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Authors: Lia Purpura

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But you can stand before it nonetheless, whatever is still partial or resistant herein. You can stand before it and read, such a sign (memento mori-like, as in “there is much work to do, Lia, keep at it”) as I could come up with, here, Baltimore, MD, June 21, 2007, and I’d not be completely ashamed.
Gray
 
Here’s the cathedral, its gray stone, the gray sky, and all the gray, after-rain mottled streets. And the sky is not a cathedral bell, but
also
gray, gray
alongside
, and the icy puddles are not mirrors of sky, though sky resides in bounded ways there. It is not a cathedral tune, this tone, but the way gray wind and stone cloud together. These grays make up the
right now
I am in, as does the sharp uncertainty of what to do with two suddenly free hours and nowhere to be.
All the likenesses gathering, all the things partaking each of the other, being as one, the many-in-all:
no
. Here, beside my uncertainty (where to go, what to do), gray underwing, stone, ice, median grass—just stay, each unto yourself. As you’re inclined: hover or seep. Crack, harrow, or blow.
I can tell you, in my uncertainty, I won’t be listening to wind in gray branches, and conjuring far off ocean waves. I won’t be revising “here’s the gray weight of a cold afternoon” to “an afternoon, cold with the weight of gray noon. . . .” I want no gray, arterial side street contracting with old, fraught scenes, and no, no one’s absence reconstituted by cold. No snow-sky hardening its stare. No “grayly they pitched their way forward in cold”

how it must have been in pioneer times, gray woolens, gray blankets and buffalo skins, the dimming gray sky a relief from the glare, though it meant, of course, more snow coming; I do not mean to synchronize their gray anticipation with my gray anticipation.
In this singular moment, I’ll have no church bells chased to birdcall. No gravely beautiful sidewalk, ice-cracked, with its palette of grays upriding like little headstones. No minor-key wind-hum. No cloud-spire combo of grays rising up. No parable-like breadth to all this, containing, extending, enlarging by grays.
Just:
now
.
All the gray things like only themselves.
It’s February in Baltimore, on Mount Royal Avenue. I’ve just dropped my son at his Saturday art class. It’s almost snowing. Each gray thing in its time, in its place, stands just as it is.
Here’s the cathedral.
And here I am, outside, giving thanks.
I’m starting by noting every gray thing.
And by
thanks
I mean
I admit I know not what to do, where to go, with all I’ve been given.
Advice
 
Dear,
Why do some men wear such tight pants, and why are they getting tighter these days?
 
My Friend,
Men wear tight pants because their legs—thighs, calves, ankles—have been long overlooked. Note the poor ankle, stripped bare by socks rubbing. Today’s trends, or being in a band serve up an excuse for tight jeans, black, or dark blue, so men might show off a thigh’s curve. But more than this, men who would slip into the body of a woman let their pants suggest this, whisper it, the stiff fabric hauled up over hips, which, too, have gone unremarked, slim hips, slight as a girl’s. Such a man minds not at all the mocking of his father, wants no handy loop for the hammer, doesn’t care to be handy (for this is about legs and not hands), his jeans so tight his friends laugh and say
nice junk, package, stash, man.
So when he sits, there’s a fold, a pressure, slight ache at the crease to remind him.
Walking at dusk, the shadow he is passes over benches and curbs, narrows, resembles that of a woman, and again it’s that time, years ago now, when he turned sideways and was called by a girl’s name, was mistaken for her and he played along—so well, in fact, that it felt not at all like a mistake. He stages now, for himself, double takes late mornings in gardens, slant against buildings at the end of the day. He returns her, there she is, so he’s not so alone, she comes back, the steep dark of another, and
he
, scissory, loose-hinged, at home in the ease and expanse of his body, is
she
. No wind billows his cuffs (no cuffs at all, rolled or bunched, fraying, workerish,
these
jeans are skinny as pencils). What is she whispering, so close to him now as he rests on a stoop, bends his knees, makes a lap, brief ambient space for a dog, for a child... ? My Friend, they wear their pants tight so as to feel
she’s here again
. To quietly, secretly, call her back in.
Dear,
How can I roll around more in nuance and say the fineness of what comes to me, hovering, wordless, what we know to call
thinking
? So often the edges of thought get sheared, tints hardily brightened, rambles clear-cut. The time I need to meander gets claimed, touched, obligated. Then it’s tainted. And I’m left with bald statements and gist.
 
