MY FATHER'S FISH

It seems preposterous now, looking back: that fish pond my father designed, the one he’d sketched out one hot May evening on his blue-gridded drawing paper, the one on which he had penciled, in his precise hand, the exact dimensions of the thing and the directions for its construction, the pond he’d built by hand - concrete, brick and mortar - and its fountain. . . all of it stuck, like a gaudy luxury, to the front of a concrete block house that was unremarkable as all the other painted concrete block houses along our street. When he’d finished it and filled it with water from the garden hose, he’d stocked it with three - or was it four? - large orange Japanese fish. Koi.

I'd loved the pond then, for the fish if not for the pond itself, and for how, when I put my hand into the cool water and held it still long enough, the fish would swim to my hand and latch onto my fingers with their suckered mouths, making a tingling place at the spot where their cool, wet world met my heat-riddled, arid world. My father had astonished me. He had thought of this thing all on his own, then had drawn it, painstakingly and perfectly, in the dim-lit, unfinished workshop behind our house. And then he had made it happen.

If you had asked me, back then, to tell you something about my father, I’d have told you that he worked long hours at the Glidden Chemical Plant across town and that he came home reeking of that chemical soup each evening. I'd have told you how my brother and I held our noses and backed away from that stench. I’d have told you that my father sometimes took a shower, ate quickly and went off to an evening class at the local community college, even after working all day. I would have told you that he went to church and prayed and read his Bible, and that sometimes he’d just start singing in the house for no reason. I’d tell you that, sometimes, he sat on the back stoop and played “Strangers on the Shore” on his clarinet and that it sounded sorrowful and melancholy in the twilight. I'd tell you how I’d come from anywhere – the nearby woods or fields or reading in the house – just to be close when he played that song like that.

But that pond and those fish! They were evidence that my father also dreamed. They were proof that he had conceived of something beautiful which had not existed before and that he had willfully brought into being, that watery thing lit from above by the sun, that orange flicker of possibility in my child’s eye.

That first night, while I lay in my narrow bed beneath the front window - the window right over the little fountain and pond - while I tried to forget the sticky heat of the evening, as I lay there marveling that my father had dreams, I drifted off towards sleep while the little fountain trickled faithfully on under the great expanse of the dark heavens and the Southern Cross.

I began to imagine that our lives had opened that day to something new and that there was a place for these fish – my father’s fish – in our lives, and a place for that water-filled fountain humming beneath my window, and even a place for my father’s dreams. And because I was the child I was, filled with fear and foreboding, because I was a child with a "vivid imagination," and also prone to moments of melancholy myself, it occurred to me that winter would come and that little pond would be rimed then with ice. What would happen to the fish? Would they suffer? Would they freeze slowly to death?

My father, I told myself, will know what to do. And for the first time, I was almost certain of that. Maybe, I thought, he’ll bring them inside. Maybe we’ll have a tank of water in the living room like Beth Poppell's house does, a tank where they’ll swim all winter, safe from the ice. And maybe, come spring, when we return them to the pond, there will be big-eyed babies. I grew dreamy and content then, lulled to sleep by the soft splashing beneath the window, never hearing it for what it really was: the feral cats gathering to feed on my father’s beautiful fish, picking the bright, fleshy parts from his dreams, discarding the impossible bones.

ENTOURAGE

When my two oldest boys were small, I'd entertain them by writing something on paper in black ball-point ink. Whatever they told me to write down, I penned there in my large, loopy cursive handwriting. Mostly it was something silly like Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, or Hinka-binka-a-bottle-of-ink, I pooped my pants and now I stink. Or other boyish nonsense and tom-foolery. Then, when they'd had their fun, I'd dip an empty pen-point in a tin cup of milk and write my own lines in between the inky lines, like the old Greek scribes used to do. I'd write, I love you. I'd write, Now is the time for all good men. I'd write, Say you love me back. I'd write their names. I'd write my own, which changed so often back then with each marriage and divorce that I sometimes woke wondering who I was. When the morning heat of the kitchen had dried the milk and the words had gone invisible, I'd ask the boys to tell me what had been written there, in between the black ink lines which still showed plainly, as before. Sometimes the boys could remember; but mostly not. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage goes.

