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April
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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19 APRIL All this talking, all these raindrops interrupting each other. But but but, they say, so earnest, so eager to please. But not one offers a good explanation, not one can answer the one big question, though I patiently listen, sitting in thin gray morning light, another day before me. Month of my birth. What record do we poets leave? Not on stone tablets, but in books like leaves that have matted together under the snows of indifference. That we were fretful, mostly, but that now and then we looked up and glimpsed something wonderful passing away. Early in April I sometimes hear from deep in the woods the watery burble of a wild tom turkey as he beckons his harem, and I have seen them stepping so carefully across the colorful tiles of the leaves, brown shawls over their shoulders, bobbing their heads as if obedient, submissive, but catching each other’s bright willful eyes. The passing years have broken this old sidewalk over the knees of tree roots, those of great maples raining shade, and of crippled elms whose leaves in August turn to a lace that sifts the heat. And the breaks have filled with mold from which frail seedlings, already with bark like their parents, hold up green banners of hope. 20 For sixty or maybe seventy years this sidewalk has been lying here, literally under foot, and suddenly, one morning when you look, it’s there, supporting you, its every pebble like a jewel— yellow or brown or red or black—set in the sandy concrete, ants patching their old gray tent. Such happiness there is in being a part of all this, of dismissing the woman watching from her window while I bend to one knee to press my hand against this broken sidewalk, feeling the light of that same sun that the sparrow hops over, and that warms the cricket as it carries its song across town in its purse. After a long illness, rain idly brushes the roof with the back of its hand. Only the fingernails touch, and they touch ever so lightly. I remember a woman who late one evening talked to me about dying, about how easy it might be, and as she talked she very slowly turned her hand palm up and let it relax as if to catch something falling out of the darkness. Her hair was white, a cloud, and her eyes were the transparent green of leaves with sunlight showing through. It seemed that I was peering into her to find whatever might be hidden, singing there. And as she cut my hair, for that is how she made her living , she told me that in a cardboard box in the back room she had two orphaned birds, a tiny Steller’s jay and another still too small to properly identify. She planned to feed and care for them until they were ready to fly, for that is what, she said, she did for love. We talked through the mirror, where I sat in her nest, under the folded wings of a barber’s cloth, eyes wide and bright, my shiny old man’s beak between them, a woman feeding me with words. The twenty-five-cent photo booth has disappeared, poof, along with the five-and-dimes they’d found a corner in, as with the boys [3.89.116.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:08 GMT) APRIL 21 and girls who stepped inside and drew the curtain, light as time, across their grins and mischief. Such fun it was to step out into the glaring light of the rest of your life, carrying your face as it had been framed for just that instant, your smile like a joke, the really good joke of a kisser as young as it would ever be again, frozen in black and white and damp with chemicals, fixed in a cold tin frame. For a girl pouring water into the cappuccino machine from a spotted carafe at the Quik Stop at eight in the evening, an old man is as difficult to look at as a page of homework. On the counter next to the register, her geometry book lies heavy, brown, and unopened. Her notebook has phone numbers scribbled all over the cover. What’s the point in learning to be old, she is thinking, when that is something she will never have to use? At the automated checkout machine at the public...