A Convergence Of Birds (15 page)

No, Mr. Cornell, I only meant that it is strange… to be out of the house. After all these years to be in life again, and out of the house. And to speak. Already I have uttered more than in the whole of the last century. I don’t know how long this voice will be with me.

I understand. I spend much time at home too, with family, do my artwork there—one of many bonds I feel with you.

You do stare so, Mr. Cornell. Do the dead look so different?

10/6

rectangle on the wall cast by sun somehow evocation of her presence, of her Blue Peninsula—perfect with Ravel Jeux D’eau passages on new record. good work this morning despite sluggishness after waking. bike ride afternoon? will she return? selfish to ask?

Some things that fly there be—

Birds—Hours—the Bumblebee—

Of these no Elegy.

?/?/?

Dear friend,

You had asked me to tell you of family, the root of which, of course, is a father and mother as husband and wife, and you, Joseph, I think, will be sympathetic to my personal interpretation: that one is married, in one sense, to moments, to melodies, to spaces of possibility, to memory, to the sound of words forming in the mouth, to the purity of a page, or, as you taught me during my sojourn in the land of Queens, to the beauty of any insignificant discarded thing.

10/8

up late again dwelling in conversation with Miss Emily. shape of clouds somehow appropriate for this feeling of post-intimacy. she told me, with great courage, of the period of fears and I told her of the white antelope dream so long ago at Andover and the anxiety over the study of astronomy for implications of infinity. shared many other impressions—cannot delineate in one session.

Two women huddled against one another, arms locked together, as the horse-driven sleigh glides over the hills, their crystalline laughter subsumed by the shiver of bells.

And a father’s business? Obviously it is to provide for his children, and when at home to monitor their behavior—even if they would rather exhaust themselves at play, as occasionally I did, especially that one time.

A woman placing her hand over an older woman’s forehead, smoothing her hair, propping the pillow upon which her head rests, then lifting her slowly, cushioning her hip, manipulating first one leg, then the other.

Brothers, we are agreed, leaven one’s life with their playful humor. Where is the need for movement of limb when this agility of spirit is present? Why, for that matter, need anyone ever go out of the house?

A woman lying on the earth, under trees of chirping birds, matching every robin’s trill with desperate keening.

You claim to want cake but you don’t want my recipe for black cake—that I painstakingly dredged up from my memory, forgetting first the brandy, then the mace—and finally having all the ingredients in proper ratio (recalling whether more currants than raisins or raisins than currants), remembering every single one of nineteen eggs. I think you might prefer something out of that machine, something dubious and to all appearances inedible.

Insert a coin and voila! Open sesame. Imagine if the treat came shooting down like a toboggan. It’s like a game, it makes me think of Coney Island, where’s the harm in it, Miss E.?

A woman holding the waist of another woman, both screeching with delight as they careen down the slick hill.

And where the wholesomeness?

You are severe, Prof. Dickinson.

I am suspicious, Mr. Cornell, of magic such as this, the mechanisms of which I could not claim to understand.

Then I should be equally suspicious of your bringing me peaches from the beyond—some Eden’s garden.

It was you who named and shaped the Blue Peninsula.

I shaped it of your memories. Your sentiments. And with the best of intentions. But I’d propose to you, Miss Emily, that sometimes the city’s wonders are as miraculous as nature’s.

I prefer the game you call “forgotten” in your studio: that dingy surface within which dovecotes reveal birds and the absences of birds. He who is gone conveys communication but leaves a hole whence he flew, and he who remains has yet to bear his missive and thus stands incomplete or unsuccessful. Why did that one make me want to cry, and still? Do you suppose those birds could send my words to Miss Barret Browning or Miss George Eliot or the Bronte sisters? Or Longfellow, Hawthorne, George Sand, or Shakespeare? Or for that matter Austin or Susie or Gilbert or Kate? And do so with dispatch?

Some things that stay there be—

Grief—Hills—Eternity—

Nor this behooveth me.

?/?/?