So then I'd go outside to the wobbly second-hand grill a neighbor had given me and I'd take a piece of charcoal in hand. I'd go back inside and rub it between my palms until it began to crumble and a fine dust coated the paper underneath it, and all its writing. Then I'd lift the page and shake the loose charcoal dust out the open window. When the paper was on the table between us, the words were visible again.

Wow, the boys would say, and Whoa, and they'd snatch the paper up and take it out into the backyard, holding it up to the light, squinting at it, poring over the magic of it, wondering how something which had been visible had gone invisible for a time and how, with just the right element added, it had become visible again. They thought it was better than any other experiment we did. They'd beg for it again and again. I took to leaving notes on the refrigerator with "secrets" written in milk just for the pleasure of watching them run outside to the old grill and take the charcoal in hand.

Their clothes and hands were black with charcoal afterwards and I had to scrub them clean at the kitchen sink where the porcelain finish had long ago worn thin. Sometimes, the charcoal stained those thin places and I had to scrub all week to remove the traces of it. Sometimes, I could see, for days, the lines in the boys' hands where the fine charcoal dust had settled, intractably, into the empty places, the fine places which had not been visible until stained. Eventually, though, it all washed free.

Gone, I'd think and feel a small, baffling knot of sadness in me rising; all gone.

If you were to see me now, writing at my desk, tending the thorny roses outside my house, talking to the cat, singing at the sink, preparing lessons for my grad students in poetry, a middle-aged woman in jeans and men's baggy dress shirts (my husband's outcasts and hand-me-downs), painting trim or hanging wallpaper, sitting on the summer porch reading or just idly watching the day wheel by into twilight – if you were to see me like this, you'd think nothing of it except that I'm a woman ordinary as rain, nothing remarkable. What you see is what you get. That woman.

You'd be wrong, of course.

I am not what is written plainly as all that. I live also between the neat lines of who-I-seem-to-be. Always, despite the placid countenance and the genial smile, there is an entourage inside of me. The infant boy lying all night in the crook of a grown man's arm in that over-crowded morgue. The gray fetal bodies in their glass jars of formaldehyde lining the shelves of the anatomy lab closet. The burned boy whose drunken father set him afire one night for disobeying him. That first man I saw naked, dead. And all the ones who followed away from there.

There is more than mere memory here too, a mind recalling something long-gone. There is also the body itself remembering: the nose recoiling as it conjures up again the stench a burned body gives off; something in the stomach's unruly pit knotting itself; the left palm and how it rested against a fevered brow while the right hand fingered a thready pulse; the texture of a woman's long hair in my hands as I washed it for her, toweled it dry it, brushed it into place around her thin face in preparation for the family's arrival – or the mortician's; bare pink fingertips recalling again the post-operative feel of the swollen stump and its sutures, the sticky wet weeping of the wound and, later, the crusted cluster of epithelials sealing, the healing begun at last; the sloshy gauze I'd taken in my hand – the hand I write with now, feed myself with, cook with, caress my husband and hug my children with – that strong right hand stained orange once with Betadine where I'd swabbed a woman's chest one morning, prepping her for the double mastectomy; and my ears which still hear always, waking from dreams, their little moans of pain.

This is what is written, in the interstices between one visible thing and the next. The milky ink of who-I-also-am. And when I write them back to me again - as I do sometimes - they are not "art" to me, not the stuff of rank sensationalism and poetry. They are who they are. Or were. And I am standing again at the old crossroads considering once more the twin devils of suffering and mortality. I am wholly myself again then, the visible and the invisible body. The quick and the dead. A house and all its rooms.

GOD'S WILL

When a baby does not get born right, everybody goes to church – only it's not Sunday School or worship or dinner-on-the-ground or choir practice, and nobody passes the plate. This is a funeral, and for a funeral, you must wear your blackest, plainest, ugliest dress. No one appreciates a fashion statement at a funeral; that would be like spitting in God's eye and everybody knows only the Devil would do such a thing and look where it landed him.

