That
building and this house and how white it was, the tree in between, dogwood
blooming and falling, blooming and falling, wind strong like my grandmother’s
stitches holding the whole thing together. That house and holding onto it, onto
the scene, onto its squat square spot and the firmness of it all, the finality,
how soon will always be coming and this house might always be here to greet it.
Might
always be here to stay. Like porch
sitting and like Saturday, gazing across, and that building and its dogwood and
how when you looked up there were no angels in the sky, how when the factory
stopped keeping rhythm there was no sky, white like chamomile sanctifying this
place only it wasn’t sanctified, didn’t believe in sanctification, couldn’t
spell it or breathe it or hardly breathe at all.
My
grandmother believed in the sanctifying of things. She stitched salient red thread into kitchen curtains,
stitches so tiny you could barely see them, salient and the asking and
how blue they were, curtains between her oak table and grandpa’s truck and how
I understood none of it, how I understood nothing of the beginnings or endings
or sanctification, sky white overhead like dogwoods blooming or that building or
grandma’s favorite holiday dress. White like divinity or the way I drew
sidewalks and that building and this house separated by the black black road
between. That road and how far it
stretched, in either direction it stretched, going on forever in my mind.
The black black road and that building, massive and
brick and the gargoyle that watched their house even after the fire in ’93,
even after grandpa imported some holy ghost and grew it up the porch-rails
until the weather stopped being France, even when the truck rusted itself the
rest of the way into place and their generation grew older and my generation
grew summer nights barefoot and first loves.
This
is how the sky falls down when it breaks, how the katydids learned to speak,
how the darkness is never what we choose, how sometimes it seems too big or not
enough, how sometimes we want people to fall like this, like summertimes
against your grandmother’s curtains and the peace of it all, the home of it
all, and how it never seems the same, even when you dig your heels into the
universe and demand it brake, and how people will break anyway, and never how
you’d like. How sometimes our bones and
skin feel immortal but how sometimes there is no eternity because there is only
right now, this moment and how you do not know what to do in it, this moment
and the unknowing and the eternity of it all and how very much you want to be
anywhere else, to be away.
One
morning you will wake up and you will go away. You will walk past snails, past
discarded beer cans, past stray cats like god’s eyes, past the way you feel
free like when it is just warm enough and kind of dusky. You will walk and you
will look, for gargoyles, for the salient, for some hope of praise, for
something to believe in, for a place to fall.
For a net. You will walk to the
sea, will travel past its edges into the spill that is expanse, is starlight,
is the sound of train whistles.
You
will walk past train whistles. You will
travel past sea-edges, past the stars which navigate ships, past your
grandmother’s kitchen and the way you’d run outside, onto the porch, dust
between your sprawling toes and how it was incomplete, how you didn’t know
anything about how to characterize, how you could not speak sanctify because it
did not exist; sanctification did not exist and you were a girl, not yet
broken, not yet rawhide, not yet looking for yearn in small places.
You will go away and you will walk. For incomplete, for the way you wish
sometimes people could break like this, like fireflies, sky white like threat
or painted things, and your grandfather there, in the drive, his black black
truck and those eyes and your grandmother inside, and all the ways you wish you
could go here, go home.
__________________
Author: Shea Daniels