Dear Joseph,

We will always correspond, for I have given you my word on it. But writing, trusted friend, to continue our dialogue, is a dangerous occupation, and letter writing, be it effervescent, is fraught with peril in its implications—as one cannot guarantee, or dictate speed of, a reply, which, until received, brands the letter incomplete, pathetic, ludicrous; whereas poems—poems one would not expect to be read by others, except, of course, those few individuals selected by the poet to receive a poem, or in the case of poems included IN a letter and written for specific occasions. It would thus seem easier, safer, to express oneself via poem, into the generous void.

10/11

stayed up all night rehearsing the conversation with Miss Emily. strange to think that for her, all night would not be an available unit of time, and somehow this is my doing, that for her it is always bright, always day now, and she seems content in this, but who am I to have made these choices for another person?—although I am happy that she has, in another sense, “all night” available, since during our excursion no one called her in to bed, curtailed her revels.

Just as loneliness through its regularity becomes a form of company, writing—not this sort that we do in correspondence addressed to a particular individual, but writing for oneself—writing for one’s dresser drawer, you might say—precisely because it is to no one in particular, can also be a companion, a kind of appendage—something to attend to, not unlike a relative needing care, and in that sense comforting—always willing to receive one, to offer constancy, fidelity, almost like an actual place, a Blue Peninsula…

10/12

took the sacred Chocolate Menier wrapper and scribbled on the back of it six words: fear, longing, loss, writing, faith, family. how you do care for sweets! she said, turning it in her hands, and I understood this to indicate she was not willing to disclose her feelings on those precious subjects—would not acknowledge the request—not in that moment, at least.

… The same could be said of our pussy—who served often as my companion in the absence of others, who had gone out calling—purring or aloof as she’d choose, but ever available for stroking. These strokes of my pen on the page are not dissimilar in relationship; those who write should know how to recognize the purring of a page, don’t you think, Joseph? The strokes could hardly be said to calm the page, but do calm the hand and mind—for we keep pets to help and please ourselves as much as to give shelter to the creatures.

Sometimes beautiful textures—inanimate ones I mean—can also soothe, like the lovely velvet behind that shop window, there. I should explain that I was a fabric salesman, if a reluctant one, at a company my father worked for. He designed textiles.

Your father was a man of elegance and culture, mine more a… statesman… a trustee. In any case, I was not a girl to care overly much for fabrics—preferring the raiments of the natural world or the caparisons of thought—but once I had a brown frock with matching shawl—before I wed myself to white. How long ago was that?

No mere brown wren you.

Pardon me? Mr. Cornell, if you linger before every shop window we will never get to our next destination, wherever that may be. I depend upon you to lead the way.

Oh, do forgive me, it is a habit. I only started to say, think how hard for shy folk like ourselves to peddle anything door to door, particularly art or poetry! Imagine: down the street you’d go, armed with a poem per house:

“Excuse me, I felt a funeral in my brain.”

SLAM.

“How do you do? I heard a fly buzz when I died.”

“Some other time, Miss.”

“Good afternoon. I dreaded that first robin so.”

“We dread you’ll come again.”

AND SLAM, SLAM, SLAM, the whole town bolted shut!

You do amuse, but disconcert me just as much with words sucked from my brain—you have so many forms of magic, Joseph. It would be very trying, I agree. At a certain point I didn’t even like to answer the door of our mansion, let alone venture to the doors of others. Sometimes at night I did not care to be alone.

Vinnie, would you mind staying with me a little longer. Vinnie, are you sure the lamp is lit? It seems so dim inside. Do watch the boogers don’t get in. Why not move your bed in here, dear sister—dear, kind sister?

However, Poetry, in all seriousness, is something that should only be shared selectively—very selectively. Poetry, we might say, wants to surprise someone who volunteers to be surprised. An all-out ambush makes no converts.

Miss Emily, could you trust me enough to explain… what kept you inside?

There are so many people in peculiar attire and outlandish vehicles, and all unbearably chaotic—where are you taking me? What world is this now? Oh, excuse me, it is my nerves, you must forgive the outburst.

Father, if I may interrupt a moment, are you sure the doors are locked? The windows too? I know you are busy at your study, Father; do not trouble yourself until you have finished your speech for the morrow, but before retiring, I would be greatly obliged if you would assure me….

