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Black Rot
- Northwestern University Press
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34 Black Rot Speaking of colors in transparent breath— you get the idea how difficult it is. I can paint you that difficulty, the vacant maple across the vacant lot a few shades closer to resplendent pumpkin but most of it is gone and won’t be represented and won’t open a gate even to its own broken palace. If you look at a single leaf you see the cause of premature autumn, what passes early and without warning sandblasted, facially pocked this one that cups my attention, this one that slams and slams its door and never shuts. I’m staring at a blighted leaf, the blight staring back at me when my father phones from his tidy sunlit 35 widowed domicile. He’s never wished me anything but well. His voice crackling from age, still neatly prearranged to happy formations of syllables, tendering chiding questions— the prerogative of old age, what we have to wish and hope for, now— now unrolling himself in partial sentences, punctuating himself, the selfsame prose he speaks, and I hear compliance say it’s beautiful here, you should see it. Just beyond the mansions that block any view I could convey to minimize his grief, gulls huddle so far inside themselves they will never be other than interior— I’ve been there, yes, done that, suffered opacity for which no pigment exists. And when he hangs up, my loneliness feels habitable, lovable, not survivable but what survives us as a matter of fact, an heirloom, a gift his voice confers and the thread of the phone wire travels the theme that ties this fabrication to us, the same one that unravels us. [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:48 GMT) 36 And the leaves turn, I turn them, my regard is boss— one side pale green and ancient parchment brown, the other fingerprinted by a coal miner, three leaves with six or seven splotches each, enough chance blemish to roll the dice on, tar and oil brimming upon each leaf margined by gold-colored light like a beach that walks itself around a black lake. Each leaf has been to Dis and back and now the blackest footsteps show— plucked from a beach where waves come on like cascading boats with bubbles for cargo, where human footprints, grown in depth and scale, make it look as if a troop of Athenian statues walked off their pedestals and practiced drills here, water polishing stones to a dry dim light all stone, light you could fashion into a home which only shines should water bury it. Autumn begins in us before it begins in things as heat begins to wane, with so much hope that sadness will pay out 37 all that it owes us for feeding on us. It begins and it begins to end in us before it ends while blades of grass the color of overuse, yellowed but not yellow, blow like razor-drawn wings across a field of blown grass. Holding on sounds pathetic in this endless shudder, windblown trees sounding like sand scouring across the shingles of a barn like a shipwreck. Trees speaking like sand dunes with branches, leaves, a crown, maybe a few shrewd nests, description wants the substance of description, father wants son to love the earth’s overwhelming and collective murder and he does, because love makes the same us of us all around, because in love we kiss the sand so sand can’t have power over us. And meditation— what is the adverse relationship between it, the evenly hovering psychological gaze, and attention, the dive-bombing heron gaze also action and never a need for a directorial cry for action when all things down to their roots in mystery find purchase, and any design breaks to unbrokenness, as late afternoon light breaks in a father’s voice, then recollects to break again as waves show themselves refulgent when they do, [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:48 GMT) 38 visible upon crash, like a leaf radiant with disease, black eyed, all curled up like that, like it’s trying to go inside when there is no inside while brittle sticks for legs fold and gulls bed down like decoys well before evening, they feel endings. . . . That particular late afternoon color the lake takes on when the sun, inarticulate from cloud, still paves a path, a white glitter, an escalator that goes and goes as long...