Pirates

Everyone loves pirates. On Halloween children roam the streets with eye patches and cardboard swords, filling pillowcases with looted sugar. Tweens wear shirts coyly alluding to booty. Frat houses order truckloads of sand delivered onto their lawns for pirate keggers. Captain Jack Sparrow wiggles his jeweled pinkie and the moviegoers of the world exude heat. Peter Pan, Hagar the Horrible, and other brightly colored stories we grew up with resonate buoyantly through our culture. So why is there no such jolly interest in the Somali pirates, sailing on boats resembling inflatable life rafts, capturing moneyed innocents for ransom? Avast! Right now, in the Year of Our Lord 2009: pirates! Not mere cyber-criminals pirating software and music, these are real pirates with guns, with draped and raggedy clothing, swashbuckling for coin. And we can watch them on the nightly news! But maybe, this close to present reality, they pale. There is no Pirate Code; they are actually committing crimes. And even when photographed wearing golden clips of ammo, squinting defiantly into a defiant sun, they look as though they would, given the chance, rather work in a department store, grow yams, drive a taxi, evaporate from our TV screens. They look like our exhausted, financially strapped cousins, sailing seas nowhere connected to the beloved waterways of myth and magic.

Theater dreams

It is as if my sleeping mind acts out each night Shakespeare's reminder that “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”: for years, most of my dreams were theater dreams. These take place within a theater, or at least within view of one; they are occasionally as far-flung as the parking lot. Characters interact in the wings, behind rows of darkened audience, in green rooms, dressing rooms, running through back hallways, dodging the fly, dangling from catwalks, or best, onstage. I stand reciting, or forgetting, making up lines. My fellow actors behave unpredictably, and the audience laughs, jeers, or is rapt. For costumes we have jeweled gowns, street clothes, or none at all, wearing only metaphors, usually cliched. I rush to change from one to the next. The plots sing of stress, searching, racing toward curtains, but also of mystical camaraderie, being part of a company, illuminated from a dozen angles. The dream itself is theater, and even more ephemeral, the stagings hung within a life whose player is forever seeking her role, fumbling for lines, and when she's lucky, acting with the creative energy of the largest theater, the cosmos. Beyond that theater's doors, beyond its lonely parking lot, we don't know who could be dreaming us, or when they may awaken.

The specimen

The eukaryote writhed on the dish. I can only describe its movements as anguished. How it moved despite the pressure of the slide, I couldn't say, but it flattened, spreading into transparency, seeking to divorce itself from its own organelles, or at least to escape the beam spotlighting it from below. Its membrane shuddered in an unmistakably sorrowful seizure. I pulled back from the eyepiece, aware that recognizing emotion at a cellular level was an unsanctioned scientific endeavor. I rubbed a strained eye while I made lab notes, knowing as I wrote that they had become a diary rather than a mere log: subjective and empathetic, and as such, fatally flawed. I knew what they would say: that I was projecting human qualities upon a form devoid of such potential. Or even that I had turned the microscope's gaze upon myself, looking into a mirror instead of a lens—that it was I who writhed, macroscopic, whose diary I kept. After all, humans are eukaryotes too.

Greensleeves

Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves was my heart of gold,
And who but my lady greensleeves.

Only she wore green, as did we, because of the siege. No fabric could come from the east or north, so we had but bolts and bolts of flags from the anniversary festival just past. My Polly's days were taken up, and her eyesight lost, in piecing that army of flags into jackets, trousers, and frocks. The dances beneath those flags of green stripe had been the last enjoyment for any of us, except the children, who played on through the siege, and of course my lord. Only a gilded heart, with gold-stopped eyes to match, would call her frocks a choice, a garland, a song.

My men were clothed all in green,
And they did ever wait on thee;
All this was gallant to be seen,
And yet thou wouldst not love me.

A golden heart he had, to be sure, but also I'd wager he loved the thing of her rather than the lady herself. The notion of love, of loving, of loving her. I've lost many a gamble, and so may be mistaken, but surely as moss and mold are that same blessed green, I know that his wasted love meant the loss of mine as well. Many a day my fellows and I spent fetching her this or that, and each of those days my fading Polly saw me not.

