicked out,
kicked out, who had spread such lies? Shaking
and banging the bars of the great gate, they had
begged him for the chance to make it on their own.
August 14th, 2005
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.
August 14th, 2005