When you come into the church-house you must sit quiet and still as death with your eyes downcast – like the deacons do when the sermon is on womanizing or adultery – and then there will be some singing of sad songs. "Amazing Grace" is a favorite song for funerals, especially if the organist can get the "bagpipes" key on the organ unstuck. "In The Sweet Bye-and-Bye" is another popular funeral song, one that talks about heaven as a sweet bye-and-bye, not the sour kind of bye-and-bye like when my grandmother used the word to talk about the woman in her housing project who is "loose," as in, "Bye and bye, that red-headed hussy is gonna get her just desserts."

Anyway, at a funeral, there is some singing and some weeping and then everyone lines up, single-file, to walk past the little wooden box where the baby is laid out in a starchy white bonnet and gown. The ladies sniffle and daub at their eyes with their hankies and the men all stand nearby in a clump, scratching under their stiff collars, eyeing the ladies in case the vapors should come over them and someone should swoon into a black heap on the floor. Mostly the women don't – swoon, I mean – but men are generally nervous about what a woman might do in a group, especially when there's a baby involved.

After everyone is done looking at the baby, the men stand out in the churchyard and shake the daddy's hand real hard and say, "Sorry for your troubles, John."

The women gather around the grief-struck mother under the shade trees and they take her hands in theirs, one after another, and pat it and say things like, "Don't blame yourself, honey; these things happen." Or they say churching things like, "God's ways are mysterious" or "You'll see that blessed little baby again in heaven" or "He's happy in God's hands now, sister."

In case none of this seems to comfort her much, if she tells them all that none of that matters and all she wants is her baby back again, the ladies go on to the inevitable: "It's God's will."

That usually works.

It works, I think, because it baffles her. Like God's will baffles me. Preacher says it's God's Will for every one of us to turn our back on the Devil and sin and to be saved and live with him forever in glory. Preacher says whenever a child of God is saved, all the angels in heaven rejoice and Gabriel blows a tune on his horn. There is shouting in the church then and rejoicing and clapping of hands and hallelujahs all around. This is called a jubilation. Jubilation is allowed in church, but only if you keep your feet still on the floorboards. If you move your feet, then it is called dancing and dancing is NOT allowed in church. NO DANCING. Dancing is too close to fornication and we all know where that will get you.

So when you're saved, there's a party in heaven. But on earth what you get is a good dunking in cold water in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But no party. This is because, if God gets you, you get no credit for it because it was God's Will anyway. But if the Devil gets you, that's nobody's fault but your own and there'll be hell to pay for it.

But I guess God's Will, today, is the baby in the wooden box and his mother who is cross now at God and how all of us are going to have to stand a while in the heat out back of the church-house, after the funeral, and watch as two colored men plant the baby beside other babies in a long row, babies who are all in God's hands now, though their boxes are lying under little white staves with their names painted on them, just like the little staves we push into our garden furrows each spring so we won't forget what we planted and where.

FLIGHT

The great jet has stalled, mid-runway, for de-icing. From behind the boardroom’s plate-glass window, I watch as a white truck with a bucket (like the large buckets telephone linemen use) suspends one helmeted, yellow-slickered man over the plane. He holds, in both hands, a large coil of white hose, moving it first over the nose, then inching it along the sleek body and over the great wings, down to the tail-fin. As he sprays, a thick gray fog engulfs the plane until it loses its particular shape and begins to resemble, from where I stand, a large whale, a Leviathan: a beast in whose belly sits my husband.

I have counted down the lit cabin windows to a place where, as closely as I can gauge, he sits - 19A, mid-cabin or thereabouts - impatiently waiting for the complicated machinery of flight to resume. My husband is an aerospace engineer. He designs landing systems. And he hates flying. Maybe it’s because he knows too much about all the ways in which that machinery can fail. Maybe because he knows the design is “safe” only to ten-to-the-minus-10 degrees and not one degree further. Maybe it’s because he knows, after all his years of studying how flight happens, that despite all the well-laid plans of intelligent men and women, despite all the intricate and elegant designs in aerospace and physics, every inch of it can be undone in one millisecond by something ordinary as a flock of migrating birds or volcanic ash.

