Earth Again

Comes to Worse

46 comes to worse Although the irony is palpable, the irony is not the story. I taught the second graders knots two days before I found him, my only son, hanging from his ceiling fan. Some sound knocked me awake, then the phone rang, his girlfriend sobbing (they’d been in a fight), and I rose from the couch, my nursing textbook thumping on the floor, to take him the portable. I instruct CPR on weekends to would-be lifeguards but couldn’t pull him down, his sinews, once taut from snowboarding, gone slack. Who knows how the neighbor heard my screams but he did and arrived to find me balancing on the chair, taking some strain off the noose.  Say you are sixteen and your father has another family, two sons he doesn’t call his sons but treats as such, and you live with your mother who swallows your disdain like so many antidepressants ignored in green bottles in your book bag. But look at me now, lying on my back, her lips latched to mine. She’s feeding me again, this time with oxygen. When I was in her body, when she prayed twice daily to Saint Anne because she’d lost three already, she fed me 47 with fluids, her body tending the wavering flame of my heartbeat that is passing now into the great vacancy and which she must again retrieve from nothingness. I wanted this quiet but not forever, all the gatekeepers here, reverent to the silence. I never imagined lantern light so blue against running water. Already, we’re crossing, the leeches and caddis huts loosed by our boots, the slow water shallower than expected.  Comes to worse. When I was a boy I feared most the bars on the basement windows, the sound of the nighthawks’ wings sawing through the dusk, the placenta from sister’s birth that my mother buried in the garden, though now I’m sure that these readied me to stare this moment in the eyes. If and when a son is born, you can cry, can weep openly when he dies, but when he is somewhere vaguely in between, you had better fasten yourself to a sturdy trunk, throw a loop around his legs, and bore your heels into the earth. I saw a girl walking to school today in her pink jacket past the school playground where the wind was moving ever so slightly the empty swings beneath a pine whose needles numbered our myriad notions of God. 48 If you look up from an Internet article on comas from which you had learned that the largely inert head of a comet is also called a coma, you might just see such a thing.  As a girl I would become quite despondent when the liturgy closed with a hymn I didn’t like because I knew the song would linger in my head throughout the day, eddying—yesterday I saw while driving to the hospital a wet barn in dusk, and cannot close my eyes today without its afterimage singeing the backs of my eye lids. Yes, it was red; it had rained for the briefest of moments.  I’m fingering the tatters of a dream-scarf that unraveled just as I took hold of it: Coming home through the backyard in the 3 a.m. rain toward the single lit window peppered with a million spent moths, I stumble on my old dog Valley who straightens her front legs, a hint she might rise up to greet me, then falters with dramatic sigh, a long exhalation that threatens to be her last: No you don’t, I tell her, no you don’t.  Coffee, green tea, some carb-free ginseng smoothie: each morning you pour it, you drink from your cup of blame, and it’s good because at least then you can stop thinking, stop talking causalities around it. When he was three and his mom and I were still together we visited her relatives back east and driving home late one night stopped to see Niagara Falls. 49 You forget that it’s a river, I mean before it takes that sheer drop, it’s just a river meandering between its banks. Cold or afraid, he climbed up onto my chest and I zipped him inside of my coat—my major foray into this welter of self-pity is not that...