The Steeper the Fall, and Wherefore Less Lonely

The Steeper the Fall

Like this, he said, and we watched him reach for yet another fistfulof straw and scatter it, filling those patches where the grass hadn't grownin enough. One half of me kept wanting to imagine him covering someshame by now unacknowledged because barely

                                felt anymore, thoughunderstood, instinctively, as never too far away; the other halfkept still. Think of it like camouflage, he continued, People think camo,they think it's all about hunting. It ain't. It's about

                                not being seen. Justbeyond him, ravens staring down the field in general for any strayparticulars seemed to wait for any of us to contradict him. No one did.In the dream, it's another time,

                                earlier in history, you can sleep outsidein the open country and wake as you fell asleep, untouched, nothingmissing, whatever sorrow or happiness as unchanged as the lake's faceon a day without wind—

                                but this wasn't that dream. You got somethingto say about it, he said, looking vaguely toward all of us, then straightat me. If there was to be any kind of tenderness here, this muchI could tell: it would have to start with tenderness. I mean the word itself.

Wherefore Less Lonely

Pulls pistol from left holster, but right-handedly. Spins pistol.As if one of those gestures that, though untranslatable, we repeatanyway, despite a growing sense that with each repetitioneach somehow means something less. Meanwhile the usual mothsagain appearing, moth-like, flower-like, like those flowers fromchildhood I used to call Strip Heaven, and nobody stopping—that I remember, at least—to ask why … Augustine speaksof memory as a mansion of vast halls, many-chambered, andfair enough, that's how memory can seem, though other times morea labyrinth of dead ends and false openings, there's a way out

—but finding it? If I tell you now there were two of them,and that over and over, whether out of fear, against fading away,or against having sworn to be kind, and fumbling it, one kept fuckingthe other, as if all machine, if I've tried to forget, and can't,did it happen, the leaves above them variously stilling, unstilling,memory as a forest of leaves, then memory as the moreimmediately apparent side of the leaf, rumor the paler side,

the soft lining … How I've loved is not how I meant to love. Byintention or fate—what I was maybe wrong to have notbelieved in—it makes no difference, finally. "Whoever by nowdoesn't know the wind blows more freely at the field'sfarthest edge will never know" amounts to wordsas camouflage—it doesn't change what's true, only whattruth looks like, which more and more comes again to memory,whose cure for loneliness, it seems, is a kind of company that only

steepens loneliness: all the lives, all the words spoken, that canneither be brought nor get taken back. My arrows, my lakeof swans—here; I relinquish them. I leave the stag, slow-dying,where long ago I found it. If not out of respect, then in my name,for pity's sake, do at least what's decent, sir, and cover its face.