My Friend,
I have a story I want to tell you.
And here, I almost said, “When I learned to shoot . . .” in order to talk about nuance, that fragile state you describe. It was something about holding the stock tight to my shoulder, the surprise taste of oil when I snuck a lick off the barrel—but in bringing the moment into the light, to you, to our readers, a formalness came. I mean, it took form, found a shape much too quickly. “When I learned to shoot . . .” seemed, for a moment, orderly and right as an introduction. But I’ve shot a gun only twice. The first time, into a blue sky at clay pigeons and my aim was very badly off, and the second on a farm in Poland at cans on a fence, where I hit every one. That was great, but to say “when I learned to shoot” suggests I’ve kept up—and I haven’t.
I have to reorient now, slow down and figure out how to link up your question (I know you struggled to put it together) with my thought—hardly formed, full of promise—about shooting, the taste of gun oil, scrollwork on the stock I ran my nail over, crescent of dirt I scraped from the barrel, sun in the scope, calm of the scope’s much-narrowed world, the space there contained, the order and peace unbidden and also unnerving. I’ll have to get back to that scattery inkling, or try to shape it anew, either way, overturn that force driving toward statement, toward fixing a point, the point overtaking and bent on sealing up thought . . . and well, yes, that takes
time
. I see what you mean—about the circling and hovering, and how hard it is to get the world to allow it. How difficult to clear space for a ramble. To love time. To get time to love you.
I’ll try again. A different route now.
Leaving Chicago a few weeks ago, I saw from the window of the plane, a wall in Lake Michigan. It was parallel to the shore, I couldn’t tell how far out—a knuckle’s length from so far up, as I closed one eye and measured. It looked like an Etch A Sketch line, stylus-drawn through a silver emulsion. A boat was motoring from shore toward the wall, leaving behind a white wave that dissolved. It was hard to judge speed, but it seemed the boat wanted to sidle up very close, wanted to fold itself into the concrete. As in the airport just this morning, the woman with the prosthetic leg (leg and hip, judging by stiffness) whose skirt was worn through with three little holes where the contraption rubbed, returned to me that sensation of awkward rotation-and-pivot. In the year I wore a body cast, I, too, rubbed holes in the backs of shirts where I leaned against walls and lockers and cars. Small, precise holes where my cast was rough. Seeing that woman, I knew again (anyone might, this isn’t clarivoy-ance) what it was like to be kept far from the bodies of others. “
Those little holes.”
I said it only to myself. I didn’t speak the words aloud (nuance needs space to hover and
roll around
as you note) because how would that sound to her:
I know about the holes. Those are my holes
. So close were the holes all these years! Who knew I’d enter them again, that I’d kept them for just this moment so I might seal up the distance between my body and hers.
My Friend, such moments
do
survive. Give them air. Let them play unsupervised in the field of the body. Keep the tasks of the day aside for as long as you can. Feed silence. Invite time. Resist gist.
Dear,
The other day I wanted to give my body away. Why? I’m not, as they used to say, a “loose woman.”
 
My Friend,
Wasn’t it you, who wrote a short time ago saying you felt not at all in possession of your body? But that it wasn’t death, either, you meant, nor was it another form of detachment or dissociation. And when you were sitting beside a man whose grand loss was known to all, that worst of all losses, a whole family gone instantly, tragically taken . . . wasn’t it then that your own surface slid? And you found no reason to dig into why, or interpret, pathologize, justify. You just wanted to give. I read in the paper the other day (yes, this very same paper that runs this column) a strange, then very right-seeming thing. These people who’d been volunteering at a local soup kitchen for seventeen years said, “We almost don’t know why we come here, we’ve been coming here so long. . . .” They call the hungry men “Sir” and the women “Ma’am.” They serve up big portions, set places, clear tables, and scrub out the pots. They are not full of pity. Or no longer are. It’s just easy, habitual giving and doing.
Wouldn’t you want it be, to him, a relief? Wasn’t it that your body, just then, needed not one single thing? Only to give, to offer itself. After much generosity of the daily kind (small things matter, too: take in mail for the neighbors, water plants, listen well), your body meant to extend itself
further
. Into. Another. Be
for
another. This is, after all, an advice column. Who writes and asks who hasn’t lost something, or isn’t afraid of losses to come, or is presently losing and lacks the will to believe it?
Once I sat next to a man on a train whose back didn’t work well—it must have been fused, it stayed rigid as he rose from his seat—and he looked to be in great pain. He held his side with one hand and his head with the other; he rested his head against the train window to redistribute the weight and the pressure, but his breath was still fitful. He stretched a little, as much as he could, then angled stiffly back into his seat where he sighed very deeply. And of that relief, I knew this: it’s momentary. All that positioning for a moment of respite.
A dose of respite so the wincing would stop, so the loss would cease, is what
you’d
be, right, for the man you just wrote of? A place to lean into and breathe—your hair, if it’s long, or your neck with its oceany warmth, scent of grass because we’re all going (
really going
, or wanting to go sooner because of the pain), that bit of relief, so pain in its constancy might be put off, it’s edges worn softer—you’d
be
that. You’d get to be part of the moment, the site at which even a brief ease asserted.
Yes, Friend, it’s criminal to hold back, stay apart, when one might give and give and give. But we’ve set this up for the greater good. For the worth of other intactnesses, for the sake of family and order, and country, the body is barred from some forms of giving. For all the body learns to bar,
Amen,
we learn to say.
So your useless, beautiful body behaves. You stay still—as anyone might—in the shivery, mutinous light of loss. Light in gimcracks through fall’s granite clouds. Light sliding along the bent ribs of pumpkins. Loss translucing the sugar from maples, the tender backlit leaves aflare. Light rashing us all, slow, fretted and grand. Friend, it’s hard to imagine the body in pain when it isn’t. Or when you’re sweating on a subway in August, hard to conjure the distant and soundless cold mornings of winter.
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