Which Would You Prefer, a Story or an Explanation? and: Maybe a Hero Is Crossing the Mountains

Which Would You Prefer, a Story or an Explanation?

I am interested, said Madeline, in people's ability to live their lives in fragments.

Two ex-husbands, three jobs in seven years, one daughter,a geranium, and a certain TV show.

I used to think I'd reach a certain age, said Madeline,and my heart would settle down, like a tired dog.

Yoga at the Y on Tuesdays;then wild gusts of anger while driving home.

Reading an interview with Alan Bloom, she learnsthat "the pursuit of happiness is a particularly American form of nihilism."

"Oh yeah, now you tell me," she says.

"I can't tell the difference between total acceptance and mild depression,"writes her friend from Philadelphia, in small blue scripton the back of a postcard of Chagall.

Dawn arrives on the horizon with its spreading rosy light.Sometimes beauty serves as a kind of anesthetic.The world provides evidence for almost anything.Which would you prefer: a story or an explanation?

Next year, Madeline will have a love affair,visit Bali and return, develop endometrial cancer,and reconnect with her old childhood Catholic faith,worth more to her than anything.

Even at the bottom of the self, even in illness and despair;in hubris, ecstasy, and gloom,

the chick can be heard inside the shell,pecking to get out. Pecking and pecking.

Maybe a Hero Is Crossing the Mountains

They are threading a long needleinto the crook of my arm&—then pushing it farther up the veinas I focus on a corner of the clinic ceiling

and try not to think about what is happening.The Taiwanese technician, whom I can barely understand,leans closer to the image on the ultrasound,

using it to guide the fine-gauge tube behind my collarbone,then south, past the lungs,into the entrance to the heart.

I close my eyes and listen to her and her assistantgo on about teaching their daughters to drive,and try to imagine I'm being held in the arms

of a giant, blue-headed woman with wings,or that I'm skimming at great speedover the waves of the Atlantic—

but here in the clinic with its IV poles and catheters,imagination's powers just seem fake and make-believe.And it seems cruel irony to me

that my sense of humorwas accidentally removed in surgeryat the very same moment that every beautiful lineI ever memorized by Walt Whitmanwent right out of my head.

So now I proceed without heroes or guides,and my two bare feet are two cold factssticking from under the sheets of the bed.

Look, world, I can seethat I don't matter anymore.Destroy my fictions if you must.

Thread your wires and electric eyethrough all my sewers and my pipesuntil you find the soul.

Make it sing, or fly, or shriek.Grant me at least the feelingthat there is something unfinished in me,

something I still have to learn from,down there,opening its eyes in the dark.