Cardinal Points

CARDINAL POINTS / Michael Pettit At the round earth's imagined corners blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise . . . John Donne This is that one morning each long summer I wait for, waking early to find the air in my dark room cool, finding on this late August morning renewal in a breeze from Canada, arrived here to revive me, to lift my spirit like a leaf fluttering from the heat-weary trees outside, ihe pecans, poplars and oaks hanging over 13th Street, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Awake, I rise with the voice of my daughter, who can sense daybreak approaching and is all through sleeping peacefully in her crib: under the wild galaxy of painted wooden stars and planets, hand-made angels and birds revolving together like a dream beyond her reach, she looks up at me—beaming, ready. And so I lift her out, past the yellow lightning bolt, past space ship and shooting star up into the skies and against my heart, rattling its crib of ribs. She settles there, warm, and in one another's arms we travel through the quiet house down the long shadowy hall to the front porch to the red hammock where we swing in the chilly dove-gray light and watch the world come to life. Down 13th Street an old ragpicker drags his sack of valuables from can to can, rifling garbage and waving as the paperboy rides by, winging the news onto the neighbors' lawns, papers 34 · The Missouri Review gathering light, glowing fat and white until the neighbors in their robes and slippers appear and disappear, enlightened. Above them, rightside up then upside down, a gray squirrel runs the telephone lines, leaping to the thin branches of a live oak he rattles with all his might, awakening songbirds, cardinals and mockingbirds that whistle greetings back and forth, back and forth as I tell Emily, on this first cool morning of her life, of the heavens and earth. Pink, grinning, quizzical, she listens, or seems to, to facts I remember or invent about stars: number, size, intensity, color. Millions beyond those few thousand the clearest summer night shows, red, yellow, white or blue they burn, their burning their being. They live as distant lights, and I give Emily names of constellations we can see—Cassiopeia, Lyra, Pegasus—and the names of constellations we can't—Nirvana, Valhalla, Heaven. At this or any hour no telescope will do: she must have faith in God, Brahma, Buddha, in Zeus, Odin, Allah. Faith Seraphim have six wings and surround the throne of Glory chanting holy holy holy, faith that below the Seraphim are Cherubim, Powers, Dominions, Thrones, Archangels, Angels. I tell her there are angels over the tame and wild beasts, over humanity, angels of annihilation and ascension, angels of clouds, dawn, flame, rarified air, thunder, terror, rains and rivers. There is Raphael, angel of joy and knowledge, and Michael the angel of chaos. There are angels of mysteries, patience, sanctification, angels of the abstract and concrete, one angel hovering over every green thing on earth, saying Grow. Michael Pettit THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 35 There is no reason not to so she believes me, and babbles her long vowels over and over and makes a sound that sounds like day. It's astonishing she has come to me. Under our angels together in our hammock we rock the sun up above the trees as I point out to Emily east, first of the five cardinal points, the round world's four directions and inward. Look east and there you'll see our star, that warms us, lights us and everything else—trees, houses, streets, beer can blinking in the gutter, spider webs shimmering in the St. Augustine, gleam of light on the wind-flicked leaves— our star turning the world its colors. See, I say, nothing's untouched. In our slow spinning round, we extend from tiny Mercury and moony Jupiter to Pluto, icy in its distant orbit. And beyond. Yet we are not stars. Out there in the deep purple red hot comets whistle along, no one to hear, nothing but the stray meteor or satellite sent rocketing up from down here, from the...