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  • Dazzled, and: The Garden, and: How to Navigate the Sea of Loneliness
  • Dian Duchin Reed (bio)

Dazzled

The meek can’t keep from oiling gears, a ceaseless feat that amuses the proponents of provocation, whose wheels were clearly meant to squeak, like the teens

last night who filled the dark and carless parking lot across the street with screams of fuck you; no, fuck you, their curses ping-ponging across hours

of howls, a stormy performance amplified for their audience: neighbors and parents and the teachers about to greet them on the first day of school, which [End Page 133]

happens to be today, and maybe that’s the root of all the ruckus— the dread déjà vu of a rusty old trap about to snap its jaws, implying

their legs are as good as shackled already—nothing for them to do but greet fate with a blare of rage and alert the entire population of heaven

earth and hell that they don’t intend to go down quietly, bringing to mind Lucifer’s reaction to his own dizzying descent, the kind of cosmic crash

that lovers of commotion might consider dazzling, a word the meek cache to praise the sun’s daily glissade to music that’s so subtle, it’s silent.

The Garden

Stranger, here . . . our highest good is pleasure.

—inscribed over Epicurus’s garden gate

Of course, he meant simple things like fragrant peaches and fond friends,

orgies and peacock tongues being the farthest things from

his Garden, which is what he called the school that met in his garden, [End Page 134]

a place he believed best bounded by a fence, beyond which Fame

and her best friend Fortune could strut down the street

arm in arm with their double dates, Pain and Fear. Welcome, says the simple

sign over my garden gate, beyond which grows tomatoes, basil, and oregano,

soon to find themselves mingling in spaghetti sauce, at about the time

the first Braeburn apples will signal perfection with a swan dive

from their branches. If you see me out there on my knees, it means

I’m praying for pleasure to grow or digging out the weed of pain.

My first garden belonged to the house of my birth, with blood-red roses,

flowering crab apple, honeysuckle that vined up the side of the garage

near a hammock, making it easy to rock and suck drops of sweet, scented nectar

from yellow blossoms. In back of the garage squatted an empty square

of dirt where my grandmother used to grow her vegetables. She died not long [End Page 135]

before I was born, and the empty ground of her absence made her present to me,

just as pleasure makes the best argument for itself where and when it’s most absent.

How to Navigate the Sea of Loneliness

First cast yourself as tiger barb or tuna, bluefish or mackerel—a schooling fish (doesn’t matter which), hundreds of you breezing past, a fin apart, united in the shared

dart and shift. Let your side-set eyes lure the others in, and when at some point water turns to air, don’t panic. School is now flock, that’s all, and you . . .

well, let’s say you’re one passenger pigeon among many—enough of a covey to mimic a cloud. And if this causes pain, it’s because you’ve forgotten to forget the word gone;

just remember instead that nothing has changed, that the hungry hawk of solitude still hovers overhead. Soon it starts to drizzle and you’re a child again,

playing pick-up sticks with your best friend, endless games of rummy. You blink to see yourself in high school wearing the same faux-fur parka [End Page 136]

as your friend, the same bizarre hairdo. You’ve learned the meaning of mirrors, are ready to meet your mate, to discover how close two bodies can come under a goose-down quilt

in December, and what it’s like to carry someone at your core, someone who’s always around. It doesn’t last: nine months of bliss and then your little fish slips away, eager to enter

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