If the travelers around him are lucky today, he’s already nodding off, eyes closed, the noise-canceling earplugs in place. Later, when the flight attendant shakes him awake and tells him to remove the ear-pieces for take-off, he’ll pull them out. He’ll be worse then, having to re-enter the crowded world of that slender cabin where people are herded in like cattle.

My husband does not care, much, for people. He does not wish to know the disappointments and struggles of their lives. He does not love the loud Texans with their big hats. He does not love the elderly who arrived in wheelchairs, the confused ones who sit delicately as porcelain in the seats into which they've been strapped by the flight attendants. He does not love the exuberant voices of the young women gossiping and getting to know each other. He especially does not love their small, squalling children.

What my husband loves is machinery, the clean sheen of steel, the precise way the moving parts are organized and maintained. The elegantly-coded software that drives it all. He admires software and computers and technology. He longs for down-time and quiet-time and machines which are reliable in all the ways human beings cannot be reliable. He wants things around him to stand a little apart from him, quiet and predictable and unvarnished. Like me.

Only when the plane has reached 10,000 feet above the earth's surface and the announcement has been made, only then will he be satisfied as he replaces the noise-canceling ear-plugs with the ear-buds of his iPod. He will dial the flywheel of the iPod upwards, some headbanger tune roaring mindlessly from it and into his head while he nods off again, while he snoozes and snores, dreams and drools, oblivious to anyone – everyone – hurtling, alongside him, through the high, thin winter atmosphere of sub-space.

Belly of a whale; belly of a plane. It’s all the same to him, my malcontent, modern-day Jonah, never bargaining for favor with anyone – God or otherwise – taking whatever the moment brings, whether it’s bliss or disaster, just as he must surely take this moment for what it is: fog dissipating, lights rising bluely down the runway in front of him, the queue for take-off resuming. And so the great machinery points its nose, cargo weighed and stowed, travelers strapped in for the mad hurtle through the blue-black morning, towards Tarshish or Ninevah or Dallas-Ft.Worth. And finally the loud lifting-off: that head-long rush into the un-firm firmament above, day breaking grayly over the tarmac, and me firmly in my place on terra firma, already distant, already beyond him now in the almost-forgotten glittering seaside city below.

THE STORY I SOMETIMES TELL MYSELF

Opelika, Alabama, 1977:

My first day of training, I faint. All week long in the trauma unit, I gag and throw up. I sway, like an old drunk, at the fraying edge of consciousness. By the second week, I learn to stand upright, to summon my senses back. I learn to make it through the autopsies and the rotting limbs where gangrene has set in, to make it through the sweet stench of burned flesh and gunshot wounds, to keep the stomach from its uprising and revolt. I keep a peppermint, sweet host, under my tongue to calm the acrid taste of bile that rises in my throat. After two months on the wards, I can look at almost anything and not flinch.

I do not flinch when the murdered woman is brought in one night, her tongue so swollen from the strangling it hangs blackly out of her mouth. Nor do I grimace when the burned boy is admitted, unable even to cry in his pain – the vocal cords scorched, black as coal – his upper body singed where his father set him afire for disobeying. And I do not flinch now facing the thousand other unimaginable things that one human being can do to another, and not for whatever cruelty or happenstance or rotten twist of fate has brought them to the ward, or to the E.R., or to the morgue and, thus, into my care. I learn to look at anything and keep my face from torquing in horror or revulsion, no matter how twisted or charred, no matter how blown open the body might be where a bullet has bored through it. I am tempered steel. I am gun-metal gray. Nothing moves my controlled countenance.

Only once is it otherwise: I lift my face from the hospital sink after morning report and I see, suddenly, the empty in my eyes. There she is before me, undeniable: my numb twin, exhausted and glass-brittle. My doppelganger. Someone who has given up on things. Someone who lives in a besieged country.

Each night, I enter again the dim underworld of the graveyard shift where I tend to the sick, to the wounded and dying. I walk up and down the dim-lit corridors, the fresh wax gleaming underfoot, the soles of my shoes sticking and squealing like some small protest. The ones who can sleep, sleep. The others merely endure, somehow, the long night and its pain-riddled hours. The rest of this town sleeps, blissful and exhausted and unaware.