Why not remain inside, when all the society I required passed through the door of my father’s house—and I assure you it was highly intellectual society.

A woman laughing, hugging the waist of her partner, legs tucked up against her chest as a sled sweeps down the hill. A glancing kiss on the cheek, who knows which lips initiated—or was it the cold’s kiss?—as they spill into snow as one rolling body, giddy at the bottom, giggling uncontrollably, one resting her head on the other’s breast to catch her breath: “Winter is grand this year!”

I have a Bird in spring

Which for myself doth sing-

?/?/?

Dear Joseph,

As to fear, suffice it to say, that which I could not yet summon the courage to say, when we were together in Queens, to you who were both an intimate and a stranger, that all the whale oil in New England could not assuage your dear Miss Emily’s fears. I required more illumination than the sun and moon in tandem to reassure me. But now you have lit the lamps for me for all eternity.

I am sufficiently at ease to offer you this frankness precisely because there are no such fears appropriate here in the Blue Peninsula—no doors, one window only, nor a conventional one, no locks, everything gives onto the sky, the heavens. There is no darkness, because the sky is confined to a square perpetually and preternaturally blue, while inside—not the blinding white of a starched sheet turned horrid beast to charge a sensitive, frightened child, but a white of powdered sugar and spirit.

10/13

Saturday is a mystical day. Emily appeared on a Saturday.

That night I stalked my father’s house, afraid of who might enter: some booger who would more likely have regarded me the ghost!

A woman in white like a gust of wind whipping into a room filled with formally attired men and women holding dainty porcelain cups in their hands. The woman in white, despite her fleeting appearance, does not jostle the porcelain or spill the tea, seeming to evaporate as soon as she arrives. “Was that gust a ghost?” they ask the woman’s father, about to make his annual speech.

“That ghost, I’m afraid, was my daughter.”

?/?/?

Dear Joseph,

Let us always be as bold as you were on the day we met in eschewing small talk. I have thought much of family since our conversation, particularly that member named as fulcrum. It would seem axiomatic, my friend, that a father concerns himself with the wider world, and a son his immediate town, while a daughter her own back yard.

A father is one thing—a father must be about his business, to provide for his dependents, but a brother—ah, if only the passage from brother to father could be eternally suspended.

I suppose a brother with a handicap is in just such a state of suspension—he is a bonded brother, whose condition offers the beauty of never leaving, never growing apart or going away, not allowing perilous room for others to intervene. It is my private belief, Joseph, that any brother wrenched from home is neither happy nor healthy. Nor are his siblings happy. And how then can a brother leaven a family with his playful humor?

The Past is such a curious Creature

To look her in the Face

A brother with a handicap, I conclude, is spared the ailments that cannot help but assault him when he moves into the wider… crueler—at least more indifferent—world. How much simpler it would be to have one’s limbs mimic the flower’s stem—a means of attachment rather than of ambulation—just as a plant respects its roots: it would never think to journey elsewhere, unless a human hand transplanted it.

Perhaps the Lord’s gift to your family, Joseph, was your brother’s immobility—to spare him any such recklessness. How much simpler life becomes once one altogether abandons the notion of leaving one’s house.

I know what it is like to be in a wheelchair; after I fell down the stairs toward the end of life, from top to bottom, I had to be confined to one—a humbling experience. I walked later with a cane, not gold-tipped like father’s, either, not for show but function, and of course my mother was paralyzed those years, so I am not speaking through my hat.

When I fainted while baking a loaf cake, that too was strange; I did imagine I was dying. But through your genius I suspect I could have scooped the batter out, climbed in myself and made the pan my coffin! Being unacquainted with such marvels at the time, I relied upon my brother and sister to assist me in a more conventional manner.

A woman taking a paper on which she has written and folding it, inserting it in an envelope, then opening her bureau drawer and stuffing it in. But the drawer jams as she pushes it, over and over—all the other drawers of the dresser, desk, and vanity spring open like those of a cash register, releasing their contents; each time she shoves it forward another bursts open until the room is filled with papers, flying everywhere in the room, an interior Amherst blizzard.