Wild Gratitude (7 page)

Soon we will give our speechless bodies

Back to the garden at night, like the scores

Of old songs we can no longer quite remember,

Or the embroidered shirts we outgrew as children.

Once, their colorful new skins clung tightly

To our skins, molding to our elastic human

Shapes, but now they hang limply in thrift shops

Next to coverless issues of
Newsweek
and
Time

And sullen piano music that no longer wants

To remember the slow torture of being played

On endless rainy afternoons in mid-October.

Sometimes I think that inside one of those faded

Musical sheets I am still practicing scales,

Still trying to avoid the musty gray smell

Of an interminable Sunday at home (and sometimes

I think the dullest afternoons of adulthood are

A memory of childhood relived in a tedium of autumn).

I used to press my forehead against the window

And imagine the sun moving behind the buildings

Like an exhausted old woman tramping home

Through a field after a long day in the city

With her hands buried deep in the pockets

Of a flowering red dress. I liked to pretend

That she would leave a smoky lantern flaming

In the elms for luck while she hummed a lullaby

To herself, a song from some other world,

The secret of light. I’d strain to listen,

But all I could hear was the voicelessness

Of the wind blowing its emptiness across the sad

Rooftops, leafing through the empty pages of trees.

All I could see was my own childish, blue boredom.

I am thirty-five now, but sometimes when I look out

At the garden at dusk, I can still feel myself

Becoming that child again, reliving that boredom,

And suddenly I am afraid only that the garden is

Changing even as we are changing, even as the sun

Goes back to being a sun toiling behind purple bars

On the horizon, and our bodies start to wear out

Like our favorite suits and hats. It’s the way

That even the fat crabapple tree swelling up

By the fence will someday retire from giving fruit

To every poor scavenger that comes along, every

Obese squirrel and thin starling, every lost crow.

Soon the sour green tree will quit storing up

Food for the moles—soon, but not yet.

Because look how the garden survives the dusk,

How quietly it waits for us, how lovingly

It welcomes us back. Maybe it already knows

That we always return to its soil like husbands

Who never quite leave their faithless wives,

Or sons who grow into their own fathers.

So, too, we will touch our bodies to the soil

And know the ground by its damp and bitter taste.

But until then, I will stand by the window at dusk

Remembering the sullen blue notes of a forgotten

Childhood, the tedious hours practicing, the rainy

Afternoons that seem eternal in an adult’s memory.

I will remember a slow dream of leaving the house

And then walk through the garden on cool nights

Listening for a single redbreasted cardinal

That sometimes returns to our dark elms. I

Like to think it is a little explosion of dye

Erupting in secret in its own time, a minor

Echo of the sun toiling on the bruised horizon.

I like to believe it is a smoky red lantern

That an old woman leaves in the branches

To fend off the darkness while she sleeps,

To keep a red flame burning through the night.

Some nights when you’re asleep

Deep under the covers, far away,

Slowly curling yourself back

Into a childhood no one

Living will ever remember

Now that your parents touch hands

Under the ground

As they always did upstairs

In the master bedroom, only more

Distant now, deaf to the nightmares,

The small cries that no longer

Startle you awake but still

Terrify me so that

I do get up, some nights, restless

And anxious to walk through

The first trembling blue light

Of dawn in a calm snowfall.

It’s soothing to see the houses

Asleep in their own large bodies,

The dreamless fences, the courtyards

Unscarred by human footprints,

The huge clock folding its hands

In the forehead of the skyscraper

Looming downtown. In the park

The benches are layered in

White, the statue out of history

Is an outline of blue snow. Cars,

Too, are rimmed and motionless

Under a thin blanket smoothed down

By the smooth maternal palm

Of the wind. So thanks to the

Blue morning, to the blue spirit

Of winter, to the soothing blue gift

Of powdered snow! And soon

A few scattered lights come on

In the houses, a motor coughs

And starts up in the distance, smoke

Raises its arms over the chimneys.

Soon the trees suck in the darkness

And breathe out the light

While black drapes open in silence.

And as I turn home where

I know you are already awake,

Wandering slowly through the house

Searching for me, I can suddenly

Hear my own footsteps crunching

The simple astonishing news

That we are here,

Yes, we are still here.