And me? I am the Watcher. I have the map in hand. I know where each sleeper reposes in the dark ward. I know the precise thorn of their pain and the trellis of the body upon which it is hung. I take my penlight in hand, checking each bed, taking in hand each wrist, my fingers feeling for a pulse. I am their best angel each night, their guardian, the one who hovers, the one who keeps vigilant watch, the most faithful of faithfuls. The one who changes nothing. The one who cannot save them. The one who cannot even save herself.

Only when the sun comes up do I leave them behind, in the care of others, and I enter again the daylit world.

How sweet it seems today, the warm blanket of my ordinary life around me, the smell of strong coffee brewing, my groggy children rousing themselves from sleep, the baby’s milky first tooth finally in, the man I married seven years ago – the man I no longer can say I really know or love – leaving for work, leaving me to the wake of whatever washes over me there in my own kitchen, the whole morning slow and bathwater-warm around me. And always, in the background, tugging at me: that shadow-world I’ve left behind for a little while in order to take up, once more, this thing I sometimes call “my life.”

Two kingdoms I inhabit. One, a kingdom of darkness and the brittle stars of the maimed and sick, the halt, the infirm, the wrongly-born and badly-made, and those who are dying. And the other, at sun-up: a kingdom of spilled cereal and sticky hands, of diapers and detergent, riddles and nursery rhymes, Big Bird and Mickey Mouse, make-believe and wild rumpus, playgrounds and grape popsicles. And all the while, somewhere between the two kingdoms: a seam – holding, barely – slightly parting at the precise place, the exact latitude and longitude, where I depart one kingdom and enter the other.

In my ordinary life, there are people – parents, friends, family, neighbors – people who I once moved easily among and loved and who might love me still I think, good people with whom I’ll never again wholly belong. There are cautious animals – stray cats, a neighbor's mangy hound, two aloof deer who come to graze on windfall apples at the edge of the field – who do not seem afraid of me, who allow me to approach them. It feels like a gift, their acceptance of me, raw as I am, when they venture near me, a brief communion between exiles who do not speak each other's languages. But they are apparitions, ghosts who appear and then disappear. Each day now, I am more at peace with solitude, with the forest of pine and sycamore just beyond my back yard, with the fogged-in meadow of milkweed beyond it where a single gnarled tree stands, twisted by wind and split by lightning. Mostly I feel a deep relief flood through me in my daylight life, like someone who was to be executed but is suddenly, inexplicably pardoned. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "peace," this thing I feel, but whatever it is called, it is surely the same stunned thing which must have washed over Persephone each spring when she left the underworld to re-enter the time of blooming and light. It is a peace, a relief, tinged with the knowledge that the underworld is still there, waiting for your return. Sometimes am I a little envious of the mud-brown river that runs fast as it can into and out of this town.

Words have forsaken me now: what words can frame them, those sufferers, what words can make them visible to those who inhabit this ordinary, lit world, a world that goes on untroubled by what relentlessly troubles these others? I do not even know, anymore, how to pray. How would I begin? And to Whom would I address my prayers?

Scripture says that if no one will say the truth of what is, even the stones will cry out.

Tell me, if you can: does the blade of grass, in its own green tongue, beseech God on their behalf? Does the clover cry out for mercy? Does the kicked stone weep? And the bunched forget-me-nots at the wild edge of these woods today - to whom do they make such an earnest blue entreaty? And what of the vines: see how they run up the trees in terror. Are they also a prayer, reaching skyward?

If so, let them pray.

As for me, I will watch children play today in the summer-scorched fields. I will tie on my apron and braid my hair and shake off my shoes. I will consider again the lilies which do not toil nor weep. I will keep my eye on the sparrow who has made her nest in the dead bough of the twisted apple-tree. I will study the cat who is stalking bugs in the weed-riddled yard. I will let the neighbor’s bony hound sleep in the cool dirt under my back stoop, his only escape from the fury of his drunk master. I will live this day to its end, drinking it like a cup of cold water on a hot day. I will give myself over to this other, lesser work. I will stake the tomato plants upright and give the garden snakes a wide berth. I will sweep spiders from this splintered porch. I will fold the towels and hang quilts to dry on the line. Also the clean sheets which will fly all day in the wind outside my window like some last white flags of my surrender.

