Summer Solstice

Instead of Stonehenge, that megalithic mystery, I explore pebbles by a modest sea. Vacation canceled: "There's been a death in the family." The tour books purchased last autumn still cast their shadowy theories: a clock or calendar, a tomb once made of timber, a stage for ceremonies, and certainly the place to be on the longest day of the year. Yet even now, even here, playing with rocks and stones, the fervor is for house and home. Though why do we not say "home and house"? It isn't about holidays, but hendiadys. A hendiadys is a little argument that double-talk can mean more than singularity, but there always seems to be an order: toil and trouble, not trouble and toil. Wind and weather. Sound and fury. Sturm und Drang. All cultures inhabit the ruins of two problems: rhetoric and what to do with the dead. Instead of cirrus, that wispy and icy category so beloved by the British, I conjure cumulus. Altostratus. Fog. The dark horizon unhinges in the eastern skies. Dawn and sunrise, twins but not identical ones, dance and tease. Ten thousand clouds are born, some as tiny as cinders from a crematorium: Shakespeare's dragonish ones; Milton's sable clouds with their silver linings; Persephone's breath.

Instead of Heidegger, that fascist philosopher, I skim Hannah Arendt for breakfast. Oh Hannah! No Being and Time for her, but On Revolution, but The Human Condition. The problem she confronts in Between Past and Future, a collection of her essays, is political rhetoric: "freedom and justice, authority and reason, responsibility and virtue, power and glory" that have become "empty shells." As for what to do with the dead: Nothing! "Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject." Arendt was snatched at age sixty-five by a heart attack. The man she called her star-crossed lover, Heidegger, died within six months; an infection of an unspecified nature felled him at age eighty-six.

Instead of Barbados, that Caribbean heel of sky and sea bisected by sand, I settle on another former British colony, in the higher latitudes, an island, but only if there is a sufficient storm to close the bridges. Sixteen hours of light, unlike at the equitable equator. The oysters, once buried in shallow beds, awaken and unhinge only in the past. The colonial cemeteries are tourist destinations, with stone markers and political associations to maintain them. There is a slave burial ground. More than one. More than two. Three.

Instead of talent, that privilege of the privileged, I cherish labor, even as it is maligned: labored breathing; laborious prose; belabored arguments. If rhetoric is an argument with someone else and poetics is an argument with one's self, as Mr. Yeats instructed, then what is an argument with the dead, who are both someone else and one's self? I am trying to work this out.

Instead of ICU, that mechanized coffin, I crave home, in all its unsanitary glory and power. How inconvenient for the ceremonies of death our houses have become. But all those days and nights on life support when a ventilator distributes the blessings of breathing, how to endure that? Even as the squabbles about causes (cigarettes, car accident, clouds in the kidneys) and cures (more burning, more praying) continue. My father—no philosopher, no poet, no traveler—finally died on a short winter day. About this, I cannot say more.

Instead of Sappho, that genius of the Lesbian fragment, I read Sappho, that fragment of the Lesbian genius. The sun stands still for hours. Prod the beach rubble. Or don't.

Instead of narrative, that chronology that argues cause and effect, I weave sea grass like chain-link fences without the chain. There must be a silver talisman that would protect us from knowing how our story ends; from knowing that our story has ended. The heat and sun at midday.

Instead of Anna Pavlova, that savant of the dying swan, I imitate Isadora Duncan when I dance in the...