Heroics of Appearance Recalled, and: Ellen's

42 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW ALBERT GOLDBARTH HEROICS OF APPEARANCE RECALLED Also in those days when we received die award for stifling a grimace that might have revealed ennui to the face of someone so delicate a blink was as good as two black lynx-claws raked down her composure we deserved it. Remember opening the door and from every mouth around die table, a shadow grew, as if they'd all convened to give shape to die realization of grandma's death, and you didn't panic to see her form like a cold, cast-iron centerpiece, but only dreamed it every night for years. And when you told me about it how I made die disinterested motions of care. It was an absentee salute toward my knowing diat more abiding affection for you would return. The midnight phone calls one makes! Ah, die great triumphs of yesteryear! And also die small triumphs of yesteryear. Crying, not crying, whichever was hardest. GOLDBARTH 43 ELLEN'S Imprinting: a duck hatches coddled in your electric blanket and calls you Mother the rest of its life in the language of attachment. Don't scoot your finger to M in Webster's; it's true, subjective experience negates objective definition, as when Ellen calls from half-way around the globe, again, to say she's strapped to the bedside there and riddled up her bicep with valium; just luce before, when she thought the bull-men after her, she's convinced I can help. A duck too returns infallibly from somewhere a hemisphere away, guided by the instinctual radar it never had to memorize to work, and over all the continent's pocks and wells of water, circles to your pond to plop in: home. I'm speaking, I guess, about a kind of certainty in knowledge gained by solely reliance on love and hunch and introspection, innate tools. Are we capable? We do our lesson for the day: without reference to previous authorities prove the earth is round. ...