THE GOD-TREE

The God-Tree

The Peaceable Cows, waiting in their fields

The birdhouse, waiting for tenants

Blooming Tree

First green of spring

Save me, O God, for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in mire where there is no standing. I am come deep into waters where floods overrun me.

-- Psalm 60: 1 – 3

Spring. Season when all the dormant things rise again, in flagrant color, from the warming earth. Season when the light returns. Season when frigid ground thaws and parts its bars in order to allow the first daffodils and tulips to enter. Demeter welcoming the stolen daughter home again from the underworld. Season of ripening bloominess, the air fragrant with something like promise – and rich in the pollen that bees love and which those with allergies do not love so much. And always, there is that Midas-touch over everything: spring's gold, dusting the porches and cars with a fine yellow haze.

In the small town where I live now, people come out after the long winter, into their yards to work and plant. The women hang laundry on the line again and beat the dusty rugs with steely mallets. Menfolk hang over fences to chat with their neighbors and tell each other how long the winter seemed. How the wood ran out before the cold did. Children grab their father's screw-drivers and punch holes in the lids of bell-jars, hoping twilight will bring the lightning bugs which they will chase, barefoot, over the twilit lawns. In the cool of evenings, the runners emerge again in their spandex leggings and trainers, earphones and iPods in place, jogging along the sidewalks and roadways where, not long ago, an icy slush was an impediment to running. Treadmills and home gymnasiums sulk, neglected, in basements: chrome and flywheels and LCD displays are no match for sunshine and gritty air and the heady smell of loamy soil. The town's long-lived widows stroll, arm in arm, through town, admiring the gardens, speaking of their lost husbands, sometimes complaining about how difficult their men were in life, openly aching for them in that way only the long-married can ache when a spouse passes first.

At the edge of town, farmland is being tilled and prepared for planting. The pungent attar of manure blows into town and wafts into the open windows, a fragrant mix of decomp and decay and sweet rot. Even the young boy-cat senses something is changing. His old companion is gone now and, in the heady aroma of the fields and flower beds, he has begun to lose the scent of the old cat. He seems lost and baffled as he walks from chair to rocker to bed, to sniff at all the things where the old blind cat lay for the past year. He is beginning to forget. When the scent goes, there will be little left to remind him. So the young male cat has taken to watching the comings and goings of the birds as they fly by the summer porch with twigs and dirty string, lifting up into the bloomy limbs of the tree, disappearing into the newly-hung birdhouse. He has that look on his face as they wheel past. You know the look I mean: old look of the predator when the prey draws near. Hunger.

To shake loose whatever winter-grief still lingers in me, I decide to drive outside of town, to the open fields, to see if the lambs and kids and calves are out in the fields now with their mothers. I will make a point today to overlook the red-tagged ears of the adult animals among them: a solemn reminder that spring - the season of birth and rebirth - is also the season of slaughter.

My grandmother told me a story once of the Caston men when they'd first come to America. They were farmers. Apparently, they weren't very good businessmen though since they'd bought the land without seeing it first. When they'd arrived, the stony land they'd purchased was crowded with hardwoods that had to be cleared before the fields could be tilled and planted. So began the long weeks of back-breaking cutting and clearing of the land. You couldn't feed a family if you had a proclivity for sparing juniper or oak, and you couldn't feed a family on scrub pine. And feeding the family was what mattered most to them in those days, fleeing, as they were, the old hard poverty of the mother-country.

But, as in the old country, one tree in each field was spared the ax. Each man, no matter how large or small the field he owned, left one tree standing. Not a fruit tree. Not a tree which would provide shade on a hot August day. Not a blooming tree, pleasing to the eye. The solitary tree had to be particular, and each man searched diligently for the proper tree: the God-Tree, they called it quietly. Reverently. From a distance.

