But The Earth Abideth Forever, and: Drought

BUT THE EARTH ABIDETH FOREVER / Joseph M. Ditta Flying home, in the late fall, to my father's funeral, alone, other passengers sunk into their seats anticipating what travelers fly towards in protective silence and closed eyes— almost I feel my life reversing itself. As I look down through clouds to the thread of some river uncoiling from its source, gleaming Uke exposed nerve along which I flow, the first yearnings, the long-forgotten oneness, the smell of morning air, a dragonfly's wings unfurled but invisible, my own beginning, tug me home— the house losing its dormers and becoming Cape Cod again, the trees shrinking to sapUngs, things singing into themselves the music of obUvion, so much of my self untangUng and freshening, standing again beside the white fence holding back the pinewood, my mother, first generation, bilingual, humming tunes from the hit parade, my father, in a sleeveless sweater, slightly balding, busy with his own thoughts of softball or the race track— murmuring back through the words of his broken tongue, 180 · The Missouri Review "At least you saw me aUve." And it did rain the day the plane came down. And it was windy when we stood by the graveside. It is a month today since you passed away. It is a snow-ladened December day. I still mourn for you. I wear a plaid scarf. It is a month today. You whispered hoarsely, "Stony . . . stony . . . brook___ " with paralytic, caved-in look. No one knew what you meant. You turned on your side without dismay. It is a month today. The rainbow almost invisibly arcs across the sky. How many times has this mirage danced its curved loveUness under the sun, against a dark massing of clouds that have left their promise and gone to other Uves, other dreamings, Uke the almost sacred touch of the beloved during long absences, the call in your sleep from a voice so intimate it speaks your name in silences you hear as actual sounds and you wake and say, "I am here, come to me," and you rise to find her in a dark you can not imagine, noticing how, between then and now, any moment could have been this moment, how in the very movement towards it there is a streaming backwards in the trace Joseph M. Ditta The Missouri Review · 282 that lives in us a separate existence shining with a light we never see, the secret light of remembering making its own world apart from us in an eternity that is all of love we will ever know? Fall, and everything is down— the plane, the leaves, the frost, the dead. Anytime is the right time to die. But the fall is a good time to be cold. This man-fathering pain in the red eye of your death, Oh my father, carries me back to the shadows of a time when the cry of absence could not tear the sky from my head. II What does it mean to come home, the mystery on the plumb? Carl dead before I left. Desperate Phyllis hit by a truck. Kathy shot somewhere in Miami. Dennis in prison for murder. Short Tommy last seen heading west after a holdup. Richy lost in suburbia. Bobo wrecked in his Corvette. They are dead or changed. The scrub pine forests have been burned off 282 · The Missouri Review Joseph M. Ditta and tract homes on straight streets run up and down like shoe boxes. Old Felix had no thumb on his right hand. When we went to the barber shop in his garage and got our hair cut, I sat there and tried to catch out of the corner of my eye the hand with the scissors stuck on the stump of his thumb, fearing he would cut my ear off and wincing when the scissors nipped and paying my fifty-cents when he shook off the sheet he gently wrapped us in. Pauline, his wife, gasping one day in the living room as her heart convulsed. My first funeral. And old Mr. Gioia, how he held his sides in pain when he had his operation, and you, my mother, complained that...