Authors: Lia Purpura

Rough Likeness: Essays (20 page)

BOOK: Rough Likeness: Essays

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By midnight I feel I can’t breathe all that well. So I force myself to sleep. And who knows what I say then.

It’s the next day—though the experiment makes a kind of continual present. As does the ice, silvering, encasing. I’m wondering what my first word will be. Should I choose, then, to say LOVE, and set that in motion, to send my love a little telegram by way of my voice, by way of a clear stage from which he might feel it, many states and thousands of miles away? What’s the one word I will choose to mark and measure the end of my silence? Should I let it surprise me, that first chancy word by which I buy back my voice? I’m of two minds: draw around the event something like a veil, and stage and perform the word—or let it slip out, like a secret under pressure, tired of holding back a force. It might be something like “excuse me” after bumping someone in the tight aisles of the co-op, or “ah” or “um” as I gather my wits to answer a simple question. Or it will be a barely audible sigh, floating a vowel out, “O,” for which, now, still, this morning, my breath alone serves richly. In my head, I try on various collisions with Big Expectations.

The snow blowers are a deep bass distraction, and when they still for a moment, regaining their strength, the thick voices of men at work fill in the silence. The sound rises and falls as the machines are crashed into banks of hard snow and the snow draws up into chutes then explodes in an arc like water from an uncrimped garden hose, hose I liked to stand on and fuss with, quietly hidden around the side of the house as my grandmother watered her extravagant roses. In that way, by silencing the running water, I could make her speak: “What?” and “Huh?” and eventually “Hey, someone’s up to something.” In the garage, made for hiding, post-trickiness, would be the oil-soaked concrete, scent of lime, fertilizer and grass seed, rakes and hoes with worn wooden handles, beach pails and shovels, fringed canvas umbrella, inflatable seahorse, garden chairs whose scratchy weave marked thighs with red lines.

It’s a little past noon when I say it: “Hi.” And then “No” in response to my housemate’s offer of coffee. Two small, clear words. No rallying gems. No symbols or portents. Up in my room, I repeat the words to myself to feel the effect more privately: “Hi.” “No.” My nose and throat engage and some empty passages fill up with reverb. The words sound good. Younger and rested. More necessary. Relieved of something and freshened.

Coda

I found pearls. I found a diary. I found a black thong and blue condoms in a purse. I found five T-bones still wrapped and frozen. A set of house keys with an address tag nearly led to my first big crime. I found a packet of private stash pictures. I found a thesis red-slashed on each page. I found a cold jay with its heart still beating. I found a phone, an iPod, a joystick. I found tinned caviar perfectly chilled. I found a wallet stuffed with euros, a man’s shoe, a Swiss army knife, plane tickets to Prague. I found an old mercury thermometer unbroken, and it confirmed a balmy thirty-five degrees. My name appeared in the cobbles’ damp pockmarks. I plucked a single blade of grass, very fresh, very green, from a crack in the sidewalk: the first blade of the year, and
I
found it—amazing!

What loot! Such a cache and a trove!

Tell me then—are these better finds? Are they somehow more than coin/feather/lanyard
?
Wilder things confer on me—
what?
Lend the experiment undercurrent, scent of an unnamed district /arrondissement/ sector, and make the very stones underfoot remarkable? There’s a rhythm, I know, a
drive
to this list. This list, though, doesn’t it blast my quieter point about discovery—it’s ongoingness, the surprise of that? Doesn’t all this excitement override thoughts about beginnings and endings—that they’re wobbly and unfixed and slip past their boundaries? Is it
not enough
to know that a street with its stuff, its overlooked prizes, curves and bends, makes its way to my eye, my hands for one very rich season, then passes into the hands of others?