The ideal tree would be damaged. Twisted. Gnarled. Grotesque. If that man was fortunate, it would be marred by catastrophe. Perhaps by a lightning strike, split in two and charred. Or by pestilence, stripped-free forever of its greenery, its tap-root gone. Such a tree was the god-sign and it alone determined the field and everything around it. At a safe distance from it, the barn would be built, and the house, and all its outbuildings. The scarred tree – the ruined tree – would serve as a "draw" for lightning. It had an affinity for catastrophe – the scar was proof of that. Everything else was safe so long as a respectful distance was kept from the "draw."

I find that tree today again – the God-tree – in almost every tilled field I visit. One bare, lone tree. Dead-center of the field. Standing solitary, nothing else near. Not even a fence-post. Farmhouses stand far-off, intact. Fences keep a respectful distance. Only the hawks and buzzards take up watch there. Sometimes a few crows. And a long silence, like the silence of a graveyard. Something weary and accustomed to its bleak habitation.

I think, sometimes, I am that god-tree, as a writer and as a woman. Some days, there is a slight scent of old brimstone in my hair. Of fire and something singed. Of wrecked things. Of old scars, mine and others. I am the thing set apart from the normal, the beautiful, the longed-for ones. I am the "draw" for catastrophe. The one who insures the safety of the others. The solitary one, the sentinel at the center of the unsafe places. A warning. A reminder. A monument. One does not, after all, live for many years tending the sick and wounded and dying, and walk away unmarred. . . .

For Whom The Bell: Good Friday, 2010

My friend, Lucille, had gone, for a semester or two, to teach graduate students in poetry at Columbia University. As her time there was drawing to an end, one of the young women in her workshop offered her some advice: "You should stop writing about slavery and being Black and start writing about something more relevant."

I live in a town of bells. I have always lived in a town of bells, and they have rung in the precise hours and half-hours of my life, both in childhood and now in what I hope are the middle years of a long life. Even when the town was dark with no power, or frozen into place in winter, the bells sounded with their strange music which reverberated long after the ringing had stopped. I can be sitting on the summer porch with my husband now, talking amiably of the quotidian pleasures of the day, or reading alone, wholly-lost in a book, but when the bells ring, I am aware: one hour has ended – with all its pain and pleasure, all its joy and sorrow – and the next one is beginning.

In times like these – war-torn times, tattered-glory times, times when the old dog-eared quarrels are returned to again and again, time of blood-feuds and gang-wars, times of the pink slip and the lay-off, times of the still-born and the miscarried and the ill-conceived, times of bad news blowing to shore and swamping the city, times of the earth shifting wildly in its tectonic bed – in times like these, it seems sometimes like the poets have gone a little insane, or at least a little irrelevant, locked as they are, into their work or gathering in workshops, intently extolling the merits of well-forged metaphor or getting all fire-eyed about enjambment and "the line." How obsessively they work, in the halls of academia, to perfect their poems. To make them less subjective. To put them through the white-hot forge of "objectivity" and purge them of the too-specific, the too-personal and too-emotional.

As if.

As if anything brought forth from such imperfect creatures could be scoured-clean of the historical moment in time in which the poet has lived, as if it could be swept clean of all the minute imperfections, the little flaws, ragged edges, fraying seams that are a person's life. Honestly, sometimes composing a poem seems, to me, a gesture of self-indulgence – stern evidence of the old "art-for-art's-sake" we've often been accused of – someone fiddling while the city burns.

I am aware, tonight, of the ridiculous figure I would seem – were anyone looking – hunched here at my desk, smudging out words, mumbling to myself, scribbling in the margins, rearranging rhythms by lamplight, working and reworking the poem towards music, relentlessly nudging it towards the unsayable something I sense behind the words while the little town sleeps and dreams beneath the streetlights, while the new moon fingers the blossoming tree below my window and, far-off in the inky blackness of deep space, the stars flicker on and off. When I pause and look up from my solitary work, I can almost hear the Void yawning out there beyond the stars; it's enough to send any poet, shuddering, back to the white page. But it isn't the Great Silence out there that makes me hesitate tonight. It isn't even the chronic schizophrenia I step into and out of as I move back and forth between my public teaching life and my solitary writing life. What startles me tonight is the town's church bell ringing in the hour: one a.m.

