Earth Again

Not Knowledge

18 not knowledge Memory should not be called knowledge. Keats I My mother’s brother’s friend: so tall in her memory he seems as she talks of him like memory itself. He walked her home a time or two, his brown corduroys coming together at his knees, the wales scratching out a sturdy rhythm near her ears (my ears! He was that tall, I was seven, must have been ’cause I can see Evelyn Street, the sycamore my dad painted white to ward off some bark beetle, the hairy fruits we kicked along the sidewalk. There was never any science behind it, whitewashing the tree, and the beetles came or they didn’t . . . God, this must have coincided with the British Invasion!)—intensely private laughter— (Where was I. Oh, the tree. He hacked off a limb or two each year till it was nothing but trunk. Wait, why am I telling you all this?) Dense pause until we realize, setting our forks, cups, next to the scramble she has made, the question isn’t rhetorical. But no one says, your brother’s tall friend, your grandson coming down the hallway wearing new corduroys, their odd knee-made music: we just sit there watching a willing red rise to her cheeks like someone summoned to a busy room, then ignored. 19 II Dawn moon staring into and out of the slough, dimming. First poppy like an offered pill in the backyard’s palm. Quarter falling unnoticed to the bar’s boot-scarred floor. Dipped net pulled up shimmering, apathetic to its catch.  I was telling the bartender about the time I sawed open a golf ball and nearly lost my eye to some high-tech liquid gel that shot out from white dimpled shavings and severed rubber bands with the force of a thumb-capped faucet, knocking me off the cement steps—dramatic helpless pose on barstool—my mother finding me in the geraniums, offending hand foreshadowing the gauze patch I’d have to wear three weeks, dreams of starling sorties (my father’d always begged don’t bother the nests, don’t bother a mother guarding eggs). She said: What you needed was an Ativan. Said: Here, passed a stack of quarters across the liquor-slick bar and nodded toward the dormant jukebox. I played B-side Raitt and Dylan—“What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this”—and thought maybe she would tend to me in the hour of my need: her tricep, halter-top tightening as she poured, maybe she would 20 proffer some tale of her own, promising orange pill washed down with something complimentary meant to lure me a little further toward my ruin. Hey. Can I— You know the line, as hackneyed as the dream when someone suddenly becomes someone else: cute barmaid now barmanager placing his would-be fists on your shoulders, squeezing gently as the houselights go not down but up.  You could just start walking, you could walk until dawn, geese peeling off the sewage treatment settling pond like a strewn clutch of change, you could picture her by now at home having showered intricate layers of smoke from her skin and blonde boy-cropped hair that drips into the crisp pages of a novel she has pulled randomly from the bookshelf; you can envision her staring plaintively at her cell phone and the wrinkled napkin. . . . But she sleeps with a fastness you can’t fathom or vacuums another powdered line up through her nose or reads a story to her sleeping son’s bedroom door or goes down once again on her goonish manager for your tip money, fives and tens. . . . You can cry Call me, to the high cold stone redux in ditch water, call me. Will you. Place the washcloth on my clammy forehead. Mother me. Beg: Little moon, St. Memory, look me in the eye. As day slips again through night’s indifferent net, comes on without reproach, white and desolating. 21 III Illucid, opaque: the steamy Mason jar dermised with frog breath and frog piss and sometimes frog turds, the remnants of crickets and grasshoppers I’d gathered, sacrificed to my sparsely warted porch-god whose Latin name Ascaphus truei means lacking a body part and true eye. Sometimes I saw the flexed legs, bow & fiddle, protruding from the excrement and sometimes heard the final glass-muted songs (without irony...