Fragments of the World

Keeping the Lean Years

I practiced penmanship at the table,waited, secretly hoping for an air raid,the excitement of huddling in the darkaround the Stromberg-Carlson, with a scrapof black cloth covering the radio dial,listening for the drone of bombers farover our heads. And while I scribbledragged sawteeth and sprawled coilsacross the tablet, my mother sat in a poolof light from the lamp, darning the toeof a sock with black thread, buildinga thick patch across the white skinof the darning egg, filling in, a threadat a time, the holes my father had wornwalking to work. At the small tableby the other chair, next to the cathedralradio, my father smoked his pipe, leaningtoward the voice of Edward R. Murrow.He plotted lines across a map markingthe lines and corridors of battlein countries with names so strangethey could have been on another planet.

When we moved from that house, the spiritof the Great Depression and the Warof Heroic and Worthy Sacrificeswent with us. Wherever we lived after that,our cupboards were filled with scarcityand caution. The Rexall One-Cent Salewas a semiannual celebration. For yearswe squirreled away jars of sale jellydeep in the hall closet.           Forty years later,my mother sits by the lamp cross-stitchinga castle above the placid Rhine. My fatherhas covered the coffee table with pilesof coupons my mother has clippedfrom magazines and papers. He has plotted themin groups for her, following closely, dutifully,row on row, the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly.

Fractured Light

The sun knocks its fist against the windshieldand splinters light into shards and cold beadsof glass. In the center of this crazed web,this startled network of tight concentriclines, here in the center of the target,his head struck the glass, a gunshot crack, yetleft no sign of blood on glass, dash, or vinyl,

left no scrap of hair or skin to tell usthe precise tilt of his skull or the weighthis body gave to this shattering. Thenand now, velocity and the plottedlines of trajectory, distance, anglesof impact remain unknown. All is lost inthis maze of geometry and physics,

this continuum of sundry momentsleft over after all the witnessesof accident and aftermath have toldthe facts, labeled the diagrams with theirlines and x's. Nothing they say returnshis breath. No calculations accurateand true can change the last certificate.

And all our piecing together can't makethis fractured sunlight whole again, can't warmhis blood to sing praise through the body heleft behind on the stretcher. Now satinlines the narrow chamber holding remnantsof his flesh. Above him a stone carriesthe last scrap of his life made palpable:

the letters of his name driven sharplyand hard into granite. The memoriesof kiss or curse are lost, and all fragmentsthis world scatters before us: the brokenlines of glass, his lover's warm breath againsthis neck—lost to him, to us all. He hasleft us nothing he held dear in this life.