I think of other writers, in their own moments in history, who must have hunched over the page like this, troubled by the world, troubled by what to do or say, knowing or not knowing their places in it all. Neruda. Ahkmatova. Hemingway. And tonight I think too of my dead friend, Lucille, who was also a poet – a friend who, one sunny spring morning sang along with me all the words perfectly – not one missed word – to the Methodist Church bells in that way only a good ex-Baptist can:

Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer, that calls me from a world of care. . . .

I also remember tonight – with an old sadness rising – how, on that particular morning, one of the "cares" of our day had been that stubborn waitress in a local restaurant who would NOT refill Lucille's coffee cup when she stopped by the table to refill mine, a woman who had made a show of turning her back to my friend and asking me what she wanted for breakfast. I am remembering how Lucille's face fell and how her eyes dropped to her silverware, the way a chastised child might look. I recall, too, the swift up-flare of anger in me then, that old anger from my childhood in the South. And I remember my response to that waitress, "She speaks, you know. Ask her yourself." Thus adding fuel to the fire of the incendiary moment we were in, not really helping anything. Pushed into a corner again and swinging my way out of it.

Isn't this what my friend had been trying to say, to talk about, in those poems she wrote? To convey a lifetime of moments like this one. To forgive, even. To understand and move through. All her life. Maybe this was why people shifted uncomfortably in the rooms and auditoriums when she read her Memphis poems, when she made it so clear, so evident, that her people were still living in the hard wake of those old inequities and histories and bigotry that the old ancestors had lived in. Maybe it was why that young woman believed she could tell Lucille that her writing was becoming "irrelevant." It's too simple, sometimes, to see Lucille as an exception to the life her people had lived, were still tangled in, and too unnerving to think that she also endured what they had. Many times. I don't believe for a moment that this was the only time my friend ever had such moments in her life. It just happened to be one I'd been, suddenly, privy to.

We'd finished our breakfast quietly then and had gone out again into Lexington Park. We'd been driving, stunned and uncomfortable, towards campus when the church bells had begun. We'd both gone stock-still, startled by the ringing. Affected, as my grandmother was wont to put it. Lucille had started singing along to the old hymn and then I'd joined in, too: two women in a little blue car, singing. When the bells had gone silent again, we'd laughed at ourselves. (We could do that, too.) And when we'd finished laughing, we'd talked about how poetry had become, for us, the only prayer we had left that seemed at all redemptive, that poems we read and loved had become – somewhere along the way in our sometimes-difficult, sometimes-incomprehensible lives – a place where we were sustained, a place in which we could fully live, in darkness and in light. And we've had some good company in that strange country.

Then, in some fit of silliness, which happened a lot when we were together, I shouted in mock Southern Baptist fervor from behind the wheel of that blue Escort, "Oh, God-bell, set me ringing!" And Lucille had, uncharacteristically, leaned out the window and shouted, "Me too! Me too!"

Poets like the two of us, I suspect, were not destined to be reliable or functional as metronomes. Nor, I suspect, did we really wish our lives to be the steady tock-tocking by which others ordered their lives, setting time in place, arranging the tedious schedules of coming and going neatly. I think people like us are more kindred to bells and tuning forks: mostly idle, mostly sitting peaceably by waiting for something to set us thrumming again, whatever that particular "something" happened to be. We took whatever came to us. We were grateful, even when that "whatever" seemed more a mixed blessing than anything else.

Every time a bell began, we were hearing, I think, something familial, something set off in us by that old resonance of metal to metal. A bell, after all, is not plastic. Nor is its clapper wooden. Metal striking metal. Something hollowed out, reverberating with the striking. Something shuddering and resonating wildly to being struck or pulled or tipped into the air. That is the kind of poets we were, are. It's one of the ways we recognized our kindredness to each other, how we knew what manner of thing we were, of what we were made, where we were bound and to what.