Rise and fall

We drive up from the city, out from under the clot of clouds and smoke. We follow the Lolo River up toward Lolo Peak. The hills are nearly bare; what snow still clings is a week old and sunken into the brush. I hope I haven't rented the set of cross country skis for nothing, but Patty says the pass usually holds a miracle, being the gate between mountains, the border of two states, and the dumping point for abundant powder. The road steepens. We crawl into an earlier time zone, beginning our hour anew. We crest the pass and coast into an oasis of pure and blinding whiteness. The pines are draped with thick white, painted onto every needle and branch. The land is so white that the sky's blue seems as brightly dark as a marble. Our floating island of winter teems with revelers in colorful snowpants, sledding and skiing and loosing their joyful dogs. We snap on our skis and push ourselves into the storybook, and our plot unfolds, a double line through vastness. Here are blind curves and downhills: lean in, you'll either fly or fall, and both are true. Bend at the knees, point your skis like an arrow, and let go.

Say to me

Say to me what it was like before big machines tore it up and peeled it back. Before we made the land to be like us, rather than the other way round. The people who walked there before, tell me, did the air feel different in their lungs? When they uttered their word for blue, did they speak of a color deeper and more resounding than the richest of our paints? Would they judge our clearest day dusty, our freshest water dull? Tell me, show me eden eyes and ears.

Sheree replies

Hi Maude,
OK.
Sheree.

She wrote it in black pen. It was in my backpack. I can't believe it. In books the quiet mousey person is always told no or ignored or they have somebody else write back and pretend to be the popular girl and laugh at her behind her back. But I saw her put it there herself, I was pretending to look the other way while I put the dictionary away, but I have really good vision out of the corner of my eye.

I don't know why I told her OK. She's weird, for sure. I guess I just don't care anymore. This school is so uptight and I don't think anyone ever thinks about real hippies or real fashion or poems by Nikki Giovanni. If I had the money I feel like I could just get on a plane and fly to New York or Sydney, Australia and get off and become part of the ocean of people walking around the streets and never come back to Elburg. But I'm broke and stuck, obviously, so fine, let's see some forest in the middle of town. Maybe it'll swallow me whole, if it even exists. If they're lucky, maybe I'll send a postcard back.

To not see

It was on the corner of Farol and 12th. It was snowing on top of three days' rain, which had hardened into black ice. He turned away before he saw. His eyes were already squinted against the wind, and his vision narrowed by icy lashes, but just to be safe he made sure his face could see no red, yellow or green lights, no people, bicycles, or trucks. He didn't want to be a witness, for a thousand reasons. The flood of sounds that surged from the intersection buffeted the fence and signs at his side, sank into the back of his coat, but through nearly meditative effort his ears heard nothing but the crunch under his feet. He walked away toward 13th Street, running his bare hands over the skin of his jaws, a habit he could not drop. The skin was numb from the endless stings of snowflakes, and felt as if it were someone else's face, someone else's tensed jaw, bearing someone else's thousand reasons.

Dear Sheree:

Hi how are you? You are the prettiest girl in class. Everyone thinks so and the boys look it, you can tell. My name is Maude Brown. I know you know my name but we haven't talked at all, yet. When I have a birthday party I would invite you though. Anyway I want to know if you will be my partner for the nature project? This is secret, but there is a forest in the middle of Elburg and that forest is the best place for finding nature, and also I have a ton of jars we could use. Please tell me yes or no by tomorrow. Thank you.
Sincerely Maude

I wrinkle up the letter but I don't throw it out, I just think about if it's good enough to write over, maybe in purple, and stick into her shoulderbag when she's off sharpening her pencil. It's not too bad. I put in a compliment to make it nicer, and I wrote please and thank you. I put in a lie too though: there's no party to invite Sheree to, because Gramma says I'm too old for birthday parties. I know that's not the real reason though. There are TV shows about sweet sixteen and Mexican queensenyera and that's light years older than me. Gramma just doesn't want to have people over, ever. That's why I found the secret forest. That's why it showed itself to me.

