Teach Us to Number Our Days, and: The Psalm at the End of the Mind: In the Alzheimer’s Wing, and: What Has Been Asked, and: When There Will Be Roses

Abstract

Teach Us to Number Our Days, and: The Psalm at the End of the Mind: In the Alzheimer’s Wing, and: What Has Been Asked, and: When There Will Be Roses Marjorie Stelmach (bio) Teach Us to Number Our Days . . . that we may gain a heart of wisdom. psalm 90:12 i. Via Negativa Even now, in the desert wastes,the saints are stalking God with terrible intent— erasing images, attributes, names,until no likeness to our kind remains. Only then can they kill him. What the saints know: the weight of their failings, the number of the beast, that the sun will fall and rise again upon their unslaked need— to see God face to face. On the far side of the veil, Godis learning to limp, lose his way, count his steps. He intends to join us. What God knows: our hearts before he formed us in our mothers’ wombs, the precise articulation of our bones, all that will become us— the paint-by-number of our dust. [End Page 60] If they meet, the saints and their God, it won’t bein anyone’s lifetime. * Elsewhere, glacial sheets advance by incremental bits,trees fall in boreal forests, owls fall upon prey, whales intone their odes, the wind touches everything once,and again. A billion seeds and a star in a galaxy’s spiral armexplode. ii. The Least of These The ants are gathering manna fallen from the sun—ticks, spiders, desert beetles. They hunt midday when their predators sleep, scour the narrow ledge betweenheat-death and a food chain rife with lizards. What ants know: to forage, to find their way home. God loves the desert’s sift and revision, the particledmovement of dunes, the disciplined way his creatures cleave to the basics: lay pheromone trails, care for their young,bury their dead, kill, are killed. He observes all this with the perfect detachment he learnedfrom his study of scientists. * When the sun burns directly overhead, the scientists begin:blot the pheromone trails, obscure the scent of the home nest, [End Page 61] sever one antenna from each ant’s head, consigning herby these removals to a landscape of blur. Call her Odysseus. What scientists know: statistics, meticulous observation, the keeping of impeccable records. “Repeatable, repeatable, repeatable,” they mutter: a mantra. At the far point of her slog where he’s scattered the dead,a tech lifts Odysseus and clips off her legs at the “knee.” Undeterred, she shoulders a corpse and heads homeward,until, at exactly the halfway point, frantically waving her one antenna, she halts: lost. You’ll say it’s the painof her wounded limbs pressed again and again into blistering sands. You’ll be wrong. Now, to the feet of a second Odysseus the tech supergluesa tiny set of pig-hair stilts. Released, she seizes spider flesh, and, setting off in her seven-league boots, she reaches the nestand strides right past—by exactly the 50% predicted. What Odysseus knows astounds the scientists: how to count her steps. iii. In Another Part of the Wilderness August 1945, Wendover Air Force Base: At a secret base near the Great Salt Flats,enlisted men assigned to the assembly of the bomb [End Page 62] are missing home: signs bristling with arrowsrecord the distance to each boy’s hometown. At night in the barracks they stare at the ceilingcounting their enlistment down. Meanwhile, on another part of the base:b-29 crews toss in dreams, rehearsing their mission. They’ve dropped their leaflets on a dozen cities,promising prompt and utter destruction, urging civilian evacuation. But as for the actual targets,the boys are not told. Elsewhere, President Truman is praying for the guidanceof the Lord, that we might use our atom bomb in His ways and for His purposes. August 2015, Wendover Air Force Base: The floors of the emptied barracks are warped,the roofs collapsed, no glass left in the window frames. Nightly, Wendover frees its ghosts to the foraging winds.Together the ghosts and the winds scour a desert still fenced with barbed wire and postedwith warnings: Danger. Unexploded...