On Looking: Essays (14 page)

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Authors: Lia Purpura

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Poor sorting: I like that: that it all gets dropped, the big stuff enmeshed with the grainy soft stuff. The indiscriminate mess. That it forms a long train, so that seeing it all, one can trail events back. Guess at them. View time. And by way of the whole scattered and shifting pattern, by the gathering eye, make something of these loose details, collecting.
 
 
Deposition on Thaw
I will note, though its impetus was warmth, the sharpness of the thaw. During the thaw we were given to see the way snow melted into vertebrae, whole bodies of bone inclined toward one another. Bones stacked and bent in the attitude of prayer, the edges honed and precarious. Forms arced over the sewer grates and curbs as the gutter streamed with bubbly melt. What remained were not yet remains. It was clear how the warmth would eat everything down, but where some parts were colder than the rest, that core kept the figure upright. The shapes were knife-edged, hunched, easing a pain; they grayed and were everywhere pocked with dirt, and unlikely in their strength.
A few days later, just sheering, frayed patches covered the ground, and the elbows of everything poked through. White remained where the ground must have been colder, or wind blew and packed the snow hard.
How to read a land?
There were thicknesses, white places layered in smears that others were trained to read.
Densities
amid the rivulets of veins.
Occlusions. Artifacts.
I remember, about the X-ray, thinking
Artifacts? That sounds harmless.
Evidence of some action passed—little shard, small bit taken out of my body and sent off for further study. Vase, mirror, tile. Lip of a cup. A thing that remained to be found and told. An image that sings about time.
 
 
Deposition on the Shapes of Tasks
Waiting all that long week—for test results, the snow to stop, dough to rise, nightfall—small tasks turned into days. Days unfolded into tasks. The inside-out arms of clothes pulled right, made whole and unwrinkled, took lovely hours. Tasks filled like balloons and rounded with breath; they floated and bumped around the day: some popcorn, some dishes, some mending. And though dressing for sledding, undressing, and draping everything wet over radiators was deliberate, a stitch ran through, jagged and taut, cinching the gestures tight with uncertainty. Everything coming down—snow, sleet, threat, delicacy—twined through like a rivulet, that cut water makes in its persistence, its pressure carving, so the bank grows a dangerous, fragile lip. The work of glaciers changes a landscape: old stream valleys are gouged and deepened, filled with till and outwash.
Filled
, of course, over millions of years. In sand-grain, fist-sized increments.
This kind of time illuminated tasks one would hardly be given to see otherwise. Titled them, even: the scraping of old wax from candlesticks; the tightening of loosened doorknobs. Oil-soaping the piano keys.
 
 
Deposition on Fevers and Still Lifes
That week time was ample, broad as a boulevard, a stroll, a meander. Not a tour. Not a map or a path to be found. School was canceled. Scents fully unfolded—coffee, chocolate, and milk marbling together on the stove, thinnest skin across to touch and lift and eat. And like a concentrate of heat itself, my bounded sight burned holes in the things most fixed upon: the ceiling’s old butterfly water stain. One rough, gritty chip in the rim of a favorite cup.
It was in this way that joy and severity flared everywhere: along the banks of steep places I went to quickly, glanced, then ran from. They burned together in cornmeal in a pour, the yellow dust that rose and stuck to my hands as I folded in the unbeaten eggs, cold suns to poke and dim with flour—as outside, too, the cold sun dimmed, and the sky sifted and shushed down.
Yes, that week passed with a fever’s disheveled clarity. That time, its atmosphere, moved the way fevers by turn dilute and intensify moments, so by evening one cannot reconstitute the day and calls it “lost,” calls it “flown,” says after a night’s sleep “what happened to the day?” Things that week were touched in sweaty uncertainty and weakly released. There were intimacies akin to falling back to a pillow after water, soup, and tea were brought, gratitude unspoken; the night table’s terrain, the book, the book’s binding, glue at the binding and the word for each sewn section,
folio
, surfacing from far off. The sheet’s silk piping to slip a finger idly under for coolness.
In its riotous stillness, that week was a study—Dutch, seventeenth century, with its controlled and ordered high flare and shine. Days held the light and feverish presence of a bowl of lemons in pocked disarray. Always one lemon pared in a spiral of undress, its inner skin gone a flushed, sweet-cream rose. Always the starry, cut sections browning and the darkness, just beyond the laden table, held almost successfully off. I, with my props—mixing bowl, dough—tilted toward, soaked in late afternoon light, while time raged all around in shadow, the dark stroking cup, quartered fig, plate of brilliant silver sardines left on the counter from lunch.
 