The acts of the players

I didn't know at the time, but I was in myths. This was long before I had the notion of faith, even longer before I knew of faith deeper than religion. I was a dinghy tossed on a sea of hormones on a small planet free of real want or struggle. I was also shy and unfashionable, but something in me hungered to get on a stage and speak and move there. To become others, unlike myself; to become a new self; to become everything; to unbecome. The theater people were telling the old myths, the true untruths. We resurrected long-dead spirits, filled fertile blackness with noise and motion until it was curtains. Before and after the myths, we theater people sprawled in the wings, stumbled, flaunted, loved and hated. Magic and ephemeral were my new favorite words. I got high on trappings too—gowns, masks, flowers, ego—for we were like any disciples: clueless. We were pretty awful, and we were also transcendent. Theater was my first church and first communion.

Honey and flies

Honey, don't you know that you aren't the only one trying to screw shut a jar of paste while holding an umbrella under one arm and keeping your purse from slipping off your shoulder? Don't you know how many people say the same dumb things, reply “You too” when they're told to have a nice breakfast by a waiter who probably won't eat for another four hours? What have you been reading, celebrity magazines? What have you been sampling for normalcy—Vogue, Glamour? Do you have any idea how we look from outside, fumbling through our days like flies buzzing at a closed window, trying to reach the sun?

Polish

He hated Leo's guts. As he assured a puckered little monsignor of the quality of the brand's leather uppers, he looked across at Leo tossing a shiny heel from one hand to the other, on his knees before a delighted matron stuffed in brown fur. Nothing wrong with positivity, surely, or enthusiasm, or even what you might call spark—nontheless, the flourish disgusted him. He hoped no one could guess that such an agreeable person would harbor red daggers for another seemingly agreeable person. Then of course, he hated his own guts too; every accidental glimpse of his polished black oxfords reflected in the low shoe-store mirrors made him inexplicably embarrassed, slightly ill.

Paul Bunyan's homecoming

I popped my eyeballs out and tucked them in the pocket of my flannels to defrost for a few minutes. Gently knocked my temples against the doorframe to loosen crystallized snot from my nose hairs. And ran an empty mascara wand through my lashes to remove the clinging, teary icicles. As I returned the wand to its hook by the deadbolt, a pool of melted snow spread from under my boots, a dark ring magnifying my entry. “Babe!” I cried, in case I was not yet perfectly obvious. “Fire up the coffeepot! Ignite the candelabra! Your fella's home off the mountain!”

In her sea

She was waiting for the child. She was both the ocean and a ship upon it, lying belly up on the mattress, sailing through salted dreams. One night, her ribs rose and separated like continents dividing, splitting at the ocean floor. As they split, her skin stretched and fiery magma seeped into the gap. She awoke gasping. After this, she found she could bend in new ways, her loosening joints allowing her, even as she grew increasingly heavy and round, to move through the waking world like a slippery eel. Another night, the child dropped, and the sound of humpback whales signaled through her dreams. She tossed in the bed and listened; she tried to depth-sound the small one through choppy waters: How deep, how far away? And how shall I know you when you arrive?

Unplug

Your world hums, but you don't notice, just as you don't notice air, your heartbeat, the sky. The hum is as assumed as the notion that tomorrow the road you live on will have the same name, that tomorrow you will live, that there will be a tomorrow. Then someone drops a hatchet through a wire forty miles east, and zap, the hum is gone. So are the talking, beeping, typing, shifting, stacking, and ringing that piled atop it. It's silent, a silence so rich and vast it's orchestral. You look up--everyone looks up. Ears drink it, it slides under fingernails and into the hollows of bones. You are looking up, we're looking at you and you at us with newborn eyes, all else forgotten, bodies full and raw: alive. Something is wrong, and something is so right.

The old man and the tree

The old man was combing dumpsters for aluminum when he found the red bow. It probably came from a fancy tin of cookies, or maybe it was last year's bow and no longer good enough. He pulled it out, keeping it above the dripping soda cans in his basket. Why you want this, he wondered. It's no use to recycle. On his way through the park he left it tied to a spindly evergreen, just as the sun fell back toward the mountains after a half-hearted day's climb.

The old man walked back to his trailer, from which a small part of the chill was removed with a few dollars of propane each month. While he drank tea and gin, the tree with the bow stood in his mind. He had not noticed it before, but the bow suited it. Not a bad tree.

The next afternoon a small flag on a pipe cleaner was twisted onto the tree. The day after that, four strips of silver tinsel shivered there as well. Still not bad. He wished he could reach higher than halfway up.

