The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book

June

33 JUNE Bumper to bumper, the days stream past the day-old baked goods store though sometimes a Sunday morning pulls in, driven by some old man who stops in the present for a moment to buy a little bag of yesterdays. But mostly the days, by the dozen, dry out and get thrown to the birds, sparrows and starlings to whom each hour is every bit as tasty as the last. Time and again, our parents cautioned us that quicksand was waiting just under the water to suck us right out of the world, and, though we fooled with finding it, not one of us did. It was all imagination, for the bottom was always solid under us as, barefoot and lucky, we waded the summers. But more than the bottom, it was time that firmly held us up, all of us young and calling back and forth above the surface. The heron I have disturbed on my walk awkwardly lifts from her place at the edge of the pond, slapping the water, and flaps into the woods without a single word though I have driven her away from a soup of minnows floating in a silver bowl. And from their chosen spots along the bank, where all morning they have been angling for dragonflies, relishing those tangy blues, one after another the great bullfrogs dive under their tattered tablecloth of duckweed with no more than a squeak of frustration. 34 The little garter snake that wriggles away writes not one angry word in her peculiar cursive, nor does the black wasp curse though she must drop her pellet of mud and fly, and the cabbage moth, disturbed at her meal of broccoli leaves, flutters away but is able to hold her long tongue. Each of them wordless, waiting for me to be gone. This dumpster can’t go far on those sore little wheels that have such a hard time making it over the broken cement. It is like a fat old man (or fat old woman), who has to be helped both into and out of a chair, by a lumbering son or daughter heaving with effort. And for clothes the standard coverall brown or blue with bleached-out spots. And a voice like a clank, mouthing the same complaint over and over, with very bad breath, down there in the flies at the end of the alley. During the night, the cleaning staff has come and gone, moving invisibly in and out of the empty offices, leaving new phone books, gleaming in shrink-wrap, and taking the old ones down the hall to the coffee room to stack them soft and exhausted beside the water cooler. For an hour, alone at my desk, I thumb through the new book, turning leaves to find you gone—and you, and you, and you—no longer listed, missing, swept away. All day, the old books, ruffled by wear, lean in their sorry pile, until at closing time, a man with a squealing handcart arrives to wheel them away. He passes my door with his load of old names, rolling away. Many have never noticed the Unknown Soldier there on the courthouse lawn, squinting from under the bill of his cap into time, which is nothing but light. Carrying briefcases, hoping for justice, the living walk past, heads bowed. This young attorney in her dark suit with a silk scarf JUNE 35 white as a document knotted about her long neck? Let’s wish her well, whatever her brief, that word so right in the sight of a mildewed monument like him. She hasn’t looked up, nor reached out to brush with her bright red fingertips the soldiers’ names on his pedestal. He stands with his stone knees locked, one hand on his rifle, the other saluting the distance, and she is the distance. What am I offered for this shoebox of tools? Do I hear a half dollar? This was her hammer. On its handle, these spatters of cream and yellow paint are all that is left of her kitchen walls and the trim for the two small windows, one that opened south to her vegetable garden, one that looked east to a neighbor’s yard. Cream enamel for the sunny sill upon which her pill bottles stood, expired prescriptions to the left and the most recent ones to the right. And these yellow spots are...