 
Deposition on Millennia/Effluvia
To say “a glacier formed this land” sanctifies the blink of an eye.
To see, from the air, glacial streams and think
like a snake
or
ribboning,
and of the land on either side
accordion
or
fan
colludes against awe. Neatens up the work of time. Makes of time a graven thing, hand-sculpted, carved, and held. Time should seize, should haul us back, then let go, wind-sheared into
now
, breathlessly into the moment’s hard strata. Each morning in Rome, my old friend runs in a park along the aqueduct, which breaks and restarts in yellowed fields, its arches sprouting wild grasses, its arches collapsing, the houses, apartments, roads of his neighborhood visible through it—as houses and roads have been for nearly 2,000 years. You can sit on rocks in Central Park, soft outcrops undulant as sleeping bodies, formed tens of thousands of years ago and look up at the city skyline knowing the North American ice sheet flowed exactly that far south. Or hold in your hand a striated stone from Mauritania, abraded at the base of a glacier 650 million years ago, and touch the markings, those simple scratches so easily picked up and put down again on the touch-me table at the museum. Kick any stone beneath your foot, here, in Baltimore, and you’re scuffing easily 300 million years of work.
I cast back for any one thing I did on any one day that week: how unencumbered the brushing of my hair, the perfect scrolls of carrot peel I lowered like a proclamation into the hamsters’ cage; careless grace of understatement, luxury of simple gesture after gesture (fork to mouth, mouth to glass, fork and glass rinsed in the sink and—linger here, see the heat pulling fog up the glass, atilt and cooling in the drainboard). I’m calling up the tongue-and-groove gestures, the hook-and-eye moments of the day, so they might again spend themselves freely, mark the layers of events en route, classify the waiting. Cajoled from somewhere back in the morning, the peeling of that tangerine (cut thumb plunged into the yielding core, stinging and wet and red) comes forth.
I am recalling such occasions for attention offered in a day I was free to ignore. And now, am not free at all (for this
is
a deposition): cutting burnt crust away; snagging a sock on a rough stair plank; digging a sliver of dirt from a nail under running water. I am tied to the sight of the world, to things burnished and scoured by use, and by their diminution loved—as I so loved and saved my grandmother’s wooden cooking spoon, older than me, smooth as driftwood, when to relieve her boredom, her aide used it to plant and prop a geranium on the balcony. The spoon has folded into its profile, has tucked within it, englaciated, the rim of the aluminum roasting pan (why that of all the nicked saucepans and ceramic bowls of creamy batters tapped and tapped and tapped against?). I took and washed (as my grandmother no longer can wash) its singed rack burns, its smooth neck, thinned from lifting huge roasts by their taut white lacings.
One idly picks up pine cones, rocks, shells to mark a moment, to commemorate time. One picks them up because they shine out from their mud, or water lapping brightens their veins and shorn faces, or there they are, wedged inexplicably whole in a jetty and a spiral tip beckons, though the center be partial and broken.
 
 
Deposition on Watches
That week my watch broke, so I borrowed my son’s digital Monsters, Inc. watch. But I missed the clean, white face of my old one, and its circular sweep. The digital time dosed its minutes, shifted its numbers too economically one into the next, the angular 2 and angular 5 simple mirror images, a single bar across the middle making the 0 an 8. Then, as the days without school-time unwound and were lashed together instead by flares of fear, spots of love, solemn noon bell at the cathedral, all the morning’s held breath, all the whites piling, like suds, their calm expanse up, it was easy to wear no watch at all. But I have not become a person divested of watches. I miss the circle’s perpetuity, dawn and dusk sharing the same space, if only for minutes. The hour pinning itself to the changing light of seasons.
The watch I want now—I saw a picture of it yesterday—posits a looker at the center, who, to properly see the numbers, would have to turn and face each one: already by 2 the numbers start to tilt, so that the 6 is a 9, if you’re outside looking in. But a 6 if you’re in the middle. I like to think of standing in the center, arms reaching out and brushing all the minutes and hours.
I like the idea of turning to face the hour, having the hours arrayed around me. From a still point, having to face the increments of a day.
 
