--------------------------------------------------------- First Communion, There Was a Time, Summer Questions, and Stars of Desire Cory Brown cbrown@ithaca.edu © 1997 Cory Brown All rights reserved. --------------------------------------------------------- First Communion Another guest has departed and we are left with the backdrop of another day, left to carry out the remains of July. One or two days strung out before the clouds clear and we can begin to see the sun again in a new light; cicadas' buzzes imminent, not yet salient to the ear, but expected enough for me to hear them in the mind. I raise my screen to get a better view of the lake, cornflowers and day lilies in the hazy, muggy afternoon--as if an unimpeded view of the outdoors could offer me something I hadn't seen or heard before. All for the purpose of giving me that little extra umpf of inspiration like a good cup of strong Vienna-roast. And here I've come again to see if I can make that seminal commentary, that communal graft which both describes and sets the stage for what is to be described later, when hummingbirds and helicopter leaves are just an image from the past and yet a vision of what is to come. Like seeing the still lake from far away, such as where I am, and recognizing its resemblance to itself in the midst of a fierce, mid-winter freeze. I suppose I'm still making stabs at attaining that transcendent experience, ever since my first holy communion, a wafer-taste emerging on my tongue as I write, mixed now with a straight-forward mocha flavor, no cream no sugar, unadulterated adulteration, pure as can be. But that's how we always start everything it seems, waiting and waiting until we can't see another way out, a few confessions and blandishments along the way and then it's all over. The baby wakes up, the phone rings, and what with the diaper and all. And before you know it the buzzing of reality has stopped and your eyelids are closing ever so slowly. A black spider crawls up one side of the door and then the other before it reaches the top, where it continues steadily along its path, rightside up for now, and you breathe a long pleasant sigh of relief in your sleep. --------------------------------------------------------- Summer Questions Can I imagine a life without them? It is the anger I would miss. How wind can come upon you as you picture yourself in the fall, standing in the middle of an apple orchard with your hand outstretched for the last time of the day, and suddenly the entire summer's complexion has changed. They are the incompletions, lying awake at night and picturing the purity of an imaginary planet's skies. They are the lies that make up the thin tissue we think of as skin and July's grass and purple loosestrife. They are evenings in early August, the sun's last light stretching itself pink and reluctant over the orchard's high straggling limbs. Trying to make it appear so natural. --------------------------------------------------------- There Was a Time 1. There was a time when what I wanted to say came to me unhesitantly, the ease not so much in how it was to be phrased or what words to use, but in the faith I had in the foundation of sayings. Like in a dry spell as a boy when I could stand at the bottom of what was a small pond and look down at all the cracks that marked where patches of earth the size of large sea turtles had separated but could be reunited in a nice common rain. The slightest smell of it in the air and I could imagine again the catfish scanning the silt, my hook down there being dragged around, drawing attention to itself as a squirming, nourishing morsel. But even the patches of earth themselves were refreshing in their own way, the way you could leap from one shell to the next, large as continents, and then pause and look up just in time to see a player piano-shaped cloud drop its tune trippingly from the sky, the beginning of a long, large-dropped, shirt-soaking shower. And you could imagine the continents growing soggy and you worrying about it raining for forty days and forty nights and how you were going to fit them all two by two in what it was you had no way of knowing how to build, let alone find the words to tell the others. 2. Now, it's as if the dandelion seeds flying in the air, sometimes it seems as fast as birds, could be the words themselves. As if being here watching the swallows weave between powerlines is a way of weaving between the lines myself. And to take ourselves back to the time before we sat down to muse about going back, or to muse by going back, would be a way of disingenuously seeing ourselves here, of being here, as if just being here isn't enough. What I want to say now is in the margins, that place where the dandelion seeds in the air come from and disappear to, and where the goldfinch hides when it's not within the view of my window. And it wouldn't help to get a larger window, for discovery is what's outside the aperture, which dislocates and misplaces. And discovery is, after all, the only setting worth sitting at, the placemat of the greatest meal--even if we do suspect when we sit down that there may be an old forgotten hook somewhere in one of the dishes, the baked sole perhaps, the lightly battered haddock, or the deep-fried catfish with its myriad meandering bones you have to always be on the lookout for with that curious dexterity of tongue and roof of the mouth, so you can never just relax and taste the taste. Little bones like hooks themselves waiting for you to swallow hook line and sinker if you are so inclined. That is, gullible enough to want it all: the dips and subtle hesitations of swallows skimming the treetops, as well as the slow movements in the darkness of ponds. --------------------------------------------------------- Stars of Desire I would like to have written about the falling stars for you. How one after another streamed like tears down the face of the night sky, the sky shrouded here and there by thin clouds appearing from the West. And how those clouds would turn the night's face inscrutable for a few passing moments, as if it were longing, or lost in thought. But we didn't see them as we would have liked: clear as notes in a piano sonata tripping down the scale in trill or tremolo, or in multitudinous burstings like slow, silent fireworks. I had known it all along, before we sat down outside in chairs with our heads back in a sort of obverse position of homage and prayer. Had known it as we hummed old songs for our daughter in your lap, each of us imagining how it might be to be back in our mother's arms-- listening to a voice as familiar as our own pulling us down into deep sleep like stars falling into earth. That night you came to me in the smooth skin of a half-dream and convinced me in whispers that we had seen the stars as we had wished. That those flames were the source of these momentary passions, were ours. Ithaca College cbrown@ithaca.edu --------------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT (c) 1997 BY CORY BROWN, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. ---------------------------------------------------------