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This World
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
This World Today, still dazed and unsteady from last night's dream, I carry my coffee to the porch: mere was a war; I was shmried away on a flatbed truck from everyone, me ones I love. But here the day is already steamy. the sun breathing down on the concrete steps. the morning glories wide open, unfurled and perfect in their extravagant blueness, crowded as germs on a vine chat has wrapped itself entirely around the railing and onto the roof. They seem to come from a different world. they are so blue. and so many, but here they are, hundreds ofthem. every blossom a raised glass. every blossom a throat. They drink the light and change it: sky. I have a friend with eyes this shade ofblue. I think about her and the way she talks, the way her voice speeds up. climbs higher, cracking, as ifyou're being taken from her even as she speaks. as ifshe had to reach you somewhere far away, she's that excited. Last time I saw her she was standing on a moving bus, unsteady, hanging on, but waving. waving, blowing kisses, until the Greyhound had completely turned the corner and was gone. T hen I think about another time, a boy, in Crete. My room was in the hills, but every day I walked or hitchhiked [Q a village by the ocean, and that day when a bus went by, a load ofchildren. one boy waved and I waved back. And would have forgotten except that hours later. in the village 1 in a shop where I was buying plums, a woman was crying, her eyes darker than the fruit, one thumb lifting her apron (Q smear away rears while she counted out change. Ourside me sunlight glinted in the market square as ifthe stone were full ofbroken glass, and I went back (Q where my friends were sitting, a cafe where we'd started meeting every afternoon for wine at ouzo: a boy from Germany, two girls from Sweden, me. We hardly spoke, just sat together, drinking, watching the merchants arrange and rearrange their racks ofcolored scarves and bulky handmade sweaters. When I gOt back some news had come around: a small hoy, in the village on a field trip with hisschoolmates, was swimming in the ocean when [he current pulled him under. This had happened in the last half~hour: the current pulled him down and he was dead. Marta, telling us the story, had understood no more than that. After a time twO women walked by. wailing, voluminous in skirts and head shawls, and then the children, a row oftiny stoics holding hands. no one pushing or shoving anyone else. no one quarreling or crying. We were so dose to them we could have (Quched them. and we were far away from home, the separate countries where. like drawers ofdothing in our parents' houses, our own real lives had seemed (Q wait. But then, as much as [0 our families or our lovers, more, we seemed connected to each orner, bound by the rickety enamel table, by the crumbs, the half-drunk botde ofretsina, Bickering, cast by sunlight ontO Gumer's arm, bound, even. byour lack ofgrief, our sense ofbeing, 4 [18.191.87.65] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:51 GMT) for whatever curious reason, left behind. I thought ofthe way I imagined the Second Coming as a child, how I would see myselfreturning home from school to find my family spirited away, lifted in an instant from the earth, the house empty, nothing to note my mother's place but a potholder, dropped, or, rolling across the Roor, a slowly unravelling spool ofthread. 1 thought ofthe boy's mother sending him offthat day, kissing his hair as, pleased and excited. he clutched the bag that held his swimming trunks and towel. And I thought ofthe bus on the road, the hand. grown smaller, larger now. in memory, waving. Maybe not even the same boy. That was ten years ago. He would be eighteen or rwenry by now and I would be thirty, on a porch in Madison, Wisconsin, so tired I want to go inside the house and back to bed. 1want to sleep again, remembering my mother who is still alive, and my friend with eyes like Rowers, and the boy, and Giinrer, and the others, who are by now deep into whatever life they have made. I want to wake up again...