A square of suet was next, hung in mesh cut from an onion bag. He had tried to buy the suet with food stamps, which didn't work, but the clerk gave him a lump anyway. Dirty old man. Who eats suet anymore?

The old man rested the day after that, sleeping through the few hours of daylight and waking only in time for tea and gin.

The next time he saw the tree, he stopped and put down his bag of cans and stared. There were two bright strings circling the tree, a string of popcorn and a string of cranberries. They made the tree fuller and rounder than he had remembered it, even with tea and gin. Moreover, there were three birds in the tree. The suet was nearly gone, and bits of red berry flecked the ground underneath, where two more birds pecked and quarreled.

Next there was a fishing lure. Then another lump of suet. A letter in a green envelope. Three cranes folded from newspaper. A glass angel. A chime that sang when the wind grew piercing. A candle on the ground, which he found burning one day. Orange quarters, hung for the birds with fishing line. A god's-eye of blue and pink yarn. The best was snow, frosting every needle and ornament. The tree grew daily. Now even at night it glistened.

The old man's trailer was still cold. He took his aluminum to the recycler and bought his holiday dinner, cooked and ate it, by himself; but also there was in his mind all that night the sight, and the smell, the feel, even the sound, of the tree with the red bow, the tree blooming, giving off ever more color, more size, more heat.

Consuelo

She's growing thin and wobbly. Can't eat like she used to. She seems to have lost her sense of smell, and her eyes are tired, half-closed. We buried her sister on the mountain last summer; by now the snow is falling over the body. Where will we bury her? It is too cold to dig the earth now. Sometimes I hear her struggle, from the next room, where I sit and read library books and pretend not to think of her. I wish she would die and get it over with, and also I wish for her to linger, for us to enjoy what is left of her company for a few days more. Thus, I give her peanut butter, but not vitamins—love, but not a fight.

Babies

The offspring of the species are carried through early life on thrones and seem to be, in status, its kings and queens. They stare; it doesn't occur to them that they should look when addressed, or stop looking after a prudent length of time. They voice judgment, or withhold comment, without fathoming that they could possibly care whether other moving things want to hear or not hear from them. They kick as their legs desire to kick; they grab for the sparkle, the hairy raisin; surely these are there for them. They gorge themselves in slow motion with crumbs, oblivious to snot or the preference of others to not touch it. They wear most anything effortlessly and with a pleasing effect. Should is an unknown to these early humans and, we must note, it seems a dubious development among more mature ones.

Freight docking

At the meeting of many rails, in air so cold that sound travels for miles down the tracks, one engine abandons freight and pushes it into the care of another. Energy shoots through the metal cars, a thunderclap chain reaction at a speed that belies their lumbering appearance and slow starts. Humans made trains for their own small-minded purposes—to move gold and wood, to avoid the menace of stillness—but the sound effects are divine.

Facewatching

Sometime when you have nothing better to do, watch people's faces when they forget that anybody might be looking, when they forget that they want their faces to look a certain way-- smooth, composed and pleasing, confident. There's a woman at her knitting: her forehead also knits, into a tapestry of focus, a bangle of chewed lip and flared nostril pinned to her face as she funnels all available beauty and symmetry into her work, leaving none for personal use. The face of the young man at his post after hours of vigilant inactivity creases into an honest diagram of distaste and weariness. And occasionally a face simply drops open, an abstract painting of the mind behind it: the girl's face pops into three circles, two white, one red, as a person walks past under the cloud of an uncommonly hideous wig. She cannot disguise her amazement at the ratty thing, and you can look straight into her brain and root around, like it's a box of trinkets.

Greetings earthlings.

That's what the training program says we usually say. Or just come in and start blowing stuff up. Makes me titter. Why would you go someplace just to destroy it, not even sightsee first? I guess that's something homo sapiens sapiens do, though. Take me to your leader, that's next. No, really I want to try out this water stuff. And I want to hear the noises of flies, and eat kelp straight from the sea. And sleep! I'm a little afraid of that, but the manuals say it only lasts a little while, and doesn't hurt. Actually maybe it would be better if I slept a very long time. It might help me learn to forget. I'm not supposed to try these things, but I've thought it through. I'll stay hazy during, so nobody here will notice, and then I can pretend I got lost on the way back, to account for gaps in my eras. Heaven knows Rrina and her moons won't miss me. Maybe this will make her regret blowing gases at me when she told me never to return.

