Open Shutters (6 page)

                         “Imagine,” he went on,

“your mother says just one thing in your life,

and what she says is,
It’s beautiful.
You see?

But there was more. This morning I understood

how lucky I was. First I saw my mother move,

half a century after it couldn’t happen.

And then my daughter. I got to see her move—

the child you know I feared I’d never have

because I married late—and in a way

I saw her outside her lifespan, like my mother.

And all within the space of twenty-four hours.

On two TV screens! Nothing more banal.

I’d looked in my past and future crystal ball.”

Our soup had come. Meanwhile, unwatched, the screen-

saver of the laptop I’d left on

at home was open, a window onto icons

of windows flying forward endlessly

like long-dead stars still seeking by their light

and at the speed of light a match in words.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Is it too neat

to write about? Would anyone believe it?”

“Probably not,” I said, dipping a spoon

into the cosmos of my egg-drop soup,

and inhaling, as I leaned down, the aroma

of the moment’s vapor. “Still. It’s beautiful.”

Evening, four weeks later.

The next jet from the nearby Air Force base

repeats its shuddering exercise

closer and closer overhead.

A full moon lifts again in the fragile sky,

with every minute taking on

more light from the grounded sun, until

it’s bright enough to read the reported

facts of this morning’s paper by—

finally, a moon that glows

so brilliantly it might persuade us

that out there
somebody knows.

A comfort once—the omniscience

of Mother, Father, TV, moon.

Later, in the long afternoon

of adolescence, I lay on the grass

and philosophized with a friend:

would we choose to learn our death date

(some eighty years from now, of course)?

Did it exist yet? And if so,

did we believe in fate?

(What
we
thought: to the growing

narcissist, that was the thing to know.)

Above our heads, the clouds kept drifting,

uncountable, unrecountable,

like a dreamer’s game of chess

in which, it seemed, one hand alone

moved all the pieces, all of them white,

and in the hand they changed

liquidly and at once into

shapes we almost—no,

we couldn’t name.

But if there were one force

greater than we, had I ever really

doubted that he or she

or it would be literate?

Would see into the world’s own heart?

To know all is to forgive all—

(now, where had I read that?).

Evil would be the opposite, yes?—

scattershot and obtuse:

what hates you, what you hate

hidden in cockpits, caves, motel rooms;

too many of them to love

or, anyway, too late.

By now I’ve raided thousands

of stories in the paper for

thinkable categories:

unlettered schoolboys with one Book

learned by heresy and hearsay;

girls never sent to school;

men’s eyes fixed on the cause;

living women draped in shrouds,

eyes behind prison-grilles of gauze.

Mine, behind reading glasses

(updated yearly, to lend no greater

clarity than the illusion

that one can stay in place),

look up and guess what the moon

means by its blurred expression.

Something to do with grief

that grief now seems old-fashioned—

a gesture that the past

gave the past for being lost—

and that the future is newly lost

to an unfocused dread

of what may never happen

and nobody can stop.

Not tired yet, wound-up, almost

too glad to be alive—as if

this too were dangerous—

I imagine the synchronized operations

across the neighborhood:

putting the children to bed;

laying out clean clothes;

checking that the clock radio

is set for six o’clock tomorrow,

to alarm ourselves with news.

I saw your father make a book,

instinctively, from upturned palms;

    as prayers began

in a language I don’t understand,

I saw he didn’t need to look.

Your brother, sisters, others read

from lines in their own empty hands

    that you were dead,

or so it seemed to one who had

nothing by heart yet but the snow.

For days now, I’ve kept seeing how

the volume of your coffin sank

    into the sole

dark place in all that whiteness—like

your newest book of poems, blank

to you in your last weeks because

a tumor in your brain had blurred

    more than your eyes;

prompting your memory, a friend

had helped you tape it word by word.

After, at your brother’s house,

I asked your father: “What does it mean

    when you pray with open

hands? Are they a kind of Koran?”

He smiled, and said I was mistaken:

he’d cupped hands to receive God’s blessings.

Nothing about the Book at all;

    but since I’d asked,

here was the finest English version

(plucked up from the coffee table—

tattered cover, thick but small

as a deck of cards), translated by

    an unbeliever,

a scholar who’d found consolation

in it when he lost his son.

That was the closest the old man

would come to telling me how he feels.

    I think of him

when in my head a tape unreels

again your coffin’s agonized

slow-motion lowering upon

four straps, incongruously green;

    and then that snap—

like Allah’s blessings falling through

fingers that wished to keep you.