 
Deposition on Failure
Last May, I remember, on this very sidewalk: a fly’s soap-bubble, gasoline colors; taut grimace on the face of a baby bird, that hatched and unliving, ancient, pimpled bud on the grass; corms of daylilies, and “corm” itself that most perfect union of “corn” and “worm,” meaning exactly the thick, stubborn grub I hacked to separate. I remember the ripe, raw, shivery scents.
But during this thaw, come on so fast now—just for a day, just for caprice, it was sixty degrees.
And when I went out walking the sun was so soft—an assertion, bravura. Where warmth thawed the planes of bone like a high bank, my face was a running stream again. I took off my mittens and left them in the crook of a tree; it always takes a few days to believe the warmth.
The snow receded, the warmth returned, and I was fine. I was negative.
Negative, negative,
I was thinking, buoyant. The hard winter lifted all at once, the sun came, dewy and beading, the air was sweet and I was fine—oh burgeoning cliché I entertained, cannot believe I entertained: spring bearing its blood-tide and life all abloom, all’s well ending well in a spate, a thrall of undulant weather, etc. Rising, on cue, such music as dripping icicles conduct, such shine and promise, oh window of light on the nibbled Red Delicious little Sam just dropped. And the neighbors’ voices carrying, the out-of-doors voices lofting, reconfiguring again the space between our houses: it was New World Symphony, English horn-solo-fresh. I was a turning season, a spit of land at low tide, a window thrown open. Would you believe it if I told you (told
unto
you, lo! for real) I saw a butterfly—and it was corn-yellow? I resisted the easy convergence—
spring, warmth, I’m fine
—not a bit, and I knew that to be an indulgence, a failure, partial sight. As if I had come to the brightness of that day wholly—wholly—from dark.
But I cannot forget—for this is a deposition—that all that dark week there was this, too: the diamond-blue light at each drift’s core. My husband’s abundant embrace. Sanctum of my child under quilts. In candlelight, sewing the ghost. Folding a swan. With books, in the folds of a story. Our son, himself, that most beloved unfolding.
And the color of the sky: workshirt-turned-inside-out, and the gray of our house against it, a darker inner seam, revealed. Our house an object light chose for lavishing, a river stone eddied into calm. The tender crack in a baking loaf, its creamy rift rough at the edges and going gold. Of all the names for snow considered, of all the shifts in tone it made, I found clamshell, bone, and pearl. That week I found lead in the white, mouse in it, and refracted granite. Talc with pepper. Layers of dried mud, zinc, and iron. Blown milkweed and ashy cinder. Silvered cornfield. Uncooked biscuit. Mummy, oatmeal, sand, and linen. Some morning glory. Some roadside aster.
Spires
 
I
keep thinking of spires. How they must have appealed. That she might have wished for one to press her cheek to. I keep seeing rooftops, slate sharply pitched, as gray as high clouds, as a gathering storm. Smokestacks, the university’s turrets, tram lines spoking out from the center of Warsaw, north toward the apartment we shared, ten years ago now. I keep seeing the city from air.
Ten years ago this All Souls’ Day we took the train out to spend the afternoon with her family. It got dark very early. At the cemetery in Skierniewice, the candles, graveside, sent up a glow, a warm light without edges. There were so many people to push our way through. So much going on. The mums at each plot and the tidying up. The villagers with rakes and trowels and bags. Silk flowers, carnations, evergreen boughs. The newly-turned graves, their dark soil, wet. The picnics on graves, the deceased as host. Sitting down with the family, and the vodka brought out. Meat wrapped in paper and hunks of hard cheese. Pickles in jars. The blackberry jam. The plum wine and fruit brandies. Orange rinds in thick syrup. Sour tomatoes. Hardboiled eggs. The cabbage in spices, vinegar, salt. This return every year to keep company, faith. To keep solace going.

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