The sisters

One holds my hand to lead me through the doors and down the hall. She is accustomed to the statues lurking at every turn, but I am not: in the stairwell, an Aryan Mary placidly treads on a gagging snake; a short, bald friar permanently intrudes into the female cloister; and in the community room, Jesus carelessly dangles drops of wooden blood over the doilies and pink curtains. My room is simple and there is commotion over whether the baseboards have been dusted for my arrival. I wash my face at the sink, then sit upon the bed until prayers. The sisters, mostly old women now, sit in two choirs, facing in mirror image, and sing. They sing of oil, milk and honey, but do not shy away from songs of vengeance, pettiness, plagues, weeping and gnashing of teeth—they sing of all. I linger at the edge of their music and ask silent questions. Can it be that after two children, one divorce and forty years I am going to become one of them, become of them, become them, become? Around me, thirty voices merge into the single, low, clear, patient, endless woman's voice of God.

The hanging gardens

Moss in the brain, that's what they say I've got, though in larger words. When my ears shut to the words, they flutter translucent photographs on a white screen to prove it. There's no work so I walk, and I look, and sometimes I knit. Green. I'm going to knit a garden, a nest of greenery, and fall asleep in it. When my fingers grow numb I stop and picture Jerome in the sand, Jerome in a tent, Jerome in a latrine, in Iraq. Nebucchadnezzar built the gardens of Babylon not far from where Jerome sleeps now, also wearing green, drab green. The king built gardens for his sick wife to remind her of Persia. But my gardens are growing inside me. Her gardens were destroyed by earthquakes. So, they tell me, shall mine be.

How they are

"How are you?" I ask.

"I'm so in lust. I see him in Organic Chem, and then sometimes at the gym, and I think he has to notice because I keep trying to sit next to him in study group and I gush sweat whenever I talk to him. I think I'd have a chance if only we could run into each other at a party. You think I'm crazy?" say her eyes.

"Broke," say her fingernails. "Flat broke. Who'd have thought I'd be buying three frozen burritos on credit? This isn't the way that Grandma raised me, but then again Grandma never tried to get her PhD."

"Screw you for asking," says the rim of his ballcap. "Like you care."

All the mouths say: "Fine."

One potato and fifteen pinto beans

Men buying tampons are too easily explained. I prefer the dirt-covered hunter who stops in for soap, passing up Irish Spring and Lever 2000 for a bar of imported South of France Milled Soap with Organic Vegetable Oils, wrapped in silky paper with a cream flower border. The nun loading up a cube of Bud Light, three boxes of Sutter Home, and a pound of Starlight Mints. The frantic, aged-looking child purchasing twelve sourdough rolls, not wheat, and six slices of banana bread, not zucchini, for an unnamed taskmaster who directs him via cell phone. A $16.99 Super Cleanse Kit, plus a $1.99 jumbo bag of Cheesy Popcorn... hours vaporize into possibilities.

9 p.m.

“Hi, would you like a bag?”
“Oh! Oh man, I forgot my cloth bags, it’s so stupid of me, I keep them right in the car and so you’d think I’d never forget them, but somehow I do, I’m usually really good about it— Callim, Shard, guess what, we got everything on Mommy’s list but we forgot the bags again! I hate wasting trees, I’m so sorry!”
“So…?”
“Oh, I guess a bag.”
“OK.”
“Sigh.”
“Are these clementines or satsumas?”
“They’re… yeah, satsumas.”
“…”
“…”
“Um, your kids are running out the door there, I just wouldn’t want them to get run over in the parking lot…”
“Callim, Shard, come here! Get back in here! Get— OK, thank you very much for trying to go outside when you have outdoors energy, but Mommy needs you here—“
“Mommy, you said I could have a cookie before we came in here— Mommeeeee, listen—“
“Bwownie! Bwownie!”
“Mommy, you said—”
“OK. OK. Brownie and cookie. After we’re done.”
“Bwownie for me? My bwownie?”
“Yes. Yes. Your brownie.”
“Your total’s $65.18.”