The Wings

THE WINGS / Mark Doty The bored child at the auction Ues in his black rainboots reading, on the grass, whUe beneath the tent his parents grow rich with witness: things that were owned once, in place, now must be cared for, carried to the block. A coast of cloud becomes enormous, above the wet field, whUe the auctioneer holds up now the glass IUy severed from its epergne, now the mother-of-pearl lorgnette. These things require the boy's parents so much they don't know where he is, which is gone: the book he's brought, swords on its slick cover, promises more than objects or storm. He's lost in the story a whUe but then the sun comes out, he's been reading a long time, and he lies on his side with his cheek against the grass. This seems the original moment of restless dreaming: shiny rubber boots, a book forgotten in one hand, a tired reader's face pressed against damp green. He's the newest thing here. I've bought a dark-varnished painting of irises, a dead painter's bouquet The Missouri Review · 29 penciUed, precisely, Laura M. 1890. The woman in front of us has bid for a dead woman's plates, iridescent flocks of blue birds under glaze. When it's aU over the parents awaken the sleeping reader: his father's bought a pair of snowshoes nearly as taU as the boy, who slings them both over his back and thus is suddenly winged. His face fiUs with purpose; the legendary heroes put away, in his satchel, he's become useful again, he's moved back into the world of things to be accompUshed: an angel to carry home the narrative of our storied, scattering things. Didn't you want apples on the branch, not just the cold-scented globes but winesap or some sharp red baUooning from the bearing wood? And didn't we find, on Saturday morning, at the edge of town, beside a barn twisting on its foundation, trying to coUapse, an abandoned orchard offering branch after branch, the ones a Uttle higher than the deer could reach? Everywhere under the trees long flattened grasses where they'd lain, gorged with the low or windfall fruit. We cut an armload, 20 · The Missouri Review Mark Doty trying to jostle nothing loose, swearing at the sweet ringing when any one feU— strange how a soUd thing chimes. In a barn down the road —among the oUy lawnmowers, the cracked motors, sapbuckets and gaskets—a rabbit cage, two rough-cut painted pine hares bracing a pen of chicken wire, their red eyes eager and intent: a beautiful thing, made for the loved companion of a loved chUd, ours for two doUars and irreplaceable. We brought it home, with the few intact apple branches and a sheaf of maple burning the unmatchable color things come to when the green goes out of them and the rippling just under blooms through. Some days things yield such grace and complexity that what we see seems offered. I can't stop thinking about the German film in which the angels —who exist outside of time and thus long for things that take place— love most of aU human stories, the way we teU ourselves what we dread or wish. Of aU our locations their favorite is the Ubrary; the director pictures them perched on the balustrades, clustering on the stairs, bent over the soUtary readers as if Mark Doty The Missouri Review · 22 to urge us on, to say Here, have you looked here yet! If endlessness offered itself to me today I don't think I'd have done anything differently. I was looking from the car window at the unlikely needlepoint wUd asters made of an October slope, blue starry heads heaped upon each other, too wet and heavy with their own completion to stand. I didn't even stop, but that brief yeUow-eyed punctuation in a field gone violet and golden at once, sudden and gone, is more than I can say. There's simply no way to get it right, and it was just one thing. Holsteins...