Karen Hays Paints Equals Signs on the Windowpane

Once again I’m in the backyard when I should be in bed. It’s too early, and I have too many clothes on—snow pants even. The rain is thickening to an embryonic snow, but I’m determined, this early morning, to write outside, under this overhang, or eave, whatever you call this bonus little piece of roof. It has something to do with the essayist-geologist Karen Hays and her malign and delicious influence. I want to be close to rocks, maybe—rocks and sand and milkweed and vetch and the sorts of animal carcasses that will assuredly turn up headless once all of this thaws. Few essayists scratch and scratch at seemingly mundane things— bugs and snails and iron and jungle gyms—until their inner holiness, or inner horrors, begin to leak out. Maybe the holiness depends on the horror. Anyhow, I’ve convinced myself that today, to get to the inside of things, I have to be outside.

After having studied the old frosty bird-shit patterns on the hood of my Kia Spectra (which proved thoroughly inadequate this winter), trying and failing to divine some writerly inspiration from the assuredly veiled mathematic inherent in the thawing urate cream and ammonia, I decide to look up from the computer screen to the cinderblock garden bed Louisa and I built earlier this year. The dead tomato plants stand like sentries, a head taller than me. I will say nothing here of the skeletal or the anorexic, because that’s too obvious.

What would Karen Hays say about these tomato plants? If this were a different season, probably this: “Everything is blooming in what feels like a time-transgressive violation of botany’s natural order. Like a kid’s drawing. The clematis and roses and weigela and lilies (day, tiger, Asiatic), and irises and hydrangea and strawberries and tomatoes and speedwell and veronica and coreopsis and butterfly weed and everything else is all in bloom at the same damn time and while it is lovely, I find the riotousness of the whole spectacle frankly eerie. The herbs all need to have their flowers pinched off.”

The only thing that defied the winter somehow was this plume of lemongrass, overflowing its bed like some awful pompon. I feel as if I have to say something, as if there’s something in my chest I have to dislodge, pinch off. Prayer, maybe. A snowball. God forbid, an aubade. But something more than that, too. An essay. Yeah. That’s it. So far, I’ve written only this, which is clearly a mess, I’m thinking, and maybe going nowhere:

Uncle was a wrestler in Stillwater, slept in silver plastic suits to sweat out the weight, always made 103. He was the smallest on the team but had the largest appetite. He talks now, on the couch, his initials finger-inked in the dust on the windowpane, hovering over his head like some ambitious mountaineer of a caption, of driving with his father pre-sunrise across the panhandle to Goodwell for the meets, the talk radio station droning meditatively about the Sooners—our adopted nickname, purloined from the “illegal” white land-grabbers who stole the choicest parcels from the “legal” white land-grabbers who stole them from the Creek and the Seminole—or droning about Will Rogers, or interviewing a medical research technician at Oral Roberts University who, as Uncle—young and exhausted and starving in the passenger seat and filling a Styrofoam cup with his spit, emptying it out the window, and filling it again: anything to make weight—imagines her juggling scalpels and biohazard bags filled with untold excised horrors, declared, “This is the only Christian medical school in the nation and I wanted to be trained with the Christian perspective, not a more secular perspective,” to which his father, driving, Uncle assures me, now old and fat and sneezing cherries of blood into a peach Puffs Plus, his window initials now dusted over, replied, “Does that mean she aced Laying on of Hands 101?” or droning on about oil dropping to ten bucks...