In the Blind: For Tommy, My Oldest Friend

IN THE BLIND: FOR TOMMY, MY OLDEST FRIEND / Sydney Lea As in water face answers to face, the Proverb says, so the mind of man reflects the man. . . which must in my case mean the surface is roiled as this one before me when it's lashed by furious beavers. What a lot of time I spend in the blind, splashing from thought to thought. At random. And how often I reach for you, we shared so much, we rode all over God's acre together, and always thought the same. Now that we've shot past forty, what does it all add up to? Quick birds that breast the sun and rob my breath. The revelation of internal pattern in a hardwood log at the moment my maul lays it open, before I throw it on the heap to dry and be burned. Whiffs of old memory. Is the beautiful random enough? Everything that is here and goes away. (I bet you don't have time for all this stuff. . . .) Sometimes, late in November here, the river will suddenly go austere, abstract, as if its waves would cease their movement, stiffen. Do you remember how we used to argue over religion? Especially in the fall, it seems I still spend a lot of my life waiting for something to fly down and stay. How often TH be here, this marsh alive around me —something that riffles the slue, a rustle in weeds— but the sky so empty only thought can fill it. Except for the slow-motion stars, and Queen Moon: The Missouri Review · 292 just this morning, perfectly round, she stUl was high, and my thought was of you one time when you offered me a confession —and it was hard, for we thought ourselves rock-hard adolescents: "Sometimes," you said, "I could cry when I hear that Christmas carol, ? Little Town of Bethlehem/ " I know exactly what you mean, though we don't anymore have much in common except this past which speaks to us in symbols —the important part, at least— and usually mutely. It's the part about the deep and dreamless sleep, am I right? And the way the silent stars go by. I think I knew even then what I feel now, however hard of expression. This morning the moon was full, and there I was, half-asleep, in my ignorance awaiting some wonderful declension, in advent of . . . what? There are moments in the blind when I could lay my head back and bellow. Do you remember those summer evenings in your father's Rocket 88 when we'd fly back and forth like swallows trapped in a building? Here to there to here to there! And yet we felt ourselves free: how loud the radio! how loud we sang along! Remember the Dells' old anthem? "Of What a Night!" We didn't know where we were going, but everything on the way was so perfectly lovely —the silent small towns winking like planets, the rolling frost-studded country— moment to moment to moment, 292 · The Missouri Review Sydney Lea what could it matter? Over the undulant doo-wop, that falsetto. Something that hovered over the two of us. At least we thought so. Some ever available charm. I can see, as if it were caught in a mirror, our heads thrown back in song, eyes to the sky, improvising harmony, light like a symbol of something up there and answerable. Possible, undivided, great. As if we were not moving at all. Streaming down on our kindred faces, a light like grace. Sydney Lea The Missouri Review · 293 ...