And the World Stays

Abstract

And the World Stays Patricia Hooper (bio) Auguries Disturbances of air, those flocking birds that leaf the sugar maple in the yard in late October after the leaves have fallen. On the porch today I thought, abstracted, summer, but then they lifted, almost all at once, leaving the maple bare. Later a crow, hectoring what may have been an owl in the branches of the pines. Two months ago, when my daughter called, an intermittent static kept breaking up her voice . . . an accident . . . air-lifted . . . spinal cord . . . paralysis . . . her seven-year-old who couldn’t feel his legs. It was an August evening, clear and warm, and through the open window I could hear a wood thrush, warbling . . . It must have been terror that made me fasten on the least bright harbingers of hope: small singing birds, a summer evening’s calm. But as I drove to the airport, on the highway, there they were, a flock of crows descending on the limping jay along the shoulder, closing in before they touched the ground. And for a moment I saw them from below, as the jay saw them, blocking the sun, a blackness at the center, wings sucking the light out of the air. [End Page 28] Prognosis Some things the mind cannot take in entirely, as if to spare itself or let the sense seep in over a month, a year. Reason absorbs one drop, and then the next of what might be a flood too great to bear. A dam could break. Some things the mind keeps from itself. Unknowingly, it knows what it can take. [End Page 29] Sketchbook & Journal Dan’s freezer: birds found dead along the trail in snow ruts, autumn’s crevices, the wren almost mistaken for a leaf, the sparrow, one red-winged blackbird lifted from a whorl of bracken, double-bagged and ziplocked, kept for sketching when the time comes: winter Sundays or summer evenings on the deck. The feeders arranged on wires overhead, above asparagus or beans and Donna’s flowers. He isn’t looking for them, but they’re sometimes there— the fledgling caught in sleet, a finch who crashed into the picture window, once a redstart the cat brought home—things passing, hard to catch in motion, dizzying till the heart has stopped. He feeds the living, gathers up the dead because how else to learn auriculars, eye-rings, and supercilium? How else to come so close to seeing what they are? Dan’s essays, also: sightings, swift details that can’t be seen in flight—wild, secretive— a voice, a look, a gesture half-perceived, the owl’s call, a quarrel with the garden, a dying father’s words . . . How to connect these scenes until they’re stilled, stalled in the heart? They ripple from the pen and fill the page— cold passerine, cold teal . . . cold light by which we see the vanished life for what it was and greet it mornings in the present world: blue sky, gold fields, blackberries, Donna’s flowers, sun rising in the pines, and on the desk wing-bars and stripes, the margins of a feather— what the mind salvages to study later. [End Page 30] The Spider Summer is almost gone. I noticed it when I went to fill the feeder: chrysanthemums wearing a hint of gold, though they won’t steal the whole show till September. And for now August luxuriates: blowsy overblown roses heavy as hydrangeas, waves of purple Russian sage, and a whole chorus of yellow-throated trumpet lilies. Yes, let’s have it— extravagance at the end! Something is missing though: the fat brown spider I stepped on near the porch last night, its web large as a dinner platter near the door. Soon afterward I heard the rain begin, and now, today, only the empty web remains, tattered but glistening . . . It’s strange, something dies and the world stays: breezes, an iridescent beetle creeping up the rose stems, and the sun warm on the metal sprinkling can. And somewhere far away, the ripples I used to see in childhood at the lake. September came, we’d pack the car for home, and school would start, and...