As for experiment #2, the words, the “Hi” and the “No”—how my housemate, a visiting philosopher from Italy, hoped for better ones. She wanted the experiment refined and improved. For me to have undertaken it on a sunny day, to have kept the silence rolling for a week. She wanted to see me negotiate harder. And of course the experiment could have been revved, but what happened that weekend moved by degrees. It was about small adjustments and deepening time. Silence in its most animate form. It included sensations, their span from icy, darkened moments to those blowing and flying, cracking and pelting—time and sensation slipping from worn, gray sky to frayed hose, the gray weave below the green casing revealed, the precise pressure I had to apply, all my weight on one foot making sure the hose crossed the concrete path, so I might properly clamp off the water, stop the brown, threaded o-mouth from gushing—or spraying, if my grandmother was using the nozzle to mist her roses somewhere in the long, hot core of summer.

Surely there is a calibration for all this. Surely such moments are worth noting, small as they are, moving forth and retracing, mildly roving. Surely nothing more amped—stop the noise, kill the hype—need happen to make one certain of existing. Existing precisely, existing acutely—as, say, after a fast when eating commences, the tongue rides slowly the slick curve of a green olive, singular morsel, whose skin resists just a little, then gives, and there comes a burst of briny, sharp pleasure. Then the paring away of brisk scraps from rough pit. Rolling the pit. Holding it, shifting—all those tender and ordered attentions.

Then comes a cool sip.

Ice against teeth. Sweat on the glass.

A breath. Conversation.

Abundance dosed out so as not to confound with its rush of riches.

NOTES

The Lustres
: Works quoted include
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
(Jim Felstiner);
Specimen Days
(Walt Whitman); “The Prelude” (William Wordsworth);
A Scrap of Time
(Ida Fink); “A Sketch of the Past” (Virginia Woolf).

“Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblence” (Theme & Variations)
: The title quotes from Wallace Stevens’ essay “Three Academic Pieces.” Other works quoted include:
The Aeneid
(tr. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey); “Canto 81” (Ezra Pound); “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (Wallace Stevens).

Against “Gunmetal”
: I thank Jim Holmes, master gunsmith, for his guidance on firearms.

Street Scene
: “petals on a wet, black bough . . .” is from “In a Station of the Metro” (Ezra Pound).

Being of Two Minds
: Quoted material is from “On Transience” (Sigmund Freud), and
Middlemarch
(George Eliot).

There Are Things Awry Here
: Quoted material is from
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(Thomas Hardy).

Advice
: quoted material is from
Heraclitus: Fragments
(tr. Brooks Haxton).

Shit’s Beautiful
: The line “Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen—a force that both chastened and exalted her” is from the essay “When Madness Is in the Wings” by Michelle Nicole Lee, orginally appearing in
The New York Times.

LIA PURPURA is the author of six collections of essays, poems, and translations.
On Looking
(essays) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other awards include National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, work in
Best American Essays,
the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction, and The Ohio State University Press and The Beatrice Hawley Award in poetry. Recent work has appeared in
Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker,
and
The Paris Review.
She is Writer in Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

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“Merely”: I think this means to gently show, say, me, that knots have actual origins, are phenomena of growth and not primarily lyrical owls, dragons, volcanoes hiding in paneling, shifting and motile in those moments before sleep. It also reveals (see #2) the utility value of knowing one’s materials.

Here’s one of those things a person would learn very early on; you don’t just set up a log and—bam—split it.

“This just isn’t working” must have come forth, maybe wordlessly, as when one has been laboring for a very long time, and suddenly a shift in consciousness occurs and clears the way for a new approach.

Here he must have noted resistance, paused, raised, swung again, and again, until ash in all its peculiarities was known.

“This thing is so freaking hard”—but wordlessly again. Or
Shit, this son of a bitch piece....
Here, once, occurred the moment of stopping, wiping a brow and looking closely at what was causing the trouble, as I might look behind me after tripping on an uneven sidewalk to see what occasioned the stumble.

Moment of choosing to stay with, to see when, to see if. . . .

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Purpura, Lia.

Rough likeness : essays / Lia Purpura.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-936-74734-4

I. Title.

PS3566.U67R68 2011
814’.54—dc22

2011007028

Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.