A Private Space, and: Knowing the Enemy

10 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW ELEANOR WILNER A PRIVATE SPACE (for Stephanie Sugioka) This is the space where the question of beauty enters, in soft slippers, decorous, even a little obsequious, muted as if by choice. She kneels with her pot of steaming tea; as she pours, the long black screen of hair falls across her face. She handles her limbs as if they were porcelain. She is almost perfect, except for the space, the shadowed gap, in her huge kimono sleeves. A hint of silver flashes in that dark, a sliver of moon on a night in September, the silk chrysanthemums nodding like conspirators along the hem of sky. (The icon painters of a thousand years ago, always left a little space unfinished somewhere in the work. It was the place, they said, inviting to the soul— the place where the singular could enter the design, the ultimate intensity of a slight intrusion.) One silver stroke: her eyes opened wide as ivory fans at the flick of a wrist. The moon slid through the silk wrappings of the clouds. Later she would pass through the rooms, through the lines of mourners, like light WILNER 11 through the elegant black laquered slats of blinds, slender and bright beyond suspicion. KNOWING THE ENEMY The sun strikes the whale's back; he dives, until the sun is overcast with tons of green. He knows himself full-grown; the burden that he carried in his belly like a stone, is gone: he has given his Jonah back to God. For years he carried him, under the furrowed trenches of his brow and felt him walk by day the caves under the great hUl of his back— this memory, this earth-bound being he had been. Since he was small this manthing had been tangled in the mangroves of his mind; burning like swampfire, or the hated sun, searing him who needed filtered light, for whom the mist was heaven. Such preferences are fate. When, with a great heave, he disgorged this image that distended him, he found it strange how puny his antagonist had grown— a twin-taUed tadpole flashing off in foam. His silver geyser rises in the air; the bad dreams disappear like islands off his starboard flank. He moves, huge, through his own mist, oUed sUver by the moon, arrowed as St. Sebastian, bristling harpoons. ...