The Opening, and: Flight, and: The Mother

The Opening

(France 1950)

Rare the fish the boy       found streamsidewhen he first devised the game—look for the narrowest placeto cross the creek to build a dam—gather the leaves       from forest floor,twigs and branches       to bolster the frame,grow the structure untilhe'd created a cascadein miniature or salmon ladderfor a tiny salmon to swim home.

Water works its way around.       Father made himthrow a sunfish back.They happened on the entrance tothe cave in a hillock upstreamso overgrown they must have       missed it manytimes. Inside was nothing       but the barest trace—two lines to sketch a something'shorns, a curve for hump. A partialsomething else beneath the chalkylichen, but enough to realize everywhere

the evidence of ancient hand—and modern when the boy brokea stalagmite, the top he pocketed.They never spoke of how       they'd stumbledonto a vast silence, how gamely       they had crawledinto a hillside opening to nowhereanyone knew to be significant, and facedthe darkness no light breached before,and corridors of void like empty arms.

Flight

Years later the once-child would recount almost casually how many experiments the enemy performed on the angel, whom she called Father, when the angel was a pow. Because he was fallen, they cut him without anesthesia to see if it hurt. They removed an insignificant organ—then a significant one—to see if the etheric angel-body could heal itself. They debated removing his wings. Some of them wanted to make him fly first but they feared he'd escape. One came to him in pain, seeking absolution. My soul to keep, the man whispered furtively, but also a bit frantically. Fate's upon us, he cried. The angel found language fled. The once-child had told the story many times of her father's return, how he'd been arrested a soldier but returned an angel, silent and scarred. How then the angel had left the once-child's mother and how poor they were. The once-child hadn't mentioned that Father'd been tortured until the cousins' meal, as if silence erased trauma, and the angel gone for good.

The Mother

(France, 1950)

Scrubbing sheets in the stream in winter. Subtracts herself from the brittle grass, cement porch of the laundry house where women work Saturdays, and from the others to—"forbid it Lord"—somewhere beyond the ken of claims to certain rights, the law that doesn't ask what it feels like to coincide with another, to be in the space of encounter. The law that asks how we are "to understand that which differs from our capacity" to understand. Is it Cartesian to ask why she's not the rabbit she knows lives off their garden, who never has to wash the winter linen? She doesn't know this rabbit. The sheets freeze as they dry in ripples patterned by a bitter wind. Adds herself to the equation, what she bears witness to.