American Fanatics

HOW’S THE WORLD TREATING YOU?

H O W ’ S T H E W O R L D T R E A T I N G Y O U ? January, twenty years in California I Back east, when a river steamed in March or early April, it was a clear unwinding trick. Iced veils and vows swirled up— all the stiff stuff the living wear suffering long winter met the canceling kick of the molecular coming down. Or kiss? Reciprocity, finally, for sins paid and accounts cleared? Heat, it seemed. Luck, it seemed. Vapor. I I “Offer it up,” my mother used to say of any suffering, short or long. Crossing herself twice, she raised good eyes for all the good it did her heavenward. January the thing had gone to her brain; by June she left me holding the invisible ladder our fond dead were always, evidently, scaling out of purgatory. I don’t mind saying it was heavy as hell. Only the prayers and the bitter pain of the living hastened them, hitched them up by their singed wing collars  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 93 and bought us spring as well, though God himself went undisturbed in the exchange. He was a tenured full professor doing unfathomable mathematics in the clouds. He was The Lily-Counter, The Cup-Shuffler, The Great Soul-Disposer wearing his fatal green eyeshade and moving consequences on a board too quickly for any truly reliable reporting. Choices, choices. Snake-dangerous. A terrible baby when awakened from His many daily beauty naps. I I I Or what? I’m fifty; I’m tired of tiptoeing around God. Stepping on the scale each morning to weigh my case for salvation bartered and lost by night. It’s almost always spring here. January, which has no business being charming, makes a big production out of camellia, bougainvillea, euphorbia, blown bouquets and kisses thrown in the original Latin and Greek. Even the plainest white rose in my backyard is over-everbearing: January steps lightly from the chaparral wearing summer’s pretty prom gown off the shoulder, rubbed to a torn glow, and no underwear.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 94 I V I never said I didn’t believe in the ladder. Or in the way my body has begun to break down, building up, out of itself, death and questions for wherever it is I’m going next now that I will probably die in mild California. If heaven calls for debt consolidation, I’m motherless; I have only myself to trade for. V Helpmate, hindrance, long and short con, wet nurse for wind that is everywhere heard, like prayer’s late sighs undoing us in the cool evenings, elbow, knee, wrist, and pelvis— the body’s best hinge— unearned pleasure asks us only to bow down a little lower each year in praise of it. That’s all. In another twenty years I’ll be the arthritic plum tree topped by heavy bearing. I’ll bend, knuckles breaking odd angles against the green door of the yard. And fulsome, dark-juiced in the meanest cells and partitioned chambers of my own permission, I’ll fall that easily back into the ground.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 95 Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 96 ...