Bananas, and: Observations From a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast, and: Journal of Dr. Beaurieux

Bananas

A monkey with the muttonchops and lipsof Henrik Ibsen barks, and creatureson the forest floor stand still to sniffand listen. There, a traveler may pick,according to Jules Verne, a fruit “healthyas bread and succulent as cream.” Buddhaate bananas in that realm. And Jesuswould have loved them, if he lived nearby,or later. Muhammad with his wisdombrought about the great diffusion of bananaswest, into the Andalusian caliphate where Berbersate black figs. Experts say banana, Spanish,comes from Portuguese, from Wolofslave merchants who got it from the Berbers’Arabic, banaana, meaning finger.They don’t know. Five hundred years agofine tailors made kimonos for the summer heatfrom fabric woven of the softest, innermostbanana leaf. Bashō, named for his banana plant,wore bashofu, one student says, and wrotewhile kneeling on a carpet of banana silk.Now, thanks to peonage abroad, we findthe sweet banana cheap and plentiful.Former rabbi Eli Black, a family manin middle age, after he bought United Fruit,in conscience paid his workers six times more,and when the company, and then his conscience,and then bribes and tax schemes, failed,he took his briefcase, bashed the windowfrom an office forty-four floors up,and threw his papers and himselfout of the New York skyline into the street.

Observations From a Hillside Stairway on the Day of Atonement, Just Before My Wife and Daughters Break Their Fast

Under the hanging lights in a pool hallat nineteen I read the table after the breakand followed a map in my headto take beer money from older menwhile, eight thousand miles under my feet,boys I knew from high school,some of them, learned to pray.Now, at a table in Vegas,holding maybe a rag and an ace,my son is reading a voice, a glance,and running probabilitiesin his head. Sons of other menare bivouacked at dawn in a desertwhere Abraham’s father worshippedBabylonian gods. Everything wobblesand spins. Here, in the little woodsa block from Erwin Methodist Church,bottles drunken boys have shatteredover the brick steps flashin wobbling streaks of sunlight.Two hundred years ago, James Erwinat the end of boyhood left his father’s house,and walked into the local wildernessto preach. Wolves appeared at dusk,and the boy with a Bible sang.He shouted God’s praise into the sky.Here, the fox grapes hang from a guy wireover the edge of the trees where a doeand two fawns stand in poison ivyto the hip. I never did learnto pray or carry a tune, but I saythese words into my cupped palmquietly, not to spook the deer.

Journal of Dr. Beaurieux

Witness to an execution by guillotine, June 28, 1905

After the blade dropped, and the eyelids twitched,the spasms tugging at the lips went calm,and when I called out to the head, “Languille!”the eyelids lifted up, this time, I swear,in a distinctly normal movement, slow,as if awakening, or torn from thought.With pupils focusing themselves, the eyeslooked sharp, not like a dying man’s, not vague,and when the lids went shut, I called again,“Languille!” and again, without a twitch,they lifted, and the eyes looked into mine.