In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Perspective

5 Perspective How do you paint the color of bone, the pelvis where the flesh has been cut away? For more than two days we’ve soaked in bleach the ivory girdle of the deer my son killed. Every few hours I check the bucket so I can watch the dissolution, the falling away of the life that can’t last. Think of O’Keeffe’s inheritance. What her hands were given by the skeleton of the world. What she was expected to give back. Who doesn’t want to hear a holy word echoing along the rock’s split lip? But to hunt means to stalk in silence, to listen for the solace in an animal’s missed step. Early on I learned from my grandmother to fish is to search the sea by sending a line down its length. When my sister caught the eel, we didn’t know what to do. The only other person on the bridge was a black man seated on a five-gallon drum. He took the rod, laid it on the ground, and in one stroke severed the head, held the dancing curve until it slowed, then stuffed it in a bag. We slipped the hook from between the teeth, ran our fingers across the ridges. My sister peered through the cut hose and wouldn’t tell me what she saw. Today I stare at the shadows in the valley, see what can be seen through the hole in the pelvis where the ball of the femur should rest. The sky’s different framed like this. When there’s nothing around it, it seems endless. After Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Pelvis with the Distance” (1943) ...