View from Space, and: Getting Free
- View from Space, and: Getting Free
View from Space
A dolphin, we guessed. We watched a longtime, from the great heights of the Cliffsof Moher, but nothing rose out of the bankand slosh. A rock, a disappointment in a scenewe wished magical, alive, back when the twoof us were new, looking for signs. Just that,though, a scene to join the others, flattenedinto the past, the way they all go, even this yearof nausea and chemicals, of life-and-deathexigency. What seemed a space cut out of time,we watch fill with detritus, as it does. I’m tired, too tired to drive; yousteer us along the bay, point out rocks almostsubmerged. Rocks, not gulls, or one gullstationed on a rock. Deeper out, the waterturns indigo, a guide to where enormitieshide, the sunk ships, the fissures—what didwe want to find, before the bright net of day,the existing things, kept entering, and we keptdutifully picking them up onshore, to showeach other: look, this, and this, and whatin the world shall we do with this? [End Page 677]
Getting Free
My long-dead ex-husband’s wife died of cancerthis week. That much I know. What else? She toldno one she was sick, didn’t go to the doctor,finally collapsed more or less aloneinto the Bermuda Triangle of her own wishes.Why would someone want to disappear before shedisappears? I will never know this, either. Thingsfeel like my fault, my deliberate lack of attention. We cast ourselves out of our lives;there’s a crumbling at the edge of what we know,a bit of satisfaction, as if we’d left shore with itsfactories and smells, and climbed the mast.Nothing in sight but horizon and fresh air.We take in a breath, a breath made of elementalparts of a thousand thousand souls we’ll neverget rid of, that will be reincarnated into innumerablemore life-forms until the sun and Earth die a colddeath a few billion years from now. But that won’t be the endfor those atoms, even the atoms of thosewe left with anguish and tears, even those weturned around in the driveway for, to hear theirpleading to try again. Nearby supernovae will shockand stir the dusty remnants of the solar systemand new solar systems will form around it.Some of the atoms will make up the bodiesof newborn life-forms on the new planets.Many of my own atoms may have been part ofalien organisms that lived on some long-ago-destroyed planet. I am sad for them,the ones who live forever, ignored in me,and the ones who’d longed to get free. [End Page 678]
fleda brown most recently published her eighth collection of poems, No Need of Sympathy, and a collection of essays, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, with Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. A professor emerita at the University of Delaware, she now lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.
