Heavenly Bodies

Dirt Cowboy Café

62 Dirt Cowboy Café Heart, oh heart, I sit here writing your name on pieces of paper, folded, hidden, misplaced . . . found again. There is the element of saying and there is the element of making: one needn’t choose. I am singing the dream out from the ice, asking it to carry me like a horse or a river, down and away. This day, here in paned-glass sun: the young waitress shaking out her apron and retying it flat across her stomach— a bit of vanity—her hair swept off her neck, crash of a milk bottle on the granite counter, cream spread in a mild pool toward the rim, and the roots of habit and longing briefly seized by the mind. So noisy here! The sound echoes out of years, brought to this showing forth, unrehearsed. It seems we wake and find ourselves repeating, embodying the ancient gestures by which we recognize ourselves completed. 63 Not one of us could be born and invent life—it must show through us— the arm flung in the air, the coffee poured out, and down the street, someone hurrying by, head down against the wind. And a man and a woman come to an old grief, carved in them, carved into them —the old way of water wearing rock— by law, and the hatred between them is equal to the hope neither will release. Each wants to be whole, to embody all of time, when nothing in this world is whole, and this is by law. When my father said bitterly to my mother: you have changed, he meant, without meaning to say, how she had changed him. A man holds his head down against the wind. Yet the wind fills him with the dust of temples, the breath of the dead. The dream of the light inside the branches— a gleam of wet, glimmer that is a bud, the leaf within the bud. 64 The photographer comes inside and closes the lens of his camera. Then he is the lens. Then my eye is the light. This is the element of saying. The young waitress flings a paper cup behind her, into the trash can. That is a saying. The cream swirled into the coffee, the sugar dissolving, disembodied, and the body of the manager disappears, swallowed into a doorway. The element of making is slow, uncertain as a temple, a falling forward, stitching back, like a stone wall, like the panes in an arched window, like a repetition chosen beyond necessity. Yet somehow we have seen all this before— the girl in the fur hat speaking syrup into a phone; the falseness of her charm is an ancient imposter, familiar and therefore true. A door is opened and falls closed. Suddenly at every table someone looks down and is reading— books, newspapers, calendars, reading tea leaves, reading bones. 65 A woman in a periwinkle jacket: I am reading her shoulders as the day introspects. In dream the passive construction and the past perfect tense prevail: she was being pushed on a swing. The woman with many television credits gazes out the window, heavy with years, forgetting herself, forgetting sorrow, the false husband, the crippled child, the old plots forgetting, and it is suddenly lovely, as free as something read or dreamed; the young waitress with sun on her face—her unblemished face—looks up, from the middle of eternity, her desire immaculate in the moment. When a word is beautiful above all others—your name— when a woman appears as a bird of prey and we turn away, hoping not to be recognized—oh heart!— when the light on the branches flares in a window with no sky, this is old story reading us, these are springs from words laid down before and ahead of us, and in the moment we are making an answer. ...