from Startles

 

Startles

Many of the details proved incorrect, but they made such good stories. The truths they assigned to us didn’t come from the stories themselves, but out of a need to tell them. It was we who absorbed them, unknowing, responding in truth to what were lies. If the fear of a bear scares you as much as a bear, both are true, bear and not-bear.

Bear with me. A phrase my daughter can’t comprehend, like “in a word.” She can’t answer our question with one word, she says. It’s not irony, but the failure of an idiom to mean to her what it means to us. The idiom, rendered literal, is silly, like “I’m glad you found each other,” when she wondered where they’d gotten lost.

No one had been lost, they simply hadn’t been found. If they hadn’t been found later, they would not have been lost, simply displaced to fantasy. “At least they’re reading books!” my neighbor says of kids who read “only” fantasy. The truest genre in this time when the real refuses to acknowledge itself as such, or when fiction turns into our history before myth even tries. But I’ve lost my bearings now.

It’s like time travel without time, or dreaming without needing to dream. I dream I need to rent an apartment in New Haven, return to school, but I keep forgetting where the apartment is. Roads ramify into veins branching out from the suburbs (never central) and into wooded areas. The poet sat beside a large window, out of which we could see lawn and trees, and more trees beyond those. Unable to see well, she listens to books.

The actor’s memoir concludes with a 45 minute reading of poems. That a life story can end with verses suggests they were necessary to the unraveling of time into experience. His accent accentuates significance. Some Shakespeare, some Heaney, some lives, like the widow’s, defined by lost couplets. What shall be the exit song of us?

Will the stadium darken, laser lights do ADHD flickers across the crowd, or will the lawn sit unmown like the palm of a hand that eases closed? Speed correlates to compassion: move quickly and you lack it, but move slowly and your hesitation maps love’s portion. The words of the loving kindness prayer evaporate like rain from a summer parking lot, but I’ll lay it out like a sketch. Not detail but structure matters then. Not the hollow tubes of a pervert’s island home, but a monastery’s poor plenitude.

Hurt, not harm, my mother-in-law says. Is that like pain without suffering, I wonder? Between concepts a yellow police line droops in cold rain. I’ve changed my climate—warmth startles me!--but echoes feel cold to the touch, as if sound were transmitted by light off a pond. He loved it, but she ran, its tintinnabulations chasing her like a breaking chord.